The Hours of the Virgin (17 page)

“Furnished rental,” said John when we gathered in the living room. “I didn't know a house could stand mute.”

“What about his redial?” I started going through the books on the built-in shelves.”

“Tried it. The memory on some of them only lasts for a couple of days. I'd say this clown was some kind of deep cover if anyone was hiring.”

“I can start knocking on doors,” said the uniform.

I held a copy of
Huckleberry Finn
by the covers and shook it. “Witness Protection Program.”

“Christ, I hope not,” John said. “If it's a choice of commies or feds I'll take commies. But I'll put in a call to the Justice Department. Seeing as how he's dead maybe I'll have an answer by next leap year.”

Nothing came out of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
. I put it down and hoisted
The Iliad
. The guy was eclectic. “Some people just don't make much of a dent. I thought that when we met.”

“Terrific. His whole life was a waste of physical space and now he's wasting my time.”

“What about those doors?” asked the uniform.

When I picked up
The Bridges of Madison County
something slid off the top and landed on the rug without bouncing. I put my foot on it. The uniform was looking at Alderdyce and Alderdyce was looking at his watch.

“No sense getting the neighbors riled up until we've had the grunts in here with toothbrushes,” John said. “I've already put in too much time on this. Only reason I got interested at all is his name was still fresh in my mind from last week. I don't miss this hands-on shit at all. I like my desk just fine.”

“Okay, Inspector.”

As they turned toward the door I bent down quickly, scooped up the object, and put it in my pocket without looking at it. On the way to the car my fingers traced its triangular shape. That completed the set in my collection.

18

I stopped for lunch at a chain place on the Detroit side of Eight Mile Road, a maze of booths and latticework and movie lobby cards on the walls. I sat in the considerable shade of Audrey Hepburn's left eyebrow, ordered a glass of milk and a Reuben named after Erich von Stroheim, and examined the essential clue while I was waiting. I held it up by the post and let the triangle spin at the end of its tiny chain. The post ended in a hairpin bend jewelers call a French hook. The earring matched the one I'd found at the Tomcat Theater.

“What a pretty earring! Where'd you get it?”

The waitress had returned with my milk. She was blonde, eighteen, and boyishly slender in a green velour jerkin, nylon blouse with puffed sleeves, and a pointed hat with a feather. The theme for January was
The Adventures of Robin Hood
.

“I just picked it up somewhere,” I said. “I'm thinking of having my ears pierced. Does it hurt?”

She touched the jade button in her right lobe and looked serious. “You don't want to do that.”

“Yeah, I thought it hurt. I found it on a floor, but not here. If you lost an earring, how long would you go on wearing the other one?”

“Depends on how soon I missed the one I lost. I'd take the other one off right away then. I'm not into punk.”

“How soon would you miss one like this?” I put it in her hand.

She held it up to her ear, moved her head up and down and from side to side, then gave it back. “It tickles my neck when I turn my head. I think I'd notice pretty soon if it was gone.”

“So if you lost it on Telegraph Road in Detroit you wouldn't still be wearing its mate in Madison Heights.”

“It'd be like walking around with one short leg. I guess some people wouldn't mind.”

I thanked her. She left. When she came back with my sandwich she had a crease in her forehead. “Are you some kind of detective?”

“Some kind.”

“What can I do to get somebody to leave me alone?”

“Old boyfriend or wannabe?”

“Old boyfriend. He's a computer hacker. He trashed my credit record and orders things sent to my apartment. Embarrassing things. My neighbors—”

“You could get a court order. If it happens again you could have him locked up.”

“I tried that. They said I needed proof it was him.”

“Any other hobbies?”

“Him?” The crease deepened. “Well, music. He collects old records. You know, the big ones. Opera and like that. He said they're worth a bundle.”

I put a pickle slice on the Reuben and replaced the bun. “Know where he lives?”

“I still have a key. I gave it back but he sent it to me in the mail.”

“That makes it easy. Go in there sometime when he's out. Bring a cordless electric drill with a three-eighths-inch bit and bore out the holes in all his records. It'll make Caruso sound like Dean Martin on a bat.”

“Who's Dean Martin?”

“I'll eat now,” I growled.

She took her crease away. When I finished my lunch I left ten bucks on a $6.80 check, wrote Dean Martin's name and the address of a nearby Sam Goody's on a page in my notebook, tore it out, and left it with the money, pocketing a copy of the check as a business expense.

I drove back to the office through a mix of rain and snow the consistency of curdled milk. The greasy pavement kept my hands on the wheel and my thoughts on the road. My subconscious poked at such details as women's jewelry and corpses.

The concept of Boyette double-crossing his partners in the forgery scheme was just a piece of raw meat to throw at John Alderdyce. If I'd added that Earl North may have been one of those partners, he'd have wrinkled his nose and tied a tin can to my tail. Cops allow only one coincidence to a case, and Merlin Gilly's death had used it up. The earring in Boyette's house stank even higher. I hardly needed a waitress too young to know Dean Martin from Morton Dean to tell me Laurel Strangeways hadn't worn the widow all the way across town and then lost it like the other, on top of a book no less. There wasn't a carpet pad this side of Flubber that could make one bounce that high.

It was a plant and a good one, meant to be found by someone who would take the time to look. Which presented me with Maid Marian in the clutches of the dragon or one fat dragon with a yen for detective for dessert. All I had to do was step into the trap and all would be known.

The office smelled of asbestos and dry rot and nobody getting rich on the double. I sat down and stared at the mail, still unopened from that morning; looked but didn't touch. Envelopes with windows, an insurance offer from a post office box in Pueblo, Colorado, and a package the size of a metropolitan directory that would be the stationery I'd broken down and ordered at cost from a printer I'd done a favor for, never mind which printer or the nature of the favor. Nothing elaborate, just
A
.
WALKER INVESTIGATIONS
and the address and telephone in blue on granite stock, no beady eyes or crossed machine guns. There was a chance the professional look would speed up payment on some of the statements I sent out. In the mood I was in I'd probably get a paper cut opening the package and bleed to death.

I dialed the service and asked for messages. I had two, both from a Mr. Strangeways, both saying the same thing. Call back.

“I thought you might wish to avoid me.” The colonial accent was especially heavy on the line. “I'm afraid I came off pedantic the other night.”

“Host's prerogative,” I said. “Have you heard anything from your wife?”

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“I'm still backing and filling. Nothing concrete yet.” I opened the belly drawer and dropped the second earring next to the first one in the pencil trough. I was getting tired of listing to one side.

“I'm more than a little concerned. She's never stayed away this long without word.”

“Did you call the friends in Baton Rouge?”

“A woman answered, thank God. She acted surprised. She said she hasn't seen her in years and wasn't expecting her. She doesn't know Laurel that well. The woman works for a studio where she had some shots taken for her model's portfolio. They weren't social.”

“Did you believe her?”

“The surprise was very low-key. Most people, when they dissemble, err on the other side. I think she was telling the truth. What do you think it means?”

“What do you?”

He breathed some recycled air. The machine whirred in the background. He was among old friends in the library. “It begins to sound as if you were right when you said she planned her disappearance. She knew I was too much the gentleman to call and check up on her until it was too late. We pornographers are sensitive about our court manners. I never saw them as a weakness until this moment.”

I said nothing. I was getting too old to play Pat O'Brien to his Jimmy Cagney.

“I should like to pay you to find Mrs. Strangeways,” he said then.

“I'm already looking. But if you'd care to pick up my expenses, a retainer of fifteen hundred will do it.” I told him where to send the check.

“Who's been paying them until now?”

“Boyette. But his credit ran out this morning. He's in the county morgue with a hole in his head where a bullet used to be.”

“Good Lord. Do you think Laurel's in danger?”

“I'll ask her when I find her.”

“You will of course notify me when the fifteen hundred runs out. I love my wife, Mr. Walker. I'm certain there's a satisfactory explanation for her behavior. Even if there is not, I wish to hear it from her. If I had to visit the morgue to see her, I wouldn't have any reason to come back out.”

“I'll call you.”

“I nearly forgot the other reason I called,” he said. “I've heard from Earl North.”

I'd been in the process of hanging up. I screwed the receiver into my ear. “Heard how?”

“Over the telephone. This morning. The cheeky son of a bitch decided to take me up on my offer to provide him with a letter of recommendation.”

“How did you handle it?”

“In a courtly fashion.” He nearly spat out the adverb.

“Did you ask him about Mrs. Strangeways?”

“I asked him if he knew where she was. I did not ask him about their relationship.”

I waited. His British understatement had begun to crawl under my skin.

“He said the last time he saw her was the day he finished cataloguing my library. I'm not as sure about him as I was about the woman in Louisiana. His astonishment may have been feigned.”

“Anything else?”

“Certainly. I apologized for suspecting him and said I was overwrought. I shouldn't need to tell you that was one of the most difficult things I've had to do since my physical therapy. In any case I invited him here to collect his reference. He'll be at the house this afternoon at four o'clock. Will you be available?”

19

A group of women in arctic boots and quilted overcoats were patrolling the gravel apron in front of Gordon Strangeways' gate, carrying signs with inscriptions like
PIGS EAT HIGH ON THE HOG
and
WOMEN ARE PEOPLE TOO
. One of them was pushing a stroller containing a small human being in a pink snowsuit who looked like Broderick Crawford.

“Who'd he run on the centerfold this month, Mother Theresa?” I asked Ben, the welterweight security guard. The protesters stood in a cloud of spent breath watching him pat me down. The day was sunny, the air steel cold, and there wasn't a TV news crew in sight.

“Just the usual weekday crowd. You should see 'em when it's warm.” He led the way to the Jeep, where Vernon, his partner, was waiting to come out and strip the gears on the Cutlass.

The estate looked less woodsy by daylight. Some of the trees had protective wire around their trunks and a tent of professional-grade plastic had been stretched over a section of adolescent sod to protect it from frost. No wildlife put in an appearance.

This time, Ben and I entered the house together without stopping to knock. “He's waiting in the sun room,” said the guard.

The sun room took up half the southwest wing. The contractors had laid terra-cotta on a football field, enclosed it with girders and glass, and inserted a roof twenty feet up to keep the room from colliding with the sky. On chunks of ancient masonry arranged along the base of the ceiling, orators in laurel wreaths and naked charioteers practiced their crafts in crumbling relief; plunder from some Mediterranean ruin, torn from its setting and transported a third of the way across the world to balance out the greenery growing in blue Pewabic pots. In that room it was always June. The glass magnified the sun into dusty yellow bars with dust-motes swimming around in them; a dream of summer against the snow clinging to the trees outside.

Gordon Strangeways lay in the center of all this on the brocaded cushions of a chaise longue bent in the shape of a gondola. It had broken loose of its moorings in Venice and drifted to shore here by way of the Thoroughfare. Its owner wore a thick white terrycloth robe that set off his tan and a pair of emerald-colored plastic cheaters behind his aviator's glasses. A blue blanket as thin as a napkin covered his legs. They would be covered most of the time; scarred, wasted things, whiter than the robe, too thin to make creases in the blanket. The motorized scooter stood close. It was too loyal to its master to wander off and graze.

Jillian Raider, the lawyer and general factotum, sat nearby in a white wicker armchair with a laptop computer open on her knees. She had on a gray linen blouse to match her eyes, tied at the throat with a figured scarf, and a mulberry skirt with a slit that buttoned and just enough of the buttons unfastened to expose a round knee and a well-toned calf in sheer hose. Her shoes were plain black, again without heels. She glanced up briefly as we entered, then returned to the keyboard.

The man on the chaise didn't stir, even when the guard cleared his throat. It was shirtsleeve weather in the room, but the welterweight left his coat zipped and his fur cap stayed put on his head. He was the kind that didn't break a sweat before the third round.