‘Sure,’ I said, catching him in the fib almost at once. I’d seen his mother’s passport, but he didn’t know that. Lilith’s birthday was on April 4th, some six months away. Unless Skip was a guy who really planned ahead, his birthday surprise story was pretty fishy.
‘I had to look at a couple of letters,’ I confessed. ‘You know, to track the owner down.’ I imagined Skip, left alone in his mother’s appalling house, tossing clothes and shoes and unopened boxes around the cluttered house in disgust, frustration and rage. I pictured him finding the bag, opening the shirt box, going through it with growing shock and surprise.
‘Who is Zan, do you know?’ I asked.
‘My mother’s old boyfriend.’
‘Do you know his full name?’
‘What’s it to you?’
I shrugged, but probably not very convincingly. ‘Just curious. I guess I thought Zan was your dad. Is he?’
Skip stared past me at the dark and silent TV. ‘I don’t have a father. I was conceived spontaneously by the process of parthenogenesis,’ he said bitterly.
‘My dad’s still alive,’ I said conversationally. ‘But I lost my mother a long time ago.’ I reached out and laid my hand very gently on the blanket covering his good leg. ‘Take care of your mother, Skip. She needs you.’
‘She doesn’t need anybody,’ he snarled.
‘We all need somebody, Skip. Do you have a wife?’
He snorted.
‘A girlfriend?’
‘She decided that Maryland was a foreign country, and that leaving the beaches of sunny California would be worse then living naked among the Tlingit in Alaska. So, fuck her.’
‘Well, OK then!’ I had to laugh. ‘So, tell me how you really feel.’
‘Do you remember praying with me?’ I asked after a moment of silence.
Skip’s eyes flicked to the right, in the general direction of the bedside table where a rosary hung from the knob of the drawer. ‘Sorry, I don’t,’ he said.
I pointed. ‘Would you like me to hand you the rosary?’
When he said yes, I gently unhooked it from the knob and held it up. I fingered the rosary, running the cool, smooth black beads between my fingers before dangling the crucifix over his open palm. I let it fall, and his hand closed over it. Skip’s eyelids drooped. He breathed in deeply, held his breath for a moment, then let it out slowly.
‘I am tiring you,’ I said. ‘I better be going.’
Skip’s eyes flew open. ‘I’m sorry. How are you?’ he asked, which I appreciated, even as an afterthought.
I raised my arm, still encased in the brace. ‘Broken arm. Almost completely healed.’
‘Good, good.’
‘Would you like me to visit again?’ I asked.
‘Yes, please. The cable channels are fascinating, but I honestly think King Tut has given up all his secrets. The Titanic, too, you know?’ His eyes closed, his chest rose and fell, slowly, rhythmically.
I was tiptoeing toward the door when somebody in the hall outside bellowed, ‘Nick, buddy,’ and barged into the room. When the man saw me, he stopped dead, as if his shoes had suddenly hit a patch of superglue.
‘Well, well, well. This must be your mother.’
‘Shhh,’ I warned, tapping an index finger against my lips like the proverbial librarian, although I’d never seen a real librarian actually do that. ‘He’s asleep. Can we talk in the hall?’
‘And you are?’ I asked as I pulled the door shut behind me.
‘Jim Hoffner, Ms Chaloux. I’m working for Nick.’ He held out his hand.
I didn’t think much of Hoffner’s investigative skills if he mistook me for the elfin Lilith Chaloux. ‘Sorry, my name is Hannah Ives. We’ve spoken on the phone.’
Hoffner’s hand retracted as if I’d zapped him with a gag hand buzzer.
‘And I believe you have visited my home on a couple of occasions.’ I sent icy shards in his direction. After what he’d had done to my house, I wanted to slap the jerk silly, but, for the moment, I was enjoying making the worm squirm. ‘I believe you may have left something behind the last time you were there.’
‘Oh?’
‘Your fingerprints.’
‘I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about Mrs Ives.’ His face grew red beneath a tan that owed more to a tanning bed in a strip mall somewhere, than it did to a week spent lounging on a Florida beach.
‘Your goons, then. I should send you the cleaning bill. Do you know how hard it is to get fingerprint powder off wallpaper?’
‘I . . .’ he began.
I raised a warning finger. ‘Just stay away from me, Mr Hoffner. Concentrate on squeezing whatever you can out of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, take your thirty, forty percent, whatever, and stay out of my life.
‘I have nothing to interest you now,’ I announced airily. ‘I just stopped by to tell Nicholas that I was able to locate his mother and return the box of letters you were so interested in getting your hands on directly to her. So . . .’ I rubbed my palms together. ‘They’re back home where they belong. All’s well that ends well, don’t you agree?’
I left Hoffner sputtering in my wake.
Out in the parking lot I passed a green Ford pickup. The state of Maryland allows seven characters on a vanity plate and James Hoffner had managed to use them all: GOTALAW.
I stopped, peered through the window into the cab. Tossed carelessly on the front seat was a New York Yankees baseball cap. A pair of sunglasses with ice-blue lenses dangled by one earpiece from the sun visor. My heart flopped. Had Hoffner followed me to New York City? Had he been the guy watching me from the corner of 5th Avenue and 11th Street the day I found the Simon sisters?
TWENTY
Thursday dawned bright and clear but too damn cold to walk a dog. Too cold to do anything, in my opinion, except slip into a bathtub full of bubbles and try to soak off the oily feeling I got after my confrontation with James Hoffner.
I’d been almost fully immersed, a hot washcloth neatly folded and pressed over my eyelids, when Paul knocked on the door. ‘Would madam care for coffee?’
I raised a corner of the washcloth and peeked out. ‘Madam would. Very much.’
Paul pushed the door open with one foot and eased into the bathroom, a mug of coffee in each hand. He handed one to me, then lowered the toilet seat lid and sat down on its chenille cover. ‘You really shouldn’t have provoked the man, Hannah.’
‘Who? Hoffner?’
‘Who else have you been provoking lately?’
I slid the washcloth completely off my eyes so I could glare at my husband. ‘But he needed provoking. Especially after what he did to our house. And I think he followed me when I went up to New York City, too. The creep.’
‘You can’t prove that he did either of those things.’
‘That’s why he needed provoking.’
‘To what end?’
I slithered down in the tub until bubbles covered everything but my head. ‘The way he smiled, like he was smarter than me. Made my blood boil! He shouldn’t be allowed to think that he can get away with spying, with trashing other people’s houses, even if he has it done by some goons in absentia.’
Using my toes, I turned the tap so that more hot water would trickle into the tub. ‘Help me sort something out.’
Paul leaned back against the toilet tank, extended his long legs and crossed them at the ankles. ‘I have a feeling this is going to take some time, so let me get comfortable,’ he grinned.
‘I’ve been working on a timeline,’ I said, ‘and some things just aren’t fitting in. The Metro crash was on Tuesday afternoon, September seventh.’
‘“A date that will live in infamy,”’ Paul quoted.
I wrung the washcloth out and placed it over my eyes again. ‘And when did Meredith Logan go missing?’
‘I don’t know. We didn’t hear about Meredith until much later, from Emily. I’m assuming that you know the answer to this que
stion.’
‘I do. Meredith disappeared on Tuesday, September seventh, around lunchtime.’
‘And you believe there’s a connection?’
If my eyes hadn’t been hidden under a washcloth, I would have rolled them. ‘What do you think Nicholas Ryan Aupry, aka Skip, was doing on September seventh before he stepped on to a Metro train and sat down next to me?’
‘I don’t know. What?’
‘He told me he was doing genealogical research at the Library of Congress, in the Thomas Jefferson building, just four or five blocks away from the Lynx News building.’ I raised a single finger. ‘Opportunity.’
‘OK, but what’s his motive?’
‘Like me, he’d figured out that John Chandler was his father and he wanted to confront him. Meredith Logan simply got in the way and, I don’t know, maybe something snapped.’
‘You did say that he’d confessed to a murder when he thought he was dying.’
‘Exactly! Yet when I saw Skip in the hospital yesterday afternoon, he claimed he didn’t remember praying with me. But when he said it, his eyes shot right over to the rosary on his bedside table, so I’m convinced he did remember it happening. And if he remembers praying, he also has to have remembered that he confessed to a killing.’
‘He could have been speaking figuratively, Hannah. What were his actual words?’
‘“I think I killed somebody.”’
‘He thinks he killed somebody? How can one be ambivalent about that? Either you killed somebody or you didn’t. It’s not like Skip pushed Meredith off the edge of a cliff then left her lying on the rocks below, not knowing whether she was alive or dead. Meredith’s death was very hands-on. She was strangled.’
‘Motive and opportunity,’ I said. ‘Skip’s number one on my suspect list.’
‘Your theory should be easy enough to prove one way or the other. Don’t you have to sign in at the Library of Congress? Wouldn’t he have to apply for a Reader Identification Card? And there are security cameras all over the joint, as I recall.’
Underneath my washcloth, I nodded, agreeing. ‘Security is really tight. Airport-like. Last time I was there . . .’ I raised a corner of the washcloth and fixed an eye on my husband, ‘. . . I was doing research for good old Whitworth and Sullivan, damn them.’
I repositioned the washcloth over my eyes and lay back. ‘Security guards paw through your packages, handbags, backpacks, you name it, coming and going, and you have to pass through metal detectors and theft detection systems, too.’
Paul balanced his mug on his left thigh. ‘So, let’s say, for point of argument, that Skip lied about being at the Thomas Jefferson building. He wouldn’t show up on their surveillance tapes at all. And if he was doing research at the Jefferson building, as he claimed, the tapes would show when he came and when he left, wouldn’t they?’
‘They would,’ I agreed. ‘But I’ll bet the police are not looking at Library of Congress surveillance tapes because nobody knows what you and I do, that Skip confessed to a murder, that he was in the neighborhood at the time, and that he may have a family connection with the boss of the murder victim.’
‘And you’re going to point this out to them, right?’
I whipped the washcloth off my eyes and tucked it into the soap dish. ‘I don’t know what to do! I wish I knew somebody with access to those security tapes.’
‘The long-suffering police lieutenant Dennis Rutherford?’
I sighed. ‘There may be twenty-one police jurisdictions in the Washington, DC area, but, alas, Chesapeake County is not one of them.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something, Hannah?’
‘What?’
‘The press has been speculating that Meredith’s death was the work of a serial killer. How about that other victim, the girl they found near Reagan Airport? And the woman who was attacked in Rock Creek Park? They can’t all have been Skip’s doing. He could have murdered Meredith, I’ll give you that, but you and I both know that he was teetering between life and death in intensive care when the other two girls were attacked.’
I extended my arm. ‘Hand me a towel, Professor, and stop being so damned reasonable.’
Paul stood, grabbed a towel off the rack next to the sink, and when I climbed out of the tub, he wrapped me snugly in it. ‘I feel like a taco,’ I said.
‘You don’t look like a taco.’ He kissed the top of my head.
‘Who knows almost as much about what the police are up to as the police do themselves?’ I asked my husband a few minutes later as I was struggling to pull my jeans on over damp legs.
‘Police scanner hobbyists?’
I hadn’t thought about that one. ‘Zzzzt! No, the correct answer is the media.’
‘And so?’
‘I think it’s time I paid another visit to Lynx News, don’t you?’
TWENTY-ONE
I found Jud Wilson’s card where I had left it: in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing on the day I first met John Chandler at Lynx News. Hoping he was as first-to-come-and-last-to-leave as Meredith Logan, his predecessor, I telephoned Jud at eight o’clock on Monday morning. He wasn’t available to take my call, so I left a message reminding him who I was and asking to see him.
When my telephone rang about ten minutes later, I was up to my elbows in soap bubbles, washing out a cashmere sweater in the kitchen sink.
It was Jud, sounding out of breath. ‘Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, Mrs Ives, but it’s been pretty hectic here this morning. How can I help you?’
‘The first thing you can do,’ I said lightly, ‘is start calling me Hannah.’
‘Sure. How can I help you then, Hannah? John Chandler told me he’d settled everything with you on your last visit. Is this something new?’
‘It is. And it’s not Mr Chandler I want to see, it’s you.’
‘Why me?’
I thought about appealing to his ego. Such a bright young man! What a promising career! Do I have a scoop for you! But he was a bright young man with a built-in, finely tuned bullshit-o-meter, so I decided to tell him the truth. ‘This is about Meredith Logan,’ I said. ‘Did you know Meredith well, Jud?’
‘I did. She was going to be moving up to production – echoing rolls and cuts, locking up, a bit of talent wrangling. I was going to take over her duties on the office side of things, so I had been shadowing her off and on.’
After his speech, Jud was quiet so long that I thought I’d lost the connection. ‘Jud? You there?’
‘Sorry. I was just thinking that if I had been shadowing her on the day she disappeared, she might still be alive.’
‘That’s not your fault, Jud. You couldn’t watch over Meredith twenty-four seven.’
‘I called in sick that day,’ he confessed.
‘You can’t help being sick.’
‘But I wasn’t. Sick, that is. Monday was the last day of Abbey Road on the River, the Beatles Tribute Festival. I took a water taxi over to National Harbor with some friends because the band “All You Need is Love” was performing the entire “White Album” that night. Later, we ended up at a bar in Georgetown and, oh man, I don’t remember coming home, but I must have because I woke up around ten in my own bed with a headache so evil I thought my eyeballs were going to explode.’
‘I’ve been sick like that before.’
‘But I’ll bet nobody died because of it. God, I feel so guilty!’
‘I’m feeling guilty about Meredith, too,’ I confessed. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been sitting on some information that might point the police in the direction of her killer, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me.’
‘You? But you don’t even know Meredith.’ A note of suspicion had crept into his voice. ‘Or do you?’
‘When I knew Meredith, she was Meredith Thompson, a student at Bryn Mawr College, and she was my daughter Emily’s best friend.’
‘Jesus! You’re Emily’s mother? Emily Ives?’
It took a moment for this to sink in.
‘You know my daughter?’
‘Know her? I dated your daughter, Mrs Ives. Emily Ives. Hannah Ives. I never made the connection. I feel like an idiot.’ While I gaped like a beached fish, grateful that Jud couldn’t see me, he continued. ‘I thought we had a good thing going, too, until Emily met Dan.’
Dan. Daniel. Last name Shemansky. My son-in-law’s given name until he took it into his head that he wanted to be called ‘Dante.’ Just Dante, one name, like Cher or Madonna or Elvis.
‘You must have gone to Haverford, then,’ I said.
‘Right. Emily was my lab partner in Environmental Geology. I met Meredith in German 101. We were all pretty tight.’
A long-ago phone call popped into my head. Emily had needed a science credit so she’d registered for Environmental Geology at nearby Haverford College, not because Bryn Mawr didn’t have a course that would satisfy the requirement, but because the geology class was scheduled before lunch, and the vegetarian food options at Haverford – particularly the lentil casserole – were way better, in Emily’s opinion, than those at Bryn Mawr.
‘So, can you meet me somewhere where we can talk, Jud?’
‘After what happened to Meredith? Do you think I’m nuts?’
The thought that anyone would suspect me of murdering Meredith, or anyone else for that matter, left me temporarily speechless.
‘I’m sorry, Jud. I remember how close the two of you were.’
‘She got me this job, Mrs Ives. I’d been working as a paralegal for a major law firm and not enjoying it much at all. I’d always wanted to break into broadcasting and it was Meredith who gave me that opportunity.’
‘I see what you mean,’ I said after a moment. ‘Let me come to the Lynx offices again, then. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.’
‘We have plenty of coffee in the office, but it’s pretty horrible. Pick me up a soy latte at Union Station and you’ll be my friend for life.’
‘Consider it done,’ I said.
‘We can talk, but, soy latte or not, I can’t make any promises, Mrs Ives,’ I could tell there was no way he was going to call me Hannah now.
A Quiet Death Page 14