“Somebody will call it in,” Horace Wingard said. “They’ll have seen you, and they’ll call it in. You’ve got to get that car out of sight somewhere and you’ve got to do it now.”
“This is as out of sight as it’s going to get,” Larry Farmer said. “We need to use a car. This is Mr. Demarkian, by the way. Last I heard, you thought it was a wonderful idea for us to hire him.”
“I thought it was a wonderful idea for you to hire someone,” Horace Wingard said coldly. “You don’t have the capacity to investigate a crime of this complexity. I did not say I thought it was a wonderful idea for you to hire him. The man is a publicity hound. He’s on television more than Paris Hilton.”
“He’s the best there is,” Larry Farmer said. “You told Ken you wanted the best there is.”
“I’m going to call Mr. Bairn right now,” Horace Wingard said. “You can’t get away with this. You can’t ruin the reputation of Waldorf Pines. This is a quality complex.”
“Last I heard, your quality complex had two dead bodies in it, and a missing person who’s either the murderer or dead herself under a tree somewhere.”
Horace Wingard managed to go a little redder. Then he turned on his heel and marched back into the clubhouse. He was wearing shoes with heels on them. They were very discreet heels. They couldn’t be mistaken for cowboy boots. Even so, they were heels.
“Asshole,” Larry Farmer said.
Farmer started toward the clubhouse door, and Gregor followed him. The drive he was walking across was gravel. The front doors of the club were double doors, and wider than standard ones at that. The foyer just inside was heavy with wood and beams. It was as if someone had tried to replicate a golf club from the Twenties—or, more likely, the fantasy of a golf club from the Twenties from a movie made of The Great Gatsby.
Horace Wingard was in an office to the left of the front doors. The door to that office was open, as was the door to the anteroom office that opened onto the foyer. There was a tall, thin, youngish woman in the anteroom office, sitting at a desk at a computer and behaving as if she couldn’t hear her boss in spite of the fact that he was now actually yelling, and at the top of his lungs.
Gregor bypassed Larry Farmer and went in. “How do you do,” he said to the secretary at the desk. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”
“I have seen you on the news,” the secretary said. “I’m Miss Vaile. I’m sure Mr. Wingard will be out in just a moment.”
“If he doesn’t give himself a heart attack with the way he’s behaving,” Gregor said.
Miss Vaile looked through the door to the other office and shrugged. “It’s been a strain, all this happening at Waldorf Pines. It’s been a strain on all of us. I’m sure you must realize this is not the kind of thing Mr. Wingard is used to.”
“I take it there’s not a lot of crime at Waldorf Pines,” Gregor said.
Miss Vaile hesitated just a second too long. “I suppose it depends on what you mean by crime,” she said, “but this kind of thing, violence and thuggery, no. That’s what our people come to get away from. The world has become a violent and insecure place.”
“I’m afraid I don’t really see that,” Gregor said.
There was the sound of a phone receiver being slammed into an old-fashioned cradle, and then Horace Wingard was with them once more. He was not so red, but he looked as if he was sweating. Gregor thought that this was probably going to turn out to be Horace Wingard’s biggest dissatisfaction with himself: the fact that he sweat easily and heavily, and apparently could do nothing about it.
He marched past Miss Vaile’s desk and planted himself in front of Larry Farmer, almost as if Gregor wasn’t there.
“Come on in,” he said. “And Miss Vaile, please bring your pad. I want a record of everything we say here, and I intend to use it.”
3
Horace Wingard’s office was just what Gregor had expected it to be. It was so much what it ought to have been, Gregor got the impression that it had been staged. Horace himself was so much what he ought to have been that Gregor felt that he was staging himself, and he filed the observation in the back of his mind for later.
Horace sat down behind his desk and looked at the both of them. He didn’t ask them to sit. Gregor sat down anyway. Horace Wingard made a face.
“I presume,” he said, “that you have come here because you have something to report. I expect you to have a great deal to report.”
“We came because we need to talk to the Plattes,” Larry Farmer said. “Mr. Demarkian here had found something we need to ask them about.”