Blood in the Water (Gregor Demarkian Novels) Page 11

  “Horace Wingard,” Larry Farmer said.

  “Horace Wingard,” Buck repeated. “He was right in our faces the moment we made the arrest, and he’s been in them ever since. Until today, we were able to fend him off, because we had Arthur Heydreich in jail and the situation looked fairly straightforward. Now nothing looks straightforward, and my guess is that we have maybe an hour or two before he’s back down here ready to clean our clocks. At the very least, he’ll sue the town, and whoever’s hired him will make sure he has the resources to do it. And it won’t really matter if he wins or loses, either. He doesn’t have to win. He just has to bankrupt us.”

  “Waldorf Pines,” Miss Connolly said, without turning around again.

  “You’re here,” Buck Monaghan said, “so that we can be sure that they’ll either back off, or that we’ll have good grounds to recouping our expenses in a countersuit. If you could manage to make the murderer Horace Wingard himself, none of us would mind. But we’re not expecting to be that lucky.”

  FIVE

  1

  Horace Wingard heard the news on the television in his office at the club, and as soon as he heard it he jumped out of his chair and started pacing. Pacing was not good for much of anything, and he knew it, but it was the only thing he could think of. He’d never been under the illusion that he’d be able to get what he really wanted out of all this. That was because the best-case scenario was that no body should ever have been found on the grounds of Waldorf Pines at all. Still, he’d thought the very least he could expect was that the police would be competent at their jobs, the “mystery” would amount to anything but, and the perpetrator would be taken off the grounds and stuffed away in jail as quickly and as quietly as possible. That would be less quickly and less quietly than it might be under other circumstances, but that came with being associated with a place like Waldorf Pines. People were always much more interested in richer people committing crimes than in poorer ones. That was because, with poorer people, crime seemed almost inevitable.

  It took him a few minutes after hearing the news to figure out what was going to happen and why. In the end, there were always two all-important factors: the publicity and the money. The money was always more important than the publicity, but the publicity could cause money, and it could cause it to go away. There were also different kinds of publicity. The publicity about a resident of Waldorf Pines having murdered his wife and her teenaged lover was bad, but it was by no means as bad as it could possibly get.

  He was standing at the window of his office when Arthur Heydreich came into the complex. His window looked out on the golf course, but he had television sets following security cameras along one wall, and he could see the whole scene at the gate. Arthur was not driving his own car. He was being driven by somebody in a battered Ford sedan. Nobody at Waldorf Pines had a car like that sedan. Even the residents who had Fords had big, new, and shiny ones. This thing looked like it belonged to a social worker who lived with the very clients she served in South Philadelphia. Either that, or to a high school teacher who couldn’t quite get a job in a decent neighborhood.

  The car passed through the gate. Horace switched to another monitor and saw the sedan begin the long curving drive around the outside of the complex. He wondered how many people would be out there, standing at their windows, waiting to see what would happen next. It was a small mercy that it was already after the rush hour, and most of the men, at least, would be at work.

  The Ford sedan went out of sight behind a small cluster of trees. Even this late in the fall, some of the trees were still full of leaves, bushy and obstructing. Horace went back to his desk and buzzed Miss Vaile.

  “Could you come in here?” he said. “We have things to discuss.”

  Miss Vaile was an excellent secretary. She was in his office and by the side of his desk in an instant. She carried the notepad she never used. She looked as if hell could overrun Disney World and she wouldn’t have batted an eye.

  “Mr. Wingard?” she said.

  Horace looked across the room at the monitors. He couldn’t really see them from the desk. It might not have mattered if he could, since there was no security camera directly on Arthur Heydreich’s front door. He wondered what it was like over there: Arthur getting out of that awful sedan in the drive; Arthur walking up the steps to his own front door; Arthur going inside. He wondered if women were looking out their windows now. There would be if Arthur went out to the back deck. Somebody would almost certainly be taking pictures.

  Miss Vaile was waiting. Horace had a terrible urge to ask her if her first name was Vicki. Then he couldn’t remember if that was the right way to spell “Vaile.”

  He sat down behind his desk and put the palms of his hands down on either side of the green felt blotter. Miss Vaile continued to wait.

  “Well,” he said. “Have you heard the news this morning?”

  “Yes, Mr. Wingard. I keep the window to the WKVT Web site open at all times when I’m at work.”

  “WKVT is a local station?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Wingard. It’s the local Fox affiliate.”

  Horace Wingard made a face. He had no politics to speak of, but in his mind, Fox was definitely downmarket. Fox was the kind of thing plumbers listened to. Horace would have been happier if Miss Vaile were monitoring NPR.

  He put those considerations aside.

  “Well,” he said. “Let’s see if I have this straight. The police are now saying that the second body in the pool house was not the body of Martha Heydreich.”

  “That’s right,” Miss Vaile said. “The DNA tests came back, and it’s the body of a man, not a woman. So—”

  “Yes, I see. Do the police know who this man was?”

  “Apparently not, Mr. Wingard.”

  “Do we know? Is there a resident missing somewhere? Do we know if any of our families have filed a missing persons report?”

  “If anybody here had filed a missing persons report, we would have heard about it,” Miss Vaile said. “We’ve got that kind of thing very well organized. I can check just to make sure, of course, if you’d like me to. It’s not impossible that with all the fuss there’s been about the murders, some things are falling through the cracks.”

  “Do that,” Horace said. “I take it you don’t think it’s likely.”

  “No,” Miss Vaile said. “I do not.”

  Horace contemplated the situation for a little longer. “The first concern,” he said finally, “will simply be the novelty of it. If the police had just announced that they’d found the bodies of two men in the pool house to begin with, it wouldn’t matter much now one way or the other. News gets old. It’s the switch that will supply the point of interest, because the switch is an anomaly. After we get past that, though, the issues are trickier. The best thing would be to require Mr. Heydreich to move out of the complex. I’ve looked at the residential agreement, and I’m fairly sure that we do have a right, under that agreement, to ask him to go. But I also think it isn’t going to be that simple. There’s always the possibility that he could sue.”

  “I doubt if he could win such a lawsuit,” Miss Vaile said. “This is a private association. We’re entitled to have our own bylaws. And to run by our own rules.”

  “Oh, I know that, Miss Vaile. I know that. And I’m sure that if we asked our lawyers, they’d say the same. But it’s really not that straightforward when you get down to the day-to-day tactics lawyers will use. I presume Mr. Heydreich has a lawyer?”

  “It said in the paper that he had one assigned by the court.” Miss Vaile sniffed. “I don’t know if you could call that a proper lawyer.”

  “I don’t know if you could, either. And I’d be a lot easier in my mind if I thought that the only lawyer Arthur Heydreich was going to have was a public defender. But my instincts say it isn’t going to be that way. Arthur Heydreich can afford a private attorney. We do know that?”

  “Yes, of course,” Miss Vaile said. “I ran a check on his fina
ncials as soon as he was arrested.”

  “And was there anything we could use? Is he in a lot of debt? Does he gamble? Did he have a life insurance policy on his wife?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Heydreich both had life insurance policies, and each of those policies named the other as beneficiary,” Miss Vaile said. “Mr. Heydreich’s policy is for three million dollars. Mrs. Heydreich’s policy is for one million dollars.”

  “That’s standard enough, I suppose, for people around here. And it’s not quite relevant, is it, under the circumstances? Anything else? A fall in the credit score, something?”

  “Not a thing,” Miss Vaile said. “I’ll admit it did surprise me a little. I would have thought that getting arrested for murder would have some impact on your credit score, but apparently the credit reporting agencies don’t follow that kind of news.”

  “Yes, well,” Horace said. “That causes us something of a problem, doesn’t it? We’ve got the legal right to put him out just because he’s been arrested. It doesn’t matter what for, and it doesn’t matter if he’s guilty. We can do that under the clause forbidding activity that would damage the reputation of Waldorf Pines. But having the right isn’t the same thing as having the ability, and having the ability isn’t the same thing as being able to act with impunity. The simple fact is that he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And from what I heard this morning, it’s possible he won’t even be charged with anything.”

  “I think that was what the news said, yes,” Miss Vaile said.

  “There are several different possibilities here,” Horace said, “and they all make us look bad in the short run. And in the long run, too, depending on how they work out. We can make him leave, and he can refuse to budge. Then we’d have to—what? Send the sheriff and some vans out to take possession of his house? How would we do that? It would make an enormous fuss, which is just what we’re trying to avoid. And whether we got him out or not, there would be stories in the press about how we’re taking the law into our own hands and presuming him guilty before he was proven innocent, or however that goes. If he sued on grounds like that, the process could take years. We’d be all over the Internet.”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “And there would be the legal issue,” Horace said. “It’s possible that there is some kind of protection under the Fifth Amendment. It’s possible we’re not allowed to ask him to leave when he’s not been proven guilty.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case,” Miss Vaile said. “The residential agreements are perfectly plain. We may ask anybody to leave if he engages in any behavior detrimental to the reputation of Waldorf Pines.”

  “Yes,” Horace said. “But the letter of the law is one thing, and the real world is another. Do you know what I’d like to know? Do you know the one thing nobody seems to be asking?”

  “What’s that, Mr. Wingard?”

  “If the other body doesn’t belong to Martha Heydreich, where is Martha Heydreich?”

  “I think the speculation is that she’s run off,” Miss Vaile said. “At least, that was what was on the Internet this morning. She committed both the murders, and she’s run off to live under an assumed name. I’m not sure it made much sense, but it’s still early days. We’ll have new theories by tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure we will. But there’s always the most obvious possibility. There’s always the possibility that Arthur Heydreich killed all three of them, and Martha Heydreich’s body is buried in his basement. Can you imagine that? Police vans and forensics teams and all the rest of it, just like before, but going through Arthur Heydreich’s basement.”

  “I think the police already went through Arthur Heydreich’s basement, Mr. Wingard. I don’t think there’s anything to be found there.”

  “Maybe not,” Horace said, but he was thinking, and all his thoughts were nasty. He didn’t care what the police were saying this morning. He didn’t care who the other body in the pool house had been.

  He thought Arthur Heydreich had murdered Michael Platte, at least, and that if he was left at large, he’d murder half of Waldorf Pines.

  2

  Fanny Bullman didn’t think she had ever been as shocked in her life as she was by the way people at Waldorf Pines were behaving toward Arthur Heydreich. She wondered what Charlie would think of it, if he were here. Fanny had always thought of Charlie as the single most upright person she had ever met. It was true, some of the ways things were shaping up looked bad. There were the bodies in the pool house and everything that had gone with them. Fanny could remember standing on her deck and trying to see something of the police going in and out on the morning of the discovery of the bodies.

  Women from all over the complex had come out onto their decks to look. Women Fanny had never seen had gathered in little clutches and cliques to talk about it. And it had looked bad. Of course it had looked bad. There were the two bodies, one of them burned so badly it was unrecognizable. In fact, it was burned so badly, it wasn’t even really a body. Maybe they shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions that way, thinking that it had to be Martha Heydreich who was dead, but then it had made so much sense. If Charlie were here, Fanny was sure he would agree with her, because he always agreed with her, except when he didn’t.

  And lately, of course, he didn’t. He didn’t because he wasn’t here. Fanny could walk around the house and feel him, but he was really somewhere else. Sometimes she wished he’d come back. Sometimes she thought that if he did come back, she would pick up a knife and carve her initials on his face. Those were not times she liked. She wasn’t used to having strong emotions. She didn’t think she wanted them.

  And there were all the other things, too—the fact that Arthur had been right there on the scene, the one who had discovered the bodies and the only one, as far as anyone knew, who had entered the pool house in days. Well, the only person who had done that and was still alive. And then there had been the smell of him. People who went over there after the alarm was sounded, back when it looked like all that was happening was a fire—well, those people said that Arthur Heydreich absolutely reeked of the smell of nail polish, and the accelerant that was used to make the fire burn so quickly was something to do with nail polish.

  Fanny still didn’t think it was right, the way people just assumed that Arthur Heydreich must be guilty of murder. That was not the way it was supposed to be in the United States of America.

  Fanny heard the news on the radio just after she’d dropped the children off at the bus stop. She came into her own kitchen and heard the announcer’s voice doing that breathless “breaking news” thing that sounded as if he were having an asthma attack. She tried to make sense of it and found herself wishing the man would be replaced by a robot, or by anybody, someone who could talk and not sound as if he were having an orgasm.

  When the radio finished, Fanny went to her computer and began to look around the Web sites. The only one that had anything up was WKVT, and it was very sparse. DNA testing had revealed that the unidentified body in the Waldorf Pines case belonged to a man. The police had dropped the charges against Arthur Heydreich in the murder of his wife. There was no news on whether or not they would drop the charges against Arthur Heydreich in the murder of Michael Platte. Fanny had to go back and read the story twice. She thought her head was going to explode.

  There, she thought, sitting at her kitchen table and rubbing her hands together. There. What had she tried to tell everybody? It was wrong to jump to conclusions, no matter how obvious those conclusions seemed to be. You never really knew what was happening until all the evidence was in. People were going to be embarrassed when they realized they had made this mistake. They were going to be ashamed of themselves.

  And what about Arthur Heydreich? He’d been left sitting there in jail for weeks, with nobody to visit him. Fanny had wanted to visit him, but she hadn’t had the courage. She had always lacked courage, all her life. She had always been very se
nsitive to injustice, but she had never been able to do anything about it. It had made her cry, that was all. The people at Waldorf Pines who had been talking about Arthur Heydreich made her cry, too, but there were so many of them, and she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do about them anyway. People were just people. They did what they did, and nothing much ever changed them.

  She saw the strange, ugly car come around the curve when she went out to check her mailbox. It was much too early to check her mailbox, but she was feeling restless and at loose ends. She was at loose ends most mornings, but it usually didn’t bother her. Today, she was finding it hard to stand still.

  She saw the ugly little car stop at Arthur Heydreich’s house and then, a moment later, Arthur Heydreich getting out. He was wearing what Fanny thought of as his “always suit.” She was sure he had more than one of them, but they all looked alike. She couldn’t tell them apart.

  Arthur walked up the driveway and to his front door. He leaned over and picked something up from the edge of the step that Fanny couldn’t see. Then he opened the door and disappeared inside.

  Fanny found herself suddenly, oddly breathless, as if something had sucked all the air out of her world. She went back into her own house and tried sitting down. She tried sitting down at the kitchen table. She tried sitting down on the love seat in the living room. She really could not sit still today, and she couldn’t breathe.