“It’s that damned dagger, that’s what it is,” Gregor said to the air.
He had a jar of instant coffee in one hand and a white coffee mug in the other. He put them both down on the counter next to the sink and drifted over to the kitchen table. He made terrible coffee. Tibor made worse coffee, but that didn’t make his own any better. It was like the difference between arsenic and cyanide. One might be a little less strong than the other, but they were both lethal. He paged through the computer printouts and shook his head.
“Newspaper stories,” he muttered to himself in disgust. That’s all these pages held—old newspaper stories, old magazine stories, clips and items from several dozen sources. The computer service Bennis subscribed to must be some kind of media research vehicle. It wouldn’t help him any. If there was anything Gregor had learned after twenty years in the FBI, it was that newspapers almost never got anything right.
He got his kettle, filled it with water, and put it on the stove. Then he went to the phone hanging on the wall near the refrigerator. It took a little thought to decide who would be best to call. It was a question of who had access to what information and who owed whom a favor. Finally, he made up his mind and punched a number out on the touchtone pad.
“Philadelphia Police Department,” the woman on the other end of the line said, answering. “Commissioner’s office.”
“This is Gregor Demarkian. I’d like to speak to Robert Cheswicki, please.”
“If you will wait a moment, I’ll see if he’s in.”
Gregor waited for her to ask him to spell his name. When she didn’t, he got a little nervous. Secretaries and telephone operators who didn’t ask him to spell his name usually got it wrong. He had been transformed into “Greg Marks” by more people in more places than he wanted to count. This time he was lucky. Either this woman was better at names than most of the people Gregor had dealt with, or Bob Cheswicki was very good at deciphering mangled messages.
“Gregor,” Bob said, sounding as sunshiny and beamy as he looked in person. Gregor had always thought there was something wrong with an assistant commissioner of police who was cheerful all the time. “Where did you come from? I haven’t heard from you in ages!”
“I’ve been leading a reasonably quiet life the past few months, believe it or not. Nobody’s thrown the corpse of a taxi dancer into John Cardinal O’Bannion’s lap. Nobody’s camped out on my doorstep and insisted I do something about the weird things her mother-in-law has started to do with food. It’s been very boring.”
“You don’t sound bored,” Bob said judiciously. “I take it you’ve found something to perk you up?”
“I’ve found something to annoy me,” Gregor admitted. “I was wondering if you’d do me a favor. If you’d get me some information I need.”
Bob Cheswicki was cautious. “If it’s about a current case, I might not be able to—”
“No, no, no,” Gregor said. “The case is old. Very old. Four years old, in fact. I thought we’d work out a trade. Wednesday, I’ll buy you lunch at La Vie Bohème, you’ll bring along everything you can get your hands on about the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Bob came on again, and he sounded strangled. “Gregor, if you know something we don’t know about that case, all I can tell you is we want to hear it. You don’t know how we want to hear it. There are still men in this department who blow up every time they think about Paul Hazzard getting off, and I’m one of them.”
“I don’t have any new information,” Gregor told him. “I’m just—curious.”
“That’s enough for me.” Bob was definite; “If you get curious enough, you might actually come up with something. Twelve o’clock?”
“Perfect.”
“See you there.”
The phone went to dial tone, and Gregor hung up.
I must be crazy, he thought.
I don’t have anything to go on. I haven’t got a hope of getting anything to go on. And now Bob Cheswicki is going to be keeping his fingers crossed I find a way to jail Paul Hazzard, if not actually execute him.
Why do I do these things to myself?
Three
1
THERE WERE PEOPLE WHO thought Paul Hazzard was a fraud—a con man with all the right credentials and a telegenic face, but no conviction. There were other people who were afraid he wasn’t a fraud, that he believed all the nonsense he spouted, that he thought he was making sense. The reality was a little more complicated. Paul Hazzard did not lack conviction. He believed absolutely that most of the people in the world were exactly what he said they were: masses of addictions and post-traumatic stress disorders, shamed out of any hope of acquiring self-esteem on their own, in denial. There was a virus loose in the world, the virus of shame and guilt, the virus of hidden abuse. This was not like ordinary abuse. Paul thought that ordinary abuse, like battering and incest, was probably easier on everyone, because there was no confusion that it was what it was. Hidden abuse was insidious. It was made up of sideways glances and offhand refusals. It thrived on hierarchy and competition. It was the essence of “standards.” It didn’t surprise Paul Hazzard at all that middle-class Americans were so miserable. The highest standard of living in the history of the world, an almost unprecedented freedom of action, access to art and information so wide and cheap it would have made John Stuart Mill giddy—none of that mattered because none of the people Paul Hazzard dealt with could climb out of their pain long enough to experience the world around them. These were the people Paul Hazzard helped—or used to help, when his seminars were crowded, and his books sold millions of copies. He was sure he helped them. They came up to him wherever he went to speak and told him how he had changed their lives.