Bleeding Hearts(43)

“Wonderful,” Gregor said.

“You can look over the records all you want,” Bob Cheswicki said, “but it still comes down to the same thing. On the night Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died, Paul Hazzard wasn’t broke, but he was the next best thing to. And by the time he got finished paying Fred Scherrer’s bill, he really needed money.”





Five


1


CHRISTOPHER HANNAFORD GOT UP late on Thursday morning because he got up late every morning. Out in California, the radio show he did started at midnight and went to six A.M. In California, this was a schedule he liked. Waking near noon, wandering across the vast empty expanse of his loft space to his Pullman kitchen, making coffee: All in all, it was a very good routine for composing poetry in his head. In spite of the fact that the radio show made him quite a bit of money—and the poetry made him no money at all—Christopher persisted in thinking of poetry as what he “did.” He even had reason to think that way. Monetary awards notwithstanding, modern poetry in the United States was a structured field with its own set of rewards, and Christopher had won all of them. He’d had an issue of Poetry magazine devoted entirely to his work. His pieces had appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and The New Kenyan Review. He’d been asked to read at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Christopher had once told his sister Bennis that poetry was the only thing he had ever been able to take seriously. That wasn’t quite true—there were one or two women he had taken very seriously—but it expressed the one thing he had ever had trouble expressing, so he went with it. Christopher Hannaford took poetry so seriously, he had never actually told anybody he committed it.

Since Bennis had a one-bedroom apartment, Christopher was sleeping on the fold-out living room couch. The couch faced the oversize living room window that looked out on Cavanaugh Street. Halfway up this window there was a plant ledge covered not with plants, but with papier-mâché models of castles with moats, populated by miniature knights on horseback and damsels in pointed hats and dragons breathing painted fire. Bennis always made models of Zed and Zedalia when she was revising her books. Zed and Zedalia were the principal kingdoms in the fantasy world she wrote about. Zed was a country ruled by a king. Zedalia was a country ruled by a queen. They displayed, Bennis had told the New York Times Magazine, the differences between the masculine and the feminine principles in government. Christopher had read that quote and then called to ask her if she’d meant it. She’d told him not to be a damned fool. She had enough trouble keeping track of her characters’ names without worrying about turning them into analogies of God only knew what.

At the moment, both the masculine and the feminine principles of government seemed to have succumbed to the dragonic one. Christopher sat up a little and contemplated the pointed tail, the red spurts of flame, the scaly back. These models had to be a form of automedication. That’s all there was to it. Bennis couldn’t need this kind of detail to write. Christopher contemplated making himself a cup of coffee. He contemplated getting up and taking a shower. He contemplated reading one of Bennis’s books. It had been years, since the publication of Zedalia in Winter, since he’d tried.

Bennis’s living room window looked directly across the street into another living room window, a much bigger living room and a much bigger window than Bennis had. Christopher lay propped up on the back of the couch and watched the furniture in that living room do nothing in particular. He imagined Lida Arkmanian coming in from downstairs or upstairs or the back hall, rearranging things, doing away with dust. Did she do her own dusting? Christopher didn’t think so—women who owned town houses of that size rarely did any domestic work at all—but he could imagine her dusting. He could imagine her straightening shelves and washing down counters too. He had never found those things particularly alluring activities. He didn’t do any of them himself and he never asked the women he knew to do them, or even asked them if they could. He just found something he liked—half-attractive and half-comforting, oddly enough—in thinking of Lida doing them.

There was a small brass Tiffany carriage clock on the end table to the right of the couch. Christopher picked it up. It had that kind of ornate lettering he found so hard to read. Positioned so that he could imagine the rococo numerals as a species of decorative dots, he saw that it was two minutes to twelve. It was too late for lunch, that was certain, unless he wanted to ask today and wait until tomorrow. He didn’t want to wait until tomorrow. And dinner would be better anyway. Less light.