"But when I mentioned she might be dead, the penny dropped, right?" I sounded bored. I sounded contemptuous too.
She shifted uncomfortably. "Before that. I guess I'd just never really put it in words until you said it and then I realized I better reassess the situation before I agreed to anything."
"What makes you think Aubrey's involved?"
"That day... when I drove up here and Elaine and I had words... she told me that the affair had been going on for years. She'd finally figured out that Aubrey was a psychopath and she was trying to break it off." She paused and the blue eyes came up to mine. "You don't understand about Aubrey yet. You don't know what he's like. You just don't leave him. You just don't break it off. I've threatened to do that myself. Don't think it hasn't occurred to me. But I'd never make it. I don't know what he'd do, but I'd never get away from him. Never. He'd follow me to the ends of the earth and bring me back, only then he'd really make me pay."
"Bev, I've got to tell you I'm having trouble with this," I said.
"That's because you fell for it. He came waltzing up here and he laid a number on you. He conned you good and now you can't bear to admit you've been had. He's done it before. He does it to everyone. The man is certifiably insane. He was in Camarillo for years until Reagan became governor. Remember that? He cut the state budget and turned them all out in the streets. Aubrey Danziger came home at that point and my life has been hell ever since."
I picked up a pencil and tapped on the edge of the desk, then tossed it aside. "I'll tell you the truth. I want to find Elaine. That's all I want to do. I'm like a terrier pup. Somebody tells me to do something and it gets done. I'll worry the damn thing to death. I'm going to find out what happened to her and where she's been all these months. And you better hope it doesn't lead back to you."
She got up. She picked up her bag and leaned on my desk. "And you better hope it doesn't lead back to Aubrey, my dear!" she spat.
And then she was gone, leaving behind her the faint aura of whiskey that I'd just caught on her breath.
I hauled out my typewriter and wrote a detailed report for Julia, itemizing expenses for the last couple of days. I needed time to assimilate what Beverly had told me about Aubrey. It was like the paradox of the jungle tribes where one always lies and the other always tells the truth. How could one ever determine which was which? Aubrey had told me Beverly was Mr. Hyde when she drank. She had told me he was certifiably mad, but she'd apparently been drinking when she said so. I hadn't the faintest idea which of them was on the level and I wasn't sure how to find out. I didn't even know if it mattered. Was Elaine Boldt really dead? It had certainly crossed my mind more than once, but I hadn't imagined that Beverly or Aubrey might be at the heart of it. I'd been looking in the opposite direction, assuming somehow that Elaine's disappearance was linked to the murder of Marty Grice. Now I'd have to go back and take another look.
I went home at lunchtime and did a run. I knew I was just treading water at this point, but in some ways I had to wait it out. Something would break. Some piece of information would come to light. In the meantime, I was feeling tense and I needed to work that off. The run was a bad one and that put me in a foul mood. I picked up a stitch in my side at the end of the first mile. I thought I could shake it. I tried digging my fingers in, bending at the waist, thinking that if it was a muscle cramp it might ease. No deal. Then I tried expelling breath after breath, again bending from the waist. The pain was no worse, but it didn't go away either. Finally, I slowed to a walk until it subsided, but the minute I started to jog again, my side seized up, stopping me in my tracks. I'd reached the turnaround by then, but running seemed futile so I walked the entire mile and a half back to my place, cursing to myself. I hadn't even broken a sweat, and my frustration, instead of dissipating, had doubled.
I showered and dressed again. I didn't want to go back to the office, but I forced myself. I was going to have to start all over again, go back to the beginning and cast a new set of lines in the water to see if I could get a bite somewhere. I had just about used up my whole bag of tricks, but there had to be something else.
When I let myself into the office, I saw the message light blinking on my machine. I opened the French doors to let some air in and then punched playback.
"Hi, Kinsey. This is Lupe, over at Santa Teresa Travel. It looks like you hit the jackpot on that luggage trace. I put a call through to Baggage Claim at TWA and had the agent check it out. The four bags were sitting right there. He said he could put 'em on a plane this afternoon if you like. Could you call me back and let me know what you want to do?"
I snapped the machine off and shook both fists in the air, mouthing "All riiight!" to myself with a big grin. I put a call through to Jonah first and told him what was going on. I was jazzed. It was the first good news I'd had since I tracked down the cat. "What should I do, Jonah? Am I going to need some kind of court order to open those bags?"
"Screw that. Look, you have the claim tags, don't you?"
"Sure, I've got 'em right here."
"Then go down to Florida and pick up the bags."
"Why not just have them flown out?"
"Suppose she's in one," he said.
That certainly conjured up an image I didn't like. I could feel myself squirm. "Don't you think someone would have noticed by now? You know, an odor... something dripping out the side?"
"Hey, we found a body once had been in the trunk of a car for six months. Someone had shoved a high heel down some whore's throat and she ended up mummified. Don't ask me how or why, but she didn't decompose at all. She just dried up. She looked like a big leather doll."
"Maybe I'll get on a plane," I said.
By ten o'clock that night, I was back in the air again.
Chapter 19
* * *
It was drizzling and the temperature was already in the seventies at 4:56 A.M. EST when we touched down. It was still dark outside, but the airport was filled with the flat light and artificial chill of a space station orbiting a hundred and ten miles out. Dawn travelers walked purposefully down deserted corridors while doors shushed open and shut automatically and the paging system seemed to drone on and on without hope of response. For all I knew, the whole operation was mechanical, running itself at that hour without any help from humankind.
The TWA baggage-service office didn't open until nine, so I had time to kill. I hadn't brought any luggage of my own, just a big canvas bag where I kept a toothbrush and all the odds and ends of ordinary life, including clean underpants. I never go anywhere without a toothbrush and clean underpants. I went into the women's room to freshen up. I washed my face and ran my wet fingers through my hair, noting how sallow my skin looked with the fluorescent lights overhead. There was a woman behind me, changing the diaper on one of those oversized babies who looks like a solemn adult with flushed cheeks. The child kept his eyes pinned on me gravely while his mother attended to him. Sometimes cats look at me that way, as though we're foreign agents sending silent signals to one another in an out of the way meeting place.
I paused at a stand and picked up a newspaper. There was a coffee shop open and I bought scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and juice, taking my time about breakfast while I read a human-interest story about a man who'd left all his money to a mynah bird. I can't cope with the front section before seven A.M.
At quarter to nine, having walked the airport from end to end twice, I stationed myself near Baggage Claim with a portable cart I'd rented for a buck. I could see Elaine's bags, neatly lined up at on end of the locked glass-fronted cabinets. It looked as if someone had hauled them out from the bottom of the pile in readiness. Finally, a middle-aged man in a TWA uniform, with a big set of jangling keys, unlocked the small cubicle and started turning on lights. It looked like the opening curtain of a one-act play with a modest set.
I presented myself and the baggage-claim tags and then followed him out to the storage cabinets and waited while he extracted the suitcases and stacked the
m on the cart. I expected him to ask for identification, but apparently he didn't care who I was. Maybe abandoned bags are like litters of unwanted kittens. He was just grateful to have someone take them off his hands.
When the Penny-Car Rental desk opened, I rented a compact car. I had given Julia a call the night before so she knew I was flying in. All I needed to do now was find the highway again and drive north. Once outside, I pushed the cart toward the slot where the rental car was parked. The drizzle settled on my skin like a layer of silk. The morning air was hot and close, smelling of rain and jet exhaust. I loaded the bags in the trunk of the car and headed toward Boca. It wasn't until I reached the condominium parking lot, unloading the suitcases one by one, that I realized all four were locked and I had no key. Well, how very cute. Maybe Julia would have a plan. I lugged them over to the elevator and went up to the third floor, hauling them to Julia's front door in two trips.
I knocked and waited a long interval while Julia thumped her way to the front door with her cane, calling encouragement.
"I'm coming. Don't give up. Six more feet to go and I'm bearing down hard."
On my side of the door, I smiled, peering over at Elaine's apartment. There was no sign of life. Even the welcome mat had been taken inside or thrown out, leaving a square of fine sand that had filtered through the bristles.
Julia's door opened. The dowager's hump sat between her shoulder blades like a weight, forcing her to bend with its burden. She seemed to be staring at my waist, tilting her head of dandelion fuzz to one side so she could peer up at me. Her skin seemed as sheer as rubber, pulled over her hands like surgical gloves. I could see veins and broken capillaries,
her knuckles as knotted as rope. Age was making her transparent, crushing her from both ends like a can of soda pop.
"Well, Kinsey! I knew that was you. I've been awake since six this morning, looking forward to this. Come on in."
She hobbled to one side, making way for me. I set the four suitcases inside the door and closed it after me. She tapped one with her cane. "I recognize those."
"Unfortunately, they're locked."
Each of the four bags apparently had a combination lock, the numbers arranged on a dial embedded in the metal catch.
"We'll have to do some detective work," she said with satisfaction. "You want coffee first? How was your flight?"
"I'd love some," I said. "The flight wasn't bad."
Julia's apartment was crowded with antiques: a peculiar mix of Victorian pieces and Oriental furnishings. There was a huge carved cherry sideboard with a marble top, a black horsehair sofa, an intricate ivory screen, jade figures, a platform rocker, two cinnabar lamps, Persian rugs, a pier-glass mirror in a dark mahogany frame, a piano with a fringed shawl across the top, lace curtains, wall hangings of embroidered silk. A big portable television set with a twenty-five-inch screen loomed on the far side of the room surrounded by family photographs in heavy silver frames. The television set was turned off, its blank gray face oddly compelling in a room so filled with memorabilia. The only sound in the apartment was the steady ticking of a grandfather clock that sounded like someone tapping on Formica with a set of drumsticks.
I moved out to the kitchen, poured coffee for us both, and carried it back to the living room, the cups rattling slightly in the saucers like the tremor of a minor California earthquake. "Are these family antiques? Some of the pieces are beautiful."
Julia smiled, waggling her cane. "I'm the last person alive in my family so I've inherited all this by default. I was the youngest in a family of eleven children and my mother said I was fractious. She always swore I'd never get a thing, but I just kept my mouth shut and waited it out. Sure enough, she died, my father died. I had eight sisters and two brothers and they all died. Little by little, it all drifted down to me, though I hardly have a place to put anything at this point. Eventually you have to give it all away. You start with a ten-room house and finally you find yourself stranded in a nursing home with space for one night table and a candlestick. Not that I intend to let that happen to me."
"You've got a ways to go yet anyway from what I can see."
"Well, I hope so. I'm going to hold out as long as I can and then I'll lock and bar the door and do myself in, if nature doesn't take me first. I'm hoping I'll die in my bed one night. It's the bed I was born in and I think it'd be nice to end up there. Have you a large family?"
"No, just me. I was raised by an aunt, but she died ten years ago."
"Well then, we're in the same boat. Restful, isn't it."
"That's one way to put it," I said.
"I came from a family of shriekers and face slappers. They all threw things. Glasses, plates, tables, chairs, anything that came to hand. The air was always filled with flying missiles – objects rocketing from one end of the room to the other with howls on contact. This was mostly girls, you know, but all of us had deadly aim. I had a sister knock me out of my high chair once with a grapefruit thrown like a curve ball, oatmeal flying everywhere. Eulalie, her name was. Now that I look back on it, I see we were common as mud, but effective. We all got what we wanted in life and no one ever accused us of being helpless or fainthearted. Well now. Let's tackle those bags. If worse comes to worst, we can always hurl them off the balcony. I'm sure they'll open when they hit the pavement down below."
We approached the problem as though it were a code to be broken. Julia's theory, which proved to be correct, was that Elaine would have come up with a combination of numbers she already had in her life somewhere. Her street address, zip code, telephone number, social security, birthdate. Each of us chose one group of digits and started to work on separate bags. I hit it the third time around with the last four numbers on her social-security card. All four suitcases were coded with the same number, which simplified the task.
We opened them on the living-room floor. They were filled with exactly what one would expect: clothing, cosmetics, costume jewelry, shampoo, deodorant, slippers, bathing suit, but packed in a jumble the way they do in movies when the wife leaves the husband in the middle of a vicious snit. The hangers were still on the hanging clothes, garments folded over and bunched in, with the shoes tossed on top. It looked as if drawers had been turned upside down and emptied into the largest of the bags. Julia had hobbled over to the rocker and she sat there now, propping herself up with her cane as though she were a unwieldy plant. I sat down on the horsehair sofa, staring at the suitcases. I looked at Julia uneasily.
"I don't like this," I said. "From what I know of Elaine, she was almost compulsively neat. You should have seen the way she left her place... everything just so... clean, tidy, tucked in. Does she strike you as the type who'd pack this way?"
"Not unless she were in a fearful hurry," Julia said.
"Well actually, she might have been, but I still don't think she'd pack like this."
"What's on your mind? What do you think it means?"
I told her about the double set of plane tickets and the layover in St. Louis and any other facts I thought might pertain. It was nice to have someone to try ideas on. Julia was bright and she liked to pick at knots the same way I did.
"I'm not convinced she ever got here," I said. "We only have Pat Usher's word for it anyway and neither of us set much store by that. Maybe she got off the plane in St. Louis for some reason."
"Without her luggage? And you said she left her passport behind too, so what could she have done with herself?'
"Well, she did have that lynx coat," I said, "which she could have pawned or sold." I had one of those little nagging thoughts on the subject, but I couldn't bring it into focus for the moment.
Julia waved dismissively. "I don't believe she'd sell her coat, Kinsey. Why would she do that? She has lots of money. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds. She wouldn't need to pawn anything."
I chewed on that one. She was right, of course. "I keep wondering if she's dead. The luggage got here, but maybe she never made it. Maybe she's in a morgue somewhere with a tag on he
r toe."
"You think someone lured her off the plane and killed her?"
I wagged my head back and forth, not wholly convinced. "I don't know. It's possible. It's also possible she never made the trip at all."
"I thought you told me someone saw her get on the plane. The cab driver you talked about."
"That wasn't really a positive identification. I mean, a cab driver picks up a fare and the woman claims she's Elaine Boldt. He never saw her before in his life, so who knows? He just takes her word for it, like we all do. How do you know I'm Kinsey Millhone? Because I say I am. Someone might have posed as her just to establish a trail."
"What for?"
"Well now, that I don't know. We've got a couple of women who might have pulled it off. Her sister Beverly for one."
"And Pat Usher for another," Julia said.
"Pat did benefit from Elaine's being off the scene. She gets a rent-free condo in Boca for months."
"That's the first time I ever heard of anyone murdered for room and board," she said tartly.
I smiled. I knew we were floundering, but maybe we'd stumble onto something. I could have used a break at that point. "Did Pat ever leave that forwarding address she promised?"
Julia shook her head. "Charmaine says she left one, but it was humbug. She packed and took off the same day you were here and nobody's seen her since."
"Oh shit. I knew she'd do that."
"Well, it wasn't anything you could have prevented," she said charitably.
I leaned my head back against the sofa frame, playing mind games. "It could have been Beverly too, you know. Maybe Bev bumped her off in the ladies' room at the St. Louis airport."
"Or killed her in Santa Teresa and impersonated her from that point on. Maybe she was the one who packed the bags and took the plane."
"Try it the other way," I said. "Think about Pat. I mean, what if Pat Usher were a stranger to Elaine, just someone she met on the plane. Maybe they started talking and Pat realized –" I dropped that idea when I saw the expression on Julia's face. "It does sound pretty lame," I said.