Blood in the Water(61)
“A mother and a father, at least,” Buck Monaghan said. “There may be siblings. I’m not sure.”
“A mother and a father will do,” Gregor said. “Let’s talk to them. There’s always the possibility that this is something completely unimportant. Maybe the kid had a safe-deposit box because it was where he kept his savings bonds for college money. Maybe he inherited something from a grandparent. Maybe his parents got it for him at birth to keep things like birth certificates and passports in. Let’s talk to the family and find out, and if all that comes up negative, we can start thinking about how to find the bank.”
“Do you think it’s going to be something like that?” Buck asked curiously.
Gregor shook his head. “I’m almost dead certain the key didn’t belong to Michael Platte at all, but we’ve got to check out the obvious. It’s imperative. Then we can get on to the esoteric.”
“Well,” Larry Farmer said, “obvious or whatever, we’re not getting into Waldorf Pines to talk to the Plattes unless we talk to Horace Wingard first, and that’s not going to be a piece of cake.”
2
Gregor Demarkian had counted on having Buck Monaghan with him throughout the investigation. He’d counted on it without ever bringing it fully into consciousness. If he had, he’d have realized that that wasn’t going to be possible. Buck Monaghan was the town prosecutor. He had other work to do. It was Larry Farmer’s business to deal with the policing. And in spite of being called “chief of police,” Larry was not exactly at the head of a huge cohort of law enforcement officers. In fact, as far as Gregor could tell, Pineville Station had no more than two officers for each of its three shifts. There was no homicide bureau, no detective squad, no drug detail.
Larry, unfortunately, was the kind of person who talked, and he talked nonstop all the way out to Waldorf Pines.
“It’s the tax base,” he said, more than once. “That’s what Ken’s so upset about. It’s not the way it used to be, Mr. Demarkian. Everything is about money these days. Everything. And the people who live here, the ones who’ve always lived here, they don’t have a lot of it. It’s people like the people at Waldorf Pines we need to pay taxes. Ken looks around and all he sees is one disaster after another, and you can hardly blame him for wanting to bring in more people who will pay taxes. There’s a rumor that the people who built Waldorf Pines might want to build another one of those things, an even more expensive one. And Ken really wants that.”
“And you don’t.”
Larry Farmer looked away. “No,” he said finally, “I don’t. I keep thinking we got along without money for all this time, we should get along without it now. But here it is, Mr. Demarkian. Right up ahead of us. That’s Waldorf Pines.”
What was actually right up ahead of them was a stone and wrought iron wall punctuated with a stone and wrought iron gate, the words WALDORF PINES sunk into the stone just to the left of the little guardhouse where everybody had to stop before entering. It was much less impressive than Gregor had expected it to be from everything he’d heard at the Pineville Station PD. There had to be thousands of housing developments across the country just like this, with their walls and their gates and their pretensions to exclusivity. Anybody who had ever seen the real thing—who had seen, for instance, Tuxedo Park—knew what was wrong with them.
There was an elaborate ritual to wade through before they could go inside. First they had to stop at the gate. Then Larry Farmer had to present his credentials to the guard. Then the guard had to wave them through and point at the big dark wood clubhouse just to the left. They had barely pulled up to the clubhouse’s curb when a little man came rushing out from inside, waving his hands in the air and going bright red in the process.
“I’ve told you and told you,” the little man said. He wasn’t screaming. His voice wasn’t raised. Even so, there was something about the way he was saying what he was saying that was like a scream. “I’ve told you and told you,” he said again, “I don’t want you on the grounds with a police car. Sometimes it can’t be helped. We can’t do anything about that. But this isn’t one of those times. This isn’t one of those times. I don’t want that thing parked in front where every television news program in Pennsylvania can see it.”
“There weren’t any television cameras out there,” Larry Farmer said as he climbed out of the car. “The whole front gate is clear now, Horace. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”