Blood in the Water(41)

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 financials 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.”