by Jane Haddam
Walter got all the way to the pool house and stopped. From his own house, it was difficult to see the burned part, because the burned part was around the other side. From where he was standing now, he could see the blackened edges of the roof and the walls where the fire had come through before the fire department had made it onto the scene. Then there had been a lot of trouble at the gate, because nobody had notified the gate guard that there was a fire. Idiot. The fire was right there, right in front of his nose. He was just waiting for orders.
Walter stopped in the little parking lot. Gregor Demarkian had gone into the pool house. Horace Wingard and Larry Farmer were still standing in the parking lot, looking useless.
Horace Wingard saw him coming and said, “Mr. Dunbar. I hope you’re not thinking of going into the pool house. The pool house is off limits to residents until the damage is repaired. If you left personal items in a locker, we’ll be more than happy to send a staff member in to collect them for you.”
Horace Wingard always sounded as if he were saying tongue twisters. All the words came out very fast. Walter wasn’t listening to him anyway.
“I’m going to the clubhouse,” he said. “I’m going to file my petition again. And don’t tell me I need the signatures of a third of the residents, because you know that’s hogwash. I could sue you over it if I wanted to. An exclusive community for discriminating people. Hogwash. Bullshit, if you don’t want to put too fine a point on it.”
Horace Wingard sighed. “Mr. Dunbar, the residents of Waldorf Pines are already subject to a background check—”
“To a financial background check,” Walter said. “There should be a criminal background check. Criminals have money. Criminals have parents with money. Criminals have husbands with money. We could have a serial killer here, and you wouldn’t know it.”
“Mr. Dunbar,” Horace Wingard said.
“There’s trouble here whether you like it or not,” Walter Dunbar said. “There’s that hose that was thrown right up on my porch the night of the murder. I told you about it. I told the police about it. Nobody pays attention to me.”
“Mr. Dunbar,” Horace Wingard said again.
Gregor Demarkian came out of the pool house. Walter saw Horace Wingard throw him a nervous glance.
“Great detective,” Walter said.
Then he turned his back on all of them and marched on in the direction of the clubhouse.
2
LizaAnne Marsh didn’t know when she had decided that she needed to Do Something about the things that were going on in Waldorf Pines, but she did know what it was that had to get done. People were being woefully stupid about all this, as if the only thing they could do when disaster struck was to dither around and sound like people on television, saying things that didn’t mean anything.
LizaAnne was not worried about Martha Heydreich coming back in the night and murdering them all, which is what her father and mother kept talking about. She hadn’t been worried about Arthur Heydreich murdering them all, either, which was what her parents had talked about in the beginning.
Death was not all that interesting to LizaAnne. She thought it was probably only really interesting to old people, because they were so close to having to die. People who were not so old did not think about death. They thought about sex.
LizaAnne had started thinking about sex the first time she’d seen Fanny Bullman go into Arthur Heydreich’s house. Well, no, that wasn’t exactly right. LizaAnne thought about sex a lot. She thought about what it would be like to have sex with Brad Pitt. She thought about how awful it must be for him, married to that woman with the lips that made her look like a fish. It was scary the way things happened sometimes. People did things to their lives. They married people. They ran away. They hit people with their cars. People just did things, and then everything was a mess.
LizaAnne had started thinking about sex and murder the first time she’d seen Fanny Bullman go into Arthur Heydreich’s house, and the more she thought about it, the more interesting it got. The idea of older people having sex was a little confusing, except for movie stars, because movie stars always looked young. LizaAnne didn’t know what people saw in each other at that age. She did know what people that age saw in people her age, which was why she was never really upset when one of the teachers came on to her.
Still, she knew that older people had sex, and had sex with each other, and had affairs. They even did the things younger people did to mess up their lives. If Fanny Bullman was having sex with Arthur Heydreich, she was probably going to mess up her life. Arthur Heydreich wouldn’t mess up his, because his was already down the toilet.
She kept seeing Fanny Bullman going into Arthur Heydreich’s house. Sometimes Fanny Bullman went by way of the green, walking across the grass as if she were doing nothing more important than taking her children to the bus stop. Sometimes Fanny Bullman went by way of the road. Then, if LizaAnne had caught the start of the walk, she had to go out to the stairwell and look through the window there. It was always the same walk, though, and always the same little ritual when Mrs. Bullman got to Mr. Heydreich’s house. First she would stand still on the doorstep, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to go in. Then she would turn around and look up the green or up the road, to see if anybody was looking. Then she would knock on the sliding glass doors to the deck or ring the front door bell. It would take Arthur Heydreich a moment or two to open the door, but he always did.
What Arthur Heydreich did not do was come out into the open, or go to Fanny Bullman’s house, ever. It was as if, coming home from jail, he had become a vampire, and couldn’t stand the sunlight.
LizaAnne amended this. Arthur Heydreich was nothing like a vampire. Vampires were truly awesome. She had seen every movie in the Twilight series, and she had the books. Someone like Arthur Heydreich would never be cool enough to be a vampire. He had probably never been cool at all.
LizaAnne had tried to get Heather to go with her, but she wasn’t having any.
“I know he’s not arrested anymore,” Heather had said, “but you never know. He could have killed them and killed his wife, too, and her body could be under his house or something. It could be anywhere. I’m not going to make him think he’d be better off if I was dead.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” LizaAnne had said. “Don’t be retarded.”
“I’m not being retarded,” Heather had said. “Think about all the murders you hear about. Who do murderers kill? People like us, that’s who. Girls in high school and college. You can see it on television all the time.”
“Television isn’t real.”
“I don’t mean that kind of television,” Heather had said. “I mean the kind of television where they tell you real things that happened to real people. You’d know about it if you ever paid any attention to anything but MTV. The Green River Killer. Ted Bundy. The Zodiac Killer—”
“What about Jeffrey Dahmer?” LizaAnne said. “I’ve heard about him. He killed a lot of boys because he was gay. That’s why people do those things. They’re gay. Arthur Heydreich isn’t gay.”
Actually, if LizaAnne were completely honest, she had to admit that she didn’t know if Arthur Heydreich was gay or not. She hadn’t really thought about it. She just hated it when Heather got that way, and Heather got that way more and more often every day. It was a good thing they would all be going off to college soon, and she and Heather wouldn’t be going to the same place. Heather’s parents would never be able to afford a really good college unless Heather got scholarships. Heather wasn’t going to get a scholarship unless they gave one out for being retarded.
Now LizaAnne sat on the bench at the edge of the green nearest to Arthur Heydreich’s house and waited. She drove her own car to school, so she didn’t have to worry about how she would get there if she missed the bus. Usually she drove Heather into school, too, but today she’d told Heather she was sick. That way, if Heather was asked at school, she would say LizaAnne was sick, and LizaAnne would get lots of Brownie
points when she showed up later and said she’d felt better and decided to come in.
If anybody in the world was really, really retarded, it was teachers. Teachers believed anything you said to them.
LizaAnne was sitting on the bench because she didn’t think it made sense to skulk around. When you skulked around, you looked conspicuous. She had a magazine with her. As soon as she saw Fanny Bullman come out of her house, she picked it up and pretended to be reading it. She couldn’t help feeling a little self-satisfied. She had had to pick the route—green or road—and she’d picked right. That was because all adults were retarded. They thought they were staying out of sight by going by the route that passed only the backs of the houses. Instead, they were just where everybody could see them. That was a big selling point of Waldorf Pines. Every house had lots of rooms with a view to the green. That was because older people thought golf was really important.
Fanny Bullman wasn’t even looking out to make sure she wasn’t seen. She didn’t glance in LizaAnne’s direction even once. She cut across the green, right in the open, as if she didn’t care what anybody said to her. Even if you weren’t on a clandestine mission to commit illegal sex, it was a bad idea to cut across the green because it was forbidden. The green was raked and seeded and tended and cared for every minute of every day. If it wasn’t, the golfers complained, and this was supposed to be a place for golfers.
Fanny Bullman got just two houses down from Arthur Heydreich’s and slowed down. She looked around as if she were surprised to find herself where she was. Then she moved slowly over the edge of the green, to the pathway where people were allowed to walk.
LizaAnne wondered what was wrong with the woman. She wasn’t dressed up to see somebody and impress them. She was wearing old jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and a cardigan sweater that looked like it had been through the washing machine a hundred and fifty times. She was wearing her hair tied back in a ponytail that looked like it had been put up first thing in the morning, with a rubber band, and without looking in a mirror.
There were people out this morning, moving around near the pool house. LizaAnne only recognized Horace Wingard. The other two men just looked old and probably retarded. Fanny Bullman saw them and hesitated. The pool house was not near Arthur Heydreich’s house. It wasn’t really near Fanny Bullman’s, either. Fanny Bullman hesitated anyway, as if she were afraid the people there were going to take notes and ask her to explain.
The men at the pool house were not looking at Fanny Bullman. They were not looking at LizaAnne Marsh, either. Fanny Bullman shuddered slightly and turned away from them, making her way straight to Arthur Heydreich’s house now. She had a hitchy little limp in her step. She looked like she didn’t care at all what she looked like.
Fanny Bullman climbed onto Arthur Heydreich’s deck and knocked on the sliding glass doors. LizaAnne saw that shadow that was the evidence of curtains being pulled back and then saw the sliding glass doors open. It seemed to LizaAnne that it would make sense if Arthur Heydreich would come out and look at people, but he didn’t. There was no sign of a person inside the glass doors. Fanny Bullman just went through them, and they closed behind her.
LizaAnne was sure she would never behave like that if she was in Arthur Heydreich’s position. She would make a point of being seen right out in public and everything. If you skulked around and tried to hide, you looked guilty.
The magazine she had was Vogue, and she was bored with it. The only really good things about magazines were the ads, and Vogue had very good ads. Someday, LizaAnne wanted to have a diamond-paveéd spiral snake bracelet like the one in the ad for Harry Winston, the one she knew better than to ask her father for. She was pretty sure her father could afford it, but she also knew how he felt about snakes. He had had the Bible read to him a lot when he was a child.
LizaAnne was very glad that nobody read the Bible to her, ever. She didn’t think she could stand it if she was supposed to take church seriously, instead of a place you went a couple of times a year to wear clothes you bought for the holidays.
The curtain had been pulled across Arthur Heydreich’s plate-glass windows. LizaAnne left the magazine on the bench and got up to go over there. She did not worry about crossing the green. She did not care if somebody in the houses saw her. She was not the one doing something she shouldn’t.
She got to Arthur Heydreich’s house and considered the possibilities. They could have gone upstairs to one of the bedrooms. She had a hunch that that was not what they would do. It would be gross to have sex in the same bed you had sex with your wife, and now she was dead, or she wasn’t. LizaAnne hadn’t quite worked it through in her head. First Arthur Heydreich was supposed to have killed Michael Platte and Martha. Then he wasn’t supposed to have killed anybody because Martha wasn’t dead. Then it was Martha—
It made no sense. It was retarded.
LizaAnne climbed carefully up on the deck, to make sure she wasn’t heard. She walked slowly over to the plate-glass windows. The curtains were closed tight. She couldn’t see a thing. She could hear something, though. There was a lot of panting and grunting. There was a lot of shuffling of feet.
Was it really possible that Arthur Heydreich had had sex with his wife in this house, or anywhere? LizaAnne couldn’t imagine anybody having sex with Martha Heydreich.
She moved along the deck until she got to the second set of windows. These were higher on the wall, and by the time she was halfway there, she could tell there were no curtains pulled across them. That was because they were small windows, meant to sit about the television set. You’d have to be right up against the house and standing on tiptoe to see anything through them.
LizaAnne got right up next to the house. She stood on tiptoe. She was reasonably tall, but she wasn’t very flexible. It took her a couple of tries. On the third try, she made it all the way to where she wanting to go, but she was out of breath.
She looked through the window and saw Fanny Bullman, naked except for her little white socks against the beige leather of the family room sofa. One of Fanny’s legs was high in the air, arching over the curve of Arthur Heydreich’s back. Arthur Heydreich was not as naked as Fanny was. His shirt was off, but his trousers were still on. They were just puddled around his ankles, as if he were using the toilet.
It’s just so retarded, LizaAnne thought, and then, in a movement so fast, she almost didn’t believe it was real, Arthur Heydreich turned around and stared directly into her eyes.
FIVE
1
The hard thing about consulting—the thing you did not have to put up with if you were a regular part of the investigative team—was not knowing what you could and couldn’t trust about the reports you had been given. When you were part of a team, you knew the other players. You knew that Bob was color blind, and that Sherrie tended to oversympathize with witnesses. You knew that lab reports from Melanie were first rate on poisons but unsure on gunshot residue. You knew which coroner had an obsession with which cause of death, and which one didn’t see murder even when it slapped him in the face.
In this case the investigative team was limited, and switching out among them would not have been an option. But he still didn’t know what to think of the reports he’d been given, and he was not made confident by the problem with the key.
Right now, what concerned him most was the state of the pool house. He had asked to stop by to see it on their way across the complex to the Platte house, and Horace Wingard had allowed the visit with the kind of grudging condescension that told Gregor he was scared to death. There were, of course, obvious reasons for Horace Wingard to be scared to death. This was probably a very good job. It would not only pay well, but it would leave a lot of room for Wingard’s autonomy. He could run his own show as he saw fit as long as everything was going along well. He could make his own hours, although he probably made brutal ones. He could order around the staff. He could even bully the residents. And in this economy, this would be a hard job to replace.
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Still, Gregor was only half convinced. People didn’t usually get the deep willies about losing a job unless there was a lot going on behind the scenes—a house, a mortgage, children to support, debts. Gregor revised this. Just a house and a mortgage and children, on its own, wouldn’t produce that kind of underlying panic. For that, you needed some serious overextension. Gregor thought he was guessing right that Horace Wingard wasn’t married and that he didn’t have children. He also thought he was guessing right that Wingard probably lived on the grounds. It was interesting. The man was as twitchy as if he had mob money behind him. It was one of those things that might be worth it to check out.
It would explain, as well, why Ken Bairn was so jumpy about upsetting the management at Waldorf Pines.
Horace Wingard took them along a back path from the clubhouse proper to the pool house. Gregor found himself looking at the brushed flagstone walk and kicking against it to see if the stones came loose. They didn’t. There might be a few corners being cut on the maintenance of the pool house during repairs, but they weren’t being cut on anything a resident might be able to see for himself.
When they got to the pool house, Gregor turned around and looked back at the clubhouse. It wasn’t very far away.
“There are security cameras on this walk?” he asked.
“Of course there are,” Horace Wingard said. “There are security cameras everywhere.”
“I just want to be absolutely clear,” Gregor said. “There are cameras all along this walk? Or just at one end?”
Horace Wingard stepped up and pointed into the trees above them. “There’s one at the clubhouse end, pointing out toward the walk. On the other side of it is one pointing into the door of the clubhouse. Then there’s another in the center here. Then there are two more at the pool house door itself, one pointing back up the walk and one pointing in at the door. Of course, residents are not supposed to use this door. It’s a convenience for the maintenance staff. However—” Horace Wingard fluttered his hands.
