“He complained that somebody had thrown a garden hose on his deck on the night in question,” Larry Farmer said, “but our guys looked at it, and I think they even took it into evidence just in case, and I don’t think there was anything remarkable about it. It was a garden hose. There are dozens of them around here. They use a lot of them on the green.”
“In October?”
Larry Farmer shrugged. “They’re coiled up around the spigots, that’s all. Maybe somebody threw it and maybe they didn’t. It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody did. He’s a pain in the ass, Walter Dunbar. Somebody ought to do something about him.”
Gregor went back to looking at the front of the pool house.
He could think of at least one way for that fire to have been set, but it wasn’t an explanation that made a lot of sense.
2
They could have driven from the pool house to the Platte house, but the more Gregor looked at Waldorf Pines, the more he wanted to see of it. It was an interesting arrangement of buildings. The clubhouse was situated at the front gate not only because it could then be seen from the road, but because it was the single most impressive building of the bunch. The pool house, being hidden, was much less so. Both were more flash and splash than substance.
But it was the houses themselves that Gregor found most interesting, and especially the way they were arranged around the green. Gregor didn’t know a lot about golf, but he was fairly sure that most first-class golf courses were more expansive than this, with rolling meadows and little copses of trees and bumps and water among the grass. This was a more or less flat space, with little flags where the holes were supposed to be, but small enough that Gregor could see across the whole thing from where he was standing. The houses sat strung out along the edge of it like so many hulking bogeymen under the bed. They looked both massive and oppressive, as if they had been built to make people feel insecure about themselves.
Horace Wingard came up to where Gregor was standing and looked proud of himself. “It’s a wonderful design, don’t you agree? It’s not the kind of course that would do for professionals, of course, but we don’t want professionals here. This is supposed to be a place for people to relax.”
Gregor thought he’d be better able to relax on the New York City subway at rush hour than he could in a place like this, but he didn’t say so. He looked down the green past the house he now knew was Walter Dunbar’s.
“Where’s Arthur Heydreich’s house?” he asked.
Horace Wingard pointed almost directly across the green. The Heydreich house was not the first one next to the clubhouse, and it wasn’t the second. It was about a third of the way down the road. It had a big deck that snaked around both sides of it, complete with Adirondak chairs.
“It’s a one-way road,” Horace Wingard explained. “You come in at the gate and you go right, which would take you past Arthur Heydreich’s house immediately. Then, if you want to go out again, you have to come all the way round here and exit to the left. We discussed making the thoroughfare two-way, but we thought it would result in much too much confusion in the mornings. Our residents work, you understand, in jobs that make very heavy requirements of them. Most of them are up and out long before they’d have to be with ordinary nine-to-five routines.”
“And Arthur Heydreich was up and out that morning? The morning of the fire?”
“He was on his way to work when he discovered it, yes,” Horace Wingard said.
Gregor shook his head. “Where is Michael Platte’s house?”
Horace Wingard counted down from Arthur Heydreich’s and stopped on one nearly in the middle of the opposite line. There was a curve in the green. Gregor was fairly sure that nobody could get from Michael Platte’s house to Arthur Heydreich’s house, or vice versa, without being in full view of other surrounding houses. Getting from Arthur Heydreich’s house to the pool house was something else. The big problem would be the clubhouse. If that was shut up for the night, you could go by the path at the edge of the green and stay close to the buildings and be in and out without anybody being able to see anything.
But would anybody want to do that? Assuming your objective was to kill two people in the pool house, why would you necessarily go around that way to begin with? Especially since the security cameras were off. And they were off from … Gregor reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out his notes. Ten forty-five and twelve thirty. That was the middle of the evening, a time when there would be lots of people out and around, even on a work night. There would be people in the clubhouse. There would be people on decks, even in this weather. There would be people on the road. Why go through all the trouble of sneaking around on the edge of the green when sneaking could not keep you from being seen no matter what you did?