Lippman, Laura (13 page)

“We’re such good friends we don’t need to go into specifics, Joe,” she’d said, patting his hand. “I know. I
know
. Something bad happened, something you seldom speak of. And you know what? You’re right to keep it inside. Everyone says just the opposite, but they’re wrong. It’s better not to speak of some things. Whatever you’ve done, whatever happened, you don’t need to justify it to me or anyone. You don’t need to justify it even to yourself. Keep it locked up.”

And the next morning, when they met at the gallery, she could tell that Joe was glad for her advice. They were best friends who told each other nothing of significance, and that’s the way it needed to be.

“Is this real silver?” one of the Texans asked, barging through the door and grabbing a bracelet from the window display. “I hear that there are a lot of fakes down here.”

“It’s easy enough to tell,” Miriam said, flipping it to show the woman the stamp that certified it as silver. But she didn’t hand the bracelet back to the woman, her own private technique. She held it as if suddenly reluctant to surrender the object, as if she had just realized she wanted it for herself. A simple trick, but it made the right kind of customer wild to own the thing in hand.

The Texans turned out to be good for a lot of jewelry, which was typical. One of the women, however, had better-than-average taste, and she gravitated toward an antique
retablo
of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Miriam, seeing her interest, moved in for the kill, telling the story of the beloved figure, how a cape full of rose petals burned itself into the cloak that a peasant brought to the cardinal.

“Oh, it’s darling,” the woman trilled. “Just darling. How much?”

“You sure can sling the shit,” Joe said, coming out as the quartet left, accompanied by Javier’s effusive good wishes.

“Thanks,” Miriam said, sniffing at the burst of breeze that entered the shop in the Texans’ wake. “Do you…is there a strange smell in here this morning?”

“Just the usual mustiness that we get in this chilly weather. Why, what do you think you smell?”

“I don’t know. Something like…wet dog.”

Not in the bedroom
, Sunny would report.
Not in the basement. Not under the lilac bush. Not on the porch
. There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is
not
, yet only one place where one actually is. Miriam liked to think that Fitz, at least, had found his way to the girls, and stayed with them all these years, a loyal guardian.

As for Bud, Heather’s hapless blanket, reduced to a small square—it was here in Mexico with Miriam, a faded scrap of blue cloth, preserved in a frame that she kept on her nightstand. No one ever asked her about it. If they had, she would have lied.

Infante’s momentum, so strong all day, faltered at the driveway to Edenwald. Nursing homes—and whatever they called these places, retirement communities or assisted living, they were still nursing homes—were creepy to him. Instead of making a right into Edenwald’s parking lot, he found himself going left into the mall, toward TGI Friday’s. It was going on 1:00 P.M., and he was hungry. He had a right to be hungry at 1:00 P.M. He hadn’t been in a Friday’s for a few years, but the staff still wore those striped referee tops, which he had never quite gotten. A ref—timekeeper, custodian of the rules—didn’t convey fun to him.

The menu was also full of mixed messages, pushing plates of cheesy things and fried things, then including the breakdown of net carbs and trans fats in other items. His old partner had analyzed every bite this way, depending on which diet she was trying. By calorie, by carb, by fat, and, always, by virtue. “I’m being good,” Nancy would say. “I’m being bad.” It was the only thing he didn’t miss about pairing with her, the endless dissection of what she put in her mouth. Infante had once told Nancy that she didn’t know what bad was if she thought it was something found in a doughnut.

Thinking of which—he smiled at the waitress, not his, but one at a nearby table. It was a defensive smile, an in-case-I-know-you smile because she looked a little familiar, with that high-on-the-head ponytail. She flashed him an automatic grin but didn’t make eye contact. So she wasn’t someone he knew. Or—this had never occurred to him before—maybe
she
had forgotten him.

He paid his bill and decided to leave his car where it was, cutting across Fairmount Avenue to Edenwald. What was it about the air in these places? Whether super-posh, like this one, or just a step up from a county hospital, they all smelled and felt the same: overheated and cold at the same time, stuffy, room deodorizers and aerosols battling the medicinal air. Death’s waiting room. And the more they fought it, like this place with all its brightly colored flyers around the lobby—museum trip, opera trip, New York trip—the more obvious it seemed. Infante’s father had spent his last years in a nursing home on Long Island, a no-frills place that all but announced “You’re here to die, please hurry up.” There was something to be said for the honesty of its approach. But if you could afford a place like this, of course you’d ante up for it. At least it cut down on a family’s guilt.

He stopped at the front desk, where he could tell that the women were checking him out, wondering if he was going to be a regular. He inspected them back but didn’t see anything of note.

“Mr. Willoughby is home,” the receptionist said.

Of course
, Infante thought.
Where else would he be? What else did he have to do
?

“CALL ME CHET,” said the man in the brown cardigan, which looked expensive, maybe cashmere. Infante had been gearing up to meet someone feeble and ancient, so this trim, well-dressed man was a bit of a shock. Willoughby was probably this side of seventy, not much older than Lenhardt and considerably healthier-looking. Hell, in some ways he looked healthier than Infante.

“Thanks for seeing me with no notice.”

“You got lucky,” he said. “I usually play golf over at Elkridge on Thursday afternoons, but this last gasp of winter forced us to cancel. Do I detect some New York in your voice?”

“Some. They beat most of it out of me in the twelve years I’ve lived here. Ten more years and I’ll be saying ‘warter’ and ‘zinc.’”

“Of course the so-called Bawlmer accent is a working-class accent. It hews very close to Cockney. There are families who go back four hundred years in Baltimore, and I can assure you they don’t speak that way.”

On the surface it was an asshole thing to say, a clever way of saying
My family is old and rich
, just in case the casual mention of Elkridge Country Club hadn’t done the trick. Infante wondered if the guy had been like that as a detective, trying to have it both ways. A cop, but a cop who never let his coworkers forget that he didn’t have to be one.

If so, he must have been hated.

Willoughby settled into an armchair, his regular seat judging by the sweat line where his close-trimmed hair ended. Infante perched on the sofa, clearly a woman’s purchase—rose-colored and uncomfortable as hell. Yet Infante had known the moment he crossed the threshold that it had been some time since a woman lived there. The apartment was neat and well kept, but there was a palpable absence. Of sound, of smells. And then there were the little things, like that grease line on the easy chair. He knew the feeling from his own place. You could always tell whether a woman was a regular on the premises.

“According to the records, you’ve got the Bethany case file. I was hoping I could pick it up.”

“I have the…” Willoughby seemed confused. Infante hoped he wasn’t edging into senility. He looked great, but maybe that’s why he had moved into Edenwald so young. But the brown eyes quickly turned shrewd. “Has there been a development?”

Infante had anticipated this question and prepared for it. “Probably not. But we’ve got a woman in St. Agnes.”

“Claiming to know something?”

“Yeah.”

“Claiming to
be
someone?”

Infante’s instinct was to lie. The fewer people in the loop, the better. How could he trust that this guy wouldn’t spread the news all over Edenwald, using it as a chance to relive his own glory days? Then again Willoughby had been the original primary. No matter how good the file was, he might have valuable insights.

“This doesn’t leave the room—”

“Of course.” Promised quickly, with a brisk nod.

“She says she’s the younger one.”

“Heather.”

“Right.”

“And does she say where she’s been, what she’s been up to, what happened to her sister?”

“She’s not saying much of anything anymore. She asked for a lawyer, and now they’re both stonewalling us. The thing is, when she started slinging this shit yesterday, she thought she was in a lot of trouble. She was in an accident on the Beltway—serious injuries, but probably nofault—and fled the scene. She was found walking on the shoulder of I-70, where it dead-ends into the park-and-ride.”

“That’s not even a mile from the Bethany house.” Willoughby’s voice was a murmur, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “Is she crazy?”

“Not
officially
. Not in a way that gets picked up on a preliminary psych exam. But, in my unofficial opinion, she’s a fuckin’ nut job. She says she has a new identity, a new life that she wants to protect. She says she’ll give us the case, but not her current identity. I can’t help thinking there’s a lot more to it. But if I’m going to trip her up, I need to know the case forward and backward.”

“I do have the file,” Willoughby said, his manner slightly sheepish—but just slightly. “About a year ago—”

“File’s been out for two years.”

“Two years? Jesus, time changes when you’re not going to the job. I’d need a second to tell you that this was Thursday and if I didn’t play golf regularly—anyway, there was an obituary in the paper, and it got me thinking about something, and I asked for a chance to review it. I shouldn’t have held on to it—I know better—but Evelyn, my wife, took a bad turn about the same time and…Well, it wasn’t long before I had another obituary to worry about. I forgot that I had it, but I’m sure it’s in my den.”

He rose, and Infante was already calculating the dynamic of what was about to happen. Willoughby was going to insist on carrying the box, and robust and healthy as the older man looked, Infante should figure out a way to do it for him without insulting him. He had seen this with his own father, when he was still in the house in Massapequa, his insistence on trying to grab his son’s suitcase out of the trunk of the car. He followed the man to the den. But, sure enough, Willoughby hoisted the box in his arms before Infante could figure a way around it, grunting and grimacing a bit before he placed it on the Oriental rug in the living room.

“The obituary’s on top,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

Infante opened the lid of the cardboard box and saw a clipping from the
Beacon-Light
: “Roy Pincharelli, 58, longtime teacher.” As it often happened with obits, the photo was from a much earlier time, perhaps even twenty years earlier.
The strange vanity of the dead
, Infante thought. The guy had dark eyes and hair, a dense cloud in the black-and-white photo, and he held himself as if he thought himself quite the dreamboat. On first glance he was okay. But study the photo for more than a second and the flaws revealed themselves—the weak chin, the slightly hooked nose.

“Complications from pneumonia,” Willoughby recited from memory. “That’s often a code for AIDS.”

“So he was gay? How does that track with the disappearance of the Bethany sisters?”

“As the article says, he was a longtime band teacher in the city and county school systems. In 1975 he was teaching at Rock Glen Junior High, where Sunny was one of his students. On weekends he had a part-time gig—selling organs at Jordan Kitt’s Music Store. In Security Square Mall.”

“Man, teachers and cops and their part-time jobs. We do the heavy lifting for society, and we still need OT gigs. Nothing ever changes, does it?”

Willoughby’s look was blank, uncomprehending, and Infante recalled that the man was rich, that he had never known what it was like trying to make ends meet on a police’s salary.
How nice for you
.

“Did you talk to him at the time?”

“Of course. And, in fact, he said he noticed Heather early that afternoon. She was in the crowd, watching him play Easter songs.”

“You said he taught Sunny. How did he know Heather?”

“The family had attended school concerts and the like. The Bethanys were very big on family solidarity. Well, Dave Bethany was big on it, to be precise. Anyway, Pincharelli said he saw Heather in the crowd that day. A man, maybe in his twenties, grabbed her arm, began to yell at her, then just as quickly walked away.”

“And he notices all this while he’s banging on his organ?”

Willoughby smiled and nodded. “Exactly. A mall on a Saturday is a busy, antic place. Why would you notice that one encounter? Unless—”

“Unless you were already fixated on the girl. But he was gay.”

“That’s my inference.” It killed Infante the way this guy talked, using two-dollar words without even a hint of irony or self-mockery. He must have been a good police beneath the bullshit, or the others would have torn him down in no time.

“So why does a gay guy care about two girls?”

“First of all, the crime wasn’t necessarily sexual in nature. That’s an obvious conclusion, but it’s not the only one. We had a case in Baltimore County, a few years before the Bethany girls, where a man flipped and killed a young girl because something in her manner reminded him of his mother, whom he loathed. That said, I’ve often wondered if Heather saw something that day, something that she didn’t realize she saw, but which terrified the teacher. If he was gay, he most certainly was closeted at the time and probably feared losing his job if discovered.”

“So how do both girls end up missing?”

Willoughby sighed. “It always comes back to that. Why two? How do you even get
two
? But if it was the teacher and he grabbed Heather first and stashed her somewhere—the back of his van, for example—and then found Sunny, he would have had a huge advantage. He was her teacher, someone she knew and trusted. If he told her to come with him, she would have done it automatically.”