by Jane Haddam
“I will not have a fuss,” he kept saying. “I will not have one.”
Gregor was willing to bet almost anything that if he stepped out of the house and onto the road right this minute, he’d catch half a dozen people staring out their windows, ready to observe and report on whatever was going on.
2
It was Horace Wingard’s job to “do something” about Eileen Platte’s attempted suicide—or maybe not quite attempted suicide—and what he did was to run around looking important and barking directions into his cell phone. Gregor had no way of knowing if all the bustling was necessary. He did know that he and Larry Farmer should not stay in the house. Eileen Platte’s husband was called. Various members of the ambulance team got to work checking blood pressure, heart rate, pupil dilation, mental responsiveness. Gregor listened to Eileen Platte cheerfully answer the question about who was president of the United States with “Dwight David Eisenhower!” and wondered again about drugs.
Out on the road, he caught up with Larry Farmer and took the man’s arm. “Let’s go do something on our own while Horace Wingard is distracted,” he said. “Do you have somebody in your notes named Caroline Stanford-Pyrie?”
“Of course I do,” Larry Farmer said. “We interviewed everybody, we really did. We interviewed every single resident of Waldorf Pines. We’ve got notes on all of them.”
“Then let’s go over there and find out if she’s home.”
“There are two of them,” Larry Farmer said. “Two ladies, both widows, I think. The other one is Susan Carstairs. They’re refined.”
“What?”
“They’re refined,” Larry Farmer repeated. “You know what I’m talking about. They have really good manners. Their manners are so good, they make people nervous.”
“All right,” Gregor said. He had a sudden flash of a woman he had seen through the window of Horace Wingard’s office, the woman he had recognized.
But Larry Farmer was just getting going. “I think it defeats the purpose, don’t you? Having manners like that, I mean. What’s the point in being all polite like that, if nobody will talk to you because you scare them? I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t know what to say to people like that.”
Gregor let this slide. “Which one is her house?” he asked. “Maybe we should go back towards the green.”
He turned around and headed to the backyard, going by the side of the house where Horace Wingard was least likely to see him. When he got to the green, he stopped and waited for Larry Farmer to come through.
“I don’t suppose I have any luck, and these women live in the house directly to the right of the clubhouse,” he said.
Larry Farmer panted a little and shook his head. “I don’t remember off the top of my head who lives in that house, but it’s not them. They’re over there.”
Larry pointed across the green, so close to where they were it was almost next door. Gregor sighed. “I don’t suppose the people who do live in the house next to the clubhouse have some secret to hide that Michael Platte might have found out about.”
“They might have,” Larry Farmer said, “but they didn’t kill him. They’ve been in Florida since right after Labor Day.”
Gregor let it go, and started across the green again, this time in a very small cut, toward the house that belonged to Caroline Stanford-Pyrie and Susan Carstairs. The route they would have had to take to get to the pool house to kill Michael Platte was plain enough, but at the time of night it would have been necessary to get there, it also would have been easily seen. It was as if these people lived on a stage set and kept track of each other with score cards.
Of course, if Eileen Platte had been telling the truth, Caroline Stanford-Pyrie had made that trek at least once at night, and early enough at night for Eileen to think it was a good time for sandwiches. Gregor wondered how many of the neighbors had witnessed that little jaunt, and what they had thought of it. Given the things people said about Michael Platte, they’d probably thought he was screwing another old lady.
Gregor started off toward the Stanford-Pyrie house, going a little farther out into the green this time, so that he could get a better look at the possible routes. The only one who really had a good shot at getting to the pool house without being seen was Walter Dunbar, and Walter Dunbar was the one person Gregor had seen only for a second, and only in passing. Even so, it had been a strong first impression. It wasn’t hard to see what kind of a person Walter Dunbar was. Anybody who had ever worked in a large organization had met men like him. Gregor could certainly envision Walter Dunbar committing a murder, but he thought the murder would be much more brutal and direct than finding some esoteric way to light a fire from a distance.
Gregor corrected himself. That assumed that the murders were connected, and that there was only one murderer. It also left out the whole problem of Martha Heydreich. Still, it bothered his sense of proportion to think that there had been two, or maybe even three, murders in the same night, and in the same place, and more than one murderer.
He made his way a little farther out into the green. He looked around for 360 degrees. The problem remained intractable. He did another 360-degree turn, and realized that there was a teenaged girl sitting on a bench, staring at him. He stopped for a moment to stare back. The girl was blond and chunky, too heavy for fashion and wearing both too much jewelry and too much makeup. For a moment, Gregor wondered if he was seeing Martha Heydreich herself, complete with clown mask. Then the girl got up and walked toward him, and he could see she was much too young.
Larry Farmer was getting more nervous by the minute. “We ought to get out of here,” he said. “Horace Wingard is going to have a cow.”
The girl kept coming. Gregor waited for her. When she got close enough for Gregor to smell her perfume, she stopped. The perfume was Joy. Gregor recognized it because he’d bought it for Elizabeth half a dozen times, special gifts for anniversaries, because it was billed as the most expensive perfume in the world.
The girl was not chewing gum, but there was something about her that made her seem as if she was. Close up, she was even more outlandishly made-up than she’d appeared to be from afar. She sized Gregor up and down and shrugged her shoulders.
“Are you that guy,” she asked, “the detective? I heard somebody say the police were bringing in this great detective because they didn’t know who did the crimes.”
“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “I am a detective, yes. I don’t know how great.”
The girl shrugged again. “I just thought I’d tell you,” she said. “It’s just retarded, what everybody is saying now. That Arthur Heydreich didn’t kill Michael, I mean. Of course he killed Michael. I practically saw him do it.”
“What?” Gregor said.
“Well,” the girl said. “Okay. I didn’t actually see him. I mean, I saw him, but I didn’t see him kill Michael. Michael was out walking on the green, and Mrs. Heydreich was with him. I could see them from my window. And he came out of the house and sat on his deck. Then he went inside again.”
“Do you even know if he saw them?” Gregor asked.
“Of course he saw them,” the girl said. “Everybody saw them. It’s so retarded, the way everybody acts like they didn’t see anything that night, just because they’re afraid the police will talk to them. It was a lie that Michael had an affair with her. He would never have had an affair with her. I mean, for God’s sake, she was practically a gargoyle. He’s having an affair with the other one though, that Mrs. Bullman. Did anybody ever tell you that?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“She lives in that house over there,” the girl pointed vaguely across the green. She could have been pointing at any house or none of them. “She came out of the house and watched them, and then she went across to the clubhouse. I saw her. She left her kids alone and everything. She was trying to see if Mr. Heydreich was having a drink at the bar.”
“You know that—how?” Gregor asked.
The gi
rl made a face. “I know that because I know what’s going on around here,” she said. “Mrs. Bullman and Mr. Heydreich have been screwing each other like rabbits ever since he got out of jail. I’ve seen them. Actually seen them. That’s who the other body is, in the pool house. It’s Mrs. Bullman’s husband. They had to get rid of him, just like they had to get rid of Mrs. Heydreich, who’s probably buried in the basement or something, or they took her out and dumped her in a river. There are rivers around here. And they had to kill Michael because he knew all about it, and he would never have just let them get away with it.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I see.”
“You don’t have to listen to me if you don’t want to,” the girl said. “I think it’s just retarded the way everybody around here just does whatever and doesn’t think about it at all. You tell me where Mr. Bullman is. You just tell me. I haven’t seen him around since the murders. The two of them got together and killed them, and you’re going to let them get away with it.”
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 sym
phony. 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.”