Blood Ties (28 page)

“You seem to know an awful lot about this guy.”

Sam managed a tight smile. He felt not the slightest temptation to let Dave Hempel in on the secret of Stephen Tregear's involvement.

“Intuition, Dave. A lifetime of police work. Now. Does Ellen conduct the interview? Otherwise I'll charge Mary Plant, and we'll end up with a lawyer in the room.”

When Sam came out of the lieutenant's office, he smiled.

“She's all yours,” he told Ellen. “Go get her. The tapes are running.”

*   *   *

Ellen went into the holding room with a manila folder under her arm. She sat down across from Mary Plant and laid the folder on the table, and then seemed to forget its existence.

She smiled at Mary, as if to say,
No hard feelings because I understand.

Then she was all business.

“Let me tell you how Walter Stride spends his spare time,” she began. And then she laid out the case—the two homicides, the blood samples recovered from Walter's basement, the DNA evidence, the semen sample taken from Sally Wilkes' body.

By this time Mary was in tears. She seemed to find the semen evidence particularly hard to bear.

“Would you like to see the pictures of his victims?” Ellen asked, sounding like she was granting a favor. “Would you like to see what Walter does to women?”

Mary shook her head. By then she was sobbing convulsively.

But Ellen opened the manila folder and lined up the photographs so that they faced Mary Plant.

“Look at them,” she said softly. “You need to look at them.”

Ellen waited in sympathetic patience while Walter's girlfriend stared in horror at his handiwork.

After about one minute, Ellen put the photographs back in their folder. Then she offered Mary a box of tissues. She even offered to bring her some tea.

“No, thank you.” Mary shook her head. Gradually she began to calm down.

“Look, Mrs. Plant—Mary—you have to understand your legal position. Walter got away because you warned him. He's still out there, walking around, sharpening his knives, getting ready for his next victim. We have you for obstruction of justice and as an accomplice after and, if he kills again, before the fact. We're talking about prison time here.

“But we really don't want you. We want Walter. He played you. From all accounts, he's an attractive man, and you're just human like the rest of us. He made you feel good, didn't he.”

Mary nodded, as if the joints in her neck were stiff. She dabbed at her eyes, and it wasn't just for effect.

“Tell me about him,” Ellen said. It was an invitation, from one woman to another, to confess her pain.

And that was what Mary did. At first she hardly mentioned Walter. She talked about her ex-husband and about the boss's hands. She talked about loneliness and the desperation that assails a woman by herself in the years after she turns forty.

And Ellen listened, making little agreeing noises the tape recorder never caught. Her job had never made her hard, and probably never would. She really did understand. She was not free from pity and the wish to comfort.

Finally Mary began to describe the first time she met Walter, what a handsome man he was and how sweet. At that moment, knowing the evil he had done, and that she had been betrayed yet again, she was still in love with him.

She told Ellen things she thought she would never tell anyone. She described what it felt like to have his hands on her, to know that someone could still want her and care about her.

In a world of sad stories, this was the one Ellen knew she would always remember.

And in the act of confession, Mary had accepted this policewoman as her friend. It was not the fear of prison that would move her, but the fact that at last one other person understood.

“There's something you can do for us,” Ellen said at last. “We need a description. There are no photographs of Walter. He could walk into this building right now, and we wouldn't know him. He's faceless, and that's his protection. We need to know what he looks like. Will you help us?”

“Yes.” That was all she said, just “Yes.”

“We'll have someone in here in a few minutes,” Ellen said, retreating into her identity as a cop. “He's called a sketch artist, although they use a computer these days. He'll help you put together a likeness. Then you can go home.”

“I hate doing this,” Mary said.

“I know, but it has to be done.”

*   *   *

“That was masterful,” Sam told her. He was almost obscenely pleased. “That was goddamn good work.”

Ellen really didn't want to be congratulated. She felt too much kinship with Mary Plant to know any sense of triumph. After all, she was in love with Walter's son.

“Promise me, Sam. Promise me that if the sketch artist gives us something useful, Mary Plant walks.”

“What does anybody care about Mary Plant? The prisons are overcrowded as it is.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

It was four-fifteen. The sketch artist was already at work. There was nothing to do except hook into his feed and watch Walter's face come together on Ellen's computer screen.

Ellen wished she could go home. As of this morning, home was now a high-end apartment near Fisherman's Wharf, where Walter's son would pour her a glass of Pinot Grigio and listen to her troubles.

Probably Steve was watching the same feed, seeing his father's face take shape. What must he feel?

*   *   *

Almost as soon as she was out of police headquarters, Ellen's cell phone rang. It was her father.

“Your mother and I are in town for a matinee. We wondered if you might be free for dinner,” he said.

Her first impulse was to beg off, but then she thought better of it. It would be an interesting experiment.

In fact, she decided, it was a golden opportunity. The thing had to be done sometime or other, and perhaps it was better that the first shock took place in a restaurant rather than at home in Atherton.

“Can I bring someone?”

There was a slight hesitation, and then her father said, “Sure. A friend of yours?”

“You could call him that.”

The only remaining question was, how did she present this to Steve?

They had been officially living together for only a few hours, but Tregear had given her a key to the front door. As soon as she was inside, she called his name and was greeted with a faint “I'm up here.” She found him in his work room. Gwendolyn was standing on his shoulder, her front paws in his hair as she peered over his head. They were both staring at the image of Tregear's father on the computer screen.

“That's Walter,” he said, without looking at her. “Older and heavier, but it's him. It's him to the life.”

“Steve, I want to ask you a favor.”

Tregear tapped a key and the image collapsed.

“Name it,” he said. He seemed almost to be defying her to think of something he wouldn't do for her.

“Will you have dinner with my parents tonight?”

“Sure. Where?”

Father and daughter had settled on Tarantino's, a fish place on the Wharf. It was about a four-minute walk from Tregear's apartment and Daddy liked crab. It was also socially neutral, so Ellen wouldn't have to find out whether Steve knew which fork to use.

It was only on occasions such as these that she realized how inescapably she was still her mommy's girl.

“I just need to go back to my apartment for a few minutes to get some clothes,” Ellen said.

*   *   *

Getting dressed was a revelation for both of them. Ellen had stopped by her apartment and picked up a black sleeveless dress and heels. It would be the first time Tregear had ever seen her in a dress, and this one fitted over her trim figure like a second skin. When she turned around she found him studying the change with obvious appreciation.

Then he cocked his head a little to one side and his eyes narrowed speculatively.

“You should wear that outfit with a pale gray shawl,” he said. “Besides, it gets cold up here at night. There's a knit shop in the Cannery. Let's stop there on the way and see what we can find.”

“Okay.”

He himself wore a white turtleneck shirt and a silk sport coat of indefinable color. The effect was decidedly but effortlessly patrician. He had a couple of expensive items in his wardrobe, probably because there was little enough else for him to spend his money on, but there was no display about him. He seemed indifferent to effect, as if it never crossed his mind that anyone would notice his clothes.

You are a beautiful man,
she said, nowhere but in her mind.

The shop in the Cannery had exactly the right shawl, a silk fishnet, almost iridescent. Tregear took it off a peg and draped it over Ellen's shoulders, his hands lingering briefly on her arms.

“You were right,” she said, smiling at him in the full-length mirror. “It's perfect.”

“You're perfect,” he answered. “Now let's go eat.”

Her parents had already arrived and were sitting at a table next to a window that opened out onto the Bay. Daddy was working on his customary predinner cocktail, and he stood up when he saw his daughter and her date approaching. Ellen made the introductions and the two men shook hands, Steve addressing her father as “Dr. Ridley.”

Now how the hell did he know that?
she wondered, but then she stopped wondering because she knew. By now he probably knew her great-grandmother's maiden name.

“And this is my mother.”

Mrs. Ridley offered her hand and submitted to the briefest possible pressure from Steve's. For the moment at least, she seemed prepared to suspend judgment.

They sat down and the waiter came. Ellen decided to be extravagant and ordered a Pimm's Cup, complete with cucumber, and Steve waved the man away, saying he was fine.

Conversation got off to an awkward start. Daddy wanted to know about his little girl's new guy. “So what is it you do?”

“I work for the Navy,” Tregear said, smiling as if the admission embarrassed him. “At least, they sign my paychecks. I don't know what I do to earn them.”

“It's classified, Daddy. Steve is a security specialist.”

Daddy seemed prepared to hear more, but his wife raised her eyebrows, which meant she had chalked up at least one black mark against the new beau, who was something technical—like the man who fixed your sprinkler system. Ellen decided to steer the conversation in some safer direction.

They talked about movies, and this drifted into a discussion of movies based on novels, and then somebody mentioned
Pride and Prejudice
, and the two men took up the question of which of the several movie versions would have been least offensive to Jane Austen. Ellen was content merely to listen because she sensed her father was having such a marvelous time.

Mrs. Ridley remained silent, apparently not even listening. It was one of her unconscious biases that intellectual conversation at dinner was vulgar.

“Laurence Olivier was the best Darcy,” Dr. Ridley announced, “but the 1940 film was hopelessly sentimental. Jane Austen was never sentimental.”

Steve pursed his lips slightly, suggesting that he was unconvinced.

“You wouldn't call
Persuasion
sentimental?” he asked, as if merely soliciting an opinion.

“No.” Dr. Ridley shook his head, perhaps a little too vehemently. “
Persuasion
is romantic, which is not the same thing.”

“I remember once hearing a definition of Romanticism as ‘the struggle to maintain an illusioned view of life.' On that basis, aren't ‘romantic' and ‘sentimental' virtually synonymous?”

“That's an interesting definition. Where did you read it?”

Tregear merely shrugged. “I didn't say I read it. I said I heard it. I don't even remember where.”

Dr. Ridley seemed disappointed, but he recovered quickly.

By the time dinner was served, they had achieved a wary truce about Jane Austen. The waiter brought Dr. Ridley his crab, along with a nutcracker to use on the claws. Mrs. Ridley had ordered sole, her habitual choice, and studiously avoided noticing her husband's careful dissection of the crab.

Ellen and Steve, refusing to take sides, had both ordered abalone steaks.

While they ate, Dr. Ridley described a seminar he had recently attended at UC Medical, which had been titled “The Neurology of Decision Making.” A small discussion had arisen over the concept of free will, which the panel members had seemed to regard as tasteless and beside the point.

“What do you think, Steve? Is there such a thing as free will?”

It was less a question than a challenge, another move in the intellectual game, and Tregear smiled to show that he understood it as such.

“For me, and for most people, free will is doing what I want to do. By that reckoning the will is more or less free depending on the circumstances. But we don't choose what to want. We just want it, and then we build a belief structure to justify wanting it. Desire is a cause, and action is an effect. We aren't free of that. As Kant pointed out, experience isn't intelligible without the idea of cause and effect. So it becomes a question of definition.”

“Like the definition of ‘Romanticism'?”

“Something like that.”

No one was interested in dessert, but Dr. Ridley wanted a cup of tea. When it came, Tregear pushed his chair back a little.

“I'll leave you three now,” he said, standing up. “Ellie, I'm sure you'd like a little time alone with your parents, and I'm sure they would with you. I'll see you later.”

The two men shook hands and mumbled the usual assurances about what a pleasure it had been. And then Tregear was gone.

“Well, that was abrupt,” Mrs. Ridley said, virtually the first words she had uttered through the whole meal.

“But well meant.” Ellen smiled. “Don't tell me you're not glad, or you'll hurt my feelings.”