Blood in the Water(72)

“And these cameras were running on the day of the fire?” Gregor asked.

“They were,” Horace Wingard said. “And before you ask, there was virtually nothing to see on them. We do have footage of Arthur Heydreich entering the building, and of Arthur Heydreich going to the door of the locker rooms and opening them. He stepped inside the women’s locker room briefly, but he was out again in no time at all. It’s hard to tell what he was doing, really, but he seems to be just standing there.”

Gregor went to the little entry to the locker rooms. He found himself staring at a small wedge-shaped space. On the left was the door to the women’s locker room. On the right was the door to the men’s. The space itself was tiny. The doors were propped open with wooden door wedges.

“Were the doors open like this on the day of the fire?”

“I don’t know,” Horace Wingard said. “I suppose they must have been. We’ve been keeping them open to make Michael Platte’s job easier. There’s no point in keeping them closed if nobody’s using them, and if they’re open it’s easier for a watchman to hear sounds.”

Gregor nodded. That made as much sense as anything else. “What about the method of setting the fire?” he asked. “The report I saw said that the accelerant was basically nail polish, but it doesn’t say anything about the catalyst. I take it that means nobody found one. There wasn’t debris with the remnants of a timer, a clock, some wires—”

“It wasn’t an explosion,” Larry Farmer said. “It was a fire.”

“Fires can be rigged just like explosions can,” Gregor said.

“If I’d heard anything like an explosion, I’d have come running without hesitation,” Horace Wingard said. “There was nothing like an explosion. Arthur Heydreich said he smelled smoke, and I didn’t believe him, because of course I thought he was just saying what he had to say now that he’d been arrested. But if you think about it, that’s not really implausible. I mean, if the fire had been started much earlier, say half an hour or so before Arthur Heydreich noticed it, well that’s just the way it would happen. It would take a fire a little time to get going.”

“Not if the place had been doused with nail polish,” Gregor said. “And the smell should have been overwhelming. Arthur Heydreich didn’t say anything about a smell?”

“Just the smell of smoke,” Larry Farmer said.

“But the cameras were running here all the time,” Gregor said. “Nobody could have gotten in after Arthur Heydreich to throw nail polish around and set a fire. Unless there’s a back door?”

“There’s the same back door we came through,” Horace Wingard said. “But there are cameras there, as well. Of course, the locker rooms were dark. And there was no camera in the women’s locker room. So if somebody stayed in there all night, and if nobody put on a light—”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I got that part. But whoever came to the locker room should have been caught on the security cameras outside when he left, and nobody was. Which brings us back to what started the fire, because if there was nobody inside to throw a match, and no evidence of a timer device to set the thing off—”

“That’s right,” Larry Farmer said. “I mean, you’ve got to see our point, Mr. Demarkian. We weren’t being sloppy. Nothing else made sense except—”

“Don’t start that again,” Horace Wingard said. “Really, Mr. Farmer, don’t start that again.”

Gregor left them to it and walked out into the cool of the morning air. The little parking lot in front of the pool house was empty and an old man was walking up the road in their direction, looking put out on general principles. Gregor had met old men like that before. He wasn’t interested in meeting another one this morning.

Horace Wingard went off to talk to the old man, and Gregor looked at the arrangement of parking spaces and small paths that surrounded the pool house’s front door.

“Who lives directly there?” he asked Larry Farmer, pointing to the first house on his left. It was the only house right at hand, actually, because to his right was the clubhouse, and it was only beyond that, on the other side of the curve, that houses started on that side.

“That’s the Dunbar house,” Larry Farmer said, making eye movements in the direction of the man talking to Horace Wingard. “He was right on our tails as soon as the first police cars showed up. He likes to contribute.”

Gregor let that one pass. “I’ll have to talk to him eventually,” he said. “You’re sure he didn’t see someone tromping up the green in the middle of the night or something else that might be useful?”