Blood in the Water(86)

“You really shouldn’t do that,” he kept saying, as Gregor began to walk across the golf green.

“I shouldn’t walk on the golf green?”

“You shouldn’t talk to suspects like I’m not here. That’s not part of the agreement. You’re supposed to be consulting. I need to know things.”

“You don’t need to know that,” Gregor said. “Caroline Stanford-Pyrie isn’t your murderer.”

“You know that for sure? How can you know that for sure? And she’s done something. I can tell. I may be a hick town sheriff, but I can tell.”

“I want to see Arthur Heydreich,” Gregor said.

He looked up and down the length of the golf course. The houses were not the same and yet the same all at once. It made him crazy.

Larry hurried up from behind—somehow, Larry was always hurrying up from behind—and pointed at a house that was nearly all the way around the circle from the clubhouse. Gregor nodded and headed for it.

“You can’t just go barging in there,” Larry said. “You need a warrant.”

Gregor was about to say he didn’t have time for a warrant, but it felt like a waste of breath. He cut across the green to Arthur Heydreich’s house and rang the doorbell. The sound that came from inside was out of tune and echoing.

“Suspects won’t just talk to anybody,” Larry Farmer said. “It’s not like television.”

Arthur Heydreich opened the door and looked Gregor Demarkian straight in the face. He looked—untidy. His hair was uncombed. His shirt was twisted on his body. He looked like a man who just didn’t care anymore. Or wouldn’t, when he had a chance to think about it.

“Ah,” Arthur Heydreich said. He did not bother to notice Larry Farmer.

“I’d thought I’d ask if I could talk to you,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Arthur Heydreich made a face. “I didn’t think there was anything to talk about,” he said. “The police arrested me. They were wrong. Now I’m not arrested anymore.”

“Well,” Gregor said. “Your wife is still missing. There’s that.”

“Is there?” Arthur Heydreich said.

Gregor knew the signs. Heydreich’s lawyer might have been a public defender, but he obviously wasn’t one of the violently stupid ones you sometimes read about in cases that went to appeal. He must have told Arthur Heydreich not to talk to the police, and not to talk to reporters.

Gregor cleared his throat. “I can stand here forever. Or I can stand in the road. We could probably work up an audience if I stayed here long enough.”

Arthur Heydreich shrugged. Then he looked straight at Larry Farmer and said, “Not you. And don’t tell me it can’t be done. I don’t have to talk to the police if I don’t want to. I never did have to talk to you.”

“This can’t happen,” Larry Farmer said.

But it was the same here as it had been at Caroline Stanford-Pyrie. Maybe, Gregor thought, it was part of the Waldorf Pines mystique. Maybe all these people thought they were too important to talk to the local hick town fuzz.

“It’s not like the neighbors don’t know what’s going on,” he said, leading Gregor back through the house down a central hall. “Everybody knows what’s going on. While I was in jail, the Pineville Station Police Department made themselves famous all over the county telling people I was the only person who could have committed two murders. The place is a mess. I don’t care if you mind or not.”

The place was indeed a mess, the kind of mess that happens when nobody bothers to so much as pick up a dropped napkin off the floor for days on end. Gregor was fairly sure this was not the way the house could have looked before Arthur Heydreich was arrested. He was also a little surprised to think it could have gotten into this state in only two days. Under the debris, it was more or less the same open space as the one Gregor had just seen in Caroline Stanford-Pyrie’s house. The houses, then, were only dissimilar in their cosmetics.

Arthur Heydreich looked at the pile of dishes in the sink and the boxes from frozen food on the floor and said, “The maid left while I was in jail. Not that you can blame her. She’d been hearing for weeks that her boss was a vicious homicidal maniac who killed people wholesale and then burned them up. I wonder what they would have done if I hadn’t seen that smoke and gone to investigate.”

Gregor leaned up against the counter. It looked like the only clean space in the room. “They probably would have done the same,” he said. “It’s standard procedure. The husband is always going to be the first suspect.”