Gregor Demarkian and the young man in the off-the-rack suit reached the front door and rang the bell. Caroline toyed with the idea of not answering, and saying later that she hadn’t been home. She decided against it. It was the kind of thing the police always caught you out at. Then they pretended to believe it made you look guilty. Caroline remembered that, too, from all the fuss about Jacqueline.
Caroline put her pencil down and got up and went to the door.
“Yes?” she said when she opened up. It was cold and windy outside. A blast of icy air hit her legs and penetrated the thin cotton of her black boxer pants with no trouble at all. Caroline shivered.
The young man in the off-the-rack suit took a leather folder out of his inside jacket pocket and flipped it open. “I’m Detective First Grade Russell Donahue,” he said politely. “I’m investigating the death last night of a resident of this house, Paul Hazzard. This is a consultant for the Philadelphia police department, Gregor Demarkian.”
“I know Mr. Demarkian from the newspapers,” Caroline said. “Could you tell me what you want?”
“Well,” Russell Donahue said, “we’d like to come in and look around, for one thing.”
“Do you have a search warrant?”
“That’s not the kind of looking around I meant, ma’am. At least, not at this point. Of course, we can go back and get a search warrant if you want us to. You are—?”
“My name is Caroline Hazzard. I was Paul Hazzard’s daughter. I understand that you must be eager to look through my father’s things. I understand you even have a right and an obligation to do so. But without a search warrant or some consultation with my brother and my sister?”
“Are your brother and your sister home?” Russell Donahue asked.
“No,” Caroline said.
“I think Ms. Hazzard is operating under a misconception,” Gregor Demarkian said. To Caroline, he looked fat and unappetizing and out of shape. Definitely in denial. “We don’t want to look through your father’s things, Ms. Hazzard. Far less do we want to search the house, at least at this time. What we are interested in this morning is the wall on which the antique weapons are kept. Assuming that they’re still kept there.”
“We want to see the place the dagger came from,” Russell Donahue put in.
Caroline looked back over her shoulder. She could go on like this for a long time. She might even chase them away from the door this morning. But what good would it do her? They would only come back later, armed with warrants and a combative attitude. They would get what they wanted and be angry with her at the same time.
Caroline stepped back. “It’s the first door on your left as you go down the hall. The archway thing. I was working in there when you rang the bell.”
“Working at what?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
He had walked past her down the hall. Russell Donahue was right behind him. Caroline closed the front door and followed them both.
“I do a local cable television show on carpentry for women,” she said. “I was drawing demonstration boards.”
Gregor Demarkian was standing next to the coffee table where she had been working, leaning over her drawing of the gazebo’s entrance-side elevation. “What’s a demonstration board?”
“An instructional drawing.”
“They’re very colorful.”
Caroline hated to have her things touched. It made her feel furious. It made her feel violated. It was a form of violation. It was a form of symbolic rape. She nudged him away from her drawings.
“They’re colorful like that so that I can do demonstrations in front of large groups of people and no one will have to strain to see.”
“I take it these are the weapons on the wall,” Russell Donahue said.
Gregor Demarkian coughed.
Caroline turned her attention to the plainclothes policeman and the wall of weapons behind him, which did not need to be pointed out in that awkward and obvious fashion. The wall in question was covered over in weapons from side to side and top to bottom. The weapons were crammed in next to each other so thickly, it was in some places impossible to see the wall behind them. Japanese ceremonial swords. Milanese short knives with silver hafts and gold-inlaid holster sheaths. Arabic fighting daggers carved in intricate whorls and patterns. Caroline made a face. Paul had always been such a worshiper of death.
Gregor Demarkian walked up close to the wall and examined it.
“I’ve heard that the dagger in question, the one that was suspected in the death of your stepmother, is missing,” he said.
“That’s right.” Caroline nodded. “My brother James looked for it last night, when he got word that Daddy was—that Daddy was dead. It was gone then.”