“It could have, but it didn’t. I’ve barely seen the man in the last four years. Not that you ought to take my word for that.”
“I try not to take anybody’s word for anything.”
“Smart man.”
Fred Scherrer turned and looked back at Candida’s house. As far as Gregor could tell, the scene hadn’t changed at all. The door was still open. Men were still walking in and out. There were still too many lights on everywhere. Fred Scherrer shivered and turned back to them. Gregor thought that he looked feverish, that his eyes were unnaturally bright.
“Come on,” the attorney told them. “Let’s go up to the house and meet the bozos. Maybe you can do something to get their brains on track.”
2
The Bryn Mawr police handling the investigation into the death of Candida DeWitt were not, in fact, bozos. One of them, a big man named Roger Stebbins, Gregor knew from previous experience with murder in Bryn Mawr. Stebbins was not as good a police officer as his chief, but he was good, and comparing him to John Henry Newman Jackman might not have been fair. John Henry Newman Jackman, Stebbins’s chief, was the single best local Homicide man Gregor had ever met. Roger Stebbins was a man Jackman trusted. That was enough for Gregor any day.
Roger Stebbins was standing just inside the front door, against one wall of the two-story foyer, near a pair of doors that led off into a room on the left. Gregor paused a moment to be impressed with the foyer. The floor was marble. The staircase that led to the second floor balcony was a sweeping curve of polished mahogany and inlaid teak. There was a chandelier hanging from the nearly invisible ceiling by a thick chain, made up of hundreds of tiny prisms that scattered little rainbow arcs of light in every direction. Gregor remembered somebody saying that Candida DeWitt had done very well at her way of life. That seemed to be an understatement.
Roger Stebbins had straightened up a little when he saw Gregor and Russell Donahue come in. Now he crossed the foyer with his hand held out.
“Mr. Demarkian? I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Roger Stebbins.”
“I do remember you. This is Russell Donahue of the Philadelphia police. Detective first grade.”
“Right,” Stebbins said. He shook Russell Donahue’s hand in a perfunctory way and then shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He looked very worried. “I talked to John Jackman about this,” he said. “John sent his regards and said to give you all the help you wanted. I don’t exactly know what kind of help I could give. It all seems straightforward enough on the face of it.”
“Has the body been removed?” Gregor asked.
Roger Stebbins shook his head. “We left it. John said you might want to see it.”
“I do. We do,” Gregor said. “Where is it?”
Roger Stebbins looked back over his shoulder at the doors he had been standing next to when Gregor and Russell entered. “It’s in there. I’ve had to post a guard or keep watch myself every minute. That bastard Scherrer is like ooze. He gets into everything.”
Fred Scherrer didn’t seem to be into anything at the moment. He had disappeared. Gregor started toward the inner doors. Roger Stebbins and Russell Donahue followed.
“This is the living room, more or less,” Roger Stebbins said, “except you know what it’s like in these great big houses. There are at least three other rooms on this floor that a regular person might call a living room.”
Gregor looked inside. The room was an unqualified mess, the way rooms got when they had been worked over by tech men, but the tech men themselves were gone. Aside from a single uniformed patrolman standing next to the body, there was only a white-coated man from the medical examiner’s office, waiting. Gregor walked over to the body and looked down at it.
Candida DeWitt had been an attractive woman in an understated way. She was now an attractive corpse, but there was nothing understated about her. Her lipsticked lips looked too bright against the whiteness of her face. Her eyes looked as if she had used kohl on them instead of eyeliner. Her eyes were open. They were very blue.
Gregor got down on his haunches and leaned closer to Candida DeWitt’s chest, trying to see what could be seen of the wound.
“Russell,” he called. “Come here for a minute.”
Russell Donahue came and got down on his haunches too.
“Just one wound,” he said. “A smash, bang right in the heart.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “It looks like the other ones though, doesn’t it? The ones last night on Paul Hazzard.”
Russell Donahue was doubtful. “We’ll have to check with Forensics,” he said. “Whatever was used here couldn’t possibly have been the same weapon. We have the weapon in the Hazzard murder case.”