Hearts of Sand(49)

“The Fourth of July is the day after tomorrow.”

“Last I checked,” Bennis said. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I put it entirely out of my mind. I mean, I did and I didn’t. Everybody has been talking about the Fourth, and I kept thinking it was somewhere in the distance.”

“It is,” Bennis said. “It’s the day after tomorrow.”

“That’s not nearly distant enough.”

2

Later, when Darlee Corn had been in to pick up the plates and bring him a glass of brandy, Gregor sat on the edge of the big old-fashioned bed and tried to get it all straight in his head. The Fourth of July meant a day of no real work, so he would have to revise his tentative schedule. It might even mean that he wouldn’t be able to get out and look around. He had no idea what Alwych did on the Fourth. He didn’t mind fireworks, if they were handled by professionals. He was generally in favor of celebrating the Fourth, but what he wanted for a celebration was a big barbecue out somewhere that also had a pavilion, and then he wanted it to rain so that everybody had to go indoors.

Gregor was not much in favor of eating outside.

He got up off the bed and began to pace. He expected a phone call any minute, telling him the people below him had complained. He stopped and looked at his laptop for a while. He scrolled through notes about the bank robberies, the money, the murder, everything that might be connected to this case.

He brooded a little about what he meant when he thought about “everything” that might be connected to this case. Did anybody at all know what “everything” meant here?

He got out Patrick’s diaries and went through them, page after page, not knowing what he was looking for. He read through long passages of what was essentially angst, of Patrick not being able to figure it all out, of leads that went nowhere and ideas that turned out to have nothing to do with anything.

He got to the section with the pictures in it and went through those one after the other. He got to the ones that had been taken by the security cameras and started to go very slowly. The pictures were blurry. Too much was shot from over the tops of people’s heads, so that you could see hats or caps but not faces.

He got to the ones he had found curious even the first time he saw them, and stopped. In these, he could see Chapin Waring clearly, and he understood completely why she had been identified from the photographs of Martin Veer’s funeral. The way she held her head and shoulders was distinctive all on its own.

He moved the photographs around and tried to concentrate on the figure of Marty Veer. This was not so distinctive, and looking at the photographs he could see what everybody who had looked at them had seen, from the beginning until now. The figure of the accomplice was—distorted, sort of. It bulked in odd places, and flattened out in even odder ones.

Gregor set the photographs out in order: first robbery, second robbery, third robbery, fourth robbery, fifth robbery.

He looked at the figure of the accomplice over time. It was always bulky and distorted, but it was not always bulky and distorted in the same way. He didn’t see why he should think the figure was Martin Veer, or anybody else. He didn’t even see why he should think the figure was the same person each time. This was not a body type. Nobody on earth was built to look like that.

Surely, Gregor thought, the Bureau must have thought of this at the time. There had to be some reason why they had fixed on Martin Veer as the accomplice.

He went through Patrick’s notes again, and found it: Once Chapin Waring had been identified as one of the robbers, there were search warrants issued for all six of the kids in that tight little group. In Martin Veer’s house, police had found one of the bags from the Fairfield County Savings Bank—just the bag, not any money, and nothing else.

On the other hand, they had found nothing at all in the houses of any of the others.

Gregor looked around for more, but couldn’t find it. They had found the bag with Martin Veer, and nothing else with any of the others, and they had decided on Martin Veer as the accomplice.

Gregor got up and walked around to where he had dumped his bags this morning when he checked in. The big picture book on the Waring case was lying on the floor near a wing chair. He picked it up and walked back to the other side of the bed to sit down.

The picture book, unlike the case notes from the Bureau, included a lot of photographs of Chapin Waring and her friends that were not in any way connected to the robberies.

Gregor found a caption that identified the group by name, and picked Martin Veer out from that. Then he went back over the rest of the pictures and checked out each one Martin was in. There was Martin at the beach in a bathing suit. There was Martin in tennis whites with a racket. There was Martin sitting at a table with all the rest of them, drinking something in a tall glass.