2
Back in his office at the clubhouse, Horace Wingard was working out—mentally, with nothing on paper—just what it was that could go wrong from the way things were working out now. Horace Wingard did not like the idea of things going wrong that could not be anticipated. He had lived his life heading trouble off at the pass, and he wasn’t about to stop now.
Miss Vaile was out there, sitting at her desk, doing work on the computer while she waited for him. She always waited for him. It was one of the things he had hired her for.
The introduction of Gregor Demarkian into this thing was good on a number of levels, Horace decided. It was especially good because, in the cleanup that was going to have to come after somebody had been arrested, he’d be able to tell new people interested in Waldorf Pines that Waldorf Pines had enough weight in the local community to require them to hire a high-priced consultant in case anything went wrong on the premises. Dealing with the kind of people who wanted to live at Waldorf Pines, it was never a bad move to associate yourself with celebrities. Gregor Demarkian was a bona fide celebrity, even if only a minor one. He had even been on television.
In another way, though, the introduction of Gregor Demarkian was a problem. He was not local. He was not Larry Farmer or Ken Bairn. Horace had known from the moment he was first introduced to the man that Gregor Demarkian was not about to allow himself to be ordered around, and not about to focus his investigation in the direction that was most likely to be good for Waldorf Pines.
Horace didn’t give a flying damn if Michael Platte was dead. He’d wanted the boy off the premises for months. He didn’t care about the identity of the unidentified body, either, because that was likely to be something he would not want associated with Waldorf Pines. He didn’t even care about the strange disappearance of Martha Heydreich. The woman had been an embarrassment to have around.
All that mattered, in the end, was making sure that Waldorf Pines was safe, and that he himself was safe. And that was going to take planning.
He opened the big, deep drawer on the left side of his desk and got out his old-fashioned Rolodex. Everybody else in the universe had given them up, but he still found his useful. He looked through the entries he had for private detectives and discarded each one. He didn’t want to know if a resident’s daughter was having an affair with the son of a Mafia boss or if one of the women was shoplifting at every store from here to Philadelphia. He tried his professional contact list, but he had the feeling that if he asked his man at the FBI about Gregor Demarkian, he’d be told to take a long jump off a short pier. It was difficult, knowing how to approach this.
He drew his phone close to him and called out to Miss Vaile at her desk.
“Miss Vaile,” he said. “That woman Mr. Demarkian is married to. She was, she is—”
“Bennis Hannaford,” Miss Vaile said. “Engine House, on the Main Line. Those Hannafords.”
“Ah.”
“There was a scandal a few years ago,” Miss Vaile said. “One of her siblings, I don’t remember if it was a sister or a brother, anyway, whoever it was, committed a murder. And was executed for it, I believe.”
“And was Miss Hannaford involved?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Ah,” Horace Wingard said again.
“I could get some more information for you, if you’d like,” Miss Vail said.
“Yes, please,” Horace said. “Yes, I’d like that very much. Are Mr. Demarkian and Mr. Farmer still on the grounds?”
“I just saw them come out of the Stanford-Pyrie house. Or, Mr. Demarkian did. Mr. Farmer seemed to be standing on the porch.”
“Fine,” Horace said, although he didn’t feel fine about that at all. “Tell me when they leave, will you? I want to talk to them before they go.”
“Of course, Mr. Wingard.”
Horace put down the phone. There had to be something, somewhere, to get this thing moving in the direction he wanted it to go.
Because the bottom line was simply this: Once the initial shock of the publicity was over, the deaths of those two people in the pool house and the disappearance of Martha Heydreich were not necessarily a bad thing. He was rid of two people he hadn’t wanted around anyway, and the publicity was already fading into legend.
Horace Wingard could handle a legend.
What he couldn’t handle was round two of a world-class scandal.
THREE
1
Larry Farmer was waiting on the deck when Gregor came out, feeling a little stunned by the entire conversation—or maybe by the entire situation. It didn’t help that Larry was jumping around like a six-year-old who hasn’t been allowed to play recess games.