There was a connection. He even knew what that connection was. He just had to figure out what to do with it. The doorbell rang and he put down his pen and went into the foyer.
“Hello,” the young woman said when Gregor opened up. “I’m Sonia Veladian.”
“Sonia Veladian?”
“Father Tibor sent me,” Sonia said helpfully. “I’m the one who—ah—went to this workshop that Paul Hazzard’s organization ran and Father Tibor said you might want to know—”
“Oh, yes.” Gregor backed up quickly to let the young woman inside. “I do want to know. I’m sorry. I just didn’t connect for a moment. I thought Father Tibor said you were in Somalia.”
“With UNICEF. I was. We were evacuated out about five weeks ago. I’ve been in Rome.”
“And now you’re back.”
“Visiting my mother,” Sonia amplified. She walked into Gregor’s living room, dropped down into the club chair, and laughed. “My mother’s a mess. She’s on husband number five. She’s over sixty and she still can’t balance her checkbook. If it weren’t for my brother and me, she’d probably be on welfare. But she means well.”
Gregor didn’t go into how many murderers he’d known who insisted that no matter what they did, they always meant well. “Would you like me to get you a cup of coffee?” he offered her. “I only have instant, but in this apartment that’s a blessing.”
“That’s okay. I took Father Tibor to lunch. I love to overeat, but this afternoon was too much even for me. Father Tibor said Paul Hazzard was killed here last night.”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve got to start reading the papers again,” Sonia said. “I stopped just after we were evacuated because it was all just too depressing. Well, I suppose I’m not surprised. I remember thinking at the time that he was just the kind of person to get his head bashed in. Father Tibor said Mrs. Krekorian is the prime suspect. That can’t be right, can it?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“Well, that’s just nonsense,” Sonia said crisply. “I’ve known Mrs. Krekorian all my life. She used to feed my brother and me when Mom would disappear for a couple of days. Her and Mrs. Arkmanian. Does Mrs. Arkmanian still live in the neighborhood?”
“She’s got the town house right across the street.”
“Dynamite. I suppose you really want to hear about Paul Hazzard. You’re investigating the murder. I do see People magazine every once in a while.”
“I think the less said about People magazine the better,” Gregor said firmly. “I don’t want you to tell me anything that’s going to be painful for you to discuss. Not unless you think it has immediate and direct importance in the case under consideration. I don’t want you to feel—”
“It’s okay,” Sonia said. “It really is. I don’t mind talking about it at all anymore. Talking about what happened to me, I mean. And you don’t even want to know what happened to me. You want to know what I know about Paul Hazzard. Well. Okay. The way it started was, when I was about eleven years old, my mother got this boyfriend, his name was Ern, and Ern had these proclivities. He used to come into my room at night, and do things—if you don’t mind, I’m not going to go into specifics here, they don’t matter at the moment—and he would tell me that if I told my mother, he would kill us both and I was scared to death and that was how it went on for about six months, when one afternoon my mother came home early because she’d gotten fired from this job she had at a restaurant and there we were. And she blew a fit.”
“I can imagine.”
“Don’t. You have no idea how many mothers in this sort of situation pretend they haven’t seen anything. It’s like I said. My mother means well. Anyway, there was no end of fuss. Mom threw Ern out, she called the police, she took me to a doctor, there was an investigation. On and on and on. And then it just went away. I just forgot about it. Except that I didn’t, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Mrs. Krekorian and Mrs. Arkmanian were a big help,” Sonia said. “And I was good at school and my mother was proud of that, so I worked my butt off and did really well. Then I won a merit scholarship and another scholarship one of the Armenian-American organizations offers and another one, too, for winning second place in a competition this company gave where you had to write an essay on the wonderful things chemistry does for people’s lives. And I went to Penn State. And I had a 3.9 grade average right through the first semester of my junior year. And then I fell apart.”