27 Blood in the Water (27 page)

The girl turned on her heel and marched off, her exit made a little less impressive by the fact that the high heels on her impractical shoes kept sinking into the grass of the green.

“Who was that?” Gregor asked Larry Farmer.

Larry Farmer produced one of his signature sighs. “That,” he said, “was LizaAnne Marsh. I think the usual term is ‘piece of work.’”

TWO

1

Susan lost her head. This was not surprising, because Susan always lost her head. Back in the worst of it, when everything was coming apart, when the only thing keeping them alive was being able to think straight—well, Susan hadn’t been able to think straight. Caroline wondered now, as she had wondered then, why she had taken the woman along with her. She could have made her exit on her own with a great deal more ease.

Ah, well, it wasn’t hard to answer that one, Caroline thought. She’d always had her principles. And if they were, as her sons put it, the principles of the Mafia—so be it.

Gregor Demarkian and that idiotic man from the local police department were coming across the golf green. It was getting late in the day for that. The green was raked, and people still played on it well into the fall. Any minute now there would be a couple of old men with their bellies hanging over the waists of their golf shorts, done up in caps with little balls on them, teeing up. Caroline had a sudden shuddering moment of self-awareness. She lived among these people now. She would live among these people—or people just like them—for the rest of her life. It was the one thing she would never be able to forgive Henry for.

Gregor Demarkian and the Keystone Kop were climbing up to the deck. Susan gave a strangled sob and dashed out of the kitchen. Caroline heard her racing upstairs, and then the pounding of feet in the upstairs hall, and then the slamming of a door. She sighed. It was always the same. Time after time. Once, one of the lawyers had suggested that it would be better for everybody if they just drugged Susan into insensibility and stashed her in a closet somewhere until the publicity had died down.

Except, of course, that Susan hadn’t been Susan then, any more than Caroline had been Caroline.

The two men made it all the way up to the deck itself, and Caroline made up her mind. She stepped out to where they were and waited until they were close enough to her so that she wouldn’t have to shout, even out here in the wind.

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “You may come inside.”

“Inside would be good,” the other man said.

Caroline turned to him. “I said Mr. Demarkian could come inside. I did not say you could. You can wait out here, if you like, or you can go back to where you came from, but you’re not going to enter my house without a warrant. Am I clear?”

“Oh, wait,” the other man said.

“I’m glad I’m clear,” Caroline said. She turned to Gregor Demarkian. “If you could come through here,” she said, stepping away from the sliding glass doors. “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a step. They’re a nuisance, these kinds of doors. I’ve never liked them.”

“See here,” the other man said.

“A warrant,” Caroline said, not bothering to look at him.

Gregor Demarkian stepped into the kitchen. Caroline stepped in after him and pulled the sliding glass door shut. Then, just to make sure, she locked it.

“We should go into the family room,” she said, waving to her left at the other end of the vast open space. “They were designed for young families, these houses. I’m sorry about your friend out there. I can never remember his name. Do you know mine?”

“I know both of them,” Gregor Demarkian said. “At the moment, you’re calling yourself Caroline Stanford-Pyrie. I think it’s an interesting name. Very distinctive. It’s not what I would have chosen under your circumstances.”

“Susan thinks like you,” Caroline said. “That’s why she calls herself Susan Carstairs. But I thought it would be counterproductive. One of my sons studied film in college. He says that what you call this, what you call what I’m doing with my name, is ‘hanging a lantern on it.’ If you want to get away with something very outrageous, something everybody is going to pick up on right away, then you call attention to it, and sometimes they don’t pick up on it. I don’t talk to my children anymore, of course. But I remember that.”

“Is that your decision or theirs?”

“Mine,” Caroline said. “I know who I am, Mr. Demarkian, in spite of going under a false name. I know who I am and I know what I believe. And one of the things I believe is that loyalty to family and then loyalty to friends must outweigh any other considerations of any kind whatsoever. Legal considerations. Moral considerations. My sons didn’t agree with me.”

“I think you’re being a little hard on them,” Gregor said. “It was the biggest con in history, the biggest financial scandal in history. They must have known that as soon as they discovered it was going on. It wasn’t going to stay hidden forever.”

“It had stayed hidden for nearly thirty years,” Caroline said. “Did you ever wonder how that happened, Mr. Demarkian? There was my husband, the great Henry Carlson Land, running this enormous business, with fifteen hundred employees, with trading partners all over the world. And he wasn’t being shy about being seen, or being quoted, either. I have a scrapbook full of pictures somewhere, of the two of us. Charity balls. Opera first nights. Movie premieres. Alison and Henry, Mr. and Mrs. Carlson Land. I liked being Mrs. Carlson Land. Did you know that?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said. “But I could have guessed.”

“I was arrogant about it, too,” Caroline said. “Part of it was just—well, when I was growing up. Everybody was always saying it was impossible. With the tax laws the way they were, and inflation, and people having so many other options for work rather than going into domestic service. The world I was born into was dead as a dodo, nobody could live that way anymore. Or, if you wanted to, you had to marry one of these new people, who didn’t care about any of the things we thought were important. And then there was Henry, one of our own and still able to—well, able to.”

“I think there are lot of people who would be surprised to find that you think Wall Street bankers are doing all that badly in this economy,” Gregor said.

Caroline snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not that they’re doing badly. It’s that they’re thugs. That’s what you have to be to get along in the market these days. And Henry was a thug. I should have realized it. I should have realized that it was impossible for somebody to be, these days, what Henry appeared to be. Well bred as well as well heeled. Operating in the old way, in a gentlemanly way. Do you know he never went into the office until ten o’clock?”

“Really?”

“Bankers hours, we used to call them when we were growing up,” Caroline said. “Bankers worked less than other people because they were bankers. They didn’t get out of bed at four and into the office by five-thirty. They had lives, real lives. We sat down to dinner at eight. We went to the opera and the symphony. We sponsored art exhibitions. We did all that kind of thing. You know the kind of thing, because you married one of us. You married Bennis Hannaford.”

“She doesn’t do much of that kind of thing anymore.”

“It’s the way people were supposed to live,” Caroline said. “It’s the way people of good family were supposed to live. And we were people of good family. I’m a descendant of travelers on the
Mayflower
on both sides of my family. Henry’s great-grandfather gave a library wing at Yale, and his father gave the sports complex at Hotchkiss.”

“Mrs. Land,” Gregor said faintly, “or Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie, or whatever you want to call yourself. Your husband bilked investors and banks out of sixty
billion
dollars. Billion, with a ‘B.’ He ruined countless midlevel investors. Took their entire life savings. He brought down two international banks. And the last I heard, he was in jail for the next two hundred and twelve years.”

“He’s seventy-two,” Caroline said. “I rather think he’s going to cut that sentence short by a bit. The scam of the century,” Caroline said. And then she laughed.

Up to then, they had been standing in the middle of the open space that was designated as a “family room”—Caroline preferred rooms with doors, thank you very much—and now she dropped down into a chair and stretched out her legs. Gregor Demarkian looked at her for a bit and then sat down himself, on the very edge of a love seat.

“The Susan you refer to,” he said.

“She calls herself Susan Carstairs now,” Caroline said. “It’s Marilyn Falstaff, of course. Poor Neddy Falstaff. He was like Susan, really. He didn’t have the stamina it takes to get through something like this. As soon as Henry decided to spill it all to the police and the FCC, Neddy couldn’t take it, and there he went, right out a twentieth-story window. I was surprised he could get it open. Anyway, Susan needed somewhere to hide just as much as I did, so I took her along with me.”

“And that was—”

“About two and a half years ago,” Caroline said. “It’s amazing how much time has passed, isn’t it? It’s been nearly seven years now since the smashup. And then, of course, there were lawsuits everywhere. Everybody was convinced I must have known all about it. I didn’t. I wasn’t brought up to stick my nose into my husband’s business affairs. And I had money of my own, from my own family. I didn’t see the justice in allowing a lot of—well, people, let’s say. I didn’t see why Henry’s investors should be allowed to take my money.”

“What have the courts had to say to that?”

“That I’m right,” Caroline said. “My money is my money. Are you surprised?”

“No.”

“The only problem left after that was the publicity,” Caroline said. “And there was a lot of it. People yelling at me on the street. Henry’s investors following me from place to place. And the reporters, of course. And the stories in the magazines and the newspapers and on television. And the books. My grandmother used to say that a lady never got her name in the papers except when she was born, when she married, and when she died. I should have listened to her. There were so many photographs of Henry and me at one thing or another, in society columns, in
Town & Country
. They just get dredged up and reprinted wholesale when anybody wants to write a story.”

“So you changed your name and came out here,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And then Michael Platte found out who you were.”

“It bothered me, that business of his finding out who I was,” Caroline said. “Who Susan and I were, I should say. You never met Michael Platte, of course. He was dead before you were brought in on this thing. But he wasn’t a bright boy. He was a sociopath, that was certain. But he wasn’t bright. And he was not curious. He didn’t paw through old newspapers and magazines. I doubt if he ever listened to any news at all. That’s why I always thought it must have been her who figured it out, and not him.”

“Her?”

“Martha Heydreich,” Caroline said. “She was a sociopath, too, if you want to know the truth. And absolutely the creepiest human being I’ve ever met.”

“That’s something I hadn’t heard before,” Gregor Demarkian said. “That she was creepy. What does that mean, exactly?”

Caroline shrugged. “It was uncomfortable to be around her. She was just—off, somehow. I don’t mean all the silly exaggeration, the makeup, the endless piles of pink everything. I mean she just felt like she oozed. And I never believed all that stuff about her having an affair with Michael. I’m fairly sure Michael was more gay than not, if he ever got around to sex in the middle of all the drugs he took. And he took a lot of drugs.”

“And you gave him twenty-five thousand dollars in cash,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Caroline stared up at the family room ceiling. It had patterns in it. She had never known why. “I did give him twenty-five thousand dollars in cash,” she said. “I suppose it was LizaAnne who knew about it. He told her, or she found out somehow. She was always chasing Michael around, stalking him. I’m old enough to know how those things work, of course. It was supposed to be a single one-time payment to keep his mouth shut, but it wouldn’t have been that. He’d have been back for more. He had too big a habit not to be back for more. And I could never have counted on his not telling anybody. He was drugged too much of the time.”

“It makes a good motive for murder,” Gregor said.

“It does,” Caroline agreed, “but I didn’t murder him. All I did was buy a little time, time enough to get off somewhere else where nobody would know who we were. And I will guarantee you Susan didn’t murder him. I could see her bashing somebody on the back of the head and then taking off, but not all the rest of this nonsense, fires starting with nothing to start them and then only after hours and hours. Susan, like Michael Platte, is not very bright.”

“You’re bright enough,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And at the moment, you’re really the only one with a motive I have.”

“Well, blackmail is certainly a motive,” Caroline said, “but if that’s what you’re looking at, you must realize it wasn’t only me. There’s Fanny Bullman, for one thing. By now that woman must have slept with nearly everybody at Waldorf Pines. It’s really quite amazing. She’s sleeping with Arthur Heydreich now. I think that’s because he’s become something of a celebrity. I marvel at the innocence of somebody who thinks that being arrested makes somebody a celebrity. Did you know that Henry is giving press conferences from prison? I don’t know how he gets away with it, but he is.”

Gregor Demarkian didn’t look interested. “So Michael Platte was blackmailing you, and you think he might have been blackmailing Fanny Bullman.”

“We could go on,” Caroline said. “There’s our esteemed manager, Horace Wingard.”

“He has something to be blackmailed about?”

“It depends,” Caroline said. “I don’t know if he cares or not. It’s nothing criminal. It’s just that he wasn’t born Horace Wingard, and the background he implies for himself is completely bogus. His name was something impossible to pronounce, Testeverde, something like that, and his father was an immigrant from somewhere in the Soviet Bloc. He went to public schools and some godforsaken community college, and then he just sort of reinvented himself as Mrs. Vanderbilt’s private bouncer. I suppose it depends on whether or not the people who hired him here care or not. If they don’t care, then Horace Wingard probably doesn’t care, either.”