B is for Burglar (21 page)

“Well, she wasn't crazy about the idea that Bev knew, but there wasn't anything she could do about it. She said she'd handle it.”

The martinis arrived, along with the sandwiches, and we stopped talking for a while in order to eat. He was opening up a whole new possibility and I had a lot of questions to ask.

 

 

 

 

“What's your theory about what went on?” I asked when we'd finished lunch. “I mean, as nearly as I can tell, Elaine was in Santa Teresa until the night of January ninth. That was a Monday. I've tracked her from her apartment to the airport and I've got a witness who saw her get on the plane. I've got someone else who claims she arrived in Miami and drove up through Fort Lauderdale to Boca. Now, this person swears she was in Boca briefly and then took off again and was last heard from in Sarasota where she's supposedly staying with friends. I have a hard time believing that last bit, but it's what I've been told. When could Beverly have killed her and where?”

“Maybe she followed her to Florida. She was off on one of her benders just after New Year's. She was gone for ten days and came home a mess. I'd never seen her so bad. She wouldn't say a word about where she'd been or what had happened. I had a business deal I had to close in New York that week so I got her settled and then I took off. I was out of town until the following
Friday. She could have been anywhere while I was gone. Suppose she followed Elaine to Florida and killed her the first chance she had? She flies home afterward and who's the wiser?”

“I can't believe you're serious,” I said. “Do you have any evidence? Do you have anything that links Beverly even superficially with Elaine's disappearance?”

He shook his head. “Look, I know I'm fishing here and I could be completely off base. I hope like hell I am. I probably shouldn't have said anything. . . .”

I could feel myself getting restless, trying to make sense of what he had said. “Why would Beverly have hired me if she'd killed Elaine?”

“Maybe she wanted to make it look good. The business about the cousin's estate was legitimate. The notice arrives in the mail and now what's she going to do? Suppose she knows Elaine is strolling along the bottom of the ocean in a pair of concrete shoes. She has to go through the motions, doesn't she? She can't ignore the situation because somebody's going to wonder why she doesn't show more concern. So she drives up here and hires you.”

I looked at him skeptically. “Only then she panics when I say I'm going to the police.”

“Right. And then she figures she better cover for that so she talks to me.”

I finished my martini, thinking about what he'd said. It was very elaborate and I didn't like that. Still, I had to concede that it was possible. I made concentric circles on the tabletop with the bottom of my glass. I was thinking about the break-in at Tillie's place. “Where was she Wednesday night?”

He drew a blank. “I don't know. What do you mean?”

“I'm wondering where she was Wednesday night and early Thursday morning of this week. Was she with you?”

He frowned. “No. I flew to Atlanta Monday night and came back yesterday. What's the deal?”

I thought I should keep the details to myself for the time being. I shrugged. “There was an incident up here. Did you call her from Atlanta on either of those days?”

“I didn't call her at all. We used to do that when I was off on business trips. Talk back and forth long-distance. Now it's a relief to be away.” He took a sip of his drink, watching me above the rim of the glass. “You don't believe any of this, do you?”

“It doesn't make any difference what I believe,” I said. “I'm trying to find out what's true. So far it's all speculation.”

He shook his head. “I know I don't have any concrete proof, but I felt like I had to tell someone. It's been bugging the shit out of me.”

“I'll tell you what's bugging me,” I said. “How can you live with someone you suspect of murder?”

He stared down at the table for a moment and the smile when it came was tainted with the old arrogance. I thought he was going to answer me, but the silence stretched and finally he simply lit another cigarette and signaled for the check.

 

 

I called Jonah in the middle of the afternoon. The encounter with Aubrey Danziger had depressed me, and
the two martinis at lunch had left me with a nagging pain between the eyes. I needed air and sunshine and activity.

“You want to go up to the firing range and shoot?” I said when Jonah got on the line.

“Where are you?”

“I'm at the office, but I'm on my way home to pick up some ammo.”

“Swing by and pick me up too,” he said.

I smiled when I hung up the phone. Good.

 

 

The clouds hung above the mountains like puffs of white smoke left in the wake of a giant old-fashioned choo-choo train. We took the old road up through the pass, my VW making high-pitched complaints until I shifted from third gear to second and finally into first. The road twisted up through sage and mountain lilac. As we approached, the dark green of the distant vegetation separated into discreet shrubs clinging obstinately to the slopes. There were very few trees. Steep expanses of California buckwheat were visible on the right, interspersed with the bright little orange faces of monkey flower and the hot pink of prickly phlox. The poison oak was thriving, its lush growth almost overwhelming the silvery leaves of the mugwort which grew alongside it and is its antidote.

As we reached the summit, I glanced to my left. The elevation here was about twenty-five hundred feet and the ocean seemed to hover in the distance like a gray haze blending into the gray of the sky. The coastline
stretched as far as the eye could see and the town of Santa Teresa looked as insubstantial as an aerial photo. From this perspective, the mountain ridge seemed to plunge into the Pacific, appearing again in four rugged peaks that formed the offshore islands. The sun up here was hot and the volatile oils, exuded by the underbrush, scented the still air with camphor. There were occasional manzanita trees along the slope, still stripped down to spare, misshapen black forms by the fire that had swept through two years back. Everything that grows up here longs to burn; seed coats broken only by intense heat, germinating then when the rains come again. It's not a cycle that concedes much to human intervention.

The narrow road to the firing range veered off to the left just at the mountain's crest, climbing at an angle through huge sandstone boulders that looked as light and fake as a movie set. I pulled into the dirt and gravel parking area and Jonah and I got out of the car, taking guns and ammo from the backseat. I don't think we'd exchanged six words the entire thirty-minute trip, but the silence was restful.

We paid our fees and tucked little wads of foam in our ears to muffle the sound. I had also brought along a headset, like earmuffs, for additional protection. My hearing had already sustained some damage that I was hoping wasn't going to be permanent. With the plugs in place, I could hear the air going in and out of my own nose, a phenomenon I didn't pay much attention to ordinarily. I like the quiet. At the core of it, I could hear my own heart, like someone thumping on a plaster wall two floors below.

We moved up to the range, roof overhead like a carport extending fifteen feet on either side of us. Only one man was shooting and he had an H&K .45 competition pistol that Jonah coveted the minute he laid eyes on it. The two of them talked about the adjustable trigger and adjustable sights while I inserted eight rounds of reloads into the magazine of my little gun. I inherited this no-brand semiautomatic from the very proper maiden aunt who raised me after my parents died. She'd taught me to knit and crochet when I was six, and when I was eight, she'd brought me up here and taught me to target-shoot, bracing my arms on a wooden ironing board that she kept in the trunk of her car. I had fallen in love with the smell of gunpowder when I first came to live with her. I'd sit out on her concrete porch steps with a strip of caps and a hammer, patiently banging away until each snapped out its load of perfume. The porch steps would be littered afterward with bits of red paper and gray spots of burned powder the size of the buckle holes in a belt. I guess she decided after two years of my incessant hammering that she might as well school me in the real thing.

Jonah had brought both his Colts and I fired a few rounds from each, but they felt like too much gun for me. The walnut grip on the Trooper handled like big hunk of petrified wood and the four-inch barrel made sighting a bitch. The gun bucked in my hand like that quick, automatic kick when a doctor taps on your knee, and each time the gun bucked a whiff of gunpowder blew back at me. I did slightly better with the Python, but it was still a distinct and familiar treat when I took
up my .32 again, like holding hands with an old friend.

At five, we packed up our gear and headed over to the old stagecoach tavern, tucked into a shady hollow not far from the range. We had beer and bread and baked beans and talked about nothing in particular.

“How's your case going?” he asked me. “You turned up anything yet?”

I shook my head. “I've got some things I may want to talk to you about at some point, but not for now.”

“You sound bummed out,” he said.

I smiled. “I always do this to myself. I want quick results. If I don't get things wrapped up in two days, I get depressed. What about you? Are you okay?”

He shrugged. “I miss my kids. I used to spend Saturdays with them. It was nice you called. Gave me something to do besides mope.”

“Yeah, you can watch
me
mope,” I said.

He patted my hand on the table and squeezed it lightly. The gesture was brief and compassionate and I squeezed back.

I dropped him off at his place again at 7:30 or so and went home. I was tired of worrying about Elaine Boldt so I sat on the couch and cleaned my gun, taking in the smell of oil, finding it restful to dismantle and wipe and put it all back together again. After that, I stripped my clothes off and wrapped up in my quilt, reading a book about fingerprint mechanics until I fell asleep.

 

 

Monday morning, I stopped by Santa Teresa Travel on my way into the office and talked to an agent named
Lupe who looked like an interesting mix of Chicano and black, slim as a cat. She was in her twenties, with tawny skin and dark frizzy hair with a faint golden cast, cut close to the shape of her head. She wore small rectangular glasses and a smart navy blue pantsuit with a striped tie. I showed her the ticket carbon and told her what I was looking for. My guess was correct. Elaine had been a regular client of theirs for the past several years, though Lupe seemed puzzled by the carbon. She pulled the glasses down low on her nose and looked at me. Her eyes were a flat gold, like a lemur's, and it gave her face an exotic quality. Puffy mouth, small straight nose. She had fingernails that were long and curved and looked as tough as horn. Maybe she had been some kind of burrowing creature in another life. She pushed the glasses back into place again thoughtfully.

“Well, I don't know what to think,” she said. “She always bought her tickets through us, but this one was purchased at the airport.” She touched at one corner of the carbon, turning the ticket around so I could see the face of it. It reminded me of those teachers in grade school who somehow managed to read a picture book while holding it forward and to one side. “These numbers indicate that it was generated by the airline and paid for by credit card.”

“What kind of credit card?”

“American Express. She usually uses that for travel, but I tell you what's odd. She'd made reservations for . . . wait a minute. Let me check.” Lupe typed some numbers into her computer terminal, nails tap-dancing
across the keys. The computer fired out line after line of green print-like tracers. She studied the screen.

“She was scheduled to fly out of LAX, first class, on February third, with a return 3 August and those tickets were paid for.”

“I hear she left on the spur of the moment,” I said. “If she set up the reservations over the weekend, she'd have had to go through the airlines, wouldn't she?”

“Sure, but she wouldn't just forget about the tickets she had. Hold on a sec and I'll see if she ever picked 'em up. She could have traded 'em in.”

She got up and moved over to the file cabinet on the far wall, sorting through her files. She pulled out a packet and handed it to me. It was a set of tickets and an itinerary, tucked into a travel folder from the agency. Elaine's name was neatly typed across the front.

“That's a thousand dollars' worth of tickets,” Lupe said. “You'd think she'd have called us and had 'em cashed in when she got to Boca.”

I felt a chill. “I'm not sure she got there,” I said. I sat for a full minute with the unused tickets in my hand. What was this? I reached into my purse and pulled out the original TWA folder Julia Ochsner had mailed to me. On the back flap, there were the four luggage tags sequentially numbered and still stapled firmly in place. Lupe was watching me.

I was thinking about my own quick flight to Miami, getting off the plane at 4:45 in the morning, passing the glass-fronted cases where abandoned suitcases were stacked.

“I want you to call Miami International for me,” I said slowly. “Let's put in a claim for lost baggage and see if we come up with anything.”

“You lost some bags?”

“Yeah, four of 'em. Red leather with gray fabric bindings. Hard-sided, graduated sizes, and my guess is that one is a hanging bag. These are the tags for them.” I pushed the folder across the desk, and she wrote the numbers down.

I gave her my business card and she said she'd be in touch as soon as she heard anything.