by Jane Haddam
“In Ken’s office, yes,” Buck said. “Are you going to do a Hercule Poirot and give us the solution? Don’t you need all the suspects together in one room in order to do that?”
“I’m not sure anybody ever really does do that,” Gregor said. “No, this morning, I’m not giving out solutions. This morning, I’m asking for what I need and for some force beyond poor Larry Farmer to help make an arrest. You do have other police officers in Pineville Station besides Larry Farmer?”
“Two, I think,” Buck Monaghan said.
They went up the steps and into the building. Gregor marveled again at what towns had found possible in his childhood and before that they no longer found possible now. They went up to Ken Bairn’s office and found the doors wide open and Delores Martin and Sue Connolly sitting together near the anteroom desk.
Delores looked up and said, “We’re just hoping you’re going to tell us that those people at Waldorf Pines are all murderers and we should lock them up.”
Gregor shook his head and headed back to Ken Bairn’s inner office.
Ken was sitting behind his desk, the chair turned so that he could look out the window into town. Even from here, Gregor thought, it didn’t look like much of a town.
Ken turned around. “Are you going to tell me that everybody at Waldorf Pines is a murderer?” he asked. “I knew when this started that it wasn’t going to do us any good.”
“Everybody at Waldorf Pines isn’t a murderer,” Gregor said. “Only one person is. But that was inevitable. I can tell you one thing that might help your relations with Horace Wingard.”
“What’s that?”
“As I told Larry Farmer last night, he’s operating under an assumed name,” Gregor said. “Not that there’s anything illegal about that, because there isn’t. In the United States, you’re within your rights to use any name you want to as long as you do not do so with an intent to defraud. I don’t think Horace Wingard intends to defraud anybody. He just wants very desperately to be anybody else but who he was born to be.”
“And who was he born to be?” Buck Monaghan asked.
“The son of a working-class father,” Gregor said. “But you do realize, he isn’t the only one. There’s Caroline Stanford-Pyrie and Susan Carstairs. They’re operating under assumed names, too.”
“I knew there was something like that going on,” Larry Farmer said. “That’s why she wouldn’t let me into the house yesterday. I still say you had no right to do what you did there, Mr. Demarkian. Suspects have no right to refuse to talk to the police—”
“Of course they do,” Gregor said. “And you should know that. Anyway, she talked to me when she wouldn’t talk to you, and that worked. And I’d have said nothing about it, except that it isn’t going to matter much in the next day or two. If Horace Wingard hasn’t called the papers to tip them off yet, he will as soon as we’ve made an arrest.”
“Tip them off about what?” Ken Bairn said.
“About the fact that Waldorf Pines is harboring the wife of Henry Carlson Land, the same wife that half of Land’s investors think is hiding most of the money that Land bilked out of investors in his Ponzi scheme. And in case you’re wondering, he’s known pretty much from the day Alison Land showed up. He’s probably been keeping the knowledge in reserve for an emergency, and this is beginning to look like an emergency.”
“Beginning to?” Buck Monaghan said.
“Alison Land,” Larry Farmer said. “My God. That must mean the other one is Marilyn what’s-her-name. There have to be a million lawyers looking for those two. But how did you find that out? They’ve been hiding for over two years.”
“They weren’t doing much of anything to disguise themselves except living at Waldorf Pines, which is a place where they wouldn’t be expected to be,” Gregor said. “But then it’s the nature of Waldorf Pines that matters, too, as much as the identity thing. All through this thing, there are too many people pretending to be somebody they aren’t. That’s true of Horace Wingard. It’s true of Caroline Stanford-Pyrie and Susan Carstairs. And, of course, it’s true of Martha Heydreich.”
“All that makeup,” Larry Farmer said. “I kept thinking that must be hiding something. I suppose now she’s wandering around Waldorf Pines, being somebody else, and we haven’t either noticed her.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “the last time she was at Waldorf Pines, she was definitely being somebody else, and you could say that the entire time she was at Waldorf Pines she was somebody else, or at least, like Horace Wingard, somebody other than she had started out to be. But she’s not at Waldorf Pines now. By the way, speaking of people who are or are not at Waldorf Pines, when you did your initial investigation, did you look into the whereabouts of somebody named Charles or Charlie Bullman?”
“I suppose I ought to have,” Larry Farmer said.
“The notes I have from you say that Charles Bullman was away on a business trip on the day you first went to Waldorf Pines to investigate,” Gregor said. “And you were told that by his wife. After that, there isn’t anything at all, which sounds to me like you didn’t follow up. I’ve been told by several people, however, that not only was Charles Bullman not at Waldorf Pines on the day the bodies were discovered, but he hasn’t been there since. At all.”
“Wait,” Buck said. “Do you mean that’s the answer? The other body in the pool house belongs to this Charles Bullman?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Do you remember that I said there were several things that mattered? Let me spell them out. First, nobody in this case is what he or she seems to be, and that includes most of the people we’ve met at Waldorf Pines. That’s true in the usual sense, meaning that people put up a good front for the public, but it’s also true in that a fair number of people there are hiding their real, or at least original, identities. So there’s that, yes.”
“Yes,” Buck Monaghan said.
“Good,” Gregor said. “The second thing to remember is that Waldorf Pines itself is not what it pretends to be. It is not an upper-class gated community. It’s gated, all right, but in fact it’s aimed at the high end of small town and the low end of corporate success. It is not a place for aristocrats. It is a place for people who like pretending to be aristocrats. And that means something very important. It means that the people of Waldorf Pines are not independent. Reputation matters to them in a very real and unequivocable way. Being suspected of a murder, for instance, can get these people fired, or destroy their businesses. So can a lot of other scandals that might not affect them if they were actually what they pretend to be. Michael Platte had a nice little line of blackmail going at Waldorf Pines and that blackmailing is why Michael Platte is dead.”
“The blackmail,” Ken Bairn said. “Not because he was having an affair with Arthur Heydreich’s wife.”
“This was how I was trying to explain it to Larry yesterday. Michael Platte is the key to all of this because Michael Platte’s behavior is the catalyst for what everybody else is doing here. And I don’t mean that it’s the catalyst for the murderer, although it is that. There’s a lot of seriously strange behavior going on at Waldorf Pines, and most of it has nothing to do with who was murdered or why. But it all has to do with Michael Platte.”
“It’s incredible that somebody who was that much of a total screwup could be that effective,” Buck said.
“He was effective because he paid attention, and because he knew what people like his parents cared about. But even so, I’m fairly sure he wasn’t having an affair with Arthur Heydreich’s wife,” Gregor said. “Although I’d be willing to bet anything that it was Martha Heydreich’s safe-deposit box key we found on his body. You’ll have to look into that later. But there’s a third principle here, and you can’t forget it, because it matters. Murderers do not do strange and outlandish things for the hell of it. The real world is not a murder mystery. It’s not even an episode of Law & Order. If there’s some aspect of your case that seems particularly unnecessary and bizarre, the chances are good
that there was some need for it to be particularly unnecessary and bizarre. And this case had something particularly unnecessary and bizarre from the beginning. One of the bodies was in the pool, whacked on the back of the head in the standard manner for that kind of thing, dead of drowning because he was alive when he went into the pool. That’s fine. But the other body was burned until it was unrecognizable.”
“But you don’t know that that was what the guy intended,” Larry Farmer said. “He could have meant the whole pool house to have burned up. Or she could have. You know what I mean. You start the fire meaning for it all to go up in flames, and then somebody comes along and calls the fire department too early, and there you are.”
“Possible,” Gregor admitted, “except for the fact that in order for that body to have been in the condition in which you found it, the murderer would have had to start the fire directly on the body to begin with. He’d have had to douse that body with enough accelerant to make sure it went up and went up good, and he’d have had to light the match almost directly under it. That’s a lot more forethought than you would have put into it if you’d wanted the entire pool house to go up, and not at all what you would have done if you’d wanted to disguise both of the bodies. The swimming pool was full. Michael Platte’s body was floating in water. No fire would have disguised what happened there under any circumstances. There’s only one reason for that fire to have been started where and how it was, and do you know what that reason is?”
“No,” Larry Farmer said.
“That reason,” Gregor said, “is the fact that the identity of the second body is the most important point. If you know the identity of the second body, you know who committed the murder, and you can figure out why without working too hard for it. The second body was the key, because the second body was the reason there was a murder at all. And that brings us to the stupid thing,”
“Nothing seems all that stupid so far,” Buck Monaghan said. “In fact, this whole thing is beginning to sound like something out of one of those detective novels you’ve been complaining about.”
“No, no,” Gregor said. “The whole thing is incredibly simple. It was so simple, I almost missed it. But here’s the thing. Two things in this case happened because the murderer knew that the first thing you were going to do when you discovered the bodies was to arrest Arthur Heydreich for the murders. The first thing was the burning of the bodies. The second thing was the depositing of a small garden hose on Walter Dunbar’s porch.”
“Walter Dunbar?” Larry Farmer exploded. “I can’t believe it. Walter Dunbar is an ass. He’s a prick. He’s one of those guys who runs around making himself important any way he can. We don’t even know somebody put that garden hose on his porch. He could have made it all up. It could have been his own garden hose. He just wants to act like he knows everything and have an excuse to call us all hicks and idiots.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “That’s exactly why that garden hose was thrown onto his deck. It was, in case you can’t see it, nearly perfect. Anything that happened, no matter how trivial, would have gotten Walter Dunbar up in arms and telling the world, but something that happened on a night when murders were being committed—well, it was the perfect thing. Walter Dunbar is Walter Dunbar. He’d be sure to tell everybody he met about it, his neighbors, the police, the newspapers if they asked. That was exactly the point.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Larry Farmer said.
“I think you ought to get those two police officers and take me out to Waldorf Pines,” Gregor said. “I don’t believe in murderers who run around doing extra murders to keep people quiet, or whatever the reason’s supposed to be, but I don’t like the idea of letting this person run around loose. He’s entirely too good at this.”
3
The drive out to Waldorf Pines felt as if it took forever, and it took longer because Larry Farmer spent it talking to Horace Wingard on his cell phone.
“Nobody’s trying to ruin your life,” Larry kept saying. “Nobody’s trying to ruin anybody’s life. We’re just trying to do our jobs … yes, I know what my job is … yes, I know what Waldorf Pines means to Pineville Station … well, why do you have six news vans parked in front of your gate?”
The news vans were, most definitely, parked in front of the gate. There were so many of them that Gregor was afraid they wouldn’t be able to get inside. And it wasn’t only the news vans that were causing the problem. There were also sightseers, people who had shown up in their cars for no good reason Gregor could tell, plus sightseers from Waldorf Pines itself on the other side of the gate. Reporters were trying to climb Waldorf Pines’s low stone wall. People with phone cameras were climbing trees and taking pictures of the people milling around in the clubhouse parking lot.
One of the young officers in the front of the car flipped the siren on, and people began to move back and away. The car inched forward, more and more slowly, more and more insistent. The officer started leaning on the horn as well as blowing the siren. He got them all the way to the gate when there was another obstruction. It was Horace Wingard. He was standing athwart the passage as if he could physically protect it with his own body.
It was an act, but Gregor Demarkian had to admit it was a very good act.
Gregor tapped the young officer on the shoulder and asked him to stop. “I might be able to help with this a little,” he said, “and it’s something we need, anyway.”
“Something we need?” the officer asked.
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I should have thought of it. But I don’t think it will matter. It will only waste time.”
Gregor didn’t know if the officer was naturally uncurious, or if the situation was just too tense to allow for questions and conversation. The officer stopped the car. Men and women swarmed around it, including many reporters with microphones. Gregor opened his door and stepped out, getting it closed just in time to keep a young woman reporter from landing on Larry Farmer’s lap.
“Jesus Christ,” Larry said from inside the car, and then the door was closed.
Reporters closed in around Gregor now, and he had to back up all the way against the police car to keep from getting run over.
“Mr. Demarkian,” one of them yelled, “are you here about the Land financial scandal? Is that really why you were called in by the Pineville Station Police Department?”
This was so ridiculous, Gregor didn’t even try to answer it. If he had been here looking for Alison Land, he wouldn’t have come on the request of the Pineville Station Police Department. That would have been an FBI operation, and they wouldn’t be looking at retired agents to help with it.
“Mr. Demarkian,” another reporter yelled, “do you think Alison Land should be required to pay back the money her husband stole? What about the small individual investors who lost everything they had?”
“Mr. Demarkian! What do you think of Alison Land living in luxury in a place like Waldorf Pines when many of the investors her husband ruined are looking forward to a retirement eating dog food?”
“Mr. Demarkian! When did you first suspect that Alison Land was hiding out in Waldorf Pines, and why didn’t you immediately inform the public of her whereabouts?”
Did they go to journalism school for this? Gregor wondered. Did they really? Tommy Moradanyan Donahue could think of better questions to ask in this situation, and he wasn’t out of elementary school.
He also knew something about jurisdiction, too.
Gregor edged his way toward the gate and Horace Wingard.
“There’s something you’ve forgotten,” Gregor told Horace when he got up next to him.
“What’s that?” Horace said.
“This isn’t the only entrance to Waldorf Pines.”
Horace Wingard looked momentarily appalled. Then he turned his back to the reporters and ran off through the clubhouse gates.
Gregor Demarkian turned back to the mob. A dozen microphones were suddenly shoved into his face.
/> “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “if you’ll take the road you came in on just a little farther along the curve, you’ll find the back entrance to Waldorf Pines. You might want to go and check there. If he’s got any sense, Arthur Heydreich is right now trying to get out that way in an attempt to avoid being arrested for the murder of his wife.”
EPILOGUE
1
It was cold on the day the call came from the National Surgery Registry Database, cold enough so that Gregor didn’t have time to be annoyed about institutions that refused to name themselves anything anybody could recognize. Maybe annoyed was not the word he was looking for. He had only been finished with this case and Pineville Station for three days, and in those days Bennis had said “but I still don’t understand” at least forty times. Bennis did not usually have a problem understanding things. In fact, for Gregor, her usual problem was understanding things far too well. Gregor was not the kind of person who would cheat on a wife, but if he had been, he truly hoped he’d have the sense to know that Bennis was not the kind of wife you cheated on. She’d know you were doing it before you did.
The call came in on his cell phone as they were walking back from the Ararat on a clear November morning. Donna Moradanyan Donahue had managed to get at least half the buildings on the four-block stretch that was the neighborhood decorated to look like something having to do with Thanksgiving. When Donna decorated, it was not a minor thing. Entire buildings were encased in crepe paper. Roofs sprouted gigantic papier-maîché Indian corn crowns. Streetlamp poles were encased until they looked like actual candy corn, monstrously enlarged by a nuclear accident. Gregor had never understood why the city of Philadelphia didn’t complain about the streetlamp poles, but it never did.
Surely, he thought, there had to be a bureaucratic Death Star somewhere, or a division, or an agency, that had to have six different kinds of paper to allow anyone to decorate a lamppost, and then had to have those six kinds of paper filed for each post and then had to have them all filed again for each new use at each new holiday. That was the way these things worked.
