Born Innocent (22 page)

“
That I feel exactly the same.”

“
Good.” He took her hand. “Come on.”

He pulled her off the bed. She went without reluctance. He led her to the bathroom, where he turned on the taps in the huge tub, poured in some foaming bath oil provided courtesy of the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel, and led her down into the steaming, bubbling water.

“
Is this the time?” she asked on a sigh.

“
The time for what?”

“
When you do all those things you mentioned this afternoon?”

“
What things?”

“
You know, the things that take more than twenty minutes.”

He chuckled.

She asked again, “Well, is this the time—or not?”

He assured her that it was.

Beneath the froth of bubbles, under the hot, soothing water, she felt his hand on her thigh.

With a long, yearning sigh, Claire let her head relax against the rim of the tub. Joe’s hand moved higher.

Claire forgot everything, as she knew he intended her to. She forgot the man who now lay unconscious in the hospital, and the unknown person who’d shot him and left her to take the blame. She forgot her hopes that she might learn what had really happened from one of the people on Joe’s list. She even forgot that there was a secret she was keeping from Joe—a secret that, once revealed, could destroy his trust in her, and shatter the wonder they now shared.

For a long, long time, she thought of nothing but Joe’s hands, and the pleasure they were giving her. And once his hands were through, there was his mouth, and after his mouth, there was the best part of all____

Sometime later he carried her to the bed, and he made love to her some more.

After that, as soft as a baby’s blanket, sleep settled over her. She woke, but only partway, when she felt Joe cover her and pull her close.

He kissed her, a breath of a kiss, and smoothed her hair back with his callused hand. “Shh. Sleep now.”

The next thing she knew, it was morning.

* * *

The desk called them at six, as Joe had requested. They quickly showered, and room service was knocking on the door just as Claire finished dressing. She ushered in the bellman, who had their breakfast, and told him to wheel the cart over by the round table.

“
Breakfast!” she called to Joe in the bathroom as soon as the bellman had left. He came out right away, smelling of after-shave, with a towel around his waist and water droplets still gleaming in the triangle of hair on his chest.

He leaned across the cart and kissed her. They sat down. She poured the coffee. As they ate, they planned the busy day ahead.

Before noon, they’d been cursed at and threatened with two lawsuits. They’d put fifty miles on her car driving around Alameda and Oakland.

Three people on the list had agreed to talk to them, and from them they’d only learned more of the same about Alan Henson. He charmed people and took their money, and he seemed to have no conscience about the personal destruction he left in his wake.

They took a break for lunch, during which they decided on their next moves and talked about the few things they’d learned.

After lunch, they went further south, to Daly City, San Bruno and Burlingame. They learned from a fortyish, exhausted-looking housewife that, thanks to Alan Henson, her children would be paying for their own college educations—if they could find jobs that made that much. They talked to a retired couple with nothing left of their life
savings. The couple lived in a painfully tidy trailer that their children had chipped in to buy for them after Alan Henson had cleaned them out.

By four o’clock, they began moving back toward San Francisco, trying again to reach the people who hadn’t been available on their first pass through the area. They were lucky—at least in the sense that they found the two people they’d missed before. But the first one, an older woman, yelled at them to leave her alone, she’d done nothing, and she’d already told the police as much. She marched into her small house and slammed the door.

Joe said, “I have a feeling that’s all we’re going to get from Mrs. Yamamoto.”

Claire sighed and agreed.

The second one, Titus Paley by name, ran a dry-cleaning business in Daly City. Since he hadn’t been at his house or the dry-cleaning shop earlier, they decided to give both locations one more try.

They found him at the dry-cleaning shop. When they told him they wanted to talk to him about Alan Henson, Titus Paley pulled a .45 out from behind the counter and pointed it at them.

“
Alan Henson cost me two of my three shops and my cabin in Tahoe,” Titus explained in an extremely level voice. “I didn’t shoot him—if I had, you can be damn sure he’d be dead now. I got nothing else to say to anyone ’cept my lawyer, so get out.”

Both Claire and Joe thought it wisest not to argue. They backed out of the shop and got in the car and speedily drove away.

After that, they took a break for dinner.

As dark drew on, they tried the little row house not that far from Union Square. Again, there was no one there.

They drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito that night. Two of the names listed addresses there. But they struck out on both counts that time.

Finally, they went back to the hotel for the night, no closer to finding out who shot Alan Henson than they had been when Claire had insisted they come here.

When they lay down together in bed, Joe reached for her. She went into his arms. He loved her as tenderly and thoroughly as he had the night before. Claire tried to give herself up to the beauty of his touch, but time pressed in on her. She couldn’t entirely forget how close they were to the end of the list—and how little they’d learned.

At last, when he settled her against his body, she tried her best to simply close her eyes and forget everything. She succeeded, eventually. For a few brief hours she knew nothing except the soothing oblivion of a dreamless sleep.

The next morning, Claire woke to the sound of the phone ringing. Joe answered it.

“
Yeah?” he said. Then, “Great. Thanks, Ted.” He hung up.

Claire opened an eye and groggily demanded, “That was your detective friend?”

Joe yawned and stretched. “Yeah.”

Claire sat up in bed. All her grogginess had fled. “So? Don’t hold out. What did he say?”

Joe yawned again. “Well, you know how he’s been keeping an eye on Mariah Henson’s apartment?”

“
Yes? And?”

Joe reached out and wrapped his hand around the back of her neck. He pulled her close and kissed her, a lovely, lingering kiss. Then he told her, “It looks like she’s in town, maybe taking a break from sitting by her husband’s bedside.”

Claire shivered a little, partly at the memory of the hatred in the woman’s blue eyes the one time Claire had seen her, and partly with anticipation. She’d almost given up hope that she might get a chance to talk to Henson’s wife.

She asked, “Did your friend see her?”

Joe shook his head. “I said,
it looks like she’s in town.
Ted came off an all-night surveillance job and decided to stop by there on his way home. He managed to get into the parking garage.”

“
And?”

“
Her car’s there.”

Claire was already halfway to the bathroom. “Don’t just lie there, Joe Tally. We have to get going, talk to her while we have the chance. Order breakfast. We don’t have all day.”

“
Yes, ma’am.” He was laughing at her enthusiasm as he picked up the phone again.

Mariah Henson’s apartment house wasn’t that far from Professor Lionel Whitling’s run-down residence hotel. It would have taken less than half an hour to walk from one place to the other.

But the two places were universes apart in every other way. The professor lived in a dreary room in a drab building on a narrow street.

On Mariah Henson’s street, the charming turn-of-the-century architecture that usually distinguished San Francisco had been swept away. In its place were modern buildings of marble, steel and glass, structures that looked more like places to do business than somewhere anyone would want to live. The buildings weren’t skyscrapers by any means, but they seemed to loom and intimidate nonetheless.

The street was spotless, and the sea wind swept in off the bay, smelling assertively clean and crisp. Trees were
contained in big stone planters along the sidewalk, and security guards waited just beyond front entrances to quickly discourage anyone who had no business there.

The guard in Mariah Henson’s building stopped them the moment they stepped beyond the big smoked-glass doors. “Good morning. How can I help you?” He stood behind a stone desk in front of a polished stone wall opposite the main door.

Claire cast Joe a quick glance, to let him know she wanted first crack at this one. His response was a nod so brief that only she could have seen it.

She said, “We’d like to speak with Mariah Henson, please.”

“
Is Mrs. Henson expecting you?”

“
I’m sure.”

The guard’s dark brows drew together over his large nose. Claire’s evasive response had gotten nowhere with him. He demanded, “Is she expecting you or not?”

Claire drew herself up and decided that the best defense was to get pushy. “No, she’s not expecting us. Ring her apartment and tell her Claire Snow would like to speak with her, please.”

The guard grunted. “Fine. Just a minute.”

He punched some buttons behind his stone podium and made the call Claire had told him to make. As he waited for someone to pick up on the other end, Claire tried not to look worried. After all, it was highly unlikely that Henson’s wife would actually consent to speak to them.

In a moment, she knew, she and Joe would be told to leave. She wondered if they should try finding their own way into the parking garage and lurking near Mariah Henson’s car until she showed up to claim it.

So sure was she that they would be turned away, she had to stifle a gasp of surprise when the guard said, “You can go up. The elevator is down that hall. Tenth floor. Number D.”

The tenth floor was also the top floor, it turned out. Claire and Joe got in the glass-walled elevator and stared at their own reflections as they smoothly ascended the floors.

At the top of the building, they stepped out into a hallway. At one end of the hallway there was a huge round window that offered a breathtaking view of the bay. At the other end, there was a marble wall with brass letters on it: 10A and B were to the left, C and D to the right.

Joe and Claire approached the marble wall and turned right. They walked to the end of that hall, where they could choose between C and D. They turned right, and at last came to a pair of tall double doors. The brass plaque beside the doors informed them that they had reached apartment 10D.

A maid straight out of a B movie let them in. She wore a black dress with white apron, collar and cuffs. She was tall and Swedish-looking, her hair pulled back in a French roll.

“
This way, please. Mrs. Henson expects you.” She led the way from the high-ceilinged, skylit foyer to a high-ceilinged, skylit sitting room. “Sit down, please.” She gestured at the plush modular couches and chairs arranged around a black marble fireplace.

Claire sat down in one of the chairs. Joe went and stood by the fireplace. The maid left them.

As she and Joe exchanged a telling glance, Claire had to stifle a laugh. Mariah Henson’s apartment was so aggressively luxurious, it almost didn’t seem real. It was a palace of areca palms and leather and polished stone and glass. The view of the bay out the one window wall was stunning in its splendor. A huge crystal nautilus shell displayed on an ebony pillar drew the eye back in disbelief time and again—the thing was four feet in diameter, at least.

Mariah Henson kept them waiting for several minutes. She was giving them time to be intimidated by the sheer opulence of her living room, Claire had no doubt.

But at last she appeared, looking calm and aloof, wearing a silk jumpsuit the same maroon color as the business suit she’d worn to Claire’s preliminary hearing four days before. She swept into the room and took the big leather chair across from the smaller one Claire had chosen.

She rested her hands on the chair arms, and she looked slowly from Claire to Joe. Her blue eyes were flat. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t offer you coffee. I don’t imagine this is a social call.”

“
No,” Claire answered evenly. “It’s not.”

“
What do you want, then?”

Claire decided to cut right to the point. She leaned forward. “Mrs. Henson, we’re trying to find out who shot your husband.”

Mariah Henson’s maroon fingernails dug into the butter-soft leather of her chair. “Don’t insult my intelligence. He was shot in
your
little bungalow, with
your
gun, after having some kind of a fight with
you.
If you really want to know who shot him, the best place to look is in a mirror.”