When the bedroom light went out he went into the kitchen. From the cabinet under the counter next to the stove he took a bottle of bourbon from Gloria’s liquor stash and poured himself just a couple of fingers. He’d have to have sex with Gloria one of these days, he thought, but for the time being her wanting it would keep her in line better than satisfying her.
As for her being able to snoop on what he was doing on her computer, he realized he would have to be more careful, go down to the library to use their computers for his continued monitoring of Meadows’s progress on the Walker case. Close one.
For now he wrote “bourbon” on the grocery list she attached to the refrigerator door, then crossed it out thinking he should get it himself as a gesture of forgiveness. Jeez, flowers, dinners, make them come first, but hurt their feelings once and they never forget it. Is this what he’d dreamed of, all those years in prison? How long would it be before this kind of life just seemed like another sentence?
Beaufort gave a world-weary sigh and sat in the office chair at the desk. Achilles had come out from wherever he was hiding and laid himself down with his head on the man’s foot. Achilles always seemed to know when to make himself scarce and when it was safe to come out. Dogs were smarter than women that way, he thought.
Beaufort clicked on the square that showed the Pompano Park site. It didn’t take him long to find out where Quinn’s questions had been leading. She asked if he did flat racing or steeplechase. He knew the difference between those, and had answered flat.
Only as he looked at the photographs of the track, at the horses pulling surreys rather than the jockeys riding them, and then as he read more, he discovered the point of that conversation. Pompano Park wasn’t a racetrack that offered flat racing. It had always been and was still exclusively for what they called harness racing. He said he only did flat racing. And that he had raced at Pompano Park. His thumb and index finger jerked involuntarily and hit the glass of bourbon, knocking it onto the carpet. Shaking, he picked up the glass and went into the kitchen for more while he thought about what Carlo’s wife had done.
She had not only caught him in a lie, the bitch had set him up for it. She must be on to him.
Maybe it was time to stop being so cautious. He could just kill the two of them in their beds and burn their house down to destroy the evidence. That would take care of all the problems, get rid of the confession which was probably in there somewhere, and anyone who could connect him to it.
But then he thought probably. There was no guarantee that DiForenza had the confession in the house. Unless he put his hands on it, unless he read what Hickock had said about him, he would never feel any safer than he did now.
It was probably a better idea to get the wife out of the way before he did anything else. This was necessary. He stepped outside the house to light a cigarette, see how good he was about not smoking in the house? And called Yanchak.
Twenty–three
When I got home from dropping off Gemma-Kate I found Carlo unloading the dishwasher. I went into my office to use Google Earth to locate the address where Jerry No-Last-Name was living and who owned it. Then I poured myself the last of the wine, sat on one of the counter stools, and enjoyed watching Carlo scrub some food off the stovetop. It’s important for philosophers to engage in something physical now and then.
“You were very kind to give Jerry dinner,” he said, breaking our companionable silence. “I don’t necessarily agree with you about his being mean. He seems to be more of a loner, and a little lonely. Very much on edge.”
“When you invited him, did you tell him to bring a date?”
“Just as you asked me to.”
“He didn’t.”
“I suppose he doesn’t have someone to ask. New in town and all that.”
“He lives with someone,” I said. “A woman.”
“How do you know this?”
“I got his address and looked it up. The house is owned by Gloria Bentham. Did he mention her?”
Carlo frowned and shook his head.
“Interesting that he came to dinner by himself. Why would he accept an invitation to dinner without at least mentioning her? Or mention her at least one time during the evening?”
“Maybe she’s a relative. Or maybe he’s renting a room.”
I asked him if he had formed any opinion about Jerry No-Last-Name.
“He seems like an average man, no better no worse. Jumpy, though. Intense. Perhaps a little socially inept. And he thinks J. K. Rowling is a man. I wouldn’t think you’d have to be particularly culturally literate…”
I took the utensil container out of the washer, set it on the counter, and started putting the knives and forks away. If there were any prints on Jerry’s, they might have survived the washing, but not the rubbing I saw him give them.
Kitchen tidied, Carlo turned all the living room and kitchen lights out, put on his red astronomy goggles, and headed back into the darkness of the backyard. I followed him by the glow of his special flashlight that also shone red, picking my way carefully around the chaise lounges on the patio.
“That tune he was humming,” I said. “Did you hear it?”
“I did,” Carlo said, his mind on keying star coordinates into his GPS, which made the scope turn slowly with a burrrring sound.
“It sounds familiar, but I don’t know the name of it.”
“Neither do I.”
“I thought you might. He didn’t hang around long to look at the stars.”
“He was very enthusiastic at first, praising my abilities at astronomy, telling me how smart I am to be able to find the deep space objects. But his interest waned quickly. Many people are like that. It can be disappointing. You see these grand photographs in magazines showing brilliant colors, and then find that through a telescope everything is shades of light.”
Carlo focused his attention on the eyepiece for a moment. “Want to see Jupiter?”
“Sure,” I said, and stepped up to the telescope as Carlo moved away.
“Can you see the moons? Only four of them, little pinpricks of light surrounding the planet.” Without waiting for my little hum of assent he went on. “He also seems to have a tobacco addiction. As soon as we got outside he tried to light up, and I had to tell him that the light would affect our ability to see. He seemed incredulous at first, waved the glowing cigarette in front of my face and laughed as though I were making a joke.”
You can only appreciate the moons of Jupiter for so long. I gave up my place at the telescope. “Did he put it out?”
“Finally, yes. It took another ten minutes to get my eyes to readjust. I was mildly annoyed.”
“What did you talk about besides stars and planets?” I asked as I watched him reposition the scope to examine the Orion Nebula.
Not turning away from his gazing he said, “He asked how much I paid for the telescope. Other than blatantly currying favor—”
“Is that like sucking up?”
Carlo gave me that look he gives when he knows I’m just taking him down a peg. “He was very curious about my time as a priest. Whether I worked at St. Anthony’s after I was ordained. More questions about Victor Santangelo, how close I was to him. He kept bringing the conversation back to that time and place, I noticed, but without making it clear why. And he asked questions about you.”
“Like what?”
“What it’s like being married to an FBI agent.”
“How did he know that?”
“Elias mentioned it to him when we met at Starbucks. He also said that you and I seem so different from each other. Asked how we met. He asked if you were a rider, of horses, and I said I thought you had been at one time but had had an accident and your back couldn’t take the jolting anymore. And he mentioned again that ‘my lady was lovely.’”
“Again?”
“Yes, I do recall he also said that when I saw him at the grocery store yesterday. Bit of a sycophant, as I said. I told him he probably didn’t want to
say that to your face. He asked, ‘What, she doesn’t like being told she’s beautiful? I thought every woman liked that.’ I said, ‘No, she doesn’t like being called my lady.’ And he said, ‘Women these days,’ and shrugged.” Carlo frowned into the dark sky as if his thoughts were somewhere up there, and said, “And that was about it. I think he has a little crush on you. Either that or empty flattery.” Then he turned his head toward me and looked hard and long, fixing me in place with his gaze the way he still did sometimes. It still made me feel like I was being caressed by a spirit. I’ll never know how long it would last because I was always the first one to look away. But I felt loved, even if I wasn’t the first, even if I wasn’t the only
Leaving Carlo with his telescope, I got my forensic kit out of the kitchen drawer, took out the powder and brush, and gave the faucet and flush lever in the guest bathroom a light dusting. Nothing. Now that might just have meant that the guy didn’t wash his hands after going. If that was the case, though, there would have been something, an old print from Carlo or me. But nothing. Someone had very recently wiped down the sink. The lever on the toilet, too. The toilet had been flushed, so there should at least have been the sign of human contact on the lever. The man was being careful not to leave any trace of himself in the house. Sometimes an absence of evidence could be suspicious. Gotta be a con.
I went back to my computer and googled Jerry Nolan, a shot in the dark. Girard “Jerry” Nolan, born 1946, rock drummer. The age was right, but the photo didn’t look like my Nolan. Plus, he was dead. Tried Facebook and found well over a hundred Jerry Nolans. Gemma-Kate was right, some people actually did have the name Nolan without being grifters. Half of them on Facebook provided profile pix if you didn’t count the dogs, motorcycles, superheroes, or that one with the two girls in bikinis. Even so, that left over fifty Jerry Nolans without pix where I couldn’t do a visual match, and who knew how many Jeremys or Jeremiahs?
Plus I wasn’t getting paid for this.
Best to just be careful and see what the guy’s game was.
Twenty–four
The next day around noon I considered taking Al and Peg for a walk over to the house I’d found. But I dismissed the idea, as they wouldn’t be thrilled about it, the lazy bums. There’s more than one reason pugs look like old potatoes. Instead, I put on my sneakers, and took comfort in the fact that it was now cool enough during the day to go for a run. By cool enough I mean in the low seventies. By run I mean run, none of this slow lope that people my age are thought to tolerate. And I took the long way, down Golder Ranch and across Cañada del Oro Parkway to Hawser, so if I did see anyone I’d look a little spent.
There were no cars parked out front of the house where Jerry Nolan was living, and the gate in the chain link fence wasn’t locked.
A perfect place for an unsuspecting fingerprint is the latch on a door handle where you press your thumb. I didn’t even have to break inside. I took a roll of packing tape out of my pocket, cut off a thumb-sized piece, and pressed it against the latch where Jerry had entered the night before. That’s when I heard tires on the gravel drive behind me.
I turned around to see a worn-out woman getting out of her car with weary legs. Her jeggings and a peasant blouse untied at the neck made me think of a fifty-year-old flirtatious kitten. As she approached I saw those vertical lines between her eyes that no amount of moisturizer can eliminate. Two more lines setting off her frown. She was a woman whose unhappiness was etched into her skin deeper than a tattoo that said HURT ME. I remembered what I had thought about Jerry being the kind of man who beats his wife.
She came toward me with a question, but I went first.
“I’m Brigid Quinn,” I said. And for now no more. I hated to do this to her, knowing where it would lead, but I had to know what was up. This, too, I regret.
The woman’s eyes shifted to a sign next to the door that said NO SOLICITING. She asked, “What are you doing on my property?”
“I’m actually looking for someone.” I paused because I couldn’t be sure what name he had given this woman. I went with first only. “Do you know Jerry?”
I watched more than weariness play across her face. All the things I’d seen before in my career were there. Suspicion, jealousy, anger, sadness, and fear. Everything could be explained by my presence except the fear. We both knew I meant her no harm, but someone else apparently did.
“Why do you want to know about Jerry?” she asked. At another time, I thought, she might be a polite sort of person, but the threat of another woman had at some point become great enough to make her forget her manners.
My usual inclination at a time like this would be to make something up, to invite them to church the way Carlo would, but I just couldn’t be that dishonest. It would be victimizing her even more, and it wasn’t worth it just to satisfy my curiosity. Instead, I found myself wanting to help her.
Silence makes people want to fill it, and I discovered I’d been thinking too long when she said, “Does he know you?”
The unspoken messages were coming thick and fast now. Does he want you instead of me?
“Look,” I said. “I live in the neighborhood. Jerry helped my husband,” subtle emphasis on husband, “move his telescope. He just happened to be passing by and they met. Has he mentioned Carlo?” Again, a little emphasis on the Carlo.
Now, with all the other emotions coming and going across her face, I noticed a new one: shame.
“No” was all she said, and I could tell she was ashamed of not knowing such a simple innocent detail about her husband’s, boyfriend’s, whatever’s, doings. Then she looked suspicious again, sending the lines between her eyes deeper. She wasn’t even buying the truth. At least, she would be feeling at some unconscious level, it was better than being ashamed.
She wasn’t moving toward the door, which I realized I had been blocking. I stepped out of the way now, but she stayed where she was with a hateful, narrow-eyed stare. Whatever I was, whatever I had come for, I was the enemy. For some time now, everyone had been the enemy. I had no reason to stay, but I couldn’t just leave this woman to herself and—what else? Was it Jerry Nolan who had made her this way? Or had he just found her and made the most of it? Were they married? I didn’t need to ask. I could find out everything on my own now.
One more try. “I wanted to invite both of you over for dinner. Sometime,” I said, implying that Jerry had told us all about this woman. I hoped in the course of things she didn’t realize I hadn’t called her by name just in case it wasn’t Gloria Bentham.
“Thank you,” she said, summoning the woman she might have once been, polite, gracious. “But I don’t think—”
“Just something casual. Carlo will grill something.” Okay, so we didn’t have a grill but I was sure I could get one and one of us could learn how to use it.
“No,” she said, her voice a little harsher now. “We’re just not really … sociable.” Then she either saw the look on my face or realized herself that I was there because Jerry had been, indeed, very sociable. Sociable how, exactly? The jealousy and shame had equal play now. She turned her head to the right and left, looking down the street. Clearly, she didn’t know he had already been at the house for dinner just last night. But she was thinking about it, where he had been, where he said he had been. She wasn’t stupid.
“I was out taking a run,” I said, pretending to wipe perspiration off my brow. I assumed she was looking for my car and not seeing it. Also she might be wondering how the hell I knew this was Jerry’s house. Then I heard the dog bark. “I can tell your dog’s bark. That’s how we met, Jerry and Carlo, I mean. He was out walking your dog.” That was a slip—why would I assume it wasn’t his dog? Of course it was obvious, but why would Gloria think it would be obvious to me that they weren’t coupled enough to share a dog? Oh Lord, I couldn’t say two words without making it all much worse than before I began.
With the license plate I noted as I walked away, I was able to check records and find that it a
long with the house belonged to Gloria Bentham, decent credit rating, employed as a doctor’s receptionist, unmarried. So Jerry Nolan was a moocher. Not only a moocher, but an abusive one to boot. Possibly not physically, but emotionally. Gloria was one of those women who was willing to put up with anything but loneliness.
When did your average insecurity turn into pathology?
And how could I figure all this out? Here’s how: I occasionally volunteered at Desert Doves, training women to defend themselves. As with villains, I’d seen enough of this kind of woman in my career to be able to profile her within the time of our conversation. The only thing I couldn’t know is whether she would tell him about meeting me, what her attitude would be. Timid? Angry? And what would the meeting tell him about me? That I was looking for information about him? I hoped Gloria would tell him about my visit, because his reaction might flush him out and confirm my suspicions.
Twenty–five
I’ve always been a little competitive, so it was with a particular sense of triumph that I had given Carlo the anniversary gift of an evening on Kitt Peak. It’s hard to know what to get a philosopher as a birthday gift. Everything Carlo really treasured (except me, I assured myself) was inside his own mind. This would also get his mind off of Jane. I bet she never gave him a night on Kitt Peak. Of course he wasn’t interested in astronomy back then, so.
I also liked the idea of depositing Carlo on a mountaintop to keep him safely out of the way in case Mr. Nolan found I’d connected with Gloria and decided to get aggressive. So far, however, we hadn’t heard from him, and it had been a week since he came to dinner.
The skies are clear in Arizona and in many areas darker than most populated places on earth. Consequently, there are four major observatories within driving distance from our house, one that I can see on Mount Lemmon from our backyard. On a cloudless day, driving south from Tucson, you can spot a white speck that is one of the domes of the observatory on Kitt Peak. It’s about a two-hour drive from us, and is the most dramatic location open to the public. On that afternoon in early December we descended into the valley that is Tucson proper, and then ascended again slowly to the base of the mountain. After that the climb began rapidly to a height of a little over six thousand feet.
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