Blood in the Water(54)

He found the entry that said “Farmer, cell,” and punched it. He listened to the ring and wondered what Larry Farmer was doing at this hour of the morning. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. Larry Farmer could be in the shower. He could still be asleep. Gregor didn’t care.

The phone rang long enough so that Gregor began to get worried that it would go to voice mail. If it did, he would simply call it again, and not worry for a moment that he was disturbing someone. Still, voice mail was a nuisance, and calling again was a pain.

The phone was finally picked up, and Larry Farmer sounded as bouncy and perky as he ever did. Gregor gave a brief thought to the idea that Larry Farmer was bouncy and perky when he slept.

“Mr. Demarkian!” Larry Farmer said. “Good to hear from you! Are you here already? I can get right out to the station—”

“I’m in a car on the way,” Gregor said. “I just found something. It’s in the scene of crime notes from the morning when the bodies were discovered, but it’s not in the Buck Monaghan notes for the prep for the prosecution. I have no way of knowing if Buck Monaghan even has this information at all. And that makes me nervous.”

“Really, Mr. Demarkian, we’re very careful to give Buck all the information we have. And he insists on it. He says that if we don’t give him all the information, we’re just asking for the defense to be able to pull something on us at trial. And he’s right, you know, he’s really right. I don’t know what defense lawyers do these days, but they think of everything. Even the public defenders do that. And the kind of lawyer that would be hired by somebody at Waldorf Pines, well—”

“Didn’t Arthur Heydreich have a public defender?” Gregor asked.

“Well, yes, he did, but that was only temporary,” Larry Farmer said. “He’d have gotten a better one eventually. We all knew it.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “Listen very carefully. I have here a piece of paper with the notes from the scene of the crime on it. It includes a list of things found in Michael Platte’s pocket when he was fished out of the water. You got that?”

“Yes, of course. I remember that. I was there when it was done.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “The list includes keys, a wallet with fifty-two dollars in it, some loose change amounting to ninety-three cents, a condom still in its wrapper—”

“They all have condoms these days, did you ever notice that, Mr. Demarkian? We never had condoms, not even in college, nobody would give us any. Now they have condom dispensers in the men’s rooms at these places. Anything for safe sex.”

“Back to the list,” Gregor said. “He had a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The lighter was a standard Bic. Got all that? Okay. Now go back a little, to the keys. The officer very carefully described each of the keys. He’s got two house keys, both identified later and noted as being to his parents’ house at Waldorf Pines. He’s got a trunk key and an ignition key to his own pickup truck, also identified later. Then there are a little collection of keys that are described and not identified. Most of them are irrelevant to anything. One of them sounds like the key to his dorm room at college. He was almost certainly supposed to return it before he left, but he wasn’t the world’s most responsible person, so we won’t worry about it. It’s got the college’s name on it. There’s another one labeled U.S. Post Office. That will be to a post office box. I don’t suppose anybody has checked that out, what post office he had the box in, here or at college, what he used it for, anything like that?”

“Oh,” Larry Farmer said. “No, no we didn’t. We could, of course, I can see how it might seem significant now—”

“Yes, it’s definitely significant now,” Gregor said, “and it definitely ought to be checked out. But the one I can’t believe is this one. ‘Silver, two inches, bulbed hold, four prongs.’”

There was silence on the other end of the line. “I remember that,” Larry Farmer said. “But there was nothing on it to say where it was from. And it didn’t look very used. I remember that, too. What could that possibly have to do with anything?”

“Did you keep the keys?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, of course we did. We kept everything. We explained to Mrs. Platte that she couldn’t have them until the case was finished because we might need them for evidence, although I do have to admit that I don’t see how any of that could be important.”

“Did anybody show that key to Buck Monaghan?”