The Confidence Woman (15 page)

“Now tell me why a classy lady like yourself would be accused of murder,” Hyland said.

As Claire attempted to tell him, he peppered the conversation with interruptions and advice. She should have hired him sooner. She should never have talked to Amaral without a lawyer. She shouldn't have let Amaral into her office. She should have insisted he get a warrant before she let him take the book.

Claire supposed Hyland would bill her by the minute or a fraction thereof. She struggled to get her story out and to make herself understood.

“I met Amaral's witness, and—”

“You met the witness?” he asked, leaning forward and making her want to back her chair away, the same way a prosecutor could make her feel. “How did that happen?”

“I went to the house at the time of day I was supposed to have—”

“What time was that?”

“Dusk. A woman ran by. I stopped her and asked—”

“What did she see?”

“A woman with frosted hair who could have been any of us. But she said one woman was a size fourteen and the other a twelve.”

“What size are you?”

“Ten.”

“It's not wise to talk to a witness. The prosecution could accuse you of putting words in her mouth.”

“It won't happen again. I don't think she'll make a good witness for the prosecution.”

“Why not?”

“It was dusk, there were a lot of shadows, she couldn't see that well. A defense attorney should be able to make something out of that on the witness stand.”

“My object is not to put anyone on the witness stand. You may have seen me on the evening news, but most of the people I represent never go to trial. Here you have a badly decomposed body discovered weeks later, making it impossible for the prosecution to establish an exact time of death.
Nevertheless
it would be helpful if you had an alibi for the evening the runner saw the women arguing.”

“I was home alone.”

“Did you make any long-distance phone calls? Speak to someone who could confirm your whereabouts?”

“I'll check my bill. I don't believe some of the other suspects' alibis. Elizabeth and Ginny claim they had dinner together in Santa Fe. Elizabeth has a credit card receipt, but I doubt she had dinner with Ginny. They don't like each other. I think Elizabeth actually had dinner with a lover in Santa Fe but doesn't want her lover in Tucson to know. That leaves Ginny with no alibi. Miranda Kohl claims she was on location, but I don't know how Amaral established that fact. Miranda is an actress filming a new TV series and—”

“What about the other woman?”

“Lynn? She says she was home with her husband.”

“In my experience a significant other will do anything possible to protect a mate. It's quite a complicated scheme to find another copy of
The Confidence-Man,
fake a signature, then hide that book in your office. It's possible that whoever is trying to frame you had help and the help came from a husband or a lover.”

Until now that thought had been as ephemeral as a moth outside the window, a possibility Claire had not wanted to consider. Hearing Hyland put it into words made her realize it was a possibility she had to consider.

“If that isn't your book, what do you suppose happened to your copy of
The Confidence-Man?”

“I assume that Evelyn sold it, and I'm hoping that sooner or later it will turn up on the rare book market.”

“It would help if we could find it. Presumably Evelyn's prints and your prints will be on it to establish chain of custody and ownership. Are your prints on the book that was found in your office?”

“I wore gloves when I handled it.”

Hyland leaned back in his chair and crossed the foot of one leg over the thigh of the other. He turned his full attention on Claire and she saw how powerful a force it could be when focused. “Is there any possibility your fingerprints will be found in the victim's house?” he asked.

“It's possible I touched a wall or a window outside, but I never went inside,” Claire said. “Evelyn could have taken something else from my house. A glass, for example, or a pencil, something I wouldn't have missed that had my fingerprints on it.”

“I won't allow Amaral to fingerprint you until he charges you, and my goal is to prevent him from charging you. At the moment I think his case is weak.”

“Is there anything I can do to clear my name? Waiting for Amaral to come after me is a very
uncomfortable
feeling.”

“I suggest you concentrate on your job and leave my job to me.”

He stood up and shook Claire's hand, making it clear that the meeting was over.

******

When she got home that night she went outside and watched Venus slipping into view above the West Mesa. It was the dark of the moon, the best time to see Venus. Even the lights of the city didn't dim its power. She pondered her conversation with Sid Hyland. Considering the men in her friends' lives as accomplices added a layer of complexity to the investigation and left her wondering whether any of
them
were capable of murder or fraud.

The only suspects who had no man to aid or abet them were Claire herself and Ginny, who remained a puzzle. Was she a drunk or just pretending to be? In a sense inebriation was always a performance.

They had gone to school in a time when young women masked their intelligence, but Claire had never thought Ginny was stupid. She had the intelligence to plan the book-in-the-office scheme, but was she devious enough to carry it out? It was a question Claire couldn't answer without knowing whether Ginny was a real drunk or a fake.

She remembered what Sid Hyland said about turning her defense over to him. She should be relieved to place her burdens on his broad shoulders, but doing nothing meant she had to live with the ominous threat that sooner or later Amaral would come up with something even more incriminating, something she had overlooked or someone else had inserted. It would be difficult to prove in court that the murder took place on the night in question, but most likely it had happened then.

Claire went inside to her office, found her phone bill for the month of April and discovered that she had made no long-distance calls that night. There was nothing to prove she had been at home. Since she was already sitting at her desk in front of her computer, she decided to take a look at
CultureVulture.com
, the Web site Ginny wrote for. She typed in the URL. The Web site came up and a vulture appeared on her screen, cawed and flapped its wings. As Ginny had said, the site covered cultural events. Claire negotiated her way to the listings for Santa Fe, searched the Gerald Peters Gallery and found a description for the Renata Jennings show that was credited to Ginny Bogardus.

“What can you say about abstractions?” it read.

They're red, they're black, they're a circle, they're a square, they're the very absence of pictureness. Forget about Renata Jennings's black phase. The black paintings in this show are stuck in the box. By now haven't we learned all there is to learn from black? Black is punctuation—the
comma,
the period, the semicolon, the pause in the flow. Red is the now. Red
is
the flow. Red is the fiery breath of the dragon. The paintings in Jennings's red series swirl and whirl and dissolve the boundary of the box. They suck the strength from the viewer and leave you gasping on some subtly reptilian level of consciousness. Skip the black. Red is the reason for this show, the only reason for this show.

It had a certain bravura style that Claire found amusing, but it was an exaggeration of the show she had seen, reminding her that the written word had always been the perfect forum for a literary con artist.

Before she went to bed she went outside and lured Nemesis in with a dish of tuna. Venus, no longer alone in the sky, had been surrounded and diminished by a multitude of pinholes in the darkness.

******

When Claire got to work in the morning, she took a step down one of the paths that began when Evelyn Martin left Jeffrey Omer's critical analysis of Melville on her shelf. She supposed that leaving that book was Evelyn's idea of a joke. Presumably she had found it in a used bookstore somewhere; it had the beaten and battered look of a book that had been around. It was cheap, it was available, it was on the subject of the book she was stealing. The fact that it was that particular book could be considered serendipity or more bad luck. It was leading Claire to question the credibility of her boss, but then she was in a mood to question the credibility of everyone she knew.

She logged on to her computer, went to Dissertations Abstracts, located Harrison Hough's dissertation on Herman Melville and ordered a copy to be sent to her home address. It was something any scholar could do, but rarely would do without ulterior motive. If Harrison had gotten his Ph.D. from UNM, his dissertation would be in the library, but his doctorate was from UTEP. Fortunately Harrison was out that day so she didn't have to feel guilty every time she ran into him.

******

When she got home on Friday, she found a package lying on the brick floor of her courtyard. She went to her office, took the critical edition of
The Confidence-Man
from the shelf and brought it back outside. By now the days were long enough for her to sit on the banco in the evening and read. She opened the package and began the process of comparing the critical introduction to the dissertation. Normally, comparing a dissertation to anything went beyond boring, but this task had the thrill of the hunt, giving her the heightened alertness of a predator closing in on a prey, which might be exactly the way someone else was feeling about her. A transference took place between the hunter and the hunted,
and
she soon saw one between the doctoral candidate and the critic. The repetition in the phraseology was more than coincidental. In addition to “existential enigma of the self” and “insidiously implicative,” she found “ontologically amorphous” and other phrases she had heard Harrison use. Harrison and Jeffrey Omer had reached similar conclusions, but well-meaning students of Melville might logically reach similar conclusions. Using the exact same language, however, would be considered plagiarism. While paraphrasing was acceptable, copying was not. Claire wondered whether Harrison had studied Omer so intently that the critic's phrases wore a channel in his brain and became his phrases. It was hard to imagine Harrison being dumb enough to steal deliberately from Jeffrey Omer, but it might happen unconsciously to someone who lacked an inventive mind. The committee at UTEP had been lax when they accepted the dissertation. Harrison's adviser should have been familiar with Omer's work.

While Claire had been reading, the shadows took over her courtyard. She put the dissertation and the book down on the banco and watched the shadows come to life on the summer wind. Nemesis climbed to the top of the wall and stood still, silhouetted against the fading light. Something rustled in the courtyard and he leapt for it, disappearing among the shadows. It was the hour when the coyotes came out of the Sandias into the foothills and began to hunt. There was the moment when a predator killed a prey and there was an instant right before the kill when the prey was there for the taking. Claire wondered which moment the predator found most gratifying. Harrison had stepped into her line of fire. She had enough evidence in these documents to ruin his career. Was she capable of doing it? What kind of a burden would it be to know it and not do it? Would she have to think “plagiarist” every time she looked at Harrison? The civilized action when in doubt was to discuss it. She picked up the documents, coaxed Nemesis inside and shut the door behind her.

Usually when she was troubled by something to do with books she ran it by John Harlan. She called him at home and was pleased to get the man and not the machine.

“Claire,” he said, “how have you been?”

“I just discovered something I'd like to talk to you about. I found evidence that Harrison plagiarized some of his dissertation on Melville.”

“Well, that doesn't surprise me. That pompous pooh-bah never had an original thought,” John replied. “Have you had dinner yet?”

Claire looked at her watch, which read eight o'clock. She thought about what was in her refrigerator—very little. “Not yet,” she admitted.

“I'm fixing myself some gruel. Would you like to come over and share it? There's more than enough for two.”

“It's getting late.”

“What the hell, it's Friday night, isn't it? You don't have to work tomorrow.”

Claire
had forgotten that it was Friday. It had been one of those weeks when she was too preoccupied to remember the weekend was approaching. She had made no plans and faced the wasteland of no one to see and nowhere to go. The feeling hung over from high school that it was okay to stay home alone with your cat during the week, but to stay home on the weekend was pathetic. She accepted John's invitation.

She knew he lived in a townhouse complex near the store, but she had never actually been there. It was only an eight-minute drive from Claire's house, but much farther away in feeling. Albuquerque comprised fifteen hundred feet in elevation and several life zones beginning with the Rio Grande, which nourished a bosque of magnificent cottonwood trees. Claire lived at the high end of the city near where private land ended and national forest began. The natural vegetation here—prickly pear and cholla—was full of thorns, but a few hundred feet higher it turned to piñon and juniper. In her development people were changing the vegetation by planting lilacs and cottonwoods, and she herself had a wall of roses. The Heights and the Valley both had natural beauty and spectacular views, and that was where people with money tended to live. There was some fine architecture around the university and the downtown area, but in much of Albuquerque scrubby desert had been replaced by undistinguished buildings and unnatural vegetation.