Blood in the Water(64)

“She was an unpleasant woman?”

“She was loud,” Horace said, “and exaggerated. Everything was too much. Too much makeup. Gestures that were too overly dramatic. A voice that could pierce tempered steel, and she was never quiet. Clothes that were extreme in ways that would be difficult to explain if you hadn’t seen them. Violent colors. Evening gowns with constructions that were practically like architecture. Bathing suits that were barely this side of pornographic. A breast enhancement that made her look like Dolly Parton was having an affair with a bicycle pump. Oh, and hats.”

“Hats?”

Horace Wingard nodded. “She always wore hats. Very retro hats, not quite high-fashion hats but aspiring to that kind of area. Things that she had to pin on to get them to stay. Feathers curling under her chin. Little veils. And everything pink. It was like watching a high-fashion runway show where all the models were truck drivers.”

“Truck drivers?”

“She had no grace,” Horace Wingard said. “She was awkward when she moved. She was big boned and tall and outsized in every way, and she moved like she’d been put together with parts. But, you know, that’s the thing. She barged around. She barged in. It was what she did. She was a barger. But at the same time”—he shrugged—“tiny waist. Tiny hands. Even those were exaggerated. They were just smaller than life rather than bigger.”

“I’ve seen two pictures of her, and neither of them were very clear,” Gregor said. “Do you happen to have a better one?”

“I probably gave Mr. Farmer here the pictures he’s got,” Horace Wingard said, “unless Arthur did, of course, and I suppose Arthur might not have been cooperating at the time. She didn’t take very clear pictures. It was surprising, really, because she was the sort of person who liked to call attention to herself. We’ve probably got a hundred pictures of her, and in every one of them she’s either in the back of the crowd or so made-up she might as well have been wearing a mask.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “maybe she was.”

“I don’t think even Martha Heydreich went quite that far,” Horace Wingard said.

“Possibly,” Gregor said. “But what you’ve been describing to me is someone who will be almost impossible to recognize if she stops putting on all that makeup. We’ve got to at least consider the possibility that that was deliberate. It’s possible that Martha Heydreich was intending to disappear all along.”

“And kill two people when she went?” Larry Farmer interrupted. “What do you mean by ‘all along’? Since she’s been living at Waldorf Pines? Since before?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “And I don’t know about either. But I think we should at least consider the possibility that what went on here was not spur of the moment, not even relatively spur of the moment.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been that,” Horace Wingard said. “There must have been some kind of device, or something, to set off the fire. Granted, the police haven’t found that device, but there must have been—”

“It’s not that we didn’t look for it,” Larry Farmer said. “We went through that place with a sieve. Whatever it was must have been destroyed in the fire.”

“You weren’t looking for it at all,” Horace Wingard said. “You thought you knew exactly what you had, and you didn’t look for anything that could disturb your precious little theories. I know how you operate. I have to deal with it every day.”

Gregor got up and began to walk around the office. He didn’t need to listen to the two of them fight. He checked out a bookcase with volumes in tooled black leather. The books actually looked as if they’d been opened. He checked out a marble bust of somebody he thought he was supposed to recognize, but didn’t. He stopped at the window and looked out across the golf course.

That was when two things happened to him at once.

First, he had an idea he should have had before. It was such an obvious idea that he thought he might be going senile not to have thought of it.

Second, he saw a woman walking at the edge of the golf course, making her way to the clubhouse, and recognized her immediately.

He turned back to Larry Farmer and Horace Wingard and asked, “Who is that woman?”

“That?” Horace came to the window. “That’s Caroline Stanford-Pyrie. She lives just down the right side of the course, there, with her companion, if you know what I mean. Not that we’re prejudiced here, of course, but the way these old money women conduct affairs of that kind is truly bizarre, don’t you think?”