by Jane Haddam
“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 th
e 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.
And Walter was always right about everything.
Walter had no idea what had started him thinking, this morning, about his mother. He only knew he had woken up and walked out onto the deck as usual, and suddenly his head was full of the sound of her voice. She’d been dead now for nearly thirty years, but Walter could still remember the last time he’d talked to her. He’d gone to the little town house she’d lived in in the “retirement community” where he’d found her a place after his father died. The place had started out being called an “adult community” until he complained, because of course, by then, “adult” had come to mean “pornography.”
“It’s not a very nice thing, saying your mother lives in an adult community,” he’d told the management not a week after he’d moved his mother in. “It makes it sound like she’s going to put tassels on and buy fans.”
The snot-nosed idiot at the management office hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. He’d probably never even heard of a fan dancer. There was something that had come and gone without a trace. Walter remembered fan dancers. They were the “respectable” strippers, and Perry Mason even had one as a client on the old television show.
He’d had to go up the chain of command, then, to talk to somebody old enough to have much sense—not that even older people had much sense. He’d made enough of a stink about it to force the change of name, and he’d put his foot down about calling the place a “senior” community. If there was one thing Walter hated it was all that crap about “senior citizens.” It was as if the world was supposed to be one big high school, complete with class colors and junior–senior balls. Walter had hated high school, much as he’d hated elementary school, much as he’d hated college. Education was a pile of crap, anyway. You slogged your way through a lot of meaningless bullshit, and then they let you make a living.
The last day Walter had seen his mother, she had been watching the neighbors’ grandchildren in the neighbors’ yards. She had a pair of binoculars to do it with, and the longer she watched, the more agitated she got.
“You’re not supposed to have children here,” she told him, “not even for the afternoon. It’s against the rules. It upsets the residents.”
Walter could see how the children would upset his mother. They were on both sides of her, and they were very wild and noisy. People didn’t know how to keep their children well behaved anymore. The children ran and screamed and shouted and broke things. These children were climbing on the cellar doors and pretending to slide down. Then they were crying that they had splinters. Some of them had Frisbees. The Frisbees sailed right over the hedges into his mother’s own yard and the children climbed over after them.
“I’ll go do something about it,” he’d said.
Then he’d walked right over to the management building to complain. It was Saturday. The crew that was on for the weekend was all young, and none of them really wanted to take responsibility for anything.
“But it’s grandchildren,” the little girl in the office had said, looking confused. “You don’t want people not to be able to have their grandchildren visit?”
The little girl in the office made the statement as if it were a question, but Walter could see it in her eyes. She thought he was crazy. She thought nobody on earth would mind if people’s grandchildren made a fuss and a bother and came running onto people’s lawns, because they were grandchildren, and everybody had to love grandchildren.
“They’re throwing those Frisbees right into my mother’s yard,” he’d said, “and then they’re running into the yard to get them. They’re going to break something. A window maybe. And I don’t care whose grandchildren they are, I want them out of there. That’s why there are rules.”
Then he’d gone back to his mother’s town house. He’d let himself in by the front door and called out to her. He’d listened to the silence as if it were music.
Then he’d walked all the way to the back and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor.
After that, he’d sued the “retirement community” for not keeping their own rules and allowing the fuss of the children that had given his mother her fatal heart attack. It had taken ten hours for his lawyer to talk him out of suing the neighbors on both sides for having the children there.
“You can’t prove it was the children who caused the heart attack,” his lawyer had said. “She was an old woman. It could have been anything.”
That was the kind of thing people said these days. Whether they made any sense at all, people said them. That was why Walter was hearing his mother’s voice in his head today.
“You should never think you know somebody unless you check,” she’d said. “You should check and check again. People lie more than they tell the truth.”
This was absolutely true. Walter knew it from experience.
He stopped looking through the kitchen window and backed up to get the papers he had put on the table. Jessica was sitting there, not really drinking a cup of coffee, the way she had been all morning.
“Don’t tell me why I shouldn’t go,” Walter said. “We had all that out last night.”
Jessica looked down. “I thought you were looking at something,” she said, mostly mumbling. “I thought there was something out there you wanted to see.”
“It’s Horace Wingard and those asshole cops,” Walter said. “The cops are back. They’ve fucked up everything and now they’re going to muck around here again, making a scene. I told you they were going to fuck it up. I told you right from the beginning. Yes, I did. But nobody listens to me. I’m just a jerk. I’m just a bad-tempered old man. And here we are. That man is out there.”
“What man?” Jessica looked confused.
“Gregor Demarkian. The detective the police have hired to cover their asses. Never mind it’s just locking the barn door. We could all be dead by now.”
“I don’t see how we could all be dead,” Jessica said. “He didn’t kill anyone, Michael Platte. He was killed himself.”
“She killed someone,” Walter said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know it as soon as you saw her. Why the two of them ever got let into this complex, I don’t know. Waldorf Pines. An exclusive community for discriminating people. An advertising slogan meant to gull the idiots, and the worl
d is full of idiots. Exclusive doesn’t mean expensive. Exclusive means you keep the people you don’t want out.”
Jessica shook her head. She was staring so hard at her coffee, it was as if the thing was a crystal ball, a place where she could see visions. Walter wanted to hit her.
“Think what it must be like for his mother,” she said. “She is his mother, no matter what he turned out to be. Mothers don’t stop loving their children because the children don’t turn out well. Think of what she must be going through.”
“If it were me, I’d be damned glad I was rid of him,” Walter said. “And all I want right now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again. You can’t stop me, Jessie. You shouldn’t even try to stop me.”
Walter headed out for the foyer and the front door, the door that led to the road and not the green. Jessica did not try to stop him, but he hadn’t really thought she would. Back when they were first dating, she had tried to stop him sometimes, when she thought he was going off the handle too quickly. It had never worked out well.
It would be a better place if other people understood him as well as Jessica did. It would be a better place if everybody just stopped being idiots.
“Never have children,” his mother had said to him, when he was twelve years old. “Never have children. They’ll only be a disappointment to you.”
She had been absolutely right.
Walter stepped onto the road and watched the scene just ahead of him. His house was the one right next to the pool house and clubhouse on the right when looking up the green, so he was right next to the action as it happened. He saw Horace Wingard come out, leading Larry Farmer and the big man Walter assumed was Gregor Demarkian. He saw the three of them stop at the pool house door and look at it. It was ridiculous. What did they expect to get by looking at it? It was the kind of things detectives did on television shows, to make themselves look intelligent.
Walter clutched his papers in his hand and walked faster. He could walk very fast, even at his age. He walked every day. You didn’t have to become a cripple at sixty unless you wanted to. You didn’t have to let yourself go to hell. Most people did, and then they called it arthritis.