Hearts of Sand(48)

“She could have made a mistake,” Bennis said. “Although I don’t think we should go on calling her ‘she.’ We’ll get in the habit and then we won’t see it when the murderer turns out to be some big guy with a mustache who likes to dress up in women’s shoes.”

“There is no such big guy that I know of,” Gregor said. “There are only two guys in this case, and I haven’t met either of them yet. One is Dr. Timothy Brand. The other is Kyle Westervan. They were two of the six.”

“Two of the six?”

“There were six people in the group Chapin Waring ran around with in those days,” Gregor said. “There was Chapin Waring herself. There was Martin Veer, the one who wrecked the car on the night of the fifth robbery and died in the crash. Then there was Timothy Brand, his sister Virginia Brand, a girl named Hope Matlock, and then Kyle Westervan. All local kids, all in their first year of college. And they’d all been hanging out together since grammar school.”

“I see.”

“The Bureau checked them all out at the time,” Gregor said, “but the conclusion was that Chapin Waring and Martin Veer had committed the robberies together, and the rest of the group didn’t know anything about them. You look at the case notes and start to wonder if it was ever really possible that anybody came to that conclusion.”

“You couldn’t change that conclusion?” Bennis asked in surprise.

“I could change the conclusion,” Gregor said, “but I can’t go back in time and ask the questions I’d want asked and do the checking I’d want checked. Like it or not, there’s going to be a lot of evidence that has disappeared into the mists. And then we’re left with all the same questions we had before, plus the new ones. I keep telling myself to concentrate on what’s been happening here, right now. But not enough has been happening.”

“Well, you do have a dead body.”

“I do have that,” Gregor said. “And that tells me even less than it usually does. I have a dead body and it was stabbed in the back—actually, in the left shoulder blade. The instrument used was a large kitchen knife, serrated, that probably came from the Waring house kitchen.”

“Probably?”

“There’s nothing to say that it did, and nothing to say that it didn’t. It wasn’t part of a set, although it was similar to the ones in the kitchen. That makes the police here think it must have come from outside, but I don’t think so. The house is—the Warings have maintained that house like something in a Faulkner story. They didn’t just not sell the place; they maintained it. They paid ground crews and maids to clean it and keep it up. All the furniture is there and dusted and in perfectly good repair. The kitchen still has all the kitchen equipment in it. The dining room has two large glass display cabinets with china in them. And that’s what I saw without doing a search. I got the impression that if I’d started opening drawers or if I’d gone up to the bedrooms, there would be clothes and bedspreads and everything else all set out and ready to go.”

“And Caroline Holder doesn’t live there?”

“No, she definitely does not.” Gregor sighed. “The knife had no fingerprints on it except those of Chapin Waring, but all that means is that somebody was wearing gloves. I keep trying to visualize the actual murder, and I get nowhere. How did that work, exactly? You have to get up close to stab somebody in the back. And if that person’s back is to you, then he either didn’t know you were there, or he wasn’t expecting you to do anything, or he was running away from you. And if he was running away from you, you couldn’t get too good a stab in anyway. It just goes around and around and around.”

“And you’re still left with thirty years ago,” Bennis said.

“I’m not going back to that again,” Gregor said.

“I don’t blame you,” Bennis said. “If it’s any consolation, I wish you were here. This house is remarkably cavernous and creepy when I’m here on my own.”

“You could go stay with Donna,” Gregor said.

“Donna’s got enough going on without hearing from me,” Bennis said. “Besides, I see her all the time. She decided to decorate this house for the Fourth, and she’s only got until the day after tomorrow.”

“What?” Gregor said.

“She’s only got until the day after tomorrow,” Bennis said. “She wants the whole street to look good for the parade. Then we get pictures in the paper and the Ararat gets more business. So she came over today and wrapped the entire house up in blue crepe paper, and she’s got red and white to do tomorrow.”