Blood in the Water(88)

Gregor thought about that, too. In point of fact, he wasn’t sure that there was any one way people behaved when they were guilty. There wasn’t one way that they behaved when they were innocent.

“There are several people,” he said, “who say they saw your wife taking a walk with Michael Platte on the golf course fairly late on the night of the murders. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t believe she was taking a walk with him. She didn’t like him. Maybe they met up on the green and they were going in the same direction. Michael Platte was an oozer. He oozed.”

“Do you mind telling me what you were doing on the night of the murders?”

“I already told it to the police,” Arthur Heydreich said. “I was up at the clubhouse for a while. I played some bridge. I had a couple of drinks. I left around eleven.”

“And?”

“And I came back here,” Arthur Heydreich said. “There isn’t much else to do at Waldorf Pines. Golf, bridge, and sex, the upper-crust suburban dream.”

Gregor thought about it. “You say you came back at eleven.”

“That’s right. Around eleven.”

“That would have been during the time the security cameras were not turned on.”

“That’s not my fault,” Arthur Heydreich said. “I can hardly be held responsible for whatever little incompetencies Horace Wingard has managed to commit now. And trust me. It’s going to turn out to be incompetence. The man is an idiot.”

“Did anybody see you leave the clubhouse at eleven?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you talk to anybody going in or going out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember anybody remark on the time who might remember your being there?”

“No, of course I don’t,” Arthur Heydreich said. “Why should I? I wasn’t on my way to commit a murder. I wasn’t trying to establish an alibi. I was just spending a little down time at the club and when I got tired, I went home. Do you really think that everybody who isn’t intent on slaughter goes around making sure other people remember when and where he comes and goes so they can testify to it afterwards?”

Gregor did not think that, but he didn’t think Arthur Heydreich thought he thought it, either.

Gregor weighed his options. “A couple of people I’ve talked to,” he said, “have suggested that you yourself were having an affair, with a woman named Mrs. Bullman.”

Arthur Heydreich grimaced. “That’ll be our LizaAnne,” he said. “Now, there’s somebody who could blackmail the entire population of Waldorf Pines and make a good job of it. If you think Michael Platte had brains behind his blackmail operation, that’s where to look. LizaAnne Marsh. Our resident cunt.”

“That’s not an answer,” Gregor pointed out.

Arthur Heydreich stood up. Gregor began to think he was not going to answer, and it struck him again that there was no reason why Arthur Heydreich should answer any questions at all.

Then Arthur Heydreich turned away. “I never,” he said, “not even once, in all the time that Martha was here and with me, in all that time I never once had sex with anybody else. What I’ve been doing since I got out of jail is none of your business.”

2

On the way back to the police station, Larry Farmer was in a snit.

“This isn’t the way I thought it was going to work,” he said. “I mean, as a consultant, I thought you’d consult. We’d do the regular police work, and then we’d talk about it with you. Talk about it. You know. We’d gather the evidence and then we’d show it to you and we’d talk about it. I didn’t realize you were going to go around questioning suspects.”

“You couldn’t have questioned this particular suspect if you wanted to,” Gregor said. “He was under lawyers orders not to talk. It’s a good thing I was there and that he’d talk to me.”

“But it doesn’t matter if he talked to you,” Larry said. “It’s not official. You couldn’t testify to it in court. Or could you? I can never get it straight, those rules of hearsay evidence straight. We need evidence, Mr. Demarkian. We need something solid we can bring in to court so we don’t look like jerks. And we do look like jerks. Let me tell you.”

“I need a map of Waldorf Pines,” Gregor said.

“A map of it? Why?”

“So I can keep straight who lives in which house,” Gregor said. “I’ve got notes, and I tried to draw my own map, but I need something more stable, I guess you’d call it. Did you do what I told you to? Did you call the Bureau?”