27 Blood in the Water (26 page)

“There aren’t any more questions to answer about Michael,” she said. “Michael is dead.”

“I know,” Gregor said, “but there are some things I still don’t understand. Like the safe-deposit box key. Did Michael have a safe-deposit box that you know of?”

Eileen looked startled. “A safe-deposit box? Do you mean in a bank? Of course he didn’t have anything like that. If he’d had something like that, he would have used it, don’t you think? He’d have put things in it. Valuable things in it.”

“I don’t know what he would have kept in it,” Gregor said. “There was a key to a safe-deposit box in his clothes when he was found—found—”

“Dead,” Eileen said.

“That’s right, dead. There was the key, but there was no way to tell what bank it was from. We can’t go to look in it if we don’t know where to look.”

“He didn’t have a safe-deposit box,” Eileen Platte said. “I know he didn’t. If he’d had it, he’d have kept his money in it, and he didn’t. He kept it upstairs. He kept it in his closet.”

“A safe-deposit box isn’t a convenient place to put cash,” Gregor said. “It’s usually used for things like important papers.”

“Michael didn’t have any important papers,” Eileen said. “He had a passport, but that’s upstairs on his bureau. Everything is upstairs just the way he left it, except for the shoe box, and I’m not supposed to talk about that. Stephen took it with him to work today. He said if I said anything about it, he would say it never existed, it would be just my word against his, and everybody would believe him. But I was the one who found it. I found it. And I knew where it came from, too.”

“The shoe box?”

“What was in the shoe box. She didn’t bring it in a shoe box. She had a big envelope, a big manila envelope. I saw her. She brought the envelope to the pool house when he was working one night, and I was just coming down to bring him something to eat. Not that he ate anything. He ate less than any other person I’d ever met. I made sandwiches with cream cheese and pimento olives the way he liked them and I took them down there and she was there first. And he took the money out of the envelope and counted it.”

“Money,” Gregor said. “You’re talking about cash? How much cash?”

Eileen bent over and began to pick at the place mat in front of her. “I should have said something at the time,” she said. “I should at least have told Stephen. What was she doing, giving him money like that, and in an envelope? But then, you know, I was just—I wasn’t really sure. Because I saw them there and I didn’t go in. I tried to listen, but I didn’t really hear very much. And he counted and I thought I heard, but then maybe I didn’t hear right. It was hard to know what to do, do you see that? And I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the less I was sure.”

“But you’re sure now?” Gregor asked. “You’re sure because you found the money in a shoe box?”

“In his closet upstairs,” Eileen said. She leaned far over the table and whispered, “Twenty-five thousand dollars. In tens and twenties. When I found it in the closet, I took it down and counted it. I counted it over and over again. Then I put it back. I didn’t know what to do with it. Then later I told Stephen about it. But that was the wrong thing to do.”

Eileen sat back. She looked oddly satisfied, but at the same time she still looked blank. It was as if something inside her had broken down for good.

“The ambulance is on the grounds,” Horace Wingard said, rushing in from wherever he had been for the last ten minutes. “They’ll be at the door in an instant. Let’s try to get her out of here without too much fuss.”

Gregor didn’t care about the fuss, but he thought getting Eileen Platte into a medical facility as quickly as possible was the best idea in the room. She was staring at the wall now as if she’d never seen one before. It wasn’t clear that she was seeing it now.

“Let me just ask you one more thing,” Gregor said, hearing the air brakes on the road. “Just to make sure I have this straight. You saw Martha Heydreich give your son a manila envelope with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash in it, when was this? Just before he died, months ago, last year?”

Eileen Platte was staring at him “It was just the week before he died,” she said. “But Martha Heydreich didn’t give him the money. She did. The one who thinks she’s so perfect. I knew there was something wrong there. She isn’t who she says she is. She really isn’t. And Michael knew all about it.”

“All about who?” Gregor asked.

“Caroline Stanford-Pyrie,” Eileen said. Then she made a face, the kind of face children make when they think something is “yucky.” Then she leaned very close to Gregor and said, “She thinks nobody suspects anything, but it isn’t true. We all suspect something, even if we don’t know what it is. Her and the other one. They’re always walking around, making like the rest of us don’t know anything. But we know enough to tell.”

“Tell what?” Gregor asked.

“Tell that they’re gay,” Eileen said. “What else would two old biddies like them have to hide that anybody would care about? They’re both gay and Michael knew it and then they killed him for it. I’ve been watching them ever since.”

Eileen sat back, looking suddenly very happy and amused. Just then, there were the sounds of a door opening and the ambulance team coming in, ushered about by Horace Wingard speaking in hushed but very insistent tones.

“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 girl 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.”