Shimmer

by Hilary Norman

  ALL IS WELL OUT HERE, SAMUEL. BE SAFE. YOURS, MILDRE.

  She had decided, after all, against mentioning last night’s passer-by.

  It had probably just been an old woman being fanciful in the dead of night, and nothing, in any case, that could help the police – and the last thing Mildred Bleeker wanted was to become some foolish attention-seeker.

  ‘Not my style,’ she said to Donny.

  And Detective Samuel Becket had more than enough to concern him.

  27

  The Adani house, on Carlyle Avenue in Surfside, had a red-tiled roof and peach-coloured shutters at the windows, and looked a compact, well-cared for home.

  The grief in the atmosphere inside felt thick enough to slice.

  Barun, who’d let the detectives in, showed them into the living room and introduced them to his parents. Sanjula Adani, dressed in a white sari, was seated beside her husband on an emerald green couch in the centre of an old-fashioned room with photographs and small Indian watercolours on the walls, and two small, but glistening chandeliers overhead. The bearing of both parents was erect and dignified, yet they seemed scarcely present, their minds, Sam and Martinez both realized, in dark and terrible places.

  ‘I’ve just made some tea for my parents.’ Anjika, their daughter, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, came in with a tray. ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘Anji,’ Barun said, rebuke in his tone.

  His sister rolled her reddened eyes in irritation, then explained: ‘My brother’s reminding me that Hindus in mourning aren’t supposed to offer food or drink to guests.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ her father told her. ‘Go ahead, Anjika.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Sam.

  ‘Nothing for me, thank you,’ Martinez said.

  Barun beckoned them back out into the hallway. ‘If you can, gentlemen,’ he said softly, ‘I’d be very grateful if you could put your questions to me.’

  ‘If we can,’ Sam said, ‘we will.’

  They moved into the kitchen, a room that looked and smelled well used, the air redolent with spices, and Barun invited them to sit at the white-clothed table.

  ‘As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s all proving too much for our mother,’ he said. ‘And our father . . .’ His voice faltered, then strengthened again. ‘Sanjiv was gay, which I’m only mentioning in case it has any relevance for your investigation. But our father’s always been in denial about that, so if you were to ask him questions about my brother’s lifestyle, he wouldn’t exactly lie to you, but you still might not get the whole truth, you know?’

  ‘We understand,’ Sam said. ‘Thank you for telling us.’

  ‘Do you think your brother’s “lifestyle” is relevant, sir?’ Martinez asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Barun Adani said, ‘but you read about such things.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Sam said. ‘You do.’

  ‘It’s different with our mom,’ Barun continued. ‘She’s only ever wanted us all to be happy and safe, though I know it upset her that Sanjiv might never give her grandchildren – and I think she was always afraid for him, too.’ He shook his head. ‘Not of anything like this, though. Never.’

  Sam watched his composure crack, saw the well-mannered young man struggling not to fall apart, bowed by the pressure to hold it together on his family’s behalf, and felt for him, imagined future years loading on to his shoulders, how much those bereft parents would need him, not just to comfort them but to fulfil their dreams too.

  Anjika came into the kitchen, a cell phone to one ear, listening mostly, answering in monosyllables. New York perhaps already tugging on her, Sam surmised, then guessed too that however much she loved her family, she’d probably be back there as soon as she decently could, and who could blame her?

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Barun was back under control.

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ Sam said. ‘Just a few questions.’

  ‘Of course. Anything I can do.’

  Anjika, still on the phone, slipped back out into the hallway.

  ‘You said you hadn’t seen Sanjiv for two weeks,’ Sam said. ‘How was he then?’

  ‘He seemed fine. Well, and quite happy.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him since?’ Martinez asked.

  Barun nodded. ‘Three, maybe four times. We talked regularly.’

  ‘Do you know if anything unusual was going on in his life, or if he had any special plans?’ asked Sam. ‘Did he share his private or business news with you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Barun shook his head. ‘I’ve been trying to remember anything that might be useful, but our conversations were usually snatched. We caught up with each other, nothing much more.’

  ‘So he didn’t mention,’ Martinez said, ‘where he was going, or who he was planning to see, on Wednesday or Thursday?’

  The last twenty-four hours of a homicide victim’s life being generally considered the most important period by the investigators, right along with the first forty-eight hours after the discovery of the body.

  ‘No, sir,’ Barun said.

  Too much missing time in this case.

  ‘We heard,’ Sam said, ‘that your brother had a boyfriend.’

  ‘He did, but they broke up a while ago. Eddie Lopéz.’ A quirk of Barun’s mouth betrayed a touch of disapproval. ‘A dancer. I only met him once. Sanjiv told me he’d been in Cats and some off-Broadway shows, but so long as they were seeing each other, Eddie was just a nightclub dancer.’

  ‘We heard they were living together,’ Martinez said.

  ‘That’s right, for about three months.’ Barun had lowered his voice again. ‘But they were never right for each other, and I think Sanjiv knew it, even if he never said so.’

  ‘Do you know who broke it off?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Eddie walked out on my brother.’

  ‘Did they fight, do you know?’ Martinez asked.

  ‘If they did, Sanjiv didn’t tell me. My brother was a hard worker. He wanted to move up the ladder, dreamed of opening his own boutique hotel someday.’ Barun’s dark eyes were sadder than ever. ‘He was a romantic. He once told me he liked having someone to take care of, and I think he used to cook for Eddie, even clean for him.’ He paused. ‘Sanjiv did once say that when he got home too dog-tired to do anything, Eddie didn’t like it much.’

  ‘So was it a volatile relationship, would you say?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Barun said.

  ‘How did Sanjiv seem after Lopéz left him?’ Martinez asked.

  ‘Unhappy,’ Barun said. ‘But then he seemed to pull himself together, said he was going to concentrate even harder on work. My brother had a lot of drive.’

  Anjika, off the phone at last, came back into the kitchen, laid a hand on her brother’s shoulder in a brief gesture of warmth, then turned without a word and went back to their parents in the living room.

  ‘Did Sanjiv and your father fight about his lifestyle?’ Martinez asked.

  Barun shifted in his seat. ‘Is that relevant, Detective?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Sam said.

  Barun sighed. ‘Sure they fought sometimes. Dad wanted him to be a lawyer or a doctor – or at the very least, a rather disappointing accountant like me.’

  ‘And how did it go,’ Sam asked, ‘when Sanjiv chose hotels?’

  ‘Our dad does disappointment very well. I mean, he knows how to show it.’ He gave a small, wry smile. ‘Even better than our mom, and I’m sure you know something about Indian mothers.’

  ‘I had a Jewish mother,’ Sam said.

  That often threw people off for a moment, but Adani was too immersed in his loss for more than the mildest curiosity. ‘Then you’ll know,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know where we could find Eddie Lopéz?’ asked Martinez.

  ‘I don’t have a clue,’ Barun said.

  ‘You could try Satin,’ Anjika said, coming quietly back into the kitchen. ‘It’s a club in Calle Ocho.’

  Barun Adani frowned. ‘How
would you know that?’

  ‘Sanjiv told me,’ his sister answered simply.

  ‘Were he and Lopéz still in touch?’ Barun asked.

  ‘Our brother was lonely,’ Anjika said.

  And her eyes began to brim.

  28

  David Becket had invited Grace and Claudia to lunch.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t,’ Claudia said in her sister’s Toyota, looking back over her shoulder at Joshua, buckled into his seat in the rear, ‘but I feel kind of apprehensive seeing Saul these days.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why,’ Grace said. ‘He’s fine, and he loves what he’s doing.’

  ‘Woodwork instead of studying medicine?’ Claudia turned her face to the window, stared out at the seemingly endless string of lavish apartment buildings and hotels and the ocean beyond, sparkling blue in the sunshine.

  ‘Saul makes furniture,’ Grace said crisply. ‘He has a real talent for it which he discovered long before he got injured, and he chose to change direction, it wasn’t just foisted on him – and I’m not at all sure that it doesn’t suit him more than medicine might have.’

  ‘Still living with his dad, though.’

  Grace shot her a sideways glance. ‘I hope you’re not planning on taking this negative attitude to lunch.’

  ‘I’m just telling you how I feel,’ Claudia said. ‘Or have I lost that right too?’

  Grace slowed the car a little. Traffic on this section of Collins was even lighter than usual today, which meant they were going to be there in no time, and she wanted to get past this before they reached the Golden Beach house.

  ‘What are you talking about, sis?’ she said. ‘What rights have you lost?’

  Claudia’s hands clenched into fists in her lap. ‘I’ve strayed,’ she said, tautly. ‘I’ve committed adultery. I’ve been a total fool. I’ve abandoned my sons and left my husband to fend for himself without so much as an explanation.’ Her eyes filled. ‘I’ve lost the right to be me.’

  Grace saw a turning up ahead into a small hotel car park, glanced in the rear-view mirror, then swung in and stopped the car.

  ‘Come here.’ She put out her arms, and Claudia leaned against her and began to weep. ‘You’ve lost no such rights at all,’ she told her. ‘You’ve been human, that’s all. Don’t cry, baby.’

  ‘But what I’ve done to Dan is so terrible.’

  ‘You’ve done it to yourself too,’ Grace said. ‘And I know you’ll find the way to put it right again, if that’s what you want to do.’

  ‘By telling him, you mean,’ Claudia said desolately. ‘But what if he can’t forgive me?’

  ‘I think he will,’ Grace said. ‘Because I’m guessing that he loves you way too much to want to lose your marriage.’

  ‘So long as I don’t wait too long.’ Claudia pulled away.

  ‘You’re going to have to judge that for yourself, sis.’

  Only one of many judgement calls that Claudia was going to have to make, Grace supposed. And no sign of Jerome Cooper since yesterday morning, but still . . .

  ‘Are you really up to this lunch?’ she asked.

  Joshua, who’d been awake but content until now, who was in general an excellent traveller, gave a sudden squawk of impatience.

  ‘It’s OK, sweetheart,’ Grace told him. ‘We’ll be on the move again in a minute.’

  ‘We don’t need a minute,’ Claudia said. ‘I’m OK.’ She opened her purse, found a tissue and wiped at her eyes. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She looked back at her nephew and smiled. ‘It’ll do me good to focus on someone else for a change, won’t it, Joshua?’

  And Joshua beamed at his aunt, sealing the deal.

  ‘Let’s go visit with family,’ Claudia said.

  29

  Sanjiv Adani’s home was no crime scene. Anjika, having given Sam and Martinez nothing further to work with, their subsequent search, warrant obtained, of her late brother’s apartment – a second floor walk-up in a two-storey house on Bay Road, a few blocks from the Lincoln Road Mall – provided little more in the way of clues.

  The essentially intrusive task of sifting through the remains of a dead person’s life had never come easily to Sam. When the victim was as tidy as Sanjiv Adani, the job could be at least more swiftly accomplished, but the results, all too often, tended to be nothing more than skin deep. No tell-tale stains, no unwashed crockery to provide prints or DNA, no old garbage to sift through, no give-away, or at least, intriguing Post-it stickers on the refrigerator door.

  Adani had been a neat, hygienic man and also, on the face of it, a conventional one, his home showing the influences, the detectives felt, of both his upbringing and his good hotel training.

  ‘There’s order and quality here,’ Sam said. ‘Not just show.’

  ‘How does falling for a male nightclub dancer sit with that?’ asked Martinez.

  ‘Maybe he just fell in love,’ Sam said.

  ‘Let’s don’t forget lust,’ Martinez said.

  The photographs on display in Adani’s sitting room were all of family, but his bedside table drawer yielded a black-and-white publicity shot of a bare-chested, well-muscled but lean and darkly handsome young man, signed in thick blue pen: For Sanjiv, from your crazy boy, Eddie.

  ‘He kept it after the break-up,’ Martinez said. ‘So I guess maybe love.’

  ‘Or infatuation,’ Sam added.

  They found nothing in the apartment to indicate a wild lifestyle. Tylenol and an old, unfinished bottle of Valium were the only pills in the bathroom cabinet, alongside a couple of decongestant nasal sprays and a collection of colognes, body balms and antiperspirants. An old Dominick Dunne novel with a scarlet leather bookmark thirty-two pages in, sat beside the bed, which was neatly made with clean blue linen, nice quality pillows and no bedspread. A black linen shirt, laundered and pressed, lay on the top sheet.

  ‘A reject, maybe,’ Sam conjectured, ‘while he was getting ready for his last night out.’

  ‘Sharp,’ Martinez said.

  ‘Maybe not as sharp as what he actually wore,’ Sam said.

  They found no hints of where he might have been heading on Thursday evening. Nothing on his computer – which they would, of course, still take away for more detailed inspection – no journal, nothing marked on his New Yorker Cats calendar.

  ‘Not even his mom’s birthday,’ Martinez pointed out.

  ‘He might not have needed to mark that down to remember it,’ Sam said. ‘Or maybe he keeps another calendar at the hotel someplace we didn’t get to see.’

  They already knew that Adani had no office or even a personal drawer at the Montreal; only a steel locker, in which they’d found a clean pair of Y-fronts, a pressed white cotton shirt, a wine-coloured tie with the hotel’s M motif embroidered on it and a book about the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

  ‘Is this all a little antiseptic?’ asked Martinez now. ‘Kind of dull?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sam, taking another look around the sitting room. ‘Or maybe it’s just like we figured: he was a good, well-trained son.’ He paused. ‘With dreams of his own.’

  ‘And a horny dancer ex-boyfriend,’ Martinez added.

  Eddie Lopéz had a rap sheet. Minor stuff, mostly – reckless driving, felony possession and prostitution misdemeanors.

  ‘And one arrest for domestic battery,’ Sam noted, back at the office.

  Which sent Lopéz to the top of their list of one, but with Satin – the Little Havana nightclub mentioned by Anjika Adani – not set to open till evening and no one there responding either to the doorbell or their phone calls; and with too many Eddie, Eduardo and Edward Lopéz listings in Miami-Dade to start trawling through until they had no choice, Sam and Martinez decided to head back over to the Hotel Montreal instead.

  It was a nice enough place, a three-star hotel, superficially well-run and maintained; a fair bet for a young man planning an upward learning curve in the business. The manager, Carl Lundquist, had only good things to say about Adani, but Gloria Garcia was still the m
ost loquacious and, at least on the face of it, the most caring that her colleague had been murdered. Though neither she nor anyone else on duty had anything immediately helpful to offer the detectives.

  No quarrels between Adani and other personnel that anyone was willing to talk about; no run-ins with hotel guests; no promotion over another colleague that might have left a sour taste. No complaints or even grumbles against the dead man. No love affairs originating in the hotel. No one knowing that much about Adani, described by two people as ‘private’.

  They wrote down names, addresses and telephone numbers, took lists of off-duty personnel, of shift and agency workers, copies of the recent guest register and duty rosters for the last two months; anything that might help them to assemble as full a picture as possible of the victim’s working life.

  On the way out, they passed Gloria Garcia in reception.

  ‘I just remembered something,’ she said.

  ‘Please,’ Sam said, hope rising, ‘go ahead.’

  ‘I remembered the boyfriend’s name was Eddie,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing else?’ Martinez said.

  ‘I know it isn’t much,’ she said.

  ‘Anything you remember is a big help,’ Sam said.

  And hoped she hadn’t seen the exasperation in his partner’s eyes.

  30

  David Becket, grey-haired, hawk-nosed, even more rumpled-looking these days than he had been prior to his semi-retirement, had always possessed a wonderful knack with people. With children especially, making him – his medical skills aside – such a popular paediatrician, and with the adult patients, too, who’d flocked to the free walk-in downtown clinic he’d run with a colleague for a number of years. He had fine, sensitive instincts, usually knowing when to push troubled people and when to leave them in peace. Which was a gift Grace liked to think she shared, but which she’d also had to learn to set aside on occasions as a psychologist with less than an hour at a time to draw her patients out.

  Saul had it, too, this gift of warmth.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, coming out onto the driveway as they arrived. ‘All my favourite people.’ And then he swept his baby nephew up in his arms, and Joshua squealed with pleasure.