Gregor eased himself into the little empty space that had arranged itself around Paul Hazzard and Candida DeWitt like a magnetic field.
“Excuse me,” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”
Candida turned to him with interest. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very glad you’re here. I was hoping you would be here.”
“Because you wanted to meet me?”
“Of course not. Because I knew your being here would make Paul very upset. Ask Paul. As far as he’s concerned, everything I’ve done for the past four years or so has been just to make him upset.”
“I don’t know why you’ve done what you’ve done.” Paul spoke angrily. “I don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s pathological.”
“A psychiatric term for everything,” Candida said brightly. “He did try to get me arrested for the murder of his wife, you know. He told the police all sorts of things that weren’t quite true. Fortunately, I had an ironclad alibi.”
“All I did was answer questions,” Paul told her. “All I did was exactly what my lawyer advised me to do, and even you said Fred Scherrer was a man worth listening to.”
“Oh, he is. He’s definitely a man worth listening to. I’ve been listening to him all this afternoon. On the subject of libel law.”
“Candida, for God’s sake.”
Little ripples were going through the crowd now. Even Gregor, who was not sensitive to that sort of thing, could feel them. People had begun to speculate.
“What did she mean, the murder of his wife?”
“His wife was murdered?”
“Who is this person?”
Somebody in the crowd would know who “this person” was. That was inevitable. Of course, Bennis did know. Gregor wasn’t worried about that. He could count on Bennis to be sensible in a situation like this. The trouble would come when some fool in the crowd would make the connection between Paul Hazzard and a newspaper story he had read once or a clip he had seen on the eleven o’clock news. Then he would blurt it all out, and then where would they be? Gregor stepped a little closer to the space between Candida and Paul. It made him think of the fifty-seventh parallel.
“Maybe I should get Mrs. DeWitt a drink,” he said. “We have some excellent rum punch.”
“Mrs. DeWitt is not going to stay,” Paul Hazzard said.
“Of course I’m going to stay,” Candida contradicted him. “And I’d love some rum punch. It’s exactly the sort of thing I have a craving for.”
“You have a craving for sensationalism,” Paul Hazzard said. “It’s a form of personality disorder.”
The tension in the room was so palpable now, it was like an ether made of fine wires. Hook it up to a battery and they would all be electrocuted.
“Rum punch,” Gregor repeated. “Come with me. It’s right over here.”
There were more ripples in the crowd, more murmurs, a cough or two. Then Hannah Krekorian suddenly seemed to come to life. She had been standing frozen through almost all of Candida DeWitt’s conversation with Paul. She had been so quiet, Gregor had forgotten she was there. Now she said “Oh!” in a loud, anguished voice that was so raw, it sounded like the wail of a wounded cat. Her thick, pasty face got red and her neck and chest, visible around the scooped-out neckline of her party dress, turned maroon. Never in his life had Gregor been made so aware of the fact that Hannah was a plain woman. Pain made her ugly.
“Oh,” Hannah said again. She was half in tears and half in tantrum. She looked from Candida to Paul to Candida to Paul to Candida to Paul. Then she veered around in a great clumsy arc and ran for the duplex’s spiral stairs. Going up to the second floor, Hannah was exposed to the shocked stares of everyone who was important to her on Cavanaugh Street. Even little Tommy Moradanyan was awake and staring. Hannah was clumsy and large and made a lot of noise. The stairs were delicate and shook under her weight.
“No, no,” Lida Arkmanian said from the other side of the room. “This is not right.”
“This is outrageous,” Paul Hazzard announced. He wheeled on Candida DeWitt. “You were always a manipulator, Candida, but this is the first time I’ve ever noticed that you were a bitch.”
Paul Hazzard gave Gregor a furious look that could have meant everything or nothing, and went shooting up the stairs after Hannah.
He looked ready to kill somebody.
2
Now the emergency support mechanisms went into operation. Now the women of Cavanaugh Street got moving. Gregor didn’t know what motivated them. If he had been in their places, he would have done something before Hannah had gone running up those stairs and Paul had gone running up after her. Either that, or he would have followed them both. Actually, somebody did that. Mary Ohanian went sprinting up the spiral stairs and came back less than a minute later.