Bleeding Hearts(120)
3
Across town, on Cavanaugh Street, Christopher Hannaford stood in the kitchen of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, putting together a salad. He was wearing socks but no shoes, jeans, and a flannel shirt but no belt. His black hair was a mess. Lida was standing on the far side of the kitchen, at the counter next to the stove, putting together the salad dressing. This was at least the fourth time Christopher had made a salad in this room. It had become a routine. It ought to be making him feel wonderful, or at least be making him feel secure. Instead, he felt like cow dung.
“Listen,” he said finally. “Why don’t you just talk to me? Why don’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, Christopher.”
“Of course something is wrong, Lida. For Christ’s sake. What do you take me for?”
“Maybe ‘wrong’ is the wrong word to use.”
“Fine. Pick the right word to use.”
“You’re making too much out of nothing.”
He sliced a pile of radish chips the size of Mount McKinley. He opened the drawer in the counter next to the refrigerator and got out a plastic storage bag. He put the radish chips into the plastic storage bag and the plastic storage bag in the refrigerator. Really trivial things were beginning to seem terribly important.
“Lida,” he said again.
Lida had the salad dressing finished. She picked up the cruet and walked over to him. She put the cruet down next to the salad bowl and stepped back.
“Nothing is wrong,” she said stubbornly. “Believe me. Nothing is wrong.”
Christopher Hannaford didn’t think he’d ever been handed a bigger crock of shit in his life.
Six
1
WHAT GREGOR DEMARKIAN LIKED best about the detective novels Bennis Hannaford sometimes gave him was the part where the detective calls all his suspects into a room and solves the crime in front of an audience. Rex Stout was good for that sort of thing. So were Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie. Gregor much preferred fantasy in his fiction to reality, since the reality was so very seldom really real. Gregor found the fantasy of the gathered suspects enormously funny, and not only because he had never once, in twenty years of federal police work, seen suspects so gathered to receive a solution. Gregor had sympathy for the fictional detectives. He knew why they wanted to bring the dramatis personae into one place. What he couldn’t understand were the fictional suspects. Why did they bother to come? Why did they put up with this kind of mock gathering of the clans at all? Gregor had once suggested to a suspect in a kidnapping case that they ought to meet for lunch, informally, to go over the possible consequences of the suspect’s descent into perjury. The suspect had told him to go to hell and taken off for a week on the Jersey shore instead.
That the remaining serious suspects in the murder of Paul Hazzard were sitting together in Paul Hazzard’s living room when Gregor, Russell Donahue, and Bob Cheswicki drove up was an accident. Gregor knew that. He hadn’t called these three people together. He hadn’t brought Russell and Bob with him so that they could watch him stage a tour de force and pounce on the killer in an unsuspected leap, eliciting an unguarded confession and bringing the case to a close with a crash. He had come here to get the murder weapon, that was all. And yet…
Gregor stood in the foyer of the Hazzards’ town house with his coat over his arm and his shoes dripped slush and rock salt into the runner carpet. In front of him. Bob Cheswicki was saying polite things to Alyssa Hazzard Roderick as she took his coat and put it away in the hall closet. Russell Donahue was standing beside him, looking uncomfortable. He hadn’t been in plainclothes long enough to be used to houses like this. Over at the archway that led to the living room, Caroline Hazzard, James Hazzard, and Fred Scherrer were waiting. Caroline looked a little defensive. James and Fred just looked bland. Bob and Russell walked away toward the living room and Gregor handed his coat to Alyssa Roderick.
“Don’t you people ever call before you show up at the door?” she asked. “We could have been out, you know. I was thinking about being out. The way things have been going, I was seriously thinking of being out to Kathmandu.”
She shoved Gregory’s coat in the closet and then walked away, passing by the others who were crowding up the entranceway and going straight for the love seat. Gregor watched her sit down and tuck her feet under her. She looked petulant.
“I hope you’ve come about something important,” she continued. “I hope you’re close to finding some resolution to this. We’re all getting very much on edge.”