by Jane Haddam
“Well,” Gregor said. “Your wife is still missing. There’s that.”
“Is there?” Arthur Heydreich said.
Gregor knew the signs. Heydreich’s lawyer might have been a public defender, but he obviously wasn’t one of the violently stupid ones you sometimes read about in cases that went to appeal. He must have told Arthur Heydreich not to talk to the police, and not to talk to reporters.
Gregor cleared his throat. “I can stand here forever. Or I can stand in the road. We could probably work up an audience if I stayed here long enough.”
Arthur Heydreich shrugged. Then he looked straight at Larry Farmer and said, “Not you. And don’t tell me it can’t be done. I don’t have to talk to the police if I don’t want to. I never did have to talk to you.”
“This can’t happen,” Larry Farmer said.
But it was the same here as it had been at Caroline Stanford-Pyrie. Maybe, Gregor thought, it was part of the Waldorf Pines mystique. Maybe all these people thought they were too important to talk to the local hick town fuzz.
“It’s not like the neighbors don’t know what’s going on,” he said, leading Gregor back through the house down a central hall. “Everybody knows what’s going on. While I was in jail, the Pineville Station Police Department made themselves famous all over the county telling people I was the only person who could have committed two murders. The place is a mess. I don’t care if you mind or not.”
The place was indeed a mess, the kind of mess that happens when nobody bothers to so much as pick up a dropped napkin off the floor for days on end. Gregor was fairly sure this was not the way the house could have looked before Arthur Heydreich was arrested. He was also a little surprised to think it could have gotten into this state in only two days. Under the debris, it was more or less the same open space as the one Gregor had just seen in Caroline Stanford-Pyrie’s house. The houses, then, were only dissimilar in their cosmetics.
Arthur Heydreich looked at the pile of dishes in the sink and the boxes from frozen food on the floor and said, “The maid left while I was in jail. Not that you can blame her. She’d been hearing for weeks that her boss was a vicious homicidal maniac who killed people wholesale and then burned them up. I wonder what they would have done if I hadn’t seen that smoke and gone to investigate.”
Gregor leaned up against the counter. It looked like the only clean space in the room. “They probably would have done the same,” he said. “It’s standard procedure. The husband is always going to be the first suspect.”
Arthur Heydreich shrugged. “So I’m the first suspect. That’s very nice. I’m on paid suspension at work. I think they were just going to fire me, but the lawyer I’ve got ran interference with that. I think Horace Wingard was going to invoke the no-bad publicity clause, or whatever it is, but he backed off from that, too. So now I’m here, and if you don’t find out who did this, it won’t matter what my lawyer does. I’ll be the man who murdered his wife and got away with it.”
“Did you murder your wife?” Gregor asked.
“As far as I know, my wife hasn’t been murdered,” Arthur Heydreich said. “At least, that was the last news I got. That’s why they let me out of jail and let me come back home. The other body in the pool house was a man. Have they changed their minds about that now?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“The lab results could be faulty,” Arthur Heydreich said, “but if they were going to be, I’d think they’d make them faulty to their own advantage. I used to hear all kinds of things I didn’t believe about police departments using any means necessary to get a conviction, but I didn’t believe it before now.”
“You don’t know where your wife has gone?”
“No,” Arthur Heydreich said.
“Do you think it’s possible that she was involved in a scheme for blackmailing her neighbors?”
Arthur Heydreich blinked. “What are you talking about? Martha wouldn’t blackmail anybody. And she wouldn’t know anything to blackmail anybody about anyway. People around here did not tell Martha secrets. She didn’t fit in that way. She didn’t fit in at all. Maybe if I had realized it before we moved here, things would have been different.”
“Things?”
Arthur Heydreich shrugged.
Gregor had not made anything like a promise to keep Caroline Stanford-Pyrie’s secrets, but he didn’t see any point in giving out information for no good reason at all. He found a way to phrase it that at least didn’t lead to identifications.
“At least one of the people at Waldorf Pines,” he said, “was being blackmailed—heavily blackmailed—by Michael Platte. This person is of the opinion that Michael Platte was not intelligent enough to have thought up such a scheme on his own. This person has also suggested that the person who did think up the scheme, the brains of the outfit, so to speak, was your wife.”
“Ah,” Arthur Heydreich said. “For God’s sake.”
“You don’t think that’s true?”
“I don’t think it’s true that Michael Platte was too stupid to come up with a blackmail scheme on his own,” Arthur Heydreich said. “That’s the kind of mistake people make about people who take drugs. They’re so out of it when they’re high, you think they’re like that no matter what state their minds are in. But Michael Platte wasn’t drugged all the time. He wasn’t drugged even most of the time. And a right little shit he was, too.”
“What kind of a right little shit?”
Arthur Heydreich shrugged, again. “My guess is he knew who was sleeping with who everywhere in Waldorf Pines, for one. I don’t know what Horace Wingard thought was going to happen when he had the pool house closed up for the winter, but I could have told him in advance. Everybody and his sister-in-law was screwing like rabbits over there, and I don’t mean just the teenagers. You wouldn’t believe this place for sex.”
“I might believe it,” Gregor said. “The rumors around are that your wife was having an affair with Michael Platte.”
“I know what the rumors are. That was supposed to be my motive. It wasn’t true. My wife was not having an affair with Michael Platte.”
“Can you really be sure?”
“Yes,” Arthur said. “I know it for a fact.”
“You’re very definite.”
“I have a lot to be definite about,” Arthur said. “Martha was not having an affair with Michael Platte.”
“Was she in partnership with him in a blackmail scheme?”
“No.”
“You’re definite about that, too.”
“Yes,” Arthur Heydreich said, “I am.”
Gregor considered this. Arthur Heydreich was standing in the middle of the breakfast nook. He had been standing there the entire time he and Gregor had been talking. He did not look like he needed to sit down.
“Most people,” Gregor said carefully, “in situations like yours, are more tentative about what they did and did not know before the murder.”
“Are they? Maybe most people are guilty.”
Gregor thought about that, too. In point of fact, he wasn’t sure that there was any one way people behaved when they were guilty. There wasn’t one way that they behaved when they were innocent.
“There are several people,” he said, “who say they saw your wife taking a walk with Michael Platte on the golf course fairly late on the night of the murders. Do you believe that?”
“I don’t believe she was taking a walk with him. She didn’t like him. Maybe they met up on the green and they were going in the same direction. Michael Platte was an oozer. He oozed.”
“Do you mind telling me what you were doing on the night of the murders?”
“I already told it to the police,” Arthur Heydreich said. “I was up at the clubhouse for a while. I played some bridge. I had a couple of drinks. I left around eleven.”
“And?”
“And I came back here,” Arthur Heydreich said. “There isn’t much else to do at Waldorf Pines. Golf, bridge, and sex, the upper-
crust suburban dream.”
Gregor thought about it. “You say you came back at eleven.”
“That’s right. Around eleven.”
“That would have been during the time the security cameras were not turned on.”
“That’s not my fault,” Arthur Heydreich said. “I can hardly be held responsible for whatever little incompetencies Horace Wingard has managed to commit now. And trust me. It’s going to turn out to be incompetence. The man is an idiot.”
“Did anybody see you leave the clubhouse at eleven?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you talk to anybody going in or going out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you remember anybody remark on the time who might remember your being there?”
“No, of course I don’t,” Arthur Heydreich said. “Why should I? I wasn’t on my way to commit a murder. I wasn’t trying to establish an alibi. I was just spending a little down time at the club and when I got tired, I went home. Do you really think that everybody who isn’t intent on slaughter goes around making sure other people remember when and where he comes and goes so they can testify to it afterwards?”
Gregor did not think that, but he didn’t think Arthur Heydreich thought he thought it, either.
Gregor weighed his options. “A couple of people I’ve talked to,” he said, “have suggested that you yourself were having an affair, with a woman named Mrs. Bullman.”
Arthur Heydreich grimaced. “That’ll be our LizaAnne,” he said. “Now, there’s somebody who could blackmail the entire population of Waldorf Pines and make a good job of it. If you think Michael Platte had brains behind his blackmail operation, that’s where to look. LizaAnne Marsh. Our resident cunt.”
“That’s not an answer,” Gregor pointed out.
Arthur Heydreich stood up. Gregor began to think he was not going to answer, and it struck him again that there was no reason why Arthur Heydreich should answer any questions at all.
Then Arthur Heydreich turned away. “I never,” he said, “not even once, in all the time that Martha was here and with me, in all that time I never once had sex with anybody else. What I’ve been doing since I got out of jail is none of your business.”
2
On the way back to the police station, Larry Farmer was in a snit.
“This isn’t the way I thought it was going to work,” he said. “I mean, as a consultant, I thought you’d consult. We’d do the regular police work, and then we’d talk about it with you. Talk about it. You know. We’d gather the evidence and then we’d show it to you and we’d talk about it. I didn’t realize you were going to go around questioning suspects.”
“You couldn’t have questioned this particular suspect if you wanted to,” Gregor said. “He was under lawyers orders not to talk. It’s a good thing I was there and that he’d talk to me.”
“But it doesn’t matter if he talked to you,” Larry said. “It’s not official. You couldn’t testify to it in court. Or could you? I can never get it straight, those rules of hearsay evidence straight. We need evidence, Mr. Demarkian. We need something solid we can bring in to court so we don’t look like jerks. And we do look like jerks. Let me tell you.”
“I need a map of Waldorf Pines,” Gregor said.
“A map of it? Why?”
“So I can keep straight who lives in which house,” Gregor said. “I’ve got notes, and I tried to draw my own map, but I need something more stable, I guess you’d call it. Did you do what I told you to? Did you call the Bureau?”
“Yeah,” Larry Farmer sounded depressed. “God, those guys are badass. Even the women are badass.”
“Did you put out an all-points bulletin? If we’re going to find Martha Heydreich, we’re going to have to make sure we look everywhere.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Larry Farmer said. “We’ve got them putting out notices and I don’t know what, and we’re going to be featured on America’s Most Wanted. I’d never have thought of that. I gave them six different pictures, and I gave even more to the FBI. I don’t understand why she isn’t the easiest person to spot in the world. She’s weird enough looking.”
“And she probably doesn’t look like that now,” Gregor said. “And there’s no real way, from those photographs, to tell what she actually looked like when she was at Waldorf Pines. She might as well have been wearing clown makeup.”
“Yeah,” Larry Farmer said. “Do you think that’s the solution? Martha Heydreich murdered Michael Platte and the other guy and then took off? I guess it would make sense, you know, if we knew who that other guy was.”
“I think the key to solving this problem is finding Martha Heydreich,” Gregor said, “and beyond that, I’m not going to go. Not yet. Right now, I need to find my driver and get myself home.”
“Home?” Larry Farmer said. “Home? Now? But you just got here. We haven’t got anything done!”
“It’s five thirty,” Gregor said, “and I haven’t even had lunch.”
“Okay,” Larry Farmer said, “it got late, but you don’t understand. Ken Bairn is going to have a complete fit. I mean it. He went to all the trouble to get you out here, and—”
“And he’s going to get exactly what he says he wants,” Gregor said. “A solution to this mess. We’ve been out at Waldorf Pines all day. We’ve talked to everybody we could conceivably talk to. Did you send somebody out to talk to Stephen Platte?”
“Yeah,” Larry Farmer said. “I sent Sue Connolly, if you want to know the truth. We don’t have the staff for this kind of thing, Mr. Demarkian. That’s another reason we got you out here. It was you or the state police, and Ken hates it when the state police are brought in. They treat us all like a bunch of hicks. They don’t treat you like any kind of hick. You scare the shit out of them.”
“That’s fine,” Gregor said, “but I’m going home, and I’m going to get something to eat. And I’m going to think for a while. Have a report for me on Stephen Platte when I get in tomorrow morning, and I’ll be early. Oh, and the safe-deposit box.”
“Right,” Larry Farmer sat up. “I forgot about that. I forgot about the safe-deposit box.”
“It belonged to Martha Heydreich,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And I’m pretty sure that when we find it, it will still be full. She couldn’t have gone to empty it after the murders, and I don’t think she emptied it beforehand. We’re going to have to discover the name of the bank. It’s going to matter.”
“The name of the bank?”
“What’s in the safe-deposit box,” Gregor said.
They were coming up on the police station now. Gregor looked out of the car and thought that the entire place seemed to him to be forlorn. He understood Ken Bairn, in an odd way. He understood the need to keep and preserve something that had been yours from childhood. But the days of Pineville Station weren’t numbered. They were over. They had been over long before Waldorf Pines was built. Waldorf Pines was like those machines that kept a body pumping blood and sucking in air long after the body itself had ceased to function. There would be no more places like Waldorf Pines built in Pineville Station. There would be no Pineville Station resurrected into a haven for the not-quite-upper-middle-class.
Gregor’s car was parked in the police station’s parking lot. Gregor got out of Larry Farmer’s police car as soon as it glided to a halt.
“Do the things I told you to do, and I’ll be back,” Gregor said. “I’ll be here first thing in the morning, and I promise you, you’ll be able to arrest somebody this time, and it will be the right person, and it will stick.”
“I don’t see how you can know that,” Larry Farmer said. “I’ve been with you all day. Have people been telling you secrets? I bet they have. I think you ought to tell me everything they said, so that I can at least know what’s going on and report to Ken and Buck. We’re the ones with our asses on the line here. You’re supposed to work for us.”
“I know,” Gregor said.
His driver must have been w
aiting right inside the police station’s door. He came hurrying out as soon as Gregor was on the asphalt. Gregor got into his car as quickly as he could, nearly desperate not to have to go on with this conversation. He tried to think of what to say to mollify Larry Farmer for an instant. All he could come up with was, “You should check into the background of Horace Wingard. His name isn’t really Horace Wingard, and I think there might be something in his background.”
“Horace Wingard? You think the killer is Horace Wingard? Ken will have a cow.”
Gregor thought Ken Bairn probably had a cow every week, but that was one of those things better left unsaid, and so he left it.
3
For some reason, the trip to Philadelphia this time seemed to take forever. Gregor sat in the backseat of the sedan and went through his notes and the notes the police had given him. He understood how the police had felt about this one. Larry Farmer was not a good police officer. He was barely an adequate police officer. His “department” was not so much a department as an instant replay of Andy Taylor’s Mayberry.
Still, Gregor thought, he could see why they had thought what they had thought. It was what he had thought. It was what anybody would have thought. And that, he had finally realized, had to be the key.
He shuffled through the folders and found the pictures of Martha Heydreich the police had given him, the copies of which they had presumably given the FBI and America’s Most Wanted. The pictures were as impossible as they had ever been. The woman looked less like a human being than a piece of modern art. Her makeup was so thick, it practically had topography. Her clothes looked decent enough when they were viewed in black and white, but in any color picture they became immediately extreme. There was all that blinding, uncompromising pink. Nobody wore pink like that. This was a woman who was dressing to disguise herself in plain sight. She had meant to be unrecognizable.
He found the report from the lab again. There was really nothing more to read. The body had been so thoroughly burned there was almost nothing left of it. It was a miracle that they’d been able to get DNA. And it had burned fast. There was security tape of that room during the early hours of the morning, the hours before Arthur Heydreich had stopped because he thought he saw a fire. If there had been fire in there before he said he saw it, it would have showed up on the tape. The fire had to have started when Arthur Heydreich said it had, or close to it.
