by Jane Haddam
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ken Bairn said.
Over in the back, Larry Farmer coughed. “Not to make too much of a big deal about it,” he said, “but we do have a limited time frame here. We’ve called a press conference. We have to know what we’re saying in the press conference.”
“That’s right,” Ken Bairn said. “And this has nothing to do with that. That party was a year ago. It’s already been on television.”
“They had some wonderful shots of LizaAnne Marsh shopping for dresses in Philadelphia,” Buck said. “She bought two, so that she could change halfway through the party. One of them cost three thousand dollars.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Ken Bairn said firmly. “Larry’s right. We’re going to have to concentrate. We’re going to have to have something to say when we get to that press conference. And it’s not going to be as easy as you think. How we could have made a mistake of this kind is beyond me.”
“The body was burned to ashes,” Larry Farmer said. “I saw it myself. There was nothing to use to identify it with. And as for dental records—well, forget it. We didn’t find half the teeth. What were we supposed to do?”
“Not jumping the gun might have been a good thing,” Ken said. “You could have said the body was unidentifiable.”
“Wait,” Gregor said.
They all turned to look at him.
“Are you saying you had nothing to identify the body with?” he asked. “Nothing at all? Nothing left over in the ashes?”
“No, of course we didn’t,” Larry Farmer said. “If we’d had something like that, we wouldn’t have gone off and identified it as Martha Heydreich’s.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “I know. But you’re actually talking about nothing at all here. Absolutely nothing.”
“Yes,” Larry Farmer said. “I mean, what can you possibly—”
“Jewelry,” Gregor said. “Mrs. Heydreich was a married woman. Didn’t she have a wedding ring that she wore regularly? Would she have taken that off when she was having sex with her lover?”
“Oh, wonderful,” Larry Farmer said. “He gets here and the first thing he does is make us all look like idiots. Of course she had a wedding ring. And no, we didn’t find it. Not that we were specifically looking for it, mind you, but we sifted through everything. If it was there, we would have found it.”
“It’s worse than you think,” Buck Monaghan said. “We should have found a lot of jewelry, not just a wedding ring. From everything we’ve been told about Martha Heydreich, she was usually decked out like a Christmas tree. Necklaces. Bracelets. Rings. She wouldn’t have taken them all off just to hop into bed with somebody.”
“Was there any indication that she had hopped into bed?” Gregor asked. “Or, I should say, that the corpses had?”
“Well, one of them was charred beyond recognition,” Larry said.
Buck Monaghan was shaking his head. “They did check—I have the case files back at my office, you can look at them sometime—there wasn’t anything on Michael Platte to say that he’d had sex that night with anybody. I think I can see where you’re going with this. The misidentification of the body affects more than the misidentification of the body.”
Gregor nodded. “You’ve got two bodies. I take it they weren’t in the same room.”
“They weren’t even close,” Buck Monaghan said. “Michael Platte’s body was in the pool room, and in the pool. Directly in it. In the water. And he’d gone into the water alive, because he bled into that pool for hours. The water was full of blood. The other body was in the locker room—”
“The men’s locker room or the women’s locker room?” Gregor asked. “Or is there only one of them?”
“Oh, there are two,” Larry Farmer said. “And now that you mention it, that’s odd. The other body was in the women’s locker room. But it was the body of a man. So what was it doing in the women’s locker room?”
“Let’s worry about that later,” Gregor said. “What I want to know now is how close that locker room was to the pool.”
“It was close enough,” Buck Monaghan said. “It’s across a big foyer with a trophy display case in it, but the display case didn’t have much in the way of trophies. Or maybe any. I’ve got some pictures of it. It got partially destroyed in the fire. You had to cross that foyer to get from the pool to the locker rooms and back again. It wasn’t too far but it wasn’t right there, if you know what I mean. I remember thinking it was a silly way to design a pool facility.”
“It sounds like it,” Gregor said, “but what bothers me is this. What evidence do you have that these two people died at the same time?”
“What?” Ken Bairn said.
“Well, as far as I can see,” Gregor said, “there’s no reason to assume that these two people ever met each other, never mind that they were killed together for the same reason. It’s different if you assume that what you’ve got is the wife and her lover, because then it makes sense that they’d be there together. And it makes sense that somebody, certainly the husband, might come along, find them engaged in sex, and have at them. After that, the circumstances are rather elaborate but they’re not out of the question. The guy finds himself with two corpses and tries to cover his tracks. He hauls one body across the foyer, lets the other one drown where it is and then sets the fire. There would be a few problems, but you could solve practically all of them by assuming that the murder was planned.”
“I thought you just said that the murder was not planned,” Buck Monaghan said. “I thought you said he came in and found them in a tryst—”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “but he wouldn’t have had to go there and find them unexpectedly. He could have known the tryst was about to take place and gone there deliberately. With a plan, as I said. That way, he would have brought an accelerant with him. I’m making a sloppy job of this, but you must see what I mean. If you assume that what you’ve got are the bodies of Michael Platte and Martha Heydreich, then you can make everything else fit. But once you assume that the bodies you’ve got are not Michael Platte and Martha Heydreich everything starts to come apart, and not just the case against Arthur Heydreich.”
“We had noticed that,” Ken Bairn said sardonically. “That’s why you’re here.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “It’s just begun to occur to me, however, just how much of a tangle this all is. You have two bodies, one of which you can’t identify. They’re not in the same room, and you have no way to tell if they’ve both been killed in the same way. Or have you?”
“No,” Larry Farmer said.
“Which means you also have no way to tell if they were both killed at the same time,” Gregor said. “One of them was left perfectly recognizable and, at the time, not even dead in a swimming pool, which sounds like the work of panic. The other was found so completely disfigured and so completely stripped of identifying articles that there was no clue as to identity, which sounds like the work of not only careful planning, but emotionless planning. You’ve got a possible motive for the murder of one of them, but no idea what the motive might be for the murder of the other. You have, in fact, no evidence at all that these two murders are in any way connected to each other.”
“Oh, my God,” Ken Bairn said.
Larry Farmer looked a little wild. “But that doesn’t happen, does it?” he demanded. “You don’t get two completely unrelated murders like that in practically the same place at practically the same time. Maybe you get them in Philadelphia, where there’s crime all over the place, but there’s practically no crime at all in Pineville Station. And there really isn’t any murder.”
“You know that isn’t true,” Buck Monaghan said patiently.
“We’re not talking about domestic violence cases,” Ken Bairn said. “We’re not talking about some idiot getting liquored up or those fools in the trailer park trying to make crystal meth. We’re talking about two completely separate people committing murder on the same day, or at least in the same t
wenty-four hours, and in Waldorf Pines of all places. Why Waldorf Pines?”
“Sue Connolly would say those are just the people who’d commit them,” Buck Monaghan said. “Ask Delores out there. She’d say the same thing.”
“Don’t be a complete idiot,” Ken Bairn said.
“There’s one more thing,” Gregor said. He hated to interrupt them. As it was, they all turned in his direction at once, and stared. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure the murders were committed by somebody or more than one somebody from Waldorf Pines?”
“What do you mean?” Buck asked.
“Well,” Gregor said. “You keep telling me this Waldorf Pines is a gated community. Gated communities are gated. They have guards. They have fences. They almost always have video surveillance cameras. In fact, I’m pretty sure one of you mentioned those. Lots of video surveillance cameras in lots of places. I’ve got to assume somebody on the police force looked at the footage from those cameras for the times in question. And yet none of you has mentioned a single thing about those cameras, or a single thing about the video footage. So—”
“Oh, God,” Larry Farmer said.
“We did look at the footage from the morning the bodies were found,” Buck Monaghan said. “There was nothing on it that we didn’t already know. There was Arthur Heydreich driving around and entering the pool house. There was Arthur Heydreich in the foyer.”
“Was there footage of Michael Platte’s body in the pool?” Gregor asked.
“There are no direct video surveillance cameras in the pool room itself,” Buck Monaghan said. “You should ask Horace Wingard to make sure I’m remembering this right, but I think the deal was that there had been cameras in there, but the wet kept ruining them. Cheap equipment, I suppose.”
“What about the women’s locker room?” Gregor asked.
“No, there isn’t one in there, either,” Buck Monaghan said. “There are cameras in the men’s locker room, but the women complained, and Wingard apparently thought they had a point.”
“But there are cameras in the foyer,” Gregor said. “So there should be footage of Arthur Heydreich going into the locker rooms if he went.”
“Well, there’s footage of him stumbling around in that direction in the foyer,” Larry Farmer said. “But there weren’t any lights on in that building anywhere. So—”
“This is awful,” Ken Bairn said. “They’re going to crucify us. Didn’t we do any of the investigating we should have been doing? Didn’t we use any common sense at all?”
“Don’t talk to me about using common sense,” Larry Farmer said, suddenly incensed. “You’re the one who wanted the case closed in fifteen minutes so that Waldorf Pines would see we were doing our jobs. I wasn’t the one who was in that kind of hurry. I’d have—”
“You’d have dithered around for a week and gotten nowhere,” Ken Bairn said. “You wouldn’t even have thought of getting Gregor Demarkian here if I hadn’t suggested it. What you think you’re doing in that job is beyond me. Hell, you don’t even want a job. You want—”
“Excuse me,” Gregor said. “There is one more thing.”
“Thank God,” Buck Monaghan said.
“The rest of the security tape,” Gregor said. “You looked at the rest of that? Was there anything on it? Anything at all.”
“You mean aside from the time between ten forty-five and twelve thirty the night before when the system went on the fritz?” Buck said. “Nope. Not a thing.”
“The system went on the fritz?” Gregor asked.
“It was shut off,” Buck Monaghan said. “Or somebody shut it off. Just turned it off. Then turned it back on again. We think. From ten forty-five to twelve thirty on the night the murders were committed.”
“Interesting,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Ken Bairn looked like he was going to lunge for Buck Monaghan’s neck. He was stopped by the sudden, flustered entrance of Delores Martin.
“Will the lot of you get out there and hold a press conference?” she demanded. “They’ve been there for ten minutes and they’re out for blood.”
PART II
ONE
1
It was the doorbell that got Gregor Demarkian out of bed the next morning, and he had to admit that the doorbell was not his favorite thing to hear even when he was fully awake and dressed. He got up to answer it because he couldn’t be sure it didn’t represent an emergency. There were cell phones these days, of course, and there was the land line, with the phone on the night table right next to his head, but he couldn’t trust the people of Cavanaugh Street to think like that. He couldn’t even trust them to call 911. There was something visceral about responding to an emergency by rushing across a cold night street in your pajamas and your robe.
He looked across the bed, at Bennis sleeping as if she’d never had anything to worry about in her life. He’d never understood how Bennis could sleep like that, considering all that she had had to worry about, but then, he’d never understood Bennis. She was, in her way, the anti-Elizabeth. She came from a world so remote from any he had ever known that she might as well have been a Martian.
He gave a little thought to Bennis as a Martian, and then sat up. He grabbed his robe from the chair. He stood up and put it on. Whoever was ringing the bell certainly acted as if it was an emergency. The bell rang and rang and rang in a staccato of small bursts. Then it went silent for a second. Then the ringing started again.
Gregor went out into the hall and down the hall to the foyer. He was surprised Grace from upstairs hadn’t come out to find out what was going on. He’d have come out to find out what was going on, even if only to have the chance of killing whoever was causing it.
He got to his front door and tried looking through the peephole. Peepholes were never of any use. All you saw was distortions. He pulled the door open and looked at Lida Arkmanian, fully dressed in three-inch heels and that chinchilla coat, holding a stack of three large baking pans. The three large baking pans were each covered with aluminum foil, and they each had something in them.
“You brought food,” Gregor said. “It’s, what—before five o’clock in the morning?”
“It’s four thirty,” Lida said, brushing past him with her baking pans. “I’ve been up all night. We’re all worried about you, Gregor.”
“I wish you’d worry about me dying of lack of sleep,” Gregor said.
He closed the door behind her and didn’t bother to lock up. It was too early in the morning and it wouldn’t serve much of a purpose anyway. Lida was already marching through the living room on the way to the kitchen. Gregor followed her.
In the kitchen, Lida had put the baking pans down on the kitchen table next to Gregor’s stacks of folders about the Waldorf Pines case. She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Then she shook her head.
“It’s impossible,” she said, shaking her head. “I love Bennis very much, Gregor, you know that, and we were all very happy when you two found each other and very relieved when you actually got married, but how is it possible that a woman of her age doesn’t know how to cook? Anything? What is this supposed to be?”
Gregor peered at it. “It’s yogurt,” he said. “It’s Dannon fruit-on-the-bottom cherry yogurt. It’s her favorite kind. She eats those for lunch.”
“These and what else?”
“I don’t think there’s an anything else. I think she just eats one of those. I don’t keep track, Lida. I’m not walking around writing down everything Bennis eats every day.”
“Maybe she is? Maybe she has one of those eating disorders? I’ve read about those, Gregor. These people, they have little notebooks, and every time they eat anything they write it down in the notebook with the calories, and then they make themselves throw it up.”
“If Bennis had bulimia, I think I’d notice,” Gregor said. “She doesn’t throw anything up. What are we doing here at four thirty in the morning talking about Bennis’s eating habits? You know she doesn’t have an eating disorder.
You see her eat at the Ararat all the time.”
Lida put the yogurt back in the refrigerator. Yogurt was practically all there was in the refrigerator. There was also a small carton of cream, which Gregor liked in his coffee, and the leftover takeout from some Indian restaurant they’d gone to in Wayne.
Lida started putting baking pans in among the yogurt.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I kept worrying about your refrigerator. I knew it would look like this. It always looked like this. But before you weren’t married. Now we all think you have a wife to make sure you eat, and she doesn’t even eat herself. I’ve got some manti in here. I made a hundred and six of them. More of them wouldn’t fit in the pan. Oh.” Lida got her shoulder bag and looked into it. A second later, she brought out a big plastic tub. “I’ve got some yaprak sarma, too. It’s not as much as I’d wanted to bring, but this was the biggest container I could find.”
“You got up in the middle of the night and cooked manti and yaprak sarma because you thought I wasn’t getting enough to eat?”
“There’s also imam biyaldi. I’m never happy with that. It doesn’t do as well in the microwave as some of the other things. But you need real food, Gregor. You can’t go running around on nothing but yogurt and green beans and expect to stay healthy.”
“This is insane,” Gregor said.
Lida looked at the things she had put in the refrigerator and checked that they wouldn’t fall out as soon as somebody opened the door. Then she closed up and sat down at the kitchen table.
“We’ve been worried about you,” she said. “I’ve been worried about you. Ever since old George died, you haven’t been yourself.”
Gregor sat down at the table, too. He pushed away some of the folders. “I’ve been entirely myself,” he said. “If you mean I haven’t been in a very good mood, that I could see.”
“Even Tibor is worried, Gregor. And I’m—well, we’ve known each other all our lives. I know what I’m talking about when I say you’re not yourself.”