Blood in the Water(87)

Arthur Heydreich shrugged. “So I’m the first suspect. That’s very nice. I’m on paid suspension at work. I think they were just going to fire me, but the lawyer I’ve got ran interference with that. I think Horace Wingard was going to invoke the no-bad publicity clause, or whatever it is, but he backed off from that, too. So now I’m here, and if you don’t find out who did this, it won’t matter what my lawyer does. I’ll be the man who murdered his wife and got away with it.”

“Did you murder your wife?” Gregor asked.

“As far as I know, my wife hasn’t been murdered,” Arthur Heydreich said. “At least, that was the last news I got. That’s why they let me out of jail and let me come back home. The other body in the pool house was a man. Have they changed their minds about that now?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“The lab results could be faulty,” Arthur Heydreich said, “but if they were going to be, I’d think they’d make them faulty to their own advantage. I used to hear all kinds of things I didn’t believe about police departments using any means necessary to get a conviction, but I didn’t believe it before now.”

“You don’t know where your wife has gone?”

“No,” Arthur Heydreich said.

“Do you think it’s possible that she was involved in a scheme for blackmailing her neighbors?”

Arthur Heydreich blinked. “What are you talking about? Martha wouldn’t blackmail anybody. And she wouldn’t know anything to blackmail anybody about anyway. People around here did not tell Martha secrets. She didn’t fit in that way. She didn’t fit in at all. Maybe if I had realized it before we moved here, things would have been different.”

“Things?”

Arthur Heydreich shrugged.

Gregor had not made anything like a promise to keep Caroline Stanford-Pyrie’s secrets, but he didn’t see any point in giving out information for no good reason at all. He found a way to phrase it that at least didn’t lead to identifications.

“At least one of the people at Waldorf Pines,” he said, “was being blackmailed—heavily blackmailed—by Michael Platte. This person is of the opinion that Michael Platte was not intelligent enough to have thought up such a scheme on his own. This person has also suggested that the person who did think up the scheme, the brains of the outfit, so to speak, was your wife.”

“Ah,” Arthur Heydreich said. “For God’s sake.”

“You don’t think that’s true?”

“I don’t think it’s true that Michael Platte was too stupid to come up with a blackmail scheme on his own,” Arthur Heydreich said. “That’s the kind of mistake people make about people who take drugs. They’re so out of it when they’re high, you think they’re like that no matter what state their minds are in. But Michael Platte wasn’t drugged all the time. He wasn’t drugged even most of the time. And a right little shit he was, too.”

“What kind of a right little shit?”

Arthur Heydreich shrugged, again. “My guess is he knew who was sleeping with who everywhere in Waldorf Pines, for one. I don’t know what Horace Wingard thought was going to happen when he had the pool house closed up for the winter, but I could have told him in advance. Everybody and his sister-in-law was screwing like rabbits over there, and I don’t mean just the teenagers. You wouldn’t believe this place for sex.”

“I might believe it,” Gregor said. “The rumors around are that your wife was having an affair with Michael Platte.”

“I know what the rumors are. That was supposed to be my motive. It wasn’t true. My wife was not having an affair with Michael Platte.”

“Can you really be sure?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. “I know it for a fact.”

“You’re very definite.”

“I have a lot to be definite about,” Arthur said. “Martha was not having an affair with Michael Platte.”

“Was she in partnership with him in a blackmail scheme?”

“No.”

“You’re definite about that, too.”

“Yes,” Arthur Heydreich said, “I am.”

Gregor considered this. Arthur Heydreich was standing in the middle of the breakfast nook. He had been standing there the entire time he and Gregor had been talking. He did not look like he needed to sit down.

“Most people,” Gregor said carefully, “in situations like yours, are more tentative about what they did and did not know before the murder.”

“Are they? Maybe most people are guilty.”