“Every day,” Gregor said again.
“The bank keeps an apartment in town. I stay over if I have to work late. My family is here. My friends are here. And New York can be a pressure cooker if you don’t have someplace to go to get away from the insanity. Like I said, lots of people do it. Go up and down the road here and talk to the people in these houses. See how many of them include men who commute to New York.”
Gregor filed it away for future reference. “Did you come here today from New York?”
“Yes,” David said. “I worked up until about three-thirty and then I packed up my things and came on out. I was intending to work at home this evening.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To see how Charlotte was getting on, and what the arrangements were about the funeral. The bank will bring people down on the day. We’ll hire buses. But even yesterday, we weren’t sure when the body would be released. There was no way to plan. I wanted to know.”
“You could have called.”
“I could have, yes, but I thought this would be more considerate. I’m sure Charlotte was sick of phone calls.”
“Did you come down from New York on the night of the party?” Gregor asked.
“I did,” David said, “and so did Tony and Charlotte.”
“Wasn’t Charlotte supposed to be supervising?”
“She was supervising. By cell phone. She had caterers in. They had something on for the night before that Charlotte couldn’t miss, and then Tony had business in the city. It’s this Price Heaven disaster. That was happening even then.”
“Did they bring you down with them?” Gregor asked.
David shook his head. “No, not at all. I worked a lot later than Tony did that day. I had to, and it was Tony’s obligation to be here for Charlotte, not mine. If I’d ended up missing the party or being an hour later, it wouldn’t have mattered. If Tony had done either of those things, he’d better have had a damned good excuse in Charlotte’s terms, and I’m not sure what that would have been. The end of the world and the Last Judgment might have qualified, but I wouldn’t place bets on it.”
“So,” Gregor said. “You came down from New York on the night of the party, and you came down from New York today. And when you got here— what? There are gates, aren’t there? And there’s somebody guarding the gates?”
“There’s somebody, yes,” David said, “and he’s a lot more competent than you think. Tony had a security service. They’re armed. And they’re good.”
“He had this all the time, not just for the party? I thought security was reinforced because the first lady was expected to be here.”
“It was,” David said. “But security around here is always tight, or at least as tight as it can be. What happened the night of the party was that they tried to close off the bridle paths.”
“Bridle paths for horses?”
“Right.” David walked over to the windows and looked out. “All these places, all the properties along this road and the properties behind them, are connected by bridle paths. They have been for over a hundred years. People keep horses. And there’s the Hunt Club, which is on the circuit too. It’s what’s been bothering me for months.”
“Bothering you how?”
“Well,” David said carefully. “Tony had the guard at the gate, armed. And on the night of the party, the secret service closed the bridle paths and patrolled the grounds closest to the house on foot. But Tony didn’t have security people patrolling the grounds every day. Charlotte said it made her feel as if she were in jail, and Tony wasn’t too happy at the idea either. But even if they had had people patrolling the grounds, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the bridle paths would have to have remained open even now.”
“What do you mean, open?”
“The bridle paths are rights of way,” David said patiently. “They go between the properties, and they’re rights of way. People on horseback have the right to use any of them at any time. That’s been a condition of the deeds out here in this section of Bryn Mawr for a century. One of them comes right up close to the house about a hundred yards up the drive. One of them comes around the back near the terrace. You’re sitting back there or standing out here and people you’ve never seen before come lumbering through on horseback. Of course, mostly they are people you know, but you see what I mean. It made a joke of any security Tony installed. Except for the night of the party, anybody could come barging onto this property at any time. It wouldn’t be legal to try to stop him.”