Bleeding Hearts(25)

Oh, yes, you would, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say that either. Instead, he took a long sip of hot black coffee and tried to be encouraging. “You saw him again, I take it? Hannah and this person were still on the sidewalk when you got back?”

“If they had been, they would have frozen to death. It was hours, Gregor. No, they must have gone out to dinner or something. They were getting out of a cab at Hannah’s place again when I got home with Tibor and the rest of the clergy—and I won’t do that again anytime soon; good Lord—and since I was standing right there at the church, and that’s a lot closer, I got a good look at his face.”

“Which you recognized,” Gregor said.

“I most certainly did.”

“Well?” Gregor asked her. “Who was it? It couldn’t really have been Jack the Ripper. Nobody alive today knows who that was.”

“Maybe I just mean he was the next best thing. It was Paul Hazzard. Does the name ring a bell?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said slowly.

Bennis nodded. “That might have been the year your wife was so sick. The year of the trial, I mean. Otherwise, I think you’d remember it. It was a kind of national soap opera, complete with press leaks and stolen tape recordings and I don’t know what else. Everybody thought the state of Pennsylvania had him nailed—Paul Hazzard, I mean—and even now just about everybody’s sure he killed his wife. It’s just that he had Fred Scherrer for a lawyer, so he didn’t get convicted of it.”

Linda Melajian came up to the table with another tray. “Here you go,” she said, starting to set down dishes, “The coronary bypass surgery special.”





3


Gregor Demarkian knew enough about the way the courts operated in the United States—and especially about the way the courts operated in cases of murder—not to have any illusions that the guilty were always convicted or the innocent set free. He had sat in a courtroom in Tupelo, Mississippi, and watched a man he knew had slaughtered five young women set free for insufficient evidence. He had sat in the FBI office in Salt Lake City and waited for word that the state of Utah had put a man he was sure was innocent to death by firing squad. The vagaries of the political system were the primary reason he was opposed to the death penalty in spite of the fact that he had worked for so much of his career with perpetrators who in every moral sense deserved to be dead. In favor of the death penalty or not, consciousness of the arbitrariness of organized justice notwithstanding, Gregor still believed implicitly in the principle of innocent until proven guilty. There were times when he had privileged knowledge, when he knew a verdict was wrong because he possessed information the jury did not have. In cases in which he had no more information than the jury had had, or even less, Gregor went with the decision their deliberations had settled on. He would have eaten dinner at the house of an acquitted poisoner with no qualms at all. “Everybody’s sure he killed his wife” was not the kind of information Gregor Demarkian allowed to influence his life.

The sausages at Ararat were round spiced patties from Jimmy Dean, his favorite. He cut one in quarters and speared a piece.

“I remember the case now,” he said. “There was a whole lot of nonsense about an antique dagger.”

“It wasn’t nonsense, Gregor. It seemed like the only explanation at the time. It was a dagger that her grandfather had brought back from some Pacific island he’d gone to in the early twenties. I remember seeing it once when I was about eight years old. I went there for a birthday party for Jacqueline’s sister Juliana.”

Gregor was surprised. “You went there? You mean you knew the woman who was murdered?”

“Not exactly.” Bennis shook her head. “Jacqueline Isherwood was a lot older than I was—my sister Myra’s age, in fact. I think Jacqueline and Myra went all through boarding school and college together. I only really knew Juliana, and by the time Jacqueline was murdered, Juliana was dead.”

“How?”

“Overdose of Seconal when she was twenty-six. Juliana was not a very stable person. We weren’t very good friends or anything. The Isherwood girls were all very serious about psychology. And you know how I feel about psychology.”

“Mmm.” Gregor speared another piece of sausage and thought about it. “Wasn’t there something impossible about that dagger? Wasn’t it that there wasn’t any blood on it or—”

Bennis sighed. “There wasn’t any blood on it, that was the thing. And there should have been, because the dagger was sort of ridged—it had millions of little cut-out patterns in it and it would have been impossible to clean all the blood out of it in such a short time, and Jacqueline was found less than an hour from the time she was killed—”