Fidelity (28 page)

“It’s about a crime, Ted. A felony.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of? You could hardly be implicated. You know that in all the time you’ve lived in my house, we’ve been able to tolerate each other and you’ve been treated well. I’m willing to go on that way, if it suits you. If it doesn’t, we can arrange a divorce with a fair settlement, and you can do something you like better.” He paused. “However…”

“However?”

“Yes. You must know that I’m never going to let you get me committed into a mental institution or arrested. It just isn’t going to happen.”

“You’re going to prevent it by imprisoning me?”

“Oh, please! You’re in the wine cellar of our own house.”

She glared at him but kept her distance, retreating a step until she backed into one of the floor-to-ceiling racks full of wine bottles. He could see that she was already beginning to feel the chill of the wine cellar. The two-ton temperature-control unit her decorators had insisted on kept the room at a constant fifty-five to fifty-seven degrees.

Forrest stepped out of the room, closed the door, and turned the key, but left it in the lock as usual. He heard her pounding on the door as he went to the long wooden table in the center of the tasting room and picked up the silver bucket Caroline had provided for people to spit their wine into at the ridiculous tasting she’d held down here last month. When she heard him turn the key to unlock the door, she stopped pounding.

He opened the door and saw her standing her customary six feet away, a smug expression on her face. He set the bucket inside. “I thought you might need this at some point.”

“You son of a bitch.”

He closed the door and locked her in. He walked upstairs and then along the hall to the suite where Maria, the chief housekeeper, lived. He knocked on her door, then knocked again. “Maria? It’s Mr. Forrest.” There was no answer, so he opened the door and looked inside. He walked through the small sitting room where she had her television set and the coffee table that held her sewing and a few magazines in Spanish. He went into her bedroom and looked at the perfectly made bed, the dresser with its top bereft of the usual cosmetics and hairbrushes, then stepped to the closet and opened the sliding door. The suitcase she always used when she took time off to visit her family in Ventura was gone. He looked at the clothes hanging along the pole, and saw that some of the outfits he was used to seeing on her were gone, too.

Caroline had told the truth.

Emily squinted in the morning sunshine outside the front door of the green stucco apartment building and rang the bell. It sounded terribly loud to her, and made her glance behind her to be sure nobody was close. The three-story buildings were identical, each with the same thick, heavy entrance door protected from above by a small curved overhang like half a barrel, and square windows beside it, two above it, and two above those. She knew she must have imagined that someone was watching her. How could he be watching? If he could see her, she could have seen him.

For most of her life, she thought of a stalker as a spectral presence, maybe a murderer who had been hiding in the back seat of her car when she had driven off, or sitting in the bushes near her house when she fumbled to get the key in the lock. She would feel a chill on the back of her neck, almost as if someone were breathing on it, and whirl quickly to protect herself. The stalker was never there, and so she had never given the enemy a specific shape. Until now.

It was not as though the man in the ski mask had accidentally stepped into place and merged with the stranger she had always feared. It felt as though he had always been there, and she had finally made the mistake of turning too fast, before he could vanish. Once she had opened her eyes that night and seen him standing over her bed, she had made him real.

There was a click from the speaker in the wall, and she heard April’s voice: “Yes?”

Emily leaned close to the grating over the microphone. “April? It’s me, Emily. I’m sorry to come so early, but it’s important.”

There was a moment of silence, as though April were trying to find a way not to have answered the ring. Then she said, “Emily, I’m sorry, but I really don’t want this. I don’t want to talk.”

“Please, April, I’m in terrible danger. My house and the office were both burned down last night. I need your help.” Emily waited for April to reply. Seconds passed, and then the loud buzz let her know that the electric lock on the door was being held open for her. She tugged the door open and hurried inside. She couldn’t help looking behind her one more time, half-expecting to see the spectral figure in the act of reaching for her before the door swung to. She waited until she heard the click before she left the small lobby, turned the corner, and went up a couple of steps to the carpeted hallway.

The unwelcome thought came to her that she was walking in Phil’s footsteps. He must have walked along this hallway often, stepped on this carpet. She kept down the mixture of hurt and anger and went on. When she found the apartment and reached up to knock, April opened the door. It made Emily remember apartments where she had lived, first alone and then with Phil. She could always hear someone coming toward the apartment door from the time they set foot in the lobby-something distinctive about the direction of their footsteps, and something audible in their intention, too.

April was wearing a pink sweatshirt and a pair of pink sweatpants, running her fingers through long blond hair tangled from sleep. “Come in.” She turned away, and Emily saw that ACTRESS was spelled out across the rear of the sweatpants.

Emily stepped inside and closed the door. The living room was furnished sparsely with cheap furniture that was small enough for a woman to drag in alone and assemble, a few framed photographs of pink camellias and yellow daffodils vastly enlarged. There were magazines on the seats of each of the stuffed chairs arranged in homage to the television set, and Emily could see that April had not yet cleared the table from her breakfast. “I’m really sorry to bother you.”

“You said there was a fire?”

“Two fires, both at the same time. My house and the office were both destroyed. I don’t know if the person who did it was trying to make me run outside in the dark where he could kill me, or just trying to scare me. A man came to my house a couple of nights ago and wanted something that Phil had. He said it was information about a powerful man. When I said I didn’t have it, he was going to kidnap me. Dewey came to my house and scared him off.”

“I’m sorry,” April said. “I heard that part of it, and I almost called you, but I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me.”

“Ever since Phil was murdered, I’ve been looking for something that would explain it-maybe a case that got out of hand, or some personal dispute. After that man came, I had Ray helping me tear the house apart looking for this evidence, and had Dewey and Billy doing the same at the office.”

“I feel bad,” April said. “Dewey asked me to help search the office, but I just couldn’t. It was just too much for me.” She was crying now. “I want to let this part of my life be over. I’m sorry for what I did to you-what I took from you. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t. I thought a detective agency would be exciting, and then I thought I loved Phil. Now I know I was stupid.”

“April, I didn’t come to browbeat you about Phil. You didn’t do anything to me. You weren’t the first. If there was a home wrecker, it was somebody twenty years ago. What I want isn’t to-“

“I know.”

“What?”

April shook her head. Her face began to crumple again. “I thought I was the only one ever, and that we had fallen in love. That was what he said.”

“Oh. I’ll bet. What made you change your mind?”

“Ray Hall.”

Emily was shocked for a second, then realized she shouldn’t be. “Ray talked to you about Phil? When?”

“After you and I talked. He made me see that it wasn’t the way I thought it was. He told me there had been other women, that Phil had told them that same kind of story.”

“I guess we all believed him. Look, April. I think you’re right to want to put this in the past as soon as possible. I’m not happy about what happened between you and Phil. But now Phil is dead. He emptied our bank accounts, which means he was planning to drop me, and he didn’t leave any money to pay the people who worked at the agency. I think that means he planned to leave town. I need to know some things, and I have to ask you.”

“Oka Y”

“Was he planning to run off with you?”

April looked uncertain. “I’ve thought of that, but I don’t know. I don’t think so. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go away with him.” She stared at the coffee table in front of her knees, as though she were trying to make out the small print in one of the magazines on it. “As I looked back on it since he died, I realized something. I don’t think I would have gone. I thought I was in love with him, but I must have been wrong.”

“I understand.”

“Lately I’ve been growing my hair out and saving money for a great stylist-Adrian Nolfi. I made the appointment months ago for him to do me at the Beverly Hills shop, not the one in West L.A., where you get his assistants. Phil knew that. He didn’t say, `Don’t make the appointment,’ or anything.” She paused and looked up at Emily. “I guess he was leaving me, too.”

“I don’t feel angry at you or blame you for what happened anymore,” Emily said. “Phil had figured out all the ways of getting women to do what he wanted before you were born. I don’t think he cared very much about whether he told us the truth.”

“That’s for sure,” April agreed. “I just feel really bad about it.”

“Right now I’ve got a terrible problem, and you might be able to help me.”

“What can I do?”

“The man who broke into my house still thinks that Phil left me some information about a powerful man, and he wants it. There’s no question in my mind that he’ll kill me for it. I think the fires last night were either a first attempt to kill me, or a way of getting me outside into the open. I’m more terrified than before.”

“I thought the information was burned up.”

Emily’s heart began to beat faster. She could sense April was lying. Did it mean she had the evidence? “I wish I could be sure one way or the other. Before the fires, I had already searched just about everywhere in both the house and the office. Ray, Billy, Dewey, and the police all searched. I keep thinking it has to be somewhere else, someplace Phil could have driven to that nobody knew about.”

“It’s not here.”

Emily studied April’s face. She seemed to be aware enough and guilty enough to want to help. Emily said, “Did he ever talk about having a special project in the works, or say he was about to come into money, or anything like that?”

“I don’t think so. He was always the same. He never said much about what he was doing, even when we were in the office and it was the normal thing to do.”

“Did he ever give you anything-a box or container of any kind-and ask you to keep it safe for him?”

“No,” she said quickly, then looked uncomfortable. “Oh, wait. He did, I guess. It was a long time ago, though. Maybe six months. It was a box.”

“What was in it?”

“I don’t know, really. He told me not to look inside. It was one of those boxes like fancy stationery comes in. He put it … um … under my bed, and told me to just forget it was there.”

“You looked, though, didn’t you?”

“At first there was just a case file, and he had it hidden under the stationery. He added things once in a while. There was a manila envelope, a couple of cassette tapes. Then he would slide the box back under the bed, and we’d forget about it.”

“Where is the box now?”

“I don’t know. One time when he came over, he just picked it up and took it with him.”

While April had been talking, Emily at first pictured him stopping here for a minute to take her out to a restaurant or something, but when she said “came over,” the image changed. He was in the bedroom with her. It had to be early afternoon, when they could pretend to be out to lunch, so they had the blinds closed to keep the sun light out. They were both naked because they had been here in the afternoon having sex. Phil must have looked at his watch, got up and put on his pants and then knelt down to pick up the socks he had tossed there, and pulled the box out from under the bed. When he drove back to work with April, he said nothing about the box, just took it with him. Emily wanted to cry, but she fought it. “Can you tell me what it looked like, exactly?”

“The box?”

“Yes.”

“It was the size of regular paper. A ream. The bottom part was just plain white, but the top had a kind of maroon color, with gold letters that said something, some brand name of a stationery company.”

“Do you remember the company?”

“I’m sorry. It was just words, no picture or anything. That much I remember. It just didn’t seem to matter at the time.”

“Was there still stationery in it?”

“There was some. Whenever he added stuff, he took out enough stationery so the box would still close. By then maybe it was only onethird stationery.”

Emily recognized Phil’s way of thinking. He had brought his papers to the apartment of his current mistress. And then he hid the papers in a box of papers. That was Phil. “He hid it here so it would be safe. Did he say from whom?”

“No.”

“Did he say why he was taking it away?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly Emily knew. Just to be sure, she said, “April, did other people in the office know about you and Phil?”

“Ray Hall. I was sure he knew at the time, but he says now that he only suspected, but didn’t know.”

“Anybody else?”

“No. And Ray says nobody else knew. I would never tell anybody, and we weren’t that obvious about it. Phil wasn’t that trusting. He didn’t like people to know things like that about him. If he could have had an affair with me without my knowing, he would have. I mean, he was married, and…” She paused, not sure how to end the sentence.

“I know. Tell me something else. Did you ever hear of anyone else he’d had an affair with?”

“No. Phil told me there had never been any others. Ray told me there had been, but he didn’t say who. Nobody had ever said anything about it in front of me before.”