“Beginning to?” Buck Monaghan said.
“Alison Land,” Larry Farmer said. “My God. That must mean the other one is Marilyn what’s-her-name. There have to be a million lawyers looking for those two. But how did you find that out? They’ve been hiding for over two years.”
“They weren’t doing much of anything to disguise themselves except living at Waldorf Pines, which is a place where they wouldn’t be expected to be,” Gregor said. “But then it’s the nature of Waldorf Pines that matters, too, as much as the identity thing. All through this thing, there are too many people pretending to be somebody they aren’t. That’s true of Horace Wingard. It’s true of Caroline Stanford-Pyrie and Susan Carstairs. And, of course, it’s true of Martha Heydreich.”
“All that makeup,” Larry Farmer said. “I kept thinking that must be hiding something. I suppose now she’s wandering around Waldorf Pines, being somebody else, and we haven’t either noticed her.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “the last time she was at Waldorf Pines, she was definitely being somebody else, and you could say that the entire time she was at Waldorf Pines she was somebody else, or at least, like Horace Wingard, somebody other than she had started out to be. But she’s not at Waldorf Pines now. By the way, speaking of people who are or are not at Waldorf Pines, when you did your initial investigation, did you look into the whereabouts of somebody named Charles or Charlie Bullman?”
“I suppose I ought to have,” Larry Farmer said.
“The notes I have from you say that Charles Bullman was away on a business trip on the day you first went to Waldorf Pines to investigate,” Gregor said. “And you were told that by his wife. After that, there isn’t anything at all, which sounds to me like you didn’t follow up. I’ve been told by several people, however, that not only was Charles Bullman not at Waldorf Pines on the day the bodies were discovered, but he hasn’t been there since. At all.”
“Wait,” Buck said. “Do you mean that’s the answer? The other body in the pool house belongs to this Charles Bullman?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Do you remember that I said there were several things that mattered? Let me spell them out. First, nobody in this case is what he or she seems to be, and that includes most of the people we’ve met at Waldorf Pines. That’s true in the usual sense, meaning that people put up a good front for the public, but it’s also true in that a fair number of people there are hiding their real, or at least original, identities. So there’s that, yes.”
“Yes,” Buck Monaghan said.
“Good,” Gregor said. “The second thing to remember is that Waldorf Pines itself is not what it pretends to be. It is not an upper-class gated community. It’s gated, all right, but in fact it’s aimed at the high end of small town and the low end of corporate success. It is not a place for aristocrats. It is a place for people who like pretending to be aristocrats. And that means something very important. It means that the people of Waldorf Pines are not independent. Reputation matters to them in a very real and unequivocable way. Being suspected of a murder, for instance, can get these people fired, or destroy their businesses. So can a lot of other scandals that might not affect them if they were actually what they pretend to be. Michael Platte had a nice little line of blackmail going at Waldorf Pines and that blackmailing is why Michael Platte is dead.”
“The blackmail,” Ken Bairn said. “Not because he was having an affair with Arthur Heydreich’s wife.”
“This was how I was trying to explain it to Larry yesterday. Michael Platte is the key to all of this because Michael Platte’s behavior is the catalyst for what everybody else is doing here. And I don’t mean that it’s the catalyst for the murderer, although it is that. There’s a lot of seriously strange behavior going on at Waldorf Pines, and most of it has nothing to do with who was murdered or why. But it all has to do with Michael Platte.”
“It’s incredible that somebody who was that much of a total screwup could be that effective,” Buck said.
“He was effective because he paid attention, and because he knew what people like his parents cared about. But even so, I’m fairly sure he wasn’t having an affair with Arthur Heydreich’s wife,” Gregor said. “Although I’d be willing to bet anything that it was Martha Heydreich’s safe-deposit box key we found on his body. You’ll have to look into that later. But there’s a third principle here, and you can’t forget it, because it matters. Murderers do not do strange and outlandish things for the hell of it. The real world is not a murder mystery. It’s not even an episode of Law & Order. If there’s some aspect of your case that seems particularly unnecessary and bizarre, the chances are good that there was some need for it to be particularly unnecessary and bizarre. And this case had something particularly unnecessary and bizarre from the beginning. One of the bodies was in the pool, whacked on the back of the head in the standard manner for that kind of thing, dead of drowning because he was alive when he went into the pool. That’s fine. But the other body was burned until it was unrecognizable.”