Bleeding Hearts(104)

Russell Donahue came back from the phone. “I’ve got somebody checking,” he said. “She’ll call us back. Have you determined anything important while I was gone?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

He was still wearing his coat. He was still standing up. He shrugged his coat off and threw it on one of the kitchen counters. Then he searched through his pockets to find the piece of paper he wanted.

“There’s never anything around here to write on,” he complained. “There’s never anything around here to write with.”

Bennis got up. The water was boiling. She took coffee mugs out of Gregor’s cabinet and the instant coffee from his pantry shelf and put them on the kitchen table. Then she opened the drawer next to the refrigerator and came up with a pen and a much-used steno pad.

“Here you go,” she said, turning back to the refrigerator to get out the cream. The sugar was in a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. Bennis got some spoons and sat down again. “Are you going to draw a picture? Or are you going to write down the name of the murderer and hide it in the cookie jar, and then when the police finally get around to doing something about the case you’ll pull the paper out and show everybody how much faster you were at working it all out?”

“Neither,” Gregor said. “I’m going to write down how it happened. Beginning at the beginning. Russell?”

“I’m paying attention.”

“Good. Let’s go back to what I was talking about before. The first and most important thing was the arrival of that invitation. That invitation provided opportunity. Remember that this is someone who has already killed once—killed Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard to be exact—and gotten away with it. It would have been a major mistake to murder Paul Hazzard in the same place and in the same way that his wife was murdered. Our murderer does not make major mistakes.”

“If that earring belongs to your murderer,” Bennis said, “she made at least one major mistake.”

“Did she?” Gregor asked. “Even assuming it belongs to the murderer, Bennis, it’s only a minor mistake. It wasn’t lost at the scene but in another room. It’s something that many people have, you said so yourself. It could never be successfully used in evidence.”

“It seems to have given you ideas.”

“That, yes,” Gregor said. He pulled the steno pad close to him and began to write.

1. P. Hazzard receives invitation

2. Murderer checks out Hannah’s apartment to see if entry is feasible

3. Murderer hand-delivers invitation, repackaged, to C. DeWitt

Russell Donahue studied the list and frowned. “There’s something I don’t understand. So what if that invitation was delivered to Candida DeWitt? That couldn’t have been enough to ensure that she’d show up.”

“There was no need to ensure that she’d show up,” Gregor explained patiently. “All along, the murderer intended for there to be two suspects in this case. One, of course, was Hannah Krekorian. The other was Candida DeWitt. I don’t even know if Mrs. DeWitt was meant to be a serious suspect. Casting suspicion in this way might have been simply spite. But to cast suspicion, it wasn’t necessary that Candida DeWitt actually attend Hannah Krekorian’s party. It was only necessary that she could be proved to have known where Hannah lived.”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

Gregor started writing again.

    4. Murderer arrives at Hannah’s apartment and gets in through window, 7:00 to 7:05 last night

    5. Murderer hides in guest room intending to stay there until party is finished

    6. C. DeWitt arrives and causes scene

    7. Hannah goes to master bathroom

    8. P. Hazzard goes to master bedroom

    9. Murderer leaves guest room and goes into master bedroom, locking master bedroom door



Gregor tapped the piece of paper he had pulled out of his trouser pocket, the timetable put together by Mary Ohanian and Helen Tevorakian. “We have to check out the particulars,” he said, “but this is how it has to have happened. That’s what I mean, Russell, about a carefully planned murder that depended so much on luck. The plan was for a murder later in the evening. The luck was in catching Paul Hazzard the way he was caught. It was a much better setup than the original plan, but it couldn’t possibly have been engineered.”

“If it happened the way you’re saying it did, it must have been someone Hazzard knew very well. It must have been someone he expected to see at that party,” Russell said.