“Oh,” Nina said, overcome. She picked a seat, suddenly ravenous.
“You sounded so upset, honey,” her dad said, ladling soup into a bowl in front of her.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure you are. I’m staying tonight, Nina-pinto. Got my favorite pillow all ready on the couch. I’ll make breakfast for you and Bob tomorrow.”
He put a spoon down next to her bowl. “Don’t forget how we handle it in this family. We’re resilient. We don’t let the bastards get us down and we kick back. The best defense is a good offense.”
“That’s what you always said.”
“And I’m always right.” Her dad patted her on the shoulder while she thought about kicking, what that entailed, how to do it, and how glad she was he had come to stay with her tonight.
The next morning at breakfast, he told her what her mother had done. Thirty thousand dollars, Aunt Helen’s bequest to Ginny, given to Richard Filsen so that Nina and Bob could live peacefully.
Then she cried, but her dad was there, and Bob was there, like rocks in this stream of change.
CHAPTER 42
NINA SAT AT HER DESK TUNING OUT THE OFFICE DIN, LEAFING through the police and autopsy reports on her mother’s death. Paul had made her copies at her request, not without a look of disquiet and an attempt to dissuade her. She had a right to see all of this, though, and he knew it.
She had a nasty scrape on her elbow and a headache and a strong desire to do something about that. As soon as she had come in, there had been an emergency meeting in Klaus’s office about the intruder in the attic. Everyone but Remy, who had court, was there. Lou said, “Shit, Nina, what were you doing up there?”
“Looking for my mother’s legal file. I looked again half an hour ago when I came in. It’s not there.”
“It was there but now it’s not there?”
“No. I never found it. I called Remy at court about it. She says that’s where it should be, since she had closed the matter.”
“But then—” Lou turned to Klaus. “We seem to be involved in a double-murder investigation.” He pointedly did not look at Nina. He didn’t like trouble, and she had brought in a typhoonful of it. “The Filsen shooter could have been the one up there.”
“I was followed up there,” Nina said. “By a very dangerous person. I think it was Albert Wu, though I can’t prove it.”
Klaus said, “You must be very careful, Miss Reilly. I am worried about your safety.”
Jack said, “Whoever that was, I am going to personally bust their ass into a thousand pieces.”
Lou said, “Our premises liability insurance will cover whatever medical expenses you may have, Nina. Even though this happened after hours and had nothing to do with office business.”
“I’m fine,” Nina said. They all went back to work.
Reading about her own mother’s autopsy would not be easy. That no longer mattered. Still, her eyes roaming down the pages, she found herself entering an odd state of mind. She was entering her mother’s body. It didn’t exactly hurt. She felt horror, but from a distance.
Whether she would sleep tonight, that was the question.
No fingerprints had been found at the scene, on the body, or on her mother’s purse. The police had not yet located the car used in the commission of the crime. The description by eyewitnesses had been too vague. These witnesses also failed to identify from NCIC photographs who had pushed her mother.
The medical examiner’s report contained details of Mrs. Reilly’s breakfast along with a litany of breaks and abrasions and crushings to her body. Her injuries appeared consistent with a fall. But of the injuries, none could be assigned to a push. On the television police shows the detective always found some suspicious bit of information from the autopsy to pursue. Nina found nothing.
Her mother’s kidneys had been failing. Nina hadn’t known that. Her mother’s heart had been affected by her illness, too. Nina wondered how much her mother had known about her illness. Very likely, she had protected Nina and Matt from her darkest worries.
The medical examiner concluded that Virginia Reilly had died of multiple traumas consistent with the fall. She had hit the rock face of the cliff on her way down.
The file held shocking photos, which Nina instantly turned facedown on the desk.
The rest of the report consisted of details, but Nina read every word several times, compelling her mind to take it in.
Flipping through a few stapled pages describing her mother’s purse contents, she saw the Pohlmann firm’s letterhead on a copy of a letter from Remy dated the Friday before her mother’s death. “This confirms our conversation that this office will be unable to pursue the above-entitled matter…” Remy had referred Virginia Reilly to three local firms who handled medical-malpractice cases.
A flash of memory: her mother young and healthy. She would stand in the doorway of Nina’s room in the morning and sing her awake, making up silly songs. Even a sullen teenager didn’t have the heart to yell at her, even on Saturday mornings.
Nina also read the report of Officer Howard Hirsch, a sixteen-year veteran of the California Highway Patrol, reluctantly provided by Paul. A specialist in vehicular accidents, his territory included the Highway 1 stretch around Pfeiffer Park, Nepenthe, and all of Big Sur.
Hirsch told it like a story.
He had received a call at 4:22 from Dispatch on November 26, telling him that a woman had gone over the Bixby Creek Bridge lookout. Upon arrival at the scene, he called for backup and paramedics.
He had observed the body hundreds of feet below on the rocks under cliffs near Bixby Creek Bridge. He couldn’t get down immediately. Because the only trail follows Bixby Creek and is miles long, Officer Eli Vogel climbed down with him on a rope belay, which took a long time. They did not request helicopter backup.
They found Virginia Reilly lying facedown between the rocks, curled up, body parts oddly twisted. Nina knew that had to do with her mother’s medical condition. Hirsch mentioned blood around the head. He speculated that she had lived for a few moments after the fall, only long enough to change her body position.
Nina put the report down, went into the hall, found the coffee machine, and poured her fifth cup of the day.
Considering the lack of a vehicle parked nearby, along with the 911 call, which certainly suggested that Virginia Reilly had been pushed, Officer Hirsch had decided to treat the death as suspicious. He called in the Monterey Sheriff’s Investigations Division, staked the crime scene, and taped off the overlook up on the cliffs.
He expressed concern that someone else might have gone along for the ride, but further search of the scene yielded no other body. The victim died at low tide and the rocks directly below the cliff were not usually covered by water. He concluded that if the witness was right, and somebody really was there with the victim, he would have had to commit the homicide, get in a car, and drive north toward Carmel or south toward Los Angeles. There was one other route out, the old winding road that led across the Lucia range east and inland right beyond the pullout. Inquiries in a fifty-mile range on these three roads had yielded no new information.
Officer Hirsch felt that it was significant that Nina’s mother had been murdered in broad daylight. He wrote, “This individual apparently waited until he or she thought there was no traffic on Highway 1 approaching or leaving the Bixby Creek Bridge, but that’s roughly a mile and a half of well-traveled road, and there could have been several eyewitnesses. A risky and public thing to do, this may reveal something about the character of the perpetrator.” His comment left Nina wondering. The killer must have been desperate, a gambler. What had her poor mother done that had driven someone to desperation?
The report continued, “As it turned out, the witness’s Ferrari vehicle, which was said to be an exceptionally quiet car by another witness, should have been out of eyesight. The witness happened to be looking in his rearview mirror and saw what he described in his statement: two people, one pushing the
other backward. A big, white, American car. Nothing else.”
The police departments of the towns of Carmel, Monterey, and Big Sur, the County Park Ranger Department, the State Highway Patrol’s office, and the district attorney’s office had made other efforts to locate the car. They checked with cab, limo, and rental-car companies, but found nothing. None of the victim’s friends or family admitted they drove her there. If she hitchhiked, the only other possibility, no one had come forward with information about it.
Nina thought. The car was key. Her mother seemed to have driven down the coast with her killer.
Police interviews with neighbors had yielded nothing. Most had worked all day on Monday. Many had also spent Thanksgiving weekend visiting distant family or just getting away. Uniformly, they expressed their sadness about Virginia Reilly’s death but offered no useful information.
Closing the folder, Nina shut her eyes and put her head down on the desk.
At five she went to visit Matt at the rehabilitation facility located near Veteran’s Park, a hilly, quiet neighborhood of Monterey. The setting sun shot lines of orange through the sky. The place looked like a large home, set well back, with Monterey pines and grass, windows lit already. But there were bars on the windows and a security check to go through before she could meet with Matt, who appeared in the new jeans she had bought for him. He looked tired and moved slowly.
She jumped up and gave him a hug, feeling his flimsiness. His bones felt as brittle as a convalescent’s. Letting him go, looking into his blue eyes, she hoped he was healing.
His eyes reddened and tears ran down his face. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he said, hanging his head. “I’m fine. Off everything but the prescriptions. They slow me down. I’m sleeping better.” He cried again.
“You’ll feel better every day.”
“The worst is the first forty-eight hours. They kept me sleeping a lot at the hospital. But the nightmares, Nina—the nightmares—I have to tell you something about Mom.”
“I’m here.” Nina watched his wringing hands and dreaded what he might say. “Go ahead, Matt.”
“I hit her. You know, the time she had to go to the hospital? I did it, not Dad. He covered for me. Some friends—ah, not friends, I don’t know what the hell they were—they gave me PCP or maybe something else. I don’t really know what they gave me. I was out of my mind, Sis, please believe me. I didn’t know what I was doing. Dad came in and took it all in and I just ran out the door, just ran. Dad took Mom to the hospital and talked to the police. He lied. He said he hit Mom.”
Nina shook her head. “You’re dreaming, little bro. Dad told me so himself. He felt very guilty about it. You’re medicated right now. Confused.”
“My head’s clearer than it has been in a couple of years. I hurt our Mom. Me.” He touched his heart. “Matt Reilly, your loser brother who totally hates himself.”
“Mom would have told me—”
“She would never. You would have hated me. She didn’t want that, so that whole incident became a secret. Everyone protected you. They didn’t want you to know the truth about me.”
“But—Dad—he was arrested!”
“I expected the police. They never came. So I took some more drugs and forgot the whole thing on days when I could afford to.”
Nina was quiet for a minute. She withdrew her hand from Matt’s. Then she said an a whisper, “You’re out of control, Matty.”
“I’m a crack addict. That’s right. I get paranoid, Nina. I don’t even remember all that has been going on. I can’t believe I kept that job at the liquor store so long. The owner’s a recovering addict. Maybe he thought I’d get straight someday. For sure he has covered my ass many times.” The hand-wringing escalated, and his eyes dulled and looked haunted.
Nina considered leaving to think things over. Instead, she screwed up her courage. “Matt, did you take Mom down to Big Sur…you know…the day she died?”
“Oh, please don’t think I killed Mom. Please don’t think that.”
She gulped. “Did you?”
“I hit her once years ago and I can’t forget about it. I never would have hurt her again. No. No. No.”
“She would have gone with you. You were so messed up, isn’t it possible you just don’t remember, or—”
Matt shook his head. “No.”
“I’m not trying to make you think anything that isn’t true.”
“You think I wouldn’t remember?” His voice rose. He jumped up and paced around the table. “You want to believe I killed Mom?”
“Sit down!” Nina commanded. She spoke close to Matt’s ear. “You don’t remember anything about that?”
“No! Jesus! No! I loved her!”
“Okay. Okay.”
“You have another visitor, Mr. Reilly,” said an attendant, followed closely by Zinnia, who had dressed herself up in dirty white jeans. Her long black hair hadn’t been combed in a while, and crawled around her face like spiders.
“How you doing?” she asked Nina, who folded her arms and waited for Matt to speak.
“What are you doing here?” Matt asked.
“I need you to take care of your end. You promised me last week.”
“You’ll get your money.”
“I borrow, too. I owe people. They aren’t as nice as I am, do you understand that? Now, from what I understand, you’re better fixed than you were.”
“What?” Nina said.
“I heard your mom died.” Zinnia turned to look at Nina. “Sorry for your trouble.”
“Get out of here or I’ll have you arrested!” Nina said.
“How you going to do that? You know nothing about me except that I keep your brother happy.”
“I’ll pay you back when I can,” Matt said. “You need to go, Zinny.”
“When?” She waved at the flat-white walls. “How long you stuck here for? Because they’re going to do more than kick my ass, y’know! They’ll hurt me.”
“You’re a drug dealer. That much I know,” Nina said.
“Oh, prove it, paralegal.” Zinnia kicked a chair, which scooted across the floor.
“You’re my drug dealer,” Matt said. “Now she knows for sure. And I’ll tell anyone who asks, including a judge.”
“What crap. No judge in his right mind will believe an addict. So shut the fuck up and pay me, Matty,” Zinnia said, turning her back on them.
“They’re teaching you something in those group sessions,” Nina said as they watched Zinnia beelining for the exit.
“Nobody gets off the hook. Nobody,” Zinnia muttered.
CHAPTER 43
NINA DROVE BOB TO HIS PRESCHOOL, CLUTCHING HIM IN A warm good-bye hug before he jumped out of the MG. She watched him scamper up the stairs.
She had now lived one-half of a life and had viewed her mother’s final half. That made a life in its entirety, fragments strung together really, discontinuous when you stepped back and took a good look. A new life had begun with this small wild animal. She saw herself in him as well as her mother.
She wondered if Matt would ever have children, ever be healthy and happy enough to sustain a serious love relationship.
On the way to her mother’s house, she stopped in to buy coffee at the bookstore café. The woman behind the counter greeted her, brought her cup, and left her alone. A neighbor had been browsing the philosophy section nearby. He told her how sorry he was about her mother and offered to help her clear things out of the house. She declined his kind offer but felt cheered.
Leaving the car parked near Lighthouse Road, she walked to her mother’s. She wanted to walk. She would fetch the car later when the time came to load it. A soft sea breeze scooted up the street, and the sky had turned a thrilling clarified blue. Like everything else on the Central California coast, the climate in winter was mellowed by the presence of the ocean. The temperature seldom dropped below forty degrees on the Monterey Peninsula, although it could feel colder because of the moisture in the air or wind. She jaywalked e
asily across a no-longer-busy road, stepping through piles of mildewing leaves at the curb.
Yellow-flowered breakfast dishes still cluttered the sink. She began by washing them.
In the old rolltop desk, her mother had kept orderly files for bills and records. Her mother had told her there was a “small” insurance policy, which lay under the photo. This policy, along with the sale of the cottage, would in fact amount to about $200,000 for each of them after paying a Realtor and taxes.
Nina sat back in the chair. She could quit working and devote her nonschool time to Bob if she wanted to, she thought, staggered. She looked at young Ginny in the photo and said, “Oh, Mom.” Then she sat on the couch and thought some more about it. This money would make her life so much easier, but—
Like the tail of a scorpion, this windfall would sting Matt. Paul, who no doubt had a copy, would wonder if Matt had known about it. Had he mentioned it to Zinnia one weak night? Nina hadn’t known the amount and assumed Matt had not. But then there was also the cottage, free and clear and now to be sold. Paul must realize Matt had a financial motive to kill his mother, along with all the other crazy stuff.
Well, Zinnia had a financial motive. Nina didn’t even know the girl’s last name. She wondered about this person who had invaded their lives, who didn’t bother to hide her own desperation.
Harlan’s windfall, the disappearance of his spousal support obligation, would also suggest a motive to Paul. For about half a second she entertained the possibility that her father or brother had murdered her mother.
Of course not. But if, Nina said to herself, breathless at the thought, if—that would be the end of me. I would never recover.
Heart as heavy as an anvil, she put the policy into a manila envelope in her bag, which already held her copy of the will. Her mother’s will left everything to her and Matt, share and share alike. Very simple, very clear. Not like Professor Cerruti’s will case.
Show No Fear Page 27