by Sue Grafton
"Oh, well – no harm done in speculating. Maybe Pat knew her in Santa Teresa and followed her from there."
I ran that around in my head. "Well, yeah. I guess it could be. Tillie says she heard from Elaine – at least, she assumed it was Elaine – by postcard until March, but I guess somebody could have faked that too."
I filled her in on my conversations with Aubrey and Beverly and right in the middle of it, my memory kicked in; one of those wonderful little mental jolts, like a quick electrical shock when a plug's gone bad. "Oh wait, I just remembered something. Elaine got a bill from some furrier here in Boca. What if we could track him down and find out if he's seen the coat? That might give us a lead."
"What furrier? We have quite a few."
"I'd have to check with Tillie. Can I make a call to California? If we can track down the coat, maybe we can get a line on her."
Julia wagged the cane toward the telephone. Within minutes, I'd gotten Tillie on the line and told her what I needed.
"Well, you know that bill got stolen along with the rest, but I just got another one. Hold on and I'll see what it says." She put the receiver down and went to fetch the mail.
She got back on the line. "She's being dunned. It's a second overdue notice from a place called Jacques – seventy-six dollars for storage and two hundred dollars for having the coat recut. Wonder why she'd do that? There's a little happy face drawn by hand: 'Thanks for your business' – followed by a sad face: 'Hope the delay in payment is just an oversight.' A few more bills have come in too. Let me see what those look like."
I could hear Tillie ripping open envelopes on her end of the line.
"Oops. Well, these are all overdue. It looks like she's run up a lot of charges. Let's see. Oh my. Visa, MasterCard. The last date on these is about ten days ago, but I guess that was just the end of the billing period. They're asking her not to use her cards until she's paid the balances down."
"Does it indicate where she was when the purchases were made? Was she in Florida somewhere?"
"Yes, it looks like Boca Raton and Miami for the most part, but you can check them yourself when you get back. Now that I've had the locks changed, they should be safe."
"Thanks, Tillie. Can you give me the furrier's address?"
I made a note of it and got directions from Julia. I left her and went back down to the parking lot. The sky was an ominous gray and thunder rumbled in the distance like movers rolling a piano down a wooden ramp. It was hot and still, the light a harsh white, making the grass turn phosphorescent green. I was hoping I could take care of business before the downpour caught up with me.
Jacques was located in the middle of an elegant shopping plaza, shaded with latticework overhead and planted with delicate birches in big pale blue urns. Tiny Italian lights had been threaded through the branches, and in the prestorm gloom they twinkled like an early Christmas. The storefronts were done in a dove-gray granite and the pigeons strutting across the pavement looked as if they'd been placed there purely for their decorative effect. Even the sound they made was refined, a low, churring murmur that rode on the morning air like cash being riffled in a merchant's hands.
The window display at Jacques had been artfully done. A golden sable coat had been tossed carelessly across a dune of fine white sand against a sky-blue backdrop. Tufts of sea oats were growing on the crest of the sand and a hermit crab had crossed the surface, leaving a narrow track that looked like an embroidery stitch. It was like a little moment frozen in time: a woman – someone reckless and rich – had come down to the shore, had shrugged aside this luscious fur so that she could plunge naked into the sea – or perhaps she was making love to someone on the far side of the dune. Standing there, I could have sworn I saw the grasses bending in a nonexistent wind and I could almost smell the trail of perfume she'd left in her wake.
I pushed the door open and went in. If I'd had money and believed in wearing furry creatures on my back, I'd have laid down thousands in that place.
Chapter 20
* * *
The interior was done in muted blues with a glittering chandelier dominating the high-ceilinged space. Chamber music echoed through the room as though there might be a string quartet sawing somewhere out of sight. Chippendale chairs were arranged in gracious conversational groupings and massive gilt-edged mirrors lined the walls. The only detail that spoiled an otherwise perfect eighteenth-century drawing-room was the little camera up in one corner monitoring my every move. I wasn't sure why. There wasn't a fur in sight and the furniture was probably nailed to the floor. I shoved my hands down in my back pockets just to show I knew how to behave myself. I caught sight of my reflection. There I stood in that rococo setting, in faded jeans and a tank top, looking like something deposited in error by a time machine. I flexed, wondering if I should start lifting weights again. The bicep made my right arm look like a snake that had recently eaten something very small, like a wad of socks.
"Yes?"
I turned around. The man who stood there looked as out of place as I did. He was huge, maybe three hundred pounds, wearing a caftan that made him look like a pop-open tent with a built-in aluminum frame. He was in his sixties with a face that needed to be taken up. His eyelids drooped and he had a sagging mouth and a big double chin. What was left of his hair had slipped down around his ears. I wasn't certain, but I thought he made a rude noise under his skirt.
"I'd like to talk to you about a past-due account," I said.
"I got a bookkeeper handles that. She's out."
"Someone left a twelve-thousand-dollar lynx coat here to be cleaned and recut. She never paid her bill."
"So?"
This guy didn't have to get by on good looks alone. He was gracious too.
"Is Jacques here?" I asked.
"That's who you're talking to. I'm Jack. Who are you?"
"Kinsey Millhone," I said. I took out a card and handed it to him. "I'm a private investigator from California."
"No fooling," he said. He stared at the card and then at me. He glanced around suspiciously like this might be a "Candid Camera" gag. "What do you want with me?"
"I'm looking for information about the woman who brought the coat in."
"You got a subpoena?"
"No."
"You got the money she owes?"
"No."
"Then what are you bothering me for? I don't have time for this. I got work to do."
"Mind if I talk to you while you do it?"
He stared at me. His breathing made that wheezing sound that fat people sometimes make. "Yeah, sure. Why not? Suit yourself."
I followed him into the big cluttered back room, taking in his scent. He smelled like something that spent the winter in a cave.
"How long have you been cutting fur?" I asked.
He turned and looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues.
"Since I was ten," he said finally. "My father cut fur and his father before him."
He indicated a stool and I sat, setting my big canvas handbag at my feet. There was a long worktable to my right, with a coarse brown-paper pattern laid out on it. The right front portion of a mink coat had been put together and he was apparently still working on it. The wall on the left was lined with hanging paper patterns and there were various quite ancient-looking sewing machines to my right. Every available surface was covered with pelts, scraps, unfinished coats, books, magazines, boxes, catalogues. Two dress forms stood side by side, like twins posing self-consciously for a photograph. The place reminded me of a shoe-repair shop, all leather smell and machinery and the feel of craftsmanship. He took up the coat and examined it closely, then reached for a cutting device with a nasty curved blade. He glanced up at me. His eyes were the same shade of brown as the mink.
"So what do you want to know?"
"You remember the woman?"
"I know the coat. Naturally, I remember the woman who brought it in. Mrs. Boldt, right?"
"That's right. Can you tell me when you saw her
last?"
He dropped his gaze back to the fur. He made a cut. He crossed to one of the machines, motioning me to follow. He sat down on a stool and began to sew. I could see now that what had looked at first like an old-fashioned Singer was actually a machine especially designed for the stitching of fur. He lined up the two cut pieces vertically, fur-side in, and caught them in the grip of two flat metal disks, like large silver dollars set rim to rim. The machine whipped the leather edges together with an overhand stitch while he deftly tucked the fur out of the way so it wouldn't get caught in the seam. The whole maneuver took about ten seconds. He spread the seam, smoothing it with his thumb on the backside. There were maybe sixty similar cuts in the leather, a quarter-inch apart. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but I didn't want to distract him.
"She came in in March and said she wanted to sell the coat."
"How'd you know it was really hers?"
"Because I asked for some identification and the bill of sale." The irritable tone was back, but I ignored it.
"Did she say why she was selling it?"
"Said she was bored with it. She wanted mink, maybe blond, so I offered her credit against something in the store, but she said she wanted the cash, so I told her I'd see what I could do. I wasn't that anxious to pay cash for a used coat. Ordinarily, I don't deal in secondhand fur. There's no market for it here and it's a pain in the ass."
"I take it you made an exception for her."
"Well yeah, I did. The thing is, this lynx coat was in perfect condition and my wife's been after me to get her one for years. She's already got five coats, but when this one came in, I thought... what the hell? Make the old broad happy. What's it to me? Mrs. Boldt and I haggled and I finally got the coat for five thousand, which was a good deal for both of us, especially since I got the matching hat. I told her she'd have to pay to have the coat cleaned and recut."
"Why recut?"
"My wife is on the down side of five feet. She's four foot eleven, if you want her exact height, but don't ever tell her I told you that. She considers it some kind of birth defect. You ever noticed that? Short women get that way. From the time they're teenagers, they start wearing funny shoes, trying to look like tall people when they're not. Know what she finally did? Learned to roller skate. She said it was the only time she really felt like a real human being. Anyway, I thought I'd give her this lynx. Gorgeous. You know the coat?"
I shook my head. "I've never seen it."
"Hey, come on. You ought to take a look. I've got it right back here. I haven't cut it yet."
He moved toward the rear and I trotted obediently behind. He opened the massive metal door to his vault. Cold air wafted out as though from a meat locker. There were fur coats hanging on both sides in double racks, sleeves almost touching, like hundreds of women lined up with their backs to us. He moved down the aisle checking coats as he went, wheezing from the effort. He really needed to lose some weight. His breathing sounded like someone sitting down on a leather couch and it couldn't connote good health.
He took a fur down off the top rack and we moved back out of the cold-storage room, the door shutting behind us with a clang. He held Elaine Boldt's coat up for me to inspect. The lynx was two shades – white and gray in a luscious blend, with the pelts arranged so that each panel ended in a tapering point at the hem. He must have guessed from the look on my face that I'd never seen a coat that expensive close up.
"Here. Try it on," he said.
I hesitated for a moment and then eased into the coat. I pulled it around me and looked at myself in the mirror. The coat hung almost to my shins, the shoulders protruding like protection pads for some strange new sport.
"I look like the Abominable Snowman," I said.
"You look great," he said. He looked from me to the image in the mirror. "So we take it in a little bit. Shorten the sleeves. Or maybe you'd look better in fox if this doesn't suit."
I laughed. "On my income, I think it's high-class to have a sweatshirt with a zipper up the front." I took the coat off and handed it to him, getting back to the subject. "Why'd you pay her for the coat before she paid you? Why not deduct your costs from the five grand and give her a check for the balance?"
"The bookkeeper wanted it the other way. Don't ask me why. Anyhow, it's not going to cost that much to clean the coat, and the alterations I'm doing myself, so what's it to me? I got a good deal. Adele probably bugged her for payment as a matter of course, but I can't get that upset over the whole thing."
While he returned the coat to cold storage, I went over to my bag and took out the Polaroid picture of Elaine and Marty that Tillie Ahlberg had given me.
When he came back out, I showed it to him. "Is this the woman you dealt with?"
He glanced at it briefly and gave it back.
"Nuh-un. I never saw either one of those women before in my life," he said.
"What did she look like?"
"How do I know? I only saw her once."
"Young, old? Short, tall? Fat, thin?"
"Yeah, about like that. She was middle-aged and she" had blondish hair. And she wore a muumuu and chain-smoked. I wouldn't let her come back here because I don't like the smoke around my skins."
"What kind of identification did she have?"
"You know. The usual stuff. Driver's license. Check guarantee card. Credit cards. You gonna tell me the coat was stolen? Because I don't want to hear it."
"I don't think 'stolen' quite covers it," I said. "I suspect someone's been borrowing Elaine Boldt's identity. I'm just not sure where she is in the meantime. If I were you, I'd leave the coat intact until we figure out what's going on."
My last glimpse of him, he was pulling unhappily at the wattles on his neck and he didn't offer to accompany me to the door.
I went out into the oppressive Florida humidity. The cloud cover felt like a premature twilight and the first of several big raindrops had begun to splatter against the hot pavement. I scurried to my car, half-ducking as though I could avoid getting wet by shrinking myself to half my size. I thought about Jack's description of the woman who'd called herself Elaine Boldt. He'd seen the snapshot of Elaine and he'd sworn it wasn't her. It had to be Pat Usher as nearly as I could tell. I ran back through my encounter with her: her attitude of wary amusement, the questions about Elaine she'd fielded, the mixture of lies and truth she'd told. Had she simply stepped into someone else's shoes? She'd been staying in Elaine's condominium, but how had she acquired the lynx coat if not from Elaine? If she was the one running up charges on Elaine's credit cards, she had to be sure somehow that Elaine wouldn't catch her at it. It seemed to me she could only pull that off if she knew Elaine was dead, which had been my suspicion for days now anyway. There might be some other explanation, I supposed, but nothing that tied everything together so neatly.
The rain was coming down hard now, the windshield wipers on my rental car flapping back and forth like metronomes, doing little more than smearing the windshield with a thin film of grime. I found a phone booth and placed a credit-card call to Jonah at the Santa Teresa ED. The connection was bad and we could barely hear each other over the static on the line, but I did manage to holler out what I needed, asking him if he'd expedite the request form I'd sent to the DMV in Tallahassee. A driver's license was the one thing Pat Usher would have had to come up with, since Elaine had none, but it wouldn't have been that hard to falsify. All she had to do was apply in Elaine Boldt's name, pass the test, and wait for the license to arrive in the mail. In some states, you could walk out of the Department of Motor Vehicles with license in hand within minutes of taking the test – at least for a renewal. I wasn't sure what the procedure was in Florida. Jonah said he'd put a call through to Tallahassee and get back to me. I expected to be in Santa Teresa again by the next day, so I said I'd call him when I got in.
In the meantime, I drove back to the condominium and had a brief chat with Roland Makowski, the building manager, who confirmed what I'd already heard through Julia.
Pat Usher had departed, bag and baggage, the same day I'd spoken to her. She'd dutifully left a forwarding address – some motel down near the beach – but when Boland tried to get in touch, he'd found out it didn't exist. I asked him why he'd wanted to contact her. He said she'd taken a dump in the swimming pool as a parting gesture and then scrawled her name across the concrete in spray paint.
"She did what?" I asked.
"You heard right," he said. "She left a turd the size of a Polish sausage floating right in the pool. I had to have the whole thing drained and sanitized and I got people who still won't go in. That woman is demented and you know what pissed her off? I told her she couldn't hang her towels over the balcony rail! You should have seen her reaction. She was in such a rage her eyes rolled back in her head and she started to pant. She scared the hell out of me. She's sick." I blinked at him. "She panted?"
"She was almost foaming at the mouth." I thought about Tillie's night visitor. "I think we better take a look at Elaine's apartment," I said flatly.
The stench came at us like a wall the minute the door was opened. The destruction was systematic and complete. There was fecal matter smeared everywhere and the couch and chairs had been slashed with murderous intent. It was clear that she'd gone about it quietly. Unlike Tillie's apartment, no glass had been broken and no furniture overturned. What she'd done instead was to open all the canned goods and pour the contents on the carpeting. She'd ground in crackers and dried pasta, jams, spices, coffee, vinegar, soups, moldering fruit, adding contributions from her own intestinal tract. The whole sick stew had been sitting there for days and the Florida heat and humidity had cooked the mess to a boiling foment of fungus and rot. The packages of once frozen meat that she'd torn open and tossed into the thick of it were full of wiggling life of their own that I didn't care to inspect. Big flies buzzed around malevolently, their glittering fluorescent heads like beacons.