Fidelity (16 page)

During the early afternoon, Dewey Burns left and Ray Hall took his place. The cops didn’t see Ray Hall as a family friend coming to lend support, so much as another source to interview. Two of them took him into the den just off the living room and asked him a lot of questions. Now and then when she was looking in that direction, she would see him. Their eyes would meet and stay locked for a moment, but then one of them would turn away. She knew that was best because if one of the cops thought they were behaving oddly, then dealing with the police would become difficult. She was still a woman whose husband had been shot to death in the middle of the night in a place where he had no known business. Emily knew that any male friend of the widow was always a convenient suspect.

In the afternoon, the cops all packed up and left Emily and Ray alone. She said, “Thanks for coming over. It was good to see one friendly face.”

“I’m sorry I just left you here last night, and didn’t stay around to be sure you were safe. I’ve been feeling terrible since I heard.”

“Don’t be silly. For one thing, I told you to leave me. For another, the man didn’t arrive until something like four in the morning. You would have had to sit outside all night.”

“At least Dewey showed up.”

“He probably saved my life. What am I being uncertain about? Not probably-did save my life. It was just a lucky accident, too. He had gone to the office early and found-“

“He told me,” Hall said. “I went over there after he called me. The guy who broke in doesn’t seem to have messed anything up but the doors, but he definitely searched the place. We’re going to have to invest in some steel fire doors and steel frames. Maybe we can get the landlord to chip in.”

“Were the police there?”

“Yeah. They found out first. A couple of them were the same ones you saw here. They’re trying to confirm it was the same guy. I don’t think anybody doubts it.”

“He didn’t say he had broken into the office, but he’s looking for something Phil had, and I suppose now he’s been to the two most obvious places to find it,” she said.

Ray said carefully, “I don’t want to scare you, Emily, but since he didn’t find it, we’ve-“

“I know. He’ll come back for me.”

“Maybe just to search the house, but…” He shrugged.

“What do you think I should do?”

“We’ve been trying to work that out while you were with the cops. You and I can go through the house now and collect anything that you care much about-jewelry, papers, and so on. Then you sleep somewhere else-a different place each night. Tonight it can be my place, and Dewey and Billy will stay here and take turns keeping watch. Then you go to Dewey’s, and Billy and I stay here.”

“You’re trying to ambush the man?”

“I don’t have very high hopes that the cops will chase him down if they haven’t already. Maybe he left a print, and it will be one they’ve seen before. But the only thing we can do is sit where we know he’ll be and wait for him to show up.”

“I don’t know, Ray. He’s dangerous, probably crazy. He got off on making me feel helpless and powerless. That’s not a good sign. He’s not exactly logical, either. He thinks there’s something Phil had that would be worth a lot of money to him, but he made it clear he doesn’t know what it is. I don’t think you guys should do this.”

“What are you worried about?”

“What else? That he’ll kill one of you.”

“And we’re worried that he’ll kill you.”

Emily shook her head. “Let’s think about this clearly.”

“Meaning what?”

“All I’ve wanted since Phil died was just to find out why this happened to him. Now I know most of it. Phil had this item-this piece of information-about some powerful man. Maybe Phil knew what he had, or maybe he didn’t, but the man thought he did. The man paid someone to lie in wait for Phil and kill him on the street.”

“You’re satisfied with that?”

“Of course not. But it’s a lot more than I knew yesterday. It might be all we’re ever going to know.”

“It’s an opportunity,” Ray said. “It gives us a lead-something to look for-and a couple of places to look. It’s our first breakthrough.”

“It’s the opposite. It gives us a way out of this. We have scary people out looking for this information, and we even know roughly what it is. It’s something this man thinks he can use to get money, either from the powerful man or from the man’s enemies. Don’t you see? It’s just incriminating stuff about somebody we don’t care about. If he paid to have Phil murdered, he’s no friend of mine. What we know for sure is that it’s not worth risking our lives to protect him.”

“You’re suggesting we do nothing?”

“What if we did? What if I just take what I want from this house and walk away from it? Then the man who was here last night could sneak in and look for the information until he finds it. Then he can do whatever he wants with it. Is this powerful man who killed Phil worth dying for?”

“No, but you are.”

“But I just told you-“

“You were the one who wanted to think about this clearly, so think. What if we do walk away?”

“Then everybody goes away happy but the man who had Phil murdered.”

“The other man-the intruder in the ski mask-has already searched the agency office. He didn’t find anything, so he came here to your house. Suppose we abandon the house and let him tear it apart searching for whatever Phil hid. And the office, too. What if he looks everywhere and doesn’t find it?”

“I think he will find it,” Emily said.

“You and I have both been searching for over a week, looking for anything that might explain what happened. I didn’t find anything incriminating about a powerful man. Did you?”

“I didn’t know what to look for. He knows the name of the man.”

“We knew Phil, and we had access to every hiding place.”

“All right,” she said. “Say he searches everywhere, and doesn’t find any more than we did. Then what? He realizes it’s a lost cause and goes away.”

“But that isn’t what he did. He didn’t come during the day, when you would be gone, and search the house. He came here at night, when he knew you would be here alone, and put a gun to your head. And he wasn’t planning to tie you up and leave you in the guest room when he left. He did that only because Dewey showed up unexpectedly. He was planning to take you with him.”

“But-“

“And if we let him search your house for whatever it is and go away without it, we’ve lost our best chance. Where will he show up next? Wherever you are, as soon as you’re alone again.”

Emily stared at him for a few seconds. Finally she said, “All right. I’ll get a suitcase.”

Emily went upstairs to the bedroom. It was hard for her to look at the room. It wasn’t a sanctuary now because it was the place where she had been in the greatest danger of her life. It wasn’t even a private place anymore, after about ten cops had trooped through, looking at the clothes she had left on the floor when the man had made her take them off, dusting the furniture for prints, crawling around looking for anything that might later prove some suspect had been the intruder.

Emily had an overpowering urge to get out, to never be alone in this house again. But first she needed to collect the things that she couldn’t afford to leave behind. She pulled two big suitcases from the bedroom down the hall, opened one on the floor of her bedroom, and began to pack. She filled the first one with clothes, then opened the other one and began to fill it. There were tax returns and credit-card bills and bank statements that he could use to rob her. There were address books and letters that he could use to find her. And when she had brought all of the practical things she could think of, she put in the photo album with pictures of her dead husband and son. And there was still the problem of the locked box bolted to the closet wall behind Phil’s clothes. She had thought about the box a hundred times while the man had her cornered in this room.

Emily stepped into the walk-in closet and stumbled over one of the cartons she had left on Phil’s side. It was full of shoes that she had been planning to drive to the Goodwill thrift store. Beyond it was the gun safe. She used the combination Phil had told her. It was the house number of his parents’ house when she had first met him. The fact that they were gone now-and so was he-made pushing the four numbers feel strange, but the metal door swung open.

Inside was the big Springfield Armory .45 ACP pistol. It looked to her a lot like the gun that the man in the ski mask had pointed at her a few hours ago. She took it out of the box, feeling anxious. She found the catch that released the magazine into her hand, and held the magazine for a few seconds. It was light, just a hollow shell of metal with a spring inside. There were no bullets in it. She replaced the magazine and took the other gun out of the box. This one was a Glock Sub-Compact 9mm pistol. She found the magazine release on that one, too, held her breath, and pushed it. She held the magazine in her hand. She felt the light emptiness of it, looked down, and realized that tears had formed in her eyes.

If she had managed to get to the back of the closet, opened the box, and pulled out one of the guns, it would have been empty, and she would be dead. Every time she had sensed that the man’s attention was flagging, every time his eyes strayed from her, she had urged herself to take the chance. She had accused herself of cowardice. All along, she had known that as soon as she was alone, she would come, open the box, and look.

Emily stood in the closet, then realized that something was different. She had not come in here only to find out whether she had guessed wrong. She had opened the gun safe because the man who had come into her bedroom in the middle of the night wearing a ski mask had caused a profound change in her. Before he had appeared, she had lots of doubts about prudence and paranoia, what was selfdefense and what was murder. She had no doubts at all now.

She reached farther into the gun safe and found a box of 9mm bullets. She put the Glock pistol and the ammunition into her purse and slipped the big .45 into her suitcase. Then she stepped to the railing above the staircase and called, “Can you give me a hand with the suitcases? I’m all set.”

Ted Forrest had been raised well. His parents had instilled in him the values of the old California upper class. Although he seldom went to chamber concerts, he was one of the orchestra’s most generous patrons. He had been to the art gallery in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco exactly twice-once when he was in elementary school and once for a charitable party held there-but there were plaques in the entrance wall and in one of the galleries acknowledging the support of the Theodore and Caroline Forrest Foundation. He also signed checks each year to museums in San Jose, Santa Cruz, and Napa, and two zoos. He helped sponsor annual pageants celebrating the founding of four towns in the central valley that were near family holdings. He occasionally went to those celebrations, partly because he liked the unjustified gaiety. There was always good food, a liberal pouring of local wines, and some kind of fiesta that involved the crowning of a queen. He liked getting a look at the young lady and her court, who were always the most impressive examples of the local livestock, raised on sunshine, exercise, clean air, and fresh vegetables.

Tonight he was forced to spend his charm on the chamber-music lovers. A few of them were bony retired female professors, librarians, and others completely alien to him, but there were also a number of people who were like Ted Forrest. They were men and women of his class who cared little about spending evenings listening to violinists, but felt that not to have an orchestra would leave their reputations for gentility diminished. Collier and Rowland were here with their nearly identical blond wives, who were cousins. Powers and his wife weren’t going to make it this time, supposedly because they had a prior engagement. Ted Forrest suspected that it was because Janice Powers couldn’t bear the thought of spending an evening so utterly in the power of Caroline Forrest. He had noticed years ago that Jan was usually willing to go places were she and Caroline were on an equal footing and there were enough people so they could avoid each other, but these evenings of Caroline’s required Jan to spend too many hours with her face set in a fixed, muscle-cramping smile.

Ted Forrest felt the same way about Caroline’s events. He also felt a certain relief that Caroline took such an interest in civic and philanthropic causes, because he knew it reflected well on him and preserved the Forrest family’s visibility in the region. Since the family’s livelihood depended entirely on the continued favor-or at least tacit approval-of politicians, it was essential to keep projecting the impression of money, influence, and conditional benevolence.

He stood at the head of the giant table in the grand dining room, looked down it at the forty-two faces, and held up his wineglass. “As always, I drink first to our superb musicians, gathered to us from all over the world, to our brilliant and renowned music director, Aaron Mills, and to our tireless, dedicated staff.” He sipped the wine to a smattering of applause, but he did not sit down. “No, you’re applauding between movements, because I’m not finished. Tonight I also offer a toast to our many volunteers, led by our able president Dr. David Feiniger, and to the generous donors who have supported the orchestra throughout the year. May your enthusiasm never wane.” He drank again and the clapping was much louder and more prolonged, as he had known it would be, because they were applauding themselves.

As usual, Ted Forrest had brought glory to himself, with little effort. It was like giving a shake to a tree exploding with blossoms. The petals simply fell around him. The orchestra crowd was easy because they were self-trained never to allow critical thoughts about any praise connected with the institution. They were satisfied with the chamber orchestra because it was an expensive entertainment that gave its patrons the reputation for being high-minded, intelligent, and public-spirited.

White-coated waiters from the catering company that Caroline had selected scuttled around behind the guests at the long table, serving and pouring and then deftly shooting a hand in to withdraw an empty plate here and there. Ted Forrest had an elderly lady from Germany on his left. For the first part of the dinner he addressed to her a great many pleasant observations, but because he hadn’t attended any concerts this year, they were vague. He commented mainly about the new chamber-concert facility made by a remodeling of an historic stone mansion a few miles from here, and his approval of music in general. He repeated a couple of comments about the season that he had overheard Caroline make to friends and that for no known reason had stuck in his memory.