by Jane Haddam
“But Martha Heydreich and Michael Platte were seen. It’s in the notes I have. Several people saw them walking across the green together. And they saw other people walking across the green. But Martha Heydreich and Michael Platte lived here,” Gregor said absently. “People wouldn’t have been surprised to see them. They’d have been much more likely to notice a stranger, especially if he was a stranger on his own. Of course, he might not have been on his own. There’s that.”
They were coming up on the Platte house, and he wished he could say he could determine something from the way it looked. People’s houses came to reflect them after a while. There were lawn ornaments and decorations, choices in the color of paint, repairs that were done well or done badly or not done at all. All the houses at Waldorf Pines looked like they’d been cloned from the world’s least interesting architecture.
Gregor came up to the back of the Platte house. He went past the green and over the path and directly into the backyard. The yard was empty. There was no lawn furniture. There were no toys the way there would be if the children here had been small. There were no ornaments. Gregor looked at one side of the house and then went around the deck to look at the other. It was all completely blank, and the odd thing was that the lawns of the houses on either side looked completely blank, too.
Gregor went around again to the center of the deck. It had a small staircase leading down to the path and the green, to make it possible for the people who lived there to get to the golf course without having to go around by the road. He looked around and saw that all the other houses had small staircases on their decks, too.
The standardization made his head ache.
He looked up at the deck. It seemed to be empty, but that might be the angle he was looking at it from. He went to the little staircase and opened the gate. He could see without having to work at it that the gate was for cosmetic purposes only. It would never keep anybody out. He climbed the short half-flight of stairs and came out on the deck proper. It really was bare of everything. There wasn’t even a chair.
“I don’t think you should be doing that,” Horace Wingard called up to him. “You’re on the Plattes’ private property. You can’t do that without a warrant, can you? You should come around and ring the bell at the front door.”
Gregor was sure he should come around and ring the bell at the front door. He wasn’t entirely sure why he wasn’t doing it. What he was doing instead was pacing along the edges of the deck, looking back up the green, looking around the deck again, and feeling entirely without purpose or direction.
He stopped at the very center of the deck and contemplated the drawn curtains across the big sliding plate-glass doors. He remembered when sliding glass doors had been an important badge of status in the suburban world, but he was pretty sure that was a long time ago.
He walked across the deck and stood directly in front of the windows. He leaned in toward the glass to see if he could make anything out through the curtains.
Then he stepped back hurriedly and stared.
A second later, he made the best attempt he ever had at kicking in a door.
PART III
ONE
1
If Bennis had been there, she would have told him, in no uncertain terms, that he should have known better. He was not now, and he had never been, the kind of person who could kick through windows and jump off cliffs. Even at the Bureau, he had spent most of his time in front of a desk. He was good at thinking, and once he’d learned how to use the computer, he was also good at finding things and putting them together. It did him no good to wish he was Indiana Jones.
It was not Gregor Demarkian’s finest hour. His feet hit the glass just as they were supposed to, flat on, but it didn’t matter. The glass didn’t break. He just bounced off it and landed on the deck on his side. He felt a sharp pain go up the side of his left leg. He had a sudden flash of insight that told him just what Bennis would say if he’d done something elderly, like broken his hip. Then he put his hands flat on the wooden decking and forced himself up. It worked.
Gregor was just thinking that he’d dodged a bullet there, and a big one, when he saw Larry Farmer peering through the curtains that covered the plate glass windows.
“Jesus Christ,” Farmer said. Then he began hammering on the plate glass. “Mrs. Platte! Mrs. Platte! What are you doing?”
“Have you both gone crazy?” Horace Wingard demanded. “You can’t break into a house. You can’t break the windows. You need a warrant just to get onto this property, and now you’re doing God only knows what.”
Neither Gregor nor Larry Farmer was listening to him. Gregor, on his feet again, was looking through the plate glass and curtains another time. Mrs. Platte—if the woman inside was Mrs. Platte—was still standing on the chair Gregor had first seen her on, but she was no longer holding the noosed rope in her hands. Instead, it swung as if there were a breeze, its shadow clocking back and forth across the kitchen floor like some kind of manic pendulum.
“Jesus Christ,” Larry Farmer said again.
Gregor Demarkian found himself wishing that Larry Farmer could say anything at all besides the cliché of the moment.
Larry Farmer pounded on the plate glass again. “Mrs. Platte,” he yelled. “Come on now, Mrs. Platte. Open up.”
Horace Wingard charged at the sliding glass doors, got a look himself at what was going on inside, and then backed away.
“Oh, my God,” he said.
Inside the house, Eileen Platte had turned to look at them, or at least to look at the sounds coming from her deck. To Gregor, she looked dazed and unsure of herself, as if she’d forgotten what she set out to do.
Eileen Platte steadied herself on the cabinets. The chair she’d set up for herself was right next to the longest of the kitchen counters. The rope was wrapped around the kitchen chandelier. It was not the most coherent suicide plan Gregor had ever seen.
Larry Farmer started to move as if he were going to try breaking down the glass doors just as Gregor had, but Gregor held him off. In the kitchen, Mrs. Platte was still moving, very slowly, very slowly, but moving.
She leaned down and hopped a little to get back onto the kitchen floor. She picked up the chair and walked it back to the breakfast nook table from where it had come. Gregor watched her look over the table, straightening a place mat and then another one, moving the basket of nuts in their shells that served as a centerpiece. Horace Wingard was still fussing.
“We can’t stay out here,” he said. “We really do have to go around to the front door. There are legalities involved.”
“If we leave here to go to the front door,” Gregor said, “she might think we’ve gone away, and get back on that chair. We could stand on the front porch for a year while she was in here—”
“Yes, yes,” Horace Wingard said. “I understand that. I understand that. But there are legalities.…”
A moment later, the legalities became moot. Eileen Platte had shuffled her way across the kitchen to the sliding glass doors. She pulled one of these back without pulling back the curtains. There was a low wind. The curtains blew back against her body and made her look like a ghost from a Thirties movie.
“I didn’t hear the doorbell,” she said, through the cloth that covered her mouth.
Gregor leaned forward and pulled the curtain away. He’d meant to be gentle about it, but the curtain was heavy, and there was a lot of it. He had to struggle to get it aside. While he fought with fabric, Eileen Platte stayed perfectly still. She was like a windup doll that had wound down.
Gregor got the curtain pulled back, and the three of them stared at a middle-aged woman in a blue sprigged house coat. She looked at them as if she found nothing at all odd about having three men on her deck in the middle of a morning.
“I didn’t hear the doorbell,” she said again. “I would have answered the doorbell. I’m supposed to answer the doorbell when it rings.”
“I’m sure you are,” Gregor said.
Eileen Platte looked away from them. “I was tidying up the kitchen,” she said. “It always needs a great deal of tidying. I used to think it was Michael who made the mess, but now of course it couldn’t be. It’s a mess all the same. Maybe I make it myself. Stephen thinks I make it myself.”
Gregor stepped into the kitchen and looked around. It was a big space, with cabinets going all the way up to a ceiling that it would take a ladder to reach. There was a big center island with a gas cooktop and a grill. Above it hung densely packed copper cookware, all shiny and looking as if it had never been used. The breakfast nook was a smallish octagonal space with a ceiling even higher than that of the rest of the kitchen. There were windows in the six angled walls that looked out, of course, on the green.
Eileen Platte sat down at the table there and looked at the three of them. “Am I supposed to be giving you something?” she asked. “Am I supposed to be making coffee?”
Gregor looked at Larry Farmer. “You’d better call an ambulance,” he said. “She should be on suicide watch.”
“But not with sirens,” Horace Wingard said hastily. “We don’t need sirens. There isn’t any rush.”
Gregor ignored him. Eileen Platte was sitting quietly, her hands folded on the table. She was looking at everything and nothing. Gregor couldn’t help wondering if she were drugged.
“I’ll call the ambulance,” Horace Wingard said. “They won’t be able to get in if I don’t okay it anyway. I’ll call them and then I’ll be right back.”
Gregor let him go without bothering to watch him leave. Then he sat down at the table opposite Eileen Platte. Her face was as white as if it had been made of plaster. Her eyes were dead.
“It doesn’t matter anymore about Michael,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do for him. There’s no way I can keep him safe.”
“No,” Gregor admitted. “There isn’t.”
“That was what I always tried to do,” Eileen said. “Keep him safe. Even when he was little. Because he was always that way, you know. He was always like that. It wasn’t the drugs.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
“I only said it was because that way, if Stephen believed it, I thought I could … he would … that he wouldn’t be so sure of it. Wouldn’t be so sure that Michael was … wrong. I don’t think it mattered, really. I don’t think he believed me. I don’t think Stephen believed me. Sometimes I think Stephen hated Michael from the very beginning, from the first day we brought him home from the hospital. But that can’t be true, can it? Fathers don’t hate their sons that early, do they? They wait.”
Gregor did not know what to say to this, but behind him, Larry Farmer was getting restless.
“Here’s the thing,” Larry Farmer said. “Mr. Demarkian? We can’t talk to her like this. It won’t be admissable. We haven’t even read her her rights.”
“We aren’t going to arrest her,” Gregor said.
“Yes, well, I know,” Larry Farmer said. “But maybe that’s just the way it looks now, you know. Maybe later it will be different.”
Gregor didn’t want to say that things would never be so different that Eileen Platte would be arrested for the murder of her son, because things did change. There was always the chance that he was wrong about some of the conclusions he’d already come to. He said nothing.
Eileen Platte was looking out the breakfast nook windows now. “I remember when we bought this house,” she said. “I remember coming to look at it and thinking how much I like this, this octagonal thing. I thought it would be like living in a castle. That was my ambition growing up. I wanted to live in a castle. I wanted to be a fairy princess. I thought that if I could have a wand, I could make all the noise go away. All the noise and all the alcohol.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Eileen looked at her hands. “It’s the same old thing. It’s always the same old thing. But that wasn’t what was wrong with Michael. I knew that from the beginning. I could see into him all along. I just kept hoping it would go away.”
“What’s she talking about?” Larry Farmer demanded. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
Gregor knew what she was talking about. It gave him the answer to a question he had been asking himself for a long time. Did anybody ever see a sociopath for what he was before he really got started? So many people didn’t. Maybe their mothers did.
“I should get work done,” Eileen Platte said, moving to get up.
Gregor put a hand on her arm. “Answer a couple of questions for me before you go,” he said. “Some questions about Michael.”
“There aren’t any more questions to answer about Michael,” she said. “Michael is dead.”
“I know,” Gregor said, “but there are some things I still don’t understand. Like the safe-deposit box key. Did Michael have a safe-deposit box that you know of?”
Eileen looked startled. “A safe-deposit box? Do you mean in a bank? Of course he didn’t have anything like that. If he’d had something like that, he would have used it, don’t you think? He’d have put things in it. Valuable things in it.”
“I don’t know what he would have kept in it,” Gregor said. “There was a key to a safe-deposit box in his clothes when he was found—found—”
“Dead,” Eileen said.
“That’s right, dead. There was the key, but there was no way to tell what bank it was from. We can’t go to look in it if we don’t know where to look.”
“He didn’t have a safe-deposit box,” Eileen Platte said. “I know he didn’t. If he’d had it, he’d have kept his money in it, and he didn’t. He kept it upstairs. He kept it in his closet.”
“A safe-deposit box isn’t a convenient place to put cash,” Gregor said. “It’s usually used for things like important papers.”
“Michael didn’t have any important papers,” Eileen said. “He had a passport, but that’s upstairs on his bureau. Everything is upstairs just the way he left it, except for the shoe box, and I’m not supposed to talk about that. Stephen took it with him to work today. He said if I said anything about it, he would say it never existed, it would be just my word against his, and everybody would believe him. But I was the one who found it. I found it. And I knew where it came from, too.”
“The shoe box?”
“What was in the shoe box. She didn’t bring it in a shoe box. She had a big envelope, a big manila envelope. I saw her. She brought the envelope to the pool house when he was working one night, and I was just coming down to bring him something to eat. Not that he ate anything. He ate less than any other person I’d ever met. I made sandwiches with cream cheese and pimento olives the way he liked them and I took them down there and she was there first. And he took the money out of the envelope and counted it.”
“Money,” Gregor said. “You’re talking about cash? How much cash?”
Eileen bent over and began to pick at the place mat in front of her. “I should have said something at the time,” she said. “I should at least have told Stephen. What was she doing, giving him money like that, and in an envelope? But then, you know, I was just—I wasn’t really sure. Because I saw them there and I didn’t go in. I tried to listen, but I didn’t really hear very much. And he counted and I thought I heard, but then maybe I didn’t hear right. It was hard to know what to do, do you see that? And I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the less I was sure.”
“But you’re sure now?” Gregor asked. “You’re sure because you found the money in a shoe box?”
“In his closet upstairs,” Eileen said. She leaned far over the table and whispered, “Twenty-five thousand dollars. In tens and twenties. When I found it in the closet, I took it down and counted it. I counted it over and over again. Then I put it back. I didn’t know what to do with it. Then later I told Stephen about it. But that was the wrong thing to do.”
Eileen sat back. She looked oddly satisfied, but at the same time she still looked blank. It was
as if something inside her had broken down for good.
“The ambulance is on the grounds,” Horace Wingard said, rushing in from wherever he had been for the last ten minutes. “They’ll be at the door in an instant. Let’s try to get her out of here without too much fuss.”
Gregor didn’t care about the fuss, but he thought getting Eileen Platte into a medical facility as quickly as possible was the best idea in the room. She was staring at the wall now as if she’d never seen one before. It wasn’t clear that she was seeing it now.
“Let me just ask you one more thing,” Gregor said, hearing the air brakes on the road. “Just to make sure I have this straight. You saw Martha Heydreich give your son a manila envelope with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash in it, when was this? Just before he died, months ago, last year?”
Eileen Platte was staring at him “It was just the week before he died,” she said. “But Martha Heydreich didn’t give him the money. She did. The one who thinks she’s so perfect. I knew there was something wrong there. She isn’t who she says she is. She really isn’t. And Michael knew all about it.”
“All about who?” Gregor asked.
“Caroline Stanford-Pyrie,” Eileen said. Then she made a face, the kind of face children make when they think something is “yucky.” Then she leaned very close to Gregor and said, “She thinks nobody suspects anything, but it isn’t true. We all suspect something, even if we don’t know what it is. Her and the other one. They’re always walking around, making like the rest of us don’t know anything. But we know enough to tell.”
“Tell what?” Gregor asked.
“Tell that they’re gay,” Eileen said. “What else would two old biddies like them have to hide that anybody would care about? They’re both gay and Michael knew it and then they killed him for it. I’ve been watching them ever since.”
Eileen sat back, looking suddenly very happy and amused. Just then, there were the sounds of a door opening and the ambulance team coming in, ushered about by Horace Wingard speaking in hushed but very insistent tones.
