Blood in the Water(80)

The girl shrugged again. “I just thought I’d tell you,” she said. “It’s just retarded, what everybody is saying now. That Arthur Heydreich didn’t kill Michael, I mean. Of course he killed Michael. I practically saw him do it.”

“What?” Gregor said.

“Well,” the girl said. “Okay. I didn’t actually see him. I mean, I saw him, but I didn’t see him kill Michael. Michael was out walking on the green, and Mrs. Heydreich was with him. I could see them from my window. And he came out of the house and sat on his deck. Then he went inside again.”

“Do you even know if he saw them?” Gregor asked.

“Of course he saw them,” the girl said. “Everybody saw them. It’s so retarded, the way everybody acts like they didn’t see anything that night, just because they’re afraid the police will talk to them. It was a lie that Michael had an affair with her. He would never have had an affair with her. I mean, for God’s sake, she was practically a gargoyle. He’s having an affair with the other one though, that Mrs. Bullman. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“She lives in that house over there,” the girl pointed vaguely across the green. She could have been pointing at any house or none of them. “She came out of the house and watched them, and then she went across to the clubhouse. I saw her. She left her kids alone and everything. She was trying to see if Mr. Heydreich was having a drink at the bar.”

“You know that—how?” Gregor asked.

The girl made a face. “I know that because I know what’s going on around here,” she said. “Mrs. Bullman and Mr. Heydreich have been screwing each other like rabbits ever since he got out of jail. I’ve seen them. Actually seen them. That’s who the other body is, in the pool house. It’s Mrs. Bullman’s husband. They had to get rid of him, just like they had to get rid of Mrs. Heydreich, who’s probably buried in the basement or something, or they took her out and dumped her in a river. There are rivers around here. And they had to kill Michael because he knew all about it, and he would never have just let them get away with it.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I see.”

“You don’t have to listen to me if you don’t want to,” the girl said. “I think it’s just retarded the way everybody around here just does whatever and doesn’t think about it at all. You tell me where Mr. Bullman is. You just tell me. I haven’t seen him around since the murders. The two of them got together and killed them, and you’re going to let them get away with it.”

The girl turned on her heel and marched off, her exit made a little less impressive by the fact that the high heels on her impractical shoes kept sinking into the grass of the green.

“Who was that?” Gregor asked Larry Farmer.

Larry Farmer produced one of his signature sighs. “That,” he said, “was LizaAnne Marsh. I think the usual term is ‘piece of work.’”





TWO

1

Susan lost her head. This was not surprising, because Susan always lost her head. Back in the worst of it, when everything was coming apart, when the only thing keeping them alive was being able to think straight—well, Susan hadn’t been able to think straight. Caroline wondered now, as she had wondered then, why she had taken the woman along with her. She could have made her exit on her own with a great deal more ease.

Ah, well, it wasn’t hard to answer that one, Caroline thought. She’d always had her principles. And if they were, as her sons put it, the principles of the Mafia—so be it.

Gregor Demarkian and that idiotic man from the local police department were coming across the golf green. It was getting late in the day for that. The green was raked, and people still played on it well into the fall. Any minute now there would be a couple of old men with their bellies hanging over the waists of their golf shorts, done up in caps with little balls on them, teeing up. Caroline had a sudden shuddering moment of self-awareness. She lived among these people now. She would live among these people—or people just like them—for the rest of her life. It was the one thing she would never be able to forgive Henry for.

Gregor Demarkian and the Keystone Kop were climbing up to the deck. Susan gave a strangled sob and dashed out of the kitchen. Caroline heard her racing upstairs, and then the pounding of feet in the upstairs hall, and then the slamming of a door. She sighed. It was always the same. Time after time. Once, one of the lawyers had suggested that it would be better for everybody if they just drugged Susan into insensibility and stashed her in a closet somewhere until the publicity had died down.