Read 27 Blood in the Water Online
Authors: Jane Haddam
“You mean Arthur Heydreich married his wife without knowing she’d had a sex change operation?” Bennis said. “Is that really possible?”
“Sure,” Steve Tekemanian said. “The results of the surgery and the therapy are mixed, of course, but she might just have been a very successful case. And I’ve seen pictures of her. The usual things that give a transsexual away are the hands and the waist. She had very delicate hands and the kind of figure you see on
Playboy
centerfolds. And then there were the, you know, the chest. She must have had that done. I don’t think they come that big naturally.”
“Although I would have started wondering if some woman I knew were as fanatic as Martha Heydreich appeared to be about broadcasting her femininity,” Gregor said. “There was the pink car, the pink clothes, the pink everything. Larry Farmer told me that her ring tone for her phone was ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl.’ Martha Heydreich seems to have spent half her time letting everybody on the planet know how female she was. And then she made herself up to the point where she could have looked like Attila the Hun without anybody knowing it.”
“Didn’t Arthur Heydreich see her without makeup?” Bennis said.
Gregor shrugged. “He might just have thought she was a homely woman. Or maybe she didn’t take the makeup off. At any rate, I think it’s absolutely the case that he didn’t know until very close to the end that she had had a sex change operation. I think if he’d have known earlier, he would just have divorced her, and that would have been that. It was only after she got caught in Michael Platte’s blackmail that it became necessary to deal with the issue as an issue. It’s one thing to ditch your wife through no fault and just chalk it up to irreconcilable differences. It’s another not to know when the other shoe is going to drop, when Michael Platte or somebody else like him was going to get into things and make trouble. Once Arthur Heydreich realized that Martha Heydreich was recognizable as a transsexual, or at least as more masculine than she should have been, to people in the general public, he’d have had to worry for the rest of his life that somebody else would make the same discovery Michael Platte had. Since nobody else had made the discovery yet, now was a good time to end the entire problem. And he did end it.”
“Wasn’t there some kind of mysterious safe-deposit key?” Steve asked. “That was on the news a few days ago.”
“It was Martha Heydreich’s safe-deposit key,” Gregor said. “They did find the box eventually. It contained the records of Martha’s surgery, and a few other things. Diaries going back to her childhood. The journal she kept when she first started the hormone therapy leading up to the surgery. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know how Michael Platte got that key or if he ever looked into that safe-deposit box. Arthur Heydreich says he didn’t know about the box, and I believe him. If he had, he’d have taken that key off Michael Platte’s body. Instead, he didn’t even go looking for it.”
“Do we know how he killed her?” Steve Tekemanian asked.
Gregor shook his head. “This time, he’s got a serious lawyer, and he isn’t talking. I suppose I can’t really blame him for that. I wouldn’t talk either if I was in his position. But I do wonder about it. It isn’t as easy to kill somebody as you’d think. He whacked Michael Platte on the back of the head hard enough to give Michael a skull bone collapse across the back of the head and it didn’t kill him. Michael Platte went into the water alive and drowned. Part of me has to wonder if the same sort of thing didn’t happen with Martha Heydreich, if she didn’t spent the last hours of her life alone in that locker room, unable to speak or move but still living. Part of me has to wonder if she was alive when he lit that match.”
Steve Tekemanian coughed. “She might have been alive,” he said, “but she wouldn’t have been conscious. If she had the same kind of hole in the back of her head the papers said Michael Platte had, she wouldn’t have been aware of anything at all.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “But I’ve read too many stories of supposedly unconscious coma victims waking up and describing everything that’s gone on around them for the last thirty years to be all that sure about that.”
“This is really depressing,” Bennis said. “I mean, this is really, really depressing. And it’s such a nice day.”
“And I’ve got a new apartment,” Steve Tekemanian said, “right on practicum central and everything. Do you do a lot of these cases, Mr. Demarkian, or just a couple a year?”
Marty Tekemanian made a strangled noise. “I don’t think that’s very fair, Steve. Mr. Demarkian just came back from breakfast. And you can’t expect him to tell you everything about his clients, he’s got professional ethics to consider and—”
“Keep your shirt on, Marty,” Steve said. “I won’t compromise Gregor Demarkian’s professional ethics. But let’s be real here. You can’t learn real forensics out of a textbook. You’ve got to know how real murders happen in the real world.”
Marty Tekemanian made another strangled noise.
Gregor started up the long flight of stone steps to the front door, thinking it might be a good idea to speed up work on those renovations.
3
Fifteen minutes later, Gregor was standing at the window of the living room of the apartment he shared with Bennis, looking down on Cavanaugh Street and seeing nothing. Somewhere underneath him, there were noises. Marty and Steve were cleaning out old George’s apartment for the last time, picking up odds and ends, making sure the place was clean. Gregor had looked in on the place for a moment on his way upstairs, and the sight of it had made his stomach clench. He had calmed down a little in the time since old George had died, but he hadn’t moved on. Not really.
He heard the door open in the foyer and the sound of Bennis’s clogs on the foyer floor. He didn’t understand how she could wear those things. He and Tibor had tried them on once when Bennis was out, and they’d both felt as if somebody was cutting off their feet.
Bennis came into the living room. He heard her drop down onto his overused couch.
“Well,” she said.
“Well, what?”
“Tibor says you’re obsessing about why anybody has to die,” Bennis said. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but I think I know what he’s talking about. He’s right, you know, Gregor. Dying is a part of life.”
“Did you ever ask yourself why?”
Bennis made a strangled noise. “Everybody asks themselves why. Usually while they’re taking Introduction to Philosophy freshman year.”
Gregor shook his head. “I’m not being juvenile, and I’m not being an idiot. I deal with death all the time. I understand why murder victims die. Somebody blows a hole in their heads, or knifes a gash in their hearts, and the organs stop functioning. I understand why cancer victims die. I understand why heart attack victims die. I’m not complaining about death. I’m complaining about—”
“What?”
Across the street, Lida Arkmanian was coming out of her own front door, carrying something in a covered tray. That would be food for Steve.
“In Norse mythology,” Gregor said, “the gods were eternal, but they weren’t immortal. You could kill them, but if you didn’t kill them, they never died. Do you see what I mean?”
“Not exactly,” Bennis said.
“I think I could handle the idea of human beings as eternal but not immortal,” Gregor said, “what bothers me is the idea that people can die for no reason. That some day, we all just stop. Just because we do. We stop.”
“He was a hundred years old,” Bennis said. “Maybe his body just wore out.”
“Precisely,” Gregor said. “And that’s the problem. I can’t get rid of the idea that it’s just wrong. Age isn’t a disease. Most of my life, I’ve thought it was a blessing. Seriously. Consider the alternative.”
“Right,” Bennis said.
“It’s not a disease and it’s not a fault and it’s perfectly natural,” Gregor said, “and there’s something fundamentally wrong with the fact that it ends you up dead. I don’t know how to say it any better than that.”
“It’s all a little mushy,” Bennis said.
“It’s a little mushy to me, too. I’m sorry that I’m being so—adolescent.”
“That’s all right,” Bennis said. “I get adolescent all the time. Usually about handbags.”
Gregor sighed.
Down below him, Lida and Marty and Steve were standing in the street, as if they would never have to worry about traffic. Marty was holding the covered dish. Lida was saying something emphatically, with lots of hand waving and foot stomping and general body language. Down the street a ways, Gregor could see the bits and pieces of Donna’s latest decorating project, which seemed to be taking up the majority of the U.S. supply of Indian corn.
It was an ordinary day on Cavanaugh Street, and as long as there were ordinary days on Cavanaugh Street, old George Tekemanian would never really be gone.
THE GREGOR DEMARKIAN BOOKS BY JANE HADDAM
Not a Creature Was Stirring
Precious Blood
Act of Darkness
Quoth the Raven
A Great Day for the Deadly
Feast of Murder
A Stillness in Bethlehem
Murder Superior
Dead Old Dead
Festival of Deaths
Bleeding Hearts
Fountain of Death
And One to Die On
Baptism in Blood
Deadly Beloved
Skeleton Key
True Believers
Somebody Else’s Music
Conspiracy Theory
The Headmaster’s Wife
Hardscrabble Road
Glass Houses
Cheating at Solitaire
Living Witness
Wanting Sheila Dead
Flowering Judas
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BLOOD IN THE WATER.
Copyright © 2012 by Orania Papazoglou.
All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print version as follows:
Haddam, Jane, 1951–
Blood in the water / Jane Haddam. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-64434-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-5131-9 (e-book)
1. Demarkian, Gregor (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Fiction. 3. Rich people—Fiction. 4. Women—Crimes against—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.A613B58 2012
813'.54—dc23
2011041006
e-ISBN 9781429951319
First Edition: March 2012