Bleeding Hearts by Jane Haddam Page A

cafeteria. He found Sydney Mellerstein, his junior partner, sitting alone at a table against the wall, drinking coffee. Fred got a cup of coffee for himself, paid for it, and went over to join Sid.
    “Jury’s still out.” He sat down.
    Sid sighed. “They must be staging an orgy. They couldn’t be having trouble coming to a decision. How’s Chuckie?”
    “Chuckie’s Chuckie.”
    “That’s too bad. I picked up our messages before I came down here. You got a call from Caroline Hazzard.”
    The coffee the cafeteria served in this courthouse was terrible. In Fred’s experience, the coffee the cafeterias served in all courthouses was always terrible. The coffee served in the cafeterias in state legislative buildings was worse. Fred doctored his cup with enough milk and sugar to produce something on the order of a mocha egg cream, and put Chuckie Bickerson firmly out of his mind.
    “Caroline Hazzard,” he said. “Now, there’s a blast from the past—the recent past, but the past. I wonder why it was Caroline who called instead of Paul.”
    “Maybe because Paul has sense enough not to bother you with hysterical phone messages when you’re right in the middle of a murder trial.”
    “Hysterical. That’s right. Caroline is the hysterical one. Always talking about her inner child and how hard she’s working to heal her addictions. What did she want?”
    Sydney took a long swig of his coffee. He grimaced. “She wants to hire you. She wants you to work for free. You owe it to the family. You can’t let that woman get away with this.”
    “Let what woman get away with what?”
    “Let Candida DeWitt get away with publishing her memoirs,” Sid said. “That’s what this flap is all about. Candida DeWitt is publishing her memoirs. I refrained from telling Ms. Hazzard that I intend to camp out all night in front of the door to my local bookstore when the time comes, just so I can have the first copy I can get my hands on. Whew. This is going to be a pip.”
    “I wonder how graphic she’ll get,” Fred mused. “ ‘Mr. Fortune Five Hundred Empire Builder may look self-possessed in public, but in private he likes to be dressed up in diapers and fed a bottle of baby formula.’ ”
    “Do people do things like that?”
    “They do considerably worse. I hope she gets very graphic. I’ll defend her in the libel actions for free. It’d be worth it for the publicity. It’d be worth it to see Candida again. I wonder how she is.”
    “I always thought you rather liked her,” Sid said. “I liked Candida better than I liked any of them, at least at the time. Of course, they were all under a lot of strain.”
    “You could say that. They’re probably still under a lot of strain. I knew Paul at Harvard, you know.”
    “Yeah,” Sid said. “I know.”
    “He was very successful at that—stuff he does. Enormously so. I suppose that’s where Caroline picked it up.”
    “He married a rich woman,” Sid said. “It’s funny how nobody ever mentions that. Nobody mentioned it at the time. Paul had made a fair piece of change, but she had serious money.”
    “That’s true.” Fred nodded. “And there was that house, right in the middle of Philadelphia—that belonged to her originally, didn’t it?”
    Sid snorted. “You shouldn’t let Harvard cloud your judgment. It belonged to her all right, but Paul was always going around saying how it had been in ‘his’ family since whenever, that ‘his’ great-something grandfather built it. He would outright lie about it.”
    “I’m sure he still does,” Fred said. “I think the family name was originally Hazuelski. His father changed it. Paul was Hazzard at Harvard. But it—got around.”
    “Did it matter?”
    “In a way. In those days. Yes. Of course, I was an outsider too, a public school boy on scholarship—but I like being an outsider. It doesn’t bother me. Paul was from Philadelphia and he was almost-but-not-quite, if you know what I mean. A second-string