“Could it be the burglar was frightened off? Do you think he heard you coming?”
Now it was my turn to shrug. “You’re the cop,” I said.
Then he asked if we could sit down. We went back to the dining room, where Gemma-Kate was, without effort, enchanting Eric with her dimples.
“She’s only seventeen, and I can see you’re married,” I suggested, pointing to his ring. “Can I get you guys something to drink? Coffee? Water?”
Max said no, but Eric took a glass of water. He appeared new on the force, a bit deferential to Max. He looked at the glass of water like that was maybe not the right thing to do, and he didn’t drink any. Maybe Max had told him something about me. Not everything by a long stretch, but something that was not flattering.
Max knew he was dealing with someone who knew how this worked, so he asked, “Point of entry?” knowing I would know.
“Back door. No damage, must have picked the lock. Bolt.”
Max could see the back door from where he was seated at the table. “Not the spring lock, too?”
“No. I figure the bolt will stop most people. But not this one.”
“I thought you knew better.”
“I think I’ve gone soft, Max.”
Max snarfed lightly and asked, “How long were you away from the house?” Fingers raised and ready to fill out the template before him.
I gave him all the details with the time of each segment. “About seven and a half hours. It took a couple extra hours on the way back to pick up Gemma-Kate at the college and stop for sushi. So you figure they were here sometime after six when it was dark? Not much of a window.”
“Not necessarily,” Max said.
He knew something I did not. “What were the other break-ins like?” I asked.
Max almost nodded, apparently reluctant to share even this. “Two others, one on the other side of Golder Ranch and one down the hill in one of the homes on Lago del Oro Parkway. One of them was late afternoon before the owners got home from work. So the burglar or burglars knew something about them. Did some homework.”
“Who are the other victims?” I asked, casually, knowing what conclusion he would draw. Which he did.
“Let us do the investigating,” he said. “I don’t want you making people more upset than they already are.”
“So the sign on the wall, this happened at the other houses. But these aren’t just kids. Kids would have broken a window,” I said.
“And that sign is staged,” he said, still not admitting that’s what had happened before. “In the few minutes that you went around the house, did you notice anything else?”
“Like what?” I asked.
Max shook his head like he didn’t have a clue like what, so I said, “Hardly anything. I was looking too hard for someone who might try to kill me. That was after losing my brakes coming down from Kitt Peak. I’ve been a little tense,” I added, rubbing a nerve that jumped under my right eye.
He stood, clearly as uninterested in my near-death experience as Gemma-Kate had been, and gestured to Eric that they were done here.
“You’re not going to dust?” I asked.
“We did at the first two houses and got nothing. He’s wearing gloves. This looks like the same MO. Just hard to tell if it’s a pro or an amateur. Seems to be signs of both. Either. You don’t want me to mess the place up, do you?”
“Rather you didn’t,” I agreed.
When Max got up and gestured at Deputy Stamen that they were leaving, I said, “Max, Carlo misses you.”
He didn’t say I miss him, too. Guys didn’t say that. He glanced at Eric and Gemma-Kate as if he did want to say something, but not in front of them. The two deputies left, not bothering to reassure us that we were safe. Max would never think there was a doubt about whether I could take care of myself.
“The burglar apparently didn’t want these,” Gemma-Kate said, pointing at two things that looked like yellow-and-black-striped pillow covers, draped over the back of one of the living room couches.
I balled up the costumes and threw them on the shelf in the coat closet. “The pugs were bumblebees for Halloween.”
Gemma-Kate looked at me, her little round features flashing into an expression of disgust that gave her the passing look of a gargoyle. “You got costumes for the dogs. Aunt Brigid, do you think you’re trying too hard with this suburban housewife schtick?”
“You should learn how to blend in as well as I do,” I said, finally putting my pistol down on the kitchen counter. I took a bottle of opened white wine that still had a few glasses left in it out of the fridge.
“Got saki?” Gemma-Kate asked. “All this stress, I could go for some hot saki.”
She didn’t look all that stressed to me. Now, me, I was a little stressed. I said, “Do you mind? I’ve been robbed. Besides, you’re underage, so you’ll drink Pinot Gris and like it.” I poured Gemma-Kate a glass of wine and put our sushi takeout on plates.
After a couple of bites of eel roll I was able to change the subject. “How did that project of yours go?” I asked. “The interview of Carlo?”
I thought of those rings in his nightstand. Refocused to hear Gemma-Kate say,
“I didn’t do it.”
“What do you mean you didn’t do it? You didn’t do the assignment at all?”
“No, I just talked with the instructor and said I had a more interesting idea but I’d need a week. It’s still about interviews, just not about mine, so it’s a different angle. The book you gave me.”
“How much have you read?”
Gemma-Kate looked like she would have rolled her eyes at me but it wasn’t worth the effort. “All of it,” she said. She picked up a piece of her rainbow roll, dipped it in the soy/wasabi mixture, and got it to her mouth without dripping or dropping. She took her time chewing it, and her only reaction to the wasabi was that her eyes watered. That’s how she would look if she ever cried, I thought.
“I started doing some checking, and reading other sources. One book called Truman Capote and the Legacy of ‘In Cold Blood.’ And the Kansas Historical Society Archives of prison documents. Really interesting stuff.”
“How so?”
She shook her head. “Not ready to talk about it yet. I’m still formulating conclusions.”
We ate a little while in silence, letting the sushi relieve the stress. Gemma-Kate got the last piece of crazy monkey roll because I was thinking about what I would do to find the asshole who broke into my house. Right after I beefed up the security. I was kicking myself about that. Later I would kick myself harder for not suspecting Jerry Nolan, but at that stage it would have just been paranoid. Plus right then I didn’t have any evidence of prior criminal activity. Plus if he was burglarizing more than one house why would he choose someone he knew already? He might not be the smartest guy, but I wouldn’t have thought he was that stupid.
Gemma-Kate cleaned up the kitchen while I straightened up the small messes the burglar had left. I folded the clothes back into the drawers and closed them, shut the lid on my jewelry box and the drawer with the wedding rings in it, and went into the library. I wasn’t sure whether to just leave it to Carlo to put everything back the way it was, or whether it would bother him less if he didn’t see what someone had done. There I was, protecting him again like some delicate flower, a man who had known prison life and once admitted to thinking of bludgeoning someone to death with a champagne bottle.
I sat down before the bins in the library closet. I had never opened this closet, never noticed the bins. I could look in them now. Just a little. I took the lid off the top bin and found paper yellowed with age, and carbon copies of old papers, with dates going back to the seventies when he got his PhD in philosophy and the late sixties when he was in seminary. There was a badge from a conference, identifying him as SPEAKER. I thought I would ask his permission to look through more of these papers, because it made me feel closer to him as a young man. I had never seen photographs of him from that ti
me. What had he looked like with his hair all one shade of dark brown, without the lines in the face I loved, eyes not yet sobered by life, some half-finished creature? I felt a sudden mush of missing, stronger than what I’d felt with all the personal and professional distractions of my time in Florida not too long ago. It seemed like forever since I’d dropped him off at the observatory, and it was only four hours. Is this what it was like to love someone? To be held in a kind of thrall that can hurt without warning, despite every intention not to care so?
Ah, here was a photo after all. It showed a couple, youngish from my point of view, dressed in waders, in the middle of a running stream. She was petite and willowy, with her hair tied back in a ponytail, the way I often wore my hair. Vulnerable, needing him, she clung to the man as if frightened that the river would carry her away. Her mouth was wide open in that kind of a laugh. He had one arm supporting her, while his other arm held out a fly-fishing rod. He was grinning at whoever was on the bank taking the picture. I got to thinking about the first time I’d worried about losing Carlo, and figured seeing this photograph right after I saw the wedding rings was what made me think that way.
I thought back to the time when I was new to the wife game, did not know the real Carlo well, and was crazy worried that he would find out what kind of woman he’d married. With my petite stature and little-girl looks (at least at that time), the FBI thought it found in me a gold mine for undercover work. Giving me the status of Very Special Agent, one that even many FBI agents don’t know about, they pimped me out across the country to use as bait for serial rapists, killers, human traffickers, child pornographers, and the low-life scum that got involved with these people.
In order to keep my cover, it meant doing things I don’t like people to know about at the potluck lunches at the Episcopal church Carlo and I occasionally attend. I don’t like to talk about the things I did with anyone, the groups I infiltrated, or what I did to nail them. How I skirted justice, how many I killed, most in the line of duty.
That I hadn’t killed anybody in about a year didn’t feel like a huge point in my favor.
Needless to say, my life hadn’t involved much fly-fishing. As I’ve said, my idea of nature was something you needed to get through in order to get to the next building. I wasn’t the sporting kind and up to now didn’t think Carlo was either.
Now I knew what the woman who had been a ghost for the past couple of years looked like. I hadn’t realized how much I physically resembled her, and it made me feel like the one who was the ghost. Or was that my imagination? I tucked the photo back, against the side of the bin next to the stack of papers.
“Aunt Brigid.”
I looked up at Gemma-Kate standing behind me, and wondered how many times she had said my name before I heard it. I shook myself out of the silly thoughts. What I needed to be thinking about was finding the burglar and making the home more secure.
“Are you still worried about the break-in?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s it. I think I’ll turn in. The sheets are on your bed.”
Twenty–nine
Waiting for the call, Beaufort sat at the same bar where he had met Gloria weeks before. He didn’t know much about brakes, but he knew Yanchak, and Yanchak knew everybody. At least that’s what he said. Beaufort thought it was a simple matter of cutting the brake line. So when the guy called him to report what had happened, and Beaufort stepped out in the parking lot to talk, he felt confident that he’d be told Quinn’s car went off the mountain as planned. But that wasn’t the story he got.
It started with the guy talking like he was from a different planet, all about remote SMS and bullshit. If he hadn’t been able to send the SMS remotely, he explained, there was a risk that they’d find evidence after the crash of the brakes being cut. Or even worse, the woman would have known immediately upon leaving the parking lot that they were disabled.
Beaufort didn’t give a shit about what “SMS” stood for. Did the guy see the car go off the edge of the cliff? Was the woman dead?
No, the man had to explain every detail of the setup, and the drive down the mountain, and his conversation with the woman at the bottom.
“What do you mean, at the bottom? Are you saying she’s not dead?”
That’s what he was saying, the man said, but it was all very professional, so Beaufort didn’t have to worry about the woman suspecting anything.
“I didn’t want her unsuspecting, I wanted her fucking dead!” Beaufort screamed. Then he screamed that he wanted his money back.
The guy told him to come and get it, easy to say when Beaufort didn’t even know his name and it was unlikely that Yanchak back in Florida would ever give it to him. Good old Yanchak, he managed to let Beaufort take the fall for the drugs all those years ago and he was still screwing him. Why had he ever trusted the Polack? The way he saw it, Yanchak owed him one. He owed him a big one.
Beaufort had finally hung up the phone without another word, as there were no words in his head. Oddly, his thoughts turned to Gloria Bentham. She had been so easy. He thought he could play Brigid Quinn the way he could play Gloria or any other woman. Now he knew there was more to Quinn than met the eye. Who was this woman who could get off a mountain without brakes?
The whole day had been a bust. He didn’t find anything at the house, in his haste and frustration he left the bag of loot there, and now this.
Still steaming from the conversation, Beaufort got into his car, drove the short distance home, and pulled into Gloria’s driveway. He bolted from the car, walked into the living room, and threw his car keys on the glass coffee table, where they hit one of the porcelain figures that Gloria loved so much. The porcelain toppled. The glass won.
“Jerry?” Her voice came from the bedroom, all questioning and timid. That made him angrier.
“Jerry!” The voice was in the room now. He whipped around to see her standing in some baby-doll getup, the black lace struggling to support her sagging tits and her saddlebags spilling out from beneath the panties. His life was unraveling and all this idiot cared about was sex.
“You broke my mother’s Lladró,” she said, too shocked to hide her sadness or her body.
“Sorry,” he muttered, but even he knew it didn’t sound that way.
Maybe his tone was what set her in a different direction, not reading him well, not realizing the kind of day he’d had and taking it as a warning. “You don’t sound sorry. You sound like you’ve sounded for the past week.”
“What have I sounded like?”
“Like you don’t care about me anymore. Like you don’t notice that I’m hurt. Look at me! I’m hurting, Jerry! My life coach today said I should share my feelings with you.”
“So share.”
“I did! I am! Ever since your little friend stopped by.”
“What friend? When?”
“I told you. A week ago.”
Beaufort got himself under some control. He was able to ask the question without grabbing Gloria and smacking the answer out of her. “What friend?” he asked.
“She said her name is Brigid Quinn. She said she knew you. She didn’t appear to know about me.” Gloria’s sadness and hurt were taking over now, and if she noticed the change come over Beaufort when she said the woman’s name, she ignored it. “You don’t want to go out with my friends, but you have your own and you don’t invite me. Her.”
Beaufort lifted the coffee table, and the pieces of broken statue dusted the floor around it. He threw the table across the room, where it hit the flat-screen television set and made a funny slash in the surface rather than cracking it the way it would if it had been glass. The television tottered on its base and then fell forward off its stand.
Beaufort darted here and there in the room, cursing and looking for what all to break. He noticed Gloria and his brain clicked to breaking her.
She saw him coming. Rather than fight, or run, she slid to her ass in the corner of the nook leading to the bedroom. She drew her knees
up close to her and folded her arms around them. She ducked her head to make herself smaller, as small as she could get. It appeared she knew how this drill went, from other times and other men, and she knew that she stood the best chance of survival if she cowered.
Beaufort watched her tighten into a little seed of a person. His brain clicked from that to the rage that swelled from his groin through his chest, rage that had been tamped down through all the prison years. It clicked to all the things in the room that he could yet destroy. It clicked to how it was better to destroy with an audience in attendance, the way it was the first time. Then, as quickly as the rage had exploded, it subsided. The only sound was his breathing and her breathing in a post-orgasmic way.
What now? He didn’t regret the damage. It felt good and eased his heart. But he watched Gloria balled up in the corner in her stupid lingerie, and felt a feeling that was … bad. He told himself he wasn’t a monster, and he could prove it. He went to her, sagged down beside her, and put his arm around her. She flinched, but he kept his arm there until he could feel her relaxing in his grasp.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “I’ll replace everything. I’ve had a helluva day, and now this.”
“What happened?” she asked, her sympathy taking over the way he predicted it always would. He could tell from the way she raised her hand and placed it on his knee that, at least this time, everything would be okay. She was grateful for the apology.
Rather than make up something about the helluva day, he asked her to tell him about Brigid Quinn’s visit.
“She was at the door when I came home for lunch one day last week,” Gloria said. “She didn’t have a car, but said she had been running. She asked about whether I knew you.” Gloria ended with a placating “I’ve been afraid to say anything. Because…” She gestured timidly at the mess around them.
Brigid Quinn was a crazy bitch, he told Gloria. She was a patron at the stables, he said. She was stalking him. She was crazy. He never went over to her house for dinner. That was a lie. Gloria shouldn’t talk to her again, and if the woman came around Gloria should tell him immediately.
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