by Sue Grafton
Dietz had flipped through the yellow pages to the hotel/motel listings.
“Hey, Dietz?”
He looked up at me.
“I’d try the Edgewater first,” I said. “Maybe his showing up at the banquet last night was just a piece of dumb luck.”
He stared for a moment until the logic sank in. Then he laughed. “That’s good. I like that.” He found the number and punched it in, his attention focusing as someone picked up on the other end. “May I speak to Charles Abbott in security? Yes, thanks. I’ll hold.” Dietz put a palm over the mouthpiece of the receiver and used the interval to fill Rochelle in on events to date. He interrupted himself abruptly. “Mr. Abbott? Robert Dietz. We talked to you yesterday about security on the banquet… Right. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I need a quick favor. I wonder if you can check to see if you have a guest registered there. The name is Mark Darian or Darian Davidson… possibly some variation. Same man. We believe he’ll have his little boy with him. Sure…”
Apparently, Dietz was on hold again while Charles Abbott checked with the reservations desk. Dietz turned to Rochelle and took up the narrative where he’d left it. She didn’t seem to have any trouble following. Watching her, I began to realize how strung-out she was, despite the poised facade. This was a woman who probably didn’t eat when she was under stress, who lived on a steady diet of coffee and tranqs. I’d seen mothers like her before – usually pacing back and forth in a cage at the zoo. No appearance of domestication would ever undercut the savagery or the rage. Personally, I was happy I’d never laid a hand on her pup.
By the time Dietz caught her up, her expression was dark. “You have no idea how ruthless he is,” she said. “Mark is very, very smart and he has all the uncanny intuitions of a psychopath. Have you ever dealt with one? It’s almost like a form of mind reading…”
Dietz was on the verge of replying when Charles Abbott cut back in. Dietz said, “You do. That’s right, the boy is five.” He listened for a moment. “Thanks very much. Absolutely.” He placed the receiver in the cradle with exaggerated care. “He’s there with the kid. They’re in one of the cottages out in back. Apparently, the two of them have just gone down to the pool to have a swim. I told Mr. Abbott there’d be no trouble.”
She said, “Of course not.”
“You want to call the police?”
“No, do you?”
From the look that passed between them, they understood each other exactly. She picked up a leather handbag from the bed and took out a little nickel-plated derringer. Two shots. I gave him a smirky look, but his expression was neutral. God, and he’d criticized my gun.
“What’s your intention if we succeed in getting Eric back? You can’t go home,” he said to her.
“I have a rental car, which I’m dropping at the airport. My brother’s a pilot and he’ll pick us up at a charter place called Neptune Air. Mark and I used it once.”
Dietz turned to me. “You know it?”
“More or less. It’s this side of the airport on Rockpit Road.”
He turned back to Rochelle. “What time’s he flying in?”
“Nine, which should give us time enough, don’t you think?”
“It should. What then?”
“I’ve got a place we can hole up for as long as we want.”
Dietz nodded. “All right. It sounds good. Let’s do it.”
I held a ringer up, snagging Dietz’s attention. I tilted my head toward the door. “Could I have a word with you?”
He flicked a look at me, but made no move, so I was forced to charge on.
I said, “I’ve got something I want to check out and I need some wheels. Why can’t I take the rental car while you two take the Porsche? You know where Messinger is and you’re on your way over. I don’t see why I need to be there.”
There was a silence. I had to struggle not to jump in with a lot of pointless dialogue. I’m too old to beg and whine. I just couldn’t picture us in a motorcade, driving across town to a kidnapping or a shootout with Mark Messinger. My presence was redundant. I had other fish to fry. Rochelle was loading her gun – both chambers. It was too ludicrous for words, but something about it gave me a leaden feeling in my gut.
I could see Dietz debate my request. In an odd flash of ESP, I knew he’d have felt safer if I were going with him. He held out his car keys, not quite making eye contact. “Take my car. There’s a chance Messinger might spot us if we pull into the hotel parking lot in it. We’ll take the rental car. What I said before goes. Nothing dumb.”
“Same to you,” I said, perhaps more sharply than I intended. “I’ll meet you out at the charter place.”
“Take care.”
“You too.”
Chapter 26
*
It was 4:42 when I turned into the entrance to Mt. Calvary for the second time that day. A long line of eucalyptus trees laid lean shadows across the road. I passed through them as though through a series of gates as I wound my way up the hill. I turned left into a parking area near the office and pulled in beside a splashing stone fountain in a circle of grass. Bright orange goldfish darted among the soft, dark green filaments of algae. I locked the car. The tall carved wooden doors to the nondenominational chapel were standing open. The stone interior was dark.
I passed a double row of flat monuments, displaying various types of granite markers and styles of lettering. Hard to decide which I preferred at such a quick examination. I reached the office and pushed through the glass door. The reception area was empty, the desk bare except for a neat stack of postcards depicting the crematorium. What kind of person would you write to on one of those? I spotted a discreet sign saying press buzzer for service attached to a device about the size of an electric letter opener. I pressed a lever. Magically, a woman appeared from around the corner. I wasn’t really up on the fine points of cemetery ethics so, of course, I told a lie. “Hello. I wonder if you could help me…”
From the woman’s expression, she was wondering the same thing. She was in her forties, dressed in prim office clothes: a gray wool dress with a touch of white at the neck. I was sporting my usual jeans and tennis shoes. “I certainly hope so,” she said. She kept her judgment in reserve just in case I was rich and had a passel of dead relatives in need of lavish burial.
“I believe my aunt is buried here and I need to know the date she died. My mother’s in a nursing home and she’s worried because she can’t remember. Is there some way to check?”
“If you’ll give me the name.”
“The last name is Bronfen. Her first name was Anne.”
“Just a moment.” She disappeared. It was hard to picture how she’d find the information. Was all this stuff on a computer somewhere? In some old file cabinet in the back? If the date and place of death didn’t coincide with Bronfen’s story, I was going to do some digging and see if I could come up with the death certificate. It might mean a few phone calls to Tucson, Arizona, but I’d feel better knowing what had really happened to Anne.
She returned in a remarkably short period of time, holding a white index card which she passed to me. There wasn’t much on the face of it, but it was all pertinent. I soaked up the typed information in a flash. Surname, Chapman. Given name, Anne Bronfen. Age, forty. Birthdate, January 5, 1900. Sex, female. Color, white. Place of birth, Santa Teresa, California. Place of death, Tucson, Arizona.
Ah. Date of death, January 8, 1940. That was interesting.
Date of interment, January 12, 1940. The space allotted to the funeral director had been left blank, but the lot number and the plot number were filled in.
“What’s this?” I asked. I held the card out, pointing to the bottom line on which the word cenotaph had been handwritten in black ink.
“That’s a commemorative headstone for someone who’s not actually buried in that plot.”
“She’s not? Where is she?”
The woman took the card. “According to this, she died in Tucson, Ar
izona. She’s probably interred there.”
“I don’t get it. What’s the point?”
“The Bronfens might have wanted her remembered in the family plot. It’s a great comfort sometimes to feel that everyone’s together.”
“But how do you know this woman’s really dead?”
She stared at me. “Not dead?”
“Yeah. Don’t you require any proof? Can I just come in here and fill out one of these cards and buy somebody a gravestone?”
“It’s hardly that simple,” she said, “but yes, essentially…”
She had launched into an explanation of the particulars, but I was on my way out.
I drove to the board-and-care in a state of suspended animation. All I’d really wanted was corroboration of Bronfen’s tale, and here I was with another possibility altogether. Maybe Agnes Grey and Anne Bronfen were the same person after all. I thumbed my nose in Dietz’s general direction as I turned right on Concorde.
I parked the Porsche at the curb and got out. For once, there was no little twitch of the curtain as I pushed through the gate. I went up the porch steps and rang the bell. I waited. Several minutes passed. I moved over to the porch rail and peered toward the back of the house. At the far end of the driveway, I spotted a single-car garage. Attached to it was a lath house and a dark green potting shed with a big handsome padlock hanging open in the hasp.
Behind me, I heard the front door opening. “Oh, hi. Is that you, Mr. Bronfen?” I said, turning my attention back.
The man in the doorway was someone else – a frail old fellow with an air of shuffling indecision. He was thin and bent, his shoulders narrow, his fingers twisted with arthritis. He wore a much-washed plaid flannel shirt, thin at the elbows, and a pair of pants that came halfway up his chest. “He’s out. You’ll have to come again,” he said. His voice was a pastel blend of raspiness and tremor.
“Do you have any idea what time he’ll be back?”
“About an hour,” he said. “You just missed him.”
“Oh, gee, that’s too bad. I’m the contractor,” I said in this totally false warm tone I use. “I guess Mr. Bronfen’s thinking about an addition to the shed out back. He asked me to take a look. Why don’t I just go on out there and see what’s what.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. He closed the door.
Heart thumping, I made a beeline for the backyard, figuring my time was going to be limited. Patrick Bronfen was not going to appreciate my snooping, but then, if I were quick about it, he’d never know. The shed was perched haphazardly on a concrete foundation that did a sort of zigzag between the single-car garage and the house. This looked like the sort of work that was done without permit and was probably not up to code. Given the slope of the side yard and the retaining wall at the property line, Bronfen probably should have had a team of civil engineers out here before he opened that first sack of Redi-Mix.
I removed the dangling padlock from the hasp and let myself in. The ulterior was probably eight by ten, smelling of loam, peat moss, and potting soil, overlaid with Bl and fish emulsion. There were no windows and the light level had dropped by more than half. I felt around in the gloom, trying to find a light switch, but apparently the shed wasn’t wired for electricity. I groped through my handbag till I came up with a penlight and shone it around. The beam illuminated a large expanse of wall-mounted pegboard, hung with gardening tools. A mower leaned against the wall, its blades flecked with grass clippings. There was a six-foot workbench, its surface littered with clay pots, trowels, spilled potting soil, and discarded seed packs. Damp air clambered over my ankles and feet. Under the bench, I could see a gap in the rotting wood where a board had been pushed out.
To the right was an oblong wooden bin with a hinged lid, knee-high, the sort of unit where tools are stored. A square of newly cut plywood had been nailed across one end. Big plastic bags of bark mulch and Bandini 101 were stacked on top. One of the bags had a rip in the bottom and a trail of bark extended across the cracked cement floor. A pie-shaped wedge of track suggested that the bin had been dragged forward and then pushed back again. I thought about Agnes’s torn knuckles and broken nails.
I lifted my head. “Hello,” I said, just to check the sound level. The word was muffled, as if absorbed by the shadows. I tried again. “Hello?” No echo at all. I doubted the noise carried five feet beyond the shed. If I’d abducted a half-senile old lady, this would be a neat place to stash her till I decided what to do.
I balanced the penlight on the workbench and removed the twenty-five-pound bags from the top of the bin, stacking them to one side. When I’d cleared the lid, I opened it and peered in. Empty. I retrieved the penlight and checked the rough interior surface. The space was easily the size of a coffin and constructed so poorly that the air flow could probably sustain life, at least for a brief period. I ran the penlight from corner to corner, but there was no evidence of occupancy. I lowered the lid and restored the bags of mulch to their original positions. On my hands and knees, I checked the area around the bin. Nothing. I’d never be able to prove Agnes Grey had been here.
As I backed out of the space, I caught a whiff of foul air, musty and sweet, like a faint wisp of smoke. I felt my skin contract with recognition, hairs standing at attention along the back of my neck. I could feel my lips purse with distaste. This was the odor of dead squirrel trapped in a chimney, rotting gopher parts left on the porch by your cat, some creature guaranteed to perfume your nights until nature had completed the process of decomposition. Jesus. Where was it coming from?
I raised myself up on my knees and fumbled across the workbench until I found the trowel. I ducked under the bench again, running my fingers lightly along the shed’s concrete footing. The material was porous, softening with age, the texture mealy. I found a patch of crumbling mortar and began to dig with the trowel, gouging out a pocket. I turned the penlight off and worked by feel, using both hands. Under the hardened outer shell, the stuff felt gritty and wet, as if the groundwater had somehow seeped in, undermining the concrete. The smell seemed stronger. There was something dead down here.
I tried the light again, working my way to the right where I could see two horizontal cracks. I began to chop away at the concrete, doing more damage to the trowel than I was doing to the footing. I pulled myself to my feet again, searching the workbench for a more effective tool. Up on the pegboard, I spotted a short-handled hoe with a pick on the backside of the blade. I crawled back to my little strip mine and began to hack in earnest. I was making so much damn noise, it was a wonder the neighbors didn’t complain. A hunk of cement fell away. Tentatively, I scooped some of the debris off, using the pick to excavate. I felt resistance, some sort of root perhaps, or a length of rebar. I turned on the penlight again and peered into the space.
“Oh shit,” I whispered. I was looking at the dorsal surface of a little finger bone. I scooted backward across the floor, bumping into the mower. I sucked air through my teeth as my banged elbow sang. The pain was a welcome diversion under the circumstances. I flicked the light off and scrambled to my feet. I shoved a bag of bark mulch in front of the hole and snagged my handbag.
I was making little whimpering sounds as I whipped out of the door again. I placed the padlock where it had been and danced away from the shed with a spasm of revulsion. For a moment, all I could do was shiver, slapping at my arms as if to aid circulation. I paced in a circle, trying to think what to do. I breathed deeply. God, that was vile. From the glimpse I’d had, the bone had been there for years. Whatever the odor, it wasn’t emanating from that, but what else was down there? In the fading afternoon light, the zigzagging foundation seemed to glow. Someone had been adding outbuildings from time to time. First the lath house had been attached to the garage, then the potting shed had been attached to that. Extending from the side of the potting shed, there was a pad where firewood was stacked. If Anne Bronfen (in the guise of Agnes Grey) was accounted for, then the body had to be Sheila’s. Bronfen claimed his
wife had run away with Irene, but I didn’t believe a word of it. I did one of those all-over body shudders, thinking about the finger. All of the flesh was gone. I gave my head a shake and took two deep breaths, disconnecting my sensibilities. There had to be other answers somewhere on the premises.
I went back to the front door and knocked. I waited, hoping fervently that Bronfen wasn’t back. Eventually, the old fellow shuffled his way to the door and opened it a crack. I had to clear my throat, assuming what I hoped was a normal tone of voice.
“Me again,” I chirped. “Could I come in and wait for Mr. Bronfen?”
The old gent put a gnarly finger to his lips, giving my request some thought. Finally, he nodded and backed away from the door awkwardly as if controlled by wires. I followed him into the house, quickly checking my watch. I’d been in the shed twenty minutes. I still had plenty of time if I could figure out what I was looking for.
The old man crept toward the living room. “You can have a seat in here. I’m Ernie.”
“Nice to meet you, Ernie. Where did Mr. Bronfen go? Did he say anything to you?”
“No. I don’t believe so. He’ll be home directly I should think. Not long.”
“Nice house,” I said, peering into the living room. There I was, telling lies again. The house was shabby and smelled of cooked cabbage and peed-in pants. The furniture looked like it had been there since the turn of the century. The once-upon-a-time white curtains hung in limp wisps. The wallpaper in the hallway, with its motif of violets, fanned out in all directions like a bug infestation. Lucky for Klotilde she hadn’t qualified for occupancy.
To the left, uncarpeted stairs led up to a second floor. I could see a dining room with a series of decorative plates on the wall. I moved toward the rear of the house, passing a small door that probably opened onto a little storage area under the stairs. Across from that was the basement door. “Is this the kitchen through here? I need to wash my hands.” But I was talking to myself – Ernie had shuffled into the living room, forgetting me entirely.