Authors: Lynda La Plante
Leroy Able was back in his office and back in his public persona when he got the call. When the sergeant asked if he’d been contacted by any old buddies, he frowned and leaned his elbows on his desk.
“Nope, why do you ask?”
“We got a stiff found early this morning, an’ you was in the LAPD, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, this guy’s got a tattoo of a shield, no other ID found on him. He’s also got a couple of bullet scars in his right leg.”
Leroy hesitated.
“You want me to take a look?”
“Found him up in an alley two blocks from Fryer’s bar, wouldn’t you know!”
The fat officer waddled ahead of Leroy, who came up to his elbow.
“Throat slit and he’d taken a beating, no witness, no nothing.”
The sheet was drawn away from Nick’s face and Leroy stared down. He breathed in.
“Nope, sorry, never set eyes on him. You know these old hippies get tatted up, don’t mean anything too much.”
Lorraine had time to study every bonbonniere, trinket tray, hand-painted lampshade and china parakeet in Lloyd Dulay’s cavernous drawing room; Dulay had kept her waiting for over an hour, and she was furious when he eventually strode toward her, hand outstretched.
“My apologies, but I was kept waiting at the airport, I was there to meet
Elizabeth Caley. Then I had to drive with her to the house, and it was hard to get away.”
“That’s all right,”
she said coldly.
He sat on the scarlet-and-gold sofa, stretching out his long legs.
“Even harder when we talked about Anna Louise’s trust fund …”
She stared.
“Really?”
“Yes, down by near forty-two million.”
She coughed.
“Robert Caley?”
He made an expansive gesture with his huge hands.
“Couldn’t be anyone else. He knows I know, and I also pulled out of the casino dealthe man is nothing but a thief. He didn’t deny it and I wanted to beat the hell out of him. He wanted to do the same to me when I told him I knew about him and Anna. He denied it, swore to me he had never touched her. I don’t know if he was telling me the truth or not.”
She licked her lips.
“You think he might also have killed her?”
“What?”
“If what you say is true, and Robert Caley has used Anna Louise’s trust fund, do you think he might have anything to do with her disappearance?”
“You didn’t say that at all, Mrs. Page.”
“No, well, I’m asking it now.”
He got up and rubbed at his shock of white hair.
“He wouldn’t need to kill his daughter to cover it up. She probably wouldn’t find out.”
“If the casino deal went through.”
“Yes.”
“But if it didn’t?”
fHe shrugged.
“I can’t give you an answr because I truthfully don’t know.”
“Could you tell me just how much money Elizabeth Caley is probably worth?”
He crossed the priceless Bessarabian rug to stand by the windows.
“She’s always used the best financial advisers to invest her moneyI know because I am one of them… .”
He remained with his back to her.
“Elizabeth had a very substantial inheritance, so I would estimate her fortune to be somewhere in the region of two hundred million, perhaps more.”
Lorraine blinked: she had not been in any way prepared to hear a figure like that.
Dulay turned toward her.
“You know, Robert also had access to a lot of that, from what I can gather, but he’s a stiff-necked bastard. Wanted to make it on his own. ‘Course, she was always bailing him out.”
He gestured dismissively.
“I guess Elizabeth will bail him out of this fuck-up he’s got himself into right now.”
COLD BLODD
“Is that possible?”
“Is what possible?”
“For him to be bailed out, as you say?”
He looked at her as if she were a stupid child.
“Well, yes and no. The way the wind’s blowing, he’s not going to get any casino license, but I guess whoever does will have to negotiate with him for the land. If Elizabeth gives him something just to tide him over, maybe he won’t have to sell at an undervalue because he needs the cash.”
She was taken aback again and looked away, not wanting him to see her confusion, but he was not looking at her. He was fiddling with a gold chain tucked into his waistcoat.
“I’m going to tell you something that is highly confidential, Mrs. Page, and as such I want you to swear it will not go further than this room.”
She folded her arms.
“Well, I can’t really do that, if it has any criminal connection
“
“It doesn’t.”
“Then you have my word, Mr. Dulay.”
He sat down heavily again.
“If there was anything going on, it would not exactly be incest.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, Mrs. Page, it would not be incest. I am referring to what you suggested yesterday, that Caley was having a sexual relationship with Anna Louise.”
p>
“I don’t understand.”
“Anna Louise is not Robert Caley’s daughter. She’s mine, Mrs. Page, which is why I was able to find out about the trust fund, because the funds in it were mine too. Anna Louise is my daughter, not Robert Caley’s.”
“Does he know?”
“Of course.”
“Did Anna Louise know?”
“No.”
She took a deep intake of breath.
“You confronted Robert about the trust fund, and he admitted it, but you said you were not sure if he was having a sexual relationship with Anna Louise?”
“If you want it word for word, I said that if he was abusing my daughter, I would shoot his head off his shoulders, and he said, and I quote, Mrs. Page, that if I was ever to make such a disgusting accusation again, then the head would come off my shoulders!”
“But did you or did you not believe him?”
she asked quietly.
“Yes, I suppose I did, because he was very shocked. In fact, he went through a range of emotions I didn’t honestly think he was capable of, but
in the end he was just violently angry.”
He leaned forward in his chair, his small, hard eyes^boring into her flushed face.
“Maybe check out all the facts before you throw dirt, Mrs. Page.”
She stood up and snapped back at him.
“If I had been given the facts maybe I would not have needed to. I am just trying to do my job, Mr. Dulay.”
He stuffed his hands into his pockets, and as she was already walking to the door he followed. Suddenly she stopped.
“Do you have a video of Mrs. Caley’s film The Swamp I could see?”
“Good God, whatever do you want that for?”
“Just part of my job, to know everything I possibly can know about my clients.”
He went to an antique fruitwood cabinet in the corner of the room and slid the doors apart: this was where he kept his video library.
“She won’t be happy about this it’s a terrible film, cheap, shoddy, but she is wonderful.”
He handed her the video.
Lorraine put it in her briefcase. She was shaking and angry with herself. She had jumped so quickly to such disgusting conclusions she was ashamed of herself. If she had been unable even to return Robert Caley’s phone calls the previous evening, the thought of facing him now made her cheeks flush with shame, so she pushed it to one side, refusing to dwell on what she would have to do to repair the damage.
She ordered her driver, the same one as the day before, to take her back to Tilda Brown’s house. ^
“You know, Bill, I’m getting worried,”
Rosie said as they sat at a sidewalk cafe near the French market.
“Me too, it stinks. They pick up this bastard, an anonymous tip says they saw him talking to Anna Louise Caley and”
“I’m not talking about Fryer Jones,”
Rosie said.
Rooney looked at his watch.
“He always was a horny son of a bitch.”
But it sounded hollow even to him.
“Why hasn’t he called in?”
“I don’t know, do I?”
Rooney snapped and then patted her hand. Sorry, sorry. Look, tell you what, say we give it to one o’clock, when Lorraine’s due back at the hotel. If Nick hasn’t shown up then we’ll start looking for him.”
“Like where? This is a big city.”
Rooney downed his third cafe au lait.
“Start with the cop shop, if they haven’t got him banged up or on a slab”
B54
“What?”
He wiped the froth from his mouth.
“Morgue, Rosie, start at the lowest point and work upwards. I know one thing for sure, until that two-bit shit shows up I’m not going near that bar of Fryer Jones, and I hope to God Lorraine doesn’t take off without coming to us first. If you look at the list of socalled eyewitnesses that give that trombone player one hell of a tight alibi, half are made up of )uda Salina’s relatives, including Raoul Corbello.”
“I tried to get in touch with Juda it was busy for almost an hour, then
no reply.”
“What about Edith Corbello?”
Rosie’s cheeks went pink.
“She’s not in the phone book, I was going to try other ways when you came back.”
Rooney stood up.
“Well, let’s go back to the hotel and have another try. Right now, until Lorraine gets back, we got nothing else to do.”
Mrs. Brown’s sister, Helen Dubois, came into the drawing room, a modern interior of metal and glass and bare boards polished to shine as though lacquered, the walls covered in severely tasteful beiges and oatmeals the better to display a collection of fashionable yarn paintings, and primitive art. In this stark setting, the plump, distressed woman looked all too human and out of place.
“I am afraid neither Mr. or Mrs/Brown can see you, Mrs. Page. They are still very shocked, and my sister is under sedation.”
“Yes, I’m so very sorry, please pass on my sincere condolences.”
Lorraine took her time gathering up her purse and her briefcase.
“The police called me in to give a statementI was here earlier in the day, I interviewed Tilda.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I can’t help thinking that maybe it was something I said that may have sparked off…”
“We won’t ever know, will we?”
Mrs. Dubois said sadly.
“But the police said Tilda left a note.”
“Yes, but it didn’t give any reasons.”
“May I ask what it said?”
Helen Dubois took out a handkerchief and pressed it to her eyes.
“Just ‘May God forgive … Tilda.’”
They walked toward the front door, Lorraine really taking her time as they passed more Mexican-looking textiles and a jardiniere of desert flora
in the hallway.
“Mrs. Dubois, do you know why I was here, why I came to see Tilda?”
“Yes, I believe you wanted to question her about Anna Louise Caley.”
“Could I see Tilda’s bedroom?”
“Why?”
Lorraine hesitated, trying to think of the best way around it.
“Well, for one, Anna Louise may still be alive it is a possibilityand she and Tilda were very close friends. After yesterday’s tragedy, I would pray to God that I did not leave any stone unturned in my search for her. At the same time, even though I cannot think of anything, maybe I did inadvertently say something … I have a terrible feeling of guilt, Mrs. Dubois, and I just think if I could perhaps sit a moment in Tilda’s room, rethink everything we discussed, perhaps I will have more of a clue as to why she did it, and it would give some comfort to her poor parents.”
Mrs. Dubois hesitated, looked up the open-tread wooden staircase.
“I don’t know.”
“Is the police cordon still in place?”
“No, no, they took it down about two hours ago.”
Tilda’s bedroom had a feel similar to Anna Louise Caley’slarge enough to accommodate a turquoise sofa on back-tilted metat legs, a dresser, a cheval mirror surrounded by more Mexican-looking embossed metal, and a king-size bed. All but the sofa was white, andJ:he room seemed strangely bare, characterless, but the exigencies of decBator taste had been relaxed to permit a fitted white carpet and a wall of built-in closets on each side of a door that led to a spacious bathroom. The room showed few signs that the occupant had been only in her teens.
The carpet was marked near the window by a number of dust footprints, more than likely from the police and the medics who had removed the body, and some faint, washed-out brown stains, already dry, which could have been coffee or perhaps, as is usual in suicides by hanging, Tilda’s bowels might have opened and the mess been cleaned up. There was no other sign that anything untoward had occurred in the room; even the curtain rail Tilda had hanged herself from remained in position, and the dressing-table stool, covered in white fabric with silver upholstery buttons like outsize sequins, was back in place in front of the triptych mirrors.
Mrs. Dubois stood in the open doorway, pressing a handkerchief to her eyes to try to stop herself from weeping.
“You don’t have to stay with me,”
Lorraine said softly.
“Thank you.”
Mrs. Dubois turned away, just as Lorraine saw the white
256 bear resting on the pillows of the bed.
“Oh, just one thing, Mrs. Dubois.”
Lorraine picked it up, sure it was similar to the white fluffy bears she had seen lined up on Anna Louise’s bed.
“Do you know where Tilda got this bear from?”
Mrs. Dubois swallowed, her brow puckering.
“It’s just that Anna Louise had the same bears, and I wondered who gave it to Tilda.”
Mrs. Dubois shook her head.
“I really don’t know, it’s been there quite a while, I think. I recall seeing it before … it’s a polar bear, is it?”
“Polar,”
Lorraine said softly.
“Yes, that’s what she called it, Polar.”
Mrs. Dubois began to weep again and excused herself as Lorraine replaced the bear on the pillow. As soon as she was alone she drew back the covers and felt beneath the pillows, the sheets and the mattress, getting to her knees to look beneath the heavy woven cotton bedspread, but there was nothing hidden in the bed or underneath it.
Lorraine made a slow tour of the neat bedroom, sitting at the dressing table and opening each drawer. Some contained underwear, lingerie, all very expensive items folded with tissue paper placed between the garments. Even the rolled-up tennis socks were lined up like balls. In the closets, Tilda had as extensive a wardrobe as Anna Louise’s and rows of shoe boxes. Lorraine bent down, wondering if she would get lucky twice, that any personal mementos might have been hidden/n the same way Anna Louise kept hers, but she found nothing otherihan shoes. She recalled the room she herself had had as a teenager, full of junk, books and magazines, cards stuck and pasted to the shabby wallpaper, and all the pictures of the rock stars and movie stars she’d had the hots for. But it was clear that in Anna Louise’s and Tilda’s rooms their parents’ decorators’ taste predominated, and they had hardly a knickknack of their own, apart from the somehow pitiful stuffed animals. Even the display of comsetics and perfumes was more fitting for a much older woman; Tilda’s creams in the immaculate bathroom were for dry skin and wrinkles, intensive moisturizers, serums and chemical peels. Nothing was usedeverything down to the toothbrush looked brand-new.