The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

  ‘That was meant to be my shift, you know?’ Alice said. ‘Eveline took my place and she … and she …’

  ‘I know,’ Maddy said uselessly, ‘I know.’

  She wished she could say something that would comfort this woman, who was clearly anguished. Bereavement was bad enough, Maddy reflected. To blame yourself must be a double burden. There was no escaping it though. She had to ask.

  ‘Do you have a picture of your friend? Of Eveline?’

  At that, Amy Alice turned to her phone and began pressing buttons and swiping images until she had one that she decided merited expansion, using her thumb and forefinger. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Eveline was so proud of this one. She looks lovely, don’t you think?’

  The sight of it came as a terrible, and wholly unexpected, disappointment.

  Chapter 16

  The woman in the picture had the looks of a glamour model. Her lips were full, whether through the kindness of mother nature or the generosity of a doctor’s syringe, Maddy couldn’t tell. The nose was short and pert as a button, the way they liked them on TV. Her skin was pale.

  But her hair was the wrong colour.

  This woman had dark hair, tumbling down to her shoulders. Instantly, Maddy felt a curious sensation of embarrassment. She had spun her theory to Jeff Howe, insisting he pass it on to the detectives handling her sister’s case, that they could well be confronting a serial murderer with a fetish for blondes – a strange kind of pervert, admittedly, one who did not seek direct sexual contact with his victims. Her evidence had been Rosario Padilla and her own sister. But she had gone too early. She knew the rule, drilled into her by Howard and known to everyone in her line of work: you have to have three. Two is just a coincidence. And now two was all she had.

  More immediately, she could see the look of expectation on Amy Alice’s face. The actress had intuited, correctly, that Maddy had asked to see Eveline’s picture for a reason. She had assumed it was because Madison was preparing to say something that might reassure the friend she had left behind, offering some words that might lighten the weight of guilt she had carried since that evening. And now she wanted to hear them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ was the best Maddy could manage, her head beginning to swim, the room beginning to revolve. ‘I was expecting … I thought … I thought she would look different.’

  Alice was forlorn. ‘Eveline liked this picture so much. She thought she looked, you know, classy. This was how she wanted to be seen, I think.’

  Maddy looked at it again. She saw the eyes, needy and eager. She wondered if they had come on to that same brute at the bar, whose blurred face had been caught so close to Abigail’s on the CCTV footage. Had Abigail too shown him imploring eyes, craving affection?

  But it was useless. She was trying to construct a pattern and this woman did not fit. A tumbling wave of exhaustion rolled through Madison, starting somewhere in her gut and reaching her brain. She had wasted enough time here already.

  As she said her goodbyes to Amy Alice, doing her best to repress her own irritation, to sound caring rather than terse, she realized that her entire morning had been wasted. Perhaps Jeff was right. Perhaps, God forbid, Quincy was right. Maybe it was crazy to be doing this. She needed to sit in a room, with pictures of her sister and mourn her. For days or weeks or months or simply let time stand still. To turn off her phone and Weibo and just stare at the ceiling. For a second, she heard her younger sister’s voice. Fresh air is what you need, Maddy. When was the last time you went for a run? Was it, like, even this decade?

  ‘Sorry not to be of more help,’ Maddy said finally, as she shook the actress’s hand, doing her best to limit her exposure to the woman’s gaze, which radiated disappointment. She went through the motions of taking a few final details, dutifully writing down the deceased’s full name: Eveline Linda Plaats. ‘I’ve got your number, you’ve got mine. Call me if anything occurs to you. Anything at all.’

  Back in the car, heading west on Sunset, she realized that she would only have to turn right on Kenter and she could soon be at Quincy’s house. She could let go of this fruitless, draining task and rest. Quincy, she reckoned, would let her do that. She would tuck her up in one of their many spare bedrooms, with freshly laundered towels and an unlit scented candle on the bedside table, and look after her, providing her with home-cooked food – or at least food that had been cooked in her home by Juanita – and a constant supply of hot tea. There would only be one condition: Madison would have to admit that she had been wrong and that Quincy had been right – about Abigail, about the appropriate way to mourn, about their mother, about everything. Madison’s foot pressed harder on the gas pedal and she drove straight on.

  The traffic was heavy, giving her time to stare out of the window. The smog meant there was not much to look at – she could barely make out the giant ‘Visit China’ electronic billboard, projecting a field of scarlet poppies swaying in the pixelated breeze – but that suited her. It gave her time to think.

  Mainly she relived the conversation with Amy Alice, kicking herself for not making the obvious move earlier. Before we start, show me a photograph so I can decide if this is worth my while. But you never could talk like that, could you? Not if you wanted to win someone’s trust. You had to be gentle, take your time. Not because you were a good person, but because those were smart tactics. You were reeling in a fish and you couldn’t rush. If you did, you’d only spook them.

  She listened to herself. She could teach one of those J-school courses, offered to wannabe journalists by never-were journalists. Maybe that’s how she’d end up, one of those sad sacks recounting old war stories and telling the students how great she used to be. She’d run a special module on how to entrap the newly bereaved. ‘I was really good at that,’ she’d say. The premonition of it produced a shiver of disgust, the colder for being directed at herself.

  Was she making too much of the blonde hair? Just because Abigail and Rosario were blondes did not mean that all the victims had to be, did it? Maybe the killer couldn’t care less about colouring; perhaps the fact that her sister and Rosie were fair was mere coincidence.

  And yet what did she have without it? Just that several women had recently died through a drug overdose which none of their families could accept. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t feel like enough. Her instinct – the inner voice that sometimes had to shout to get heard above all the others, but which belonged only to her – kept returning to the hair, the hair, the hair. It was Abigail’s signature feature; it was what made Rosario Padilla striking. Her professional instinct told her it mattered. And it had rarely been wrong.

  She played back the words Amy Alice had spoken, examining them for any unseen opening. None of it yielded much. Slowing down in the traffic, she caught herself staring at the woman in the car next to hers, only looking away when she realized the eyes above the smog mask were glaring.

  Eveline liked this picture so much. She thought she looked, you know, classy. This was how she wanted to be seen, I think.

  That last line of Amy Alice’s had repeated itself several times on Madison’s internal recording system. She didn’t know why. Now stationary, she reached for her phone and Googled the name: Eveline Plaats. Only one image came on the first page, the same head and shoulders shot Maddy had already seen. She sighed and drove a few more yards till the traffic halted her again.

  She went back to the phone and that photograph. A click revealed that it came from the LA Times, not a full-length story so much as an extended photo-caption in that part of the TV section that served up nuggets of industry buzz.

  Eveline Plaats wins brief role in long-running soap, The Bold and the Beautiful. She will make her TV debut in the fall …

  Madison clicked further and found several more pictures of Eveline: one giving a come-hither look, another posing with a group of interchangeably attractive starlets. In each one, her hair was perfectly styled: long, thick curls of brown, like an English princess.

  She though
t she looked, you know, classy.

  Now, as Madison moved the car a few inches further, her mind was revving. Classy. She knew the type of woman who believed brown hair made you look classy. She touched and swiped away at the screen on her lap, even as she controlled the steering wheel with her knees. Eventually she found a cluster of older photos of Eveline Plaats, enough of them to fill the little screen.

  Maddy found Amy Alice’s number and redialled it.

  Without introduction, she said, ‘You said Eveline liked the way she looked in that photo you showed me.’

  ‘Yes.’ Amy was hesitant, as if she was about to be confused.

  ‘What did she like about it? Why did she think it made her look “classy”? That was your word. Why did she think that?’

  ‘Because … I don’t know exactly. Maybe it had something to do with the way she saw herself. And, you know, her low self-esteem and—’

  ‘No, no. I don’t mean that. Listen to me.’ She could hear the edge in her own voice. ‘What was different about that picture? Physically.’

  ‘Oh I see. Well, I suppose the main thing—’

  ‘Come on, Amy. Please.’

  ‘Her hair was different.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Normally she cut it shorter.’

  ‘Is that it? Just the length?’

  ‘No, no. Of course not. Sorry. She dyed it for the part.’

  ‘She dyed it? So what was her regular hair colour, Amy?’

  ‘Didn’t I say? I thought I said. I’m so sorry, this whole thing’s got me so … She was blonde. Like a gorgeous, kind of Swedish blonde. But she thought it made her look cheap. Like it was out of a bottle or something. But actually—’

  ‘And was she blonde, you know, recently …’ Madison let her voice trail off.

  ‘Yes. Yes she was. The part in the soap didn’t really pan out. They cut most of it. Kept like two lines. We recorded it, though. She must have rewound it, like, a hundred times. Her agent told her she should go back to being blonde. It was her USP, he said.’

  ‘And could you send me a picture of how she looked with her natural colouring?’

  ‘Well, I have one from a few months ago but that’s how she looked.’

  ‘Even at the end?’

  ‘Yes,’ her friend replied quietly.

  Madison waited no more than thirty seconds before her phone chimed the arrival of a message. She clicked open the photograph that had just landed.

  And there they were, a cliché as old as Los Angeles: two pretty girls, looking for their break in Tinseltown. On the left, grinning for the camera, her hair in cornrows, Amy Alice. And on the right, her best pal, doubtless looking as fresh and unadorned as the day she left behind the prairies and hogfarms of her home state – her skin fair, her hair as blonde as a bale of Iowa hay.

  To Madison it was confirmation. Her sister Abigail had not been the first woman to die this way. She had not even been the second. If Maddy was right, Rosario Padilla and Eveline Plaats had been victims one and two. Abigail was the third: the third victim of a brutal serial killer.

  Maddy pulled over and asked Amy to find somewhere quiet where she could talk. As it happened, she had stayed at the café. The actor’s life: there was nowhere else she had to be.

  Maddy began by saying, ‘I need you to tell me everything you can about Eveline’s last day.’ With a pen in her hand, her phone on speaker and a notebook on her knee, Maddy scribbled as she pressed Amy Alice on every last detail of the twenty-four hours that preceded the moment she found her friend cold and dying on the floor. She interrogated her over every memory, every phone call she overheard, every gesture Eveline made, forcing her to go back over the same ground twice or three times.

  By the end they had assembled a fairly full account of the final movements of Eveline Plaats – but for one glaring gap.

  ‘And you worked a cleaning shift just this morning, you say?’

  Amy Alice hesitated, unhappily aware of where such a question was leading. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how well do you get on with your supervisor or whoever it is that hands out the work?’

  ‘Him? You don’t want to get on with him. You don’t want to make eye contact with him. Not unless you want a pair of sweaty hands on your ass.’

  ‘Oh, a charmer.’

  ‘Besides, he won’t tell me.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Can’t you just ask the police? He must have had to tell them about this.’

  ‘Sure. If they asked. But, like you said, we’re not so sure they were that bothered about a girl who’d been … a glamour model. Anyway, we’re the ones who need to know. We’re the ones who care, Amy. You and me. So how do you know he won’t tell you?’

  ‘Because I already asked.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Of course, I did. It was, like, the first thing I asked. “Where did Eveline work yesterday?” To his face. Can you believe they made me work the very next day?’

  ‘And what’d he say?’

  ‘He got very weird.’ She dropped her voice an octave till she sounded like a meatpacker from Queens. ‘“None of your business, OK? You clean the houses, I’ll clean up this shit.”’

  ‘Was there anyone else you could ask?’

  ‘There’s a sweet woman who answers the phone sometimes. She just shook her head when I asked, like she was terrified of the question.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘They all said the same thing, Maddy. They told me to mind my own business. Sort out the funeral, contact Eveline’s family, but leave the rest to them.’

  Maddy bit down hard on her pen. ‘Why don’t you call them again now? Say you think she might have left something behind, you’ve been looking for it everywhere. The family want it. A necklace, a bracelet or something? I can patch you through from this phone. I’ll be listening in the whole time.’

  ‘It won’t work.’

  ‘I know. But you’re an actress. Just say the lines. Let’s see what they say.’ Maddy smiled an unseen, plaintive smile.

  After a delay and some false starts getting the phone into ‘conference call’ mode, Maddy sat in her car hearing Amy Alice’s breathing as she waited for the manager of the CleanBreak Company to pick up. With her own phone on mute, she was able to eavesdrop unheard.

  Amy began with an enthusiasm bordering on the flirtatious, as she chatted to the sleazeball at the other end. Maddy could tell he was confused, clearly used to the ice treatment from this particular member of his workforce. Maddy willed the actress to dial it down a little. But then came the request. I’ve had Eveline’s parents on … They say it’s a family heirloom … I’ve looked everywhere for it … The only place it could be is the place where she worked that day. It must have fallen off … Let me save you the hassle, let me make the call. Why don’t I come over there now? And afterwards maybe we can go get some—

  If Maddy hadn’t heard the response herself she might not have believed it. Even when on the receiving end of a full blast of womanly charm from the beautiful Amy Alice, signalling interest and availability, the dispatcher from the cleaning firm could not have been clearer.

  ‘The answer’s no,’ he said, his words followed by the stubborn, sustained tone of a phone that had been hung up.

  Maddy exhaled and ended the call, then called Amy Alice back to thank her and ask for her confidentiality: for now this had to stay between them.

  As she started the car, she felt that familiar pulse of adrenalin: the moment you realize you’re working on a story someone, somewhere, doesn’t want published. It felt like progress. Clearly the location of Eveline Plaats’s last place of work was a secret, one sensitive enough to make a slimeball groper pass up the prospect of live flesh rather than betray it. There was only one person Maddy knew with even a remote chance of unlocking it.

  Chapter 17

  ‘You gotta be fucking joking.’

  That Katharine Hu responded this way even before Maddy had made her main request was not e
ncouraging. All she had done was to call her friend at work, asking if she could spare no more than an hour to meet somewhere outside the office – and to bring her laptop with her.

  ‘You gotta be fucking joking.’

  ‘What? It will only take an hour, I promise.’

  ‘I mean, you gotta be joking that this is what you’re doing. For Christ’s sake, Maddy, didn’t we talk about this? You’re in mourning. And that’s not a twenty-four-hour deal. You gotta give yourself time.’

  ‘I can explain,’ she replied lamely, though how she was not quite sure. She decided on a change of tack. ‘I need you, K. That’s the bottom line. There’s no one else I can turn to.’

  ‘Is this, “K, I need you because you’re a great friend” or is this, “K, I need you because you’re a computer genius”. Because, I gotta tell you, ‘bring your laptop’ sounds a lot like the second.’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘If I do this—’

  ‘Oh, K, thanks so much, I knew—’

  ‘Whoa, I said if. If I do this, there’s a price.’

  ‘OK, what’s the price?’

  ‘You have to listen to me give you a stern fucking talking-to afterwards.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘I mean it, Maddy. You gotta listen to me. You’re not doing this right.’

  ‘I will, I promise. I’m three blocks away. Soon as you can.’

  Six minutes later, Maddy saw the figure of Katharine Hu, in her professional woman’s uniform of a black pant-suit, stride into the café. Katharine’s brown hair, barely styled at the best of times, was long and lank. Her eyes – perhaps because they were too raw for her usual contact lenses – were behind glasses that, Madison noticed, carried an oily film. Most of the time, Maddy forgot the decade-wide age gap between them. But at this moment, her best friend and closest colleague looked like a woman who had lived through forty hard years – at the very least. Still, Madison was relieved to have her there: she felt as if she’d been fighting a fire alone and at last had someone at her side.