Bleeding Hearts(26)

“By the husband?”

“Yes, Gregor, I think so. You can look in here.” Bennis tapped her stack of computer printouts. “That’s just about everything ever printed on the case. I subscribe to one of those networks, you know. Your computer plugs into it and then when you want some information you just ask and out comes all this. It’s very helpful. Like with the dagger. The police thought the dagger had to be the murder weapon because the wound was so odd. One of the true crime magazines had the police drawings of the cross-sections the autopsy people made. Apparently, if you looked at Jacqueline from above, what you saw was the round hole where the sharp point went through her chest and then a little curved depression to the right. Your right, as you looked at it. But if you looked at the cross-section, it got stranger.”

“I think it’s strange enough the way it is,” Gregor said. “A little curved depression? Where? In her skin? In her clothes?”

“In her skin,” Bennis said. “She wasn’t wearing many clothes, just a bra and a pair of panties, and it wasn’t much of a bra. That was in the papers at the time too. It was one of the reasons so many people thought Paul Hazzard must have killed her. Who does a woman walk around in front of in nothing but her bra and panties, especially in her living room, if not her husband?”

Gregor Demarkian’s wife, Elizabeth, had never in her life walked around in front of him in her bra and panties. He ate some hash browns and wondered why any woman would do that.

“Cross-sections,” he said finally.

Bennis grabbed the computer printout and pulled it toward her. “Here’s the cross-section. The doctor who did the autopsy testified at the trial that he didn’t usually do cross-sections of this kind, but the odd shape of the depression bothered him, and so he did. Take a look at it. You can’t tell from this angle, but the hole the sharp part made—the part that actually pierced Jacqueline Isherwood’s heart—was perfectly round.”

Gregor looked. For a tissue cross-section, the outline was strikingly clear. He wondered if the magazine that had published it had tidied up the edges to make a better illustration. What Bennis had looked like this:



Gregor pushed the printout back to her. “Do you have a picture of the weapon that probably wasn’t the weapon? Or doesn’t your computer service do photographs?”

“They come over the fax. Really, Gregor. You’re going to have to catch up with technology one of these days. It’s wonderful, the things we can do with microchips.”

“The only microchips I want to hear about are deep fried and made of potato,” Gregor said. “Do you have that picture?”

“Of course I do.”

Bennis rifled through the computer printout again, found a loose sheet of paper, and passed it over. On it, Gregor found a smudged black-and-white photograph of a very curious weapon, a round, needlelike shaft point attached to a sharp-edged curved handle, ornately carved. It looked like this:



Gregor studied it for a moment, then handed it back to Bennis. “The objections were well founded. There have to be a million ridges in the surface of that thing. It would have taken days to make a good job of cleaning it, and even then you probably couldn’t have gotten everything. Not if you’d plunged that thing into a woman’s chest. What’s it made of?”

“Iron,” Bennis said. “I think some of the decorative scrollwork may be copper or brass.”

“Well, iron or copper or brass, cleaned or not, right shape or otherwise, I wouldn’t have believed this was the weapon in a murder in twentieth-century America under any circumstances—except maybe if it had been found sticking out of the woman’s chest when the police arrived at the scene, and even then I’d have questions. People just don’t do things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like use antique daggers to do their nearest and dearest in. What for?”

Bennis frowned. “Well, it was right at hand, wasn’t it? It was hanging there on the wall. Maybe there was an argument—”

“Try to picture it to yourself,” Gregor said patiently. “You’re having a royal bust-up with your father. The two of you are yelling and screaming at each other. You’re so furious, you want to kill him. So you walk to the wall, take this extremely odd-looking thing out of the brackets holding it up there, walk back to your father, who has been standing still for all this in the meantime—”

“Oh,” Bennis said. “Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe it was premeditated. Paul Hazzard decided to kill his wife. So he waited until she was alone and not expecting anything, then when her back was turned he took the dagger down from the wall—”