by Jane Haddam
“Why would it be worse?” Susan asked. “They’ll still know who killed them. You said that yourself. You said they used to think that it was Arthur Heydreich who killed them, and now they’ll think it was Martha.”
You had to go over and over things with Susan. You had to explain and explain and explain again, and then you had to start all over from the beginning.
Caroline had toast and jam and butter on the table. The toast was in a silver toast rack. The jam and butter were in small ceramic bowls. She did not allow jars and boxes from the supermarket on her breakfast table.
She tried it again. “The police will know that,” she said, trying to say it slowly, and trying not to scream. “And the people at Waldorf Pines will hear it from the police. But it’s much the way it was before. They’ll only partly believe it. With some other part of their brains, they’ll wonder if the police couldn’t be wrong. And this time, of course, they’ll wonder all the more, because the police were wrong the first time. Then they’ll do the even more natural thing, and start to suspect each other.”
“I don’t see why that’s the natural thing,” Susan said.
“It is the natural thing, nonetheless,” Caroline said. “It’s the way people are. They’ll suspect each other, and they’ll gossip about each other, and then all sorts of things will come out that wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s why it’s so important for us to just stay away from these people as much as we possibly can. And since that’s what we were already trying to do, it ought to be easier for us than it will be for some people.”
Susan was still standing there, shifting back and forth on her feet as if she were in the first form and being reprimanded by the head of the Lower School.
“Are you going to give up organizing the cotillion?” she asked. “That’s where we see other people most of the time.”
“I know,” Caroline said. “Part of me doesn’t understand why they’d want to have their wretched cotillion after all this. I mean, think of it really. They don’t want a real cotillion, a private thing for private people. They want something they can splash all over the newspapers, and maybe even have television cameras for. You’d think they’d have had enough of publicity with all that’s been going on with the murders. Have you been remembering to go in and out the back way?”
“I’ve hardly been out of the complex at all,” Susan said. “And yes, I did remember, only the back way and then with a scarf and sunglasses, although what good the sunglasses are supposed to do, I never did understand. I didn’t understand it with—with—you know. I never did see the good it was supposed to do. I was always recognized anyway.”
“You were recognized because they were looking for you,” Caroline said. “Nobody is looking for you now. Nobody expects to find either of us in Waldorf Pines, and the newspeople aren’t chasing that story anyway. It really is just a matter of keeping our heads. Nobody is interested in us.”
“They would be interested in us if they knew who we were,” Susan said.
“But they don’t know who we are. And there’s no reason for them to find out.”
“They’d be interested in us if they knew about us.” Susan walked over to the percolator stand, as if there was something there to see. “It’s not the same as if we had nothing to do with them at all. Martha and Michael, I mean. We did have to do with them. We couldn’t help it.”
Caroline took a piece of toast out of the toast rack. They’d been talking for so long, it was cold. She hated cold toast. She hated this house, if it came to that. Everything was too obviously expensive. Everything was too florid and overdone.
She took a butter knife and went at the butter, real butter, whipped to make it possible to spread. Caroline did not believe in margarine. She did not believe in anything contrived or fake.
“There is nothing,” she said, very carefully, “to connect us to either Martha Heydreich or Michael Platte except what inevitably arises from the fact that we lived in the same housing estate. There is no reason why anyone, anywhere, should make any other connection between us. And there is no reason why anybody, anywhere, should connect either one of us with—with what happened before. I suppose there are people who would like to do it for spite, but they don’t know we live here and they have no reason to connect us to this place. Not even my children know we live here.”
“You should talk to them,” Susan said. “It’s not good, what you’re doing to them.”
“They should have thought of that before they did what they did to me,” Caroline said. “Now sit down and have your breakfast and start behaving like a grown-up, or you’re going to blow this whole thing into the stratosphere. And you know you don’t want that. You’ve been there before.”
THREE
1
The key was waiting for him when he got to the Pineville Station Police Department, lying on what looked like a mouse pad. Larry Farmer paced and struggled back and forth in front of Miss Connolly’s counter. Buck Monaghan had left word to be called as soon as Gregor got in. Gregor himself had begun to feel a little foolish about the whole thing. There was always the chance that he could be wrong. There was always the chance that whoever had written the evidence descriptions couldn’t describe a basketball without making it sound like a toaster.
As it turned out, the person who had written the evidence descriptions had not been bad at the job, and the key lying there on the counter was almost certainly a key to a safe-deposit box. Gregor looked at it for a moment without touching it. Then he said,
“Tell me this has already been through the wringer. It’s been fingerprinted. It’s been tested for blood. It’s been—”
“Yes, yes,” Larry Farmer said. “We did all that. We may not have the kind of forensics you see on television, but we do get things done here. And we’ve got a mobile evidence lab.”
He leaned over the key as Miss Connolly picked up the phone to call Buck Monaghan. He turned the key over in his hand. It was like every other safe-deposit key he’d ever seen. It was small. It was blank. It was without identification. Gregor put it back down.
Buck Monaghan appeared from upstairs and looked over the scene. “Well?” he said.
“Mr. Demarkian thinks it’s a safe-deposit key,” Larry Farmer said. “I don’t see why he thinks that. It looks like any other key to me. It looks like one of those keys you lock luggage with. Why he’d think it was a safe-deposit key, that’s beyond me.”
Gregor picked up the key and handed it to Buck.
“Ah,” Buck said.
“I don’t see what the ‘ah’ is about,” Larry Farmer said. “It’s like there’s some secret code here and nobody’s let me in on it.”
“If it was a luggage key, it would have some identification on it,” Buck said. “It would have the name of the luggage company. It would have something. The point of safe-deposit boxes is that they need to be both secure and discreet. So the keys don’t have identification on them. They don’t have the name of the bank. They really don’t have the number of the box. The idea is that if you have a right to the key, you already know the bank and the box number.”
“Well, that helps us out,” Larry Farmer said. “We have a key. We have no idea what bank it came from and no idea what box it will open. And don’t you need two keys to open a safe-deposit box?”
“You definitely do,” Gregor said. “I don’t think a bank would have a great deal of trouble accepting that they ought to come forward on something like this when the box holder has been murdered, and even if the bank doesn’t want to do it, we could always get a warrant to open the box. But that assumes two things, neither of which I think is going to help us.”
“What two things?” Larry Farmer looked definitely put out.
“The first is that the box belonged to Michael Platte,” Gregor said. “Just because he had the key on him doesn’t mean he owned it. He could have stolen it. Which, given the things you’ve said to me about him so far, wouldn’t be a shock. He could have been given it by
somebody else. In either of those cases, you might find that a bank would not come forward to admit that the key was theirs, if they even knew it. And you’d have a hard time convincing a judge to give you a warrant to open the box even if you could find out who it belonged to and what bank it was at.”
“If he stole the thing,” Buck Monaghan said, “then he had no right to it, and it’s not likely that whatever is in it is germane to his murder. Although it might be. But you must see how the banks will think. People keep all kinds of sensitive information in safe-deposit boxes. They wouldn’t do that if they thought their confidence could be violated for any excuse at all.”
“Two murders isn’t an excuse,” Larry Farmer said. “Even a judge should be able to figure that out.”
“Why don’t we worry about all that when we’re farther along,” Gregor said. “Right now, we’ve got Michael Platte dead, an unknown person dead, Martha Heydreich missing, and a safe-deposit key. Michael Platte has family at Waldorf Pines, doesn’t he?”
“A mother and a father, at least,” Buck Monaghan said. “There may be siblings. I’m not sure.”
“A mother and a father will do,” Gregor said. “Let’s talk to them. There’s always the possibility that this is something completely unimportant. Maybe the kid had a safe-deposit box because it was where he kept his savings bonds for college money. Maybe he inherited something from a grandparent. Maybe his parents got it for him at birth to keep things like birth certificates and passports in. Let’s talk to the family and find out, and if all that comes up negative, we can start thinking about how to find the bank.”
“Do you think it’s going to be something like that?” Buck asked curiously.
Gregor shook his head. “I’m almost dead certain the key didn’t belong to Michael Platte at all, but we’ve got to check out the obvious. It’s imperative. Then we can get on to the esoteric.”
“Well,” Larry Farmer said, “obvious or whatever, we’re not getting into Waldorf Pines to talk to the Plattes unless we talk to Horace Wingard first, and that’s not going to be a piece of cake.”
2
Gregor Demarkian had counted on having Buck Monaghan with him throughout the investigation. He’d counted on it without ever bringing it fully into consciousness. If he had, he’d have realized that that wasn’t going to be possible. Buck Monaghan was the town prosecutor. He had other work to do. It was Larry Farmer’s business to deal with the policing. And in spite of being called “chief of police,” Larry was not exactly at the head of a huge cohort of law enforcement officers. In fact, as far as Gregor could tell, Pineville Station had no more than two officers for each of its three shifts. There was no homicide bureau, no detective squad, no drug detail.
Larry, unfortunately, was the kind of person who talked, and he talked nonstop all the way out to Waldorf Pines.
“It’s the tax base,” he said, more than once. “That’s what Ken’s so upset about. It’s not the way it used to be, Mr. Demarkian. Everything is about money these days. Everything. And the people who live here, the ones who’ve always lived here, they don’t have a lot of it. It’s people like the people at Waldorf Pines we need to pay taxes. Ken looks around and all he sees is one disaster after another, and you can hardly blame him for wanting to bring in more people who will pay taxes. There’s a rumor that the people who built Waldorf Pines might want to build another one of those things, an even more expensive one. And Ken really wants that.”
“And you don’t.”
Larry Farmer looked away. “No,” he said finally, “I don’t. I keep thinking we got along without money for all this time, we should get along without it now. But here it is, Mr. Demarkian. Right up ahead of us. That’s Waldorf Pines.”
What was actually right up ahead of them was a stone and wrought iron wall punctuated with a stone and wrought iron gate, the words WALDORF PINES sunk into the stone just to the left of the little guardhouse where everybody had to stop before entering. It was much less impressive than Gregor had expected it to be from everything he’d heard at the Pineville Station PD. There had to be thousands of housing developments across the country just like this, with their walls and their gates and their pretensions to exclusivity. Anybody who had ever seen the real thing—who had seen, for instance, Tuxedo Park—knew what was wrong with them.
There was an elaborate ritual to wade through before they could go inside. First they had to stop at the gate. Then Larry Farmer had to present his credentials to the guard. Then the guard had to wave them through and point at the big dark wood clubhouse just to the left. They had barely pulled up to the clubhouse’s curb when a little man came rushing out from inside, waving his hands in the air and going bright red in the process.
“I’ve told you and told you,” the little man said. He wasn’t screaming. His voice wasn’t raised. Even so, there was something about the way he was saying what he was saying that was like a scream. “I’ve told you and told you,” he said again, “I don’t want you on the grounds with a police car. Sometimes it can’t be helped. We can’t do anything about that. But this isn’t one of those times. This isn’t one of those times. I don’t want that thing parked in front where every television news program in Pennsylvania can see it.”
“There weren’t any television cameras out there,” Larry Farmer said as he climbed out of the car. “The whole front gate is clear now, Horace. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Somebody will call it in,” Horace Wingard said. “They’ll have seen you, and they’ll call it in. You’ve got to get that car out of sight somewhere and you’ve got to do it now.”
“This is as out of sight as it’s going to get,” Larry Farmer said. “We need to use a car. This is Mr. Demarkian, by the way. Last I heard, you thought it was a wonderful idea for us to hire him.”
“I thought it was a wonderful idea for you to hire someone,” Horace Wingard said coldly. “You don’t have the capacity to investigate a crime of this complexity. I did not say I thought it was a wonderful idea for you to hire him. The man is a publicity hound. He’s on television more than Paris Hilton.”
“He’s the best there is,” Larry Farmer said. “You told Ken you wanted the best there is.”
“I’m going to call Mr. Bairn right now,” Horace Wingard said. “You can’t get away with this. You can’t ruin the reputation of Waldorf Pines. This is a quality complex.”
“Last I heard, your quality complex had two dead bodies in it, and a missing person who’s either the murderer or dead herself under a tree somewhere.”
Horace Wingard managed to go a little redder. Then he turned on his heel and marched back into the clubhouse. He was wearing shoes with heels on them. They were very discreet heels. They couldn’t be mistaken for cowboy boots. Even so, they were heels.
“Asshole,” Larry Farmer said.
Farmer started toward the clubhouse door, and Gregor followed him. The drive he was walking across was gravel. The front doors of the club were double doors, and wider than standard ones at that. The foyer just inside was heavy with wood and beams. It was as if someone had tried to replicate a golf club from the Twenties—or, more likely, the fantasy of a golf club from the Twenties from a movie made of The Great Gatsby.
Horace Wingard was in an office to the left of the front doors. The door to that office was open, as was the door to the anteroom office that opened onto the foyer. There was a tall, thin, youngish woman in the anteroom office, sitting at a desk at a computer and behaving as if she couldn’t hear her boss in spite of the fact that he was now actually yelling, and at the top of his lungs.
Gregor bypassed Larry Farmer and went in. “How do you do,” he said to the secretary at the desk. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”
“I have seen you on the news,” the secretary said. “I’m Miss Vaile. I’m sure Mr. Wingard will be out in just a moment.”
“If he doesn’t give himself a heart attack with the way he’s behaving,” Gregor said.
Miss Vail
e looked through the door to the other office and shrugged. “It’s been a strain, all this happening at Waldorf Pines. It’s been a strain on all of us. I’m sure you must realize this is not the kind of thing Mr. Wingard is used to.”
“I take it there’s not a lot of crime at Waldorf Pines,” Gregor said.
Miss Vaile hesitated just a second too long. “I suppose it depends on what you mean by crime,” she said, “but this kind of thing, violence and thuggery, no. That’s what our people come to get away from. The world has become a violent and insecure place.”
“I’m afraid I don’t really see that,” Gregor said.
There was the sound of a phone receiver being slammed into an old-fashioned cradle, and then Horace Wingard was with them once more. He was not so red, but he looked as if he was sweating. Gregor thought that this was probably going to turn out to be Horace Wingard’s biggest dissatisfaction with himself: the fact that he sweat easily and heavily, and apparently could do nothing about it.
He marched past Miss Vaile’s desk and planted himself in front of Larry Farmer, almost as if Gregor wasn’t there.
“Come on in,” he said. “And Miss Vaile, please bring your pad. I want a record of everything we say here, and I intend to use it.”
3
Horace Wingard’s office was just what Gregor had expected it to be. It was so much what it ought to have been, Gregor got the impression that it had been staged. Horace himself was so much what he ought to have been that Gregor felt that he was staging himself, and he filed the observation in the back of his mind for later.
Horace sat down behind his desk and looked at the both of them. He didn’t ask them to sit. Gregor sat down anyway. Horace Wingard made a face.
“I presume,” he said, “that you have come here because you have something to report. I expect you to have a great deal to report.”
“We came because we need to talk to the Plattes,” Larry Farmer said. “Mr. Demarkian here had found something we need to ask them about.”
