Murder Alfresco #3 (27 page)

Andre canceled their dinner date
before she could think of a graceful way of doing so herself. He called to say he was going out with the money people for the second time in as many nights. They wanted to move forward quickly and were already hammering out business plans for a new restaurant. It would probably be a late night, as one of the backers was taking the red-eye to New York and they were hoping to nail down the basics of a deal before he left. They would be delighted if she would join them, but he would understand if she did not feel like making the drive down to San Francisco after work. She did not. He made promises of future nights together, as well as a bright future generally, in which he would open a new restaurant that was truly his from the ground up, designed and run his way. As much as his enthusiasm pleased her, she was tired, and out of sorts, and grateful to be let off the hook. She absolved him of any lingering guilt related to the matter, put down the phone, and welcomed a quiet evening to herself.

She’d brought a bag of Meyer lemons home from the restaurant. She dumped them into a wire vase and placed it on the counter, took one and rolled it between her palms, and breathed
in the delicious citrus smell. Meyers were so much more subtle and yet more potent than ordinary lemons. Regular lemons assaulted the nostrils. They were all acid, like a shout. Their rind was rough and more translucent, as though the fruit had less substantive intentions. Meyers had a warm, soft, velvety rind. Their fruit was softer, heavier, and sweeter. And the smell. The smell of them! It was perhaps Sunny’s favorite smell. There was the lemon scent of course, but more delicate and complex than the smell of ordinary lemons. The real difference was the hint of pine resin mingled with the citrus. Normal lemons were merely tart. Meyers were complex, with a base note of pine, like the smell of a hot day in the mountains when the pine needles give off their woody musk, and a mid-tone of sweetness and a bell-like chime of citrus high note.

She looked around the kitchen. It was still early. What she really needed was a swim. On another day, she would have driven straight to the gym from work, to dive into the cool water and let the number of each stroke be her only thought, down and back, down and back, counting one to twenty, one to fifty, one to a hundred. Tonight, she had resisted. The subtle disharmony in her body—the tight muscles, stiff joints, the knots in her shoulders—fit the disharmony in her thoughts, which were largely sullen, vaguely hostile, and conflicted. She was indecisive and had stood by the door to her office for ten full minutes, weighing the pros and cons of driving to the gym. In the end, out of apathy more than a real decision, she had driven home.

There was fresh arugula in the refrigerator, so she made a salad and ate it standing up in the kitchen, even though she wasn’t hungry. She ate without noticing what she was doing,
and only realized she’d been eating when it was gone. The iPod waited on the window sill. She picked it up and turned it on. Nothing. She carried it into the bathroom and held it in front of the blow-dryer, aiming the warm air at each of its orifices in turn. She counted to a hundred, and a hundred again. At the third one hundred, she turned off the blow-dryer and held the iPod ceremoniously with both hands. Still nothing. Whether the mechanisms worked or not, the battery was probably dead. She paced, arriving in the living room with no purpose in mind. There were deep shadows around the furniture and a patch of waning golden light on the floor. A damp chill was settling in.

Beside the hearth stood a neat stack of firewood and a basket of kindling and pinecones. She put a pinecone in the hearth and made a teepee of kindling around it, then crumpled a scrap of newspaper and lit it. When the kindling blazed up to its peak of intensity, she put a medium-sized log across it and another on top. The flames licked the dry logs hungrily. She set the iPod on the mantle. A cross, sour mind such as possessed her tonight was no good for thinking well or talking, no good for creating or appreciating anything. She was trapped. With such a mind, only dull, rote chores were appropriate. This was a mind best suited to paying bills and cleaning the toilet. She went numbly around the house picking up stray items, returning jackets and shoes to their proper places, and fluffing up disheveled pillows, then sat back down in front of the fire. The orange flames, the occasional pop of resin, and the familiar smoky smell enveloped her, replacing the scattered thoughts with the flickering dance of flame.

Stationed on the couch in the deepening twilight, she eyed the stack of mail across the room. On top of it was the DVD Andre had dropped off yesterday. If watching it was to be bitter medicine, now was the time to take it.

She set up her laptop on the coffee table and put the movie in. Classical music played to the opening credits run over stylized animation of a woman trapped in a spider’s web while sinister male faces laughed and jeered around her. The story began at a manor house in the countryside, where a fresh-faced new maid was coming to work. The Japanese dialogue was translated in subtitles, unnecessarily. The animation reminded her of
Speed Racer,
with minimal detail, curt movements, and exaggerated expressions. Soon, and predictably, despite the well-meaning efforts of the other maids to safeguard her, the innocent falls into the evil clutches of the master of the house, who imprisons her in the basement and initiates her into the rites of the bondage cult that obsesses him.

In a state of trancelike immobility, she watched the movie from beginning to end, including the scenes that echoed the nightmare discovery of Heidi Romero’s body, those in which the little maid was tied as Heidi had been tied and hung from a bracket high on the wall much as Heidi had been hung from the branch of the oak tree. When it was over, she ejected the DVD, put it back in the case, and left it by the door, where it could be removed from the house as quickly as possible. She began to wish Andre hadn’t canceled dinner, that they were squeezed into one of the tiny tables at La Poste right now, laughing and eating artichoke salad and drinking a bottle of French Pinot. They had a hard enough time getting together. He worked nights and weekends, she worked days. Monday and Tuesday nights were their only chance to see each other at a reasonable hour, and they’d missed them both. Now it would be days before she would spend more than a few late-night hours with him.

Gripped by a strange mixture of sorrow, disgust, and arousal that immobilized her in a state of despondency, she lay on the
floor and felt the heat of the fire against her face. Her mind was held in thrall to the terrible images of the little maid and she could think of nothing else. They played over and over for what seemed like hours. She thought of every character in the threadbare narrative, relived each scene, went backward and forward and back again to certain moments, watching the movie again and again in her imagination until the sheer repetition of the scenes and emotions it portrayed exhausted her. She walked numbly to the shower and then to bed, eager for sleep to wipe the slate of the day clean so she could start over.

She never knew what woke her. Her eyes opened and she climbed out of bed before she knew what she was doing. In the dark living room, the iPod sat on the mantle where she had left it. The white ashes in the fireplace gave off a faint glow. Sunny stood in front of them, where the floor was warm, and felt the slight heat against her shins. She picked up the iPod. It was warm too. She felt for the button she’d tried a dozen times and pushed it. The tiny screen flickered and lit up, hurting her eyes in the dark. A menu appeared. She sat down where she was and pulled her knees up, turning her back to the ashes and hugging herself to stay warm. She slipped the headphones on and selected the play list. Instead of songs titles, a list of files named by date and time appeared. She selected one called “12Jan6PM.”

At first, she couldn’t hear anything except a faint hissing. Then she heard the cry of a gull followed by thumping. It was the sound of a houseboat rocking against its mooring. A woman spoke in the distance, offering some kind of condolence to whoever she was talking to. She said, “That’s terrible,” drawing out
the middle of the word in sympathy. She said, “I’m sorry to hear you had a bad day,” and then, “What makes you say that?”

Sunny hit pause, then worried about the battery running out and switched the device off. She took off the headphones and turned her face to the ashes of the dying fire. The woman was definitely young and the background noises fit the houseboat. It was Heidi, she was sure of it, either talking on the phone or talking to someone beyond the reach of the recorder. Why would she record a phone conversation? And if the conversation was important enough to record, why not use the answering machine and get both sides of the conversation. Sunny tried to remember if she saw one at Heidi’s place. Maybe she used one of the dial-in services, in which case she wouldn’t be able to record it. Maybe the iPod was all she had. Sunny shivered in the dark room. That had to be Heidi’s voice. As eager as she’d been to free Heidi Romero from the events that ended her life, she had failed to do so. Hearing her talk so casually, Sunny realized that Heidi still lived in her imagination in a perpetual state of torment and suffering at the hands of her killer. This voice was the real Heidi. There was no fear in it, no dread, no urgency. She was just a young woman talking on the phone as if she had all the time in the world.

Sunny took the iPod and went into the bathroom. She closed and locked the door, checked that the window was locked, and sat down on the bathmat. She pulled two towels down from the rack, arranged one over the tub, and put the other around her legs. Then she settled back and put the headphones on. The first recording picked up in the middle of a conversation about a ski trip. Heidi described her abilities, modestly, Sunny suspected. The person on the other end of the line was presumably Mark
Weisman. They talked about various options. Heidi said in theory she preferred the mountains at Whistler or Snowbird, but Tahoe was reporting the best conditions. They talked about skiing Rocky Mountain powder versus the hardpack typical of the Sierras. Heidi’s voice was light and full of laughter. The idea of a ski trip with her new romance was obviously exciting. Judging by the sound of Heidi’s voice and the occasional cry of a gull, she was sitting on the deck. Near the end of the conversation, someone with a deep voice and much closer to the microphone than Heidi cleared his throat.

The file ended and she skipped down to the next. It was another telephone conversation between, presumably, Heidi and Mark Weisman. They seemed to be talking about Mark’s work schedule and when he would be in town next. Sunny listened for a few minutes, then skipped down to the next file. There were several innocuous sentences, then Heidi said, somewhat snidely, “Is your wife going to be there?” She backed off, her voice gentler. “I was just asking. . . . No, no, I love
Vedana.
You know that. I always have a great time. . . . Honey,
Vedana
is the best, but it’s your wife’s, too. . . . I have some stuff to do in the morning. I can meet you there at noon.” Mark must have said something that irritated her again, because her next words sounded edgy. “And whose fault is that? I have all weekend free, but that doesn’t do us any . . .” Her voice trailed off and Sunny heard the French doors being forced closed.

She scrolled through the rest of the menu, but there was nothing else in the memory. There were over a dozen of Heidi’s phone conversations recorded, all of them, it seemed, with Mark Weisman.

She went into her bedroom and set the iPod up to record, then left it on her nightstand with the microphone angled
toward the door and walked out to the living room. The front door was the farthest point from the microphone and she stood in front of it and said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is a test of the Association of Culinary Professionals Specializing in Crime Scene Evidence Recovery. This is only a test.”

The recording was not as clear as the ones of Heidi, but it was comparable. It stood to reason that the microphone might have been damaged or clogged with mud, which would naturally degrade the quality of the recording. Sunny wrapped the iPod in a tea towel and put it on the bottom of a drawer full of kitchen towels.

She knew the woman speaking was Heidi because she mentioned working at the sporting goods shop, among other details, and even though Heidi never said his name, she knew the person on the other end of the line had to be Mark Weisman, for lots of reasons, but especially because of the reference to the
Vedana.
The person who had cleared his throat had made recordings of Heidi talking on the phone to her lover. It was therefore someone who lived very near her. A neighbor, or at most two boats over. Sunny thought of the woman playing the piano, and how the screech of the parrot named Chopin and the ringing of the woman’s telephone both had sounded loud and close enough to be in the same room with them. Standing in the kitchen, her eyes widened with fearful comprehension as she remembered Ronald Fetcher leaning over the wooden railing of the dock, watching her from above while she fished the iPod out of the mud.
The tide reveals all kinds of interesting things. What did you find down there?