by Jane Haddam
Gregor nodded. “And given what security tape you do have of the night in question, there was nobody on this walk?”
“No. Of course—”
“There’s an hour and three-quarters missing,” Gregor said, before Horace Wingard could. “I know. But from what I understand, there isn’t any tape missing from the morning of the fire.”
“That’s right,” Horace Wingard said.
“And the missing time,” Gregor said, “that was because the tape was—what? Malfunctioning? I thought I heard somebody say it had been turned off.”
Horace Wingard looked uncomfortable. “That seems to be the best explanation anybody can give me,” he said. “That somehow somebody or something just turned off the master switch in my office and then turned it back on again later. It sounds ridiculous to me. I’m in my office most of the time. I wouldn’t have allowed somebody to walk in and just—”
“Are you in the office all the time?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Horace admitted.
“And is your office locked when you’re not in it?”
“It is if the club is open when I’m gone,” Horace said.
“Were you gone on the night of the murders?”
“No,” Horace said.
“Were you in your office the entire time?”
“No,” Horace said again.
“Was Miss Vaile in her office?”
“Miss Vaile had gone home,” Horace Wingard said. “But—”
“Where is the master switch for the security system in your office?”
Horace Wingard looked about ready to spit. “It’s just inside the inner door,” he said, “and yes, please, don’t tell me. Anybody could have gone in there while I was walking around on my own that night. But it would have been taking a chance. It would have been taking a very big chance.”
“It seems to me that we have somebody who murdered two people on a night when there were any number of other people wandering around. Whoever it is doesn’t sound to me like somebody who would be averse to taking chances,” Gregor said. “Let’s get back to where we were. On the day after the murders, the day when the bodies were discovered, there wasn’t anybody on this walk?”
“I was on this walk,” Horace Wingard said. “I came out this way when I was first informed there was a fire. As you must have noticed, this door is very close to my office. I came out to see what was going on.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
They went into the pool house by the back way, through a tangle of wires and repair material and past large machines that probably did things like run the lights and power the heat in the pool. They came out at the pool itself, a great concrete mass painted blue and now drained entirely of water. There was no sign that there had ever been a body in it. The sight of it made Horace Wingard fuss.
“The police drained the water,” he said. “I don’t know what that’s going to mean with the repair people, because of course we haven’t been able to get anything done. We thought we’d have access back by now, of course, but then there was that terrible mistake, and now we’re back to having a crime scene on the premises. I think it’s ridiculous, if you want to know the truth. Why do you have to close off an area for months at a time, just because a crime was committed there? You wouldn’t do it with the Grand Concourse at Grand Central Station. You wouldn’t do it with a street corner. And yet, here we are.”
“We were just being careful,” Larry Farmer said. “And you should be glad we were. Think what a mess we’d be in now if we weren’t.”
“You’re already in a mess,” Horace Wingard said acidly.
Gregor walked around the pool, very slowly. “It was full of water,” he said, “regular pool water? Chlorine? That kind of thing.”
“Of course,” Horace Wingard said. “If you don’t put chlorine in the water, you get … scum.”
“And Michael Platte drowned,” Gregor said. “He was alive when he went into the water. We know that because there was blood in the water, and water in his lungs. Those things are in the reports.”
“We went over all this before,” Larry Farmer said. He sounded exasperated.
Gregor shook his head. “I’m just trying to get some things straight in my mind. Michael Platte was hit on the back of the head hard enough to at least potentially kill him. What with? Have you any idea?”
“There are a lot of ideas,” Larry Farmer said, “but you know the kind of thing we’re talking about. A shovel. A rock. We haven’t found anything with blood on it yet, if that’s what you mean.”
It wasn’t quite what Gregor meant, but he let it go. The pool was an ordinary pool, “Olympic-sized” as the saying went, but without the bells and whistles you’d find in a more expensive place. There were no waterfalls. There were no side pools with hotter water.
Gregor walked the length of the pool to what had to be the “front” of the room, the doors leading out to the foyer and the place where residents would enter if they wanted to swim. He looked around the ceiling.
“There are cameras here?” he said.
“Yes.” Horace Wingard was hurrying to catch up. “In three places, including one aimed at the door to the outside, one aimed at the pool room door, and one aimed at that door that leads to the locker rooms. There is also a camera inside the men’s locker room, but not one inside the women’s because—because women—”
“And these cameras were running on the day of the fire?” Gregor asked.
“They were,” Horace Wingard said. “And before you ask, there was virtually nothing to see on them. We do have footage of Arthur Heydreich entering the building, and of Arthur Heydreich going to the door of the locker rooms and opening them. He stepped inside the women’s locker room briefly, but he was out again in no time at all. It’s hard to tell what he was doing, really, but he seems to be just standing there.”
Gregor went to the little entry to the locker rooms. He found himself staring at a small wedge-shaped space. On the left was the door to the women’s locker room. On the right was the door to the men’s. The space itself was tiny. The doors were propped open with wooden door wedges.
“Were the doors open like this on the day of the fire?”
“I don’t know,” Horace Wingard said. “I suppose they must have been. We’ve been keeping them open to make Michael Platte’s job easier. There’s no point in keeping them closed if nobody’s using them, and if they’re open it’s easier for a watchman to hear sounds.”
Gregor nodded. That made as much sense as anything else. “What about the method of setting the fire?” he asked. “The report I saw said that the accelerant was basically nail polish, but it doesn’t say anything about the catalyst. I take it that means nobody found one. There wasn’t debris with the remnants of a timer, a clock, some wires—”
“It wasn’t an explosion,” Larry Farmer said. “It was a fire.”
“Fires can be rigged just like explosions can,” Gregor said.
“If I’d heard anything like an explosion, I’d have come running without hesitation,” Horace Wingard said. “There was nothing like an explosion. Arthur Heydreich said he smelled smoke, and I didn’t believe him, because of course I thought he was just saying what he had to say now that he’d been arrested. But if you think about it, that’s not really implausible. I mean, if the fire had been started much earlier, say half an hour or so before Arthur Heydreich noticed it, well that’s just the way it would happen. It would take a fire a little time to get going.”
“Not if the place had been doused with nail polish,” Gregor said. “And the smell should have been overwhelming. Arthur Heydreich didn’t say anything about a smell?”
“Just the smell of smoke,” Larry Farmer said.
“But the cameras were running here all the time,” Gregor said. “Nobody could have gotten in after Arthur Heydreich to throw nail polish around and set a fire. Unless there’s a back door?”
“There’s the same back door we came through,” Horac
e Wingard said. “But there are cameras there, as well. Of course, the locker rooms were dark. And there was no camera in the women’s locker room. So if somebody stayed in there all night, and if nobody put on a light—”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I got that part. But whoever came to the locker room should have been caught on the security cameras outside when he left, and nobody was. Which brings us back to what started the fire, because if there was nobody inside to throw a match, and no evidence of a timer device to set the thing off—”
“That’s right,” Larry Farmer said. “I mean, you’ve got to see our point, Mr. Demarkian. We weren’t being sloppy. Nothing else made sense except—”
“Don’t start that again,” Horace Wingard said. “Really, Mr. Farmer, don’t start that again.”
Gregor left them to it and walked out into the cool of the morning air. The little parking lot in front of the pool house was empty and an old man was walking up the road in their direction, looking put out on general principles. Gregor had met old men like that before. He wasn’t interested in meeting another one this morning.
Horace Wingard went off to talk to the old man, and Gregor looked at the arrangement of parking spaces and small paths that surrounded the pool house’s front door.
“Who lives directly there?” he asked Larry Farmer, pointing to the first house on his left. It was the only house right at hand, actually, because to his right was the clubhouse, and it was only beyond that, on the other side of the curve, that houses started on that side.
“That’s the Dunbar house,” Larry Farmer said, making eye movements in the direction of the man talking to Horace Wingard. “He was right on our tails as soon as the first police cars showed up. He likes to contribute.”
Gregor let that one pass. “I’ll have to talk to him eventually,” he said. “You’re sure he didn’t see someone tromping up the green in the middle of the night or something else that might be useful?”
“He complained that somebody had thrown a garden hose on his deck on the night in question,” Larry Farmer said, “but our guys looked at it, and I think they even took it into evidence just in case, and I don’t think there was anything remarkable about it. It was a garden hose. There are dozens of them around here. They use a lot of them on the green.”
“In October?”
Larry Farmer shrugged. “They’re coiled up around the spigots, that’s all. Maybe somebody threw it and maybe they didn’t. It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody did. He’s a pain in the ass, Walter Dunbar. Somebody ought to do something about him.”
Gregor went back to looking at the front of the pool house.
He could think of at least one way for that fire to have been set, but it wasn’t an explanation that made a lot of sense.
2
They could have driven from the pool house to the Platte house, but the more Gregor looked at Waldorf Pines, the more he wanted to see of it. It was an interesting arrangement of buildings. The clubhouse was situated at the front gate not only because it could then be seen from the road, but because it was the single most impressive building of the bunch. The pool house, being hidden, was much less so. Both were more flash and splash than substance.
But it was the houses themselves that Gregor found most interesting, and especially the way they were arranged around the green. Gregor didn’t know a lot about golf, but he was fairly sure that most first-class golf courses were more expansive than this, with rolling meadows and little copses of trees and bumps and water among the grass. This was a more or less flat space, with little flags where the holes were supposed to be, but small enough that Gregor could see across the whole thing from where he was standing. The houses sat strung out along the edge of it like so many hulking bogeymen under the bed. They looked both massive and oppressive, as if they had been built to make people feel insecure about themselves.
Horace Wingard came up to where Gregor was standing and looked proud of himself. “It’s a wonderful design, don’t you agree? It’s not the kind of course that would do for professionals, of course, but we don’t want professionals here. This is supposed to be a place for people to relax.”
Gregor thought he’d be better able to relax on the New York City subway at rush hour than he could in a place like this, but he didn’t say so. He looked down the green past the house he now knew was Walter Dunbar’s.
“Where’s Arthur Heydreich’s house?” he asked.
Horace Wingard pointed almost directly across the green. The Heydreich house was not the first one next to the clubhouse, and it wasn’t the second. It was about a third of the way down the road. It had a big deck that snaked around both sides of it, complete with Adirondak chairs.
“It’s a one-way road,” Horace Wingard explained. “You come in at the gate and you go right, which would take you past Arthur Heydreich’s house immediately. Then, if you want to go out again, you have to come all the way round here and exit to the left. We discussed making the thoroughfare two-way, but we thought it would result in much too much confusion in the mornings. Our residents work, you understand, in jobs that make very heavy requirements of them. Most of them are up and out long before they’d have to be with ordinary nine-to-five routines.”
“And Arthur Heydreich was up and out that morning? The morning of the fire?”
“He was on his way to work when he discovered it, yes,” Horace Wingard said.
Gregor shook his head. “Where is Michael Platte’s house?”
Horace Wingard counted down from Arthur Heydreich’s and stopped on one nearly in the middle of the opposite line. There was a curve in the green. Gregor was fairly sure that nobody could get from Michael Platte’s house to Arthur Heydreich’s house, or vice versa, without being in full view of other surrounding houses. Getting from Arthur Heydreich’s house to the pool house was something else. The big problem would be the clubhouse. If that was shut up for the night, you could go by the path at the edge of the green and stay close to the buildings and be in and out without anybody being able to see anything.
But would anybody want to do that? Assuming your objective was to kill two people in the pool house, why would you necessarily go around that way to begin with? Especially since the security cameras were off. And they were off from … Gregor reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out his notes. Ten forty-five and twelve thirty. That was the middle of the evening, a time when there would be lots of people out and around, even on a work night. There would be people in the clubhouse. There would be people on decks, even in this weather. There would be people on the road. Why go through all the trouble of sneaking around on the edge of the green when sneaking could not keep you from being seen no matter what you did?
Gregor looked up and saw that Horace Wingard and Larry Farmer were looking at him anxiously. He’d spent a lot of his life with people looking at him anxiously. He straightened his shoulders.
“Let’s go over to the Platte house,” he said. “And let’s walk. I want to see how this place plays out.”
“We can go by the road or by the green,” Horace Wingard said. “It is forbidden to walk across the green itself, of course, but there’s a path—”
“Do many people walk across the green anyway?” Gregor asked.
Horace Wingard went red again. “Of course they do. It becomes a matter of pride to let people know that you’re not following orders, or that you’re above the rules. Of course, they expect other people to follow the rules. They think the world is coming to an end if somebody cuts across their lawn.”
Gregor nodded. He was sure they did.
He stepped out onto the green anyway, looking up and down the circle of houses that surrounded it. All of those houses had huge walls of windows looking onto the course, and big decks where people could sit and watch the action. Gregor assumed they were set back far enough not to endanger residents and their windows from flying golf balls, but he might be wrong about that. Maybe people liked the idea of being close enough to the action
to really feel it, at least every once in a while.
He looked from Arthur Heydreich’s house to Michael Platte’s house and back again. There was some kind of activity going on at Arthur Heydreich’s that he couldn’t quite make out.
“All right,” he said. “If we do a direct run across the green, we’d get to the Platte house fairly quickly, and that’s what I suppose he did when he went to work at the pool house. He should have shown up for work at what time that night?”
“Six,” Horace Wingard said. “But I told you. Michael didn’t keep schedules. Not really. He—”
Gregor waved this away. “He spent a lot of time screwing around, I know. Ten forty-five to twelve thirty. That’s the problem. From the way this shapes up, everything would have had to be done between ten forty-five and twelve thirty. There would have been people in the clubhouse then. There would have been people around. Your gate is always manned? There isn’t a time at night when the guards are off and residents use a key or a code or something like that?”
“Certainly not,” Horace Wingard said. “Our gates are manned all day every day. It’s one of our premier claims to distinction.”
“But that back gate you mentioned,” Gregor said. “For that, people have keys.”
“They’re not supposed to use the back gate,” Horace Wingard said. “It’s a service gate. It’s only a few families who have children. There’s a school bus stop on the road there. They use that gate. Nobody else ever goes in or out of it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “That won’t work, either. If the second man had come in by the back gate, he’d have had to cross the green to get to the pool house, or use the road or the path. But in any case, if he did that between ten forty-five and twelve thirty, it would be nearly impossible for him not to be seen.”
“Well, it should have been impossible for Martha Heydreich not to have been seen,” Horace Wingard said, “and Michael Platte and whoever else was here, but nobody seems to have seen anything. It’s as if the security cameras went off and everybody went blind and deaf.”
