Blood in the Water(98)

The car bumped down into Pineville Station itself. The brick buildings looked uninhabited at this hour of the morning.

The driver started to turn in to the Pineville Station Police Department parking lot, but Gregor waved him off to the other side of the street. He had arranged to meet everybody in Ken Bairn’s office, because getting the explanations out once was easier than getting them out a dozen times. Here was something he didn’t like about consulting: The need to get permission to do whatever it was you needed to do next to make sure the case was solved and solved in such a way that it could be prosecuted. He would have been happier this morning if he could just have gone out to Waldorf Pines himself.

He was getting out of the car in front of the municipal building when its front door opened and Buck Monaghan came out. He looked only half dressed for work, although by now it was close enough to the start of the real day that Gregor thought he should have been perfectly professional.

Buck reached out and took Gregor’s briefcase and his copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer, which was still unread.

“You were in a hurry,” he said.

Gregor got his briefcase back. “There’s always the chance that the murderer may do something stupid,” he said, “although this one hasn’t been stupid yet. Well, in perhaps one point. Is everybody upstairs?”

“In Ken’s office, yes,” Buck said. “Are you going to do a Hercule Poirot and give us the solution? Don’t you need all the suspects together in one room in order to do that?”

“I’m not sure anybody ever really does do that,” Gregor said. “No, this morning, I’m not giving out solutions. This morning, I’m asking for what I need and for some force beyond poor Larry Farmer to help make an arrest. You do have other police officers in Pineville Station besides Larry Farmer?”

“Two, I think,” Buck Monaghan said.

They went up the steps and into the building. Gregor marveled again at what towns had found possible in his childhood and before that they no longer found possible now. They went up to Ken Bairn’s office and found the doors wide open and Delores Martin and Sue Connolly sitting together near the anteroom desk.

Delores looked up and said, “We’re just hoping you’re going to tell us that those people at Waldorf Pines are all murderers and we should lock them up.”

Gregor shook his head and headed back to Ken Bairn’s inner office.

Ken was sitting behind his desk, the chair turned so that he could look out the window into town. Even from here, Gregor thought, it didn’t look like much of a town.

Ken turned around. “Are you going to tell me that everybody at Waldorf Pines is a murderer?” he asked. “I knew when this started that it wasn’t going to do us any good.”

“Everybody at Waldorf Pines isn’t a murderer,” Gregor said. “Only one person is. But that was inevitable. I can tell you one thing that might help your relations with Horace Wingard.”

“What’s that?”

“As I told Larry Farmer last night, he’s operating under an assumed name,” Gregor said. “Not that there’s anything illegal about that, because there isn’t. In the United States, you’re within your rights to use any name you want to as long as you do not do so with an intent to defraud. I don’t think Horace Wingard intends to defraud anybody. He just wants very desperately to be anybody else but who he was born to be.”

“And who was he born to be?” Buck Monaghan asked.

“The son of a working-class father,” Gregor said. “But you do realize, he isn’t the only one. There’s Caroline Stanford-Pyrie and Susan Carstairs. They’re operating under assumed names, too.”

“I knew there was something like that going on,” Larry Farmer said. “That’s why she wouldn’t let me into the house yesterday. I still say you had no right to do what you did there, Mr. Demarkian. Suspects have no right to refuse to talk to the police—”

“Of course they do,” Gregor said. “And you should know that. Anyway, she talked to me when she wouldn’t talk to you, and that worked. And I’d have said nothing about it, except that it isn’t going to matter much in the next day or two. If Horace Wingard hasn’t called the papers to tip them off yet, he will as soon as we’ve made an arrest.”

“Tip them off about what?” Ken Bairn said.

“About the fact that Waldorf Pines is harboring the wife of Henry Carlson Land, the same wife that half of Land’s investors think is hiding most of the money that Land bilked out of investors in his Ponzi scheme. And in case you’re wondering, he’s known pretty much from the day Alison Land showed up. He’s probably been keeping the knowledge in reserve for an emergency, and this is beginning to look like an emergency.”