Dead Lift (4 page)

Chapter Six

“I said I never met him, not that I never heard of him.” In the city jail, Claire had worn her street clothes but, at County, they’d been traded for a standard-issue orange jumpsuit with a loose cut that hid every curve on her slender frame.

“Did you know that Platt and King co-owned the Westside Cosmetic Surgery Center?” Afraid of the microbes I knew were there, I kept the visiting room’s scummy telephone handset a couple centimeters from my ear.

Claire’s eyes, flat and tired, had sunk into a complexion that lacked yesterday’s vibrancy. The pane separating us was so gritty I thought maybe its opaque glass was partly to blame for her weathered appearance.

“Of course I knew,” she said. “I’ve been a patient there for years.”

“Why’d you withhold that yesterday?”

“I didn’t withhold anything.”

“Now two things trouble me.”

With her free hand, she massaged her temple in a gesture that hinted at impatience.

“You suggested you had no connection to Platt. And you didn’t disclose that the woman you
say
set you up is
married
to his business partner.”

“I don’t have a connection to Platt.”

“But you knew—”

She raised her free hand to cut me off. “And I assumed the partnership was common knowledge. My attorney has all that background.”

When I didn’t answer, she narrowed her eyes. “Who are you to judge me?”

“I haven’t judged you.”

“You were in the papers. The out-of-towner who helped the FBI bust up that crime ring last March. You killed a guy.”

“Those people had my daughter.”

“You let them take her away from you.”

“I…
let
them?” I fought to control my anger. She was either misguided or cruel. Racketeers had kidnapped my baby when they killed my husband—I thought I’d lost them both—and then they sold her to an unwitting couple desperate to have a child. Even helping to bust them hadn’t made things right. Annette still thought the Fletchers were her parents, and Jack’s death would forever leave a void. But I couldn’t let my thoughts go there now. I needed to focus on why I’d come.

I stared at her through the glass. “Did you kill Platt?”

She smacked the pane. “No. A thousand times, no.”

I regarded her for a moment. The strange Jekyll-Hyde feeling was back and I couldn’t figure out what it was about this woman that made me alternately think she was innocent, then nuts. “If you knew that about me, why’d you ask yesterday whether I had kids?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know yesterday. My mom looked into you. She visited me last night before my transfer. Told me about the news articles she found.”

“The people responsible for kidnapping my daughter also killed my husband,” I said. “They tore apart dozens of families and took uncounted lives. Your attorney defended them. So I ask myself, if he took
their
cases…”

She finished. “Would he take anyone’s? Probably. But I’m not guilty.”

I checked my watch. Visits at County were limited to thirty minutes and we had four left.

“Got somewhere to be?” she asked.

“Your gym, actually.”

She raised her eyebrows, amused. “The shark tank.”

“We’re still watching Diana.” I paused. “When’s the last time you were there, by the way?”

“Thursday. Why?”

I shook my head. “Just curious.” Then, in an inexplicable moment of courage, I added, “Mind if I take a look around your house?”

She shrugged. “Look all you want. Hide-a-key’s near my bathroom window. Alarm code’s 0606-star, my youngest’s birthday.”

I didn’t know what I expected to find at her house, but Claire’s cooperation swayed me back slightly toward the Dr. Jekyll end of her personality spectrum. “Thanks.”

“As for the club,” she said, surveying my faded, off-brand tank top. “Help yourself to my closet. Might give you a head start toward fitting in.”

Something told me Claire paid more for a top than I paid for a week’s rent.

“I wouldn’t feel right sweating in your designer clothes.”

“Standing offer,” she said. “Think it over.”

***

While I was at County, Jeannie power shopped at Houston’s Galleria, browsing expensive stores and probably buying more stuff than she could afford. She sounded a little disappointed when I called to say I was finished at the jail, but when I told her my plans to visit Claire’s house, she perked right up.

“Bring me,” she said. “That place will be
nice
. And what’s this business about borrowing her clothes?”

“Calm down,” I said. “Cocktail dresses and four-hundred dollar shoes weren’t part of her offer.”

“I’ve barely put a dent in the second floor of this fabulous mall,” she said. “What time are we going to Claire’s? We have appointments at noon.”

I remembered Vince and his half-laughing warning. “Pedicures?”

“Negative,” she said. “Highlights for me. Wax for you. And, listen, before you—”

“No.”

“—refuse to go, the waxer is—”

“
No
.”

“—Diana’s daughter.”

I hung up.

She called me right back. “I met her during a smoke break at the funeral yesterday. Start thinking about what you’ll say.”

I didn’t want to think about hot wax anywhere on my body, much less what I would say to the daughter of a potential murderer as she applied it to me.

“Back to our plan,” I said. “Richard got some police cronies to take over Diana’s surveillance…sort of a second job thing, I guess. That freed him up, but I’m still too edgy to include him at Claire’s. How about we meet at her house and stay until it’s time for your appointment—”

“
Our
appointment
sss
.”

“—Then we’ll head to Tone Zone and see what we can learn. Diana usually goes around lunchtime. We may cross paths.”

It took some prodding before Jeannie would agree to skip the rest of the Galleria, but the prospect of seeing the inside of a decadent River Oaks home was too much. Finally she broke down and asked for directions. We agreed to meet at Claire’s.

I arrived in the neighborhood first. My slow drive through one of the oldest, most affluent communities in Houston was strangely quiet. Except for the occasional dog walker, everyone seemed to be cocooned in stately mansions that ran the gamut from old Tudor to Victorian to contemporary, and service vehicles on every street underscored the upkeep required to maintain appearances. Trucks and trailers for various landscape architects and vans belonging to general contractors, sprinkler services, and painters reminded me how much additional cost, beyond the inconceivable mortgages, an upper crust lifestyle demanded.

Enormous oaks, easily over a hundred years old, towered overhead forming an arboreal tunnel for passing motorists like me. In their shade, some homeowners had suspended children’s swings in front yards, their ropes often tied off from perches as high as twenty or thirty feet. The maturity and abundance of these trees, many with trunks covered in lush ivy, certainly made an impression, but to a grassroots Midwesterner like me, the shock value was in homes large enough to be hotels. Evidently, Monday was trash day because residents had deposited recycle bins on their curbs, a detail that somehow humanized them for me.

In Hollywood, I’d once paid forty dollars for a tour of the stars’ homes and been disappointed to find so many of them obscured from public view by high and thick shrubbery. By contrast, Houston’s elite proudly shared sweeping views of their estates, opting instead to simply keep their front drapes drawn and, where applicable, their gates closed.

I passed three properties in a row, all some variant of the White House, before finding Claire’s cul de sac which, like everything else in the neighborhood, was super-sized, more like a traffic circle on steroids. Wide, tall, and deep, Claire’s house was clearly spacious, but I was relieved it wasn’t as sprawling and over-the-top as those on nearby White House Row. I eased my car around a laundry service van and pulled into her extended drive, which curved to the right and ended in front of a three-car detached garage with an upstairs apartment I thought might be some kind of guest quarters. The garage was connected to her house by a covered breezeway, beyond which a wooden play-set, so large I thought it might be a commercial model, was nestled in the shade of four sprawling oaks near a lacrosse goal. Further back, an empty dog kennel reminded me of her love of animals.

The hide-a-key was where she’d described and I rehearsed the alarm code in my mind twice before pushing open the back door and keying in the numbers. I stepped into her kitchen, past a heap of muddy sneakers that clearly belonged to boys, and was momentarily awestruck. My entire apartment would have fit in her kitchen and dining hall. I shut the door and got to work.

At yesterday’s meeting, Claire had said she’d left her anonymous note on a counter. But, she’d also mentioned a cleaning lady and I knew the police had been through there too. If there ever was a note, it was gone now. The only item that caught my eye was a stainless steel plaque left discreetly in a corner nook that said, “Pets leave paw prints on our hearts.” Draped over its corner was a worn leather collar with a tag that said, “I rescued a human.”

I crossed to her two-sided stainless refrigerator and studied the photographs and notes stuck there. A series of wallet-sized school pictures showed two boys evolving over what I assumed to be the last three years. Both had darker coloring than Claire, caramel skin and brown eyes, not green, but the bone structure and expressions were all hers.

A pocket calendar, held in place by a magnet from a local private school, was open to July and its date boxes were crossed off through last Friday—when Claire had been served with her search and arrest warrants and taken away. The little squares were too small to write down anything descriptive, but Claire apparently used initials and abbreviations to remind herself about upcoming plans. July had various entries for
P
,
J
and
KT
with times beside them. I flipped back to June and saw more entries for
J
, a few for
P
, and a smattering for
K
. May had two
J
s, no
KT
s, and three
M
s. May was also thick with
K
s.

I gave up on the alphabet soup but suspected it might be useful so I took the calendar and dropped it into my bag. Around the corner, her neutral beige living room displayed artsy, wall-mounted shadow boxes that contained some kind of dried flowers. Drapes made from the same burgundy and gold chenille that covered the throw pillows were open, unlike her neighbors’, letting morning sun fill the first floor. I ran a finger over a soft, fancy sofa pillow and marveled over the effort that Claire—or more likely, her decorator—had put into the room.

A set of French doors, open on the other side of the foyer, led to a home office and I walked inside. Her computer was conspicuously absent from its spot on the desk, but the keyboard and mouse had been left behind. The desk faced the door, and I walked behind it and took a seat, staring across the foyer into the bright, super-coordinated living room, imagining for a moment that the house were mine. My attraction, I realized, was directed toward the home’s tidiness, not its pricey artifacts.

I started pulling open drawers. Bills and receipts, some dating back ten years, were tucked in hanging folders. She seemed a compulsive keeper of owner’s manuals—vacuum cleaner, dish washer, electric toothbrush, DVD player, cellular phone. Three models of cell phones, actually. From her files, I learned Claire’s kitchen cabinets and countertops were replaced in May and that Daniel’s Z4 was due for an oil change, though I doubted she cared. There were investment portfolios and 529 plans, copies of her parents’ living wills and power-of-attorney forms, and tax returns dating back through her last two marriages. I spent twenty minutes browsing paperwork but found nothing to tie Claire to Platt, or to anyone other than her family.

Her bookshelf had a collection of romance paperbacks, the sort of books Jeannie liked to read, as well as a collection of fitness magazines, photo albums, and a dog-eared copy of
How to Move On—After He Moves Out
, which struck me as odd since Claire had initiated her divorce.

My cell phone rang. It was Jeannie.

“Just turned onto her street,” she said. “Brought you a latte.”

“Right after the laundry service van.” I started up the custom curved staircase. “The back door’s unlocked. I’m going upstairs.”

Over my shoulder, I watched through an ornamental foyer window as Jeannie’s rental car rolled up the drive. She headed toward the back of the house, where I’d parked my old Taurus. I continued up the steps, headed for the master bedroom. Soon, the back door swung open, then shut, and Jeannie hollered out, “Helloooo?”

I leaned over the balcony. “Nice digs, huh?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Come on up.”

“In a minute. I’m starving.”

I wondered what that had to do with coming upstairs. “You’re
not
going to eat her food.”

“
She’s
not gonna.”

Suction broke as she yanked open a refrigerator door and I turned away from the banister. Arguing was futile.

Then, Jeannie screamed and there was a crash. She screamed again and I raced down the stairs.

Chapter Seven

In the kitchen, I found Jeannie backed up against Claire’s granite island countertop, two spilled coffees and a broken dish at her feet. She stared, wide-eyed, into an open freezer and pointed.

I rounded the corner, stepping around puddles and glass. Jeannie curled her lips into a disgusted snarl and pulled her eyes off whatever she’d found. “This lady’s a freak.”

Fog whirled in front of us and I gazed, disbelieving, into the freezer. Nestled on a shelf of its own was a set of vacuum-sealed rats. Individually bagged, they’d been positioned in alternate directions so that each set of heads was separated by the long, naked tail of a neighbor.

Too nauseated to speak, I turned away and pulled a long series of paper towels off a dispenser.

She flung the door closed. “Right next to the Lean Cuisines and frozen spinach.”

Together, we cleaned up the mess. Claire’s microwave clock showed that the time was nearing eleven.

“We only have a half hour,” I said.

She nodded. “What are we looking for?”

“I’m not sure. Mainly I want to get a sense of her. But I’d also like to know if she had a history with Platt.”

“Anything so far?”

I shook my head. “Let’s look upstairs.”

Four bedrooms opened off the second floor hall. Jeannie took the master suite and I turned the other direction and stepped into a gloomy room that obviously belonged to one of Claire’s boys. Navy blue walls sucked all the light from the space, but his twin bed was neatly made and even his desk was orderly. Again, I noticed that a computer was missing.

The room’s centerpiece was what I estimated to be a two-hundred gallon aquarium tank set up to accommodate a fat brown snake. Coiled and still, it lay pressed into a corner of the glass and didn’t acknowledge me. A copy of
Your New Burmese Python
rested open, pages down, on the enclosure’s mesh lid and I was relieved to at least have an explanation for the frozen rats.

Larger and brighter, the room next door belonged to the other son. Framed prints of airborne skateboarders, some in black-and-white, others in color, hung on the walls. I went from one to another and didn’t realize until the fourth image that the same boy was in all of them. A shelf with a dozen or so skateboarding trophies was mounted above a custom desk, fashioned to fit one corner of the room. Once again, there was no computer, but all the ancillary accessories were in place.

Jeannie’s voice startled me. “What do you think?”

I turned. She’d posed in the doorway holding a red silk evening gown on a hanger in front of her.

“Unless that dress has a card attached that says ‘Love, Wendell’ I’m not impressed.”

She frowned. “But—”

“The woman that dress belongs to is in jail right now, alone and miserable and missing her kids. Do you think she’d like to know you’re fondling her clothes?”

She skulked away.

Twenty minutes later, she found me again, this time in a guest room. Its only point of interest was an enormous bookcase on which Claire kept more photo albums. I was sitting on the bed, flipping through a book of wedding pictures when Jeannie came in with a small wooden box and plopped down beside me.

“Found this in the back of her closet. Bunch of letters inside.” She leaned into me for a view of the album in my lap. “That her hubby?”

I tapped a man in an olive green suit and lamb chop sideburns. “Her first, I think. These are old.”

Jeannie cocked her head. “You hear that?”

I listened, shook my head.

“Thought I heard a car,” she said.

Then, there was the unmistakable sound of car doors thumping closed.

“Someone’s here,” I said. Jeannie put the box on the floor and I slid the wedding album back into its spot. Below, the back door flung open so fast it hit the wall. Loud, asymmetrical footfalls sounded in the kitchen. We headed for the stairs.

Jeannie followed me down the steps and a pair of sweaty, hurried boys spun around the corner and stopped, staring.

“Hi,” I said.

“Who are you?” The younger one’s shaggy bangs prevented me from looking him fully in the eyes, but I could see enough to know these were Claire’s sons.

“Friends of your mom,” Jeannie said, apparently having reached the same conclusion. “She sent us to pick up a few things.”

“Have you seen her?” The older one seemed disbelieving.

Unsure how much they knew of their mom’s situation, I lied and said no.

I walked the rest of the way down the stairs and peered around the corner to the kitchen, where they’d left the back door open. “Who drove you here?”

The older one shrugged. “A friend. We’re getting stuff too.” He thumped up the steps, followed by his brother, and we waited in the foyer, listening to them open and close closet doors and talk in hushed tones.

Jeannie pointed at her Tag Heuer. “Gym time.”

A gust of wind caught the back door and blew it hard against the wall. “These guys are supposed to be at their grandmother’s,” I told Jeannie in a low voice. “I want to meet the ‘friend.’”

I left her in the foyer and went to the back porch, pulling the door shut behind me. The sky had grown overcast since I’d arrived. Thick air and a heavy breeze suggested a storm was coming.

A Lexus idled in the drive, windows down. Rock music played inside, but it wasn’t objectionably loud. Two teens waited in the front seat, unaware I was watching. The driver perched a hand on the steering wheel, a cigarette between his fingers. His friend wasn’t smoking but casually flicked a lighter.

“We haven’t met.” I leaned down on the driver’s side, low enough to see both boys. “Can I get your names?”

Too late, I realized I didn’t even know Claire’s sons’ names. The kids in the Lexus watched me impassively.

“Jeff,” said the driver. He made no effort to hide his cigarette.

“Chase,” said the other.

“What’s your plan for today?”

“Skate park,” Chase said. “Xbox later.”

Then Jeff asked, “Is Kevin around? Thursday he said he’d be around.”

“I’m not here to talk about him.” I had no idea who Kevin was. “I’m here to talk about
this
.” I reached through the window and plucked the cigarette from Jeff’s fingers. “You know better.”

Claire’s boys barreled from the kitchen, now toting backpacks. Jeannie followed them to the car.

I stopped the older one. “Why are your computers missing?”

“Grandma’s getting us new ones.” He pulled open the back door and slid inside. His brother followed suit.

“Does your mom use her machine much?”

He shrugged. “Nah. We always have to help her. Or her boyfriend will, if he’s around.”

“Have fun at the skate park,” I said.

The older one nodded. Jeff put the car in reverse.

“Remember what I said about the cancer sticks,” I told him.

He nodded, a gesture I knew was only meant to placate. We watched them head for the road and Jeannie sidled up next to me.

“New computers for all of them?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I think the machines were taken with the search warrant. Sounds like the kids weren’t here when Claire was served and that Grandma’s covering up for her. I’m glad about that.”

“Why’d they take the computers? Doesn’t sound like Claire uses them much.”

A rain drop fell on my arm, then cheek. “I’d like to know that too.”