27 Blood in the Water (22 page)

And Walter was always right about everything.

Walter had no idea what had started him thinking, this morning, about his mother. He only knew he had woken up and walked out onto the deck as usual, and suddenly his head was full of the sound of her voice. She’d been dead now for nearly thirty years, but Walter could still remember the last time he’d talked to her. He’d gone to the little town house she’d lived in in the “retirement community” where he’d found her a place after his father died. The place had started out being called an “adult community” until he complained, because of course, by then, “adult” had come to mean “pornography.”

“It’s not a very nice thing, saying your mother lives in an adult community,” he’d told the management not a week after he’d moved his mother in. “It makes it sound like she’s going to put tassels on and buy fans.”

The snot-nosed idiot at the management office hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. He’d probably never even heard of a fan dancer. There was something that had come and gone without a trace. Walter remembered fan dancers. They were the “respectable” strippers, and Perry Mason even had one as a client on the old television show.

He’d had to go up the chain of command, then, to talk to somebody old enough to have much sense—not that even older people had much sense. He’d made enough of a stink about it to force the change of name, and he’d put his foot down about calling the place a “senior” community. If there was one thing Walter hated it was all that crap about “senior citizens.” It was as if the world was supposed to be one big high school, complete with class colors and junior–senior balls. Walter had hated high school, much as he’d hated elementary school, much as he’d hated college. Education was a pile of crap, anyway. You slogged your way through a lot of meaningless bullshit, and then they let you make a living.

The last day Walter had seen his mother, she had been watching the neighbors’ grandchildren in the neighbors’ yards. She had a pair of binoculars to do it with, and the longer she watched, the more agitated she got.

“You’re not supposed to have children here,” she told him, “not even for the afternoon. It’s against the rules. It upsets the residents.”

Walter could see how the children would upset his mother. They were on both sides of her, and they were very wild and noisy. People didn’t know how to keep their children well behaved anymore. The children ran and screamed and shouted and broke things. These children were climbing on the cellar doors and pretending to slide down. Then they were crying that they had splinters. Some of them had Frisbees. The Frisbees sailed right over the hedges into his mother’s own yard and the children climbed over after them.

“I’ll go do something about it,” he’d said.

Then he’d walked right over to the management building to complain. It was Saturday. The crew that was on for the weekend was all young, and none of them really wanted to take responsibility for anything.

“But it’s grandchildren,” the little girl in the office had said, looking confused. “You don’t want people not to be able to have their grandchildren visit?”

The little girl in the office made the statement as if it were a question, but Walter could see it in her eyes. She thought he was crazy. She thought nobody on earth would mind if people’s grandchildren made a fuss and a bother and came running onto people’s lawns, because they were grandchildren, and everybody had to love grandchildren.

“They’re throwing those Frisbees right into my mother’s yard,” he’d said, “and then they’re running into the yard to get them. They’re going to break something. A window maybe. And I don’t care whose grandchildren they are, I want them out of there. That’s why there are rules.”

Then he’d gone back to his mother’s town house. He’d let himself in by the front door and called out to her. He’d listened to the silence as if it were music.

Then he’d walked all the way to the back and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor.

After that, he’d sued the “retirement community” for not keeping their own rules and allowing the fuss of the children that had given his mother her fatal heart attack. It had taken ten hours for his lawyer to talk him out of suing the neighbors on both sides for having the children there.

“You can’t prove it was the children who caused the heart attack,” his lawyer had said. “She was an old woman. It could have been anything.”

That was the kind of thing people said these days. Whether they made any sense at all, people said them. That was why Walter was hearing his mother’s voice in his head today.

“You should never think you know somebody unless you check,” she’d said. “You should check and check again. People lie more than they tell the truth.”

This was absolutely true. Walter knew it from experience.

He stopped looking through the kitchen window and backed up to get the papers he had put on the table. Jessica was sitting there, not really drinking a cup of coffee, the way she had been all morning.

“Don’t tell me why I shouldn’t go,” Walter said. “We had all that out last night.”

Jessica looked down. “I thought you were looking at something,” she said, mostly mumbling. “I thought there was something out there you wanted to see.”

“It’s Horace Wingard and those asshole cops,” Walter said. “The cops are back. They’ve fucked up everything and now they’re going to muck around here again, making a scene. I told you they were going to fuck it up. I told you right from the beginning. Yes, I did. But nobody listens to me. I’m just a jerk. I’m just a bad-tempered old man. And here we are. That man is out there.”

“What man?” Jessica looked confused.

“Gregor Demarkian. The detective the police have hired to cover their asses. Never mind it’s just locking the barn door. We could all be dead by now.”

“I don’t see how we could all be dead,” Jessica said. “He didn’t kill anyone, Michael Platte. He was killed himself.”

“She killed someone,” Walter said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know it as soon as you saw her. Why the two of them ever got let into this complex, I don’t know. Waldorf Pines. An exclusive community for discriminating people. An advertising slogan meant to gull the idiots, and the world is full of idiots. Exclusive doesn’t mean expensive. Exclusive means you keep the people you don’t want out.”

Jessica shook her head. She was staring so hard at her coffee, it was as if the thing was a crystal ball, a place where she could see visions. Walter wanted to hit her.

“Think what it must be like for his mother,” she said. “She is his mother, no matter what he turned out to be. Mothers don’t stop loving their children because the children don’t turn out well. Think of what she must be going through.”

“If it were me, I’d be damned glad I was rid of him,” Walter said. “And all I want right now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again. You can’t stop me, Jessie. You shouldn’t even try to stop me.”

Walter headed out for the foyer and the front door, the door that led to the road and not the green. Jessica did not try to stop him, but he hadn’t really thought she would. Back when they were first dating, she had tried to stop him sometimes, when she thought he was going off the handle too quickly. It had never worked out well.

It would be a better place if other people understood him as well as Jessica did. It would be a better place if everybody just stopped being idiots.

“Never have children,” his mother had said to him, when he was twelve years old. “Never have children. They’ll only be a disappointment to you.”

She had been absolutely right.

Walter stepped onto the road and watched the scene just ahead of him. His house was the one right next to the pool house and clubhouse on the right when looking up the green, so he was right next to the action as it happened. He saw Horace Wingard come out, leading Larry Farmer and the big man Walter assumed was Gregor Demarkian. He saw the three of them stop at the pool house door and look at it. It was ridiculous. What did they expect to get by looking at it? It was the kind of things detectives did on television shows, to make themselves look intelligent.

Walter clutched his papers in his hand and walked faster. He could walk very fast, even at his age. He walked every day. You didn’t have to become a cripple at sixty unless you wanted to. You didn’t have to let yourself go to hell. Most people did, and then they called it arthritis.

Walter got all the way to the pool house and stopped. From his own house, it was difficult to see the burned part, because the burned part was around the other side. From where he was standing now, he could see the blackened edges of the roof and the walls where the fire had come through before the fire department had made it onto the scene. Then there had been a lot of trouble at the gate, because nobody had notified the gate guard that there was a fire. Idiot. The fire was right there, right in front of his nose. He was just waiting for orders.

Walter stopped in the little parking lot. Gregor Demarkian had gone into the pool house. Horace Wingard and Larry Farmer were still standing in the parking lot, looking useless.

Horace Wingard saw him coming and said, “Mr. Dunbar. I hope you’re not thinking of going into the pool house. The pool house is off limits to residents until the damage is repaired. If you left personal items in a locker, we’ll be more than happy to send a staff member in to collect them for you.”

Horace Wingard always sounded as if he were saying tongue twisters. All the words came out very fast. Walter wasn’t listening to him anyway.

“I’m going to the clubhouse,” he said. “I’m going to file my petition again. And don’t tell me I need the signatures of a third of the residents, because you know that’s hogwash. I could sue you over it if I wanted to. An exclusive community for discriminating people. Hogwash. Bullshit, if you don’t want to put too fine a point on it.”

Horace Wingard sighed. “Mr. Dunbar, the residents of Waldorf Pines are already subject to a background check—”

“To a financial background check,” Walter said. “There should be a criminal background check. Criminals have money. Criminals have parents with money. Criminals have husbands with money. We could have a serial killer here, and you wouldn’t know it.”

“Mr. Dunbar,” Horace Wingard said.

“There’s trouble here whether you like it or not,” Walter Dunbar said. “There’s that hose that was thrown right up on my porch the night of the murder. I told you about it. I told the police about it. Nobody pays attention to me.”

“Mr. Dunbar,” Horace Wingard said again.

Gregor Demarkian came out of the pool house. Walter saw Horace Wingard throw him a nervous glance.

“Great detective,” Walter said.

Then he turned his back on all of them and marched on in the direction of the clubhouse.

2

LizaAnne Marsh didn’t know when she had decided that she needed to Do Something about the things that were going on in Waldorf Pines, but she did know what it was that had to get done. People were being woefully stupid about all this, as if the only thing they could do when disaster struck was to dither around and sound like people on television, saying things that didn’t mean anything.

LizaAnne was not worried about Martha Heydreich coming back in the night and murdering them all, which is what her father and mother kept talking about. She hadn’t been worried about Arthur Heydreich murdering them all, either, which was what her parents had talked about in the beginning.

Death was not all that interesting to LizaAnne. She thought it was probably only really interesting to old people, because they were so close to having to die. People who were not so old did not think about death. They thought about sex.

LizaAnne had started thinking about sex the first time she’d seen Fanny Bullman go into Arthur Heydreich’s house. Well, no, that wasn’t exactly right. LizaAnne thought about sex a lot. She thought about what it would be like to have sex with Brad Pitt. She thought about how awful it must be for him, married to that woman with the lips that made her look like a fish. It was scary the way things happened sometimes. People did things to their lives. They married people. They ran away. They hit people with their cars. People just did things, and then everything was a mess.

LizaAnne had started thinking about sex and murder the first time she’d seen Fanny Bullman go into Arthur Heydreich’s house, and the more she thought about it, the more interesting it got. The idea of older people having sex was a little confusing, except for movie stars, because movie stars always looked young. LizaAnne didn’t know what people saw in each other at that age. She did know what people that age saw in people her age, which was why she was never really upset when one of the teachers came on to her.

Still, she knew that older people had sex, and had sex with each other, and had affairs. They even did the things younger people did to mess up their lives. If Fanny Bullman was having sex with Arthur Heydreich, she was probably going to mess up her life. Arthur Heydreich wouldn’t mess up his, because his was already down the toilet.

She kept seeing Fanny Bullman going into Arthur Heydreich’s house. Sometimes Fanny Bullman went by way of the green, walking across the grass as if she were doing nothing more important than taking her children to the bus stop. Sometimes Fanny Bullman went by way of the road. Then, if LizaAnne had caught the start of the walk, she had to go out to the stairwell and look through the window there. It was always the same walk, though, and always the same little ritual when Mrs. Bullman got to Mr. Heydreich’s house. First she would stand still on the doorstep, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to go in. Then she would turn around and look up the green or up the road, to see if anybody was looking. Then she would knock on the sliding glass doors to the deck or ring the front door bell. It would take Arthur Heydreich a moment or two to open the door, but he always did.

What Arthur Heydreich did not do was come out into the open, or go to Fanny Bullman’s house, ever. It was as if, coming home from jail, he had become a vampire, and couldn’t stand the sunlight.

LizaAnne amended this. Arthur Heydreich was nothing like a vampire. Vampires were truly awesome. She had seen every movie in the
Twilight
series, and she had the books. Someone like Arthur Heydreich would never be cool enough to be a vampire. He had probably never been cool at all.