27 Blood in the Water
Read 27 Blood in the Water Online
Authors: Jane Haddam
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
1
It was seven o’clock on the morning of Friday, October fifth, and Arthur Heydreich was at peace. “At peace” might not be exactly the phrase he was looking for. He’d been thinking about it the entire twenty-six minutes he’d spent in the shower. It was a wonderful shower, the best he’d ever had in his life. The shower stall was big enough for at least two people. It would have reminded him of the shower stall at school where everybody had to shower together after practice, except here the floor and walls were made of marble. The showerhead was huge, too. You could get two people in there comfortably, with both of them getting wet. He never showered with anybody else. He liked the feel of the water stinging his skin, especially when it was nearly hot enough to make him bleed. It was the hot that was the final nail, the nail that nailed it all together. He’d had enough of cold showers when he was growing up, and not because he needed to cool off from some hot fantasy on the Internet. There hadn’t even been an Internet. No, he’d had enough of cold showers because his mother was always forgetting to pay the gas bill. Either that, or she wasn’t able to pay it. One way or another, the small, cramped apartment in South Philly had been cold.
Arthur stepped out into the middle of his bathroom and looked around. He’d bought this house because of this bathroom—or almost, sort of. He’d bought this house because it was in Waldorf Pines, but he could have bought any house in Waldorf Pines. He’d been only the second person to sign a contract. He’d looked at all the houses and then he’d seen this bathroom and that had been it. It was bigger than his bedroom at home had been. It had extra-large terra-cotta tiles on the floor and marble everything else. There was a whirlpool. There was a bidet nobody ever used. There were his-and-hers sinks and his-and-hers vanities. He could have played handball in there without feeling cramped.
He stepped naked from the bathroom into the even larger dressing room and headed for his own walk-in closet, because this house had his-and-hers walk-in closets in the master bedroom. The closet was also bigger than his bedroom at home. On one wall there were built-in drawers for things like underwear and socks. His shirts and ties were hung up next to his suits. The maid did it when she was finished cleaning up downstairs.
Arthur got a good black suit and a cream-colored shirt and one of the ties Martha had matched up for him. It amazed him that he could have spent the last few weeks in such an agony of depression—such an agony of something. He hadn’t paid attention to the house or the suits or his car or anything at all, not for days. It was crazy. Ever since he’d started climbing his way out of the mess he’d been born into, he’d made it a point to note and appreciate every increase in his circumstances on a regular basis. He wanted to appreciate those things over and over again. He wanted never to forget, and he wanted never to get used to it. That was how people fell off the map. They got used to it. They took it for granted. They got sloppy. Arthur Heydreich was anything but sloppy.
He stepped into the bedroom proper and looked at his wife’s side of the bed, ruffled and mussed and every which way, as if she’d been murdered there during the night and struggled so hard she’d pulled the bed sheets off. Martha always slept like that. It drove Arthur a little crazy. She tossed and turned at night and she left her clothes in a trail on the floor and she left dirty dishes on the kitchen table. This was apparently the way you behaved if you’d had maids all your life. It was also the way you behaved if you were dirt poor and didn’t give a damn. Sometimes Arthur wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her.
On the other hand, the bed was something called a “California king.” It was bigger than most beds. Arthur wondered why it wasn’t called a “Texas king.” Whatever it was called, he didn’t need to worry about Martha tossing. She was far enough away that she might have been in a different room.
He got his wallet off the nightstand next to his side of the bed and put it in his pocket. Then he headed downstairs. “At peace” was not the phrase he wanted, but there had to be one out there. “Resolved” was wrong. It sounded as if he had made up his mind to do something, or come to some kind of decision. There were no more decisions to be made. He understood everything now. He had nothing more to worry about. All the problems had been … resolved.
Whatever.
The staircase to the ground floor was a big sweeping thing that came off a balcony. All the ceilings were very high. A chandelier hung down from the ceiling into the curve. The front door was actually a double door and had windows all around it. Arthur took note of each and every thing, cataloging it in his head, as if he were a real estate agent getting ready to show the place.
He went down across the foyer, then through the living room. The living room had a massive fieldstone fireplace that took up one entire wall. There were two conversational groupings of couches and love seats and chairs. Martha had done a very good job with all of it. She did a very good job at all the things he had married her for, except one.
Arthur went through the dining room—another chandelier, a table with chairs to seat twenty-four; they gave dinner parties here—and then through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. The kitchen was part of a big open space that included an octagonal sunroom for a breakfast nook and the family room. You really had to be careful going through this house. The lists alone could make you dizzy.
There was one place set at the kitchen table, a place mat with a stemmed crystal bowl full of melon balls on it. There was a silver spoon next to the bowl. There was a coffee cup and saucer next to the place mat. There was a linen napkin next to that. Arthur sat down, put the napkin on his lap, and said,
“Cortina?”
Cortina was the maid. She was very small and very Latina and probably, Arthur suspected, illegal. At first, he’d objected to that. He was very careful about the things he did in his life. He’d gotten all the way to Waldorf Pines and he intended to stay there. He didn’t want to get fired one day because he’d been employing illegal immigrants and not paying their Social Security taxes. Martha had explained all that to him. It was a big world out there, one he’d never suspected.
“Cortina?” he said again.
Cortina stuck her head out of the walk-in pantry and grunted. “I am coming,” she said. “Do you know how late Mrs. Heydreich is going to sleep? I need to have a time for the housecleaning or I get behind.”
“Mrs. Heydreich isn’t asleep,” Arthur said. “She was up and out before I even woke up this morning. She must have one of her committees.”
“Her car is in the garage. I saw it when I came in.”
Arthur stood up and walked across, past the pantry door, to the mudroom. He went through the mudroom and then opened the door to the garage. It was a heated garage. Cars never failed to start just because of the weather. If you had good cars, you had to make sure to take care of them.
He had good cars. His own was a Mercedes S-Class sedan, a good dark blue, sober and responsible and establishment. Martha’s was a Mercedes, too, but one of those little two-seaters, and painted bright pink. It was sitting where it was supposed to be, in the bay farthest from the pantry door.
Arthur closed up and thought about it. Then he went back to the kitchen.
“Huh,” he said. “Maybe she walked. It’s only across the golf course. It’s a nice day.”
“Does that sound like Mrs. Heydreich to you? That she would walk?”
“It’s a nice day,” Arthur said. “Martha does walk. She walks all the time.”
“She drives that car all the time. Everywhere. She’s famous for it. You should hear the other maids talk about it. And it isn’t just the maids.”
“I’m not sure what you want out of me,” Arthur said. “If she isn’t here and she didn’t take her car, she must have walked.”
“Things happen,” Cortina said. “People are kidnapped. People disappear. People are murdered and found in ditches.”
“Are you saying you think my wife was kidnapped and murdered? Out of her own bed? With me in it?”
“I’m saying you don’t know what happens. You never know. Things happen.”
Arthur sat down at his place at the table again. Then he reached into his pocket and brought out his cell phone. “This is crazy. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Things happen,” Cortina said. “I don’t live here. Maybe you sleep like the dead. Things happen all the time where I come from.”
Arthur wanted to say that where she came from there was a drug war going on, and people killed their local government officials if they couldn’t get a job in the post office for their uncles. He didn’t say it because he didn’t know it was true, and because that wasn’t the way you talked to maids.
He punched Martha’s speed dial number into the phone and waited. She had a million committees. She was on the admissions committee for the Waldorf Pines golf club and the cotillion committee, too, and she did volunteer work at the Waldorf Pines library. She had so many things to do, it almost didn’t matter that she didn’t get paid for them. She was busier than he was.
He let the phone ring for a moment and then, just when he was about to put it down and give up, he heard the ringtone on Martha’s phone, sounding muffled but oddly close. He closed his phone and looked up.
“Ah,” Cortina said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Arthur said.
He opened his phone and punched in the speed dial number again. This time, Martha’s phone started ringing almost immediately, crashing its way through a tinny rendition of “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”
Arthur got up and followed the sounds into the family room.
Martha’s big Coach handbag was sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch, closed up tight and looking like she’d put it down there half a minute ago.
2
Caroline Stanford-Pyrie was at the end of her rope, and her ropes were never very long to begin with. It just went to show, really, that it was always a bad idea to sign yourself up for organized hospitality. Organized camaraderie might be more like what this was supposed to be—oh, she didn’t know what it was supposed to be. She didn’t even care anymore. She just wished the world would go back to being what she remembered it being, and then she’d be able to sit down and relax for a little while. As it was, she kept herself up at night, worrying that things were going to go wrong and it was somehow going to be all her fault.
Right now what was going wrong was this meeting, and it was going to go on going wrong as long as everybody insisted on showing up late. That was one of the ways you could tell the right people from the wrong ones. The right people were always absolutely punctual, even if they’d had a snootful the night before and felt like death warmed up. Caroline felt that way quite a lot of the time, but that didn’t stop her from doing what she’d promised to do. Character, that was what mattered. Character and breeding.
Caroline made her way from the foyer of the Waldorf Pines country club to the big dining room at the back. There were no cars coming down that absurd circular drive. There was nobody at all arriving for this meeting, and she had set it for seven o’clock precisely to escape all those lame excuses everybody had for needing to be into work early. To hear these women talk, every business in America expected its junior executives to be at their desks and hard at it before dawn. It was nonsense, and she knew it. She knew that they knew she knew it.