Bleeding Hearts(115)

“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.”





Five


1


FRED 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.”