Fidelity (9 page)

He thought she looked less annoyed, a little softer. It made him remember a time when they were in high school and had come out on a walk like this. They had already had sex a few times, at night among the big rocks in the hills on a blanket laid out on the stillwarm ground. On this afternoon they had been walking for two hours, so far into the desert that there was no chance that anyone would see them, even though they were in the open. They stopped in full sunlight on the flats and began to kiss. Neither of them ended the kiss, and things went further, and soon all of their clothes except their boots lay on the hot, sandy ground. At first they tried to lie together on their spread-out clothes. Nothing was thick enough except Hobart’s jeans, but the sun found the tiny copper rivets and metal buttons and heated them enough to burn skin. Finally Valerie placed her elbows and knees on the fabric of his jeans so he could kneel and enter her from behind.

As he remembered, he could still see her in the bright sunlight, the most naked and exposed he had ever seen anyone up to then, and she was amazing and beautiful. Even then he was awed at the generosity and bravery she had. He loved her, and loved even the self he had been on that day, too, because of how young and clumsy and stupid and sincere they were then.

As Hobart approached Valerie, his hand reached out to her. She spun to turn away from him and said, “It’s getting late. I need time to stop at the bank before work.”

He stood there with his hand held out, feeling the wind blowing on his palm. Then he lowered his hand and followed. She stayed ahead of him, and she seemed to Hobart to be going faster now that they were on their way back, and it stung him.

When they reached the edge of the plateau and she started down the incline, he decided not to chase her, and she got still farther ahead. He watched her, letting her lengthen her lead until she was small and he no longer heard her feet on the stone and gravel.

He kept moving down the slope at his own steady pace. He watched her reach bottom, then raise her hand to shield her eyes and lookup at him for a second or two. Then she turned and walked back to the trailer where she lived, went inside, and closed the door.

Hobart reached the bottom and walked at an unhurried pace along the path to the rectangle of asphalt. He passed her trailer without stopping and walked straight to where his car was parked. He got into the car, pulled his seat belt across his body, and saw the door of Valerie’s trailer fly open. She was out and moving toward him. He started the engine, and he saw her walk faster. He pretended he didn’t see her, turned his head, and backed the car up to turn around and head for the exit.

She appeared beside him and rapped on his window, hard, so he would press the button to lower it. “Where are you going?”

“You said you have to get ready for work, so I figured I might as well get on the road.”

“Just like that?”

He stared at the dashboard, then raised his head and looked up at Valerie. “Don’t you ever wonder what it would have been like if we could have kept from punishing each other?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied. “I don’t do that to you.” She stared at him, the muscles in her neck taut. “I felt insecure when you got that call. I was trying to get over it. I would have. I am.”

“Good.” His voice was flat. “It was just business. Have a good evening at the restaurant. Get a lot of tips.”

“I was over it, and now you’re just being mean.”

He hesitated and then said, “I think it’s a shame that whenever I reach out, you hold me off, and then push me farther away. It’s such a waste.”

“It’s because it’s too late.”

“We’re here now. We’re both alive and thirty-eight years old. I have enough money so you could call the restaurant and say you’re not coming back. We could stay together and live, just the way we wanted to when we were kids.”

“That was supposed to happen twenty years ago, Jerry. If you wanted it, you could have had it. Too much has happened since then. We know too much, we’ve done too much.”

“You’re doing it again. You’re denying yourself a chance to be happy just to get back at me.”

“What makes you think that just being with you is what would make me happy?”

“I’ll be seeing you, Valerie.” He turned in his seat, backed the car up the last few feet, and shifted to Drive.

She stayed beside him. “When? When will you be back?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t know that it matters.” He drove out of the trailer park onto the access road, went past Hadley’s to the stop sign, and turned onto the interstate, headed west toward Los Angeles.

Emily sat beside April at the reception desk and patiently explained the process again. “The finance company lends money to people to buy things-say it’s a TV set. The company offers this customer a period of twelve months with no payments. When the year is up, the customer has to start paying back the three thousand bucks he owes for the flat-screen high-definition TV Only in the meantime, his wife ran off with a neighbor who wasn’t sitting in front of a TV all day. The finance company wants the customer to start making payments, but he sold the house and moved away. The finance company puts together a list of these people and sends it to us. Here it is. We go down the list finding out where they live now.”

Emily saw the expression of labored thought on April’s face, but kept her own expression bland and calm. She had to keep the agency operating. She had to hold her emotions inside, so the others couldn’t see her uncertainty, and maybe so they didn’t sense the ferocious need she had for their help. She had to keep performing each of the small, irritating tasks, because if the agency died, so would her chance to know what had happened to Phil.

“It doesn’t feel right to me.”

“Very good.” Emily smiled. “The glimmerings of a conscience in one so young.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“This is not fun. It’s survival. I’m trying to make the payroll for this week, and skip-tracing is something I know how to do. The people who owe the finance company are mostly good people who don’t intend to screw anybody. But they do owe the money.”

“Okay,” April said. “I just feel funny, chasing regular people for money.”

“We’re not getting into that end of it, and I hope we never have to. Let’s do a couple of the traces on this list.”

Emily turned the computer keyboard so she could reach it, and typed the name, Social Security number, and driver’s-license number in the blank form on the screen, then clicked on “Search.”

“You’re such a good typist.”

“Thanks. Typing used to be what paid the rent.” It occurred to Emily that April probably thought of the boss’s wife as a spoiled rich woman who spent her days getting facials and pedicures and going to the gym. After an instant she realized that she had not worked in the office since about the time when April was in kindergarten. April wasn’t much older than her son Pete would have been.

The rest of the blank spaces on the skip-trace template on the screen began to fill themselves in rapidly: current address, current employer, vehicles registered. “Ah,” she said. “This one has moved to Oregon. Save it, print it out, and go down the list to the next one. I’ll be back in a bit to see how you’re making out. I’ll catch the phones.” Emily went back to Phil’s office and sat at his desk.

Emily had been married to a detective long enough to recognize that the police effort was essentially over. If the homicide detectives found nothing in the first week, they probably wouldn’t find anything later. They had too many murders to spend all their time on an investigation that had stopped producing new information. For a year or two, the murder book they had compiled for Phil would stay within Detective Gruenthal’s reach, and then it would be archived to make room for newer cases. Emily had to do what was necessary to keep the case alive, and the first thing she had to do was keep the detective agency going.

If she had to close the agency, there would no longer be detectives she could ask to follow leads in Phil’s murder, and she could no longer search their memories for things they might have observed in the weeks before Phil was shot. There would be nobody to explain anomalies she found in the case files, payment receipts, and phone records. There would be no office, and the telephones would be disconnected. Anybody who had a tip about Phil’s death that might get them in trouble would think there was nobody left to tell but the police.

She had Bill and Dewey out looking for two men who had jumped bail posted by the Open Bars Bail Bond Company. Neither suspect was violent, but both were out on crimes that were serious enough to rate bail over one hundred thousand dollars. The reward on either one would keep the agency open for another month or two.

Emily returned her attention to the filing cabinets behind Phil’s desk. She had been going through the files for a week, ever since the day after Phil’s death, starting with the ones that appeared to be the most recent, and moving backward to the older ones.

She had never heard any of the names she was now reading in the files, and there was nothing about the cases that seemed dangerous. Almost all of them were civil lawsuits, in which the agency had been hired by one side to investigate the other. No investigation seemed to have turned up anything especially damaging. There were no pieces of paper in any of the files that contained threats. There were no notations that said anybody was angry, or even dissatisfied.

At times the Kramer agency had taken on investigations that had to do with real crimes. Now and then Phil had been hired by a defense attorney to find exculpating evidence that the cops had missed or withheld. But she had not been able to find any cases from the past couple of years that had involved criminal charges, or even a file in which the police were mentioned prominently. She kept moving through the records, going back in time, not knowing precisely what she was looking for.

Then she sensed someone was in the doorway behind her. She looked up from the file she had taken out of a cabinet, composed her face in a motherly expression so she wouldn’t scare April, and spun the desk chair around.

Ray Hall had been watching her.

“Hi,” she said.

“You’ve got Dewey and Billy chasing bail jumpers?”

Emily nodded. “We’re broke, Ray. I’m picking the low-hanging fruit so we can all pay our bills this month.”

Hall closed the door. “What’s April doing?”

“I’m teaching her skip-tracing. She can do it on her computer while she’s answering the phones.”

“She told me you’re answering the phones.”

“If she told you that, then she could have told you what she was doing.”

“What’s in the files?”

“I’m still trying to find cases we can collect fees on.”

“Find any?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“There’s one other thing I haven’t found, and it puzzles me,” Emily said.

“What’s that?”

“Phil’s cases.” She watched Ray. “I’ve been going through the files for the past year or two, and I can find pieces of paper with his handwriting on them, but they’re just bills and correspondence. He’s not the investigator in any of the cases. Do you have any idea of what he did with the cases he worked?”

Ray Hall stared at her, and she wondered if the complexity she read in the look was really there, or if she was just imposing it on him. After a few seconds, he answered, “It’s something I still haven’t figured out. In the past year or two I haven’t known of any investigation he was doing on his own.”

“Any? Not one?”

“None that I know of.”

“Why not?”

Ray shrugged. “It’s not unusual that the owner of an agency would decide that the best use of his knowledge and experience isn’t taking telephoto shots of a workmen’s-comp case playing basketball.”

“So what did he consider the best use of his knowledge and experience?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’ve been wondering about it, trying to figure out the answer?”

“Yes,” he said.

“But you didn’t mention it to me.”

“I didn’t notice that he was working cases, but he must have been. I haven’t figured out a way to find out what any of the cases were. I searched that desk the morning after he died before you got here, but I found nothing. Whatever he was working on, he didn’t write it down in any of the usual places.”

“Do you know any reason why he wouldn’t?”

“No. Not yet.”

The telephone rang, and she could see April through the glass watching to see whether Emily really would answer it. Emily held up a finger to tell Ray Hall to stay for a minute, and said in her best receptionist voice, “Kramer Investigations.” After a moment, she said, “Yes, Detective Gruenthal. It’s me,” and Ray Hall walked out.

Emily watched him through the glass wall. She thought she saw April’s eyes meet his and stay there for a moment, but he didn’t slow down on his way to the door. For an instant, Emily felt her chest constrict. Could Ray Hall be involved with little April? She wasn’t sure why the idea mattered so much to her. She wanted to go after him and make him stay while she got rid of Detective Gruenthal, but it was too late to do it gracefully.

She closed her eyes and listened to Sergeant Gruenthal telling her the same things Ray Hall had already told her about the night of her husband’s death. She was struck by the number of sentences he began with “We don’t know if,” or “We don’t know who,” or “We don’t know what.” When his pauses began to convey the message that he felt he had fulfilled his responsibility to her, she said, “Thank you. I’m glad you called. Please let me know if anything new comes up.”

She hung up and went out to the front desk where April was working on the skip-tracing list. Emily noticed the sheets April had printed and said, “Very good, April. Why don’t you go to lunch now?”

“All right.” April got up, pulled her purse out of a desk drawer, and disappeared out the door.

Emily went to Phil’s office and retrieved her purse, waited for a moment to give April time to ride the elevator down, then locked the office door and took the stairs. She knew the space in the basement garage where Ray Hall parked, and she thought there just might be a chance of catching him. When she arrived, she saw that Ray’s space was empty. There was still April.