Bleeding Hearts(57)

“She’s locked herself in the bathroom up there and he’s talking to her through the door,” Mary Ohanian said, out of breath. “I don’t think she’s paying much attention to what he’s trying to tell her.”

“I wouldn’t listen to a thing he tried to tell me,” Sheila Kashinian announced. “Can you imagine?”

Gregor got hold of the sleeve of Candida DeWitt’s dress and began to pull her out of the limelight. “If I were you,” he told her, “I’d either retreat into obscurity or leave entirely. Leaving would be the better course.”

“I suppose it would.” Candida allowed herself to be led, but she was looking back at the spiral stairs. “I suppose I should stay long enough to talk to her. To tell her it wasn’t Paul’s fault. This wasn’t something he set up to hurt her.”

“Did he set it up at all?”

“Of course not. I just thought—”

Gregor had pulled them back toward the buffet table and the window. The space around the table was empty now except for Tommy Moradanyan, who had found the shrimp unattended and taken advantage of the situation.

Gregor poured a glass of punch and handed it to Candida DeWitt. He poured a glass of raki for himself.

“She’d be better off without him,” Candida DeWitt said suddenly. “You do realize that, don’t you? Paul Hazzard is very bad news. In spite of the fact that he didn’t kill his wife.”

“Do you know that for a fact? That he didn’t kill his wife?”

“Oh, yes. I know it almost as well as if I’d been standing in the room when Jacqueline was stabbed. He ruined Jacqueline, you know. He—twisted her.”

“Did you know Jacqueline before you met Paul?”

“The proper question would be whether I knew Jacqueline before she met Paul. I didn’t. I did know her before he began to… work on her. That’s what Paul does when he gets tired of women. He works on them.”

“Did he work on you?”

“He tried. That was what was wrong with the way the police were doing their thinking. They believed—they insisted on believing—that Paul wanted Jacqueline dead so that he could be with me. But Paul didn’t want to be with me. He had broken our—relationship—off nearly six weeks before Jacqueline died. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t been the one to end it.”

“Maybe he broke it off only because his wife told him he had to,” Gregor suggested. “Maybe that was his motive. He broke it off under duress. He didn’t want to. He rid himself of the duress. Then he could resume the relationship.”

“If Paul was interested in resuming the relationship, he wouldn’t have tried to hand me over to the police on a silver platter,” Candida told him.

“True.”

“Paul would never have wanted to be rid of Jacqueline. Whatever for? He was tired of her, yes, but she was useful to him and he had her completely cowed. She was really very stupid about men. Paul had affairs all the time and she never noticed. As long as Paul showed up for the family things her people gave and took her to the Assemblies every year and never got photographed with anyone else who belonged on the society pages, Jacqueline thought everything was all right.”

“I’ve heard her described in much less flattering terms,” Gregor said. “She seems to have—upset other people a good deal more than she seems to have upset you.”

Candida shrugged. Her glass was empty. She handed it to Gregor and waited patiently while he refilled it. She was an old-fashioned woman in her way. She let men do things for her. It probably worked.

“Jacqueline,” she told Gregor, “was an extremely easy woman to say things against. She was essentially stupid. She was arrogant in the way only really upper-class people can be arrogant. She was mostly oblivious of other people. Except that she wasn’t oblivious of Paul. Which was her mistake. It’s always a mistake not to be oblivious of Paul.”

Activity had been going on in the room around them, feverish activity that Candida DeWitt had ignored and Gregor had failed to notice. Now he saw Helen Tevorakian coming down the spiral stairs, looking worried. He stopped talking to Candida DeWitt to listen.

Lida Arkmanian and Sheila Kashinian were waiting for Helen at the bottom of the stairs. Helen was more or less of Lida and Hannah’s generation, and Sheila had been adopted into it by popular acclamation. Helen reached the foyer and shook her head. She was wearing a fussy dress pasted over with pink sequins. It made her look fatter than she really was.

“I don’t know what’s going on up there now. They’re absolutely quiet, except that Hannah is crying.”