“Are you in the office all the time?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Horace admitted.
“And is your office locked when you’re not in it?”
“It is if the club is open when I’m gone,” Horace said.
“Were you gone on the night of the murders?”
“No,” Horace said.
“Were you in your office the entire time?”
“No,” Horace said again.
“Was Miss Vaile in her office?”
“Miss Vaile had gone home,” Horace Wingard said. “But—”
“Where is the master switch for the security system in your office?”
Horace Wingard looked about ready to spit. “It’s just inside the inner door,” he said, “and yes, please, don’t tell me. Anybody could have gone in there while I was walking around on my own that night. But it would have been taking a chance. It would have been taking a very big chance.”
“It seems to me that we have somebody who murdered two people on a night when there were any number of other people wandering around. Whoever it is doesn’t sound to me like somebody who would be averse to taking chances,” Gregor said. “Let’s get back to where we were. On the day after the murders, the day when the bodies were discovered, there wasn’t anybody on this walk?”
“I was on this walk,” Horace Wingard said. “I came out this way when I was first informed there was a fire. As you must have noticed, this door is very close to my office. I came out to see what was going on.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
They went into the pool house by the back way, through a tangle of wires and repair material and past large machines that probably did things like run the lights and power the heat in the pool. They came out at the pool itself, a great concrete mass painted blue and now drained entirely of water. There was no sign that there had ever been a body in it. The sight of it made Horace Wingard fuss.
“The police drained the water,” he said. “I don’t know what that’s going to mean with the repair people, because of course we haven’t been able to get anything done. We thought we’d have access back by now, of course, but then there was that terrible mistake, and now we’re back to having a crime scene on the premises. I think it’s ridiculous, if you want to know the truth. Why do you have to close off an area for months at a time, just because a crime was committed there? You wouldn’t do it with the Grand Concourse at Grand Central Station. You wouldn’t do it with a street corner. And yet, here we are.”
“We were just being careful,” Larry Farmer said. “And you should be glad we were. Think what a mess we’d be in now if we weren’t.”
“You’re already in a mess,” Horace Wingard said acidly.
Gregor walked around the pool, very slowly. “It was full of water,” he said, “regular pool water? Chlorine? That kind of thing.”
“Of course,” Horace Wingard said. “If you don’t put chlorine in the water, you get … scum.”
“And Michael Platte drowned,” Gregor said. “He was alive when he went into the water. We know that because there was blood in the water, and water in his lungs. Those things are in the reports.”
“We went over all this before,” Larry Farmer said. He sounded exasperated.
Gregor shook his head. “I’m just trying to get some things straight in my mind. Michael Platte was hit on the back of the head hard enough to at least potentially kill him. What with? Have you any idea?”
“There are a lot of ideas,” Larry Farmer said, “but you know the kind of thing we’re talking about. A shovel. A rock. We haven’t found anything with blood on it yet, if that’s what you mean.”
It wasn’t quite what Gregor meant, but he let it go. The pool was an ordinary pool, “Olympic-sized” as the saying went, but without the bells and whistles you’d find in a more expensive place. There were no waterfalls. There were no side pools with hotter water.
Gregor walked the length of the pool to what had to be the “front” of the room, the doors leading out to the foyer and the place where residents would enter if they wanted to swim. He looked around the ceiling.
“There are cameras here?” he said.
“Yes.” Horace Wingard was hurrying to catch up. “In three places, including one aimed at the door to the outside, one aimed at the pool room door, and one aimed at that door that leads to the locker rooms. There is also a camera inside the men’s locker room, but not one inside the women’s because—because women—”