“Listen,” he said, “believe it or not, I came looking for you because there was something I wanted to ask you. Something I think maybe I should have told Gregor Demarkian last night. Not that it’s really anything important.”
Bennis looked interested. “Do you mean you know something about the murder? I mean, of course you should tell Gregor if you know something about what happened last night. That’s the whole point of an investigation. To find out what happened.”
“It’s not about what happened last night. It’s about me. And Paul Hazzard.”
“You? You knew Paul Hazzard?”
“Not exactly,” Christopher said. “Not the way you’re using the term. You remember that place you paid for me to go to right after Daddy died, the therapy place for compulsive gambling?”
“I remember you went. I also remember you didn’t stay very long.”
“You also know I haven’t done anything but buy a lottery ticket once a month for years. You haven’t had to bail me out, have you?”
“No,” Bennis admitted. “I haven’t.”
“Okay, then. The thing is, the place I went to was run by Paul Hazzard’s organization. He used to have some kind of corporate entity set up to keep all the pieces in place. Maybe he still does. Anyway, most of the time the man himself never went near the place. It was run by people he’d trained. But while I was there, he did show up just once for a couple of days.”
“And?”
“And it was strange,” Christopher said. “It was very strange. That was what I wanted to talk to Gregor about. I also wanted to tell him I’d had contact with Paul Hazzard before so it didn’t come out later and look like Christ only knows what. But it’s more than that. It’s what happened while he was up there. In Vermont.”
Bennis got out a cigarette and lit up. “You’re being very mysterious,” she said. “In fact, you’re getting me very nervous. Does this whatever-it-is have something to do with you personally? Did you have a motive for killing that man?”
“It’s not that,” Christopher told her. “It’s just that this thing—this thing that happened with Paul Hazzard—well, the implications could be not so good for your friend Hannah. It was something that happened with Paul Hazzard and an, um, older woman.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Bennis said.
Linda Melajian came back with a mushroom omelet on a plate with toast and hash browns. You got your cholesterol at the Ararat whether you wanted it or not.
Christopher reached for the salt.
“Let me explain the whole thing to you,” he said to Bennis. “Let me start from the beginning.”
Five
1
YEARS AGO, WHEN GREGOR Demarkian had only recently met Bennis Hannaford, Bennis used to give him books. The books were always murder mysteries of the most traditional kind—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout—and always seemed to follow the same pattern. First a murder was committed. Then suspect A was designated most likely to have committed it. Then it was proved to be impossible for suspect A to have committed it. Then it turned out that suspect A had committed it after all. Of course, Gregor realized that not all these books had that identical plot. The problem was that many of them had. The pattern was fixed firmly in his brain. It insisted on coloring his expectations of what was going to happen next in his own life. It made him very uncomfortable. There was Hannah, the most likely suspect—so likely now that it was beginning to seem impossible that the murderer could be anyone else. Gregor kept trying to twist the picture and make the most likely suspect come out to be Candida DeWitt. It just wouldn’t work. She hadn’t had any blood on her at all. That wasn’t conclusive, but it went a long way to make her a less likely prospect than Hannah. Then there was the weapon. Gregor had the feeling that under the circumstances, Candida DeWitt was the person with the least access to the ornamented dagger. She might have a key to Paul Hazzard’s house left over from the days when she was on good terms with the family, but it was a long shot. Candida’s relationship with Paul Hazzard had fallen apart just about the time when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard was murdered. If Gregor had been Paul Hazzard, after that murder he would have had all his locks changed. That wouldn’t have been to keep out Candida DeWitt. She would have been a very minor problem. He would have wanted the locks changed to make sure no overly ambitious reporter could gain access by scaring up one of the stray keys that were sure to be lying around, given to friends who had promised to water the plants while the family was away on vacation or to building contractors doing serious repairs. Down in Washington, Gregor had known people who changed their locks every year, exactly because things like this happened. A house with locks in it that had been around for a while might be safe enough from random burglars, but it was likely to be as open as a bordello’s front door to an entire collection of friends, foes, acquaintances, and strangers. Gregor knew what happened to house keys. He knew what had happened to his own.