28 Hearts of Sand (17 page)

“Is that the youngest sister?” Bennis asked. “I’ve heard about her. She’s gotten all social consciency or something and sends her kids to the local public school.”

“The local public school can out-Eton Eton,” Gregor said. “And yes, she’s the youngest sister. The other two sisters don’t live in the area. I think one of them is in Chicago. Anyway, that’s been checked out, by both the local police and the Bureau, so that’s all right. But she felt like somebody from central casting, too.”

“Do I feel like something from central casting?”

“No,” Gregor said. “You’re sui generis. And I always thought so. But I just feel up against a wall here. I’ve talked to two Bureau people, one retired and one very much on the case. I’ve talked to all the police officers locally who’ve had anything to do with the murder. And in all of that, I’ve only got one significant piece of information.”

“What’s that?”

“The uniform that went to the Waring house on the night of the murder is a woman named Angela Harkin. She says that when she was checking the place out, before she actually knew there was something wrong, she went around to the back and looked through a gap in the curtains and saw a single foot, wearing an espadrille.”

“And espadrilles mean something important?”

“When she found the body of Chapin Waring, Chapin Waring was wearing tennis shoes.”

“But that is interesting,” Bennis said. “That must have been the murderer. And the murderer must have been a woman.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

“But if there was another person there while the officer was looking around, how did she get out? Wouldn’t she have been seen?”

“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “The place isn’t as big as Engine House, but it’s big. There are lots of ways to get in and out. And the alarm wasn’t tripped that night, so whoever got in knew how to turn it on and off. There was just the one officer there at the time. What bothers me the most is that that wasn’t in the notes I got, and the officers on the case didn’t seem to make anything of it. Everybody here is so wrapped up in discussing what happened thirty years ago, they lose sight of the obvious.”

“They probably just think that if Chapin Waring was murdered in her own hometown, it probably had something to do with what happened thirty years ago. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s interesting,” Bennis said.

“Everybody loses sight of the fact that Chapin Waring may have been missing for thirty years, but that doesn’t mean she’d ceased to exist for thirty years. She was doing something all that time. And there’s really no reason to suppose that she’d been murdered now for something that old. From what I hear about her—in the notes and out—she was something of a juvenile delinquent all her life, except that she never was called that and she didn’t end up in reform school, because her family had too much money. But the general feeling seems to be that she was never good for herself or for other people. She was the kind of person who got people wrapped up in things they couldn’t really handle.”

“Well, that seems true enough.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “I’m just saying there’s no reason to suppose she stopped doing that when she left here. That leads me back to the other brick wall, and that’s the question of what she was actually doing for those thirty years.”

“And then you’re the one who’s bringing the whole thing back to what happened thirty years ago.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “This is why I need somebody to talk to. If I don’t talk, I end up going around and around in circles in my head. Today, the alarm went off at the house. We all hauled ourselves out there, and I do mean all of us, and all we found was the front door, slightly open. The alarm had gone off, so either the person who opened the door didn’t know how to disengage it or didn’t want to. But there were no signs of forced entry anywhere in the place, which would seem to indicate that whoever opened the door had the key. And there was absolutely no reason for this that I could tell.”

“Maybe somebody came to steal something?”

“If they did, it was nothing immediately discernible. Caroline Holder didn’t look around and go, ‘Oh, my God! The family credenza is missing!’”

“Maybe whoever it was took something not immediately evident,” Bennis said. “Maybe they took something from upstairs, or in the kitchen.”

“I’ve got every intention of asking Caroline Holder to make a revised inventory,” Gregor said. “But if whoever broke in didn’t know how to disarm the alarm, then she didn’t have enough time to look much farther than the foyer. And if she did know how to disarm the alarm, then that means she had to have come into the house, disarmed the alarm, done whatever it was she had to do, reset the alarm, and then left and let it go off. Does that sequence of events sound plausible?”

“She could have made a mistake,” Bennis said. “Although I don’t think we should go on calling her ‘she.’ We’ll get in the habit and then we won’t see it when the murderer turns out to be some big guy with a mustache who likes to dress up in women’s shoes.”

“There is no such big guy that I know of,” Gregor said. “There are only two guys in this case, and I haven’t met either of them yet. One is Dr. Timothy Brand. The other is Kyle Westervan. They were two of the six.”

“Two of the six?”

“There were six people in the group Chapin Waring ran around with in those days,” Gregor said. “There was Chapin Waring herself. There was Martin Veer, the one who wrecked the car on the night of the fifth robbery and died in the crash. Then there was Timothy Brand, his sister Virginia Brand, a girl named Hope Matlock, and then Kyle Westervan. All local kids, all in their first year of college. And they’d all been hanging out together since grammar school.”

“I see.”

“The Bureau checked them all out at the time,” Gregor said, “but the conclusion was that Chapin Waring and Martin Veer had committed the robberies together, and the rest of the group didn’t know anything about them. You look at the case notes and start to wonder if it was ever really possible that anybody came to that conclusion.”

“You couldn’t change that conclusion?” Bennis asked in surprise.

“I could change the conclusion,” Gregor said, “but I can’t go back in time and ask the questions I’d want asked and do the checking I’d want checked. Like it or not, there’s going to be a lot of evidence that has disappeared into the mists. And then we’re left with all the same questions we had before, plus the new ones. I keep telling myself to concentrate on what’s been happening here, right now. But not enough has been happening.”

“Well, you do have a dead body.”

“I do have that,” Gregor said. “And that tells me even less than it usually does. I have a dead body and it was stabbed in the back—actually, in the left shoulder blade. The instrument used was a large kitchen knife, serrated, that probably came from the Waring house kitchen.”

“Probably?”

“There’s nothing to say that it did, and nothing to say that it didn’t. It wasn’t part of a set, although it was similar to the ones in the kitchen. That makes the police here think it must have come from outside, but I don’t think so. The house is—the Warings have maintained that house like something in a Faulkner story. They didn’t just not sell the place; they maintained it. They paid ground crews and maids to clean it and keep it up. All the furniture is there and dusted and in perfectly good repair. The kitchen still has all the kitchen equipment in it. The dining room has two large glass display cabinets with china in them. And that’s what I saw without doing a search. I got the impression that if I’d started opening drawers or if I’d gone up to the bedrooms, there would be clothes and bedspreads and everything else all set out and ready to go.”

“And Caroline Holder doesn’t live there?”

“No, she definitely does not.” Gregor sighed. “The knife had no fingerprints on it except those of Chapin Waring, but all that means is that somebody was wearing gloves. I keep trying to visualize the actual murder, and I get nowhere. How did that work, exactly? You have to get up close to stab somebody in the back. And if that person’s back is to you, then he either didn’t know you were there, or he wasn’t expecting you to do anything, or he was running away from you. And if he was running away from you, you couldn’t get too good a stab in anyway. It just goes around and around and around.”

“And you’re still left with thirty years ago,” Bennis said.

“I’m not going back to that again,” Gregor said.

“I don’t blame you,” Bennis said. “If it’s any consolation, I wish you were here. This house is remarkably cavernous and creepy when I’m here on my own.”

“You could go stay with Donna,” Gregor said.

“Donna’s got enough going on without hearing from me,” Bennis said. “Besides, I see her all the time. She decided to decorate this house for the Fourth, and she’s only got until the day after tomorrow.”

“What?” Gregor said.

“She’s only got until the day after tomorrow,” Bennis said. “She wants the whole street to look good for the parade. Then we get pictures in the paper and the Ararat gets more business. So she came over today and wrapped the entire house up in blue crepe paper, and she’s got red and white to do tomorrow.”

“The Fourth of July is the day after tomorrow.”

“Last I checked,” Bennis said. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I put it entirely out of my mind. I mean, I did and I didn’t. Everybody has been talking about the Fourth, and I kept thinking it was somewhere in the distance.”

“It is,” Bennis said. “It’s the day after tomorrow.”

“That’s not nearly distant enough.”

2

Later, when Darlee Corn had been in to pick up the plates and bring him a glass of brandy, Gregor sat on the edge of the big old-fashioned bed and tried to get it all straight in his head. The Fourth of July meant a day of no real work, so he would have to revise his tentative schedule. It might even mean that he wouldn’t be able to get out and look around. He had no idea what Alwych did on the Fourth. He didn’t mind fireworks, if they were handled by professionals. He was generally in favor of celebrating the Fourth, but what he wanted for a celebration was a big barbecue out somewhere that also had a pavilion, and then he wanted it to rain so that everybody had to go indoors.

Gregor was not much in favor of eating outside.

He got up off the bed and began to pace. He expected a phone call any minute, telling him the people below him had complained. He stopped and looked at his laptop for a while. He scrolled through notes about the bank robberies, the money, the murder, everything that might be connected to this case.

He brooded a little about what he meant when he thought about “everything” that might be connected to this case. Did anybody at all know what “everything” meant here?

He got out Patrick’s diaries and went through them, page after page, not knowing what he was looking for. He read through long passages of what was essentially angst, of Patrick not being able to figure it all out, of leads that went nowhere and ideas that turned out to have nothing to do with anything.

He got to the section with the pictures in it and went through those one after the other. He got to the ones that had been taken by the security cameras and started to go very slowly. The pictures were blurry. Too much was shot from over the tops of people’s heads, so that you could see hats or caps but not faces.

He got to the ones he had found curious even the first time he saw them, and stopped. In these, he could see Chapin Waring clearly, and he understood completely why she had been identified from the photographs of Martin Veer’s funeral. The way she held her head and shoulders was distinctive all on its own.

He moved the photographs around and tried to concentrate on the figure of Marty Veer. This was not so distinctive, and looking at the photographs he could see what everybody who had looked at them had seen, from the beginning until now. The figure of the accomplice was—distorted, sort of. It bulked in odd places, and flattened out in even odder ones.

Gregor set the photographs out in order: first robbery, second robbery, third robbery, fourth robbery, fifth robbery.

He looked at the figure of the accomplice over time. It was always bulky and distorted, but it was not always bulky and distorted in the same way. He didn’t see why he should think the figure
was
Martin Veer, or anybody else. He didn’t even see why he should think the figure was the same person each time. This was not a body type. Nobody on earth was built to look like that.

Surely, Gregor thought, the Bureau must have thought of this at the time. There had to be some reason why they had fixed on Martin Veer as the accomplice.

He went through Patrick’s notes again, and found it: Once Chapin Waring had been identified as one of the robbers, there were search warrants issued for all six of the kids in that tight little group. In Martin Veer’s house, police had found one of the bags from the Fairfield County Savings Bank—just the bag, not any money, and nothing else.

On the other hand, they had found nothing at all in the houses of any of the others.

Gregor looked around for more, but couldn’t find it. They had found the bag with Martin Veer, and nothing else with any of the others, and they had decided on Martin Veer as the accomplice.

Gregor got up and walked around to where he had dumped his bags this morning when he checked in. The big picture book on the Waring case was lying on the floor near a wing chair. He picked it up and walked back to the other side of the bed to sit down.

The picture book, unlike the case notes from the Bureau, included a lot of photographs of Chapin Waring and her friends that were not in any way connected to the robberies.

Gregor found a caption that identified the group by name, and picked Martin Veer out from that. Then he went back over the rest of the pictures and checked out each one Martin was in. There was Martin at the beach in a bathing suit. There was Martin in tennis whites with a racket. There was Martin sitting at a table with all the rest of them, drinking something in a tall glass.

Gregor went back to the security pictures. He went back and forth.