“I expect this makes sense to you,” Jason Battlesea said.
“Of course it does,” Gregor said. “Look at those tapes again. Chapin Waring is wearing black and a mask, but not doing much to disguise her identity. Martin Veer is not only wearing black and a mask, he’s padded up in odd places to make him look bulky, and to almost force him to walk in a way that wasn’t natural to him. The point wasn’t just to make sure nobody recognized him, but to make sure that if somebody thought they did recognize him, it wouldn’t be him they’d recognize.”
“They did it on purpose,” Hope said again. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, as if they were cold. “I didn’t know about the robberies, but I knew there was something going on between Chapin and Marty. There was always something going on between Chapin and everybody. You’d think she had enough in her life without having to go after everybody else’s boyfriends and without staging one drama after another in the long soap opera that was Being Who Counted at Alwych Country Day, but Chapin could never relax. And I’d started to see the signs all the way back in February. That she was looking to get rid of me. That she was trying to get Marty to dump me and take up with her and then she’d pick him out another girlfriend she’d like better.”
“I take it you knew about the robberies before the police did,” Gregor said.
“I knew the first time I saw one of those security tapes on television,” Hope said. “You couldn’t miss Chapin. She wasn’t even really disguised, just obscured sort of, enough so that if you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t be able to describe her very well. I never understood why nobody else saw it but me.”
“Maybe they did,” Gregor said.
Hope sniffled. “The night of the last robbery, after those people died, that night Marty was crazy. Marty wasn’t like Chapin, you know. He wasn’t a good person, not really, but he wasn’t like Chapin. He wouldn’t do just anything for the rush. So when I heard that two people had died, I was expecting something. And I got it. Marty started drinking early. He had a flask, and then we went to a roadhouse in New York State because, you know, in those days the drinking age over there was eighteen. And he was just drinking and drinking and going crazy. And I kept trying to talk to him. And then he got sick. We were on our way out to the car, and he bolted around the side of the roadhouse and got sick. And I went back there to talk to him.”
“And?” Gregor said.
Hope shrugged. “And I went back there and I waited for him to stop heaving and then I asked him. And he was too drunk to play around with it. He just told me right out front. About how I was completely sickening, as far as he was concerned. I was completely ridiculous, prancing around, pretending to be a debutante when I wasn’t anybody and my family wasn’t anybody and never had been, and all those things. ‘Prancing around’ was how he put it. And even at the time, I thought it was ridiculous. I mean, he was nobody and his family was nobody, too. They were more nobody than my family was. They didn’t even have the history. His father had just made a bunch of money in kitchen fixtures. But it wasn’t Beach Drive kind of money. It wasn’t Waring and Brand kind of money.”
Gregor was getting tired of standing. He pushed some papers to the side on the sagging old couch and sat down. “Did you tell him all that? About his family not being anybody?”
“I don’t know,” Hope said. “I think I might have tried. But I was drunk, too, and it was late and everybody was yelling at us to go and I was feeling a little crazy. Because there wasn’t anybody else. I didn’t have other friends. I didn’t have a place to be or anything like that. I had college, but I didn’t have anybody there and then when I went to grad school later, I didn’t have anybody there. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. So I think maybe I just got back into the car and sat still and didn’t say anything.”
“I don’t understand,” Jason Battlesea said. “What did she know as soon as she saw the security tapes? What could she have known that the police wouldn’t have known at the same time?”
“Marty Veer wasn’t disguised just to be disguised,” Gregor explained. “He was disguised deliberately in order to make him look as much like Hope as possible. He was bulked up in ways to make it seem as if it was Hope committing the robberies along with Chapin Waring. Hope and Marty were close to the same height and they had similar body types.”
“He wouldn’t have liked her so much if he’d heard what she said about him when he wasn’t around,” Hope said. “She was always going on and on about how he was ‘squat’ and how you could really tell what class people were in from how tall they were and how lean and it was like racehorses or something. She didn’t really like him. She didn’t even like him a little bit. She was just playing games with him to get rid of me, and once she was rid of me she’d have found a way to get rid of him. She’d have killed him if she had to.”