Bleeding Hearts(99)

“Let’s go on to something else,” he said. “Did you know that Mrs. DeWitt intended to go to Hannah Krekorian’s party last night?”

“Oh, yes. She asked me to go with her.”

“And you refused?”

“Point-blank.” Fred Scherrer shook his head. “I knew it was going to lead to trouble.”

“This kind of trouble?”

Fred blanched. “Of course not. If I’d known that, I would never have let her go. Although I’ve got to admit, getting Candida to give up doing something she’d decided to do was damn near impossible. I just thought there was going to be a scene, that’s all. I didn’t want any part of it. That way, if she got sued for harassment or something, I would be in a position to defend her.”

“Did Mrs. DeWitt tell you how she came to be invited to this party?”

Fred nodded. “She got an invitation, ‘in her mailbox’, as she put it, in the middle of the week. She used the phrase ‘in my mailbox’ so many times, I finally asked her what she meant by it. She said she didn’t think the invitation had actually come in the mail. She said she thought someone had simply put it in her mailbox.”

“Did she have reason for that?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she must have.”

“Did you see the invitation? Or the envelope?”

“I saw the invitation,” Fred Scherrer said. Comprehension dawned. “I see. You’re right, of course. She would have kept the envelope for the return address. It’s probably upstairs in her desk. In her bedroom.”

“I’ll go check,” Roger Stebbins said. He hurried out of the room.

Gregor turned his attention back to Fred Scherrer. “Did Mrs. DeWitt tell you why she was going to the party? Did she give you any indication of what her purpose was?”

“She said she wanted to see what would happen,” Fred Scherrer said. “When Jackie—Jacqueline—when Paul’s wife died, in the police mess that followed that, Paul tried to throw suspicion on Candida as a way to deflect suspicion from himself. He and Candida had only recently severed a long-term relationship, and it was Paul’s idea, not Candida’s. I think she’s always been very… unhappy about all that.”

“Did she say anything to you last night, after Paul’s murder? Anything about what had happened at Hannah Krekorian’s house or who she thought might have killed Hazzard.”

Fred Scherrer shook his head. “She said that now that Paul was dead, she knew for sure who had killed Jackie. But it was my impression that she always thought she knew who killed Jackie.”

“But this was different?”

“Oh, yes. This was certainty.”

“And that’s exactly what she said. Now that Paul Hazzard was dead, she knew who killed his wife.”

Fred Scherrer closed his eyes, concentrating. “I’ll tell you exactly,” he said. “We were sitting in a cab, and she’d just explained the whole thing about the invitation to me. Then she said, ‘And now that he’s dead, of course, it clears everything up. I know just what happened the last time.’ I suppose she could have meant how it was done, and not who.”

“Especially if she already knew who,” Gregor said.

“Especially then,” Fred Scherrer agreed.

There was a sound at the door, and they both turned slightly. Fred Scherrer was careful not to turn too much. Gregor watched as Roger Stebbins came blundering through, looking too big and clumsy and out of place among all the delicateness of the room. He was holding a plain white envelope in one hand and grinning.

“Found it,” Roger Stebbins said. “There’s a little secretary thing in an alcove off the main bedroom. You unlatch the label part and pull it down, and behind that there are a lot of little pigeonholes. It was in one of those.”

Gregor put out his hand. “Can I have that?” he asked. “Are you preserving the surface to check for prints?”

Roger Stebbins handed the envelope over. “It’s the wrong kind of paper for prints. You think that’s going to be of any use to us otherwise?”

“In one way, I think it’s going to be a great deal of use,” Fred Scherrer said. “Unless Hannah Krekorian is a lot smarter than she looked last night, I think this takes care of any suspicion that she sent that invitation to Candida herself. That was an engraved invitation Candida got, wasn’t it? An engraved blank?”

“Right,” Russell Donahue said.

“That’s an envelope from Hallmark,” Fred Scherrer said.

“This is an envelope with an uncanceled stamp on it,” Gregor said. “Mrs. DeWitt was right. It did come in her mailbox. But not in her mail.”