Blood in the Water(36)

“No,” Bennis said, “not that kind of wrong person. I mean they don’t want to think that the person who is really guilty is the richest guy in town, maybe, or the mayor, or somebody else they would rather not arrest. I don’t think they’re going to call you in if they think the perpetrator is the local high school drug dealer. They bring you in when the murderer is going to be somebody—normal.”

“I don’t think murderers are normal,” Gregor said. “I never did buy that thing about how any one of us could be a murderer under the right circumstances. Most of us could be killers, yes, but that isn’t the same thing.”

“You’re not really going to give me one of those lectures about the fundamentally altered mind of the murderer,” Bennis said. “I mean, the first time I heard you give one of those was the week after we met, and that was—”

Gregor sat in Larry Farmer’s car and thought that his theory was fine as far as it went, but that he’d never developed it to the point of determining how you could recognize such a person when you first met him.

Larry Farmer had pulled up right outside the Pineville Station Police Department’s front door. It wasn’t much of a police department as far as Gregor could see, but the departments that hired him almost never were. Larry Farmer looked around a bit and then sighed with relief.

“That’s all right, then,” he said. “I was sure we’d already be inundated. It’s just the kind of thing, you know. There’ll be trucks down here before the day is out. It’s been enormous news locally for weeks. This is going to make it worse.”

Gregor sat where he was, without moving. Larry Farmer didn’t seem to be moving, either.

“We’re going to want to call a press conference,” Larry Farmer said. “I hope you don’t mind, but it’s absolutely vital. We can’t be seen as just sitting on our rear ends or not doing something to repair the situation. Especially now that we seem to have made such a mess of it. There’s going to be a lot of local publicity and there’s going to be a lot of, well, people.”

“People?”

Larry Farmer shrugged.

Gregor leaned back a little. “My wife says that people hire me when they know who committed the murder, but it’s somebody they don’t want to take the responsibility of arresting. That they call me in to take the heat when the murderer turns out to be the mayor.”

“Oh, the murderer isn’t the mayor,” Larry Farmer said.

“I wasn’t suggesting he was,” Gregor said. “I was trying to find out if that was why you had hired me. To take the heat of the publicity which you know is going to be bad.”

Larry Farmer squirmed. “Is that unacceptable? Would you be unwilling to work for us if that was what we wanted? Because, I have to admit, Mr. Demarkian, the publicity is an issue. The publicity and the pressure. There’s going to be a lot of pressure, because it’s Waldorf Pines. And we haven’t talked money yet, but I’ve heard about what you charge. You’re not cheap. I don’t think I could justify your fee if it wasn’t for the problem with the publicity. And, you know, the pressure.”

“I’ve got nothing against taking the heat with the publicity,” Gregor said, “but I do think that if you’ve got a good idea who did this and why, or even just who, that it might save us both a lot of time if you just told me now. Making me stumble around until I stumble on the obvious just wastes time. And even if you’re wrong, knowing who you suspect and why is useful information.”

Larry Farmer fluttered his hands in the air. Everything about the man fluttered.

“But that’s the thing,” he said. “That’s the thing. You know who I suspect? Arthur Heydreich. Or at least, I would have suspected him if that body in the pool house had been his wife. What would you think? Here’s a man found right at the scene with two dead bodies. One is definitely the body of the kid who was screwing his wife, or at least who everybody said was screwing his wife. The second was unrecognizable but, you know, arguably—”

“It made sense to expect it belonged to the wife,” Gregor said. “We’ve been over this before.”

“Now I don’t know what happened, or why,” Larry Farmer said, “The kid who’s dead? The body we can identify? Well, he belongs to a Waldorf Pines family. He was a first-class screwup. His parents bought him out of some legal trouble on and off, and he got expelled from college for something drug related. But dead in the pool with his head bashed in from behind? Who would do that? He wasn’t a major dealer. He didn’t know anybody who was, that we can tell. His parents moved to Waldorf Pines after he left for college. And I refuse to believe all that nonsense about the Marsh girl. It’s ridiculous.”