B is for Burglar (25 page)

He moved toward the rear and I trotted obediently
behind. He opened the massive metal door to his vault. Cold air wafted out as though from a meat locker. There were fur coats hanging on both sides in double racks, sleeves almost touching, like hundreds of women lined up with their backs to us. He moved down the aisle checking coats as he went, wheezing from the effort. He really needed to lose some weight. His breathing sounded like someone sitting down on a leather couch and it couldn't connote good health.

He took a fur down off the top rack and we moved back out of the cold-storage room, the door shutting behind us with a clang. He held Elaine Boldt's coat up for me to inspect. The lynx was two shades—white and gray in a luscious blend, with the pelts arranged so that each panel ended in a tapering point at the hem. He must have guessed from the look on my face that I'd never seen a coat that expensive close up.

“Here. Try it on,” he said.

I hesitated for a moment and then eased into the coat. I pulled it around me and looked at myself in the mirror. The coat hung almost to my shins, the shoulders protruding like protection pads for some strange new sport.

“I look like the Abominable Snowman,” I said.

“You look great,” he said. He looked from me to the image in the mirror. “So we take it in a little bit. Shorten the sleeves. Or maybe you'd look better in fox if this doesn't suit.”

I laughed. “On my income, I think it's high-class to have a sweatshirt with a zipper up the front.” I took the coat off and handed it to him, getting back to the subject.
“Why'd you pay her for the coat before she paid you? Why not deduct your costs from the five grand and give her a check for the balance?”

“The bookkeeper wanted it the other way. Don't ask me why. Anyhow, it's not going to cost that much to clean the coat, and the alterations I'm doing myself, so what's it to me? I got a good deal. Adele probably bugged her for payment as a matter of course, but I can't get that upset over the whole thing.”

While he returned the coat to cold storage, I went over to my bag and took out the Polaroid picture of Elaine and Marty that Tillie Ahlberg had given me.

When he came back out, I showed it to him. “Is this the woman you dealt with?”

He glanced at it briefly and gave it back.

“Nuh-un. I never saw either one of those women before in my life,” he said.

“What did she look like?”

“How do I know? I only saw her once.”

“Young, old? Short, tall? Fat, thin?”

“Yeah, about like that. She was middle-aged and she had blondish hair. And she wore a muumuu and chain-smoked. I wouldn't let her come back here because I don't like the smoke around my skins.”

“What kind of identification did she have?”

“You know. The usual stuff. Driver's license. Check guarantee card. Credit cards. You gonna tell me the coat was stolen? Because I don't want to hear it.”

“I don't think ‘stolen' quite covers it,” I said. “I suspect someone's been borrowing Elaine Boldt's identity. I'm just not sure where she is in the meantime. If I were
you, I'd leave the coat intact until we figure out what's going on.”

My last glimpse of him, he was pulling unhappily at the wattles on his neck and he didn't offer to accompany me to the door.

 

 

I went out into the oppressive Florida humidity. The cloud cover felt like a premature twilight and the first of several big raindrops had begun to splatter against the hot pavement. I scurried to my car, half-ducking as though I could avoid getting wet by shrinking myself to half my size. I thought about Jack's description of the woman who'd called herself Elaine Boldt. He'd seen the snapshot of Elaine and he'd sworn it wasn't her. It had to be Pat Usher as nearly as I could tell. I ran back through my encounter with her: her attitude of wary amusement, the questions about Elaine she'd fielded, the mixture of lies and truth she'd told. Had she simply stepped into someone else's shoes? She'd been staying in Elaine's condominium, but how had she acquired the lynx coat if not from Elaine? If she was the one running up charges on Elaine's credit cards, she had to be sure somehow that Elaine wouldn't catch her at it. It seemed to me she could only pull that off if she knew Elaine was dead, which had been my suspicion for days now anyway. There might be some other explanation, I supposed, but nothing that tied everything together so neatly.

The rain was coming down hard now, the windshield wipers on my rental car flapping back and forth like
metronomes, doing little more than smearing the windshield with a thin film of grime. I found a phone booth and placed a credit-card call to Jonah at the Santa Teresa P.D. The connection was bad and we could barely hear each other over the static on the line, but I did manage to holler out what I needed, asking him if he'd expedite the request form I'd sent to the DMV in Tallahassee. A driver's license was the one thing Pat Usher would have had to come up with, since Elaine had none, but it wouldn't have been that hard to falsify. All she had to do was apply in Elaine Boldt's name, pass the test, and wait for the license to arrive in the mail. In some states, you could walk out of the Department of Motor Vehicles with license in hand within minutes of taking the test—at least for a renewal. I wasn't sure what the procedure was in Florida. Jonah said he'd put a call through to Tallahassee and get back to me. I expected to be in Santa Teresa again by the next day, so I said I'd call him when I got in.

In the meantime, I drove back to the condominium and had a brief chat with Roland Makowski, the building manager, who confirmed what I'd already heard through Julia. Pat Usher had departed, bag and baggage, the same day I'd spoken to her. She'd dutifully left a forwarding address—some motel down near the beach—but when Roland tried to get in touch, he'd found out it didn't exist. I asked him why he'd wanted to contact her. He said she'd taken a dump in the swimming pool as a parting gesture and then scrawled her name across the concrete in spray paint.

“She did what?” I asked.

“You heard right,” he said. “She left a turd the size of a Polish sausage floating right in the pool. I had to have the whole thing drained and sanitized and I got people who still won't go in. That woman is demented and you know what pissed her off? I told her she couldn't hang her towels over the balcony rail! You should have seen her reaction. She was in such a rage her eyes rolled back in her head and she started to pant. She scared the hell out of me. She's
sick
.”

I blinked at him. “She panted?”

“She was almost foaming at the mouth.”

I thought about Tillie's night visitor. “I think we better take a look at Elaine's apartment,” I said flatly.

The stench came at us like a wall the minute the door was opened. The destruction was systematic and complete. There was fecal matter smeared everywhere and the couch and chairs had been slashed with murderous intent. It was clear that she'd gone about it quietly. Unlike Tillie's apartment, no glass had been broken and no furniture overturned. What she'd done instead was to open all the canned goods and pour the contents on the carpeting. She'd ground in crackers and dried pasta, jams, spices, coffee, vinegar, soups, moldering fruit, adding contributions from her own intestinal tract. The whole sick stew had been sitting there for days and the Florida heat and humidity had cooked the mess to a boiling foment of fungus and rot. The packages of once frozen meat that she'd torn open and tossed into the thick of it were full of wiggling life of their own that I didn't care to inspect. Big flies buzzed around malevolently, their glittering fluorescent heads like beacons.

Roland was speechless at first and when I turned he had tears in his eyes. “Well, we're never going to get this cleaned up,” he said.

“Don't do it yourselves,” I said automatically. “Hire someone else. Maybe your insurance will cover it. In the meantime, you better call the cops.”

He nodded and swallowed hard while he backed out the door so that I was left to search the apartment by myself. I had to be very careful where I put my feet and I made a little mental note never to chide Pat Usher for anything. As far as I was concerned, she could hang her towels anyplace she pleased.

 

 

 

 

With the cops on the way, I didn't have much time. I picked my way through the apartment, gingerly opening drawers with a hankie across my fingertips out of respect for latent prints. I did a superficial run-through and came up with nothing, which didn't surprise me. She'd stripped the place. All of the drawers and closets were empty. She hadn't left so much as a tube of toothpaste behind. By now, she could be anyplace, but I had a feeling I knew where she was. I suspected she'd used the last two flight coupons for a return trip to Santa Teresa.

I closed the place up again and went next door to tell Julia what was going on. It was two-thirty in the afternoon and I had a four o'clock plane to catch with almost an hour of driving just to get to the airport. The sky was miraculously clear again, the air smelling damp and sweet, sidewalks steaming. I loaded Elaine's suitcases back in the rental car and took off, promising to call Julia as soon as I learned anything new. This case was going to break for me. I could feel it in my bones. I'd been on it a week now and I had smoked Pat Usher out of
hiding. I wasn't sure what she'd done to Elaine or why, but she was on the run now and I wasn't far behind. We were circling right back to Santa Teresa where the whole thing had begun.

When I reached the airport in Miami, I returned the rental car and picked up my seat assignment at the TWA counter, checking the four bags through to Santa Teresa. I got on the plane with six minutes to spare. I was beginning to feel a low-level anxiety, the sort of sensation you experience when you know you're having major surgery in a week. There was no immediate danger, but my mind kept leaping into the uncertain future with a churning dread. Pat Usher and I were on a collision course and I wasn't sure I could handle the impact.

 

 

With the three-hour time difference, I felt like I got back to California roughly one hour after I left Florida and my body had trouble dealing with that. I had to wait an hour at LAX to catch the short hop to Santa Teresa, but even so it was only seven in the evening when I got home, toting Elaine's bags with me like a packhorse. It was still light outside, but I was exhausted. I'd never eaten lunch and all I'd had on the plane were some square things wrapped in cellophane that I was almost too tired to pick open. It was one of those lurching flights with sudden inexplicable drops in altitude that make napping tough. Most of us were too worried about how they'd collect and identify all the body parts once we'd crashed and burned. Some woman behind me had two kids of the whining and screeching sort and she
spent most of the flight having long ineffectual chats with them about their behavior. “Kyle, honey, 'member Mommy told you she didn't want you to bite Brett because that hurts Brett. Now, how would you like it if Mommy bit you?” I thought a quick chop in the ear would go a long way toward parent effectiveness training, but she never consulted me.

At any rate, when I got home, I headed straight for the couch and fell asleep, still in my clothes. Which is why it took me until morning to figure out that somebody had been in my apartment searching discreetly for God knows what. I got up at eight and did a run, came home, showered, and dressed. I sat down at my desk and started to unlock the top drawer. It's a standard-issue desk with a lock on the top drawer that controls the bank of drawers to the right. Somebody had apparently slipped a knife blade into the lock and jimmied it open. The realization that someone had been there made the nape of my neck feel like I'd just applied an ice pack.

I pushed back from the desk and got up, turning abruptly so that I could survey the room. I checked the front door, but there was no indication that anyone had tampered with the double-key dead bolt. It was possible that someone had made a duplicate of the key, though, and I'd have to have the lock replaced. I've never worried about security, and I don't run around doing tricky things to assume that my domain is inviolate—no talcum powder on the floor near the entranceway, no single strands of hair affixed across the window crack. I resented the fact I was going to have to deal with this break-in, surrendering a sense of safety I'd always taken
for granted. I checked the windows, moving carefully around the perimeter of the room. Nothing. I went into the bathroom and examined the window there. Someone had used a glass cutter to make a small square opening just above the lock. Electrical tape had evidently been used to eliminate any sound of breaking glass. Where the strips of tape had been peeled off, I could still see remnants of adhesive. The aluminum screen was skewed in one corner. It had probably been popped out and then put back. The job had been cleverly done, set up in such a way that I might not have discovered it for weeks. The hole was large enough to allow someone to unlock the window, sliding it up to permit ingress and egress. There's a curtain at that window and with the panels in place, the small hole in the glass wasn't even visible.

I went back into the other room and did a thorough search. Nothing seemed to be missing. I could see that someone had eased sly fingers between my folded clothes in the chest of drawers, had deftly gone through the files, leaving everything much as it had been, but with faint disarrangements here and there. I hated it. I hated the cunning and the care with which it had all been done, the satisfaction somebody must have felt at pulling it off. And what was the point? For the life of me, I couldn't see that anything was gone. I didn't own anything of value and the files themselves were not worth much. Most of the ones I kept at home had been closed out anyway and my notes on Elaine Boldt were at the office. What else did I have that someone might want? What worried me too was the suspicion that this
might be Pat Usher's handiwork. Somehow she seemed much more dangerous if, along with savagery, she was also capable of craftiness and stealth.