Bleeding Hearts (38 page)

“Never mention control to anyone in recovery,” Christopher said. “A need for control is a sign of codependency. Maybe they’ve got a point. Maybe I was watching three completely noncodependent people. They were certainly out of control. I think Sylvia was thrilled with the trouble she was causing. She was that kind of woman. Paul Hazzard was after her anytime his daughter’s back was turned. The daughter was getting more and more frenzied. Then, just before lunch one day, Paul Hazzard and Sylvia Charlow disappeared. Poof. One minute they were with us. The next minute they were gone. A minute and a half later, Alyssa showed up to eat. She looked all around the dining room and didn’t find either one of them. She looked all around the dining room again. Then she said, ‘That goddamned shithead’ in a very loud voice and went racing out again. At which point, of course, we all did the inevitable.”

“Which was what?”

“Which was follow them, of course. The staff tried to stop us, but there was nothing they could really do about it. We all poured out of the dining room and went racing up the stairs to the second floor. Alyssa Hazzard went straight up to Paul Hazzard’s room and started banging on the door. It was locked, of course, but she kept banging. In the end, there was nothing he could do.”

“He opened up.”

“Of course he did. To give him credit, he wasn’t disheveled and neither was Sylvia. There was no reason at all to think they were doing anything more provocative than talking. I don’t think Alyssa cared what they were doing. She just started screeching at them.”

“Was she screeching anything in particular?”

“Yep. That’s why we’re having this conversation, isn’t it? It was what she said to Sylvia that struck me, a couple of days ago, as having relevance to what’s been going on around here. Like I said a little while ago. It’s a side issue now.”

“What did she say to Sylvia?”

“She said, ‘You silly cow. He’s after you only for your money.’ ”

Gregor considered this. It fit, of course, but did it make any difference?

He thought even Hannah now believed that Paul Hazzard had been after only her money. And they all knew Hannah wasn’t committing these murders.

“What did Alyssa Hazzard say to her father?”

Christopher Hannaford laughed and poked at his omelet with his fork. “Oh, that was typical. That was right out of a soap opera. ‘You old ass,’ she told him. ‘You know what trouble you got us all into when you tried this the last time. You know what kind of trouble you’re going to get us all into again. What the hell do you think you’re trying to pull?’ It was hysterical, Gregor, it really was. I didn’t even blame her. He
was
an old ass.”

F
RED SCHERRER HAD BEEN
dealing with police officers now for better than thirty years, and he couldn’t help thinking that he would have made a better one than most of the ones he’d met. He would certainly not be as prone to thinking in tracks. That was why he was so often victorious in his fights against official law enforcement agencies. That was why he was so good at getting acquittals not only for the possibly innocent, but for the flagrantly guilty. Police departments got into ruts and dragged district attorneys down with them. Judges took what was handed to them and never bothered to think a case through. If Fred had been this particular police department dealing with this particular case, he would have gotten out of one particular rut right away. He would have stopped insisting to himself and everybody else that the two murders had to have been committed by the same person. Fred didn’t see why that was necessary at all. For the first murder he favored that old woman in whose apartment the murder had been committed. For the second murder he favored himself.

Of course, Fred thought, lying on the made-up bed in the hotel room he had rented at the Sheraton Society Hill, he knew the second murder had not been committed by himself. He’d had a few wild nights in his life, especially in the army, but he would have remembered it if he had stabbed the woman he was interested in to death. That didn’t matter. If you thought of the law as a contest—and Fred always had thought of the law as a contest, a gladiators’ showdown between the forces of Oppression and the champions of the Individual—all that really mattered was the win and lose. Fred had worked very hard to be the one who always won. That was all that mattered.

It was now eleven o’clock on Monday morning and he was going crazy.
That
was all that mattered. He was staring at the ceiling. He was devising clever prosecution strategies to put his own sweet butt in the electric chair. He was trying to remember if Pennsylvania had an electric chair. He was doing nothing useful at all, and he was about to burst. He still thought it had been the right decision, to stay over for a couple of days now that Candida was dead. This way he didn’t look as if he were trying to escape investigation. He wished somebody would come to his door and demand something out of him that he would have to cope with. His room was nice and big and clean and empty. His ceiling was painted in thick cream that looked as if it had been polished. The room service in this hotel was a marvel. He had to
do
something.

“Listen,” Sid had said on the phone that morning. “Get out of that room. Go to the library. Let me fax you some work. You know you by now, Fred. If you don’t have anything around to occupy your mind, you’re going to do something stupid.”

“Don’t fax me any work,” Fred had told him then. “It will only get lost. I’ve got other things on my mind for the moment.”

What he should have had on his mind was Candida dead on the floor, Candida murdered, Candida the person. What he ought to have been doing was having an orgy of emotion. Fred had never been very good at emotions. They had always seemed to him to be such a waste of time. He preferred to think.

Daggers, he thought now. Walls. Town houses. Jealousy. Money. Everybody thought he needed more money. Billionaires thought they needed more money. There was no end to it.

He sat up on the bed. What hair he had was a mess. He could feel it sticking out of his skull in sharp points. He smoothed it down.

Money, he thought again. Money and the dagger. Those were the keys. It was all so clear to him, sharp as a photograph, except that it wasn’t exactly. It was as if he were looking at the picture upside down. Jacqueline lying on the floor of the living room in that town house, lying dead the way he had seen her in the police photographs that had been handed over to him in discovery. Candida De Witt, talking calmly in the car on Friday night about what she knew and what she didn’t know. Candida, lying dead herself on another living room floor. Christ, what was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he make it come out straight?

He got off the bed. His coat was lying over the back of the desk chair on the other side of the room. He had left it there when he had gone down to breakfast to let the maid clean up. The maid had picked it up and shaken it out and folded it neatly and left it there herself. Fred shrugged it on and searched around in the pockets to find his gloves. He never actually wore his gloves, but he liked to know he had them with him. He was the same way about the personal confessions of his clients. He liked to know if they were guilty or innocent. He made a point of insisting that they tell him. He was better than a priest at never telling anyone else. It just made him feel better to know.

Fred let himself into the hall, checked the pocket of his pants for his room key, and headed for the elevators. Going down, he went over it all one more time. There were two other people in the elevator car with him. One was a stout little elderly nun in a white habit that reached just to the middle of her knees, and a black veil. She looked mad as hell. The other was a middle-aged woman in a powder-blue suit with a pleading expression on her face. They seemed to be together.

“They make really wonderful chicken salad in the restaurant downstairs,” the woman in the pastel suit was saying. “It will be perfect for you. I know how you love your chicken salad.”

Fred got out of the elevator as soon as the doors opened on the ground floor. He didn’t care if the elderly nun liked chicken salad or not. He passed the reception desk and saw that it had sprouted decorations it hadn’t had when he’d checked in on Saturday night. There was a bright crimson cardboard heart trimmed in red paper lace next to each of the check-in stations. The young woman stationed at the cashier’s desk was wearing a “Be My Valentine” heart pin on her right shoulder. Fred passed them all and went out onto the street.

Valentine’s Day was—when? Friday? Thursday? Decorations were appearing all around him, in the windows of stores, on the doors of restaurants and delis. This was a busy part of the city. Fred walked up to one of the hotel doormen and gave him the address of the Hazzard town house. The doorman was wearing one of those “Be My Valentine” pins on his tunic. It was so cold out here, Fred’s face felt stiff enough to crack. The doorman was stamping his feet and whacking his gloved hands together every chance he got.

“I wouldn’t bother to pay for a cab to go there,” the doorman said. “It’s only about ten blocks away. That way.” He pointed into the traffic.

“What about the neighborhood?” Fred asked him.

The doorman shrugged. “You shouldn’t have too much trouble, even in that coat. But things are the way things are these days. It’s a new world.”

Actually, Fred thought, it was a very old world. He could have told the doorman things about the crime in ancient Rome that would have curled his hair. He dodged into the traffic and headed out in the direction the doorman had pointed him in. He would have walked a good ways no matter what the doorman had told him. Walking helped him think. Besides, one of the reasons he had picked this hotel was that he’d known it was close to the Hazzard town house.

Daggers. Jacqueline. Living rooms. Stab wounds. Prosecutors. When he’d come to Philadelphia to defend Paul Hazzard against charges of murder, he had thought about the project in purely technical terms. Paul Hazzard was a friend of his. Paul Hazzard was in trouble. Paul Hazzard needed to be gotten out of trouble. Fred had asked Paul the ultimate question—
did you do it?
and received the ultimate answer—
no I didn’t
—and taken enough care to ensure he was being told the truth, but he hadn’t gone beyond that. It had been different with Paul, because Paul was somebody he knew. Fred had been reluctant to push the way he might have pushed other people. Fred hadn’t even been sure he wanted to know what had really happened there. And now…

Daggers. Jacqueline. Living rooms. Stab wounds. Prosecutors. Money. Blood.

It was very cold. Fred Scherrer had been moving quickly. Now he was standing right in front of the Hazzard town house, looking up at its shiny black door. Around him, the city seemed to have deteriorated. One or two of the buildings looked abandoned. There was a vacant lot full of rubbish up the street. Paul had been so proud of this house and his ownership of it. It had been a form of instant background. Fred didn’t think Paul had been capable of preventing himself from lying about how he had gotten hold of it. He wondered how much longer Paul would have been able to hold on to it in the middle of all of this. Philadelphia was falling apart. New York was falling apart. It was all going to hell.

Fred went up the stairs to the front door and pressed the bell.

Philadelphia and New York could do what they wanted to do.

He was going to get this straightened out in his head.

Caroline was in her studio when the doorbell rang, bent over her drafting table under the hot light of a flexible lamp. She should have been at work, but she hadn’t been able to face it. First Daddy, then Candida. The local press was having a field day. The national press was probably being just as bad, but Caroline hadn’t checked. She hated television. It was a propaganda machine for codependence.

Caroline would have felt annoyed with herself for not going in to work—not guilty; she had purged herself of guilt—except that James hadn’t gone in either. She had heard him call Max this morning and cancel all his appointments. Alyssa hadn’t left the house either, but there was nothing unusual in that. Alyssa went out only for social reasons anyway. They were all there together and not talking to each other. It was exactly the way it had been after Jacqueline died.

Caroline needed an arch support anchored at the north end of the trellis. She picked up the compass, placed the point of the pencil where it needed to be, placed the swing point where she thought it had to go to give her the sweep she needed, and drew. She got it wrong.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang again. Caroline got up, let herself out of the studio, and went to listen at the stairwell. If nobody else answered the door, she wasn’t going to. She didn’t want to talk to people today. She was sure somebody would answer though. She knew James and Alyssa far too well.

The doorbell rang for the third time. James came jogging out from the back of the ground floor, from the direction of the basement stairs. He must have been in the kitchen.

“Coming,” he shouted as he came.

Caroline leaned far over the railing and saw James stop as he reached the door and go for the eyehole. Then he stepped back and started to open up.

“Fred,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

Caroline watched Fred Scherrer come into the foyer. His coat was open and his hands were bare. He looked cold. James closed the door behind him and began walking toward the ground floor living room.

“I’m staying over a couple of days in case they need me for the investigation,” Fred was saying. “At least, that was my idea. But they don’t seem to need me for the investigation and I was getting a little nuts. I guess I wanted the walk.”

“You ought to be glad you didn’t come over yesterday,” James told him. “There were about six reporters stationed out there all afternoon and half the night. I hope they all die of frostbite.”

“Who is it?” Alyssa’s voice came bouncing out from the same direction James had come in. Caroline thought they must have been back there together. She wondered what they could have been up to.