“On Thursday afternoon, about twelve hours after the murder, Gus Boudette flew first class to Biot, a little spot on the French Riviera.”
Apparently I was among the last people to see Gus at the Mary Todd on Thursday morning, when he lied about being paged. “I’ve never heard of Biot.”
“That was the idea. There’s no guaranteed extradition to the United States, since Gus—Augustin, that is—has dual citizenship. He was born in France.”
“And there’s a lot of fine print on extradition treaties,” Skip added. “We’d need much more cause than we have. We don’t have that much against him, except that he knew where to pick up the Muniz woman.”
“He does have a sealed record as a juvenile offender,” Nick said. “But that’s not relevant, and there’s no motive that we can determine for him to have killed Guzman.”
“He skipped town,” I said. “Doesn’t that matter?”
Nick shook his head. “Not if we didn’t ask him to stay around. He left before we had a clue that we’d need to talk to him any more than we already did. He didn’t violate any law, nor disobey us.”
“Is he in Carlos’s notebook?” I asked.
Skip looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Haven’t you checked?”
I hoped my face didn’t turn too red. “I don’t have all the pages,” I said in a near whisper.
My embarrassment drew a satisfied grin, happily interrupted by an announcement from Maddie. “Dessert is now being served in the atrium.”
There was a mad scramble to move chairs and drinks to the part of my home that looked most like Christmas— unless you counted the bed on which Richard and Mary Lou were scheduled to sleep, now covered with gift boxes, rolls of wrapping paper, and spools of ribbon.
“Gus could have been working with someone else,” I suggested, on the way to the dessert and coffee, as if I’d come up with a brilliant idea, a killer for hire, that no cop would have thought of.
“Then it’s that someone else we need,” Nick said.
How well I knew.
Maddie chose dessert time to report on a phone call she’d taken while she was home with Beverly.
“I forgot to tell you, Grandma. Mom and Dad called and they may not be here until Friday because of Dad’s surgery,” she said.
My arms went weak; I nearly dropped the heaping bowl of cobbler and ice cream on my lap. “Surgery?” I asked, barely getting the syllables out. “What kind of surgery?”
“You know this happens every year,” Beverly said. “Lots of people use their Christmas to New Year’s vacation for elective surgery.” Of course. The holiday rush for nonemergency procedures. For Richard’s patients, not for Richard himself.
My exhaled breath was loud enough to cause Beverly to ask, “Are you okay? You sound as though you thought Richard was having surgery,” at which point everyone laughed and told “my son the doctor” jokes.
I laughed harder than anyone.
Tonight’s project for the Bronx apartment was to add some Christmas spirit to it. We’d already erected a tree in the corner of the living/dining room and added beads and ribbons for ornaments.
Tonight we made a centerpiece for the dining room table; that is, the only table we had. We glued crafts-store lichen onto a mound of green florist’s foam. For candles we poked red toothpicks from a package of multicolor party picks into the foam. I showed Maddie how adding a coat of clear nail polish to the toothpicks made the wood look waxy. We attached tiny bows and flowers and called it done.
“That was too easy,” Maddie said.
Music to my ears. “We could make stockings.”
“There’s no fireplace. Where did you and Grandpa hang your stockings?”
My mind traveled back to our early Christmases in the Bronx. Not always snowy, but cold enough to keep the sidewalk Santas from perspiring as they did in the strip malls of Lincoln Point. “We hung the stockings on nails in the bookcase, and later on your dad’s crib.”
Maddie looked horrified. “You put nails in your bookcase?”
I realized Maddie was picturing our defacing the fine walnut bookcases Richard had built along two walls of the large Porter living room in Los Angeles. “Not to worry. Our bookcases were just cinder blocks and planks of wood. We could hardly ruin them.”
We spent some time making a miniature bookcase with strips of wood and gray modeling clay “blocks.” A dash of silver glitter gave the clay the sparkly, grainy look of cinder blocks. Maddie glued felt stockings decorated with sequins to the edges of the shelves.
“Did you glue things to your apartment bookcases, too?”
“Sometimes. We might have glued photos or a streamer for a birthday party.”
“Just like with dollhouses?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I could never put nails or glue on my bookcase. I wish I lived in the Bronx.”
Some days I did, too.
After a day of shopping, swimming, tennis, and crafts (un-challenging though they were) Maddie was tired enough to suggest an early story from her teen (a bit premature?) magazine. I knew she could read at an impressively high level herself, but these were special moments and I was happy to hold on to them for as long as Maddie wanted.
It took only one column of text before I closed the magazine and tucked the baseball quilt under Maddie’s chin.
Maddie liked to use a special nightlight—a ceramic figurine that had seen Richard off to sleep for many years. I turned it on. On top of the illuminated base, home plate rotated, as a wholesome-looking boy in a red cap swung over and over again at a nonexistent ball.
The futility of the game he was playing reminded me too much of my last couple of days. I turned him off and switched on a small bulb with a simple plastic shade.
My guests had cleaned up the kitchen for the most part. Skip and June had gone off soon after dinner, and Beverly and Nick drove separate cars to . . . I didn’t know where. I expected Beverly to call with a report or a reaction to her relocated date. Maybe it was a good sign that she hadn’t.
By ten thirty I was able to relax in my atrium in front of my twinkling life-size tree with a mug of hot cider and my thoughts.
On my long table near the foyer was my oversize tote/purse, in its usual spot until I cleaned it out and sorted the receipts and other scraps of the day. A tiny triangle of white stuck up from a side pocket—the pages of Carlos’s notebook, stuffed in there by Chrissy. Just a couple of inches of paper, but they seemed out of place and almost frightening, as if they had blood on them, which, in a way, they did.
I wished they didn’t also have a kind of magnetic force drawing me to pick them up.
I worried about Mr. Mooney. What if he knew whatever it was Carlos Guzman had in his notebook, and Nadine had tried to harm him, not help him? He said she gave him medicine, which might have been a pill she knew Mr. Mooney was allergic to, or something generally toxic from the pharmacy.
So far there’d been a kernel of truth in everything the Mary Todd residents reported. The problem was, what was the kernel and what was the part that should be thrown away? A biblical expression concerning wheat and chaff came to mind, but I’d never studied the Bible enough to know if the analogy was apt here.
Nadine had no way of knowing that, given what we’d put together from Linda’s snooping and the residents comments, her scheme was about to blow up in her face anyway. Neither could she know whether she was listed in Carlos’s notebook. She might have figured that she’d be safe as long as Carlos and Mr. Mooney were out of the way.
On the other hand (there always was another side in this case), Mr. Mooney also said he gave him a pill. Did someone else happen upon him in the lobby? Maybe Gus had come back from vacation to clean up loose ends.
I knew I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Mr. Mooney and I could have prevented it. Maybe Sofia wasn’t safe now, either, if the real killer thought she knew the truth. At the very least I should visit Sofia, who’d been a friend, now that she was not
under guard.
I struggled for a few more minutes, holding on to my mug of hot cider more and more tightly, restraining my fingers lest they stray to the paper in my tote. Finally, I pulled the notebook pages from the pocket and opened them on my lap.
When my phone rang at that moment, I would have sworn it was Carlos Guzman calling to chide me from his grave. “Just as I expected,” he’d say. “Your prurient interests have gotten the better of you.”
“Did I wake you up?” Not Carlos, but Linda.
“No, I’m just winding down from the day.” Hardly.
“We’re still on for Jason in the morning, right?”
“Right.” I tried to put a little oomph in my voice, as if that would be the highlight.
Now that I thought of working with Jason—it would be a nice, satisfying change from the puzzles of the Guzman case.
Chrissy had foisted three pages on me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d held back a few, once she knew I was going to be neither her police insider nor her zealous partner.
The set contained about thirty entries, all in Carlos’s large, loping handwriting. I’d been picturing his notebook as a “little black book,” but looking closely at the copies, I saw that Carlos had used the standard, slightly larger than 8½-by- 11-inch spiral-bound variety. Thus, it took legal-size paper to accommodate the pages, with some margin for error. There were three dark circles down the side of the photocopies, the distances between them matching what you would expect from three-hole-punched paper. I imagined a shelf full of binders filled with these notebooks in Carlos’s Nolin Creek Pines apartment.
I ran my finger down the lists on the pages, scanning quickly. To my relief, the number of LP designations was fewer than two or three per page. Other than spotting an occasionalbig man around town, I didn’t recognize the names. I saw nothing that could be easily interpreted as pertaining to Gus or Nadine. Skip and Nick had more or less implied that there was no mention of Gus in the full notebook, or they would have had a reason to go after him more intensely.
On the third page, my finger stopped, then (almost) my heart. The entry read:
There was my S-something-CH. At least, it could be. No money was changing hands here. Both Carlos and STITCH were putting out information (I guessed), the reason being “farm,” whatever that meant.
I hated that the name was STITCH, as if the perpetrator of the crime (whatever it was) was a crafter. The ones I knew were incapable of anything other than cheating on the way they built room boxes—the equivalent of using a cake mix, but embellishing it, instead of starting from scratch.
I thought of the crafters who came to my house regularly on Wednesday evenings to do projects together. Besides Linda Reed and Gail Musgrave, there was Susan (Tennessee) Giles, old Mabel Quinlan (our Queen of Beads), and Betty (Tudor mansions) Fine, plus others who dropped in occasionally. Not a criminal bone among them.
The underworld of extortion was foreign to me. I was beginning to understand only the top layer of its workings. Any one of Carlos’s notebook residents could have turned him in—why didn’t they? Trying to think like a criminal, I reasoned that Dolores and STITCH profited more from what Carlos could give them. The others, who were paying money into Carlos’s IN column, must have had their own reasons for agreeing to the blackmail. I could only guess that in each case the one who had the most to lose paid the most.
In STITCH’s case, it seemed likely that he and Carlos were sharing information by some mutual agreement. STITCH must also have something to lose, I reasoned, or he/she/it wouldn’t have been following me around. Maybe he stood to lose the farm.
I said this to myself as if it were now all clear.
There were several ranches in town, and many more in the greater San Jose area, but Lincoln Point had only a “learning” farm at the edge of town where schoolchildren went to experience the daily life of a farm family. (Personally, I was happy having my farm products delivered to my local market.)
I looked out the narrow window next to my front door, into the darkness and a quiet, empty street. I hoped it stayed that way.
Chapter 24
While Maddie slept in, I got some materials ready for Jason, who was due to come for his tutoring session at nine thirty on Monday morning.
It was hard to concentrate on Steinbeck with STITCH running around my brain. I’d been so glib, telling Jason to make connections and then make more connections, and now I was stuck not being able to connect all the threads of the Muniz case.
Mr. Mooney’s “he” who gave him pills or some kind of medication confused me, since I wanted to pin everything on Nadine. I envisioned her trying to poison Mr. Mooney but almost getting caught when the EMTs arrived unexpectedly, and then turning it around to look like she’d found him. All of which could still be the correct scenario.
Unless someone else had been in the lobby just before her.
I called Linda, catching her as she was leaving her house for errands.
“You’re not canceling, are you, Gerry? Jason just took off on his bike.”
If there was a way to spin a negative interpretation of Santa Claus, Linda would find it. “No, I’m looking forward to seeing Jason.”
“What, then? More Mary Todd research?”
She had me there. “If you don’t mind.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Does the home keep the daily sign-in sheets?”
“Yes, we have them going back to day one.” Just what I hoped. “Who are you looking for, Gerry?”
“No one in particular.” This much was true.
“We collect them by the week, so we’ve already filed last week’s log away in the records room.”
“Then that log would have ended with yesterday?”
“Right.”
“Can you get a copy for me?”
“All three years’ worth?”
Tempting, but I had to stay focused. “No, just last week’s.”
“Can you wait until tomorrow? I’m not working today and if I go in and putter around the records it will look suspicious.”
“What good thinking, Linda. Tomorrow will be fine.”
“That’s it? No other questions? Don’t you want to know how Mr. Mooney is?”
“I didn’t want to nag.” “Push my luck” was more like it.
“He had a guard outside his door last night. This place is getting to be Lincoln Point Jail North. He doesn’t have anyone with him now though.”
“Why did they remove the security?”
“They took Nadine in.”
It was amazing what you could learn if you didn’t ask.
While Jason and I worked out some ideas on how he might embellish his next paper with references to other works of Steinbeck and his contemporaries, Maddie seemed content to work on her own vacation assignments. She sat in the rocking chair and wrote laboriously in a spiral-bound notebook just like the one Carlos had used. I looked over every now and then, enjoying her contemplative mood, her serious pencil chewing, the way stray red strands fell across her forehead.
I projected ahead a few days to when her parents would be here, then past that to when they returned to L.A. I was missing them already, but that’s how it was when family came and went as they did. I wished away the days till they arrived, and then wanted to stop time while they were here.
After about a half hour Maddie decided to abandon her history project and finish wrapping her presents for her parents.
“I’ll be in my bedroom if you need me,” she said. (Was that a wink?)
Just the opportunity I was waiting for. I took out my cell phone and handed it to Jason.
“Cool,” he said. “You have a camera, a GPS, and text messaging.”
Cool to Jason, maybe, but all I’d wanted was a way to make and receive phone calls. “Do you know how to reprogram these things to change the way it rings?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
“Do I need to have a source of songs, like when you download mu
sic onto the iPod?”
Jason clicked away, his fingers flying as mine used to do on the typewriter. The computer keyboard didn’t have the same feel to me, nor the same interesting sound, and I couldn’t seem to get up to the same speed with the new keys.
“Not really,” Jason said. “You’ve got a lot of tunes to choose from right here.” He showed me a list of built-in melodies that were my options.
“I don’t have time to review all these. We have to be quick, before Maddie comes back. This is our little secret, okay?” Jason smiled, his chubby cheeks filling out. “Can you just pick something for me?”
More clicks, and Jason handed it back, still grinning. I wondered if I should be worried about his choice.
“Thank you so much,” I said.
“Anytime, Mrs. Porter.”
With that out of the way, we got back to literature.
Jason’s teacher had asked him to rewrite his Of Mice and Men paper, and he’d already given it some thought. “I’m going to do the theme of loneliness,” he told me. “How all the characters in the novel are lonely in different ways.”
I had a feeling that Jason knew a lot about loneliness, but he seemed to have turned a corner and was on the road to average teenage angst. I thought of the rough start he’d had. Both of his birth parents qualified as losers, in and out of jail, on and off drugs. His first few years with Linda and her second husband were rife with conflict that continued even after Linda and Chuck divorced. But this was a new Jason, working, studying, even warming up to vacation tutoring.
Sitting with him at my atrium table, I had great hope for his future. I was glad I’d decided to give this relationship a try (as if choosing anything else wouldn’t have cost me my friendship with Linda).
“That’s a terrific idea, Jason,” I told him. “How do you plan to approach the essay?”
Jason pulled out a piece of paper, buried in the pages of his notebook—also the kind that Carlos Guzman had used. These must be standard issue now in schoolrooms. I brushed away the absurd image of Carlos going around to school- and office-supply stores, stealing notebooks.
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