Gregor did not know what to say to this, but behind him, Larry Farmer was getting restless.
“Here’s the thing,” Larry Farmer said. “Mr. Demarkian? We can’t talk to her like this. It won’t be admissable. We haven’t even read her her rights.”
“We aren’t going to arrest her,” Gregor said.
“Yes, well, I know,” Larry Farmer said. “But maybe that’s just the way it looks now, you know. Maybe later it will be different.”
Gregor didn’t want to say that things would never be so different that Eileen Platte would be arrested for the murder of her son, because things did change. There was always the chance that he was wrong about some of the conclusions he’d already come to. He said nothing.
Eileen Platte was looking out the breakfast nook windows now. “I remember when we bought this house,” she said. “I remember coming to look at it and thinking how much I like this, this octagonal thing. I thought it would be like living in a castle. That was my ambition growing up. I wanted to live in a castle. I wanted to be a fairy princess. I thought that if I could have a wand, I could make all the noise go away. All the noise and all the alcohol.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Eileen looked at her hands. “It’s the same old thing. It’s always the same old thing. But that wasn’t what was wrong with Michael. I knew that from the beginning. I could see into him all along. I just kept hoping it would go away.”
“What’s she talking about?” Larry Farmer demanded. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
Gregor knew what she was talking about. It gave him the answer to a question he had been asking himself for a long time. Did anybody ever see a sociopath for what he was before he really got started? So many people didn’t. Maybe their mothers did.
“I should get work done,” Eileen Platte said, moving to get up.
Gregor put a hand on her arm. “Answer a couple of questions for me before you go,” he said. “Some questions about Michael.”
“There aren’t any more questions to answer about Michael,” she said. “Michael is dead.”
“I know,” Gregor said, “but there are some things I still don’t understand. Like the safe-deposit box key. Did Michael have a safe-deposit box that you know of?”
Eileen looked startled. “A safe-deposit box? Do you mean in a bank? Of course he didn’t have anything like that. If he’d had something like that, he would have used it, don’t you think? He’d have put things in it. Valuable things in it.”
“I don’t know what he would have kept in it,” Gregor said. “There was a key to a safe-deposit box in his clothes when he was found—found—”
“Dead,” Eileen said.
“That’s right, dead. There was the key, but there was no way to tell what bank it was from. We can’t go to look in it if we don’t know where to look.”
“He didn’t have a safe-deposit box,” Eileen Platte said. “I know he didn’t. If he’d had it, he’d have kept his money in it, and he didn’t. He kept it upstairs. He kept it in his closet.”
“A safe-deposit box isn’t a convenient place to put cash,” Gregor said. “It’s usually used for things like important papers.”
“Michael didn’t have any important papers,” Eileen said. “He had a passport, but that’s upstairs on his bureau. Everything is upstairs just the way he left it, except for the shoe box, and I’m not supposed to talk about that. Stephen took it with him to work today. He said if I said anything about it, he would say it never existed, it would be just my word against his, and everybody would believe him. But I was the one who found it. I found it. And I knew where it came from, too.”
“The shoe box?”
“What was in the shoe box. She didn’t bring it in a shoe box. She had a big envelope, a big manila envelope. I saw her. She brought the envelope to the pool house when he was working one night, and I was just coming down to bring him something to eat. Not that he ate anything. He ate less than any other person I’d ever met. I made sandwiches with cream cheese and pimento olives the way he liked them and I took them down there and she was there first. And he took the money out of the envelope and counted it.”
“Money,” Gregor said. “You’re talking about cash? How much cash?”
Eileen bent over and began to pick at the place mat in front of her. “I should have said something at the time,” she said. “I should at least have told Stephen. What was she doing, giving him money like that, and in an envelope? But then, you know, I was just—I wasn’t really sure. Because I saw them there and I didn’t go in. I tried to listen, but I didn’t really hear very much. And he counted and I thought I heard, but then maybe I didn’t hear right. It was hard to know what to do, do you see that? And I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the less I was sure.”