by Saul Black
“Are you insane? Your mother would have me killed. Speaking of killing…”
“Yeah.”
“How’s it going? I mean, I know you can’t talk about it, but you doing okay?”
“I’m good. We’re doing the work.”
“That heroic man still treating you right?”
“More than I deserve.”
“Well, it’s not the same without you here, you know. I can’t believe you betrayed me for Cole Valley. All those goddamned yoga-Nazis.”
“You do yoga.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to have people shot for not doing it.”
They chatted for a few minutes, hugged good-bye.
“Listen,” Valerie said, “when this business is over, come for dinner, will you? It’s been too long.”
“All right, hotshot. Gimme a call. Meantime, stay alive, okay?”
Valerie loaded the package into the trunk. She got in the driver’s seat, checked her phone, started the engine.
Then she saw the flowers.
Several of the ground-floor occupants on this block had cheered up their stoops and window ledges with potted plants, shrubs, hanging baskets. Next door to Valerie’s building on her left, the young couple had installed two hefty concrete tubs with silvery-green olive trees in them.
But that wasn’t what had caught her eye. What had caught her eye was the window box on the ground-floor apartment two doors down, on the right. The window ledge was a foot wide, and the box ran the full length of it, four or five feet.
Flowers, to Valerie, were “flowers.” Beyond daffodils, roses, and tulips she would have been hard pressed to identify anything.
Except, now, globe amaranth. The flower Raylene Ashe had had pinned in her hair. The flower her killer had put there.
Perhaps Raylene will help you toward the nonrandom nature of my selection?
She got out of the car and went up the stoop. The flowers in the window box nodded, as in gentle confirmation. She pulled the image up on her iPhone.
“Depending on the variety, flowers are white, red, pink, lilac, or purple. ‘Strawberry Fields,’ with bright-red blossoms, and ‘All Around Purple’ are popular…”
All Around Purple.
The back of Valerie’s neck livened. As if he were standing right behind her, whispering. It took an effort not to spin around, and even then she couldn’t help herself from turning, slowly, and taking a visual sweep of the block. Nothing unusual. Or all the nothing unusual that could just as easily be concealing something extraordinary. Him. A young couple across the street were walking their brown-and-white Jack Russell. Its tongue protruded like a little pink scroll. At the gourmet grocery a pretty white-aproned girl was adjusting the striped awning. Sunlight glinted on her nose ring. A bus passed, faces in the windows, people deep in their details and schemes.
She closed the image on her phone and opened the pdf of Raylene’s delivery addresses. There were too many. She called Will.
“Hey.”
“Raylene’s postal route addresses. You got them handy?”
“I’m not at my desk.”
“How long?”
“Two minutes.”
“Call me back when you’re there.”
Less than two minutes. Will knew her tones.
“Okay.”
“Document search the list for my name and Capp Street address.”
“What?”
“There’s a window box two doors down from my old building with globe amaranth growing in it.”
“Globe…?”
“The flower in Raylene’s hair.”
“Jesus. Hold on.”
First, concede that it might be a coincidence. Concede that the flower head could have come from anywhere. “Grows year round in all zones.” Put that on one side.
Now, assume it wasn’t a coincidence.
The too-dumb-to-be-true scenario was that he lived right here, two doors down from her. They would do the interviews, of course (no matter how unlikely, it had to be eliminated), but it would be a waste of time. One of their very few certainties was that he wasn’t too dumb to be true. He wouldn’t have made it that easy. Nor would he have been reckless enough to pick it from this particular window box.
Rather, he was telling her three things. First, that he’d watched Raylene on her route. Second, that he’d selected Raylene because she’d delivered her, Valerie’s, mail. Third, that he knew where she, Valerie, had lived, and most likely where she lived now. He was telling her she was an object under his scrutiny. He was telling her he was watching her.
All conjecture. But the Machine said otherwise.
“Will?”
“I’m doing it. Wait. Fuck.”
“Am I on the list?”
“Yeah.” Will exhaled. “Yeah, you’re on it.”
“How soon can you get here?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Is McLuhan in?”
“Yeah. I’ll let him know.”
A face appeared at the ground-floor apartment window. A plump, gray-haired woman in her fifties, olive skin and Middle Eastern features. Valerie recognized her. They’d crossed each other on the block in the past, though it had never gone beyond exchanging a neighborly “hi.” They didn’t know each other by name.
“Hang on, Will.”
Valerie waved and held her badge up for the woman to see. The woman raised the window and stuck her head out.
“Hey,” Valerie said. “Hi. Could I come in and talk to you for a second?”
“Wow, you’re a cop?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on?”
“Could we talk inside?”
A little excitement (and, naturally, anxiety) crept into the woman’s face. “Yeah, sure, I guess. Let me get the door.”
Valerie switched back to her phone. “We’re going to need a list of occupants, management company, you know the drill. I’m going in to talk to one of the residents right now.”
The neighbor, Mrs. Zarbib, had nothing useful to tell her. She had globe amaranth every year. No one suspicious hanging around. No idiot plucking a flower.
“Elizabeth Lambert’s stuff,” Valerie said to Will, when he turned up with Agent Helin and two uniforms, just as she was exiting the building. “Who’s got it now?”
“The sister, I think,” Will said. He flipped open his notebook. “Gillian Rose. She’s out in Sausalito. What are you thinking?”
“If he selected Raylene because she delivered my mail, then maybe there’s a connection between me and Elizabeth, too. Nonrandom, right? I need to go through it. I need all the background.”
“Well, you’re better off with the sister than the parents. The father’s having a fucking nervous breakdown.”
Valerie called Gillian Rose. She sounded as if she’d just woken up. But she was home, and willing to talk. Valerie told her she’d be there within the hour.
19
Elizabeth Lambert’s fifty-six-year-old sister, Gillian Rose, lived with her husband, Paul, two Persian cats, and a Dalmatian, in a two-million-dollar home on Santa Rosa Avenue, part of the Glen Grove Estates enclave. The white concrete house looked to Valerie like several boxes stacked to give the impression they might topple over in a strong gust of wind. Paul Rose ran a high-end architectural firm. Gillian was an artist, currently specializing in collage. She wasn’t famous, but you couldn’t buy one of her pieces for less than six thousand dollars.
The morning was heating up by the time Valerie got there. Broad sunlight with just enough of a breeze coming off the water to ruffle the tips of the evergreens that dotted the hill below. Gillian was home alone, but for the pets. She was a tawny, high-cheekboned woman with honey-brown hair in a thick braid. Faded jeans and a white silk blouse. Tan bare feet with unpainted pedicured nails. An intelligent face, but exhausted. There was, within seconds, an ease between the two women. A mutual recognition that patience wasn’t a virtue either of them possessed.
“Do you want one
of these?” Gillian said, having led Valerie up onto the top-floor terrace, an oak-decked space with wrought-iron furniture and a spectacular view of the bridge and the bay. The glass-fronted room it led back into served as Gillian’s studio. “One of these” was a large, heavily iced gin and tonic.
“No, thanks,” Valerie lied. “I’m fine.”
“Of course,” Gillian said. “Not while you’re on duty. Something like this happens and you find yourself speaking TV lines. Coffee? Juice? Water?”
“Really, nothing, thank you.”
“Some of the jewelry’s gone back to my parents,” Gillian said. “And some of the clothes have gone to thrift. I don’t know … I’m not sure what you’re looking for.”
“Neither am I,” Valerie said. “But before we get to that, what I’d really like is for you to tell me as much about Elizabeth’s life as you can. Some of the facts, obviously, we have, but I want to make sure we’re not overlooking something. I know it’s painful for you right now, but I’m only asking to give us the best chance of catching the person responsible for her death.”
“Her rapist and murderer,” Gillian said. She was the sort of woman who would always force herself to say what needed to be said.
“Yes,” Valerie answered.
“Will you kill him?”
“I’ll do everything I can to catch him.”
“I want him dead.”
“So would I, in your shoes. When we get him, he’ll go to trial. And if we get the conviction a judge will sentence him. California, as you probably know, has the death penalty.”
“And the law is an ass. If they don’t execute him I’ll find a way myself.”
Valerie didn’t respond. There was no point. Gillian Rose, it was plain to her after even these few minutes, had the psychology and the resolve to do just that, once she’d decided on it. She wondered what the relationship between the sisters had been like. Everything she’d learned about Elizabeth suggested a quiet life. Gillian’s life, she imagined, had had its share of fruitful noise. There was, among the other complex energies surrounding this formidable woman, a current of guilt. For having overshadowed Elizabeth. For having gotten the glamour and the talent. And of course, simply, now, for being alive when her sister was dead.
“Excuse me for a second,” Gillian said.
She went through the open glass doors into the studio and down the stairs. When she returned she was carrying a tray. Coffee and iced water for Valerie, and what looked suspiciously like another large gin and tonic for herself. Plus an onyx ashtray and a pack of American Spirits.
“I know you said no, but it’s there anyway.”
“Oh, that’s kind of you. Thanks. Coffee, I guess.”
Gillian didn’t offer her a cigarette when she lit one for herself, and Valerie left her own where they were in her purse. It was working policy for her: you didn’t smoke when dealing with civilians because even the smokers among them saw it as a weakness. You didn’t do anything that would make them think of you as less than maximally competent, maximally strong. Instead she took out her notepad and pen and set the cup of coffee on the table next to her.
For the next hour or so, Gillian talked Valerie through Elizabeth’s life: family, school, college, boyfriends, jobs, the marriage that ended. Valerie took notes, but nothing jumped out at her. Elizabeth hadn’t had a passion. She’d started off studying history and literature at college, but had been academically mediocre. Switched to journalism, took a year out, halfheartedly started teacher training but abandoned it after a few months, worked as a temp, went back to school, eventually graduated as a journalism major, but all without a driving focus or single ambition. Since then she’d worked in publicity for a small publishing house, the San Francisco tourism bureau, a local radio station and, eventually, the Environmental Protection Agency.
“She was an Expander,” Gillian said. The Dalmatian had loped upstairs and joined them on the deck. It lay on its side half under Gillian’s chair. Occasionally, Gillian stroked its flank with her bare foot. Each time she did it the dog closed its eyes in ecstasy.
“A what?” Valerie asked.
Gillian smiled. All the Elizabeth-related smiles now were smiles of loss. “An Expander,” she said. “My label. I told her there were two types of people in the world, Seekers and Expanders. Seekers are people who are forever chasing some elusive thing that would, you know, make them once and for all happy. Whereas Expanders just identify whatever it is that already makes them happy, then try to get more of it. Sorry, that’s of no use to you, I realize.”
“And you’re a Seeker,” Valerie said. She was thinking she and Nick were Expanders. No elusive mystery for either of them. Just the two certainties: love and the job. Beyond that they were uncomplicated animals: food, sex, weather, friends. All the times they simply lay together enjoying the sunlight on their skin, the need for language gone.
Gillian closed her eyes, rolled her head on her neck, opened her eyes again. “Yeah,” she said. But her face said: None of that matters anymore. None of anything matters anymore.
“Okay,” Valerie said, flipping her notepad closed. “I guess, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take another look at Elizabeth’s stuff.”
The boxed remnants of Elizabeth Lambert’s life were in an ivory-carpeted dressing room on the floor below Gillian’s studio. There were rooms and rooms in this house. This one had floor-to-ceiling walk-in wardrobes and a striped futon and the faint odor of patchouli. Having been left to herself, Valerie opened the walk-in and found ten percent clothes and shoes, ninety percent random crap, albeit neatly stored in plastic clip-lock crates. Elizabeth’s leftovers were in cardboard boxes occupying the area under a big window that looked out from the back of the house, up the hill into the shade of the plump, dark-green conifers.
Valerie went through it, box by box, but found nothing that made a connection. The stuff was the stuff she remembered from her first trawl though Elizabeth’s apartment. If she, Valerie, was the link, there was nothing in the remainders of Elizabeth’s life to confirm it.
“Anything?” Gillian asked, appearing in the doorway.
Valerie was holding Elizabeth’s ring-bindered First Republic Bank statements in her hands. She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.
Gillian stood in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself, examining her. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re looking for?” she said.
The room was filled with light. A passing seagull cawed. Valerie imagined saying to Gillian: I’m looking for anything to link me to Elizabeth. There’s been another victim, a U.S. postal carrier who delivered my mail. My mail. Me. I think it might be me. The victims are connected to each other because both of them were connected to me. But I can’t find the connection with Elizabeth.
She knew what the consequences of telling Gillian would be. Among other things, Gillian would be disgusted that her sister’s death wasn’t even really about her sister. She’d be disgusted that her sister could have been merely instrumental. And she would hold Valerie, however partially, to blame.
That she could see all this so clearly was wearying to Valerie, the thought of having to contend with Gillian’s feelings, her likely hatred. She didn’t want it. Not out of tenderness for herself, but because it would get in the way. It would be an encumbrance.
“I’m really not sure,” she said. “But there were some photograph albums in Elizabeth’s apartment. They don’t seem to be here. Do you have those?”
Gillian eyed her, visibly sensing if not a lie then a concealed truth. Valerie was on borrowed time with this, she knew. Any moment, Gillian would be out of patience and demand a full explanation.
“They’re in the studio,” Gillian said.
The two women went back upstairs to the top floor. Gillian took three albums from a bookcase shelf and set them on one of the room’s two big work tables. The large dark-colored collage canvases hanging on the white walls were like quiet, self-involved intelligences. The smell of turpenti
ne and paint took Valerie back to her junior high art room, the lessons no one took seriously apart from Andrea Lipschitz, who was a prodigy, and who later went on to make a fortune set-designing for TV commercials.
Gillian left Valerie and stepped out onto the deck. She stood at the terrace rail with her back to her, one arm still wrapped around her waist, the other hanging by her side, fingertips holding a freshly lit American Spirit, the smoke from which went straight up for a few inches, then rippled madly. The breeze had died.
Valerie had been through all three albums and was flicking back through the last one when she stopped. It was the photograph of Elizabeth, aged perhaps twenty, in what looked like a preschool classroom. Elizabeth was in half-body close-up, occupying the left third of the shot. She was sitting at a desk, molding a piece of Play-Doh, her hair tucked behind her ears, her mouth caught mid-sentence. Two small girls stood next to her, both with blond hair in pigtails, both absolutely absorbed in what Elizabeth was making (from their faces, they might have been watching sorcery), while next to them stood a dark-haired boy of similar age in red denim dungarees and a white T-shirt, holding a multicolored ball of Play-Doh and looking away to his left at something that had distracted him. Behind Elizabeth you could see half the blackboard and the Mickey Mouse wall clock that hung next to it. To the right of the wall clock a pine store cupboard, and alongside it a window that looked out onto a hedged yard. Out of focus, but flecked with the blurred bright colors of playground equipment. A paint-spattered work bench ran the length of the window, and a group of children stood there, under the eye of the room’s second grown-up, a woman with short-chopped black and gold hair, wearing a knotted plaid shirt and jeans. She was drawing something on a large sheet of paper. The kids were on tiptoe to watch. At the very edge of the shot, on its right-hand side, you could see another little girl walking out of frame. Only half her figure was visible, her face turned away. Dark hair. A thin yellow cardigan with an orange flame design around the cuffs. A tiny gray pleated skirt. White kneesocks. Red sandals.
Valerie wouldn’t have been able to identify the details.