“No, it didn’t have to be someone he expected to see at the party,” Gregor corrected him. “After all, he’d just been ambushed by Candida DeWitt. Another surprise of that kind would probably have seemed relatively minor.”
“But it was someone he knew well,” Bennis insisted.
“Oh, yes.”
“As an explanation, this still bothers me a lot,” Russell Donahue said. “The times seem all wrong. They’re too tight.”
“They’re much too tight,” Gregor agreed. “When I was talking to Helen and Mary this afternoon, one of them said it was impossible. There wasn’t enough time in this schedule for someone to have murdered Paul Hazzard. I remember thinking that exposure was inevitable. The odds were enormous that someone would have seen the murderer either going into the bedroom, or killing Paul Hazzard, or going out of the bedroom.”
“Is that what you mean by luck too?” Russell Donahue asked. “I don’t like it, Mr. Demarkian. It’s too many good breaks and too many timetable coincidences.”
“Only if the murderer was, in fact, not seen.”
“You mean the murderer was seen?” Bennis was shocked. “But Gregor—oh, you mean the murderer was seen but the person who saw him, or her, didn’t know it was the murderer.”
“The person who saw him, or her, was Candida DeWitt,” Gregor said, “and she most certainly knew what she was looking at was a murderer, a two-time murderer. That’s why she’s dead.”
“But why wouldn’t she have told?” Bennis protested. “She must have been crazy.”
“She wasn’t crazy,” Gregor said. “She was just angry. Very, very, very angry. And she thought she was going to be smart.”
The phone rang. Russell Donahue got up from the chair he had dropped into a little while before and went to answer it.
“It’s probably for me,” he said. “Just a second.”
It was for him. Russell picked up the receiver, grunted a few times, and said, “Thank you very much.” Then he hung up again.
“Well,” he told Gregor and Bennis, “Mr. Demarkian, you were right about one thing. Whatever killed Paul Hazzard, it wasn’t that ornamented dagger. They’ve run it through every test they can think of and it all comes up negative. That dagger had Paul Hazzard’s blood on it all right, but it got that blood on it outside Paul Hazzard’s body. It was never for a second inside that man’s chest.”
Three
1
ON SUNDAY MORNING LIDA Arkmanian woke up by the alarm clock, got out of bed, went to her bathroom, and took a shower. When she was finished with her shower, she wrapped herself in a terry-cloth bathrobe and went to her closet to pick out a dress for church. She stood in her closet for a good fifteen minutes, trying to decide between the pale blue silk with the princess collar and the jade wool with three-quarter-length sleeves, before she realized what she was doing. It shocked her, more than a little. She hadn’t thought about church in a week. She hadn’t thought about the implications of church in a week. She wasn’t really thinking about them now. What she was thinking about was the way the skin on the back of Christopher’s neck felt to the tips of her fingers. It was a very odd thing. When she was married—and long before she was married, when she was growing up and first curious about sex and trying so hard not to let anyone know she was curious about sex—the feelings she had always concentrated on were her own, situation passive. The first time a boy had ever kissed her, she had centered herself, feeling what it felt like to have his lips brush against hers, his arm around her back. She had never given a thought to what his lips felt like to her—whether they were rough or smooth, whether they tasted of cinnamon or Vaseline. She had cared for nothing but what he had made her feel. That was true, she thought now, of all the years of her marriage. She had paid attention to all the things her husband had made her feel. She had never noticed at all how he had felt to her. It seemed wrong, somehow, backhanded. Were all women like this?
She had the jade wool in one hand. She put it back on the hanger bar and went out into the bedroom again. Christopher was sitting up in bed, waiting for her, expectant. When all this had started, Lida had been sure that it was some kind of joke. Christopher was bored and trying to find something to do he hadn’t done before. Christopher had never slept with an old lady and wanted to know what it was like. Over the past twenty-four hours, Lida had changed her mind. She was not a very sophisticated woman, but she had never had any trouble knowing when a man was serious.