by Jane Haddam
“And was she in the habit of doing that? Walking on the grounds of the club rather than taking her car?”
“Not on your life,” Larry Farmer said. “She had this car, it was one of those two-seater sports things, painted bright, glaring pink. Neon-electric-bust-your-eyeballs pink. According to everybody we talked to, she drove that car everywhere. She drove it just to go next door. She even had vanity plates on it. ‘GRLPWR,’ or something like that.”
“All right,” Gregor said, “so the car was in the garage. Do you know if it was warm? Had it been driven anywhere recently.”
“Not a clue,” Larry Farmer said. His face fell. “I didn’t even think to ask him about it. If he’d touched it, you know, and if it was warm. Because by the time we got there, of course—”
“It would have been stone cold,” Gregor said. “Yes, I see that. What did Arthur Heydreich do after he found the car?”
“He says,” Larry Farmer said, “that he came back into the house and got his cell phone and tried to call his wife. She was supposed to always have the cell phone with her, too. You should have seen the phone. It was bright pink, too.”
“And did she have it with her?”
“No,” Larry Farmer said. “According to Arthur Heydreich, he called her on his cell phone, and then he heard her cell phone ringing in the family room. When he went in there, he found her purse sitting on the coffee table. More pink. Everything was pink. And the cell phone had a ring tone that played ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl.’ Do you know that song?”
Bennis cleared her throat. Gregor ignored her.
“So,” he said. “Now he’s found his wife’s purse. Was everything in it? Her keys? Her credit cards?”
“Everything we know of,” Larry Farmer said. “We’ve got that, you know, under lock and key. Her keys are in it. Her wallet is in it. There’s four hundred dollars in the wallet. Her credit cards are in it. And we did check all of that. He said he thought everything was there, but we double-checked just in case. The wallet had all her credit cards in it, all the ones we could find any mention of her having had out in her name, ever, anywhere.”
Gregor nodded, thinking. “So,” he said, “I have to suppose that once he found the purse, Arthur Heydreich called the police.”
“No,” Larry Farmer said.
“No?”
“He said he didn’t want to jump to conclusions and act like an idiot and cause a fuss. This is Waldorf Pines. There’s supposed to be lots of security. He figured she had to be safe because there couldn’t be anybody coming in from outside to mug and rob her or anything, and besides she’d slept in her own bed so she probably wasn’t out before the sun came up anyway.”
“He didn’t see her go to bed? They didn’t go to bed at the same time the night before?”
“Oh,” Larry Farmer said. “No, he saw her go to bed, or he says he did. He say he takes something to sleep and he never wakes up at night. And you should see this bed. A California king, they call it. You could hold a party in it.”
“Did they?” Gregor asked. “Hold parties, I mean, the husband and wife?”
“Not that I know of,” Larry Farmer said. “You’ve got to meet Arthur Heydreich, you really do. He’s not the kind of person you’d think would do something like that. Although you never know, I guess. Most straitlaced girl in my high school graduating class turned out to be a nudist when she got old enough. People get crazier than you’d believe.”
“I’m sure they do,” Gregor said, “but back to Arthur Heydreich. If he didn’t call the police when he found his wife’s purse, what did he do?”
“He says he did what he always did. He got his things together, got in his car and headed out for work. He figured he’d call in every once in a while during the day, and then if he still hadn’t heard from her by dinner, he’d sound the alarm.”
“That would have been a nice long stretch of time, don’t you think?” Gregor said.
“That’s exactly what we thought,” Larry Farmer said. “That was one of the reasons we were sure he had to be the killer. I mean, who behaves like that? Your wife is nowhere to be seen. Her car is in the garage. Her purse with her keys and her credit cards and a whole wad of cash is lying on the family room coffee table. None of her clothes are gone from the closets, as far as you can see—did I tell you that? We checked the clothes.”
“No, you didn’t tell me,” Gregor said, “but that makes sense.”
“He said it made sense that she wasn’t lying dead and mugged somewhere. I don’t know. It didn’t make any sense to me. And he could be wrong. She had a lot of clothes. There could be clothes missing he didn’t know about or something. And, you know, there has to have been something missing, because she sure as hell wasn’t wandering around the Waldorf Pines golf course in the middle of the night stark naked. Somebody would have seen her. These people spy on each other like those two guys in Mad magazine.”
“What did Arthur Heydreich do?” Gregor asked. “Did he go straight to his office?”
“He was headed to go straight to his office,” Larry Farmer said, “but he saw something that made him nervous. You’ve got to look at a map of Waldorf Pines sometime. The houses all back onto the golf course, and they front onto the one road in the place. It’s one road, one great big loop, and it’s one way. Arthur Heydreich lives in a house about halfway down the course from the clubhouse, but on the wrong side of the loop, so he has to go all the way around to get out the front gate. He says he got into his car, left his garage, and started around the loop. He says he was looking for his wife the entire time. Then, when he got almost all the way to the gate, he thought he saw something flicker in the pool house.”
“Flicker?”
“Like a flame,” Larry Farmer said. “He thought he saw the pool house on fire, except not really all the way on fire yet. He thought he saw a flame. And the place was all closed up, for the repairs, you know, and the kid who was supposed to be watching it wasn’t too responsible about it—”
“This was the same kid that was supposed to be having an affair with his wife?”
“Same one,” Larry Farmer said. “Anyway, he wasn’t too responsible, so Arthur Heydreich said he parked his car in the little lot next to the pool house’s back doors and went in to look around. There was still water in the pool—I don’t know why, you’ll have to ask the manager about that. He gave me an explanation, but it didn’t make any sense to me. Anyway, Arthur Heydreich says when he came in everything was dark, and he looked around in the lobby and then he looked in at the locker rooms. He just looked in and he says he didn’t see or hear anything. He thought he might have smelled something in the women’s locker room so he went in and stood there, but it was absolutely black and he didn’t see anything. Then he went back to the lobby and he heard the water sloshing and he went towards that because it was dark and he was having trouble finding his way around and he knew that way better than the way into the lockers. So he figured he’d check the pool first. And he went in there, and he found a switch that turned on a couple of low lights, and when those went on he saw a body in the water and dark stuff in the water with it. And then the next thing he knew, the building went up in flames.”
“Interesting,” Gregor said. “The body in the water?”
“That was Michael Platte. And the dark stuff was blood. He’d been hit hard on the back of the head, dumped in the pool, and left to drown.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Absolutely. Michael Platte drowned.”
“But you said there was another body,” Gregor said.
“There was,” Larry Farmer said. “In the women’s locker room somewhere. I can only say somewhere because the place didn’t just go up, it absolutely incinerated. It burned fast, it burned hot, and when we finally got firefighters out there to deal with it it was already all over and it still took another half an hour to subdue it completely. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. The body was in there.”
“And
?”
Larry Farmer shrugged. “We assumed it was the body of Martha Heydreich. It was unrecognizable, you understand, but it made sense. Her lover’s body is dead in the pool. She’s dead in the locker room. Arthur Heydreich is right on the scene and he’s got stuff all over him, he smells of the damned propellant—and yes, I know, the whole building smelled of it and he was in the building, so that wasn’t conclusive. But still, you see, you’ve got to see, what it looked like to us. There’s the fire, for one thing. Something had to start the fire. Arthur Heydreich was right there. The easiest way to start that fire is to have him be there and just start it. We didn’t find any device for setting it off, or anything that could be that kind of device. We didn’t find anybody who saw anybody else go into the pool house. So there we were. Easy as pie. Cut and dried. We almost arrested him on the spot. We did arrest him two days later. And this morning we let him go.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“We sent samples from the body away for DNA testing,” Larry Farmer said. “We thought we might be able to find some of Martha Heydreich’s DNA on something. As it turned out, we couldn’t—there’s something that was gone, her toothbrush—but it didn’t matter anyway. The results came back from the lab yesterday evening, and what we definitely do not have is the body of Martha Heydreich.”
“How do you know?” Gregor asked. “Could you identify the body as somebody else?”
“No,” Larry Farmer said. “The DNA did not match anybody in any database the lab could find. Apparently that’s not all that odd. Most people don’t have their DNA on file anywhere.”
“But if you don’t know whose DNA it is,” Gregor asked, “and you don’t have a sample of Martha Heydreich’s DNA for comparison, how can you be sure it doesn’t belong to Martha Heydreich?”
Larry Farmer put his head in his hands.
“Because,” he said, “whoever the other murder victim is, undocumented or not, he’s definitely and conclusively a man.”
THREE
1
Arthur Heydreich knew that something was going on from the first moment the lights went on in the corridor outside his cell. For one thing, the lights actually did go on, rather than flickering and wavering for half an hour until somebody came along to set them to their daytime levels. Arthur had spent a lot of his time in jail thinking about those lights, and all the other lights, up and down the small building that was the Pineville Station Muncipal Jail. There were the lights in the cells themselves, that shut off abruptly every night at ten. There were those lights in the corridor, that seemed to have many different settings, but a schedule that varied for no reason available to him. Then there were the lights far down at the end of the corridor where the guard station was. Everything was arranged as if the Pineville Station Muncipal Jail had a regular clientele of rapists, murderers, and terrorists, liable to go bezerk at any moment and take the building by sheer force of physical power, or maybe lunatic rage. Instead, all there really were were a couple of petty thieves, three teenagers who’d been caught with marijuana, and Arthur himself. Only Arthur himself had been here more than forty-eight hours.
First the lights went on in the corridor abruptly. Then there was the low murmuring hum of people talking way up by the guard station, talking quietly, so that nobody in the cells could hear. Arthur lay in bed and tried to listen to it for a while, but it was useless. Whatever people were finding it so important to say to each other was obviously not meant for him.
He listened because it was practically the only thing he had to do. He had a few books they’d allowed him to take from home, but other than that there was nothing. Jail was nothing at all like he’d expected it to be. He’d seen a million movies where jail cells had one wall made entirely of bars and prisoners talked to each other through them. The corridors were open and the cells were open and there was a lot of conversation back and forth.
Here, each cell held exactly one prisoner, and instead of bars there were solid metal doors with just a tiny peephole in the center toward the top. Farther down there were flat slats that could be opened from the corridor side to slide in food trays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was no prison cafeteria where hundreds of men would march together in a cafeteria line.
Of course, there were no hundreds of men, either. Maybe this arrangement was for small jails, and prisons were like what they were like in the movies. Arthur didn’t know, and he didn’t know why he was thinking about it. He only knew he was so mind-numbingly bored he could barely stay awake.
The murmurs were still coming from the other end of the corridor. He wondered what time it was. It had to be after six, but before seven, because at seven they brought the food trays around. The hum went on and on, spiking every once in a while and then falling back. Arthur stared at the ceiling of his cell and let himself drift.
He remembered the day they had come to arrest him, only two days after the fire in the pool house. He had been expecting them to come, but when he saw the cars pulling up outside his front door, he’d felt his stomach clench and his mind go numb. The only thing he’d been able to think of was the early warning system. At Waldorf Pines, no visitor was allowed onto the grounds unless the front gate had your permission first, and then, when the visitor did show up, he wasn’t allowed in until you’d been found and notified. Obviously, the police were not the kind of visitors that had been meant in the brochure, but they were visitors nonetheless. Maybe he would have a cause of action because he hadn’t been notified.
The murmurs went up again, and down again, and up again. There was the sound of shuffling feet in the corridor. There was another sound, farther off, that Arthur was sure was the breakfast cart bringing the trays in for the morning.
Arthur wanted to take a shower. He wanted to take a shower in his own shower in his own home, but right now he would have settled for the shower in the shower block next door. The idea that two showers a week were as many as anybody needed made him feel a little indignant. It was practically the only thing he felt at all.
The shuffling feet in the corridor stopped directly outside his door. Arthur knew the tread. It was the small Hispanic woman. He’d asked himself a dozen times why anybody thought it made sense to let this tiny little thing be a guard in a prison, even if it was really only a jail. Arthur was not physically fit, but he could have taken that woman down in a minute and a half or less, and if she hadn’t had backup, he could have been off and on his way before anybody else knew he was gone.
The little Hispanic woman dropped the flap and said, “Come on. You’re going downstairs.”
“At seven o’clock in the morning?” Arthur asked.
“Your lawyer’s here,” the little Hispanic woman said.
Arthur got off the bed and turned his back to the door. He put his wrists together behind his back and pushed them through the slot. He felt the cuffs snap over his wrists.
He stepped away from the door and turned to look at it. The little Hispanic woman unlocked it and stepped back. He stepped out into the corridor and let her take his arm.
“You don’t think it’s a little odd for my lawyer to be here at seven o’clock in the morning?”
“Your lawyer’s here,” she said again.
“He’s a public definder,” Arthur said. “He doesn’t go anywhere at seven o’clock in the morning.”
The little Hispanic woman didn’t say anything, and Arthur let it go. It was a break in the routine. He thought he should be grateful for it. He looked behind him at the cart bringing the breakfast trays. He had no idea what happened if he missed the breakfast tray. He probably just missed breakfast. He didn’t like the idea. He never ate much of anything at home, but he was hungry all the time in here.
They went to the end of the corridor and around a corner. The little Hispanic woman opened another set of doors. They were in yet another corridor with doors, but these doors didn’t seem to lead to cells. She stopped and unlocked one of them and then opened it wide.
“
Go ahead,” she said. “You’ve got to get dressed for court.”
Arthur looked into the room and saw his clothes there, his jacket, his tie, his shirt, his trousers, the entire suit he was wearing when he’d been brought to this place. The suit was folded instead of hung up. It looked a little tired. He’d already worn it four or five times. They kept making him change into it when he had a court hearing.
“Am I supposed to go to court, really?” he said. “Now? At this hour of the morning? I didn’t even think courts were open at this hour of the morning. What’s going on here?”
“Get dressed,” the little Hispanic woman said as she removed Arthur’s handcuffs.
Then she locked the door behind him.
Arthur went over to the shelf where the suit was and looked at it. He remembered putting it on the morning he was arrested. He’d been very careful about picking it out. They were already looking at him oddly in the office. They were already talking about him behind his back. Then there were the secretaries, who hadn’t liked coming anywhere near his desk. He kept expecting to be fired, or, if not fired—that might look bad, firing somebody who hadn’t been convicted of anything, or even arrested—then put on some kind of leave of absence “until all this was over.” People were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but it didn’t work that way in everyday life. It was especially not the case once you’d been arrested.
He shucked off his orange jumpsuit and started putting on the parts of the suit, putting them on one after the other. His belt was not here, probably as a precaution against suicide, but that was par for the course with the way things were done around here. If he’d wanted to commit suicide, he could have used the tie, and they had given him that. Besides, why would anyone want to commit suicide in just these circumstances? He hadn’t been convicted of anything. He wasn’t on his way to the death house. The only thing that made him feel like he wanted to die was the endless boredom, and now the boredom had been relieved by all this.