Dark Tort (16 page)

“I already talked to Arch about the van this morning. He is absolutely sure, completely positive, that he turned off the radio, because he’d come to the end of a Dave Matthews song. Then he remembers picking up his book bag, opening the passenger door, and slamming it shut. He remembers the slamming because he said he was in such a bad mood. Plus, he recalls staring at the car for a minute, making sure he had everything he needed for his homework.”

“Right. And I suppose he’s absolutely positive he locked it, too.”

“No, that he’s not sure of. In fact, he thinks he didn’t, because his hands were full with his book bag and books.” Tom stopped laying down hard-boiled egg halves and waited until I met his gaze. “He’s sure he didn’t leave the radio and lights on. He’s sure he didn’t remember to lock the van.”

“So you do think somebody tampered with my car. Or my son has a conveniently slippery memory.”

“The former. My theory is, someone was watching you, knew your schedule. Knew when you left for the firm to go make the bread for the Friday-morning meeting.” He finished the salad and covered it with plastic wrap. “I told the investigators to send our guys out to canvass our neighbors, check if anyone saw somebody, anybody, messing with your car. We need to know if a neighbor saw someone scouting you out. I also told our guys to look at any folks who might have seen an odd, as in out of the ordinary, vehicle over by H&J that late at night.”

Someone scouting you out. I tried to rid myself of the memory of Vic Zaruski and his long, furious face, of his boatlike white convertible, and of the many times it had been parked in the Routts’ driveway. In the Routts’ driveway or on the street. He wouldn’t have messed up my car, would he? He wouldn’t have strangled a girl he cared about, or had once cared about, would he?

“Goldy?” Tom queried. “Think. Look back at that scene you came upon in the office. Something missing? Something out of place?”

I sighed. I’d already told the investigators down at the department that I couldn’t tell if the place had been robbed, that I’d been concentrating on Dusty . . . and then I remembered I hadn’t yet told Tom about the bracelet. Where was my mind?

“Tom,” I began, “I need to talk to you about a piece of jewelry that Dusty was wearing last week.” Tom raised his eyebrows and cocked his chin, as in Go on. I told him all I’d shared with Britt and how I’d been unsure whether Dusty had been wearing the opal and diamond piece around her wrist when I’d found her.

“You don’t know where she got it?” Tom asked.

I shook my head. “She promised to wear it last night, and to tell me about it.”

“And you can’t remember whether she had it on when you found her.”

“Nope. It’s as if the memory is just out of reach.”

He told me to sit down, then pulled up a chair for himself. Then he took my hand and told me to shut my eyes. This I did.

“Now picture the office after you tripped and got up,” he said softly, “and describe every aspect of it to me.”

I did this, too. At one point Tom told me to imagine that I was seeing Dusty, and gently rolling her over.

“Was the bracelet there?” he asked.

In my mind’s eye, I looked at Dusty’s wrists. They were empty. I said, “No. There’s no bracelet, no watch, nothing.”

“Now open your eyes and talk to me.”

I hesitated. “Do you think Sally Routt would tell us if she’d seen Dusty wearing an expensive bracelet?”

“She might tell you. I doubt very seriously she’d tell me, or any cop, for that matter, given her attitude toward law enforcement.” Tom stared out the window, where new snow clung to every pine needle, every branch of aspen leaves. “The last few weeks or days,” he said finally. “How did Dusty seem? Didn’t I hear Sally Routt talking to you about that?”

“Sally said Dusty had been secretive.”

“And was she? I mean, apart from dodging the bracelet question?”

I stopped to think. “She did seem like . . . like someone with a secret.”

“Or secrets,” Tom said, his voice low.

Gus and Arch were not due back for a while, so I slipped back over to the Routts’ house. Sally was still crying incessantly. I said I had something important to ask her, and she quieted for a moment. Had she seen Dusty wearing a bracelet? I asked. Opals interwoven with diamonds? I drew a quick sketch on a piece of paper offered by Sally’s father, who tapped his way to the kitchen and opened a drawer to pull out a single sheaf. For a blind man, he could get around remarkably well, but he undoubtedly had every inch of the house memorized. Sally blinked at my crude drawing. She said she’d never seen anything like it, on Dusty or anywhere else. When she described the bracelet to her father, asking if he had felt anything on Dusty’s forearm when she hugged him, he simply shook his head.

“Dusty didn’t tell us everything,” Sally told me, handing the paper back. “And as I told you before, she’d been keeping something to herself, or so it seemed to me, lately. Of course, I was always worried when it came to our relationship. You know, I’m a single mom who’s made a bunch of mistakes. She knows I didn’t want another repeat of the Ogden mess.”

“Um, did the cops take everything from her room? Jewelry box, everything?”

“Yes,” Sally said, with a sharp intake of breath. “She had a jewelry box, but they showed it to me, and there was just an old silver charm bracelet in there. I told them they could take it, but they didn’t. They did turn her mattress upside down, since that’s the main place people hide things, apparently. They looked in our freezer, too. Second place people hide things. Nothing there either.”

“Yeah. Well. If there’s anything you think of, Sally, anything she might have said to you, anything she might have been keeping that seemed strange to you, would you please tell me? It would help.”

Sally bit her bottom lip so hard I thought it would bleed. But she merely nodded before she began weeping again. I told her I could see myself out.

Back at the house, I told Tom I’d come away empty. Did this mean the killer had stolen the bracelet? I asked.

“Not necessarily,” he replied.

“Maybe it was in her purse,” I said numbly. “Did the cops find her purse?”

“Yeah, they did. I think they would have told me if they’d found a real expensive piece of jewelry in there.” I must have looked despondent because then Tom said, “Why don’t you give me your Picasso there, and I’ll fax it down to the department with a note? They alert all the pawnshops, in case something turns up. A twenty-thousand-dollar bracelet ought to raise a few eyebrows on East Colfax, in any event.”

“Aren’t there pawnshops anywhere else in Denver?”

“Just a figure of speech, Miss G.” He finished his note to the department and punched in the fax numbers. “It’s always a good idea to cover all your bases.”

I was wondering if that was a figure of speech, too—did it mean you had to have a guy on each base defending it, or did it mean you had to cover the bases if it started raining—probably not that one, I reasoned—when the boys returned. It was already five forty-five. Gus clutched such a large handful of twenties and checks that when he slapped them triumphantly on the kitchen table, a third of them drifted to the floor. Behind him, Arch, cautious as ever, had folded his much smaller take into a careful package that he placed on the counter, along with the magazine order form. Gus’s blond-brown hair, several shades lighter than Arch’s toast-colored locks, framed his face, halolike, as he grinned, ebullient. The two of them resembled the faces of Janus: Arch ever worried and scowling, and Gus optimistic and brimming with confidence.

“Arch, where do you put your stuff?” Gus demanded as he unzipped his down jacket and dropped it to the floor. “Oops.” Gus, his appealing face shiny with melted snow, gave me a wide smile and scooped up the coat.

“I’ll show you,” Arch said, frowning. He hung his and Gus’s jackets on the hooks in the kitchen, then turned to give me a serious look. “We invited somebody to dinner.”

“ What?”

Immediately defensive, Arch retorted, “It’s what you would have done! We found her crying in her house. It’s Wink Calhoun, Dusty’s friend. You know, the one who adopted Latte? Anyway, she’s coming, and she’s bringing Latte. Hope that’s okay. They’ll both be here in about five minutes—”

“I’ve already invited Wink, but not Latte—” I began.

“C’mon, Mrs. Schulz,” Gus pleaded, his cheerful, red-cheeked face upturned to mine. “That’s a really cool dog, and we don’t have one at my grandparents’ place. Anyway, he took right to me! We both said it would be okay if she brought him.”

“Call me Aunt G.,” I told him, and he broke into a huge smile.

“Okay, Aunt G.,” which came out sounding like Angie, “we had to do it. Wink was Dusty’s best friend. Plus, she lives in a garage or something.”

“I know, I know, I’ve already asked—”

“Actually, Wink lives in a guesthouse,” Arch corrected, in a tone that made me cringe, since it echoed my own. “It’s a garage that somebody turned into a guesthouse on Pine Way. Nobody was at the big house, so we backtracked to the driveway and followed the sound of the crying. And get this, she’s only a receptionist, and she bought three subscriptions.”

Tom asked, “Is that how she described herself, ‘only a receptionist’?”

“Yeah,” the boys chorused.

“She’s the receptionist at Hanrahan & Jule,” I informed the boys as the doorbell rang. Then I said, “You boys need to go find Scout the cat and put him in the cage we use to take him to the vet. If he attacks Latte again—”

But the boys were already scrambling away, calling exuberantly for the cat.

When I opened the door, Wink Calhoun, tall, pretty, and pink-eyed, hesitated before stepping across the threshold. Her flat, oblong face always seemed just a bit too large for her body, and a pronounced underbite prevented her from being beautiful. But she had a ready smile and a retro look, complete with finger-waved light brown hair that gave her an undeniable charm. She wore a navy blazer over a white oxford-cloth shirt and a long blackwatch-plaid kilt that complemented her slender, shapely figure. She also wore tassel loafers, which I noted were soaking wet.

Her lack of movement at the door frustrated Latte the basset hound, however. He let out several loud barks and bolted into the house, tearing the leash out of Wink’s hands.

“I’m so sorry!” Wink began as the boys tumbled out of the kitchen to welcome the dog. Wink called to Latte to calm down. Not only did the basset hound ignore her, he started barking wildly as he raced around in a circle from the front hall, through the living room, then the dining room, then into the kitchen, back through the hall and the living room . . . until he hit the dining room again. Scout the cat, who had been hiding in the basement, took that opportunity to streak up the stairs, where the boys squealed and pounced on him. Jake the bloodhound, who had been sitting in his usual spot out on the deck, was clawing madly on the back door to be let in, all while howling at the top of his lungs to be allowed to be part of the fun. Latte, who seemed to be encouraged by the chaos, continued to make a mad circular dash through the rooms on the main floor, until Tom scooped him up in his arms.

“I’m telling you, Miss G.,” Tom called over Latte’s hollering, “apprehending criminals is nothing to this!”

“This is so cool!” Arch said, smiling gleefully, when he and Gus returned to the kitchen.

“Here, let me have him,” Gus was insisting to Tom. Tom allowed a squirming Latte to be taken by Gus. Latte, sensing the weakness of the transfer, wiggled madly and leaped out of Gus’s arms, only to begin his crazed circuit once more. Tom caught him again in the kitchen, and quickly transferred the dog outside.

“I made it!” Wink said. “You wanted me to come over, and the boys said—”

“Tom’s fixing a roast. Come on in.”

I shut the door behind her and opened my arms. She walked into my hug and began to shake with sobs.

“I’m so sorry, oh, dear Wink, I’m so sorry,” I repeated over and over.

Tom peeked out the kitchen door. The boys’ voices behind him were querulous. Where’s Mom? Why won’t you let the dogs in? Why doesn’t Wink come into the kitchen? But when Tom caught my eye and saw the embrace, he backed silently into the kitchen and quieted the boys.

At length, Wink stopped crying. She took a tissue out of her blazer pocket, cleaned up her face, and regarded me.

“Let’s talk in the living room,” I said gently. “How about a glass of sherry?”

Wink swallowed and didn’t move. “Sorry about falling apart. Dusty was my best friend in the firm. This happens to other people. It doesn’t happen to people you know.”

“The cops are working on it,” I reassured her. “It’s a good sheriff’s department. And later on, you and I can talk about what they were all up to.” Wink pressed her lips together firmly. “I don’t think the cops are going to find out what happened to her.” “What do you mean?” “You don’t know these people the way I do.”

So tell me about them,” I said.

“I wasn’t trying to scare you. I really do want to find out what happened to Dusty,” she said. Her mouth turned down. “I just don’t want to hear any of the gory details, you know?”

“Don’t worry.”

“And I can’t divulge any, you know, of the confidential business stuff, although I really don’t care at this point.”

“The cops talked to you, right?”

She looked over at the fire. “Yeah.”

“You told them everything pertinent, I hope?” When she nodded, I said, “Let’s go sit down.”