“But what’s that supposed to mean, too much?” Christopher asked. “It’s not as if Hannah’s life has been one unrelieved stream of failures with men. It couldn’t have been. She was married. She has children and grandchildren.”
Lida cocked her head. “On the day Hannah was married, right after the ceremony while she was standing in the receiving line to the dinner, Daphne Tessevarian walked up to her and said it was too bad she looked so fat in her wedding dress, but once she had children it wouldn’t matter so much because she would be expected to gain weight.”
“Ouch.”
“Christopher, listen.” Lida clutched the quilt to her chest—it kept slipping—and took another sip of champagne. It felt good. It tickled. “Listen,” she said again. “Krekor is convinced that he knows Hannah and that Hannah could never have stabbed anyone, but I am not so sure. I am not so sure at all. What with Paul Hazzard, she was so happy, Christopher, she was thrilled, and then that woman showing up and everything falling all to pieces and in public like that, in front of everyone. And the man was stabbed six times at least, as if he were stabbed in anger. I don’t think Hannah could think through a murder and commit it, but I think she might be able to kill someone like Paul Hazzard in anger.”
“I think you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions. You’d have to account for the dagger. You’d have to account for a lot of things. I think it’s much more logical to suspect Candida DeWitt.”
“Yes,” Lida said softly. “We all want to suspect Candida DeWitt. It absolves us all of the responsibility.”
“I feel responsible for only one thing,” Christopher said. He finished off the last of the chocolate hearts and put his champagne glass behind him on the night table. Then he took Lida’s champagne glass out of her hand and put it on the night table too.
“Let’s go back to what we were doing,” he said. “I’ll bet you anything you want that I can get you to feel like that again.”
“I thought that was impossible,” Lida said. “I thought with men, once they—you know—I thought then they had to wait for a different night.”
“I didn’t say I could get me to feel that way again. I said I could get you to.”
“Does this have something to do with whipped cream?”
“No,” Christopher said. He stretched them both out on the sheets and then he kissed her. “Whipped cream is for when you’re bored, and I am not bored. How about you?”
“No.” Lida felt a little breathless. “I am not bored.”
“Good.”
Good?
Christopher got back under the quilt and Lida put her hand on his bare back.
He had a very nice back.
He had a very nice everything.
How long was she going to be able to get away with this?
Three
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN DID NOT believe he would shield anyone from the consequences of murder, not even a woman he had known all his life. He was not so sure he would remain clearheaded in the face of evidence against her. It wasn’t just a question of his having known Hannah Krekorian. It wasn’t even a question of his having liked her. The real problem was his expectations. Here was a woman he had seen day after day for the past couple of years. He wasn’t relying on what he remembered about them all from forty or fifty years ago. He had Hannah these days to consider, and Hannah these days was a heavy, talkative woman in middle age who paid more attention to the sound of her own voice than she did to what other people said to her. Hannah these days cooked too much food when her family came to visit, spent too much money on birthday and Christmas presents, and vaguely resented the very idea of Gloria Steinem. It wasn’t that women like Hannah Krekorian didn’t commit murder. Gregor had good reason to know that they committed it in batches. The problem was that they didn’t commit this kind of murder. If Hannah had poisoned her family one by one and collected the insurance money, or put cyanide in the candy she handed out to the children who came to her door on Halloween, or overdone the insulin injections she gave to a failing old aunt or mother—those were the kinds of murders women like Hannah committed, and only after there were half a dozen bodies on the floor did anyone realize they were crazy. This sort of thing was something else. Six stab wounds into the chest of a grown man. It didn’t fit.
The picture of him on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t fit his image of himself, but he had expected worse, so he wasn’t too upset. He’d never expected for a moment that he’d be able to escape publicity altogether. That was like believing the tooth fairy really did bring Tommy Moradanyan his quarters. Even Tommy didn’t believe that. At least the headline on the Inquirer was more sensible than some of them had been in the past. It said