The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 7

  I realized that that look was a better backdrop for all the jewelry. An emerald necklace, for instance, is going to pop against a cream-colored silk evening shell much more effectively than against some sequined piece of frou-frou.

  However, the woman who had smiled out at us envious peons from the pages of the Los Angeles Times now stared dully, without makeup, her brown roots showing, her body scrawny and curveless in the orange prison outfit. She’d gathered her hair with a rubber band and fashioned it into a semblance of a French twist with another rubber band. I’m sure prisoners weren’t allowed to have hairpins. I don’t know how she achieved it.

  All of which is to say, you can take the woman out of the Chanel, but you can’t take the Chanel out of the woman.

  Eileen Tenaway’s eyes were widely spaced—another East Coast, Jackie-Kennedy-like trait—and poised over a straight, thin nose. Her mouth had a slight downturn just before the corners, followed by a tiny upturn—a double cupid’s bow, doubtless highly attractive to a young Richard Tenaway at whatever fancy party had brought them together years ago.

  Her jawline swept upward from the point of her chin to her ears with incredible youthfulness, and I wondered whether she’d already had face work—perhaps an under-chin touch-up. I strained to tell; if she’d had any, she’d had the best. Her skin color was pale and fairly even.

  I silently moved to where I could see the picture over her shoulder.

  It was a studio portrait of a baby girl. An expensive job, a beautiful job. The baby was sitting up in front of a burgundy brocade drape. Her hair was white-blond, curled about her tiny ears, and she was smiling simply and freshly, showing stubby baby teeth and the tip of a pink tongue. Her dress was a simple design of cerulean velvet, and her little feet wore chamois booties.

  Over Eileen’s head Gary mouthed to me, First birthday.

  The child’s healthy fat hands clutched at a miniature necklace made, it took no Ph.D. to realize, of fine topaz beads, the stones varying in color from light gold at the back of the neck to deep orange, almost brown, at the center. Absolutely arresting.

  She could have been painted by Sargent, one of those children-versus-the-dark pictures he was so good at. Because in spite of her smile, there was a somberness about the child, an expression in the eyes of—what? Anxiety? Sadness? Wistfulness?

  The picture was so terribly poignant, and Eileen Tenaway’s spine slumped so dreadfully as she held it and gazed, that tears sprang to my eyes. I blinked them back.

  At last she looked up. “I was starting to forget what she looked like,” she said.

  That was the agony she carried inside.

  “I want my baby back.” She had cried all she could cry, and all she could do now was talk, but that hurt too. At this moment I saw she was real. Not a name in a gossip column, not a white-fang smile at a charity ball. A woman who had gone through the thing every parent dreads more than death itself: the loss of a child.

  Gathering myself, I said, “I’m so sorry, Eileen.”

  Gary looked at me helplessly.

  I took a chair at the table at right angles to her and laid my hands flat. “Eileen, here’s what I know,” I said. “Somebody fed your baby enough pills to kill her. They think you did it.”

  She peered at me, but still did not really acknowledge me.

  I hardened my voice and leaned into her face. “So do I, you bitch.”

  She gasped and then, when all I did was stare back at her, looked to Gary. He glanced sideways at me. I watched Eileen carefully, looking for a flush to come up her neck, or a vein to pop at her temple, or her hands to clench.

  Nothing. It was as if her insides had been ripped out and replaced with cold meat.

  “I thought you were supposed to be on my side,” she said.

  She didn’t talk East Coast, though. She talked California, maybe Marin County, or Walnut Creek. Yes, that was it, a cool Walnut Creek tone, locus of suburban San Francisco conservatism and wealth.

  “All right,” I said.

  “All right what?” asked Gary.

  “I am on your side,” I told Eileen. “But I’m not here to be your new best friend. I’m here to make the jury want to be your best friend. You and I need to talk. Gary, can you excuse us for a while?”

  “Uh,” he said, surprised, and I thought a little hurt. Fine. “Uh, sure.”

  Before he walked out he said to his client, “The one silver lining to your talking to the police that day was I was able to show the tape to our jury focus groups. Based on their feedback, I decided to hire Rita. You need her.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” she said, as the door slammed behind him.

  When the gust died away, I said, “I’m new at this.”

  “Me too.”

  I smiled at that, but she just looked at me warily. I said, “Look, Eileen, I don’t know what Gary told you about me, but I’m twenty-nine years old, mother of one, and fighting like hell to be the best actress in Hollywood. Maybe he saw that in me and that’s why he approached me. I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard of you.” She looked me up and down for the first time, and I knew what she was assessing: Does she look younger than me? Thinner? Prettier? Smarter?

  It’s exactly what goes on in casting waiting rooms.

  “You will, Eileen. You will.” I sat back in my chair diagonally like a hoody girl pretending she doesn’t care if anyone likes her. I had determined not to be deferential to Eileen. I was the high-status one here: I was free. Moreover, the only way this was going to work was if I could inspire deference in her.

  “It’s no sprinkles off my ice cream if you don’t get acquitted,” I added. “But wouldn’t it be a kick if you did?”

  She just watched me, her lips a little open, trying to figure me out. Her body was tense, especially in the shoulders and eyelids, as if trying to keep me from looking too far in.

  “Eileen, what was the name of your best friend when you were little?”

  Her eyes opened in real confusion, and I saw they were a terrific color of hazel.

  I said, “We’re just talking here.”

  “Well,” she said, “her name was Beatrice Rhinegold.”

  “Why did you like her?”

  “Why did I like her? She lived on my street and she was nice to me. One time when I had the chicken pox she brought her dog to the lawn under my bedroom window and taught it to do tricks while I watched. She did that for days.”

  I could see the memory in her eyes. “Well, I like Beatrice Rhinegold too,” I said.

  “Yeah. We made popcorn balls every Halloween.”

  “Did you keep in touch with her?”

  “No, she moved away.”

  I massaged Gary’s leather briefcase with my hand, then looked up. “At some point, Eileen, you’re going to tell the jury your side of things, and when you do it you’re going to be talking to Beatrice as if she’s sitting in the middle of the jury box.”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “You should think about it. You should look forward to it, because your story is going to set you free.”

  “I really don’t want, uh, can’t you just—”

  I let my voice off the leash a bit. “What you want or don’t want is totally irrelevant, Eileen. Do you get that? You want this horrible thing never to have happened. You want things you did in the past to be erased from the world. You want other people to come up to you and say they’re sorry. I can only help you if you talk to me about that night. Otherwise I’ll walk out and you can not think about it all you want in prison for the rest of your—”

  “All right all right all right! God!”

  She settled her butt deeper into the hard chair and heaved a sigh they must have heard at the front desk. “I put Gabriella to bed at eight o’clock. We read a story and she went to sleep. I didn’t give her any ice cream that night. They said they found some in her stomach. I went to bed around eleven. When I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night,
I thought I heard something. I turned on some lights, but I didn’t see anything. Gabriella was sleeping. I didn’t hear anything else. When I woke up in the morning—it took me a long time to wake up. I felt sick. When I woke up, I could tell”—she paused—“something was wrong.” Eileen’s face was like carved wood; she was controlling it as hard as she could. Her hands trembled on the tabletop. I noticed her fingernails were neatly shaped and not too long. “I always heard Gabriella stirring when I went down the hall to her room. But that morning she was quiet. I went in and—found her.” Another pause. “She was face-down outside the covers, and I thought, Oh, she must be cold. But before I even touched her I knew. I turned her over and she was purple. They say the blood pools when—you know. And she was cold. She looked so...gone.”

  We sat in silence for a while.

  Eileen cleared her throat and continued, “It wasn’t until the ambulance and police came that I realized the house had been burglarized.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I hadn’t seen it at all. The place was a mess, everything all over, every drawer dumped out, cushions cut open. The food from the refrigerator was all over the place. They’d even searched the room I slept in.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hadn’t even noticed. They didn’t get anything but some money I had in a tennis ball can, and a few small things—a jade figurine, a Louis Quinze inkwell, a clock. They couldn’t figure out where the safe was.” I expected to see a trace of triumph in her face but did not.

  “Yes?”

  “In Gabriella’s room, set into an outside wall behind a flimsy poster.”

  “And how come you didn’t wake up as early as usual?”

  “I couldn’t wake up. I had this terrible headache, I couldn’t focus my eyes very well. I remember wobbling down the hall. When you’re a parent, you sleep so lightly, you know? You always have this feeling of responsibility. I knew something had happened, and it was morning and I was struggling to become alert. It was like a nightmare.”

  “And why do you think—”

  “I must have been drugged. Didn’t you read the papers?”

  “Drugged how?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe with some kind of gas mask over my face while I slept. I don’t know how they did it,” she went on, her voice solidifying like ice crystals. “You’d have to ask them.”

  “Who?”

  She bit off the words. “I don’t know.”

  At the moment, she was utterly unconvincing to me. The vibes she was giving off, plus her facial expressions, were a mix of real and fake. She was trying for total control, yet she couldn’t help showing flashes of authentic emotion: I saw irritation, anger, and above all, fear.

  Did Eileen Tenaway really know what had happened, or at least why it had happened? She was scared and confused and calculating.

  And the grief was there beneath it all. She missed her baby. Was that the only footing for her life now? Maybe so.

  As she talked she avoided eye contact with me, yet her eyes were overactive, roaming all around that harsh room as if looking for a chink in the masonry.

  Chapter 9 – When One Case Closes …

  “Thanks for making the time,” said George Rowe, striding into a law office in a strip plaza in El Segundo.

  “Sure,” grunted the attorney. He knew what was coming, but he had to go through this exercise as he’d done on several unpleasant occasions before. Cost of doing business.

  “Oh,” Rowe said. “Good morning. Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “You know who I am?” The bartender rose from his chair.

  “Of course. I’d recognize you anywhere, pants or no pants.”

  “What the fuck is this? Who the fuck. This fucker—”

  “Shut up,” said the attorney. He wore a cheap suit and a comb-over.

  The bartender’s mouth formed a tight slit.

  Rowe carried only an electronic gadget the size of a paperback book. He opened it, pressing keys as he did so, and set it on the corner of the attorney’s desk. The attorney did not ask him to sit, nor did Rowe care to; this was going to be quick.

  The lawyer stood at Rowe’s elbow looking at the liquid-crystal screen. The bartender crowded in, and Rowe stepped aside as the movie began. There was no sound, no need for it. The attorney and his client watched, the bartender breathing heavily.

  Quietly, Rowe said, “It only lasts about four minutes.” The attorney cut him a look, then bit his lip to keep from laughing. The bartender’s eyes glazed over as he watched the video. His mouth fell open, then slowly closed into a tight slit again that got tighter still.

  Rowe had chosen a slow fade-out to end the movie, a blackening of the final image of the bartender’s white buttocks poised over the girlfriend’s hips as they discussed, apparently, whether to do it again.

  Los Angeles is a city of many movies.

  Rowe shut the device.

  He and the attorney looked at the bartender.

  At last the bartender said, “That bitch.”

  Predictable, thought Rowe.

  “And you bastard!” The bartender’s face was a rich, interesting cranberry color all the way to his hairline. He stepped toward Rowe. “You’re gonna—”

  “Shut up,” said his attorney again. “Do not make any threats.”

  The bartender lunged at Rowe, who moved quickly and obliquely in his hard-soled shoes to trip one of the bartender’s legs backward, popping it out from under him.

  “You fucking piece of fuck,” the bartender said from the floor, holding his knee.

  His lawyer said, “You’re getting mad at the wrong people.”

  Rowe hooked his thumbs in his belt and said, “Look, fax us a letter within an hour and we’ll consider not going after him.”

  The attorney said to his client, “Did you bring that two hundred and fifty dollars I told you to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it to me and get the hell out of here. I’ll send the letter for you.”

  Rowe picked up his video player and said, “Your girlfriend doesn’t live there anymore. Don’t go looking for her.”

  “You shit fuck motherfucking fucker.”

  Rowe reached down and, with a move so quick it was almost invisible, slapped the bartender’s ear, hard. “Understand?”

  The bartender yelped, then gritted his teeth and muttered, “Yeah.”

  Rowe said to the attorney, “I can’t help asking. Why did you take this one?”

  The lawyer hated Rowe’s flat stomach and unstained tie. But he touched his comb-over in self-affirmation, then answered cheerfully enough, “I wasn’t busy, and the odds seemed fair. But I didn’t know he was that stupid.”

  _____

  At home Rowe shucked his shirt and tie for shorts and T-shirt. He opened a can of American beer in celebration, took a gulp, then phoned his boss.

  “Avery. Have you gotten a fax yet?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Nita just put it on my desk. Crunch & Munch closed. Good work.” His boss’s voice was a poppa-bear growl.

  “Thanks, and now let’s talk about Tenaway.”

  “What do you think?”

  Rowe stood with the phone to his ear, holding his beer with the other hand, and gazed at the whiteboards in his living room. He had the boards practically memorized, not that they were any good. On them he had written things like:

  Minas Gerais.

  Baby revenge?

  Reverse bribe, find all principals.

  Sister-girlfriend weak link?

  Visa dates.

  Rowe said, “I want all the files again.”

  “What for?”

  “I want the paperwork the Brazilian police wrote up, and—”

  “There’s nothing new, George.” Avery was smiling, but his voice didn’t show it. He liked to challenge Rowe and he liked to be sold up the river by Rowe’s passion for the game. “And you know the claims have been paid.”

  Rowe took a sip of beer from the can. He pressed his upper
lip lightly against the sharp metal opening. “Yeah. But if we can prove fraud, we can probably get it back from the company. And who knows about the wife?”

  “She’s blowing through hers right now paying Gary Kwan to keep her ass out of prison. I think her luck might be running out.”

  “I wouldn’t,” remarked Rowe, “call it lucky to have your kid die.”

  Ignoring that, his boss said, “This one we’d prosecute forever.”

  “All the way,” Rowe agreed. “We’d have automatic front-page coverage. You can’t buy deterrence like that.”

  “But why, George? Just tell me why on this one.”

  “I don’t think we were as thorough in Brazil as we should have been.”

  “You’re still mad you didn’t get to go.”

  “Damn right I am! Yes! Schaller and Contini don’t know their ass from an outhouse. I can’t believe you just accepted—” He caught himself. “I’m just respectfully saying I can do better.”

  “Yeah,” said Avery, “the respect is just squirting out of the phone here.”

  Rowe ran his hand through his cinnamon crew cut. “Look, we’ve got this businessman, this prominent guy, he drops out of sight. Essentially he flees the country, OK? He flees the country successfully, for whatever reason. Then he turns up dead? He either screwed over his business partners or he owed somebody something he couldn’t pay.”

  “Drugs.”

  “Drugs, I don’t know. Maybe. Seems like drugs would be too dirty for this guy. Some other crime.” Rowe’s voice came from deep in his chest, like a singer’s, but he didn’t care much for singing. He liked drumming. In an alcove off the hall he’d placed his drum kit, a small stand-up set of maplewood and chrome. Once in a while he’d jam with a few other guys, horn players who liked to play jazz standards, some ragtime. Drumming like that required steadiness, taste, and patience. He liked the precision of it. Sometimes when the music came together just right, tears sprang to his eyes.