Crunch Time (36 page)

I craned forward to read some of the titles on her bookshelves. There were chemistry and math texts, plus a number of books on something called string theory. I had a vague notion that this fit somewhere into the realm of quantum physics, although where, I’d been told, the quantum physics people couldn’t exactly say.

In this as in all else, Lolly had her own strongly held opinions. For the clutch of string theory volumes, in the place where a Library of Congress number would be, Lolly had made her own labels. On one:
Crap.
On another:
More Crap.
(Apparently this was her favorite word.) For the theory of super strings, careful printing on the label read,
Super-Dooper Crap.

“So how do you like my place?” she asked as she disappeared. “Before you answer that question,” she called, “tell me if you want some coffee. I’m trying to be a hostess here, even if you are an uninvited guest.”

I said, “I’d love anything caffeinated, thanks.”

The kitchen was actually a kitchenette, I realized, just around the corner from the living room. Lolly had covered the entrance with another madras bedspread, hung from a wire. Water ran and microwave buttons beeped. I could not imagine the reason for Lolly’s “new crib.” Once again, I perused book titles.
Accelerated Calculus.
Neurological Science.
Hydronics.

Maybe she’d flunked out of MIT. Somehow, I doubted it.

The microwave beeped again, and Lolly reappeared, holding two cups of steaming instant coffee. “I know it’s not your kind of drink, but my espresso machine is on the blink, sad to say.” She handed me a chipped mug and offered a wry smile. “Just kidding, I don’t have an espresso machine. I don’t have any milk, cream, or sugar, either, sorry.” She looked around her cheaply furnished apartment. “You haven’t told me how much you like my place.”

“Lolly—”

“Sit down,” she said, interrupting me, using her free hand to wave toward the bedspread-covered couch. “Here’s what happened. I got a four-point-oh at MIT first year. Since I was on a full ride, my parents were thrilled. So was I. And . . . I celebrated a bit too much when I came home. Got a DUI right on Main Street, next to Frank’s Fix-It. How come nobody ever busts him for smoking weed? Well, he wasn’t driving. Anyway, with me charged with DUI? At this my parents were
not
thrilled.” She put down her coffee and ran her fingers through her black and blue hair. “First they refused to pay for my lawyer. Not that they would have had that kind of money anyway. But then they kicked me out of the house. So here I am, taking a semester off, ‘for financial reasons.’ ” Her black-painted fingernails hooked quotation marks. Her blue eyes pierced me. “I was lucky, though. A friend gave me a loan. I mean, what bank is going to lend money to a drunk scholarship student, right? With that money, I paid my lawyer, got new tits, and started to work for an escort service. I’m gradually paying back my friend—”

“Lolly—” I said again.

“You’re interrupting me, Goldy,” she scolded, wagging a black fingernail in my direction. “But still. That’s the end of the story of how I became Humberto Captain’s whore.”

I said, “Oh my God.”

“I know what you’re going to say, because I’ve heard enough of it from Father Pete.” She put her hand on her chest in mock seriousness. “ ‘You shouldn’t go from drinking to prostitution, Lolly!’ ” Her dead-on imitation of Father Pete’s voice and manner made me smile, even though I was trying to be serious. “At least,” Lolly said dolefully, “he’s still talking to me. Which my parents aren’t.”

“You have a nice friend, to have loaned you all that money,” I said conversationally as I leaned back on the couch.

“Why do you think I decided to open the door for you just now?” she asked. “I figure I owe you. This friend? He used to work for you. Julian Teller.”

I started at the sound of Julian’s name. I hadn’t seen him since Jack’s funeral. Julian had inherited a packet from his biological mother, who’d given him up for adoption, then tracked him down before she died. In spite of having money for the first time in his life, Julian continued to hold down jobs. He’d been going part-time to the University of Colorado while cooking at that vegetarian bistro in Boulder where the owner took August off. The restaurant had survived the recent downturn, thank goodness. When Julian had told me this, he’d also insisted that I hire Yolanda to fill his place as my assistant. She needed the money and he didn’t, he said. So here was Julian again, reaching out to women with financial difficulties and asking nothing in return.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Lolly. “Julian shouldn’t have loaned me that kind of cash.”

“I was thinking no such thing,” I said huffily. “And if you’re so good at mind-reading, why aren’t you in Vegas?”

“I tried gambling,” she said matter-of-factly. She sipped her coffee. “But you have to have a team. If you’re going it alone, there’s more money in whoring.”

“Good God, Lolly.”

She squinted at me. “Hey, I’m trying to redeem myself here! I’m going to repay Julian. I’ll go back to school. My parents and I will eventually work things out.” She frowned and looked out the dirty living room window. “But Father Pete said I had to do more.”

“Do more?” I felt completely at sea. “Do more what?”

“Do
good,
Goldy! Jesus, wake up! How do you think I got involved with Ernest McLeod in the first place?”

“Because . . . Father Pete told you to?”

Lolly heaved a large sigh, as if my inability to comprehend her leaps in thinking were beyond her ken. She said, “As far as I know, Father Pete and Ernest don’t—didn’t—even know each other. But after our good rector gave me a lecture on doing something for the good of humanity or whatever, I said to myself, ‘The next person who comes to me for help—unpaid help, that is—I gotta do something for them.’ The next day, Ernest McLeod showed up at my apartment door. Just like you, except he didn’t pound on it and demand to be let in.”

“When was this?” I asked sharply.

“Couple of weeks ago. He’d sorta been watching Humberto for some clients—”

“The Juarezes.”

“Those people who were at the party last night? That man who confronted Humberto? Omigod, I figured they must be. . . . But no, Goldy, Ernest didn’t tell me their names, and I didn’t want to know. So Ernest had seen me with Humberto. He’d followed me. When he came here, he talked about how Humberto had stolen a big whack of dough from these people, or rather, from the man in the couple. Ernest said it wasn’t actually money, it was gold and gems. I didn’t believe him until he showed me a picture of a diamond necklace that had belonged to the guy’s mother. It was from a photo in a Havana nightclub, and the newspaper was all yellowed and raggedy, plus it was in Spanish.” Lolly paused, shaking her head. “But I could see the picture, and the necklace.” Lolly gave me another of her fierce looks. “I’d
worn
that frigging necklace, Goldy.” My throat turned dry. Lolly went on. “Humberto had loaned it to me to wear to a charity shindig we went to. We had sex in the afternoon, and afterward he told me he wanted me to wear a very special piece of jewelry to the posh dinner. He clipped it on my neck and said it had belonged to his aunt. Since he’d already told me neither his mother nor his father had had siblings, I thought,
Duh, I just caught you in a lie, Humberto
. So I believed Ernest’s story. And I decided to help him.”

Abruptly she stood and raced to the bathroom. I rubbed my arms, trying to get the feeling back in them. When Lolly came back, her eye makeup was smeared. Somehow I felt that she would be damned before she let anyone see her cry. After a moment she cleared her throat and again took up her story.

“So I said to Ernest, ‘What do you need me to do?’ He told me it wasn’t really legal. I said, ‘That’s okay, neither is prostitution.’ He smiled, you know? And then he said, ‘This’ll be prostituting yourself for a good cause.’ ”

I took a sip of coffee, now cold. I could hear Tom’s voice in my ear. If Lolly had engaged in an illegal search, then any evidence gleaned from that search would be tossed out of court. Still, if all this helped lead to Ernest’s killer . . .

Lolly said, “Ernest told me Humberto didn’t have a safety deposit box, ’cause he’d been following him for weeks, like a Rocky Mountain tick stuck to his skin, he said. And Humberto had never once gone to a bank. But Ernest
had
followed Humberto to New York City, to Forty-seventh Street, to be exact. The Diamond District. And that’s where Ernest found out Humberto sold a couple of diamonds. So, Ernest said, he was convinced that Humberto got them from somewhere in his
house
. Ernest asked me to look around for a safe. I did. There wasn’t any safe, at least not then, but I’ll get to that. For Ernest, I looked under pictures, tapped on the floor, checked the backs of closets. Stuff like that. I’m no investigator, but I couldn’t find anything remotely suspicious. I’m not talking about the
necklace
. That was different; he kept it in a jewelry box, the dummy. But a cache of gold and gems? No.” She shook her head again. “One thing’s for sure. Humberto is not the brightest bulb in the box. So I was sure I’d be able to find the rest of what Ernest was talking about, since I
am
a pretty bright bulb myself.”

“You’re a supernova, Lolly. But are you telling me Humberto doesn’t have a safety deposit box and doesn’t have a
safe
?” I asked, incredulous.

When Lolly shook her head, the black and blue hair moved like wings. “Not that I could find. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not in some place I didn’t find. All he has is his place. But the house does have security. There are two sets of codes, one for the front gate, one for the house itself. Of course, the third time I went over there, I opened my compact and used the mirror to watch him enter the codes, and I memorized them. What you learn in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. Anyway, I watched him do this several times. And Humberto is too stupid or too lazy to realize you need to change the codes from time to time. Furthermore, I’d done enough nose-powdering for him to think I only cared about my appearance. Not only that, I’d faked enough orgasms for him to think I was only in our relationship for the sex. When he paid me, he always said, ‘This is for you to buy yourself a little something.’ I always acted surprised and grateful.”

“Two sets of codes, and that’s it?” I still couldn’t believe what she was telling me.

“No, no, no, that is not it. As I said, there was no hiding place that I could
find
. But Humberto has his four cars, and his office building. He also has three thugs who guard his house and grounds. They’re all Spanish-speaking, and I don’t speak Spanish.” She sighed. “I did tell Ernest about the necklace, and that it was kept in an
unlocked
jewelry box. I felt terrible admitting I hadn’t been able to find the cache of stolen stuff Ernest insisted must be there. So I searched again. I went through the bureaus one more time. The closets. I scoured the cars. I looked in the freezer, under the mattress, and in every item of Humberto’s clothing. I checked the seams on all the pillows and upholstery. There was nothing handmade or hand-sewn. While Humberto slept and the guards drank themselves silly out in the gatehouse, I went through every box in the basement and the attic. One day I even took the toaster apart. No diamonds. I figured all I had to say if I was caught was that I’d lost something.”

“But that didn’t happen,” I said.

“Nope.”

I said, “Damn it. But why did you get upset a while ago? It’s not your fault that Ernest was killed.”

“Just let me finish my story, will you, Goldy? I want to get through this. Next time Ernest came over, I told him I’d failed. He said he had a new plan and gave me some of his temazepam. Know the drug?”

“Sleeping pills.”

She pointed a black-painted fingernail at me. “Correct. He asked me to open up the pills and sprinkle the powder into new bottles of the guards’ rum. He said to pour a little rum out of each bottle first, so it would look as if the guys had started drinking them and just forgot they’d opened them. Ernest assured me the dose I was putting in wouldn’t be enough to kill the guys.” When she shrugged, the torn-out neck of her sweatshirt fell off one shoulder, revealing the ratty strap of a bra. She pulled the sweatshirt back into place and went on. “The guys kept their bottles of rum in the refrigerator, so I knew I could do it. Ernest asked for the security codes, and I gave them to him. He also furnished me with a disposable cell and told me to call him the next time Humberto and I were going out on a date. That’s what Humberto always calls them: ‘dates.’ What a joke.”

She rubbed her eyes. I waited.

Finally, she said, “So then Humberto invited me to the opera. He always wanted to show me off to people, like he was such a stud, he’d been able to land a young girlfriend. And he wanted to appear cultured. Yeah, like yogurt, I always thought. Anyway, when he was on his way over here to pick me up, I called Ernest. Then I put the phone into my purse, to throw away at the opera, the way Ernest had told me. When I told Humberto I needed to stop at his place for a jacket I’d purposely left there, I threw away the guards’ open bottles of rum and put the doctored ones in their place.”

“Then what?”

“Down in Denver, I tossed the cell, the way Ernest told me. When the opera was over, I was so nervous we’d surprise Ernest while he was robbing the house, I told Humberto the music had moved my soul. I wanted to make love in the car. He complied.” She ran her hand through her hair.

“And when you got back to Humberto’s house?”

“The guards were all fast asleep. Humberto woke them up, yelling at them like there was no tomorrow. He insisted they search the house. That’s when they discovered the missing necklace.” She sighed. “Humberto called an ambulance for the guards. Then he phoned the police. But I think he was afraid of getting caught telling them about a piece of jewelry
he
had stolen
being
stolen, so he clammed up. As soon as the cops left, those son-of-a-bitchin’ guards hollered that
I
had to be the one who had stolen the necklace.” She lifted her chin, indicating the tiny apartment. “They came over here and tore the place apart.” Her right hand patted the couch. “I had to put this bedspread over my sofa, because they ripped through the old fabric, looking for the necklace. They went through the trash, inside my apartment and out in the parking lot, so I was glad I had dumped the cell in Denver. Then the assholes broke into my
parents’
house and ransacked
it
. But wait, this is the good part.”