He brooded into his glass again, his fingers clenching and unclenching around it. I could see that he wanted a refill and was struggling against the need. I expected him to lose the struggle, say something, and pop to his feet again, but he didn’t. He set the tumbler down on the table, pushed it away with his fingertips, and then looked at me again.
“You see the kind of bind I’m in, why I’m so confused and upset? It all sounds unbelievable, I know that, but everything I’ve told you is the truth; I swear it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I need somebody to believe in me,” he said, “and not just to get myself off the hook with the police. I need to know what happened to Alice, have her found and brought back home if she hasn’t been … if she’s all right. That’s the most important thing.” He drew a tremulous breath. “Do you believe me?”
Good question. The desperate appeal in his voice sounded genuine; he had looked and acted sincere throughout the interview, seemed to honestly care about his wife’s well-being over and above his own. But I had been fooled on more than one occasion by accomplished liars looking to use me for their own ends—the guy in Atherton, most recently, and the story he’d told had been a hell of a lot less credible than Cahill’s. I’d made the mistake of buying into that one, if not for long, and lived to regret it, and it had made me even more leery and cynical.
On the other hand, if Cahill was responsible for his wife’s disappearance, what did he have to gain, really, by retaining a private detective? It wouldn’t take much, if any, of the heat off him. Could work against him, in fact, to have another trained professional snooping around. The only way I could see that his motive made sense was if his story was more or less straight, if he really was innocent.
“Will you help me?” He extended a hand, palm up, almost as if in supplication. “Please?”
By way of answer I took out the standard agency contract I’d brought with me. He read it over quickly, gave me a grateful look, and signed and returned it.
I got to my feet. “Suppose you show me around, Mr. Cahill. Starting with the outside garage door.”
2
The lock on the garage door was a stainless-steel dead bolt of good-quality Japanese manufacture. The only key to it, Cahill said, was the one he kept on his key ring. I examined the keyhole, bolt, plate. No tampering marks, as he’d indicated. But that didn’t mean the lock was immune to a skeleton key.
The door into the kitchen was the heavy-duty variety; its lock bore no telltale scratches, either. We went back inside and I had a look at the locks on the other doors. Double dead bolts on both the front and back, the doors themselves also heavy-duty and tightly fitted into their frames. Likewise the windows in the kitchen, family room, living room, utility room. With the alarm system armed, the house was about as secure as you can make a private residence these days.
We saved Alice Cahill’s office until last. It was at a rear corner of the ground floor, behind the family room. One of those large enclosures designed for no particular purpose—office, den, recreation room, spare bedroom, kids’ playroom, whatever the owner cared to make of it. It was shrouded in gloom, which Cahill chased by flicking a wall switch as we entered. There were windows in the back wall and one side wall, both tightly covered with thick venetian blinds so that little daylight could penetrate.
“Alice always keeps the windows covered like that,” Cahill said. He seemed less edgy now that I’d agreed to take his case, but the facial muscle still ticced. “She doesn’t even like to look outdoors into the garden.”
The furnishings were all dark wood. A computer workstation sat in the middle of a thick-pile carpet, positioned at an angle so that when Mrs. Cahill occupied the brown leather desk chair her back would be to the blinded windows; the workstation held a printer and a desk lamp but no computer. Next to it stood a desk with not much on it except a thick, padded shipping envelope, a couple of plastic paper trays; next to the desk was a leather recliner, a floor lamp, and a boom-box portable radio on a spindly table. Most of the inner wall was spanned by a bookcase, its shelves filled with paperback books and a plastic case of the sort that holds CDs and DVDs.
“I don’t see a computer,” I said. “Does your wife do all of her writing on the missing laptop?”
“Yes. She has an iPad, too. The police confiscated it and my iPad. Fat lot of good it did them.” He added with some bitterness, “They haven’t returned them yet.”
He went to the desk, presumably for the e-mail printouts he’d told me about. But the padded bag caught his eye and he paused to pick it up. “This came the day she vanished—it was on the front porch when I got home. Copies of her latest novel, I think. I haven’t had the heart to open it.” He shook his head, set the bag down again, and opened the bottom drawer of the desk. While he was doing that, I pulled the blinds back on each of the windows to check the locks. As secure as the rest.
Cahill handed me a manila folder labeled Dellbrook. There were three e-mails signed by Grace Dellbrook, the first dated a little more than two weeks ago, the most recent two days before Alice Cahill was last seen; if another one had been received the morning of her disappearance, she had not printed it out. There were only two replies from Mrs. Cahill. I read them over in order received and answered. Dellbrook’s initial communication was fairly long, angry but controlled and nonthreatening, claiming that Alice Cahill’s novel The Convenient Bride was a plagiarism of her, Dellbrook’s, two-year-old novel, What the Bride Found Out. Several points of similarity were cited as proof—San Francisco setting, plot and character development, the climactic scene.
Mrs. Cahill emphatically denied the charge. She had never read or heard of What the Bride Found Out, the cited similarities were coincidental and relatively minor, if in fact they existed at all, and she did not appreciate being accused of a crime she hadn’t committed. Curt and dismissive, but not provocative.
The other two Dellbrook e-mails showed escalating hostility. In the second she cited other similarities between her book and Mrs. Cahill’s, all of which were disputed and refuted as “utter nonsense.” The third demanded an admission of guilt, an apology, and “a suitable financial settlement” and threatened “dire consequences” if they weren’t forthcoming. Presumably that meant contacting Alice Cahill’s publisher and perhaps an attorney.
“You see what I mean by a nutcase?” Cahill said when I finished reading. “People like that crawl out of the woodwork when they think they can scam some money.”
“Did you show these to the police?”
“Yes, for all the good it did. The cop in charge, a lieutenant named Kowalski, barely glanced at them. Too focused on me as a suspect.”
I got Cahill’s permission to borrow the file. Then I asked him, “How do you suppose the woman got your wife’s e-mail address?”
“From Alice’s website. She made the mistake of including it so her fans could get in touch with her.”
“Your home address included, too?”
“No. But it’s not too hard to find out where somebody lives these days, is it?”
I agreed that it wasn’t. “What was your wife planning to do about the threats?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Didn’t she discuss them with you?”
“No. She didn’t say anything at all to me about these ridiculous accusations. I wish she had. But she can be … well, closed off when something upsets her.”
“If she didn’t tell you, how did you find out?”
“I came across the e-mail file in her desk a few days ago.” The admission was apologetic. “We have a pact: I don’t intrude on her privacy and she doesn’t intrude on mine. But the way things are … I looked through her files hoping to find something that would explain what happened to her. This is all there is that might have any bearing on it.”
I said, “In her second reply, she mentions having bought a copy of the Dellbrook novel online. I’d like to see it if it’s still here.”
“
It is. In the bookcase.”
I went over there with him. While he hunted for What the Bride Found Out, I looked over the other books. Reference books, two shelves of modern and historical romance paperbacks, and one shelf of Alice Cahill’s novels under her own name and the Jennifer West pseudonym, multiple copies of each.
“Here it is,” Cahill said. He pulled out a somewhat shabby copy of a paperback with a black-and-white cover illustration that might have been drawn by a semi-talented third-grader.
I opened it and looked at the first sentence—“Doreen was as thrilled as a new bride must always be on her wedding day, her heart beating fast, as her thoughts dwelled on the church ceremony and all the wonderfulness that would follow.”—and closed it again.
“Piece of crap,” Cahill said. “Alice’s writing is ten times better.”
“You read all of her books?”
“Well … no. I read the first couple, as a favor to her, but that kind of stuff…” He shrugged and finished lamely, “I’m not much of a reader.”
“All right with you if I borrow this, too? And a copy of The Convenient Bride?”
“Sure. Help yourself. You’re going to talk to the Dellbrook woman, right? If you can find her?”
“I can find her.” I transferred a copy of The Convenient Bride from the shelf to my coat pocket, tucked What the Bride Found Out in there with it. Then I said, “I have to ask this question. Did your wife have any other enemies you know of?”
“No. How could she, cooped up in here the way she was?”
“No problems with her sister, the doctor, her college friend?”
“Not the way you mean. Some friction, sure—like I said before, it’s not easy dealing with a panicky agoraphobe. She and Kendra were always sniping at each other—Kendra’s the bossy, preachy type—but they’ve been doing that ever since they were kids.” He sighed heavily. “Besides, it couldn’t have been any of them driving that car Mrs. Cappicotti saw. I’m the only one who can’t prove where I was around one o’clock that day.”
I let it drop for now. “Tell me some more about the accident she was involved in. You said the passenger in the other vehicle was killed, the driver injured. How badly injured?”
“Broken leg, concussion.”
“Man or woman?”
“A Pleasant Hill woman named Hernandez, Sofia Hernandez. Her father was the one killed. But if you’re thinking she bore a grudge, she didn’t. No civil suit for negligence or anything like that. We paid all her hospital bills and the funeral expenses.”
“Did you or your wife have any direct contact with her?”
“No. It was all done through the insurance people and our attorney.”
“No communication from her since?”
“Not that I know about. Alice would have told me if she’d heard from her.” Cahill wagged his head again. “More than four years. You can’t be thinking the Hernandez woman is responsible for Alice’s disappearance after all that time?”
“It’s not likely, no, but stranger things have happened. I’m just trying to cover all the bases.”
I wrote “Sofia Hernandez, last known living Pleasant Hill 4 yrs ago” in my notebook. Also the contact information for Kendra and Paul Nesbitt and Fran Woodward, which Cahill supplied, and the full name of the police lieutenant in charge of the official investigation, Frank Kowalski. When I was done, I asked Cahill for a recent photograph of his wife. He said he had a good one in his office upstairs.
His office, a converted bedroom, wasn’t half as neat or well appointed as hers. Mismatched furniture, his computer on a stand next to a small limed-oak desk. The photo of his wife he gave me was the one on the desk, a head and shoulders color portrait. “Don’t worry,” he said as he removed it from the frame. “I have another one just like it.”
“How recent is it?”
“Five years, but she hasn’t changed that much … physically.”
Alice Cahill was a slender, olive-skinned brunette, pretty in a snub-nosed, gamin sort of way. Her eyes were her best feature, slightly slanted so that they gave her face a faintly Asian look, the pupils so dark they seemed almost black. In the photo the eyes had a mischievous gleam. It would be gone now if she was still alive, I thought. Four years gone.
In addition to the converted office, there were a master suite and another bedroom upstairs. The door to the second bedroom was open and I could see an unmade bed and a scattering of his clothing inside. “Alice and I have separate rooms,” he said as we passed it. “She sleeps in the master bedroom.” I nodded and made no comment, but he seemed to need to explain further, the tic along his jaw jumping and fluttering. “Before the accident we had an active sex life. Afterward … only now and then, and on her initiative. The past six months, not at all…”
I said, “That’s none of my business, Mr. Cahill, unless it has some relevance.”
“It doesn’t, but Alice blabbed about it to Kendra and Kendra told the cops. Supposedly another motive for me wanting to do away with her. I … thought you should know.”
Everything in the master bedroom was in perfect order. Compulsive housekeeping, I thought. I saw no need to poke around in the various drawers and the big walk-in closet—Cahill and the police would have done that, and he’d have told me if anything relevant had been found—but I did take a quick look into the closet. There were relatively few items of clothing, most of them casual wear; the reason, Cahill said, was that his wife had insisted on downsizing her wardrobe after the accident. She had given away most of her jewelry, too, to charity outlets. Another indication of the depth of her guilt over the death she’d inadvertently caused.
I’d spent enough time here, gathered more than enough information to begin my investigation. Cahill and I went downstairs. He stepped out onto the porch with me. I told him I’d be in touch as soon as I had anything to report, and we were shaking hands when he glanced past me and said, “Oh, there’s Mrs. Cappicotti, the neighbor I told you about.”
I turned to see a woman coming down the front walk of the house opposite, a smallish brown-and-white dog on a leash pulling her along. “You want to talk to her now?” Cahill asked. “I’ll go over with you—”
I did want to talk to her, but alone. “No need for that, as long as she’s approachable.”
“She is. Nice old lady, a little feisty sometimes.”
The woman had stopped on the sidewalk to look over at Cahill and me. I said good-bye to him and went down and across the street. The woman was around my age, maybe a little older, with wispy gray hair poking out from under a knit cap. She had a lean, rosy-cheeked face, wore a pair of blue-rimmed glasses with thick lenses. The day was warmish, but she was bundled up in a coat and paisley scarf. Wrapped around her left hand was a plastic Baggie, all set to do her part to keep the streets of Shelter Hills Estates clean.
The dog was jumping around, panting noisily. I kept a wary eye on him as I came up—I’ve had run-ins with dogs before—but this one seemed tame enough and showed no interest in me.
“Mrs. Cappicotti?”
“That’s me. Don’t worry about him, he doesn’t bite. You another policeman?”
“No, ma’am. Private investigator.” I showed her the photostat of my license.
“Working for Mr. Cahill, eh? Well, he must’ve got himself a good one if you’re still in business, man your age. That why you’re not retired?”
There wasn’t any point in telling her I was semiretired. “I’d rather work than sit around on my fanny all day.”
She liked that; she made a chuckling sound, exposing dentures so white they must have been fairly new. “Exactly how I feel,” she said. “I was in the insurance business, but the damn company had a mandatory retirement age. Now I do volunteer work—hospice, Senior Center, county food bank—and run the household for my daughter and her family. That’s why I’m living here with them instead of—” The brown-and-white dog kept yanking at the leash, eager to get on with the walk. “All right, Spots, all right,” she
said to the pooch. Then to me, “Spots. Stupid name for a dog. But my granddaughter named him, so what can you do?”
“Nice-looking animal. What breed is he?”
“Jack Russell terrier. Gentle enough, but he’s a pain in the ass sometimes. I prefer cats. Got two of those in the house, too.”
I said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Cappicotti, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“About that car I saw over at the Cahills’, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, but you’ll have to ask ’em while I walk this beast. He’s about to yank my arm out of the socket.”
I nodded, fell into step with her as she set off. “Mr. Cahill told me you saw the car drive into his garage about one o’clock the day his wife disappeared.”
“Not exactly. It was already inside when I came out with Spots here. I just got a glimpse of its hind end before the door came down.”
“And it was light colored?”
“White or beige or light tan. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and I just had a glimpse, like I said.” She added, her upper lip curling disdainfully, “The policeman I talked to seemed to think I might not have seen a car at all, that it was just my imagination. Idiot. I don’t have that kind of imagination and I’m a long way from being senile.”
“Could it have been Mr. Cahill’s BMW?”
“Could’ve been, but he says it wasn’t and I believe him. Whatever happened to his wife, I don’t think he had anything to do with it. I’m in the minority there, even my daughter and her husband think he did, but I know people and he’s not capable of it. Good neighbor, friendly. Never complained about having to carry that heavy cross of his—his wife not being able to leave the house, I mean.”
“So as far as you know, the two of them got along.”
“As well as could be expected, the situation being what it was. Heard her screaming at him a couple of times, I guess when she had one of her panic attacks, but never once heard him raise his voice to her.”
Endgame--A Nameless Detective Novel Page 2