Bleeding Hearts (13 page)

“She hasn’t budged. She doesn’t seem sleepy either. Candida DeWitt is on the phone?”

“That’s right. I know you said not to bother you, but I thought—”

“No, that’s all right. Did you get in touch with anybody else? Who’d be the D.A. on this if they ever caught the perpetrators?”

“Raymond Barsi. I talked to him half an hour ago. He’s lighting a fire under the police department.”

“I’ll light a fire under the police department if he doesn’t,” Fred said. “You talk to our people at the
Daily News
?”

“Yeah. At the
Post
too. I didn’t have any luck at the
Times
.”

“We’ll get the
Times
,” Fred said. “Don’t worry. I’ll turn this into the black version of the Central Park jogger case. This
is
the black version of the Central Park jogger case. They just don’t know it yet. Could you believe that hospital?”

“Yes,” Sid said.

Actually, Fred could too. He could believe a lot of things. Even Chuckie Bickerson hadn’t made him feel like he’d gotten lost in one of Franz Kafka’s nightmares, and Chuckie Bickerson made practically everybody feel like that. Fred stretched and scratched his head. “All right. Let me talk to Candida. Have you found a rental nurse yet?”

“Not rental nurse, for God’s sake, Fred. Private duty nurse. Yes. She’ll be here at ten.”

“Fine.”

“Phone’s off the hook,” Sid said.

The phone receiver was lying on its side on the kitchen table. There was no hold button on this set. Candida had probably heard every word Fred had said to Sid. Fred wondered what she’d thought of it. Fred had never been able to decide, with Candida, what really impressed her. Candida did not give much away.

Fred picked up the receiver and said, “Candida? This is Fred.”

“Fred,” Candida said. Her voice sounded like music. “Hello. I was beginning to wonder if I had been cut off.”

“If you had been, you should have called right back,” Fred told her. “I’m always happy to hear from you. I’m sorry about the delay. Things are a little crazy here at the moment.”

“Things are always crazy where you are, Fred. I’m used to it. To tell you the truth, I called to ask you a favor.”

“So ask. Anything I can do.”

“I was wondering if you could come down to Pennsylvania for the weekend. This coming weekend.”

Fred cast an involuntary glance in the direction of his living room. By the time the weekend rolled around, they would know who this woman was, and what they were going to do with her, and whether there was a hope of catching the men or boys who had hurt her. They would be involved in warehousing her, that was all. Nobody needed Fred for that.

Fred sat down in the nearest kitchen chair. “Of course I’ll come to Philadelphia,” he said. “I’ll be glad to. You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?”

“Oh, no,” Candida said. “No, of course not. Not legal trouble, or anything like that. You’ll stay with me, of course. I’ve got a perfectly nice guest room with its own Jacuzzi.”

“I’ll be delighted. You sound worried.”

“Oh, I’m not, not really. I just need some advice, and I couldn’t think of a better person to give it to me.”

“You don’t want to give me a hint?”

“No, no. It’s something I’ll have to show you. You’ll see. And don’t make too much of this. You know how you get.”

“Overwrought,” Fred suggested.

“Overzealous,” Candida amended. “I’ll see you—when? Friday? Saturday?”

“I’ll be down Friday afternoon, if you don’t mind having me that early.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Good,” Fred said. “And Candida? I’m glad to hear from you.”

“I’m glad I called,” Candida said. “I’ll see you Friday.”

Then she hung up.

Fred sat still for a while in his chair, tapping his feet against the oversize kitchen floor tiles. It wasn’t that unusual that he should hear from Candida DeWitt—although he’d never been invited to her house before. They had been in touch on and off since Fred had wound up Paul Hazzard’s murder trial with an acquittal. They contacted each other randomly and tentatively, as if neither one of them were entirely sure what they wanted to do besides that.

It was unusual to hear such a note of strain in Candida’s voice. Candida was never strained. She was never angry or upset or indiscreet either. It went with the territory.

“I wonder what Paul’s doing to her now,” Fred said to himself, out loud, as if Sid were in the room and he could ask for some input. Then he got up and replaced the receiver gently in its cradle.

Once he started talking to himself, he knew it was time to stop thinking and start taking action.

Action always made him feel a million times better.

Out in Bryn Mawr, Candida DeWitt sat in her living room in front of her fireplace, contemplating the white spray paint that now defaced the fireplace’s fieldstone façade. She didn’t mind the spray paint much. That could be removed. She didn’t even mind the message.

DEATH TO YOU

it said in oversize letters, but that was silly and melodramatic. If that had been the beginning and end of it, she would never have taken it seriously. No, it wasn’t the fact of the spray paint or its message that bothered her. It was how it had been done.

None of her locks had been forced.

None of her windows had been opened.

At no point had her alarm system gone off or even started to go off.

What that meant was that the person who had painted this message on this fireplace had entered Candida’s house with a key and known the house well enough to disarm the security system. Candida could think of only a handful of people who could do that, and they were all connected to Paul Hazzard.

One of the reasons they had suspected Paul of murdering Jacqueline to begin with was the fact that none of the locks had been forced in that house either, and none of the windows broken, and the alarm system hadn’t gone off in spite of the fact it was armed.

The similarities made Candida DeWitt very, very uncomfortable.

L
A VIE BOHèME WAS
not Gregor Demarkian’s idea of a restaurant. It wasn’t even his idea of a comfortable bordello. La Vie Bohème was one of those places with too many spider plants and Boston ferns in the windows that faced the street, too much space between the tables in the main room, and too much fondness for silverware that was supposed to be a work of art on its own. Gregor Demarkian had a lot in common with the bluff old colonels who went to lunch in Agatha Christie’s novels, although he didn’t think he had anything at all in common with Hercule Poirot. Gregor liked his chairs comfortable and his food in substantial quantities. He wanted peace and quiet while he was eating and a large cup of coffee when he was finished. He wanted sensible food like steaks and prime rib and menu listings in plain English—unless, of course, he was eating Armenian or Chinese. The problem with La Vie Bohème was that it played Ravel without ceasing, served its coffee in delicate little bone china contraptions no bigger than the pieces of a dollhouse tea set, and listed steak on its menu as
boeuf à l’anglaise.
Fortunately, the steak was an excellent two-and-a-half-pound porterhouse and the chairs, though gratingly elegant, were large. That was why Gregor agreed to go there, and why La Vie Bohème was Bob Cheswicki’s favorite restaurant. Of course, the prices were outrageous. That went with the territory. Gregor knew that from twenty years as a federal agent, dealing regularly with local law enforcement personnel. There was always one restaurant in every town that high-level police officials truly loved, but that they couldn’t afford on their own. That was where you took them when you wanted their cooperation.

Gregor went from Cavanaugh Street to La Vie Bohème by cab. It was too far to walk, and what he would have had to walk through would not have been safe. It bothered him, what had happened to Philadelphia. The Philadelphia he’d grown up in had not been like this—and it was not just poverty that made the difference. This new president said he would pump a lot of money into the cities. Maybe that would work. Gregor liked the sound of it. His instincts, however, ran in the opposite direction. Money would be nice. It might even be essential.
Attitude
was what really mattered. The police he met these days didn’t seem to think they could do much about crime. The schoolteachers he met at the library lectures he sometimes gave and the mini-conventions he was asked to speak at mostly thought their students were stupid and not worth much more than the effort it took to warehouse them. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the African baseline essay or Shakespeare,” one of them had told him over cookies and punch at the Art Institute. “These kids are never going to be able to understand either.” Then there were the people themselves, bumped into in convenience stores and newsstands, corner diners and taxi stands and bus stops. Everybody seemed so tired. Everybody seemed so
lost.
It was as if Philadelphia were a wind-up toy beginning to wind down. Gregor kept half expecting a big hand to come down from the sky to tighten the spring.

Since no big hand came out of anywhere to do anything, Gregor got out of his cab in front of La Vie Bohème, tipped the driver less handsomely than Bennis would have—really, Bennis was outrageous—and made his way across the sidewalk to La Vie Bohème’s front door. It was a big blond wood door with a brass handle big enough to be God knew what. The sign that said
LA VIE BOHÈME
was a tiny brass one screwed into the door at eye level for a tall woman, engraved with letters so small they were unreadable. The energy might be going out of things in general, but some people had more than you wanted them to have, Gregor thought. And they always expended it on things like this.

Gregor let himself into the air lock, shook the slush and rock salt off his shoes, and went on through to the reception area. Bob Cheswicki was standing at the reservations desk, talking to a tall brunette woman with a rhinestone snood holding her hair at the back of her neck. Bob Cheswicki, Gregor remembered, had recently been divorced. His wife of fifteen years had finally gotten sick and tired of being married to a cop. Gregor wondered how much time Bob spent chatting up the ladies. There were men who needed to be married. There were men who never would and never could be any good on their own. Gregor didn’t know if Bob Cheswicki was one of these or not. He could see that the young woman at the reception desk was not impressed. She probably saw streams of well-paid businessmen every day. Why should she be impressed with a cop?

Bob saw Gregor come in and straightened up a little. “Here’s Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Only three minutes late.”

“There was a lot of traffic,” Gregor said.

The young woman at the reception desk put herself out at least as far as giving Gregor a smile. Gregor Demarkian, after all, was Somebody in Philadelphia. He got his name in the papers and his face on the six o’clock news. There had even been an article or two about him in
People
magazine. The young woman grabbed a pair of enormously large, beribboned and tasseled menus out from under the surface of her desk, stepped into the foyer, looked straight into Demarkian’s eyes, and said, “Follow me, sir. It’s right this way.”

Then she turned her back and Bob Cheswicki winked. “Think I’d do any better if I told her I was Batman in my spare time?” he whispered into Gregor’s ear.

“No,” Gregor said.

“She just gave me all kinds of grief about bringing my briefcase to the table,” Bob said. “Apparently, it isn’t done at La Vie Bohème. I wish you’d brought a briefcase.”

“It looks like I should have brought one to take away what you brought to give me. What’s in that thing?”

“Everything,” Bob said solemnly.

The young woman had stopped halfway across La Vie Bohème’s main room. She was looking back and waiting patiently, a little frown on her face. There was a hanging fern just above her head whose tendrils fell so close to her hair, they made her seem as if she were wearing a hat. Gregor got a weird image of her starring in something called
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
Had there really been a movie of that name, when he was younger?

“I suppose we’d better move,” Bob said.

“I was just riding in a cab,” Gregor said, “thinking about how awful everything’s gotten and how everybody’s attitude is all wrong.”

“We
had
better get moving. You’ve got Februaryitis. Never mind. A nice complicated murder will clear that right up.”

The young woman with the menus was beginning to look very angry. She was working hard not to, but Gregor knew the signs. He began to move toward her between the unidentified greens and spider plants.

Bob was probably right, Gregor thought. He probably did have Februaryitis, or whatever you wanted to call it. There was probably nothing wrong with the country that couldn’t be cured by a couple of weeks’ vacation in the Caribbean.

If that wasn’t it, then he must be getting old.

Whether or not bringing briefcases into La Vie Bohème was de rigueur, it was certainly implicitly discouraged. La Vie Bohème’s chairs were large and wide, but its tables were anything but. Gregor was reminded of the old-fashioned soda shoppes that had littered the neighborhoods of Philadelphia just before the Second World War. They’d had tables like this. Round. Small. Made of cast iron tortured into curlicues and flourishes and painted white. The tables at La Vie Bohème had glass tops. That was the only difference. The soda shoppe tables had only more contorted cast iron. Gregor remembered never having room to put his ice cream sundae down without worrying it would fall off. Now he wondered—as he wondered every time he came here—how he was going to cut his meat without upsetting it and everything else onto the floor. This was the kind of thing that bothered Bob Cheswicki not at all. He ordered a bottle of wine to split between the two of them—“I’m taking the day off. I wanted to enjoy myself while you were paying for it”—and began to pull papers out of his briefcase and spread them around the table. The glass top of the table was covered by a pearl-gray linen tablecloth. It slipped.