by Jane Haddam
A little while after that, Stephen came down to the room and sat in its one, hard-backed visitor’s chair. He had his jacket unzipped. His hair was very mussed. He sat with his legs apart and his forearms on his knees and watched her for a while, as if it would be useless to talk to her. The light in the window came and went and came again. There were clouds out there. Eileen could tell.
“I don’t know what you said to them,” he said, “but they had a warrant when they came to my office. A warrant when they came to my office. Can you imagine? It will be all over town before you know it. I could have been arrested.”
Eileen reminded herself that she was on a deep sea. The law of the sea said she did not have to answer questions. She would never answer questions again.
“They found the money,” Stephen said. “It was sitting right there in my desk drawer. I hadn’t had time to do anything with it yet. Do you think when you do these things? Do you ever think at all?”
Eileen almost said that she was thinking right then, right that minute, but if she’d done that, it would have started a conversation. She didn’t want a conversation.
“There’s all kinds of shit hitting the fan at the moment,” Stephen said. “I hope you’re satisfied. I hope this is what you wanted.”
What Eileen wanted was Michael back. Michael just the way he always was. Michael as she had loved him from the very first moment she had seen him in the flesh. Sometimes she thought she could still feel him moving around in her body, the ebb and flow of him that last two months or so before he was born. Sometimes she thought she could see him in his playpen the very first year, slamming soft toys one against the other as if his life depended on tearing them apart.
Stephen had gotten up and gone after a while, and then there had been nothing but the bare empty room and the silence that choked it. The day had gone on without incident, except that a nurse had come in to bring her lunch, and a nurse had come in to bring her dinner, and yet another nurse had come in to bring her pills to swallow. Of course, there was a nurse always on watch just outside the door, because they were all afraid she would make another attempt to kill herself.
She had known, stringing the rope up this morning over the beam, that the beam was only decorative. It would not hold. She would not die. She would step off the stool and into the air and then she would fall, creating a mess in the kitchen, making a noise. When Stephen came home, he would find her lying there, and she would give him no explanation.
She had no explanation for anybody now, either, except the obvious one. She had seen Michael with Martha Heydreich on the night he was murdered. That was it. Everybody at Waldorf Pines had seen the two of them together. She had stood on her own deck and watched them walking across the green, far away, almost at the pool house, and for a moment she hadn’t recognized them.
It was one of the odder things about Martha Heydreich that if you saw her unexpectedly, and couldn’t get a clear look at the color of her clothes, you almost wouldn’t know who it was.
3
Horace Wingard was getting ready to shut up the office. He’d stayed late tonight, because he always stayed late, and because tonight was not a good night to seem to be ignoring the finer details of his job. The announcements about the search for Martha Heydreich were everywhere. He’d had three or four people stop in to comment on them tonight. Miss Vaile was still at her desk, typing away at the computer. He wasn’t sure why she hadn’t gone home. He wouldn’t keep her this late unless he was in the middle of a true emergency, and this was not really an emergency. It was, he thought, the difference between acute and chronic disease. Acute disease was an emergency. Chronic disease was just something you put up with, because you had to. Because it was there.
Most of what Horace had been doing for the past several hours was just make work and unnecessary. He had gone over the figures for the maintenance of the golf green. Keeping the turf in shape was getting more expensive every day. He took out the folder with the specs for repairing the pool and went over that yet again, although there was nothing he could do about it anytime soon. The pool was a big selling point at Waldorf Pines. It was heated, and supposed to be open and ready fifty-two weeks a year. They were going to have to rethink the club dues soon, no matter what kind of fuss it was going to cause.
When he finished with the figures, he went to the computer and looked up the data on the new people asking to buy houses at Waldorf Pines. There were not very many houses for sale. Even when the complex had first opened up, there had been nice long waiting lists of people who had wanted a house here. People were afraid of themselves and each other these days. That’s why they wanted the gates and the locks and the security cameras. He was a little surprised that none of the three couples with applications in had dropped out of the process.
You had to at least pretend to be exclusive, Horace thought. That was one of those things he had learned on his way up. People always cared most about who was being kept out. That was why Horace didn’t mind LizaAnne Marsh. LizaAnne was crude about it, and she was rude about it, but she was not dishonest. People could complain about her all they wanted to, but she was only saying what all of them thought.
Horace put everything away and looked around the room. Everything was in its place. All the issues were resolved for the night. He got up and started turning off lights, going from one to the next like an old-fashioned lamplighter on a street that had just been fitted for gas.
When the office was dark, he turned back to look at it. People at Waldorf Pines thought they had secrets, but they didn’t really. Horace Wingard knew all about them. He had made it his point to know all about them. He went out into the anteroom and closed the door behind him. Miss Vaile looked up from her computer.
“Are you going home now, Mr. Wingard?”
“I thought I might as well,” Horace said. “There isn’t anything to do around here any more tonight. Although we might look ahead to problems for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Figuratively speaking,” Horace said. “Over the next few days, perhaps. Or the next few weeks.”
Miss Vaile cocked her head. “Do you really think he has the answer, then? Gregor Demarkian? Do you really think he knows what happened in the pool house?”
“I have no idea,” Horace said. “But it wasn’t that I was thinking about. I was thinking about other things.”
“I’ll admit,” Miss Vaile said, “I’ve been worried. First the murders, then the mistake about the murders, then Mrs. Platte trying to commit suicide. It feels like everything’s out of control. It’s not a feeling I like.”
“It’s not a feeling I like, either, but I think that it is under control, as best it can be. As long as there is a solution of some sort, I don’t think we have to worry about that in the long run. No, it’s something else, something I’ve been expecting for some time. I have notified upper management. They are prepared for it coming.”
“Are they?” Miss Vaile said. She looked momentarily confused. “Should I be? Is this something I’m going to have to contend with?”
“We’ll all have to contend with it for a while,” Horace said. “But I’m not sure that, in spite of the bad publicity, well, I’m not sure that the bad publicity will be all that bad. People are very odd that way, these days. Fifty years ago, it would have mattered outside the bounds of its real importance. It would have been a matter of principle. But these days, the only principle is money, and there is certainly enough money.”
“I don’t think I understand you,” Miss Vaile said.
Horace smiled, and went to the coat rack to get his coat. Except for the very top of the summer, he always wore a coat, and the coat he always wore was a Chesterfield. He always wore gloves, too.
“Do you remember a man named Henry Carlson Land?”
“Do I remember him?” Miss Vaile said. “He’s still in all the papers. He gives press conferences from prison. You have to wonder how so many people could be so fooled so much of the time.�
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“They weren’t fooled,” Horace said. “At least, a lot of them weren’t. The small fry were, I suppose. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. It’s the great vice of most small investors. They don’t really want to be bothered with their money. But the rest of them, the banks, and the brokerages—well, those people knew. They were just trusting to their ability to make it out in time. And most of them were wrong.”
“I still don’t understand,” Miss Vaile said. “Did Henry Carlson Land—was Waldorf Pines one of his properties? Are we about to go bankrupt? Is that what the problem is?”
“Absolutely not,” Horace said. “Henry Carlson Land didn’t own properties. He just pushed money around. Until it all disappeared, of course. That’s what you must never forget, Miss Vaile. Don’t ever rely on the appearance of wealth. The appearance of wealth is easy enough to fake.”
“You’re making me very nervous,” Miss Vaile said. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Then I’ll stop,” Horace said. “It’s about time I got home, at any rate. I’ll see you in the morning, Miss Vaile.”
Horace left the building, but he did not go home. Home was, after all, still Waldorf Pines, and he had no intention of being caught on Waldorf Pines’s security cameras making a phone call in the middle of the night.
Instead, he left the clubhouse and went right across the parking lot to the front gate. He said hello to the night guard and kept on walking. He walked down the long, curved road that led away into Pineville Station. The night was cold and his shoes were hard. There was a slight wind blowing against his face as he went.
He went down the road and down the road and down the road. At about a fifth of a mile from the gate, the road curved sharply to the right. He went all the way around the curve until he came to a small copse of trees that he knew could not be seen from the entry to Waldorf Pines. He went into the trees and made sure he was well away from the road.
When he was sure he could not be seen by anybody, he pulled a cell phone out of his coat pocket and turned it on. It was not his usual cell phone. He had bought this one, prepaid and anonymous, the day after the bodies had been discovered, just in case.
All it would have taken to ruin the entire plan, of course, would have been to find that there was no cell phone reception in the copse. Fortunately, the reception was just fine. It was better than it was at Waldorf Pines, and Waldorf Pines did a lot to make sure its reception was as good as money could buy.
Horace flipped to the little address book. There was only one number there. He had programmed it into the phone on the day he bought the phone. He had been wearing his gloves on that day, too, and he was fairly sure that nobody he knew was watching him.
Of course, that had been in the King of Prussia Mall, so there was no reason to worry that somebody he knew would be watching him.
Horace punched in the call and waited. The phone rang and rang and rang, and he felt suddenly irritated that he couldn’t know if the person on the other end was also hearing the ringing. He wondered what he would do, and when, if the person he wanted didn’t answer. He’d gone to some trouble to find out the best time to call.
A moment later, the phone was picked up, and a man said, “Philadelphia Inquirer. Martin Roark.”
“Mr. Roark?” Horace said.
“Who’s this?” Martin Roark asked.
“It doesn’t matter who this is,” Horace said. “It matters that I have information you want. About, let’s call them ‘the malefactors of great wealth.’”
“Who is this?” Martin Roark asked again.
Horace sighed. “I’m the person who can tell you how to find Mrs. Henry Carlson Land.”
FIVE
1
It was rare that Gregor Demarkian had one of those nights when he just couldn’t sleep. On most nights, he didn’t even toss and turn. Bennis said she was fascinated with the way he could just lie back still and drift off without so much as a crossword puzzle to relax him. Gregor said that he didn’t need to relax, because he was usually so tired that the chance to sleep was like being hit over the head with a two-by-four.
That night, however, there was no two-by-four, and it was well after two when he was repeating the same message over and over again.
“There’s a sort of protocol to these things,” he kept saying. “You go out to wherever it is that has a problem and you look into it, and there’s usually something so complicated that it takes a week or ten days to figure it out. You feel like you’ve earned your fee. They feel like you’ve earned your fee. The Philadelphia Inquirer starts getting ridiculous with its commentary. There it is.”
“You keep saying ‘you,’” Bennis said. “You mean ‘I.’”
“The whole thing is perfectly ridiculous,” Gregor said. “I knew what was going on within hours of looking into it—well, no, I didn’t exactly. But I knew who the murderer was. And then yesterday. Well, yesterday.”
“If you mean earlier today, you should say that,” Bennis said.
“Earlier today then. A garden hose. I mean, for God’s sake. Who would use a garden hose?”
“Who would use a garden hose for what?”
“And the guy was perfect,” Gregor said. “They could have gotten him out of central casting. You should have seen him. It was like that comedian’s dummy come to life. I don’t remember the comedian’s name. Don’t ask me. He uses dummies. And then—do you know what it is? It’s television. And crime novels. That’s what it is.”
“That’s what what is?”
“This idea everybody has that it’s perfectly rational that a murderer will do all sorts of weird things just to disguise the murder, or for fun, or something or the other. He’ll put the corpse in a Santa Claus suit to make a statement. Or she hated the victim so much, she dressed him up in garlic to show that he was an emotional vampire. Or something. And do you know why murderers don’t really do things like that? Do you know why?”
“They don’t have the time?” Bennis suggested.
“They don’t do that kind of thing,” Gregor said, “because when they do that kind of thing, they’re likely to get caught. And they know it. Assuming that you’re an intelligent murderer, you know, and not the kind of person who thinks it makes sense to slam a baby against a wall until its skull breaks just because it won’t stop crying—”
“Gregor.”
“You know what I’m talking about. Assuming you’re an intelligent murderer and not one of the tribe of congenital idiots, you don’t do anything out of the ordinary unless you absolutely have to. And that’s why, when you find something out of the ordinary, you have to pay attention to it. Do you see what I mean?”
“I might see it a little better if I was awake,” Bennis said. “What time is it? What are we doing up?”
“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” Gregor said. “I want to leave early.”
It was true that Gregor wanted to leave early, but not true that he was getting up to get ready. It was much too early for that.
He just couldn’t stop pacing.
2
He did call ahead, to Pineville Station, just to make sure he didn’t arrive to find the town and its officials all asleep. Then he sat back in his hired car and worked out the logistics of it on a legal pad. There were logistics here that had nothing to do with what the murderer had and hadn’t done. There were things that had to do with what Waldorf Pines was and what it wasn’t, and those kinds of things always interfered with an investigation. Who was sleeping with whom. Who was not sleeping with whom. Who had a drug problem. Who was stealing small sums of money from the company till. It was always necessary to contend with that kind of thing. It took a while to sort it out and know what was irrelevant.
The car passed out of the solid core of Philadelphia suburbs and began to move through territory that was more rural. It was easy, living in Philadelphia, to forget just how rural most of Pennsylvania was. There were the Amish, of course, but there were always hundreds of small fam
ily farms, truck farms and dairy farms and even some horse farms. There were dozens of small townships just like Pineville Station, and all of them had one thing in common: all of them were dying.
Gregor had never understood how, if the country as a whole had nearly twice as many people now as when he was born, so much of that country seemed to be emptying out of people. There had been thriving towns in these places for generations, towns that hadn’t needed a big-box store or a massive corporate employer to survive. Now it was as if all the people in them had forgotten whatever it was they were supposed to do to keep a town going without help from outside. There was something fundamentally illogical about all that that Gregor’s brain couldn’t process this early in the morning.
The car bumped down into Pineville Station itself. The brick buildings looked uninhabited at this hour of the morning.
The driver started to turn in to the Pineville Station Police Department parking lot, but Gregor waved him off to the other side of the street. He had arranged to meet everybody in Ken Bairn’s office, because getting the explanations out once was easier than getting them out a dozen times. Here was something he didn’t like about consulting: The need to get permission to do whatever it was you needed to do next to make sure the case was solved and solved in such a way that it could be prosecuted. He would have been happier this morning if he could just have gone out to Waldorf Pines himself.
He was getting out of the car in front of the municipal building when its front door opened and Buck Monaghan came out. He looked only half dressed for work, although by now it was close enough to the start of the real day that Gregor thought he should have been perfectly professional.
Buck reached out and took Gregor’s briefcase and his copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer, which was still unread.
“You were in a hurry,” he said.
Gregor got his briefcase back. “There’s always the chance that the murderer may do something stupid,” he said, “although this one hasn’t been stupid yet. Well, in perhaps one point. Is everybody upstairs?”