by Sue Grafton
“Unfortunately, they’re locked.”
Each of the four bags apparently had a combination lock, the numbers arranged on a dial embedded in the metal catch.
“We’ll have to do some detective work,” she said with satisfaction. “You want coffee first? How was your flight?”
“I’d love some,” I said. “The flight wasn’t bad.”
Julia’s apartment was crowded with antiques: a peculiar mix of Victorian pieces and Oriental furnishings. There was a huge carved cherry sideboard with a marble top, a black horsehair sofa, an intricate ivory screen, jade figures, a platform rocker, two cinnabar lamps, Persian rugs, a pier-glass mirror in a dark mahogany frame, a piano with a fringed shawl across the top, lace curtains, wall hangings of embroidered silk. A big portable television set with a twenty-five-inch screen loomed on the far side of the room surrounded by family photographs in heavy silver frames. The television set was turned off, its blank gray face oddly compelling in a room so filled with memorabilia. The only sound in the apartment was the steady ticking of a grandfather clock that sounded like someone tapping on Formica with a set of drumsticks.
I moved out to the kitchen, poured coffee for us both, and carried it back to the living room, the cups rattling slightly in the saucers like the tremor of a minor California earthquake. “Are these family antiques? Some of the pieces are beautiful.”
Julia smiled, waggling her cane. “I’m the last person alive in my family so I’ve inherited all this by default. I was the youngest in a family of eleven children and my mother said I was fractious. She always swore I’d never get a thing, but I just kept my mouth shut and waited it out. Sure enough, she died, my father died. I had eight sisters and two brothers and they all died. Little by little, it all drifted down to me, though I hardly have a place to put anything at this point. Eventually you have to give it all away. You start with a ten-room house and finally you find yourself stranded in a nursing home with space for one night table and a candlestick. Not that I intend to let that happen to me.”
“You’ve got a ways to go yet anyway from what I can see.”
“Well, I hope so. I’m going to hold out as long as I can and then I’ll lock and bar the door and do myself in, if nature doesn’t take me first. I’m hoping I’ll die in my bed one night. It’s the bed I was born in and I think it’d be nice to end up there. Have you a large family?”
“No, just me. I was raised by an aunt, but she died ten years ago.”
“Well then, we’re in the same boat. Restful, isn’t it.”
“That’s one way to put it,” I said.
“I came from a family of shriekers and face slappers. They all threw things. Glasses, plates, tables, chairs, anything that came to hand. The air was always filled with flying missiles ��� objects rocketing from one end of the room to the other with howls on contact. This was mostly girls, you know, but all of us had deadly aim. I had a sister knock me out of my high chair once with a grapefruit thrown like a curve ball, oatmeal flying everywhere. Eulalie, her name was. Now that I look back on it, I see we were common as mud, but effective. We all got what we wanted in life and no one ever accused us of being helpless or fainthearted. Well now. Let’s tackle those bags. If worse comes to worst, we can always hurl them off the balcony. I’m sure they’ll open when they hit the pavement down below.”
We approached the problem as though it were a code to be broken. Julia’s theory, which proved to be correct, was that Elaine would have come up with a combination of numbers she already had in her life somewhere. Her street address, zip code, telephone number, social security, birthdate. Each of us chose one group of digits and started to work on separate bags. I hit it the third time around with the last four numbers on her social-security card. All four suitcases were coded with the same number, which simplified the task.
We opened them on the living-room floor. They were filled with exactly what one would expect: clothing, cosmetics, costume jewelry, shampoo, deodorant, slippers, bathing suit, but packed in a jumble the way they do in movies when the wife leaves the husband in the middle of a vicious snit. The hangers were still on the hanging clothes, garments folded over and bunched in, with the shoes tossed on top. It looked as if drawers had been turned upside down and emptied into the largest of the bags. Julia had hobbled over to the rocker and she sat there now, propping herself up with her cane as though she were a unwieldy plant. I sat down on the horsehair sofa, staring at the suitcases. I looked at Julia uneasily.
“I don’t like this,” I said. “From what I know of Elaine, she was almost compulsively neat. You should have seen the way she left her place… everything just so… clean, tidy, tucked in. Does she strike you as the type who’d pack this way?”
“Not unless she were in a fearful hurry,” Julia said.
“Well actually, she might have been, but I still don’t think she’d pack like this.”
“What’s on your mind? What do you think it means?”
I told her about the double set of plane tickets and the layover in St. Louis and any other facts I thought might pertain. It was nice to have someone to try ideas on. Julia was bright and she liked to pick at knots the same way I did.
“I’m not convinced she ever got here,” I said. “We only have Pat Usher’s word for it anyway and neither of us set much store by that. Maybe she got off the plane in St. Louis for some reason.”
“Without her luggage? And you said she left her passport behind too, so what could she have done with herself?’
“Well, she did have that lynx coat,” I said, “which she could have pawned or sold.” I had one of those little nagging thoughts on the subject, but I couldn’t bring it into focus for the moment.
Julia waved dismissively. “I don’t believe she’d sell her coat, Kinsey. Why would she do that? She has lots of money. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds. She wouldn’t need to pawn anything.”
I chewed on that one. She was right, of course. “I keep wondering if she’s dead. The luggage got here, but maybe she never made it. Maybe she’s in a morgue somewhere with a tag on her toe.”
“You think someone lured her off the plane and killed her?”
I wagged my head back and forth, not wholly convinced. “I don’t know. It’s possible. It’s also possible she never made the trip at all.”
“I thought you told me someone saw her get on the plane. The cab driver you talked about.”
“That wasn’t really a positive identification. I mean, a cab driver picks up a fare and the woman claims she’s Elaine Boldt. He never saw her before in his life, so who knows? He just takes her word for it, like we all do. How do you know I’m Kinsey Millhone? Because I say I am. Someone might have posed as her just to establish a trail.”
“What for?”
“Well now, that I don’t know. We’ve got a couple of women who might have pulled it off. Her sister Beverly for one.”
“And Pat Usher for another,” Julia said.
“Pat did benefit from Elaine’s being off the scene. She gets a rent-free condo in Boca for months.”
“That’s the first time I ever heard of anyone murdered for room and board,” she said tartly.
I smiled. I knew we were floundering, but maybe we’d stumble onto something. I could have used a break at that point. “Did Pat ever leave that forwarding address she promised?”
Julia shook her head. “Charmaine says she left one, but it was humbug. She packed and took off the same day you were here and nobody’s seen her since.”
“Oh shit. I knew she’d do that.”
“Well, it wasn’t anything you could have prevented,” she said charitably.
I leaned my head back against the sofa frame, playing mind games. “It could have been Beverly too, you know. Maybe Bev bumped her off in the ladies’ room at the St. Louis airport.”
“Or killed her in Santa Teresa and impersonated her from that point on. Maybe she was the one who packed the bags and took the plane.”
“
Try it the other way,” I said. “Think about Pat. I mean, what if Pat Usher were a stranger to Elaine, just someone she met on the plane. Maybe they started talking and Pat realized ���” I dropped that idea when I saw the expression on Julia’s face. “It does sound pretty lame,” I said.
“Oh, well ��� no harm done in speculating. Maybe Pat knew her in Santa Teresa and followed her from there.”
I ran that around in my head. “Well, yeah. I guess it could be. Tillie says she heard from Elaine ��� at least, she assumed it was Elaine ��� by postcard until March, but I guess somebody could have faked that too.”
I filled her in on my conversations with Aubrey and Beverly and right in the middle of it, my memory kicked in; one of those wonderful little mental jolts, like a quick electrical shock when a plug’s gone bad. “Oh wait, I just remembered something. Elaine got a bill from some furrier here in Boca. What if we could track him down and find out if he’s seen the coat? That might give us a lead.”
“What furrier? We have quite a few.”
“I’d have to check with Tillie. Can I make a call to California? If we can track down the coat, maybe we can get a line on her.”
Julia wagged the cane toward the telephone. Within minutes, I’d gotten Tillie on the line and told her what I needed.
“Well, you know that bill got stolen along with the rest, but I just got another one. Hold on and I’ll see what it says.” She put the receiver down and went to fetch the mail.
She got back on the line. “She’s being dunned. It’s a second overdue notice from a place called Jacques ��� seventy-six dollars for storage and two hundred dollars for having the coat recut. Wonder why she’d do that? There’s a little happy face drawn by hand: ‘Thanks for your business’ ��� followed by a sad face: ‘Hope the delay in payment is just an oversight.’ A few more bills have come in too. Let me see what those look like.”
I could hear Tillie ripping open envelopes on her end of the line.
“Oops. Well, these are all overdue. It looks like she’s run up a lot of charges. Let’s see. Oh my. Visa, MasterCard. The last date on these is about ten days ago, but I guess that was just the end of the billing period. They’re asking her not to use her cards until she’s paid the balances down.”
“Does it indicate where she was when the purchases were made? Was she in Florida somewhere?”
“Yes, it looks like Boca Raton and Miami for the most part, but you can check them yourself when you get back. Now that I’ve had the locks changed, they should be safe.”
“Thanks, Tillie. Can you give me the furrier’s address?”
I made a note of it and got directions from Julia. I left her and went back down to the parking lot. The sky was an ominous gray and thunder rumbled in the distance like movers rolling a piano down a wooden ramp. It was hot and still, the light a harsh white, making the grass turn phosphorescent green. I was hoping I could take care of business before the downpour caught up with me.
Jacques was located in the middle of an elegant shopping plaza, shaded with latticework overhead and planted with delicate birches in big pale blue urns. Tiny Italian lights had been threaded through the branches, and in the prestorm gloom they twinkled like an early Christmas. The storefronts were done in a dove-gray granite and the pigeons strutting across the pavement looked as if they’d been placed there purely for their decorative effect. Even the sound they made was refined, a low, churring murmur that rode on the morning air like cash being riffled in a merchant’s hands.
The window display at Jacques had been artfully done. A golden sable coat had been tossed carelessly across a dune of fine white sand against a sky-blue backdrop. Tufts of sea oats were growing on the crest of the sand and a hermit crab had crossed the surface, leaving a narrow track that looked like an embroidery stitch. It was like a little moment frozen in time: a woman ��� someone reckless and rich ��� had come down to the shore, had shrugged aside this luscious fur so that she could plunge naked into the sea ��� or perhaps she was making love to someone on the far side of the dune. Standing there, I could have sworn I saw the grasses bending in a nonexistent wind and I could almost smell the trail of perfume she’d left in her wake.
I pushed the door open and went in. If I’d had money and believed in wearing furry creatures on my back, I’d have laid down thousands in that place.
Chapter 20
*
The interior was done in muted blues with a glittering chandelier dominating the high-ceilinged space. Chamber music echoed through the room as though there might be a string quartet sawing somewhere out of sight. Chippendale chairs were arranged in gracious conversational groupings and massive gilt-edged mirrors lined the walls. The only detail that spoiled an otherwise perfect eighteenth-century drawing-room was the little camera up in one corner monitoring my every move. I wasn’t sure why. There wasn’t a fur in sight and the furniture was probably nailed to the floor. I shoved my hands down in my back pockets just to show I knew how to behave myself. I caught sight of my reflection. There I stood in that rococo setting, in faded jeans and a tank top, looking like something deposited in error by a time machine. I flexed, wondering if I should start lifting weights again. The bicep made my right arm look like a snake that had recently eaten something very small, like a wad of socks.
“Yes?”
I turned around. The man who stood there looked as out of place as I did. He was huge, maybe three hundred pounds, wearing a caftan that made him look like a pop-open tent with a built-in aluminum frame. He was in his sixties with a face that needed to be taken up. His eyelids drooped and he had a sagging mouth and a big double chin. What was left of his hair had slipped down around his ears. I wasn’t certain, but I thought he made a rude noise under his skirt.
“I’d like to talk to you about a past-due account,” I said.
“I got a bookkeeper handles that. She’s out.”
“Someone left a twelve-thousand-dollar lynx coat here to be cleaned and recut. She never paid her bill.”
“So?”
This guy didn’t have to get by on good looks alone. He was gracious too.
“Is Jacques here?” I asked.
“That’s who you’re talking to. I’m Jack. Who are you?”
“Kinsey Millhone,” I said. I took out a card and handed it to him. “I’m a private investigator from California.”
“No fooling,” he said. He stared at the card and then at me. He glanced around suspiciously like this might be a “Candid Camera” gag. “What do you want with me?”
“I’m looking for information about the woman who brought the coat in.”
“You got a subpoena?”
“No.”
“You got the money she owes?”
“No.”
“Then what are you bothering me for? I don’t have time for this. I got work to do.”
“Mind if I talk to you while you do it?”
He stared at me. His breathing made that wheezing sound that fat people sometimes make. “Yeah, sure. Why not? Suit yourself.”
I followed him into the big cluttered back room, taking in his scent. He smelled like something that spent the winter in a cave.
“How long have you been cutting fur?” I asked.
He turned and looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues.
“Since I was ten,” he said finally. “My father cut fur and his father before him.”
He indicated a stool and I sat, setting my big canvas handbag at my feet. There was a long worktable to my right, with a coarse brown-paper pattern laid out on it. The right front portion of a mink coat had been put together and he was apparently still working on it. The wall on the left was lined with hanging paper patterns and there were various quite ancient-looking sewing machines to my right. Every available surface was covered with pelts, scraps, unfinished coats, books, magazines, boxes, catalogues. Two dress forms stood side by side, like twins posing self-consciously for a photograph.
The place reminded me of a shoe-repair shop, all leather smell and machinery and the feel of craftsmanship. He took up the coat and examined it closely, then reached for a cutting device with a nasty curved blade. He glanced up at me. His eyes were the same shade of brown as the mink.
“So what do you want to know?”
“You remember the woman?”
“I know the coat. Naturally, I remember the woman who brought it in. Mrs. Boldt, right?”
“That’s right. Can you tell me when you saw her last?”
He dropped his gaze back to the fur. He made a cut. He crossed to one of the machines, motioning me to follow. He sat down on a stool and began to sew. I could see now that what had looked at first like an old-fashioned Singer was actually a machine especially designed for the stitching of fur. He lined up the two cut pieces vertically, fur-side in, and caught them in the grip of two flat metal disks, like large silver dollars set rim to rim. The machine whipped the leather edges together with an overhand stitch while he deftly tucked the fur out of the way so it wouldn’t get caught in the seam. The whole maneuver took about ten seconds. He spread the seam, smoothing it with his thumb on the backside. There were maybe sixty similar cuts in the leather, a quarter-inch apart. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but I didn’t want to distract him.
“She came in in March and said she wanted to sell the coat.”
“How’d you know it was really hers?”
“Because I asked for some identification and the bill of sale.” The irritable tone was back, but I ignored it.
“Did she say why she was selling it?”
“Said she was bored with it. She wanted mink, maybe blond, so I offered her credit against something in the store, but she said she wanted the cash, so I told her I’d see what I could do. I wasn’t that anxious to pay cash for a used coat. Ordinarily, I don’t deal in secondhand fur. There’s no market for it here and it’s a pain in the ass.”
“I take it you made an exception for her.”
“Well yeah, I did. The thing is, this lynx coat was in perfect condition and my wife’s been after me to get her one for years. She’s already got five coats, but when this one came in, I thought… what the hell? Make the old broad happy. What’s it to me? Mrs. Boldt and I haggled and I finally got the coat for five thousand, which was a good deal for both of us, especially since I got the matching hat. I told her she’d have to pay to have the coat cleaned and recut.”