27 Blood in the Water (18 page)

“You mean you think this could be some kind of drug deal murder?” Bennis said.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think this has to do with drugs,” Gregor said. “Or at least not with your regular run of drug dealer and drug buyer. It’s the wrong kind of murder. They both are. Your friendly neighborhood drug lord doesn’t usually respond to problems by hitting somebody over the head and drowning him in a pool. A fire to make it impossible to identify a body is more like it, but in that case there should have been a bullet or a casing somewhere in the stuff they picked up at the scene, and there doesn’t seem to have been either. Somebody went through a lot of trouble to erase not just all possible signs of identification of that body, but all signs of how it might have ended up dead. To pull the same thing on you that I did on them yesterday, mostly out of frustration—we couldn’t actually prove it as a matter of fact that the unidentified body was the result of a murder at all. There’s more than one reason why you might want to get rid of a body and erase all possible means of identification.”

“I can’t even think of one,” Bennis said.

Gregor watched her as she closed up the briefcase. “I’ve got a list in there of things that have to be done before we can even think of solving this case,” he said. “It’s the longest list I can ever remember having. It’s one thing to come in at the beginning of a case, before anything has been done. It’s something else to come in in the middle of a case that’s been horribly bungled. I find myself looking at this stuff and doing just what they were doing, because all the information I have has been skewed to make me think in that direction. I don’t mean me personally, and I don’t mean deliberately, but—”

“I know what you mean,” Bennis said.

“So I made a list,” Gregor said. “I didn’t do any of the things Marty told me to do. I know I should. I know I should be more businesslike about all these things. I don’t even have an agreed fee with Pineville Station, and you know what it’s like when I don’t get that settled up front. But, try as hard as I can, I just can’t find the financial side of things anything but boring.”

“Didn’t you train as an accountant?”

“Absolutely,” Gregor said, “but to tell you the truth, I found accounting boring, too. That’s why I joined the FBI. It was a sheer fluke they didn’t put me on tax cases with the rest of the accountants. I’d better get dressed. I ordered the driver for seven twenty.”

“You ought to learn to drive so that you don’t continually get into these situations where you need a driver,” Bennis said. “Is Lida all right? Is there something going on that I should know about?”

“Lida’s fine,” Gregor said. “Or, at least, she’s as fine as she’s ever been. She’s getting old. I’m getting old. Even Cavanaugh Street is getting old. But I do know how to drive. I’ve even got a driver’s license. I just don’t like to do it.”

“You’re changing the subject. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me.”

“No,” Gregor said. “It’s the absolute truth. Lida and I are having the kind of crisis people have when they realize they’ve gotten old without noticing it. Not old in the sense old George was, you understand. Just sort of out of time.”

“Does this mean you’re going to buy a private jet and start dating blondes who don’t know when Pearl Harbor was?”

“No,” Gregor said. “It means I’ve spent a lot of my life in recent years assuming that things will always stay the same even though I know that nothing ever does. Do I have something besides that awful tie with the red and green starbursts on it? I swear Howard gave me that because he knew it would make me look ridiculous.”

“I’ve got your
Looney Tunes
tie,” Bennis said, heading out of the kitchen.

Gregor was going to call out that that one would make him look even more ridiculous, but he felt a little guilty about it. It was Tommy Donahue who had given him the
Looney Tunes
tie, and Tommy Donahue had been seven years old at the time. Tommy had not thought the tie would make Gregor look ridiculous. He had thought it would make Gregor look cool.

Gregor got up and headed out of the kitchen himself.

3

Gregor was sitting in the car taking him to Pineville Station when he found the thing he’d missed all four of the times he’d gone through the paperwork. It was not the kind of thing he would usually miss, but it had been noted in the oddest and least helpful way imaginable. And it had only been noted once. He had only pulled the folder halfway out of the briefcase. He’d been half pulling out folders and checking through them for most of the ride. Now he pulled this one all the way out and laid it down on the seat beside him.

It was a beautiful day out, bright and crisp. He had hoped to miss the rush hour traffic by leaving early, but seemed to only have half made it. There were a lot of cars on the road, and long stretches when they barely seemed to be moving. That actually worked to his advantage. The papers didn’t slosh around too much. He was able to keep track of what he was looking at. He did worry, just a little, that he would look from the outside like somebody who was “being driven.”

He got the paper he needed from the folder next to him and held it up to the light. He reread it twice, just to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. Then he got out his cell phone and accessed the address book.

One of the things Gregor insisted on when he agreed to take a case was that he have contact numbers for all the people responsible for it. And the contact numbers could not be limited. He had to have a way to call anybody anytime, twenty-four/seven, for any reason. Twenty years ago, he would have found that kind of thing excessive. Now he knew better.

He found the entry that said “Farmer, cell,” and punched it. He listened to the ring and wondered what Larry Farmer was doing at this hour of the morning. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. Larry Farmer could be in the shower. He could still be asleep. Gregor didn’t care.

The phone rang long enough so that Gregor began to get worried that it would go to voice mail. If it did, he would simply call it again, and not worry for a moment that he was disturbing someone. Still, voice mail was a nuisance, and calling again was a pain.

The phone was finally picked up, and Larry Farmer sounded as bouncy and perky as he ever did. Gregor gave a brief thought to the idea that Larry Farmer was bouncy and perky when he slept.

“Mr. Demarkian!” Larry Farmer said. “Good to hear from you! Are you here already? I can get right out to the station—”

“I’m in a car on the way,” Gregor said. “I just found something. It’s in the scene of crime notes from the morning when the bodies were discovered, but it’s not in the Buck Monaghan notes for the prep for the prosecution. I have no way of knowing if Buck Monaghan even has this information at all. And that makes me nervous.”

“Really, Mr. Demarkian, we’re very careful to give Buck all the information we have. And he insists on it. He says that if we don’t give him all the information, we’re just asking for the defense to be able to pull something on us at trial. And he’s right, you know, he’s really right. I don’t know what defense lawyers do these days, but they think of everything. Even the public defenders do that. And the kind of lawyer that would be hired by somebody at Waldorf Pines, well—”

“Didn’t Arthur Heydreich have a public defender?” Gregor asked.

“Well, yes, he did, but that was only temporary,” Larry Farmer said. “He’d have gotten a better one eventually. We all knew it.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “Listen very carefully. I have here a piece of paper with the notes from the scene of the crime on it. It includes a list of things found in Michael Platte’s pocket when he was fished out of the water. You got that?”

“Yes, of course. I remember that. I was there when it was done.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “The list includes keys, a wallet with fifty-two dollars in it, some loose change amounting to ninety-three cents, a condom still in its wrapper—”

“They all have condoms these days, did you ever notice that, Mr. Demarkian? We never had condoms, not even in college, nobody would give us any. Now they have condom dispensers in the men’s rooms at these places. Anything for safe sex.”

“Back to the list,” Gregor said. “He had a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The lighter was a standard Bic. Got all that? Okay. Now go back a little, to the keys. The officer very carefully described each of the keys. He’s got two house keys, both identified later and noted as being to his parents’ house at Waldorf Pines. He’s got a trunk key and an ignition key to his own pickup truck, also identified later. Then there are a little collection of keys that are described and not identified. Most of them are irrelevant to anything. One of them sounds like the key to his dorm room at college. He was almost certainly supposed to return it before he left, but he wasn’t the world’s most responsible person, so we won’t worry about it. It’s got the college’s name on it. There’s another one labeled U.S. Post Office. That will be to a post office box. I don’t suppose anybody has checked that out, what post office he had the box in, here or at college, what he used it for, anything like that?”

“Oh,” Larry Farmer said. “No, no we didn’t. We could, of course, I can see how it might seem significant now—”

“Yes, it’s definitely significant now,” Gregor said, “and it definitely ought to be checked out. But the one I can’t believe is this one. ‘Silver, two inches, bulbed hold, four prongs.’”

There was silence on the other end of the line. “I remember that,” Larry Farmer said. “But there was nothing on it to say where it was from. And it didn’t look very used. I remember that, too. What could that possibly have to do with anything?”

“Did you keep the keys?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, of course we did. We kept everything. We explained to Mrs. Platte that she couldn’t have them until the case was finished because we might need them for evidence, although I do have to admit that I don’t see how any of that could be important.”

“Did anybody show that key to Buck Monaghan?”

“I don’t know if we showed any of those keys to Buck,” Larry said. “We gave him the lists, of course, but I’m not sure—”

“Did you give him this particular list with these particular descriptions on it?”

“I don’t know,” Larry Farmer said. “I suppose you could ask the officers who responded to the scene, or the evidence clerk, or whoever it was, but I still don’t see why this is so important. Do you know where the key is from? Is it something to do with Waldorf Pines security or that kind of thing? I’d really like to know how all those security cameras were made to malfunction at once for two hours. I’d really like to know that.”

“I’d like to know that, too,” Gregor said, “but right now, I’ve got this key. Get it ready for me when I come in. Because from this description, I’d be willing to bet just about anything that what you’ve got there is the key to a safe-deposit box.”

“What?” Larry Farmer said.

Gregor closed his eyes and wished that Larry wouldn’t say “what” so much.

TWO

1

For most of her growing up, Eileen Platte had envied her older sister. Eileen Platte had been Eileen O’Brien then, and her older sister had been named Margaret Mary. Margaret Mary was a special name. It was the name of the nun who had seen the Virgin Mary on an altar in her convent and been given the design of the Miraculous Medal to reveal to the world. All the girls at St. Rose of Lima School loved the Miraculous Medal best, because it was the most beautiful of all the medals. There was a picture of the Blessed Virgin on the front of it with her arms outstretched. Rays of light come from her fingertips, and words came from the rays of light:
O MARY, CONCEIVED WITHOUT SIN, PRAY FOR US WHO HAVE RECOURSE TO THEE.
Neither Eileen nor her sister nor anybody else they knew understood what “recourse” meant, but it didn’t really matter.

Now Eileen stood in the middle of her kitchen, looking down at the long granite counter, and wondering what she had been thinking. She knew what “recourse” meant now, but it seemed to her that it was a trick, and always had been. The Virgin Mother would pray for those of the human family who had a right to ask her to pray for them. If you didn’t have a right to ask—well. You could ask away forever, and none of your prayers would be answered.

It was odd the way things had been, all these weeks since Michael had died. At first, Eileen had barely felt it. There was no body she could look at. There was no funeral. There wasn’t even a death notice in the papers. The whole thing was drifting and unreal, as if she’d dreamed it. Dream was the wrong word, but she didn’t know what else to call it. Sometimes she had nightmares that woke her up screaming. Sometimes she had the same nightmares, but all the emotion was gone. Michael was gone. A policewoman had come to the door and told her that. They had both sat down at the kitchen table. The policewoman had touched her hand, and Eileen had had to force herself not to recoil at the touch. There was something wrong with that policewoman’s hand, she was sure of it. There was flecks of black and green across the knuckles, that looked like they’d been poisoned.

After about a week, Eileen had found herself thinking of it as actual. That wasn’t quite the same thing as real, but it was close. The house was big and silent and empty. Michael was not in his bedroom snoring off a night doing God only knew what. Stephen was not storming around the house, delivering lectures about Michael’s faults and all the awful things that would happen to him if he didn’t straighten up. Stephen was not saying anything, really, and that was the strangest thing of all the things that had happened so far.

Actually, there was one thing Stephen did say, and it mattered. Eileen couldn’t make herself forget it.

“You shouldn’t be helping the police,” he said. “They’re professionals. They’ve got a job to do. You should let them do it.”

“But what if I have information,” Eileen had said. “Don’t the police always want information? Don’t you want to see the person who did this go to prison?”

“They got the person who did this,” Stephen said. “They don’t need any more help from us.”