27 Blood in the Water (32 page)

“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 family 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?”

“In Ken’s office, yes,” Buck said. “Are you going to do a Hercule Poirot and give us the solution? Don’t you need all the suspects together in one room in order to do that?”

“I’m not sure anybody ever really does do that,” Gregor said. “No, this morning, I’m not giving out solutions. This morning, I’m asking for what I need and for some force beyond poor Larry Farmer to help make an arrest. You do have other police officers in Pineville Station besides Larry Farmer?”

“Two, I think,” Buck Monaghan said.

They went up the steps and into the building. Gregor marveled again at what towns had found possible in his childhood and before that they no longer found possible now. They went up to Ken Bairn’s office and found the doors wide open and Delores Martin and Sue Connolly sitting together near the anteroom desk.

Delores looked up and said, “We’re just hoping you’re going to tell us that those people at Waldorf Pines are all murderers and we should lock them up.”

Gregor shook his head and headed back to Ken Bairn’s inner office.

Ken was sitting behind his desk, the chair turned so that he could look out the window into town. Even from here, Gregor thought, it didn’t look like much of a town.

Ken turned around. “Are you going to tell me that everybody at Waldorf Pines is a murderer?” he asked. “I knew when this started that it wasn’t going to do us any good.”

“Everybody at Waldorf Pines isn’t a murderer,” Gregor said. “Only one person is. But that was inevitable. I can tell you one thing that might help your relations with Horace Wingard.”

“What’s that?”

“As I told Larry Farmer last night, he’s operating under an assumed name,” Gregor said. “Not that there’s anything illegal about that, because there isn’t. In the United States, you’re within your rights to use any name you want to as long as you do not do so with an intent to defraud. I don’t think Horace Wingard intends to defraud anybody. He just wants very desperately to be anybody else but who he was born to be.”

“And who was he born to be?” Buck Monaghan asked.

“The son of a working-class father,” Gregor said. “But you do realize, he isn’t the only one. There’s Caroline Stanford-Pyrie and Susan Carstairs. They’re operating under assumed names, too.”

“I knew there was something like that going on,” Larry Farmer said. “That’s why she wouldn’t let me into the house yesterday. I still say you had no right to do what you did there, Mr. Demarkian. Suspects have no right to refuse to talk to the police—”

“Of course they do,” Gregor said. “And you should know that. Anyway, she talked to me when she wouldn’t talk to you, and that worked. And I’d have said nothing about it, except that it isn’t going to matter much in the next day or two. If Horace Wingard hasn’t called the papers to tip them off yet, he will as soon as we’ve made an arrest.”

“Tip them off about what?” Ken Bairn said.

“About the fact that Waldorf Pines is harboring the wife of Henry Carlson Land, the same wife that half of Land’s investors think is hiding most of the money that Land bilked out of investors in his Ponzi scheme. And in case you’re wondering, he’s known pretty much from the day Alison Land showed up. He’s probably been keeping the knowledge in reserve for an emergency, and this is beginning to look like an emergency.”

“Beginning to?” Buck Monaghan said.

“Alison Land,” Larry Farmer said. “My God. That must mean the other one is Marilyn what’s-her-name. There have to be a million lawyers looking for those two. But how did you find that out? They’ve been hiding for over two years.”

“They weren’t doing much of anything to disguise themselves except living at Waldorf Pines, which is a place where they wouldn’t be expected to be,” Gregor said. “But then it’s the nature of Waldorf Pines that matters, too, as much as the identity thing. All through this thing, there are too many people pretending to be somebody they aren’t. That’s true of Horace Wingard. It’s true of Caroline Stanford-Pyrie and Susan Carstairs. And, of course, it’s true of Martha Heydreich.”

“All that makeup,” Larry Farmer said. “I kept thinking that must be hiding something. I suppose now she’s wandering around Waldorf Pines, being somebody else, and we haven’t either noticed her.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “the last time she was at Waldorf Pines, she was definitely being somebody else, and you could say that the entire time she was at Waldorf Pines she was somebody else, or at least, like Horace Wingard, somebody other than she had started out to be. But she’s not at Waldorf Pines now. By the way, speaking of people who are or are not at Waldorf Pines, when you did your initial investigation, did you look into the whereabouts of somebody named Charles or Charlie Bullman?”