“Not at all. Personally, I go for any woman below the age of dead.”
“Forty-eight,” I said. “She was about the same age as Angela Doubleday.”
“Didn’t think I had a point to make, did you?”
Frank tilted the screen so we both could read the rest of the article. Wine-cooler heiress Peg Olson had met Ray Belgard at a charity auction two months before she disappeared. He’d claimed to be a Wall Street investment adviser setting up a practice in Palm Beach. Peg Olson was attracted to his good looks and eager charm and wise enough not to trust any more than a token sum to his care. It was a downpayment, she’d told one of her friends, on some of the best sex she’d ever had. She knew he was interested in her money, and like a gambler who enters a casino willing to lose a predetermined amount of money and no more, she enjoyed herself while resisting his attempts to increase her stake. Who knew? If his investments earned a fair return, she might trust him with a larger amount and emerge from the affair with sex life and profit intact.
Peg Olson proved easier to fool for a few nights than a few months. Though superficially fluent, Belgard’s knowledge of how markets worked seemed thinner at times than Olson’s and certainly wasn’t equal to the rigors of Wall Street. Not that it disappointed her terribly, but still, they quarreled. She hadn’t admitted to wanting to end the affair when she disappeared, according to friends. She may not have held his financial acumen in high regard, but she trusted him, it seemed, to her death. When the police later searched her apartment, they noted over a million dollars in jewels were missing, among other items of significant value.
I gasped when I read that.
Frank’s eyes broke from his notepad, where he’d been preparing facts for the story he’d write that night. “What?”
I didn’t want the million-plus readers of Scandal Times to know about Angela Doubleday’s missing jewelry, not until I’d given Arlanda a fair chance to find it. I cast my eyes to the end of the article, which mentioned that Ray Belgard’s brother attended the University of Miami.
“It says he’s got a brother, Jack Belgard.” I said.
“So?”
“Maybe the brother can tell us where he is.”
The sound that came from Frank was too derisive to be a laugh.
“Why don’t I just call him up and ask?”
“Put his name in your hyperdrive, see if you catch anything.”
Frank set his notepad on the kitchen table, glanced back at me, straightened in his chair. “You mean ‘search engine.’ And a search engine doesn’t catch things, it gives you hits.”
Like there was an engine out there in Cyberspace, spewing oil and smoke to power Internet searches. My request took his focus from the jewels, but he was a methodical journalist, and I had no doubt he’d conclude that Doubleday had been bilked out of something of value before she’d been killed. Given Doubleday’s hermetic existence, I wondered how Ray Belgard had managed the introduction. Maybe Doubleday hadn’t been as isolated as I’d been led to believe. Davies had lied about her monthly visits to Harry Winston. He might have lied about other trips. But I’d characterized Davies as the Romeo. The Potrero sisters suspected they were lovers, and though he’d denied it, his protestations sounded more coy than genuine, and he certainly grieved convincingly. Could Doubleday have been enjoying affairs with both of them? Celebrities are rarely known for their circumspect sex lives. After six months of pursuing the famous I’d learned not to discount any possibility. The notion posed a greater practical than moral problem. As her chauffeur, Davies would have known about other dalliances. Maybe they were enjoying a torrid ménage à trois.
“I can’t get anything recent on him,” Frank said. “The last page hit I get was six months ago.”
I wasn’t paying close attention, said, “What was it?”
“A Yahoo chat group.”
I had a vague idea what that was. I leaned close to the screen, read an archived message Jack Belgard had sent to the group, a question about something called bitewing X rays.
“What was he chatting about?”
“Dentistry.”
“Oh,” I said.
Frank cracked the top of his second cup of takeout coffee and put it in the microwave to warm. “I’d think about alternative housing, if I were you,” he said.
“Don’t worry, we’ll sleep in the car, leave you to your work.”
“That’s not the point I’m making. You’re welcome to my couch. You’d be foolish to sleep at home the next few days. This is hitting the front page day after tomorrow. You need to stay somewhere safe. If they’ve been fooling around so far trying to kill you, they might get serious when the story comes out and they realize you’re the sole witness.”
“I can’t just run.”
“Sure you can,” he said. “It’s just like walking, only faster.”
I awoke the next morning to the Rott’s tongue on my hand. When I pushed him away he returned with greater determination, anxious to make his morning patrol. I sat up, glanced at the kitchen table. Frank’s PowerBook was gone. I’d fallen asleep on the couch sometime after dawn. Frank possessed undiscovered domestic talents; my clothes, washed and dried, lay folded on the breakfast table next to keys to the apartment and a short, handwritten note. The note read, “Be careful, okay? … Breakfast in the fridge.” I opened the refrigerator door, found a half-empty package of Ball Park franks, a jar of mustard, three six-packs of beer, and the dregs of the last cup of takeout coffee.
“Be careful of what?” I said. “Food poisoning?”
The Rott nosed against my side. He wasn’t the type to complain about raw hot dogs for breakfast, though he passed on the mustard. I warmed the dregs in the microwave, shrugged into my freshly laundered clothes, and checked my mobile phone for voice mail. Arlanda had already called from the hospital.
After walking the Rott I took unfair advantage of Frank’s hospitality, using his phone to make long-distance calls for information that I didn’t plan on sharing with him, at least not immediately. A call to directory assistance in Florida yielded the phone number at the registrar’s office of the University of Miami, where I misrepresented myself as a dental assistant, pitching my voice to rise uncertainly at the end of every sentence. “I have an employment application? From a former student of yours? At least he claims to be a former student?” Whenever somebody speaks like that to me I want to stop whatever I’m doing, help them out in the same way I want to help lost children, stranded cats, and other helpless creatures. “Name’s Jack? Jack Belgard?”
The woman on the other end of the line must have felt the same way I did, because she promised to retrieve the information with a calming, “Don’t worry hon.” Through the telephone lines I heard the distinctive clicking of fingernails on a computer keyboard, then, “Is he a recent graduate?”
Good question.
“His application form? Just says he was enrolled last year?”
“Got it,” she said. “Will you want a copy of his transcript?”
“Could you confirm his telephone number and address for me? Make sure we’re talking about the same Mr. Belgard?”
She read them off for me, added, “I’m not supposed to give out any information over the phone, other than to confirm enrollment, but you’ll want to look at this transcript before hiring. I mean, ninety-nine point nine percent of our students make great employees, but …”
When she failed to complete her sentence I asked, “His grades? There was a problem?”
“His grades were fine. Students begin to practice on patients in the second year of the program, and, well, Mr. Belgard was expelled for behavioral reasons. If you need to know more than that, you have to look at the transcripts.”
I gave her my address, changing my apartment number to a suite. Students get expelled for a number of reasons, some relatively harmless. Maybe Belgard was caught with his nose in the nitrous oxide. Maybe he’d gone berserk, assaulted one of his professors with a dental pick. I dialed
the telephone number she’d given me. Disconnected, no forwarding. I doubted he’d left a forwarding home address either.
Frank would ask me who I’d called if I left a twenty for the calls. I’d buy him lunch later, not mention why I was picking up the tab. I turned his note to me over to the blank side and drew a dog’s paw. I wrote, “Thanks fer da barkfast,” and signed it in the Rott’s name. Frank hated cute stuff like that. Maybe he’d get the point, buy breakfast foods edible by species other than dogs and bachelors.
The woman at the patient-information desk at Saint John’s Hospital checked Ben’s name against her computer screen and gave me a room number in intermediate care. He’d been transferred from critical care that morning, she said. I took the elevator up, found Ben sleeping against the far wall, one of four patients in a six-bed room. I walked softly, looked at him from the foot of his bed. The bed tray held the picked-over remains of lunch. He’d barely touched his food. Considering what he’d gone through, he didn’t look too bad. I lifted the flap of my camera bag, groped for a pad of paper and pen to write him a message.
“They sure have some weird-looking nurses in this hospital.”
I glanced up, startled. He peeked at me from behind a sliver of raised eyelid. I reached down, gave his good hand a squeeze.
“You should see the patients,” I said.
Ben’s lips trembled out a smile. It wasn’t funny, what I said, but it warmed him to joke with someone.
“I got a message from Arlanda this morning, said she’d be here.”
His hand fluttered in the air, fell heavily.
“Already come and gone. Saw her this morning. Talked to the police, too. The detective, good guy, he told me about the trailer.”
“It’s totaled. I’m sorry for that.”
“It’s insured.”
“You still have the lot, that’s the valuable thing.”
He swallowed heavily, as though parched. His water bottle came with a built-in straw. I guided it to his lips. He drank, nodded when he’d had enough. “I don’t remember a damn thing,” he said.
“You got your bell rung pretty good. If you can remember your name, where you keep your money, you’ll be okay.”
He tried to widen his eyes, but the effort cost him, and he let them fall half closed. “The last thing I can remember? Getting off the plane.”
“Do you remember Ray Belgard?”
He didn’t answer.
“The mug shot you showed me?”
He answered after a long silence. “There’s just nothing there.”
I squeezed his hand again. “Don’t worry about it.”
“The detective, he told me what you did, pulling me out of the trailer. Saving a man’s life, can’t do much more for somebody than that. I’ve been thinking this morning about my life, what it’s worth, and after going back and forth on it, I’ve come up with an appropriate reward.” He caught my attention with a flickering glance. “Next time we go out drinking, the first round is on me.” He laughed at his own joke and winced in pain. “Damn, I’ve got to stop being so funny, it hurts too much when I laugh.”
The laughter and pain took the last of his energy. His face smoothed of thought, his breath deepened, and soon, he slept.
I asked the nurse for the nearest place someone could make a call and followed her directions to a bank of pay phones on the ground floor. I checked the pay phones against the number that Arlanda had called from that morning. No match. I thought she’d called from the hospital. Maybe I’d misunderstood. I gave the number a try. She answered on the third ring. I asked, “Where are you?”
Her breath came heavily, as though she’d picked up the phone at the end of a flight of stairs. “At the estate.”
“Angela Doubleday’s estate?”
“Right. Where are you?”
“The hospital.” It came out more reproachful than I intended and did not invite a response. She had rented a mobile phone with a car at the airport. I felt stupid not to have figured it out earlier. “What are you doing at your aunt’s place?”
“Digging,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m looking for a safe.”
“You don’t even know she had a safe.”
“That’s why I’m sifting, too. If the diamonds weren’t in a safe, maybe I can sift them out. You want to come up and help?”
I drove up the coast thinking Frank was right, a few days out of town would do me good. I could drive up the coast, find a cheap motel room in Morro Bay, take long walks on the beach with the Rott. As I passed Temescal Canyon Road I spotted the ruins of Ben’s trailer on the hillside above Pacific Coast Highway. I slowed and, ignoring the bleat of a tailgater’s horn, turned left across the highway into a beach parking lot. The ruins were too distant for a good photograph, but I didn’t care about that. I parked across from a cube of pay phones on the beach side of the lot, opened the trunk to get my camera. Baby took the stop as an excuse to patrol. I attached the five-hundred-millimeter lens and put the viewfinder to my eye. Shards of aluminum glinted in the early afternoon sun, ribboned by yellow police tape flapping in the wind. It was an ugly photograph, the perspective flat and the light hot, but I took it anyway. I wanted documentation.
Baby was lifting his leg to the cube of pay phones when I turned back to the car. I called his name, said, “Bad dog.” He looked up, his expression bewildered. The smell of urine at pay phones didn’t disturb him at all. The sight of the pay phones jogged a memory. I pulled the mobile phone from my pocket, scrolled through the numbers until I found the one that had called the night before, when I stood across the highway amid the ruins of Ben’s trailer. I returned the call. Above the dull crash of surf a bright ring sounded, echoed by a buzz in my mobile phone. I strode toward the pay phones, lifted the one that faced the hill, heard my own voice speak back to me when I said hello.
Whoever pushed the trailer off the cliff made his way down to the pay phones. He knew my cell-phone number. He’d called to hear whether or not I was alive to answer. He wasn’t after Ben. He was after me. That was all the motivation I needed. I combed the ruins on the hill for an hour, collecting Ben’s few possessions that hadn’t shattered beyond recognition, and packed them into the trunk of the car. I hoped to do the few things that needed doing and be on the road to Morro Bay by nightfall.
The Santa Ana winds picked up that afternoon, and as I climbed the drive to Angela Doubleday’s estate, ashes swirled above the ruins like a swarm of insects. Charred foundation walls outlined the shape of the house, the former location of the rooms hinted by the upright pillar of chimney and patterns in the debris. Arlanda knelt in the ash toward what had been the rear of the house, overlooking a swimming pool emptied of all but a couple feet of water at the deep end, now scummed in refuse. A memory of her aunt’s bedroom might have led her to that spot to scrounge for the diamonds. She gripped a kitchen colander in both hands and shook it, like a prospector panning for gold, fine ash sifting into the wind and swarming up to sting at her eyes. Soot blackened her hands and smudged her face. She picked through what remained in the colander and, finding nothing but cinder, tossed it onto a growing pile to one side. To the other side, where she might have placed objects saved from the fire, there was nothing.
“Look at you,” I said.
She jerked back on her heels, so intent on her work she hadn’t heard me approach. A gust of wind blew ash into her eyes and she dipped her head to shield herself.
“I know. I look like a mess.”
“It’s not how you look. It’s what you’re doing.”
She tried to clean her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse but that was as dirty as the rest of her. She threw her hands up in frustration. I knelt next to her, moistened the tip of my finger with my tongue, and gently rubbed the corners of her eyes.
“You plan to sift the entire remains of a six-thousand-square-foot house through that little colander of yours?”
“If I have to.”
“You
want my opinion, you’re losing perspective.”
“It’s not your two million in jewelry missing.”
“That’s right. And nobody’s trying to kill you.”
She clenched her eyes, tearing up from the pain or frustration or both, and when her eyelids fluttered open again a black speck floated free. “Tell me what to do, then,” she said. “I live in a dump, my husband has run away from me, I’ve got two boys to raise, and a crappy job in a dead-end town. I’ve lived my entire life clinging to pennies. Should I not be trying to find the diamonds?”
“You should be trying to find the people who burned your aunt, put Ben in the hospital.”
She got the point then, and it stung.
“I’m being a fool.”
“We’re all fools. I’m just asking you to fight against the natural impulse a little harder.”
Arlanda stood and tried to dust the ash from her clothing, but her hands were so caked in soot she smeared black into the legs of her jeans. “The last time I talked to the police, they didn’t seem that interested in what I had to say.”
“Maybe they’ll be more interested if you give them something specific, like a suspect.”
“You think I’m hiding one in my back pocket?”
“Ben identified the man I saw in your aunt’s house the day of the fire. I was going through the mug shot book he’d prepared when we were hit.”
“Who is he?”
“Name’s Ray Belgard. Wanted by the police in Florida. They think he murdered a local heiress. Stole her jewelry, too.”
She grabbed my forearm. “Her jewelry? You told the police?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“They won’t believe a word I say.”
“Then Ben?”
“Doesn’t remember a thing.”
She released her grip on my arm. “Looks like I branded you.” She smiled, pointed at the print of her fingers on my flesh. “I didn’t tell you this, but Ben called me that night too, before you visited. He told me about Ray Belgard, that he’d identified him from a mug shot.”
Burning Garbo Page 19