Blood in the Water(28)

“Not a clue,” Larry Farmer said. His face fell. “I didn’t even think to ask him about it. If he’d touched it, you know, and if it was warm. Because by the time we got there, of course—”

“It would have been stone cold,” Gregor said. “Yes, I see that. What did Arthur Heydreich do after he found the car?”

“He says,” Larry Farmer said, “that he came back into the house and got his cell phone and tried to call his wife. She was supposed to always have the cell phone with her, too. You should have seen the phone. It was bright pink, too.”

“And did she have it with her?”

“No,” Larry Farmer said. “According to Arthur Heydreich, he called her on his cell phone, and then he heard her cell phone ringing in the family room. When he went in there, he found her purse sitting on the coffee table. More pink. Everything was pink. And the cell phone had a ring tone that played ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl.’ Do you know that song?”

Bennis cleared her throat. Gregor ignored her.

“So,” he said. “Now he’s found his wife’s purse. Was everything in it? Her keys? Her credit cards?”

“Everything we know of,” Larry Farmer said. “We’ve got that, you know, under lock and key. Her keys are in it. Her wallet is in it. There’s four hundred dollars in the wallet. Her credit cards are in it. And we did check all of that. He said he thought everything was there, but we double-checked just in case. The wallet had all her credit cards in it, all the ones we could find any mention of her having had out in her name, ever, anywhere.”

Gregor nodded, thinking. “So,” he said, “I have to suppose that once he found the purse, Arthur Heydreich called the police.”

“No,” Larry Farmer said.

“No?”

“He said he didn’t want to jump to conclusions and act like an idiot and cause a fuss. This is Waldorf Pines. There’s supposed to be lots of security. He figured she had to be safe because there couldn’t be anybody coming in from outside to mug and rob her or anything, and besides she’d slept in her own bed so she probably wasn’t out before the sun came up anyway.”

“He didn’t see her go to bed? They didn’t go to bed at the same time the night before?”

“Oh,” Larry Farmer said. “No, he saw her go to bed, or he says he did. He say he takes something to sleep and he never wakes up at night. And you should see this bed. A California king, they call it. You could hold a party in it.”

“Did they?” Gregor asked. “Hold parties, I mean, the husband and wife?”

“Not that I know of,” Larry Farmer said. “You’ve got to meet Arthur Heydreich, you really do. He’s not the kind of person you’d think would do something like that. Although you never know, I guess. Most straitlaced girl in my high school graduating class turned out to be a nudist when she got old enough. People get crazier than you’d believe.”

“I’m sure they do,” Gregor said, “but back to Arthur Heydreich. If he didn’t call the police when he found his wife’s purse, what did he do?”

“He says he did what he always did. He got his things together, got in his car and headed out for work. He figured he’d call in every once in a while during the day, and then if he still hadn’t heard from her by dinner, he’d sound the alarm.”

“That would have been a nice long stretch of time, don’t you think?” Gregor said.

“That’s exactly what we thought,” Larry Farmer said. “That was one of the reasons we were sure he had to be the killer. I mean, who behaves like that? Your wife is nowhere to be seen. Her car is in the garage. Her purse with her keys and her credit cards and a whole wad of cash is lying on the family room coffee table. None of her clothes are gone from the closets, as far as you can see—did I tell you that? We checked the clothes.”

“No, you didn’t tell me,” Gregor said, “but that makes sense.”

“He said it made sense that she wasn’t lying dead and mugged somewhere. I don’t know. It didn’t make any sense to me. And he could be wrong. She had a lot of clothes. There could be clothes missing he didn’t know about or something. And, you know, there has to have been something missing, because she sure as hell wasn’t wandering around the Waldorf Pines golf course in the middle of the night stark naked. Somebody would have seen her. These people spy on each other like those two guys in Mad magazine.”

“What did Arthur Heydreich do?” Gregor asked. “Did he go straight to his office?”