Blood in the Water(26)

“Ah,” Tibor said.

Gregor turned to him. “You know what this is about?”

“Yes, Krekor, of course I know. It was very big news last month, I think. A double homicide. A husband and a wife and a lover. The wife had a lover. The husband killed the wife and the lover. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

Gregor thought, but didn’t say, that it was the kind of case he wouldn’t pay much attention to, because it wouldn’t present much of a challenge. The fact was, that wasn’t entirely true. He paid attention to a lot of crimes that wouldn’t present much of a challenge, because he was always interested in the way people thought and felt and acted. He’d always told himself that if he worked at it long enough, he’d finally understand why people committed murders. He had a feeling that this was not actually possible, but it was a nice goal to aim for.

The little bald man was now bouncing around so much and so fast, he looked like one of those lottery balls whipping around in the bubble before a drawing.

“That’s the thing,” he said, sounding anguished. “We thought the same thing. It all looked so cut and dried. The woman was almost certainly having an affair with this boy. Well, he wasn’t a boy. He was nineteen. I suppose that’s almost a boy. He was the son of one of the other people at Waldorf Pines and he’d had some trouble, lots of trouble, so he’d been expelled from school or something and then he’d got a job watching the pool house while it was closed for renovations. You know the kind of thing. Sit there in a chair all night and make sure nobody sneaks in. Or all day. I can’t remember what his schedule was. I don’t even know if it matters. But everybody we talked to said the same thing. They hung around together, this boy and this woman—”

“Did they have names?” Gregor asked.

“Oh,” the little bald man said. “Yes, of course. His name was Michael Platte. Her name was Martha Heydreich. And there was the husband, of course, Martha Heydreich’s husband. He’s called Arthur. He says it like that, just like that: Arthur. He doesn’t use a nickname. He’s stiff, too. If she was a woman with anything to her, I wouldn’t blame her for having an affair. But then he’s just the type, you know. He’s just the type to kill a wife who’s having an affair. The ones who get all high on their dignity and can’t stand the idea of their name being tarnished or something or the other. I don’t think we were being negligent in assuming what we assumed. We’re a small township. We don’t have the resources you have here in Philadelphia. We don’t have the expertise. But we’re not bumpkins. And I think anybody would have made the same inferences we did, under the circumstances. It just made sense. It is usually the spouse that did it, isn’t it? And in this case, as far as we could see, the spouse certainly had enough motive. But now there’s this. There’s this, and it’s going to get out sooner rather than later. And then do you know what? We’ll make the Philadelphia papers for sure, and everybody who lives in that godforsaken ‘community’ is going to come down on our heads with lawyers, and then I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I hate communities. Anything that calls itself a community is nothing but trouble. And Waldorf Pines only exists to cause trouble.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Do you have a name?”

“Oh,” the little bald man said. “I’m sorry. I’m Larry Farmer. I’m chief of police in Pineville Station.”

“And Pineville Station is—?”

“It’s a small township in Lancaster County,” Bennis said. “Way over at the far edge of it. It’s not really all that far from here. It’s just sort of rural.”

“And Lancaster County is, what?” Gregor said. “The Amish.”

“Oh, this isn’t about the Amish,” Larry Farmer said. “I wish it was. The Amish are easy enough to handle if you understand them. They mostly just want to be left alone, although of course there are all the traffic problems because of the horses and buggies. They had to build a special lane for them on the interstate just to keep people from plowing into them at eighty miles an hour. But that’s just, you know. That’s just a thing. Accommodation, they call it. I don’t mind the Amish. But this is Waldorf Pines.”

“What is Waldorf Pines?” Gregor asked.

“It’s a ‘gated community,’” Larry Farmer said. “God, I hate those, don’t you? Fancy-ass ways of keeping people out, like we were all still in high school again and the dweebs don’t get to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table. It’s got its own golf club, that everybody who lives there has to belong to, and it’s got gates and guards and sensors and all that sort of thing, although they didn’t work in this case, and if you ask me, they never work. Private security guards are a waste of time.”