Death Was the Other Woman (5 page)

BY ONE O'CLOCK I
was back at my desk with my nose pushed firmly into my book. I heard the elevator arrive at our floor a little after one, but figured its occupant must be visiting the accountancy firm down the hall. I was wrong.

Dex doesn't care if I read at my desk when there's nothing much doing, but he doesn't like it when clients see me doing it. I just managed to get the book into my desk drawer when Rita Heppelwaite sailed into the office unannounced.

Her arrival was a repeat of the performance from the day before, but today's dress was lilac, with about a million tiny buttons down the front and a froth of lace at the neck and the sleeves. I figured it would have taken me about a year to get into that dress or out of it, a hardship she seemed to have skirted by leaving more of the buttons undone—top and bottom—than I would have thought appropriate. She was the image of a woman intent on toppling the men on the high iron from their girders.

Today the fur coat was nowhere to be seen, but I figured that was because it was a few degrees warmer. Too warm for a fur coat, even if you were set to show it off.

Aside from her outfit, Rita Heppelwaite herself seemed different today. I couldn't quite put my finger on the why, but I knew it was more than the coat. When she asked for Dex, there seemed to me to be something false and foreign about her, though she smiled and seemed affable enough. Maybe that was part of it: “affable” wouldn't have been a word I would have used to describe her the day before.

I got a little more suspicious when I asked her to take a seat in the waiting room and she not only complied, but stayed put.

I went into Dex's office, careful to close the door behind me. I hadn't checked on him since before lunch, so I was thankful to see him not only sitting upright, but looking reasonably tidy and acceptably clear. He'd probably had only a couple of drinks so far.

“Rita Heppelwaite is here to see you,” I said softly, more aware than anyone that voices from Dex's office could carry if pitched just so.

“How does she look?” Dex asked.

I considered briefly. “Trampy. And she's dressed in lilac today. No sign of the coat.”

Dex shook his head. “I don't need a fashion report, bright eyes. I don't care what she's wearing. I was just wondering— you know—does she seem upset?”

I considered the question, surprised I hadn't thought of it myself. “You know, Dex, she doesn't. Not so's I can tell, anyway. She just seems a little ...” I thought about it again. “She seems a little bright. A little . . . brittle. Why?”

“I'm just wondering if she knows about Dempsey. I'm figuring it's possible she doesn't. That she's just here for a report.”

“I don't know, boss. You're the detective. And you're probably right. Should I send her in?”

He considered briefly. “Naw,” he said, “I'll come out. If she's gonna make a scene, I'd rather she do it out there.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “A floor show is just what I need. You gonna tell her?” Because thus far Dex had seemed disinclined to tell anyone anything.

“Sure,” he said, getting up and running a hand through his hair. “She's the client. She's got a right to know.”

“You want me to type while you're telling her?” I knew he didn't want me to make myself scarce. If he'd wanted to talk to Rita Heppelwaite in private, he would have had me send her into his office.

“Naw, too noisy. Maybe file,” he suggested helpfully.

I told him I'd see what I could do.

“Miss Heppelwaite,” he said, when he saw her. “It's good to see you again so soon.” I busied myself with the files, moving N's to M and vice versa, trying to look occupied while not making too much of a mess. Trying to look busy, as Dex had suggested, while keeping the pair of them in plain view.

“Mr. Theroux, it's good of you to see me again on such short notice,” she said as she rose. I looked at her closely when she said this, but if there was irony in her voice when she uttered the words, I didn't hear it. I entertained the possibility that we'd been doing such a good job covering it up that no one knew how busy Dex wasn't. The thought gave me an odd glimmer of pride.

“Not at all, Miss Heppelwaite.” He indicated she should take a chair there in the waiting room, and he pulled the other chair out slightly, so he was facing her. If she wondered why he didn't invite her into his office, she gave no sign. “I guess you're here for a report?”

She nodded. The light reflected off her lavender dress, adding a cool glow to her skin.

“Then I'm afraid I have some disturbing news for you. And there's just no way easy way to tell it.” I could see that Dex regretted this. He would have softened it if he could. “I'm sorry to have to inform you that Mr. Dempsey is dead.”

I saw her eyes go all wide, as though it would help her hear better, help her comprehend. At the same time, she let out a little gasp, something that came out sounding a little like “Oh,” and her hand flew to her mouth, as though to stop the word from escaping.

“Dead,” she repeated. Her hand left her mouth and fluttered to her throat. She touched the small bones there, at the base of her neck. An unconscious gesture. She touched them carefully, one by one, as though for luck or perhaps for strength; I wouldn't have bet money either way. “Please, Mr. Theroux,” she said at length. “Go on.”

“Not much to tell really,” Dex said, not without sympathy. “I staked out the place on Lafayette Square, just as you asked. I intended to follow Dempsey, but he never came out. Near eleven o'clock last night, I thought it best to go and investigate. I found his—sorry, Miss Heppelwaite—I found his body in the bathtub. It looked to me like it might have been a professional job.”

I liked this version of things. First of all, I liked how neatly I'd been left out of it. My reasons for liking it were probably different than Dex's reasons for leaving me out, but I liked it just the same.

Also, I appreciated how he actually managed to tell the truth, while at the same time avoiding any mention of the fact that he'd been asleep at a time when he should have been awake. The story didn't suffer from the absence of these facts: the Heppelwaite broad got the information she needed, while Dex got to leave out the little detail of his complete incompetence.

Rita herself looked gunshot when the news sunk in, as though someone had pulled a rug out from under her feet, as though the world had shifted. I watched her closely from behind my filing, and if she was acting, she should have won an award.

When she started to cry, it took both Dex and me by surprise. Maybe we'd figured that her arrangement with Dempsey had a business core and that her heart wasn't engaged or terribly involved. Her apparent grief put a lie to this. Dexter fished a white linen handkerchief from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. I hoped it was a clean one, and not the hanky he'd used to wipe our fingerprints up the night before.

“Did you . . . did you see anything?” she asked after a while.

“Ma'am?” Dex said.

She blew her nose then. Delicately. It sounded like a kitten sneezing. “Well, you were watching the house last night, weren't you? I thought you might have seen something.”

Dex shook his head. “It was over by the time I got there,” he told her. I noticed him run a hand over his smooth jaw. Probably no one but me would have spotted this as one of his tells: no one but me would have known he wasn't quite telling the truth.

He offered to return part of the retainer she'd given him the day before, but she waved the money away. I saw Dex's eyes slide over to mine, and he sent me a self-satisfied wink. “See,” he seemed to be saying, “I
tried
to do the right thing. But it looks like you'll get a paycheck after all.”

I shrugged back at him imperceptibly, relieved but a little disturbed. If I was reading things right, Rita Heppelwaite's meal ticket had just disappeared. Either she wasn't thinking clearly or she really didn't need the money, which struck me as odd in a way I found hard to put my finger on.

“Thank you for your help, Mr. Theroux,” she sniffled, dabbing once again at her eyes. Then her shoulders heaved, and she was crying in earnest. Dex looked helpless, as men often do when faced with a woman's tears. He looked as though he wished he could be anywhere else.

“There, there, Miss Heppelwaite,” he said, kind of patting her shoulder as though hoping this might be comforting. It was odd seeing Dexter, usually so confident in any situation, not knowing quite what to do with himself. “Please let me know if there's anything I can do. ...”

“But you've been so helpful already,” she said, lifting tear-filled eyes up to his and batting them furiously. “I can't imagine what I would have done without you.” He patted her reassuringly some more, but I wondered what—aside from patting her shoulders—she really thought he'd done.

Before long she pulled herself together enough to take her leave.

“Please, Miss Heppelwaite,” Dex said, as he walked her to the door. “As I said, if you think of anything at all...”

“Thank you,” she sniffed. “I'll keep that in mind.”

When the door had closed behind her, I realized there were two things about the scene that had bothered me. Rita's distress had seemed genuine, and the tears had looked real, but neither had left a mark on her beautiful face.

There are women who can cry in that way: I've read about them in books. When I cry, the tears leave their mark. My eyes get puffy and rimmed with red, my nose runs, my skin gets all blotchy. When I cry, it's not a pretty sight.

Rita Heppelwaite had cried like a fictional beauty on the edge of a breakdown. She'd poured out her emotion and soaked in Dex's sympathy. And when she'd left, none of it had marred her face in the slightest.

The other thing that didn't sit right had been her immediate reaction when Dex told her Dempsey was dead. She'd taken it all in and she'd cried—sure, she'd cried. But she hadn't asked how her lover had died. I went back over Dex's conversation with her in my mind, but no, he hadn't mentioned the how, only the when and the where.

“She took my handkerchief,” Dex noted bemusedly after she'd gone.

A small price to pay to see the last of her, I thought but did not say. It wouldn't have mattered, because I was wrong.

I WENT BACK TO MY BOOK
. Dex went back to whatever demons he'd been chasing—or whatever drink he'd been nursing—before Rita Heppelwaite interrupted the rhythm of our day.

The afternoon was endless. The day had gotten progressively warmer, and by midafternoon it felt like high summer, not the middle of fall. We were on the fifth floor, but even so, in the new heat you could smell the garbage ripening at street level. It seemed to roll itself up in the exhaust of a hundred motorcars and waft up to us in heat-soaked packages. I daydreamed about Angels Flight: about the little railcar lifting me out of the dirt and stink of downtown, to the cleaner air of residential Bunker Hill.

At four o'clock I'd had enough. I decided to pack it in early. I'd long since put all the files back where they belonged and tidied my office and the waiting area. The day was almost done, and we'd had our bit of excitement with Rita's visit. The phone hadn't rung even once—not even the usual cadre of bill collectors—and I had a strong feeling it wasn't going to. There didn't seem to be any reason for me to hang around.

I was just giving my desk a final tidy, intending to go in and say good-night to Dex before grabbing my purse and heading out the door, when we got our second unannounced visit of the day. It made me wonder why we even had a phone.

I didn't know the two men who came in the door, but I didn't have to. I knew they were the law before either of them had even opened their mouths. One was tall and dark; the other, short and florid. Both had the buttoned-down but messy look that seems to be part of the training to wear a detective's badge in Los Angeles these days. You had to wonder about it. Sometimes I think you could take a perfectly good, clean suit and drape it on a flatfoot, and he'd end up looking like he'd been wrung out.

“We're looking for Dexter J. Theroux,” the short florid one said. His big hands were working the hat he held so furiously that I worried it wouldn't survive the encounter.

“This is his office,” I said, stating the obvious. But I didn't like the man's tone, or the shifty way both of them had looked around the room when they entered. Like they were disappointed not to see something that wasn't there.

Short-and-Florid smiled at me. An insolent grin that held a touch of lechery. I didn't like him. “I know that, sister,” he said. “It's got his name on the door.” He pointed at the black-edged gold letters on the frosted glass in our front door.

“So you can read,” I said, matching his tone. “Am I supposed to be impressed?” I had my orders with regard to police officers too. Dex had told me long ago: never tell cops anything. Never offer and never volunteer. When it's time to tell a thing, you'll know it, he'd said. But in casual questioning, give them nothing at all.

The flatfoot didn't like my answer; I could see that on his ugly little mug. He looked at me evenly, as though deciding on the best way to proceed.

“All right then,” he said, “we'll play it your way. Is he in?”

“He is,” I said, rising. “I'll announce you.”

“Don't bother.” The tall cop spoke for the first time, then pushed past me into Dex's office. I peeked in behind them, partly to check on Dex's condition, partly to see if he wanted me to hang around.

“Sorry, Dex,” I called in. “They wouldn't wait for me to see if you were free.”

If Dex was upset, he wasn't showing it. “It's OK, Kitty,” he said, opening his desk drawer and pulling out a couple more glasses. I was probably the only one who would have heard the steel beneath his affable tone. “I haven't seen O'Reilly and Houlahan for a while, have I, boys? They've just come for a visit, I guess.”

“You guessed wrong, Theroux.” The short cop didn't mince any words. “We've got a bit of a mystery down at the station.”

“Yeah,” said the tall one, his voice as coarse as tires on gravel. “Someone told us about a corpse you're supposed to have seen.”

“Gentlemen, have a seat.” Dex settled himself more deeply into his chair, while he pulled the stopper out of his current bottle of whiskey—Canadian Club today, I saw. He splashed some of the amber liquid into his own glass, then poured a couple of fingers into each of the clean glasses he'd taken from his desk.

“We're on duty,” the tall one—O'Reilly—said, as he took a seat. Houlahan nodded his agreement, but pulled his glass closer while he sat down. Of this pair, I noted, Houlahan would be the easier to manage.

“If you don't need me, Boss ...” I ventured, from the place by the door where I still stood.

“Oh, thanks, Kitty. Yeah, we're fine. Can you finish that typing before the day is through?”

I looked straight at Dex, but I couldn't speak my thoughts, and he didn't meet my eyes. I wondered why anyone would need to impress these mooks, then realized it was possible Dex wanted me to hang around, just in case.

I didn't say anything, just nodded. As I went back into the outer office, I left the door ajar slightly, hoping to catch snippets of the conversation while I performed my typing show.

“You were saying?” Dex's voice was calm, assured and unaffected by whatever he'd been drinking.

I rolled a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter and began hitting keys in a leisurely fashion, trying hard not to drown out the voices I could just make out from this distance.

“We got a report...” It was O'Reilly. I recognized his gravelly voice. “You told someone you saw a stiff... up close and personal like.”

“Ah,” said Dex. Silently I agreed. It was beginning to make sense.

“That's right,” Houlahan chimed in. “At a house on Lafayette Square. But when we got there to check it out, guess what we found?” There was malice in the man's voice. At my desk, I braced myself for the worst, absently hitting a smattering of typewriter keys into the silence.

“A stiff?” was Dex's guess. From where I was sitting, it was a good one. It would have been my guess as well.

“Guess again.” It was O'Reilly this time. From the sounds of him, he was chasing his words with a sip of his drink.

“I'm all outta guesses, fellas. That was my single one.” I could imagine Dex leaned back at his desk, a studied look of bored patience on his face. But what would he be feeling inside?

I didn't get to find out because the shrill ring of the phone almost shot me out of my seat.