27 Blood in the Water (21 page)

“Somebody will call it in,” Horace Wingard said. “They’ll have seen you, and they’ll call it in. You’ve got to get that car out of sight somewhere and you’ve got to do it now.”

“This is as out of sight as it’s going to get,” Larry Farmer said. “We need to use a car. This is Mr. Demarkian, by the way. Last I heard, you thought it was a wonderful idea for us to hire him.”

“I thought it was a wonderful idea for you to hire someone,” Horace Wingard said coldly. “You don’t have the capacity to investigate a crime of this complexity. I did not say I thought it was a wonderful idea for you to hire
him.
The man is a publicity hound. He’s on television more than Paris Hilton.”

“He’s the best there is,” Larry Farmer said. “You told Ken you wanted the best there is.”

“I’m going to call Mr. Bairn right now,” Horace Wingard said. “You can’t get away with this. You can’t ruin the reputation of Waldorf Pines. This is a quality complex.”

“Last I heard, your quality complex had two dead bodies in it, and a missing person who’s either the murderer or dead herself under a tree somewhere.”

Horace Wingard managed to go a little redder. Then he turned on his heel and marched back into the clubhouse. He was wearing shoes with heels on them. They were very discreet heels. They couldn’t be mistaken for cowboy boots. Even so, they were heels.

“Asshole,” Larry Farmer said.

Farmer started toward the clubhouse door, and Gregor followed him. The drive he was walking across was gravel. The front doors of the club were double doors, and wider than standard ones at that. The foyer just inside was heavy with wood and beams. It was as if someone had tried to replicate a golf club from the Twenties—or, more likely, the fantasy of a golf club from the Twenties from a movie made of
The Great Gatsby.

Horace Wingard was in an office to the left of the front doors. The door to that office was open, as was the door to the anteroom office that opened onto the foyer. There was a tall, thin, youngish woman in the anteroom office, sitting at a desk at a computer and behaving as if she couldn’t hear her boss in spite of the fact that he was now actually yelling, and at the top of his lungs.

Gregor bypassed Larry Farmer and went in. “How do you do,” he said to the secretary at the desk. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”

“I have seen you on the news,” the secretary said. “I’m Miss Vaile. I’m sure Mr. Wingard will be out in just a moment.”

“If he doesn’t give himself a heart attack with the way he’s behaving,” Gregor said.

Miss Vaile looked through the door to the other office and shrugged. “It’s been a strain, all this happening at Waldorf Pines. It’s been a strain on all of us. I’m sure you must realize this is not the kind of thing Mr. Wingard is used to.”

“I take it there’s not a lot of crime at Waldorf Pines,” Gregor said.

Miss Vaile hesitated just a second too long. “I suppose it depends on what you mean by crime,” she said, “but this kind of thing, violence and thuggery, no. That’s what our people come to get away from. The world has become a violent and insecure place.”

“I’m afraid I don’t really see that,” Gregor said.

There was the sound of a phone receiver being slammed into an old-fashioned cradle, and then Horace Wingard was with them once more. He was not so red, but he looked as if he was sweating. Gregor thought that this was probably going to turn out to be Horace Wingard’s biggest dissatisfaction with himself: the fact that he sweat easily and heavily, and apparently could do nothing about it.

He marched past Miss Vaile’s desk and planted himself in front of Larry Farmer, almost as if Gregor wasn’t there.

“Come on in,” he said. “And Miss Vaile, please bring your pad. I want a record of everything we say here, and I intend to use it.”

3

Horace Wingard’s office was just what Gregor had expected it to be. It was so much what it ought to have been, Gregor got the impression that it had been staged. Horace himself was so much what he ought to have been that Gregor felt that he was staging himself, and he filed the observation in the back of his mind for later.

Horace sat down behind his desk and looked at the both of them. He didn’t ask them to sit. Gregor sat down anyway. Horace Wingard made a face.

“I presume,” he said, “that you have come here because you have something to report. I expect you to have a great deal to report.”

“We came because we need to talk to the Plattes,” Larry Farmer said. “Mr. Demarkian here had found something we need to ask them about.”

“And can I ask what this something is?” Horace Wingard said.

“No,” Gregor said. “Mr. Wingard, this is a police investigation into a double homicide. I do understand that you have a special relationship with the municipal authorities, but no such relationship gives you the right or the power to interfere in such an investigation. The Plattes are within their rights to refuse to talk to the police if that is what they want, and they are within their rights to hire an attorney to tell us that that is what they want to do. Neither they nor you, however, have the right to use Waldorf Pines’s status as a gated community to attempt to keep the police away. So I would appreciate it if you would stop pretending to be Truman Capote having a snit and behave like a grown-up.”

“You are not,” Horace Wingard said carefully, “a member of the Pineville Station Police Department.”

“I’m a consultant who has been hired by the Pineville Station Police Department, and my status as an active investigator will be held up in court if you insist on taking it there. I know, because other people have insisted on taking it there. Did the Plattes request you to run interference for them in this matter?”

Horace Wingard licked his lips. “No,” he said finally. “I have no idea how the Plattes feel about talking to the police. I know how I feel about having police on the premises of Waldorf Pines.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “That’s the way everybody feels about having the police on the premises. I would like to ask you a few questions. Then I would like to go out to talk to Michael Platte’s parents.”

“He isn’t there,” Horace Wingard said. “He’s already left for work. She’s there all the time. I’m not going to let you go there without warning her.”

“That’s fine,” Gregor said. “Warn away. This isn’t a stealth mission. I said I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“If you want to ask me about Michael Platte, I know less than you’d think,” Horace Wingard said. “He was a problem. It’s a terrible thing to say, I know, but there’s nothing to do but admit it. It’s everywhere these days, very nice families, good families, and one of the children just doesn’t turn out right.”

“I didn’t think Michael Platte was a child.”

“He was nineteen,” Horace Wingard said. “We gave him the job at the pool house because we didn’t want him doing something irrevocable. Breaking into people’s houses, for instance, in an attempt to get money for drugs. We thought if we just provided him with a way to spend his time—well.”

“And this job consisted of what?”

“He was supposed to stay at the pool house and make sure nobody went in or out except the repair people,” Horace Wingard said. “It wasn’t an entirely make-work job. For complicated reasons I do not completely understand, the repair company does not want us to empty the pool of water until their own people can come in and do it, and their own people cannot come in and do it for weeks. Still. We didn’t want children to come in and drown in the water, or anything like that.”

“Don’t you have a staff for the pool?”

“Yes, we do,” Horace Wingard looked uncomfortable. “And the pool is usually open all year round. It’s heated. However, when we were informed we would not be able to keep the pool open this fall while repairs were being done, well, I—”

“You fired your staff,” Gregor said.

“There was no reason—” Horace Wingard said.

“Who were probably all illegal immigrants anyway,” Gregor said.

“I’ve never knowingly hired a single undocumented worker at Waldorf Pines, or any other property I’ve managed,” Horace Wingard said. “You have no right at all to make such accusations.”

Gregor didn’t say that he couldn’t see how it would be possible to run a place like Waldorf Pines without “undocumented workers,” because he knew Horace Wingard couldn’t see it, either.

He looked around at the hunting prints and golf memorabilia on the walls and said, “Let me ask you for a bit about Martha Heydreich. You knew her better than anybody I’ve talked to so far. Do you believe the things people say about her having had an affair with Michael Platte? Was she the kind of woman who might have had an affair with a much younger man?”

Horace Wingard made a face. “Oh, it’s no use asking what kind of a woman Martha is,” he said. “It didn’t surprise me when I heard she was dead—thought to be dead, I suppose. It didn’t surprise me that somebody would want to kill her. If I was her husband, I would have killed her years ago.”

“She was an unpleasant woman?”

“She was loud,” Horace said, “and exaggerated. Everything was too much. Too much makeup. Gestures that were too overly dramatic. A voice that could pierce tempered steel, and she was never quiet. Clothes that were extreme in ways that would be difficult to explain if you hadn’t seen them. Violent colors. Evening gowns with constructions that were practically like architecture. Bathing suits that were barely this side of pornographic. A breast enhancement that made her look like Dolly Parton was having an affair with a bicycle pump. Oh, and hats.”

“Hats?”

Horace Wingard nodded. “She always wore hats. Very retro hats, not quite high-fashion hats but aspiring to that kind of area. Things that she had to pin on to get them to stay. Feathers curling under her chin. Little veils. And everything pink. It was like watching a high-fashion runway show where all the models were truck drivers.”

“Truck drivers?”

“She had no grace,” Horace Wingard said. “She was awkward when she moved. She was big boned and tall and outsized in every way, and she moved like she’d been put together with parts. But, you know, that’s the thing. She barged around. She barged in. It was what she did. She was a barger. But at the same time”—he shrugged—“tiny waist. Tiny hands. Even those were exaggerated. They were just smaller than life rather than bigger.”

“I’ve seen two pictures of her, and neither of them were very clear,” Gregor said. “Do you happen to have a better one?”

“I probably gave Mr. Farmer here the pictures he’s got,” Horace Wingard said, “unless Arthur did, of course, and I suppose Arthur might not have been cooperating at the time. She didn’t take very clear pictures. It was surprising, really, because she was the sort of person who liked to call attention to herself. We’ve probably got a hundred pictures of her, and in every one of them she’s either in the back of the crowd or so made-up she might as well have been wearing a mask.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “maybe she was.”

“I don’t think even Martha Heydreich went quite that far,” Horace Wingard said.

“Possibly,” Gregor said. “But what you’ve been describing to me is someone who will be almost impossible to recognize if she stops putting on all that makeup. We’ve got to at least consider the possibility that that was deliberate. It’s possible that Martha Heydreich was intending to disappear all along.”

“And kill two people when she went?” Larry Farmer interrupted. “What do you mean by ‘all along’? Since she’s been living at Waldorf Pines? Since before?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “And I don’t know about either. But I think we should at least consider the possibility that what went on here was not spur of the moment, not even relatively spur of the moment.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been that,” Horace Wingard said. “There must have been some kind of device, or something, to set off the fire. Granted, the police haven’t found that device, but there must have been—”

“It’s not that we didn’t look for it,” Larry Farmer said. “We went through that place with a sieve. Whatever it was must have been destroyed in the fire.”

“You weren’t looking for it at all,” Horace Wingard said. “You thought you knew exactly what you had, and you didn’t look for anything that could disturb your precious little theories. I know how you operate. I have to deal with it every day.”

Gregor got up and began to walk around the office. He didn’t need to listen to the two of them fight. He checked out a bookcase with volumes in tooled black leather. The books actually looked as if they’d been opened. He checked out a marble bust of somebody he thought he was supposed to recognize, but didn’t. He stopped at the window and looked out across the golf course.

That was when two things happened to him at once.

First, he had an idea he should have had before. It was such an obvious idea that he thought he might be going senile not to have thought of it.

Second, he saw a woman walking at the edge of the golf course, making her way to the clubhouse, and recognized her immediately.

He turned back to Larry Farmer and Horace Wingard and asked, “Who is that woman?”

“That?” Horace came to the window. “That’s Caroline Stanford-Pyrie. She lives just down the right side of the course, there, with her companion, if you know what I mean. Not that we’re prejudiced here, of course, but the way these old money women conduct affairs of that kind is truly bizarre, don’t you think?”

“What I think is truly bizarre,” Gregor said, “is that the murderer only went to the trouble of destroying one of the bodies.”

FOUR

1

To Walter Dunbar, everything that had happened in the last month—and especially everything that had happened in the last few hours—was proof positive that the world was a pack of idiots. Sometimes what had to be done seemed so obvious to him, he just didn’t believe that other people didn’t see it. Sometimes he was convinced that the world was full of people who existed only to spite him. Horace Wingard, to name one, would be willing to see Waldorf Pines and everything it supposedly stood for sink into the sea and drown before he’d admit that Walter was right about anything.