by Jane Haddam
“I’m not going to kill anyone,” Gregor said. “I’m arguing against killing anyone, that’s the point. But the wages of sin are death goes to prove it.”
“To prove what, Krekor?”
“That death is meant as a punishment,” Gregor said. “It was in that book you gave me, too, that St. Augustine. The wages of sin are death. Death is a punishment. And George hadn’t done one damned thing to be punished for that I know of. And if he’d ever done anything, it was so far in the past it couldn’t possibly have mattered any more.”
“You have read the St. Augustine, Krekor? You have read all of it?”
“He sits on the couch and pages back and forth through it,” Bennis said. “Then he stops and reads some of it and mutters under his breath. I don’t know what you were thinking, Tibor. That thing is a thousand pages long.”
“With little tiny type,” Gregor said. “But I’m not mistaking his meaning, Tibor, and you know it. The whole thing, the whole way you explained it all at the funeral, makes no sense. We couldn’t run a criminal justice system this way. We couldn’t write a code of law—doesn’t it start with what’s supposed to be a code of law? Could you imagine a code of law that gave the same penalty to somebody who cussed out his grandmother and, I don’t know, pick somebody. Hitler. That wouldn’t be a code of law. It would be a travesty. And this is a travesty. And you know it.”
“He’s back on religion again,” Bennis said.
“Yes,” Tibor said. “I am sorry for this. I did not mean to cause this kind of a problem. I only meant to give George a proper funeral.”
“And you did give George a proper funeral,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong with anything you said. He’s just grabbing hold of it and taking it to the zoo.”
“I could have given the homily in Armenian,” Tibor said.
“Then Martin and Angela wouldn’t have understood it,” Bennis said.
“I understood it perfectly,” Gregor said, “and I’m not being an idiot here. That explanation made no sense. And if a God actually exists for whom that explanation does make sense, then He doesn’t make sense, and there’s no point in listening to Him. We don’t have to figure out if God exists or not, we only have to figure out if He’s sane, and apparently He’s not. And that really ought to be all we need to know about it.”
“Don’t you think there’s something really odd about the fact that this is the first time you’ve ever had trouble thinking that God makes sense?” Bennis asked. “I mean, Gregor, you were with the FBI for decades. You investigated serial murders. You’ve been investigating murders ever since. You see broken and ravaged bodies all over the landscape and you vaguely think you probably might not believe in God but it doesn’t bother you—and then old George dies peacefully and without pain at a hundred years old and you get like this? You don’t think there’s anything odd about that?”
Gregor looked at his plate. There was too much food on it. He hadn’t eaten like this in years. His back hurt.
“No,” he said finally. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about this. I understand why people die at the hands of serial killers. I understand why they kill each other. And it does make sense.”
He was about to go on with the thought—and it was a thought; he’d been working it out obsessively ever since old George’s funeral—when the front door to the Ararat opened and a man walked in Gregor was sure he had never seen. There would have been nothing strange about that at lunch or dinner, but breakfast at the Ararat tended to be the neighborhood and nobody else.
A dozen heads throughout the room swiveled around to stare. If it had been Gregor himself in that position, he would have backed right up and gotten out of there.
The strange man came inside instead and looked around. He was very small and very round and very bald, and he was about as nervous as he could be without giving himself a heart attack. Gregor found it hard to look at him. He was that twitchy.
The man looked around the room once, then twice, then again, and finally he turned his head enough to see the window booth. The twitchiness disappeared at once. The round bald head glowed. The oddly fishlike lips spread up and out in a grin. Then the little man hurried over, and stuck his hand out over the food at Gregor Demarkian.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian! I’ve been looking for you!”
TWO
1
Gregor Demarkian had been a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for over twenty years, and he would have been one still if his first wife hadn’t gotten cancer and died. It had been a long time since he’d stood at the edge of the bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital and watched Elizabeth go, but he still thought about that day more often than he liked to admit, and he still thought about what his life would have been if that had never happened.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like his life as it now existed. He liked it wonderfully well, and he found himself surprised more often than not at how much more there was to life than he had ever expected.
As for Elizabeth, well, Gregor Demarkian had known Elizabeth Seroulian since they were both very small children. They had grown up together on Cavanaugh Street when to grow up on Cavanaugh Street was to be poor. They had gone to the same elementary schools and the same high school. They had “walked out” together when he was at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the sad little army of commuting students in an Ivy League school that had very little use for them.
In a way, Elizabeth had been, to Gregor, what old George Tekemanian had been: a repository of memories; a living, walking, breathing history. Gregor was getting to the point in his life when he needed people like that. When he looked around Cavanaugh Street, when he thought back to the days living in Maryland and Virginia and hauling out to Quantico every morning, he couldn’t believe how much he had forgotten.
The little man with the bald head didn’t look as if he had ever forgotten anything, but that was because he looked as if he had never known anything. Everything about him shone. Everything about him oozed.
Gregor looked to the side and saw that Bennis was staring at him with fascination. There was another thing he forgot, even though he was confronted by it every day. Bennis was endlessly fascinated with things he himself found perfectly ordinary.
It was what made Gregor realize that saying that two people came “from different worlds” was not just a cliché. He and Bennis Hannaford Demarkian had grown up less than ten miles from each other, and they might as well have been on different planets.
There was a cliché, he thought.
The little man with the bald head was standing next to their table, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. He had a hat, a plain little watch cap thing, the kind of hat Tibor wore to keep out the cold. The little man was twisting it in his hands.
Gregor took a deep breath and said, “Yes? You are?”
The little bald man bounced around on the balls of his feet some more. “I thought of you right away,” he said. “Right at the beginning, right when it happened. But I didn’t know how to go about it, you see, and then, at that point, there was nothing in it that looked really odd. But of course, I did know there was going to be trouble. There’s always trouble when you have a case like this, and a place like Waldorf Pines. But I didn’t think it was going to be big trouble. I didn’t think we were really going to have something to worry about until today.”
Gregor picked up his cup of coffee and took a very long drink of it. “Don’t you think you ought to tell me who you are?” he said.
“Oh,” the little man said, “oh, of course, you wouldn’t know me to look at. But I didn’t know how it worked, you see. I mean, I know you’re a consultant, and I know there are police departments who hire you, and I knew right from the beginning that you’d be the perfect one, but I didn’t know how to get in touch with you, did I? You’re not in the yellow pages, are you? How is anybody supposed to know how to get in touch with you if you’re not in the yellow pages?”
“You’re in touch with him now,” Bennis pointed out from her place over by the window.
The little bald man sighed. “Yes, Mrs. Demarkian, I am in touch with him now, but this is hardly the way to do it, is it? And it’s the very last minute, which doesn’t make me feel very good at all. And then, you know, what did I do? I saw that story about you in the style section last Sunday, and it said you always ate breakfast here at six o’clock in the morning, and so I came on out to find you. And if this isn’t the way it’s done—well, I’m sure it isn’t the way it’s done—if I’ve done absolutely everything wrong and you won’t work for us, I think I’m just going to go jump off a roof. Because we’re in a lot of trouble. And sometime today, it’s going to get worse.”
“Why is it going to get worse sometime today?”
“Because the lab results came back last night,” the little bald man said. “And I know that lab results are supposed to be confidential, but we don’t have our own lab. We have to send our stuff away. And it’s all been such a big thing, so much publicity, that when it becomes obvious that we got it all backwards—well, I don’t care how confidential it’s all supposed to be. Somebody will leak it. They will. And if we don’t have you to back us up, well, we’re going to look like complete idiots, or something worse. And we won’t hear the end of it, either. Not when it’s about Waldorf Pines.”
“Ah,” Tibor said.
Gregor turned to him. “You know what this is about?”
“Yes, Krekor, of course I know. It was very big news last month, I think. A double homicide. A husband and a wife and a lover. The wife had a lover. The husband killed the wife and the lover. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”
Gregor thought, but didn’t say, that it was the kind of case he wouldn’t pay much attention to, because it wouldn’t present much of a challenge. The fact was, that wasn’t entirely true. He paid attention to a lot of crimes that wouldn’t present much of a challenge, because he was always interested in the way people thought and felt and acted. He’d always told himself that if he worked at it long enough, he’d finally understand why people committed murders. He had a feeling that this was not actually possible, but it was a nice goal to aim for.
The little bald man was now bouncing around so much and so fast, he looked like one of those lottery balls whipping around in the bubble before a drawing.
“That’s the thing,” he said, sounding anguished. “We thought the same thing. It all looked so cut and dried. The woman was almost certainly having an affair with this boy. Well, he wasn’t a boy. He was nineteen. I suppose that’s almost a boy. He was the son of one of the other people at Waldorf Pines and he’d had some trouble, lots of trouble, so he’d been expelled from school or something and then he’d got a job watching the pool house while it was closed for renovations. You know the kind of thing. Sit there in a chair all night and make sure nobody sneaks in. Or all day. I can’t remember what his schedule was. I don’t even know if it matters. But everybody we talked to said the same thing. They hung around together, this boy and this woman—”
“Did they have names?” Gregor asked.
“Oh,” the little bald man said. “Yes, of course. His name was Michael Platte. Her name was Martha Heydreich. And there was the husband, of course, Martha Heydreich’s husband. He’s called Arthur. He says it like that, just like that: Arthur. He doesn’t use a nickname. He’s stiff, too. If she was a woman with anything to her, I wouldn’t blame her for having an affair. But then he’s just the type, you know. He’s just the type to kill a wife who’s having an affair. The ones who get all high on their dignity and can’t stand the idea of their name being tarnished or something or the other. I don’t think we were being negligent in assuming what we assumed. We’re a small township. We don’t have the resources you have here in Philadelphia. We don’t have the expertise. But we’re not bumpkins. And I think anybody would have made the same inferences we did, under the circumstances. It just made sense. It is usually the spouse that did it, isn’t it? And in this case, as far as we could see, the spouse certainly had enough motive. But now there’s this. There’s this, and it’s going to get out sooner rather than later. And then do you know what? We’ll make the Philadelphia papers for sure, and everybody who lives in that godforsaken ‘community’ is going to come down on our heads with lawyers, and then I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I hate communities. Anything that calls itself a community is nothing but trouble. And Waldorf Pines only exists to cause trouble.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Do you have a name?”
“Oh,” the little bald man said. “I’m sorry. I’m Larry Farmer. I’m chief of police in Pineville Station.”
“And Pineville Station is—?”
“It’s a small township in Lancaster County,” Bennis said. “Way over at the far edge of it. It’s not really all that far from here. It’s just sort of rural.”
“And Lancaster County is, what?” Gregor said. “The Amish.”
“Oh, this isn’t about the Amish,” Larry Farmer said. “I wish it was. The Amish are easy enough to handle if you understand them. They mostly just want to be left alone, although of course there are all the traffic problems because of the horses and buggies. They had to build a special lane for them on the interstate just to keep people from plowing into them at eighty miles an hour. But that’s just, you know. That’s just a thing. Accommodation, they call it. I don’t mind the Amish. But this is Waldorf Pines.”
“What is Waldorf Pines?” Gregor asked.
“It’s a ‘gated community,’” Larry Farmer said. “God, I hate those, don’t you? Fancy-ass ways of keeping people out, like we were all still in high school again and the dweebs don’t get to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table. It’s got its own golf club, that everybody who lives there has to belong to, and it’s got gates and guards and sensors and all that sort of thing, although they didn’t work in this case, and if you ask me, they never work. Private security guards are a waste of time.”
Gregor could think of cases when private security guards were not a waste of time, but that didn’t seem to be the right thing to say here. He moved over a little on the bench and motioned to Larry Farmer.
“Sit down,” he said. “And try to take this from the beginning.”
2
Maybe the problem was that Larry Farmer didn’t know how to take anything from the beginning. Maybe the problem was just that he was so deeply immersed in his “mess” that he didn’t realize that everybody else in the world wasn’t just exactly as immersed, so that all the details he needed to explain sounded to him like things everybody knew.
Whatever it was, Larry Farmer was a lot more organized about his breakfast than he was about the case he was nearly in a panic about. When Gregor gave him the opportunity to order breakfast, he ordered it, in quantity. His platter ended up being larger, and more complicated, than Gregor’s own.
Gregor waited for a while, watching Larry Farmer shoveling it in. Considering the way the man ate, he should have been at least a hundred pounds overweight. As it was, Gregor didn’t think he was overweight at all, just sort of naturally spherical.
Gregor waited until Larry Farmer showed some signs of slowing down. Then he said, “Let’s try the beginning again. There was a double murder.”
Larry Farmer sat back a little and stared at his plate. “It was about a month ago,” he said. “Exactly a month ago, I guess. October fifth.”
“That was when the murders happened? Or when you discovered them?”
“Oh, there was no lag in discovery,” Larry Farmer said. “We discovered them right away. That’s because the pool house caught on fire. And according to Arthur Heydreich, he noticed it. So he went in, you know, and found the bodies. One of the bodies. The body of Michael Platte was in the swimming pool and there was blood in the water. That was because he was hit on the back of the head with a blunt instrument. We’re pretty sure about that.”
“
All right,” Gregor tried again. “So it’s, what—evening, morning, what?”
“A little after eight o’clock in the morning.”
“Very good. And this Arthur Heydreich—”
“Well, that’s the thing, you know,” Larry Farmer said. “We just all assumed he was lying, but then maybe he wasn’t. I mean, the way things worked out—”
“We’ll get to the way things worked out in a minute,” Gregor said. “It’s the morning of October fifth. What happened?”
“According to Arthur Heydreich,” Larry said, “he got up, and his wife wasn’t on her side of the bed, but he wasn’t really worried about it. Martha Heydreich is one of those women who are always on a lot of committees. You know the kind of thing. He said he woke up and saw her side of the bed empty but all crumpled up the way it was when she’d slept in it, and he didn’t think anything of it. He got dressed for work and came downstairs.”
“What does he work at?” Gregor asked.
“Some financial firm in Philly,” Larry Farmer said. “And yes, it’s quite a drive, but a lot of the people who live in Waldorf Pines work in Philly. And I’ve heard of people who live Philly and commute to New York, so maybe I don’t know about commutes. I don’t understand people, Mr. Demarkian. I really don’t.”
“Well, don’t worry about it for the moment,” Gregor said. “Arthur Heydreich woke up in the morning and found that his wife was not in bed but that her side of the bed had been slept in. He took a shower and got dressed for work. Then what?”
“He went downstairs. The maid was already there. A woman named Cortina Sanchez. That’s when he found out that his wife wasn’t down for breakfast, either. This Cortina Sanchez thought she was still upstairs asleep. Then it turned out that her car was still in the garage, but he wasn’t worried about that, either, because the committees she volunteers for are usually with the golf club. They’re right there in Waldorf Pines. He thought she’d just decided to walk for once. It was a nice day, that kind of thing. You know.”