Bleeding Hearts(35)

“I don’t have to stay here and be subjected to this abuse.” Caroline stood up. Her shredded wheat was half eaten. Her juice had barely been touched. Paul wondered what it was the juice of. Radishes? With the juicer, you never knew. Caroline stalked to the dining room door and stopped. “You can try as hard as you want to keep me under your thumbs, but it won’t work,” she declared. “I’m a survivor.”

Then she turned her back to them and stalked away.

Down at his end of the table, James was eating his way through the last half of his last English muffin, sinking his teeth into two inches of cream cheese, catching the overflow of butter with his tongue. Paul watched him curiously. James was unlike either of his other children. Nothing bothered James.

“Caroline,” James said carefully, “is furious with me. She left her tote bag in the front hall last night, and when I came home I tripped over it. She was very put out.”

“Did you do it on purpose?”

“No,” James said. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me. Putting a frog in her bed, that would have occurred to me. Maybe I’ll do it sometime. I was a little potted, if you want to know the truth. I went drinking with Max and we had a better time than usual. When I tripped over the tote bag, I jabbed myself with that oversize compass of hers. I’m still bleeding.”

“I don’t suppose it was anything serious,” Paul said dryly.

“It’s not. I was wearing boots. Are you all right? You were talking on the phone, weren’t you? Do you have another lady?”

Paul buttered his bagel carefully. “I don’t have another lady, exactly. I’ve met a woman I rather like.”

“Really? What’s her name?”

“Hannah Krekorian.”

“Armenian,” James said judiciously. “Or at least her husband was. I suppose that’s her married name.”

“It is. And believe it or not, she’s not twelve years old. She’s damned near as old as I am.”

“Well-preserved?”

Paul thought of Hannah’s dumpy figure, her plain, uninteresting face. “Not exactly,” he said. “She’s just someone I’m comfortable with. I’m going to go to a party at her house this coming Friday night. A crush with cocktails, I think.”

“On the Main Line?”

“No,” Paul said. “On Cavanaugh Street. In the city. You know about that. There was a piece in the Inquirer.”

“Home of the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” James laughed. “Well, I hope you’re prepared. Maybe this woman is a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s and she took up with you only because Gregor Demarkian wants to meet you because Gregor Demarkian has decided to look into all that about what happened to Jackie and so—”

“For Christ’s sake,” Paul said. “I don’t even think that’s a pleasant suggestion. What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing’s gotten into me. I just think the coincidence is funny. Your Hannah what’ s-her-name probably doesn’t even know Gregor Demarkian. But with Candida writing her memoirs and all—” James shrugged.

“Candida’s memoirs are going to be mostly about sex,” Paul said, “no matter what the rest of you think. I know that woman. Don’t bring up all that about Jackie in front of Caroline. She’ll get hysterical.”

“She’ll get hysterical anyway. She can manufacture excuses for hysteria more efficiently than I could ever give her causes for it. You want another bagel? I’m getting up.”

“No,” Paul said. “No, thank you. I’m fine for now.”

Actually, he was hungry as hell, but he didn’t want James to notice that. Paul was always telling James that James ate too much. Which James did. But James didn’t care. Paul took a sip of his coffee and sighed.

Paul wasn’t worried that Gregor Demarkian might want to look into the death of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. He didn’t think there was anything about that that Gregor Demarkian could find—or anything he could do about anything he did find. There were other reasons why a man might prefer not to court a woman with a detective in attendance.

Of course, Paul told himself, he had no reason to expect that a detective would be in attendance. James was right. Hannah Krekorian probably didn’t even know Gregor Demarkian. Living on the same street and sharing an ethnic heritage did not add up to acquaintance in modern Philadelphia. And what could he do even if Hannah did know Demarkian? It was really too late to turn back now.

Hell, Paul Hazzard thought, it was worse than too late.

Any retreat from where he was standing at that moment would be a form of suicide—and he didn’t mean the psychic kind.