Ultimate Thriller Box Set (112 page)

But now they both knew I was on the case and, judging by Arlo’s reaction to me in Santa Monica, I knew he wouldn’t be too happy about the news, especially if he caught a peek at me and recognized me from the elevator. I figured he might do something rash and save me the trouble of cooking up some way to sneak up on him.

I’d be able to get more out of Arlo if I could make him think I knew more than I actually did. Private eyes pulled that trick all the time.

I didn’t come to any new conclusions about the case while I was standing there, but I discovered I could tell the tourists from the locals pretty easily. The tourists were the ones hiding from the drizzle under umbrellas. The locals were the ones who only needed a lid for their espressos.

Just about everybody, except the obvious tourists, seemed to have a cup of coffee in one hand and a novel in the other. Apparently, there was a city ordinance that required everybody to join Oprah’s book club and declare a favorite coffee blend. Even the bums were sipping Starbucks and reading Barbara Kingsolver.

So, before going back to the car, I stopped at the Elliot Bay Bookstore, bought an Anita Shreve novel, and snagged an empty Starbucks cup from the trash can outside, in case I ever needed to blend in with the crowd.

I drove east on Madison Street until it ended at the lake and a little shopping village that seemed to cater to well-heeled retirees and rich, young couples.

There was a small park and beach, but otherwise the shore was lined with apartment buildings that jutted out on pilings into the cold, emerald water. I wondered what would happen to the buildings in an earthquake. Californians can’t help but wonder about that.

Mrs. Harper’s apartment building was the tallest, at about ten stories, and the apartments on the end had big decks that commanded unobstructed views of the floating bridge and snow-capped Mount Rainier in the distance.

I parked the car in front of her building, walked up to the lobby, and found her name on the directory by the locked front door. I punched in the number of her unit on the security keypad and rang her up.

“Yes?” her voice crackled with static. There were Jack-in-the-Box drive-thrus with better speaker systems.

“Mrs. Harper?” I replied.

“Yes?”

“My name is Harvey Mapes, I’m a detective with Westland Security. Your son-in-law, Cyril Parkus, hired me to investigate your daughter’s death.”

I waited for her to say something, but the speaker just hissed.

“I’d like to come up and ask you a few questions.”

“Cyril didn’t say anything to me about this,” she said.

“I was afraid of that,” I said. “I’m sorry. I guess he didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“Is this really a conversation you want to have over a loudspeaker? There are other people waiting to come in out here.”

She buzzed me inside. I took the elevator to the seventh floor and walked down the long, wide corridor to the very end. It smelled like disinfectant and fried food and shag carpet. It smelled like retirement.

I knocked on her door but she didn’t open it right away.

“Do you have some ID?” she asked, her voice muffled behind the door.

I was glad I’d decided to stay as close to the truth as I could with my story. I wasn’t exactly lying, but I was certainly implying a lot more than was true.

I held my Westland employee ID up to the peephole. The ID didn’t say anything about me being a security guard, it just had my name, my picture, a barcode, and their badge-and-eagle logo. It must have impressed her, because she slid off the chain, turned the deadbolt, and opened the door.

I expected to see Lauren, the way she’d look if she were an actress playing her older self, after the make-up guy glued on latex wrinkles and rubber jowls and added a few age spots and a stringy, gray wig to obscure her youthful, sculpted beauty. But underneath all that applied age, I knew her intense eyes would shine through, revealing the woman underneath it all, the one that time, real or imagined, couldn’t hide.

So, I was startled by the matronly old woman who faced me, her gray hair tied up in a bun, wringing her hands under her grandmotherly bosom. I looked for Lauren’s intensity in her eyes, but if it had been there, I wouldn’t have had to look for it.

She had the flat gaze of a trout.

If there was an actress underneath that aged skin, she had long ego become the woman she was playing. It was hard to imagine that Lauren had sprung from her loins, or that she’d ever had loins at all.

“I tried calling Cyril while you were on your way up,” Mrs. Harper said, “but there was no answer.”

“I wish you’d been able to reach him,” I lied. “He could probably explain himself better than I can. But I’ll try. May I come in?”

She stepped aside and let me walk in past her. Oprah was muted on the TV, the kind that was designed to look like a piece of carved-wood furniture, with built-in drawers and molding. There were framed, family photos on top of the TV and on most of the walls.

“Did you leave him a message?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Harper took a seat on the couch.

“Good,” I sat down in a chair facing her. Now Cyril Parkus would know I was in Seattle and what I was doing. The best I could hope for was to get as much information as possible from her before he called back. I wouldn’t get a second chance. “I’m assuming you’re familiar with the circumstances regarding your daughter’s death.”

“It wasn’t a death,” she replied. “It was a suicide. I don’t see what there is to investigate.”

“For starters, why did she do it?”

“Only she knows.”

“Can you live with that? Mr. Parkus can’t. He needs to understand. She didn’t leave a note and, as far as he knew, your daughter was very happy.”

“Lauren wasn’t my daughter,” she said, looking away from me, “though I certainly loved her as if she was. Even so, I think Cyril has engaged you in a hopeless pursuit that will only prolong his pain. And mine.”

Mrs. Harper wasn’t her mother. That explained why I couldn’t see a trace of Lauren in her face. I marveled at my rapidly-developing detective instincts. I would have to learn to pay more attention to my first impressions.

“What was your relationship with her?” I asked.

Mrs. Harper looked at me suspiciously. “Didn’t Cyril tell you?”

“I’d rather hear it from you,” I stalled, scrambling to come up with a bullshit explanation. “When I get the story secondhand, all I’m told are the broad strokes and none of the important details.”

“It’s irrelevant,” Mrs. Harper said. “Whatever tormented her was part of her life in Los Angeles.”

I could see that she still needed more convincing and time was ticking away. I took a deep breath and leaned towards her, resting my elbows on my knees. I had to show her how serious and competent I was.

“Suicide investigation is my specialty, Mrs. Harper. It’s been my experience that it isn’t any one thing that makes someone take her own life, but rather an accumulation of events over a long period of time. They eventually build into one, overwhelming presence that permeates every moment of their lives until there seems to be only one escape. Death.”

That last word hit her like a slap, which is what I intended. I gave it my best James Earl Jones delivery, as heavy and throaty as I could, then I let the word hang in the air between us, to reinforce the gravity of the situation.

“My job is to track down those scattered events and try to determine how they became something the person could no longer live with.”

It sounded like the intro to a TV series: “The Suicide Sleuth.” It might be hard to squeeze in enough sex and action to distract people from the morbid subject matter, but the exciting main titles were already playing in my head.

I looked her in the eye.

“I think we both know that whatever haunted Lauren didn’t start in Los Angeles,” I added. “It started a long time ago.”

Mrs. Harper nodded, tears rolling down her cheeks. I’d gotten to her.

“I thought we’d saved her, that she’d put those horrible years behind her,” she said. “But I see now that I was fooling myself. I see that no matter how much joy or love comes into your life, you can never erase the past.”

I tried to hide my excitement. I tried to look caring, concerned, and patient. I tried to look like a guy who wasn’t afraid that Cyril Parkus might call at any moment and ruin everything.

“Tell me all about it,” I said.

And so she did.

Chapter Sixteen

It took her about twenty minutes to lay out the whole story, fighting tears as she remembered it all again, the hope and the happiness and then the pain.

And while she spoke, I wanted to pull out one of the pictures I had of Lauren, to see if the expression on her face, the look in her eye, would slowly reveal their meanings to me as I learned more about her.

The story began about twenty years ago.

Mona and Brock Harper lived in a big house in Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle. He was a lawyer in the shipping industry and frequently entertained clients in his home, from private dinners with a few individuals to large banquets and garden parties.

The Harpers were always looking for dependable domestic help, but they went through maids almost as fast as they went through cocktail napkins. One day, a young woman answered their advertisement for a cleaning lady. She was conscientious, worked fast and efficiently, and clearly had experience. Her name was Lauren, and although she said she was eighteen, Mrs. Harper wasn’t fooled.

Still, good cleaning women were hard to find, and not only that, but Lauren was polite, well-mannered, and a perfect hostess when called upon to serve guests at the Harpers’ many social gatherings.

Lauren was also bright and inquisitive. More than once Mr. Harper found her in the library, after her work was done, reading from his leather-bound collection of classic literature, something he’d never done. The books were bought by their decorator, strictly for show. But it pleased Mrs. Harper that Lauren was finding the décor useful. It revealed the maid had intelligence and a desire to better herself.

Mrs. Harper decided to save her.

One night, on his wife’s orders, Mr. Harper followed Lauren after she finished work and discovered that Lauren was an orphan, living in a squalid Seattle tenement with a bunch of “runaways, junkies, whores, and radicals.” As far as I know, he didn’t become a private eye after that. I guess he didn’t get the same thrill out of surveillance that I did.

They immediately brought Lauren back to their home, offering her a job as a live-in housekeeper. Lauren settled into the maid’s quarters off the laundry room and continued her exemplary work. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper tried to try and find out something about their secretive, but dependable, housekeeper, but to no avail. After a month or two, the Harpers sat Lauren down and told her if she was going to live in their home, she would have to trust them as they had trusted her. She had to tell them the truth about herself.

So, she did.

Lauren admitted that she was only fifteen, and that she was a runaway, but that no one was, or ever would be, looking for her. She said her mother was a junkie who “sold her body,” as Mrs. Harper put it, for drugs and money. Lauren didn’t know who her father was. The man her mother lived with for years was a drug dealer who sexually molested Lauren whenever her mother wasn’t available for him, and sometimes even when she was. Her mother knew about it and didn’t care.

Lauren figured her only way out was to either kill them, or run away. She chose to run, because she wasn’t about to throw away her life for those two shitheads.

I had a hard time believing the entire hard luck story. To me, the only part that rang true was the drug stuff, because it connected her to Arlo Pelz, whom I’d just learned from Jolene was a seller and a user.

I was very pleased with myself. Through shrewd and dogged detective work, I’d just landed a big clue about where Lauren and Arlo’s lives intersected. What I didn’t know yet was exactly how. The story Mrs. Harper was telling me certainly wasn’t blackmail material, at least not that version. Lauren had risen from a tragic childhood and bettered herself.

Hell, if that story had come out, it would probably have raised Lauren’s stature among her fundraising-for-charity social set.

No, the truth had to be something much worse. Maybe Lauren wasn’t as clean and wholesome as she’d portrayed herself to the Harpers. What if she’d been an addict and a whore, and Arlo knew it? Worse, what if Arlo could prove it? That might have been something so shameful that Lauren couldn’t live with it.

That theory worked, except for one thing. It didn’t explain how Cyril Parkus knew who Arlo was, or if he didn’t exactly know Arlo, how he recognized his face.

While I was mulling the possibilities, Mrs. Harper went on with her story. I have to confess I was only half-listening at that point, and probably missed some important details.

The upshot was that the Harpers virtually adopted Lauren. They hired a new maid and Lauren was promoted to surrogate daughter. Somehow, Mr. Harper pulled off some legal magic and enrolled her in the local high school under their name. They told their friends she was a “tragically orphaned” niece they’d adopted. I don’t know what lie they told their family, but whatever it was, it worked. No one questioned anything then and hadn’t since.

“She blossomed in school,” Mrs. Harper said. “She made us so proud. Straight As.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, eager to go now that I’d found what I needed. There was just one, last thing. “Did she ever mention Arlo Pelz?”

“No,” she replied.

I showed her a picture of Arlo, a close-up I took that day on the pier.

“Ever seen him before?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Who is he?”

“A drug dealer.”

“Haven’t you been listening?” Mrs. Harper stood up, clearly angry. “Lauren escaped from that world. From the day she stepped into our home, that life ended and her new one began.”

“Apparently not,” I replied.

Mrs. Harper marched over to the wall of family photos and pointed at one of them. “Here she is getting the honor roll. Here she is on the swim team. The debate team. The school newspaper.”