The Confidence Woman (23 page)

“I think you should get in your car and come back to Albuquerque. We'll talk tomorrow.”

******

She suspected that by the time she reached Flagstaff Erwin would be on his way to Mexico. Nevertheless she kept her eye on the rearview mirror as she climbed
I-17.
Every time she saw a black SUV coming up behind her, she slowed down and let it go by. When she got to Flagstaff she turned east on
I-40.
Now she had to worry about the sun setting in her rearview mirror and keeping all the semis on the road from blocking her way or boxing her in. Sometimes she looked in her rearview mirror and saw one barreling down on her, painted, polished and decorated with the loving care of a low-rider.

She had hoped to be home by dark, but by the time she reached Grants night had fallen. There were no more slick paint jobs to study once the sun set, only the arrangement and intensity of lights. Red lights and white lights outlined the shapes of tractor trailers in the dark. The road wasn't any emptier at night. If anything, more long-distance truckers came out, but Claire's sense of solitude intensified and her
thoughts
changed. During daylight she had replayed the tape and was relieved that Erwin's statement came through loud and clear. After dark her thoughts turned to the woman who was dead and the one who was missing. She inserted a piano concerto into her tape deck in an attempt to restore order, but the tape jammed and she couldn't get it to play. She spun the radio dial but found nothing she wanted to listen to. She was left with the sound of the wind at her window and the wheels on the highway. One dark thought was that the light-as-a-butterfly Miranda had ended up a swollen corpse on Evelyn Martin's floor, and she would have to tell Lynn about it. For Lynn it would be more than the loss of a friend, it would be the end of a dream.

Claire's thoughts moved on to Evelyn. Now that she knew who had gone to the house, she saw the scene in the kitchen differently. Elizabeth and Ginny could well have lost control and threatened Evelyn, but she didn't see Miranda doing that. The murder might not have been an act of self-defense, but an attempt to prevent discovery. It made Evelyn's actions seem more cold and calculating. Up to the point when she wielded the frying pan, Evelyn had merely been a thief, Claire supposed, but now that she had become a murderer, what would that do to her state of mind? Had she used Miranda's credit cards in
LA
and, if so, was she still there? Claire saw it as a sprawling, anonymous place destructive to people with no roots or sense of identity, a place where people who were close to the edge fell off. What would she do when Miranda's credit ran out? Rob another friend? Evelyn never had many friends. Approaching other people from the
U
of
A
days would be risky since she had no way of knowing who had been informed that she was dead.

Claire was relieved to finally get off
I-40
at Tramway and out of the path of the eighteen-wheelers. Nemesis waited for her at the door and she picked him up and gave him a long hug. She had been gone longer than she intended and his food dish was empty. She filled the dish, checked her phone messages and found one from Lynn saying she hoped Claire got home safely. She postponed calling her back and walked through her small, neat house, which would fit into one wing of Miranda's. It was comfortable but not elegant. She had some valuable things, some beautiful things, some that were neither. Many of them had been given her by family and friends. She treasured all of them, the plain as well as the beautiful. If there was Feng Shui in this house it had been created by love, not by money.

Ever since Evelyn robbed her, Claire had felt a disturbance in her home, but now she could see the possibility of restoring tranquility. She took the notepad, the tape recorder and the copy of
The Piazza Tales
wrapped in her windbreaker into her office and placed them on her desk.

Then she went to the guest room, took the black nightgown from the drawer, draped it in front of her and stood in front of the mirror thinking about identity and wondering how accurate an assessment Evelyn had made of her old friends when she'd chosen what to steal from them and what to give. Her visits to their houses gave her the opportunity to study what they owned and what that said about their
characters.
In Claire's experience the powerless always knew more about the powerful than the reverse. The servant studies the master, the master doesn't see the servant. Not that she and the other sisters had a lot of power, but Evelyn had so little. Claire had been busy with work during her visit and hadn't paid much attention to her. But Evelyn had been watching. What had she learned?

She'd taken a book from the shelf that had a high monetary value, but it wasn't one that Claire loved. The issue of the black nightgown was more complicated. Had Evelyn seen Claire as a woman who would ever wear (or want to wear) a silky black nightgown slit to the navel? Was Claire now or had she ever been that person? In her dreams, maybe. She remembered Evelyn at the sorority house saying,
“You
have cleavage.” That was right before she went to Europe, met Pietro and spent a semester traveling around Europe and Morocco with him in a Volkswagen van that broke down in every country they visited. Claire wondered if Evelyn had seen a budding sensuality in her back then. Had she seen it again when she visited last spring? Or was it too late for sensuality to ever bloom again? Evelyn might have given her more of a gift than she'd intended.

While Claire stared at the mirror it turned into a window opening onto a street in Marrakesh. The trees were laden with oranges. The Atlas Mountains were tipped with snow. The sun was setting on one side, the full moon rising on the other. Soft voices on the street spoke in Arabic and French. A candle burned in the room. Behind her Pietro lay on the bed smoking hashish. Was she wearing black that night or nothing? Smoke filled the window and then it became a mirror again. Claire could see that the nightgown would fit, but how would she look in it at this point? Not willing to take the risk of finding out, she folded it up, wrapped it in tissue paper and put it back in the drawer.

She went to the living room, picked up the phone, called Lynn and broke the news that she believed Miranda had been murdered by Evelyn Martin.

“That can't be true,” she protested. “It wasn't that long ago that I saw her.”

“When was the last time you actually saw her?” Claire asked. “Not the last time you got an e-mail or saw the commercial on television but the last time you actually saw Miranda alive?”

“At Christmas, I guess,” Lynn admitted. “I'll tell Steve to talk to Erwin. Erwin will tell him the truth.”

“If Steve can find him.”

“Let me check with Steve and I'll call you back,” Lynn said.

When she called back two hours later, Claire was soaking in a tub of warm water lapping at the edges of sleep.

“There was no answer,” Lynn said. “We drove over to New River and found no one home. I can't believe that Miranda is dead, Claire.”

“It's hard to accept, I know, but it's the most logical explanation.”

“It
may be logical,” Lynn said, “but to me it's horrible.”

“I'm hoping to talk to Detective Amaral soon. If he can be persuaded to do a
DNA
test, he'll be able to establish for certain whether the body is Miranda's.”

“You'll let me know what he says?”

“Immediately,” Claire replied.

******

The next day she took the copy of
The Piazza Tales,
the notepad and the tape to Sid Hyland. Hyland was dubious about the value of any of them, pointing out to Claire that the book and notepad could have come from anywhere and the tape could be anyone's voice.

“Erwin is an actor,” she said. “His voice should be on record somewhere if it gets down to that.”

She persuaded Hyland to call Dr. Rule, and he came away from that call impressed by the dentist's ability to describe Miranda's teeth.

“He'd make a good witness,” he said when he got off the phone. “He's knowledgeable, professional and precise. You need to talk to Amaral. Let me see if I can set up a meeting here.”

Amaral agreed to come to Albuquerque two days later. Claire never wanted to see him in her office again; they would meet at Hyland's office at nine in the morning. She woke up early that day and prepared for the meeting by balancing militant tai chi exercises with calming tai chi. As she drove across town to Hyland's office, she wondered how Amaral would handle himself in front of a lawyer who was twenty years older and far more experienced.

Amaral got there first and both men were standing when she entered the room. The detective was as tall as Hyland, but Hyland outweighed him by fifty pounds. His manner was soft-spoken and deferential, as it had been to Claire when they first met, but by now Claire knew this was a mask that could be taken on and off at will. From the moment Claire entered the room Amaral avoided looking at her, averting his eyes like a guilty child. As requested, he had brought
The Confidence-Man
still concealed under the dust jacket of
The Scarlet Letter.

Claire didn't waste any time playing Erwin Bush's tape. Amaral seemed startled, but dubious.

“How do I know that is Erwin Bush's voice?” he asked.

“He's an actor,” Hyland replied. “His voice will be on record somewhere.”

He'd quoted her rather well, Claire thought, except that he had said “will” where she had said “should.”

“You won't need to compare voices once you have seen the rest of the evidence,” Hyland added.

Claire put a wrapped copy of
The Piazza Tales
on Hyland's desk. “I took this book from Miranda Kohl and Erwin Bush's library,” she said. “It was part of a complete set of Herman Melville. I believe
The
Confidence-Man
you have is also a part of that set. It was the only book missing from the collection. The reason the fingerprints you found on your
Confidence-Man
match the body in Evelyn Martin's house is because the book is Miranda Kohl's and so is the body. If you will remove the jacket from your
Confidence-Man
I can demonstrate the similarities.”

As the jacket came off, she had a moment of anxiety. Her goal was to convince a man who had shown no interest in rare books of the similarities between these two books. What if she had been wrong? The only way to be sure was to place them side by side for comparison. She put on her white gloves and unwrapped
The Piazza Tales.
The ostensible reason for wearing white gloves was to protect a rare book from fingerprints and damage, but putting them on also gave her an air of authority and of confidence.

Once the two books were together it was obvious that they were peas from the same pod. They were the same dimensions. The full brown morocco was identical in texture and in color. Both books had a similar amount of wear. Claire pointed out to Amaral and Hyland how the spines of the books had faded over time, but the fronts and backs had remained close to the original color. She demonstrated that the gilt letters on the spines and front covers were identical in style.

She opened them to the copyright pages and demonstrated that both books were first editions.
The Piazza Tales
had been published in 1856 and
The Confidence-Man
in 1857. The open books brought her to her next point. She took the notepad she had found in Miranda's house and placed it on the desk next to
The Confidence-Man.

“Beer,” the list read, “wine, milk, hamburger meat and cheese.”

“That's a shopping list,” Amaral said.

“It was written by Erwin Bush,” Claire replied. “I found it in the house. It will be useful for comparing handwriting.”

“Did your tip that
The Confidence-Man
was in Claire's office come from Erwin Bush?” Hyland asked.

“It was anonymous,” Amaral replied.

Claire compared the handwriting. By now she knew the handwriting in Erwin's note well, but she had only seen the signature in
The Confidence-Man
briefly. She turned to the title page of
The Confidence-Man
and compared it to the note.

“Herman Melville died in 1891,” she said. “As I said before this signature couldn't possibly be his. If it were, the ink would be faded and cracked. Even without an authentic Melville signature to compare it to, the ink told me that this was a forgery.”

Amaral examined the signature. “I don't see any similarity between the two handwritings,” he said.

This was where Claire felt on shakiest ground, wishing that the handwriting expert August
Stevenson
was here to help. The handwritings
were
different, but she attributed that to the deviousness of a single writer, not the differences between two.

“When people are trying to conceal their style of writing, they are likely to slant the script in a different direction,” she said. “Notice how the Melville signature slants backward toward the left, not a natural way to write. Most people write in a hurry and slant forward toward the right. Another way people conceal their writing style is by squaring off the round letters and by adding or removing embellishments to the tall letters. But the inconsistency here is revealing. See how the
e
's have been squared off in ‘Herman Melville'? But the
a
is round, as it is in ‘hamburger meat' in the note. The beginning letters in the signature—
H
and
M
—are large and bold with a dramatic flourish. That's the way a forger would expect the script of a well-known writer to appear. Yet the
l
's in both documents have a plain and narrow loop.”