Fidelity (41 page)

He went down the steps to the basement, hoping the gun under his sport coat wasn’t making a lump that Hobart could see. He went to the door of the wine cellar.

Hobart put on a ski mask, then nodded at Forrest.

Forrest was disconcerted. He started thinking that there was no practical reason for a man to wear a disguise with a woman he was about to kill, but Hobart was a killer, and maybe that was how he liked it. A man like him must be crazy, must get something out of it besides money. Maybe the mask was part of it for him. Forrest unlocked the door and stepped back.

Hobart nodded at him again.

“Caroline?” he said through the door. “I’m back. You can come out.”

There was a delay that seemed long to Forrest, and he began to hate her even more.

“Caroline,” he called. “Caroline. I’m letting you out.”

After about five more seconds, he reached for the door, but the doorknob turned. The door opened inward, and she stepped into the doorway. She looked profoundly tired. Her hair was tousled, and there were wispy strands that seemed not to have proper places in her hairdo. She squinted a bit in the light. “Who are you?” she asked Hobart.

“He’s a friend of mine,” Forrest said. “I invited him.”

“To what?”

“He’s here to prove to you that you shouldn’t have behaved like my enemy.”

“You hate me this much? You bring a man with a mask on? What is he going to do-kill me?”

Forrest turned to Hobart. “Same pay as before. Go ahead.”

“Oh my God!” Caroline said. “You did bring him to kill me.”

“What did you expect?”

“I wasn’t trying to harm you. I was trying to keep you out of jail. This is crazy!”

“We’ve already had that argument. Go ahead. Kill her.”

“Okay.” With a smooth, relaxed motion, Hobart reached into his coat, pulled out a pistol, and raised his arm to aim it at Caroline’s forehead.

Ted Forrest edged slightly away so he could be a bit behind Hobart. He just had to wait until Hobart pulled the trigger on Caroline, so the right man killed her with the right gun. He reminded himself that the report would be very loud, and he would have to be quick, to move through the shock of it, not taking time to blink or flinch.

Hobart pivoted and fired through Ted Forrest’s brain. The sound was bright and sharp, and a blood spatter appeared on the stone wall beyond Forrest before he fell.

Caroline shrieked once and then stood frozen, staring down at the horrible sight of her husband’s body on the floor. After a few seconds, she raised her confused, terrified eyes to Hobart. “Why did you do this?”

“None of your business. If you scream or follow me to the stairs, or do anything for the next fifteen minutes, I’ll kill you, too. Do you understand?”

She nodded, her head barely moving.

He knelt and patted Ted Forrest’s pockets. He took Forrest’s gun and cell phone, then stood and moved to the stairs. “Remember what I said. This is the luckiest hour of your whole life. Make it last a long time.”

And then he was up the stairs and gone.

Hobart began to divest. He drove to the San Jose airport to return the car he had rented, then went to another company and rented a different one with a credit card in a different name. He drove eastward into the mountains and began to get rid of things. First had to be the two cell phones: his and Theodore Forrest’s. He took both of them apart to get to the SIM cards, drove the car over the two phones, and threw the pieces down a steep cliff. He cut the SIM cards into tiny pieces and fed them out the window into the slipstream.

Hobart’s gun had to be next. He disassembled it-magazine, slide, spring, barrel, frame, grips, trigger, and sear. He hurled the springs, trigger, and sear into a lake in the Sierras, buried the frame, and pounded the barrel into the earth in the woods with a stone. He subjected Theodore Forrest’s gun to the same treatment when he reached the east side of the Sierras and the land was drier and rockier.

One by one he tossed the items he had used in the past few weeks. His suitcase and the clothes inside it, the luggage that Theodore Forrest had used to hold the money, and the clothes he had worn to Theodore Forrest’s house, all ended up in Dumpsters behind businesses in towns that he passed along the way. He kept on driving through Nevada and on to Utah, ridding himself of things.

Hobart bought a car at a lot in Salt Lake City and turned in the one he had rented in San Jose. He bought new clothes, went to a fancy barbershop and had his hair cut much shorter than he had worn it before, and got a manicure. He drank only water and ate very little during these days. When he was ready, he drove back down from Utah into Nevada. He stayed on Interstate 15 until he was back in California, and then made his way to Interstate 10. At three A.M. the second night, he pulled into the trailer park outside Cabazon and parked. He walked across the blacktop to the side of Valerie’s trailer, unlatched the door with his pocketknife, and stepped inside.

He said, “Valerie, it’s me Jerry.”

He heard rustling noises coming from the bedroom. “Jerry?”

“I apologize if I scared you, but there didn’t seem to be much sense in sitting alone out there waiting the rest of the night for you to wake up.”

She appeared at the bedroom door, a blanket wrapped around her and her blond hair in complicated tangles. “How do you even know I’m in the bed alone?”

“I don’t. I hope you are, but I don’t have a right to expect it. If you want me to go away for an hour so you can settle that, I can drive down the road to the casino and have a cup of coffee or something, but then I’d like to come back and talk to you.”

She pushed the bedroom door open all the way. “Oh, you might as well come on in. Nobody’s here.”

“I can still come back.”

“You already woke me up and I can’t sleep wondering what you want.”

She sat on the bed and turned on the small bedside reading lamp, then moved it so she could see him. “You got dressed up.” The light tilted higher. “Nice clothes. You got a haircut. Very handsome, especially for-What time is it? Three or so?”

” ” Yes.

She sniffed. “Expensive aftershave from a barbershop, too. You smell like a whore. And who would know better?”

“Not you.”

She let the light stay on his face for a few more seconds, then turned it off. “What brings you here?”

“This is my last visit,” he said. “Here’s the way it is. I’m sorry I robbed that store twenty years ago. I apologize for doing it and going to prison. I did it because I wanted to have a nice life with you.”

“It would have been a nice life.”

“I thought the money would help us get away, and that away was better. I was young and stupid. I apologize.”

“You were young. You apologized at the time, and you apologized after. But if somebody breaks something, it doesn’t matter why or how. It’s broken. Talking about it forever doesn’t make it unbroken. After the first day, it doesn’t even matter whose fault it was.”

“Yes, it does.”

“No. You went to prison, and things happened there that changed you. I was out here. I changed in ways that I wouldn’t have if you had been with me. We’re not the same people we were. We can’t have the kind of life we would have had.”

“That’s just bitterness.”

She shook her head. “I think about it all the timeabout you and me together then. I can still see us. It’s like we were the first people. It’s not the time that’s gone, it’s the innocence. We don’t have it anymore, and we can’t get it back.”

“Okay. We can’t.”

“You said this was your last visit. I take it you’ve found somebody you like better.”

“No. You’re the one that I’ve always loved, and I’m going to love you until I’m dead. I want you to do what you should have done fifteen years ago and marry me.”

“Oh, Jesus, Jerry.” She sighed wearily.

He knelt in front of her, reached into his pocket, and grabbed her wrist. “I got you a ring.”

“If this is a joke, I’m not laughing.”

He put the ring in her hand, then leaned on the bed to turn on the reading light. He picked it up and held it above the ring. It was a three-carat solitaire, and in the intense white light it looked enormous.

She said, “Now I’m laughing.” She looked terribly sad, and tears began to run down her cheeks. “Why did you do this?”

“We got off track, a long time ago. It was my fault. Now I’m grabbing us by the neck and wrenching us back on. We can’t start over like we were eighteen, but we can take what’s left at thirty-eight.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

She held out the ring in the palm of her hand. “I can see you have money. If I didn’t notice before, I would now. Where did you get it?”

“Selling electrical supplies.” He watched her face fall and her eyes harden. “All right, it’s swag. I got it by being a criminal. But I’m done now. Regardless of whether you ever see me again, I’m done.”

Y•

“Because it’s not a life. It’s just what you do when you don’t have the heart to kill yourself and hope somebody will do it for you.”

“So this is your last visit because now you have the heart. If I won’t have you, then you’ll go out in the desert and kill yourself.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to say things. I can hear you think.” She paused. “You’ll have to make me a promise.”

“What?”

“If you do decide to kill yourself, you’ll kill me first.” She slipped the diamond ring on her finger. “I recognize this. It’s the one I showed you in the magazine when we were kids. Same cut, same setting.”

“Yes.”

“When we go walking, the sun will light it up like fire.”

Emily flew to San Jose and rented a car to drive the rest of the way. She didn’t like the car because it was newer than her faithful Volvo, and it had a lot of mechanisms on the dashboard and the console that struck her as childish and self-indulgent. All the padding in odd places seemed to her to be designed to hide the sounds of an engine and transmission that were not to be trusted.

Emily drove the car anyway, in spite of the feeling she had that at every mile it was being used up like a pencil or a candle. She found her way on the 101 freeway to the Golden State Freeway, then down Route 152 to Route 33, which headed south and east into the Central Valley. Once she was on the right road, she tossed the map onto the seat beside her.

She sped across the open country, looking at the broad fields. They were lined with long, straight rows of low, leafy unidentifiable vegetable plants stretching to a vanishing point that seemed to move with her.

She drove fast, but it wasn’t because she was in a hurry. It was because the roads were made for it. She got used to moving to the right shoulder to let over-height pickup trucks flash past, because it felt to her that it was their road and not hers.

Here and there near the towns-Los Banos, Dos Palos, Firebaugh-there were fruit and vegetable stands to sell produce to people like her driving down the highway between big cities. She had always loved stopping at those places, white-painted wooden-frame structures with homemade signs bigger than they were, where teenagers and grandparents handled the sales because everybody else was busy. Here the stands were tiny outposts at the edge of plots of land so big that from the road Emily couldn’t see any farm buildings.

When she reached Mendota, it took her only a few minutes to find the police station and park. She got out of the car, walked to the trunk, and opened it. She took out her tote bag and walked to the front of the station, up the steps, and into the small lobby.

Behind the counter there were two police officers, one male on the telephone and one female busy at a computer. The woman noticed Emily first. She stood up and walked to the counter, then said, “Hello, ma’am. How can I help you?”

Emily said, “I wonder if you could direct me to the officer who was in charge of a murder case. It occurred here eight years ago.”

The policewoman’s shoulders seemed to hunch slightly. She leaned forward, and Emily could see a flat, guarded look in her eyes. “What murder case might that be?”

“The victim’s name was Allison Straight. She was only sixteen when she was killed.”

The policewoman turned to look behind her at the man who sat at the other desk. Emily could see that the policeman had sergeant’s stripes on his biceps. He stood up and walked toward the open door behind the counter. As he passed the policewoman, he nodded.

The policewoman said, “The detective who handled that case is Lieutenant Zimmer. The sergeant just went to get him.”

Two minutes later, the sergeant returned, accompanied by a tall, thin police officer in a sport coat. He said, “Come in, please,” and lifted a hinged section of the counter so Emily could step inside the enclosure. She followed him into an office, and he pulled a chair to the front of his desk for her, then sat down. “I’m Lieutenant Zimmer. I understand you wanted to see me about the Allison Straight case?”

“Yes,” said Emily. “My name is Emily Kramer. I brought you this.” She reached into her tote bag, pulled out the maroon stationery box and set it on the desk.

“What is it?”

“My husband, Philip Kramer, was the owner of a privatedetective agency in Los Angeles. Two and a half weeks ago, he was murdered-shot down on the street. Since then I discovered that the reason he was killed was that he knew what happened to Allison Straight. What’s in that box is the evidence he collected to prove it.”

She sat patiently while Detective Zimmer opened the box and examined the photographs, the written statements, glanced at the maps and charts and the autopsy report.

After a time, he looked up into her eyes, and she saw the sadness that had somehow been hidden in his face and brought back. He said, “Do you know that Theodore Forrest was shot to death two days ago while he was trying to kill his wife?”

“Yes. It’s been in the papers, even in other cities. I read it in Seattle this morning.”

“There’s nothing anybody can do to him now. Why did you bring me this?”

“Because you-the police-have to know. Because trying to get more evidence for you was the last thing my husband ever did. This was the last thing I could do for him.” She paused. “I’m afraid I have a long drive ahead of me and a plane to catch. I’d like to go now.”