Blood in the Water(27)

Gregor could think of cases when private security guards were not a waste of time, but that didn’t seem to be the right thing to say here. He moved over a little on the bench and motioned to Larry Farmer.

“Sit down,” he said. “And try to take this from the beginning.”

2

Maybe the problem was that Larry Farmer didn’t know how to take anything from the beginning. Maybe the problem was just that he was so deeply immersed in his “mess” that he didn’t realize that everybody else in the world wasn’t just exactly as immersed, so that all the details he needed to explain sounded to him like things everybody knew.

Whatever it was, Larry Farmer was a lot more organized about his breakfast than he was about the case he was nearly in a panic about. When Gregor gave him the opportunity to order breakfast, he ordered it, in quantity. His platter ended up being larger, and more complicated, than Gregor’s own.

Gregor waited for a while, watching Larry Farmer shoveling it in. Considering the way the man ate, he should have been at least a hundred pounds overweight. As it was, Gregor didn’t think he was overweight at all, just sort of naturally spherical.

Gregor waited until Larry Farmer showed some signs of slowing down. Then he said, “Let’s try the beginning again. There was a double murder.”

Larry Farmer sat back a little and stared at his plate. “It was about a month ago,” he said. “Exactly a month ago, I guess. October fifth.”

“That was when the murders happened? Or when you discovered them?”

“Oh, there was no lag in discovery,” Larry Farmer said. “We discovered them right away. That’s because the pool house caught on fire. And according to Arthur Heydreich, he noticed it. So he went in, you know, and found the bodies. One of the bodies. The body of Michael Platte was in the swimming pool and there was blood in the water. That was because he was hit on the back of the head with a blunt instrument. We’re pretty sure about that.”

“All right,” Gregor tried again. “So it’s, what—evening, morning, what?”

“A little after eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Very good. And this Arthur Heydreich—”

“Well, that’s the thing, you know,” Larry Farmer said. “We just all assumed he was lying, but then maybe he wasn’t. I mean, the way things worked out—”

“We’ll get to the way things worked out in a minute,” Gregor said. “It’s the morning of October fifth. What happened?”

“According to Arthur Heydreich,” Larry said, “he got up, and his wife wasn’t on her side of the bed, but he wasn’t really worried about it. Martha Heydreich is one of those women who are always on a lot of committees. You know the kind of thing. He said he woke up and saw her side of the bed empty but all crumpled up the way it was when she’d slept in it, and he didn’t think anything of it. He got dressed for work and came downstairs.”

“What does he work at?” Gregor asked.

“Some financial firm in Philly,” Larry Farmer said. “And yes, it’s quite a drive, but a lot of the people who live in Waldorf Pines work in Philly. And I’ve heard of people who live Philly and commute to New York, so maybe I don’t know about commutes. I don’t understand people, Mr. Demarkian. I really don’t.”

“Well, don’t worry about it for the moment,” Gregor said. “Arthur Heydreich woke up in the morning and found that his wife was not in bed but that her side of the bed had been slept in. He took a shower and got dressed for work. Then what?”

“He went downstairs. The maid was already there. A woman named Cortina Sanchez. That’s when he found out that his wife wasn’t down for breakfast, either. This Cortina Sanchez thought she was still upstairs asleep. Then it turned out that her car was still in the garage, but he wasn’t worried about that, either, because the committees she volunteers for are usually with the golf club. They’re right there in Waldorf Pines. He thought she’d just decided to walk for once. It was a nice day, that kind of thing. You know.”

“And was she in the habit of doing that? Walking on the grounds of the club rather than taking her car?”

“Not on your life,” Larry Farmer said. “She had this car, it was one of those two-seater sports things, painted bright, glaring pink. Neon-electric-bust-your-eyeballs pink. According to everybody we talked to, she drove that car everywhere. She drove it just to go next door. She even had vanity plates on it. ‘GRLPWR,’ or something like that.”

“All right,” Gregor said, “so the car was in the garage. Do you know if it was warm? Had it been driven anywhere recently.”