Secrets to the Grave (48 page)

She turned and looked out the bank of windows, a chill going through her. She hated having the shades up when it was getting dark out. More often than not she felt like someone was out there looking in at her.

It didn’t occur to her as she lowered the blinds that someone actually was.

77

“Did you know he wasn’t taking his medication?” Vince asked.

Nasser shook his head. “He’s very secretive about personal things. I picked up the prescriptions for him, but what happened after that was not my business.”

They stood in the ambulance bay, in the damp cold. Nasser had needed a cigarette. He wore the collar of his pea coat turned up against the chill. It made him look a little sinister with his dark features and razor-trimmed goatee.

“Did he ever mention a woman named Bordain to you?”

“I don’t recall. Why would he?”

“She was Marissa’s patron. She owns the property where Marissa lived.”

“Oh ... ,” he said. “I know who she is. Zander was afraid of her.”

“Afraid?”

“She intimidated him, made him feel small.”

“Do you think Zander is the kind of guy who would try to get back at somebody for something like that?”

“Zander? What would he do?” Nasser asked. “Cast an evil mathematical equation on them? He won’t even go in a convenience store to buy gum.”

“That’s what I thought.”

They were quiet for a moment. Nasser finished his smoke and stubbed out the butt in the giant sandpit atop an equally giant trash receptacle by the door.

He nodded toward the building. “It’s taking a long time.”

“It was a long knife,” Vince said.

“Do you think he’ll make it?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s such a fragile soul,” Nasser said. “It’s like he was never meant for this world, you know?”

“He’s had a tough row to hoe.”

“Do you think he killed Marissa?”

“No. I don’t,” Vince said. “Let’s take a ride. Maybe we can prove it.”

 

 

They sailed out the dark country road in Nasser’s old 3 Series BMW. The muffler needed some help, and the ragtop quaked like it might fly off at any moment.

Zahn’s place was creepy in the gathering gloom, the fog slithering around the old refrigerators and rows of strange garden statuary. The house was black and unwelcoming. Coyotes yipped and howled in the distance.

Nasser let them in and turned on the hall lights.

Vince went into the room with the collection of filing cabinets that were stacked so close together he could barely fit between the rows.

I keep every paper
, Zahn had told him.

It hadn’t occurred to him when they were searching the place in the morning because they were searching for a man, not a document. Not even Zander Zahn would have attempted to hide himself in a filing cabinet.

When it came to him, it seemed so simple he wanted to kick himself. If Marissa had wanted to put Haley’s birth certificate someplace nobody would look, what better place than in the home of a hoarder? And who better to trust it to than her strange friend Zander? Zander, so devoted to her, so enamored of her. Of course he would hide it and never tell a soul. His loyalty to Marissa was absolute.

The cabinets were jam-packed with files on every subject imaginable. One entire row that had to be fourteen feet long and five feet high held nothing but math papers. It looked like every math paper Zahn had ever completed in his life.

Cabinet after cabinet after cabinet was crammed with the paper detritus of Zahn’s life, and everything he had ever found odd or interesting or pertinent or relevant. All of it alphabetized or otherwise organized, of course. There was just so much of it. Cabinets of financial records, copies of medical records, articles on the nature of genius and the mysteries of autism and its cousins.

“Can I help?” Nasser asked.

“I’m looking for any kind of a file pertaining to Marissa or Haley Fordham.”

“Okay. I’ll start over here.”

They worked quietly for what seemed like hours. Finally, just when Vince thought his eyes were going to give out in the poor light, he found it. The file was simply marked M. He pulled the folder out of the drawer and studied the document.

“What is it?” Nasser asked, trying to get a look.

Vince closed the folder. “Motive.”

 

 

He carried the folder into the hospital with him and went in search of Mendez, finding him in the ICU, staring through the glass wall into Gina Kemmer’s room with Darren Bordain standing beside him.

“How is she?” Vince asked.

“No change. No better. No worse,” Mendez said. “We tracked down her family in Reseda. Her parents are on their way.”

“Good. That might make a difference if she can hear their voices.”

“I wanted to go in and talk to her,” Bordain said.

“Family only,” Mendez said.

“My friends are my family. Gina and Marissa were part of the group.”

“Rules are rules,” Vince said. He locked eyes with Mendez and tipped his head away from Bordain.

They took three steps to the side before Mendez spoke quietly. “Zahn didn’t make it.”

Vince sighed.

“The surgeon said they would get one leak plugged and another would spring. That was a hell of a big knife. Between the damage to the organs, the blood loss and sepsis, he just wasn’t strong enough to pull through.”

“Maybe he’ll find some peace now.”

Vince thought of what Nasser had said:
He’s such a fragile soul. It’s like he was never meant for this world, you know.

Maybe he would find more compassion in the next one.

Mendez’s eye finally caught on the manila file folder tucked under Vince’s arm. “What’s that?”

“This?” Vince asked, as if he had forgotten about it. He handed the folder to Mendez. “A little light reading.”

Mendez flipped it open and looked the document over from top to bottom twice, his eyes going wide.

“Ho-ly shit.”

“Yeah.” Vince nodded. “I thought you might say that.”

78

Vince had called to say he would be late again and to go ahead with dinner. Anne brought the girls into the kitchen to “help” and to keep her company.

“What are we having?” Wendy asked.

“Macaroni and cheese—and not the kind that comes out of a box,” Anne said, gathering ingredients from the refrigerator and putting them on the island. “The real deal, like my mother used to make. Haley, do you like macaroni and cheese?”

Haley was on all fours on the banquette, playing with her stuffed cat. “Meow. Yes. Meow. Meow.”

Wendy laughed. “Haley, are you a kitty?”

“Meow. Meow. Meow.”

Anne filled the pasta pot with water and put it on the stove to heat, then cut up an onion and diced it in the food processor.

“Mommy Anne? When can we go and see my kitties?”

“I don’t know yet, sweetie. We’ll wait for a nice sunny day.”

“Will that be tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope it’s tomorrow.”

“Haley, what are the names of your kitties?” Wendy asked.

“Scat and Mittens and Kittywampus.”

“Kittywampus?” Anne said. “That’s a funny name.”

How nice is this?
she thought as Haley told a story about Kittywampus. She had grown up in a home that was often filled with tension and sadness and her mother’s desperation to be the best possible wife to a man who deserved nothing of the kind. Anne had tiptoed through that minefield her entire childhood, and unlike Wendy, by the time she was eleven she had wished every day that her parents would get divorced.

This was how a family should be. Enjoying each other. Being together. The picture was only incomplete in that Vince wasn’t there. It didn’t matter to Anne that these girls weren’t her children. She loved having them, getting to know them, figuring out their burgeoning personalities and how their little minds worked.

Life was good.

Until the doorbell rang.

Wiping her hands on a dish towel, Anne went to the front of the house, muttering her too-familiar ritual that she was all right, she was in a safe place, Peter Crane would not be standing on her doorstep.

But Dennis Farman was.

79

“Do you spend much time in Los Angeles, Mr. Bordain?” Mendez asked.

Darren Bordain was nervous and suspicious, and had been from the second Mendez had asked him to come back to the sheriff’s office with him. His first instinct had been to say no, but he had thought better of that when Mendez asked him why not.

Refusing made it look like he had something to hide. He had already refused to let them take his photograph. He had refused to take a polygraph. If he refused to come in to look at a new piece of evidence he might be able to shed some light on, the cops were surely going to think he had something to hide.

“I go down there maybe once a month.”

“Business? Pleasure?”

“Usually some of each. I went to school at UCLA. I have friends there.”

“Did you know Gina or Marissa from LA?”

“No. I told you before: I met them both after they had moved here in—what?—’81, ’82,” Bordain said. “Why are you asking me this? I thought you wanted to show me something.”

“We’ll get to that,” Mendez said.

The closed file folder lay on the table between them. Bordain eyed it like it might open and a rattlesnake would pop out of it and strike him.

“You also told us you never dated Marissa,” Mendez said.

“That’s right. We were just friends. We hung out with the same people.”

“You didn’t find her attractive?”

“Of course I found her attractive. She was a beautiful woman.”

“A beautiful, single, free-spirited woman,” Mendez said. “It’s probably not a stretch to think she wasn’t all that hard to get in bed.”

“That’s insulting.”

“To you?”

“To Marissa. She wasn’t like that.”

“She was a single woman with a child.”

“That doesn’t mean she was easy.”

“And you were never tempted to find out?” Mendez asked.

“No.”

“Even though you admit it would have yanked your mother’s chain if the two of you had gone out.”

Bordain rolled his eyes and shifted positions on his chair for the tenth time. “Just because I can yank my mother’s chain doesn’t mean I always take the opportunity to do it.”

“And last night, when you went home after dinner, did anyone see you?”

“I don’t know. Ask my neighbors,” he said, clearly annoyed. “I thought we went over all of this. I did not run my mother off the road.”

“Hmmm ...”

Mendez pulled the file folder to him, opened it and looked at the document, sighed and closed it again, returning it to its resting place.

“You’re telling me you didn’t know Marissa before Haley was born,” he said.

“That’s right. I’m telling you that, but you don’t seem to be comprehending it.”

“It’s not that, Mr. Bordain. It’s just that I have some documentation here that contradicts what you’re saying in a pretty big way.”

Bordain looked at the file folder but didn’t touch it. Sweat was beginning to bead on his upper lip. He wiped it away, shook a cigarette out of the pack on the table, and lit it.

People always thought they looked cooler and more relaxed when they smoked. The thing they never accounted for before they lit up was that if their hands were trembling even a little bit, with the cigarette perched between their fingers it would then look like they had Parkinson’s disease.

Darren Bordain’s hands were shaking.

“And I have some problems with your explanation of your whereabouts both the night Marissa was killed and last night when your mother was run off the road,” Mendez admitted. “ ‘Home alone’ is one of those alibis that really isn’t.”

“I wasn’t aware at the time I would need an alibi.”

“It seems like you’re home alone a lot for a guy who gets around town,” Mendez said. “Dinners with friends, all those civic and charity functions you go to. You go home alone. That doesn’t make sense to me. You’re rich, charming, good-looking. I wouldn’t think you’d ever have to sleep alone.”

“Maybe I’m not as promiscuous as you would apparently like to be,” Bordain said, flicking ash into the ashtray. Flicking too hard because he was nervous, a good bit of it missed the ashtray and landed on the table. He swore under his breath, stuck the cigarette back in his mouth, and quickly brushed the ashes onto the floor.

“And then there’s this,” Mendez said, slowly tapping his finger on the file folder. He did it over and over and over and over, the sound seeming to fill the otherwise silent room like water dripping from a faucet.

He could almost see Darren Bordain’s nerves fraying.

“Why don’t you just show it to me and get it over with?” Bordain snapped. “Whatever it is, there’s probably a logical explanation for it.”

Mendez pretended to think about it, then shrugged. “Okay.”

He opened the folder and slid it across the table.

“You should pay particular attention to the box marked ‘Father.’ ”

As he looked at the birth certificate the color drained from Darren Bordain’s face, then rose back up again, bright red.

“That’s a lie.”

“That is an official document from the county of Los Angeles.”

Bordain shook his head. “It can’t be. It’s not. I am not Haley’s father.”

“No? We showed her a photograph of you. She called you Daddy.”

“She calls every man Daddy.”

“Yeah, but apparently with you it’s official,” Mendez said, tapping his finger on the birth certificate. “Do you happen to know your blood type, Mr. Bordain?”

“A-negative.”

Mendez raised his brows. “Really? Because we’ve got the sweatshirt you wore the night you killed Marissa. Man, it was soaked in blood.”