Charles began to move the items around, departing from his patchwork grid to create orderly piles. Savannah’s lipstick was paired with a checkbook, and a folded envelope shared a patchwork square with a black-and-white snapshot. “So you’re wondering if Dodie Finn might’ve been the real target. Maybe her sister Ariel got in the way.” And, in answer to a question that Riker had just thought of, Charles said, “If Dodie saw her sister’s murder, that would be consistent with her present condition. But I can’t tell you that’s what happened. I can’t work magic.”
“Right.” The detective continued to watch his friend’s methodical sorting process. Savannah Sirus’s postmortem photos, all but one, were cast aside. The groupings of her personal effects made no sense to him. A driver’s license now kept company with the round-trip plane ticket.
“This woman wasn’t suicidal before she met Mallory.” Charles picked up the plastic card. “Just look at her in this license photograph.”
Rolling on his side, Riker squinted at this picture the size of a postage stamp.
“This driver’s license is more interesting,” said Charles, “if you know it was renewed ten days before Miss Sirus arrived in New York. In this picture, her hair is styled. You see? She’s well groomed—eye makeup, rouge and lipstick.”
“The works.” Riker nodded, pretending that he could actually make out these details on the tiny photograph. There was no need to see it clearly. Charles had just described the war paint worn by a middle-aged woman who had a life worth living—until she stepped off a plane in New York City. It was easier to read the larger, more recent photograph in Charles’s other hand. This was the close-up of a dead woman with lank, dirty hair, and no makeup at all. “Mallory did all that damage in just three weeks?”
“Tell me you don’t believe that Mallory deliberately drove this woman to kill herself.”
“Naw, of course not,” said Riker. First he would have to know what Savannah had done to deserve it.
Charles held up a checkbook. “Miss Sirus was planning another sort of trip when she was interrupted.”
“I saw that,” said Riker. “The check entry for a cruise line.”
“This woman wanted to see the world. Thirty thousand dollars would buy stops in a great many ports. The check is recent, and this sort of trip would be booked and paid for months in advance. A woman with suicidal ideation wouldn’t be able to plan that far ahead. She wouldn’t see any future at all. And, apparently, Miss Sirus—I should say Dr. Sirus—had no money worries.” Charles held up a business card. “She was a dermatologist. Judging by her other checkbook entries, she was very successful. Mallory’s mother was a doctor, too.”
“But not so successful,” said Riker. Mallory’s natural mother had been a general practitioner in a tiny town. “Cassandra was probably paid in dead chickens and sacks of potatoes.”
“But there’s more,” said Charles. “Savannah’s from Chicago. Did you know that Mallory’s mother interned at a Chicago hospital?”
Yawning, Riker said, “No, I didn’t. The brat never tells me anything.”
“But you knew Cassandra was originally from Louisiana.” Charles held up the driver’s license to bring his point home. “And Savannah is a southern name.”
Riker grinned. He had met New York hookers from Harlem to the Battery who called themselves Savannah.
Charles Butler wore such a patient smile, waiting for the tired detective to put it all together, not wanting to commit a rudeness by stating the obvious thing.
“All those phone calls would make sense,” said Riker, grudgingly, “if Savannah knew Mallory’s mother in her younger days.” He was thinking of a child’s trademark line on the telephone in the late-night hours: It’s Kathy—I’m lost. All those years ago, had she been trying to find an old friend of the family? Why then, after this happy little reunion, would Savannah Sirus kill herself in Mallory’s apartment? And what was the link to Route 66 and a child killer? He so longed to bang his head against the wall. In his experience, that actually helped.
“Can you find out if Miss Sirus ever lived in Louisiana?”
“No, Charles, I can’t put that name through cop channels—not till I know what happened back in New York. Somebody might get the idea that it wasn’t a suicide. So what else have you got?”
“I found a letter in the suitcase.”
“No way.” The detective had searched the luggage himself. Ah, but he had been sleeping in catnaps for days. So he had missed something else—maybe a lot of things.
“It was in the lining,” said Charles by way of apology for contradicting a friend.
“Read it to me.”
“It’s short,” said Charles. “Mallory dated it months ago. She writes, ‘I want the rest of my letters. I want all of them.’”
“What? Mallory isn’t the letter-writing type. She e-mails.”
“Maybe Savannah doesn’t have a computer,” said Charles, the sworn enemy of technology. “Now consider all the times that Mallory called this woman. Miss Sirus may have stopped answering the phone. Then think about the days that Mallory missed from work—I mean, before she stopped showing up altogether. Maybe she turned up at Miss Sirus’s door in Chicago. Maybe the door was never opened to her. Hence this letter from Mallory. The postman always gets through.” Charles handed him a small black-and-white photograph. “This was also in the lining.”
Riker squinted at the small portrait of a long-haired boy. Reluctantly he pulled out his reading glasses and donned them. Now he could make out the youngster’s T-shirt design as an old album cover from another era. “Early Rolling Stones. The kid had taste.”
“I found that snapshot in here with Mallory’s letter.” He held up a large manila envelope. It was folded twice in order to fit inside the torn suitcase lining. “This is big enough to hold quite a lot of letters.”
The detective nodded. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” Letters were all that Mallory had asked for, and it was unlikely that her houseguest would travel to New York empty-handed.
Charles made a show of opening the envelope, turning it upside down and shaking it to demonstrate its emptiness. “Apparently all the letters were surrendered to Mallory. Yet, her houseguest found it necessary to tear the lining in her suitcase—just to hide that photograph. I’m guessing Miss Sirus never went anywhere without it.”
What was this? Witchcraft?
Riker rolled on his side, the better to study the picture by the dim bulb of the bedside lamp. “How the hell would you know that, Charles?”
“Oh, there’s a lot more you can extrapolate from that photograph. Perhaps if you looked at it in a brighter light?”
These were the last words that Riker heard before falling into a deep sleep.
8
Past the small sleeping town of Galena, Kansas, Mallory departed from a street marked by signs as Historic Route 66. She turned right to travel down a narrow road that cut through countryside and crop fields. Watching her trip monitor, she counted off the miles to her next turn: ten, eleven, almost there. Over the distance of green flatlands, she could see the silhouette of the auto body shop, a garage described as “—the size and shape of an airplane hangar.” And the letter went on to tell her that this place did a round-the-clock business with three full-time crews, and “—old Ray was always up before dawn.”
She turned onto a long dirt driveway, then stopped to select Led Zeppelin music to orchestrate her entrance. Moving forward again, she played it at top volume. “Black Dog” was reported to be Ray Adler’s secret theme song. Mallory roared into the lot, revved her engine and honked her horn to add to the noise of the band. The song was switched off and the visor lowered to hide her face. She sat very still in the shadows of the car, her back to the rising sun.
A man in his fifties came to the door of the garage and stood there squinting into the morning light. And now came the look of recognition—the song and the car. He was running across the lot, grinning and yelling, “You old son of a
bitch, is that you?” The man’s eyes were still half blinded by sunrise. “I knew you’d come back.” He all but ripped off the driver’s side door in his haste to open it. He bent down to look at her face, and now he wore an expression of dumbfounded surprise. Though he had expected to see someone else behind the wheel, his smile spread wider.
“Even better,” he said, standing back a pace to stare at her. “You’re Peyton’s kid, all right. You got his weird green eyes. Not another pair like ’em. And you got your mama’s pretty face. But this ain’t your daddy’s car. Well, damn. Let’s see what you got, girl.” He started toward the front where the engine ought to be on this recent model, and then he stopped, saying, “No, don’t tell me.” He turned around and headed for the trunk, and she obligingly pulled the release lever to open it for him.
“Oh, damn, that’s beautiful!”
She left the car to stand beside him as he admired the Porsche engine.
“You outdid old Peyton, girl. His Porsche was old when he bought it, and that was before you were born. What a damn wreck that car was. Not a bit of the body that wasn’t dented or crushed. He got it for a dollar and a promise not to sue the drunk who totaled his Volkswagen. Happened back down the road not twenty miles. God, how Peyton loved that old VW. That would’ve been the Bug’s tenth run down Route 66. Well, your dad was determined to finish the trip the way he started out. When he pulled in here, he was driving the Porsche and towing the Bug. But we couldn’t splice ’em together. And I wasn’t about to waste all the best parts of that sports car. So you can see, can’t you—just using the Porsche’s engine was out. Now Peyton once put a V-8 in an other Bug. But that’s an other story. So we used the old car’s convertible top—all we could salvage—and we put it on a prefab shell a lot like this one here. Big as a Beetle, and maybe a little longer. Same paint job, too. Now, silver to go with that black ragtop, that was my idea. Back then, there wasn’t another car like it on the road.”
Mallory already knew the history of the other car, but never lost patience with this man’s retelling of the story. She had yet to say a word, and Ray Adler was only now realizing this. His face turned beet red.
“I talk too much. My wife, rest her soul, used to tell me that all the time. Never give folks a chance to get a word in.” He smiled at her, not able to get enough of her green eyes, the eyes of Peyton Hale. “So tell me, how’s your dad and his pretty bride?”
“I never met the man,” said Mallory. “My mother died when I was six, and she was never married.”
Riker tried to ignore the knocking on his motel room door, but the early morning caller was persistent. The shower was running in the bathroom; no help was coming from Charles Butler. The detective dragged his legs to the edge of the bed. The drapes were flimsy, and the room was entirely too bright. He put on his sunglasses to answer the door.
Standing in the awful sunlight of a cloudless new day was the young desk clerk he had met last night. The boy handed him a bag imprinted with the name of a local restaurant. “Mr. Butler already paid for it, sir. The tip’s covered, too.”
Evidently, Charles had finally broken the language barrier and explained the concept of room service to the staff of this backwater motel. And the tip must have been huge. The boy’s grin was that wide, that friendly. Riker slammed the door.
Too much sun.
The paper bag yielded coffee to start his heart and pastries for a sugar rush. He lit a cigarette, and his life was complete—all the drugs necessary to begin the day.
Eyes all the way open now, he noticed the small black-and-white photograph of a young man in a rock ’n’ roll T-shirt. It was propped up against the alarm clock so he would not fail to see it. This was the picture once hidden in the lining of Savannah’s suitcase. On the back of it was a date that made the boy close to Savannah’s age when this snapshot was taken. Riker flipped it over to stare at the faded portrait of a damn good-looking youngster in his twenties. Long, fair hair grazed the shoulders, and the face had the makings of rock-star style: a touch of wit to the eyes and the hint of a wild side in his smile. The image was worn in the center with traces of pink lipstick, and he guessed that Savannah had kissed it too often. That spoke to the absence of her lover. So the lady had lost this man. The affair had ended and the photo was all she had left.
Or maybe not.
Riker looked up to see his friend in a bathrobe. He held up the photograph of the boy. “The letters Mallory wanted—the kid meant old love letters, right?”
“That would be my guess,” said Charles Butler. “It’s the sort of correspondence that Miss Sirus was most likely to keep for all these years.” He nodded at the snapshot in Riker’s hand. “You saw the date on the back? The relationship probably ended when Savannah Sirus was as young as that boy.”
Riker set down the photograph. “This doesn’t tell me why Mallory would want that woman’s old love letters.”
Charles, the quintessential gentleman, kept silent, showing great confidence that the detective would work this out in another minute.
And Riker did. Everything was clear, for Mallory’s short note to Savannah had demanded the letters, as if she had a right to them. The kid had wanted her letters. “They were written by Mallory’s father.”
“Seems logical, doesn’t it? But more important,” said Charles, “the love letters were written to a woman who was not Mallory’s mother.”
That would explain a lot, given the compulsive way that Mallory had always kept track of every transgression, real and imagined. “So Mallory’s father abandoned her mother to run off with Savannah Sirus.” One more cheat, another old score to settle. And now, in Riker’s own personal autopsy of suspicious suicide, he had motive.
Mallory, what did you do to that woman?
“The first time I met your dad, he was a sixteen-year-old car thief out of California,” said Ray of Ray’s Auto body Shop. “Didn’t even have a driver’s license.” Mallory’s host sat down at along wooden table stained with rings from a thousand coffee cups. “Well, not a car thief—I’m exaggerating. I’m sure he owned that old Volkswagen—even if he wasn’t legally old enough to drive it. But he tried to steal the parts he needed to keep it running.”
Mallory looked around the kitchen, aching to put it in order. This was the mess of a man who lived alone, though finger paintings and photographs of young grandchildren were stuck to the refrigerator with cartoon magnets. The washing machine in the corner was merely a repository for dirty laundry that even this impossibly grimy man would no longer wear. Here and there, she could make out the layer of years when his wife was still living. Signs of her were in the rosebud pattern of the curtains. The teacups were ornate. Judging by the pile of dishes in the sink, he used the good china every day—because it reminded him of his wife. She looked at the worn pattern on her spoon—real silver, and silverware was a traditional wedding gift. The kitchen called up memories of her foster father’s house in the years following the death of Helen, the woman who had raised her from the age of ten.
Ray Adler poured hot coffee into her cup, then set a carton of milk on the table alongside a five-pound bag of sugar with another silver spoon sticking out of the tear in the top. “Now the last time Peyton came through, he was heading the other way, back to the West Coast, and it was ten years later. He had two college degrees and he was working on a third. That was a predictable outcome. Peyton was one smart kid.”
Mallory drank her coffee black and listened to the story of Ray’s father catching the young thief in the act of stealing engine parts by dead of night. This might have been her own story, but Lou Markowitz had caught her robbing a Jaguar when she was a child—a more precocious thief than Peyton Hale.
“My father didn’t turn him in,” said Ray. “Dad didn’t want to mess up a kid’s whole life for thirty dollars’ worth of parts. So he made Peyton work for what he stole. Well, it was like going back to school for my dad—and me, too. That boy could make a busted carburetor rise again from the dead
and bark at the moon. In other words—the boy had a way with cars. All that summer, old junkers rolled into the garage, and they rolled out again the next best thing to new. It was magic. Our local trade doubled, and we even pulled in folks from Missouri. That’s when Peyton got Dad going on the auto body work, prefabs, real strange modifications. That got us business from four states. These days, I build race cars, too. I get work from as far away as Oregon. Oh, your father was so smart. The back seat of his car was just chock full of old paperbacks, real thick ones. Instead of a salary, Dad gave him a cut on the trade that summer. So when Peyton got back on the road again, he had a stake.”
“And he went back to school.”
“Yeah, he did. But he’d come back here every summer, work some to make his tuition, then drive on to California and back. Last time through, he was writing a history of Route 66. He wanted to get it all down on paper before it disappeared. But it was more than history. He was building a whole new philosophy around the car. Philosophy, that was his major in school. Odd thing is—it suited him. If you’d only known him, you’d see that clear as I do.”
Ray left the room for a minute or two and returned with a wooden box. “These are things that got left behind on his last road trip.” He opened it with a key and a trace of reverence, as if it contained religious artifacts. Gently he picked up a photograph. “This is him and your mother. You look just like Cass. That could be you standing there. But I don’t know the lady on his other arm.”
Mallory did.
Savannah Sirus’s young face was turned toward Peyton Hale who, like her mother, Cassandra, was smiling for the camera. Was this a picture of a crime in progress, maybe taken on the day when Savannah began to lay her plans?
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