SUMMER of FEAR Page 23

  It was my turn then for silence. Her words seemed so alien, her voice so, well, genuine. "Thanks for the updated Fultz family bio," I said. "The last I was told, Daddy was a banker and Mommy a beauty queen."

  "It... it was easier to believe an appearance."

  "So what appearance was it that let you keep me away from my own daughter when she was a girl?"

  "Oh, Russell, no."

  "If you're coming clean, include me."

  She sighed significantly, perhaps a tad histrionically. "The idea of my daughter being brought up sheltered and conservative in boring old Orange County. Surrounded by dull, conventional, materialistic people. Inexperienced, untraveled, unsophisticated. Gad, I sound bad. But I wanted her to be a true princess in this world."

  "Unpolluted by a common sheriff's deputy hauling down twenty-six grand a year."

  "Yes."

  "But you married Martin Parish, who later in life thought highly enough of you to try to kill you."

  "Marty was interim. A way to get you out of my life."

  "Damn."

  "I know."

  I thought for a moment. "Well, thanks for saying so. I suspected it was that, but it clarifies the stupidity of the whole notion to hear you admit it."

  "Pound away, Russell. This is your big moment."

  "How come nothing real is ever good enough for you'

  "I've always considered it a fault of mine."

  "You can make up only so much before your head hits the brick wall of what is."

  "I know that now. And Russell, for what it's worth, my head hurts awful bad."

  "You still haven't answered my first question. Where were you yesterday, last night, and today?"

  Amber shook her head. "Gad, Russell. I met with my attorney to rewrite my will. Does that meet with your approval"

  "It didn't take a day and a half."

  She lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. "I had a rather long meeting with State Attorney General. Allen Boster. In Sacramento. I spent the night."

  I felt my heart flutter and become light as I considered the possibilities of the People v. Martin Parish. "And?"

  "There's a chance he'll open an investigation of Martin.

  "What did you tell him?"

  "Just about everything. He'll take my deposition soon. You will be called later."

  "We'll still need the evidence."

  "Then let's go get it, Russ."

  I looked at her, unable to decide whether this new direction would lead to exoneration for myself or to even more pressure from Martin.

  I could only assume she had written Martin Parish out of his five hundred grand. Perhaps she had written me out, too. I could blame her for neither. And she had gone to the top to get what she wanted. Very smart. Very Amber.

  In Amber's house, the heat was stale and suffocating, but the sense of dread raised in me was even worse. How clearly I remembered that night of July 3, my anticipation of a secret life, my innocence, my stupidity, my desire; how clearly I remembered the smell of human flesh so strong, the sight of Alice, the painted walls, the resounding echo of insanity.

  Amber's room. I worked the carpet on my hands and knees, with a flashlight and a comb. It was unreasonably clean. I rolled the bed away to get under it, but it wasn't likely that a piece of Martin Parish would be under the bed, and there wasn't. I inspected the fresh coat of paint, under which the spray-painted red of AWAKEN OR DIE IN IGNORACE was still scarcely visible. I checked the trash cans in the side yard for some clue to this artist—a can of paint, a brush, a mixing stick, a spattered shirt or drop cloth—and discovered not one useful thing at all. I tried the garage and found more of nothing useful. He'd probably loaded it all into his car by the time I saw him that night—-yes, he was wiping his final fingerprints from the gate knob!—then stopped behind a store on his way home to use the dumpster. Could I match a dried drop of paint from the lining of Parish's trunk to the paint on Amber's wall? I couldn't match shit shinola, I reminded myself, but someone like Chet Singer could. But Chet Singer wouldn't. I thought of driving Parish's route home and trying the dumpsters, but they'd have been emptied by now. I began to feel just a little bit sick. I desired a large quantity of alcohol, and I was hungry. My face was sore. Amber hovered, wordless.

  When the doorbell rang in the cavernous entryway, I could feel the length of its diminishing echo all the way down my back. We were standing in the master bedroom. I looked at my watch. It was 9:45 P.M. Amber searched my face with a worried that looked close to panic. I pointed to her purse, which she had hung over a bedpost. She retrieved a little .32 and handed it to me, and I nodded her downstairs, toward the door.

  The doorbell rang again as we walked across the marble floor. Amber peered through the peephole, then looked at me with a quizzical expression. I looked myself. Narrowed to the point of caricature, seemingly yards away, stood the plump and forlorn figure of Chester Fairfax Singer. He was toting an ancient misshapen leather suitcase.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  "How badly have you contaminated this scene?" he asked.

  I stood back and let him in. "Nice to see you, too, Chet. Chester Singer—Amber Mae Wilson."

  He regarded her momentarily. "You're somewhat larger than on the hair-conditioner bottle," he said without a trace of humor. "And lovelier, too."

  Wearing fresh latex gloves, we used clean paper towels to check the drains for blood, and found none. Surely Parish had washed up here, but surely he was careful enough to run the water long and wipe the grills himself. The hand and bath towels looked fresh, but Chet took them down, laid them on the tile counter, and worked them over with a magnifier. They revealed nothing. I felt stupid.

  "What about fingerprints?" Amber asked.

  "He wiped the gate knob on his way out, so he probably wiped everything else, too."

  "We'll spray and dust to our hearts' content," said Chet.

  "Even a homicide captain can leave a mistake behind. In fact, I am reminded of Martin's earlier days as a detective—he was always just a little bit impatient and contemptuous of the crime scene specialists. He was not a man who worshiped detail, would not be surprised at all if Mr. Parish managed to leave us something... telling."

  "What about the weapon?" Amber asked.

  "He likely removed it when he removed the body," Chester said patiently.

  "How did he get her into his car without the neighbor seeing?"

  "I can attest to your privacy here, Ms. Wilson. Your nearest neighbors are two hundred yards away. It was dark. It was late. How big is this lot, by the way?"

  "Three point five acres."

  "Have you searched it, Russell?"

  "No."

  "Well, we may have to."

  "What about tire prints in the driveway?" Amber asked

  "You used it when you came home on the fifth," I said.

  "Your manager used it when he came here, looking for you.

  Chester glumly shook his big head. "Russell, review for me the night you found Martin here, in his... informal wear.

  I told him everything I could remember about that bizarre encounter on July the Fourth.

  "Why do you assume he was intending to enter Ms. Wilson's bed?"

  "He told me he'd done it before. And the bed was still made."

  "But maybe he was finished and had already made back up."

  "That's true." I considered Amber's bed, the prolific pink pillows, the scented silk and satin. Chet worked over the pillows and discovered two short gray-brown hairs worked into a sham, hairs almost certainly not belonging to Amber or Alice. He put them in evidence bags, carefully labeling each. A little ripple of hope wavered up through me. We got another one from the top sheet, up near the pillows. Down about halfway, Chet found a short curly hair that could have come from about any crotch in the world. Chester bagged and labeled it. We looked for semen on the sheets—few acts have made me feel lower on the evolutionary scale—and found none.

  Amber watched us i
n minor horror. "He wouldn't really have done that, would he?"

  "You tell us, Amber," I said. "You were married to him."

  "Jesus, I'm really not so sure. But you know something? I lived with him for over a year, and he's the most fastidious anal-retentive I've ever known. He'd brush out the toilet with disinfectant after he peed."

  Chet ran a clean tissue under the toilet bowl's lip, for exactly what purpose, I wasn't sure. Clean. I remembered the shaving cut on Martin's Adam's apple the afternoon of the fourth and examined the razors—plastic, disposable—in the bathroom drawer. Dumb, I thought: What would possess anyone to stop in the middle of a murder and cover-up, then shave?

  "Do you have anything to drink?" I asked.

  "Gin."

  "Light, ice."

  "Make mine a little more substantial," said Chester.

  We wandered the house. The carpet near the entrance was spotless, as it was inside the sliding screen door on which the mesh had been cut open as a nod to the Midnight Eye. We studied the stereo setup, in which Parish—after piecing together phrases from the tapes left at the Fernandez and Ellison homes—had left his dub. He would certainly have left no prints to go along with it. I saw an image of him, grim with purpose using some rinky-dink boom box in his office before the murder recording bits of monologue from tapes he had surely copied days ago, before they were booked into evidence. Amber delivered the drink to me with a guarded stare.

  In the study, I noted the lamp and magazines I'd knock over. In the kitchen, we prowled around under the sink, in the broom closet, the trash compactor, the cabinets.

  I began to feel tricked, anticipated, suckered. Marty had already done all this, I thought—cleaned up evidence of his and replaced it with evidence of Grace. Probably ran the fucking vacuum cleaner, I thought, and it actually sounded like something that anally retentive Martin would do.

  "Where's your vacuum?"

  "Corner of the den. Behind the room divider."

  Chester smiled mildly. "Sometimes the obvious is best."

  He pulled it out from beside an ironing board, popped off the back panel, and felt the bag.

  "Empty," he said.

  "Then he didn't use it," said Amber.

  "Please get me some clean paper towels."

  Chet worked off the roller and flicked the brush over a clean chain of towels. I used my pen to fan the bristles. What speckled down onto the white paper looked an awful lot like dried blood.

  "Is that what I think it is?" Amber asked.

  "Yes," said Chester. "The bag is empty because he used the machine, then put in a new bag. We are closer."

  "And took the old bag with him?"

  "Probably. It would depend on how calm he was able remain, on whether the bag might mean an extra trip back into the house for him. Show me where your trash cans are."

  Of course I had already been through the trash, in search of a painter's mess. But this time through, we removed each item individually, bringing to our labor an attention that an onlooker would have found comical. The task was made more difficult by the fact that most of Amber Mae's trash had been run through the compactor. Not only that, but the garbage was over a week old because Amber had failed, with her disappearance, to have it taken out to curbside. The smell was not good.

  The bag was, of course, nowhere to be found.

  "Well," said Chester. "Another roadblock."

  We all looked at one another rather gloomily.

  "It wouldn't hurt to check the filter," Chet said finally.

  We used a clean white towel that Chester carried, neatly folded, in his case. We spread it in the middle of the living room floor. Chet unscrewed the vacuum cleaner's lid and worked out the filter, which is engineered to keep large debris from the motor compartment. He cradled out the screen and laid it down on the towel carefully, as if it were an infant. What we had before us was a dusty mulch that covered almost a square foot of terry cotton, a bounty of dirt, dust, hair, fiber, more dust, a broken rubber band, a paper clip, a penny, more dust, a length of string, a wad of green dental floss that had somehow missed the brush, a warped postage stamp, and a great deal more dust.

  "What a job," Amber noted.

  Chester removed a bundle of evidence bags from his case and we began. "Ms. Wilson, we could use two standard tablespoons, rinsed and wiped."

  First, we separated and bagged anything that might be useful. Several hairs could have been Martin's. Nothing else seemed indicative, even suggestive. The idea crossed my mind that I was a fool. We bagged the broken rubber band, which seemed to confirm this. Amber sighed. Using a spoon, I made little S patterns through the silt, disgusted.

  "One of the hairs may help," I said, fully aware that you can't establish 100 percent identification of a human being with hair samples—not in court, anyway.

  "What's that?" asked Amber.

  "I said, one—"

  "No. What's that?"

  Amber's hand hovered over the towel, forefinger extended. I followed the aim of that finger, thinking—yes, even at this hour, even after this day, even after everything my dear Isabella had suffered at least in part for me—that if the entire promise of the female form could be contained in one finger here it was, a perfect digit, graceful, firm, strong, lovely in composition and utility, the skin slightly tanned, the flesh full with its slender contours, the nail bold and bright and domed imperiously, red as blood, pointing now at something in the dust.

  "There," she said.

  "I can't see it from here."

  "Then give me the spoon, Russ."

  She reached with it and dipped the outer lip as if for soup. She jiggled the utensil, worked it down through the gray matte She lifted it, tilting off a wad of nonspecific material that floated slowly back down to the towel. She presented the spoon to me handle first. I took it and spilled the contents onto a clean paper tissue.

  What I saw at first, I still couldn't identify—it was a U shaped concave shell the size, roughly, of a fingernail. One end was jagged and looked as if it had been torn away from something else. The other end was smoothly rounded. It was covered with dust, but under the dust I could see pink.

  "Turn it over, Russell," said Chet.

  I flipped it with my pen. It was a fingernail—pink, tapered chipped noticeably at the round end. I looked at Amber, who looked back at me.

  She shook her head. "Not one of my colors."

  "Alice's?"

  "How would I know? I don't suppose when you—"

  "No."

  Chester keyed in on this truncated exchange, his patient eyes searching first my face, then Amber's.

  I returned his stare with what innocence I could fake, while trying in my mind to recreate that night, and I could see Alice's rigid outstretched arms inviting me into the freezer, could feel her icy-slick weight on my back as I bore her up the mountain, but I could not for my life see her fingernails.

  I touched it with my pen. "Fake?"

  "Yes," said Amber "It was torn off. Maybe in a struggle. There's probably some real nail on it. Does that help?"

  "Definitely. Get Alice's makeup stuff and bring it in here."

  Amber returned a moment later with her sister's overnight case. She dug through and found two bottles of nail polish in a shiny black plastic kit. One was red, the other an opalescent white.

  "Amber, what does this suggest... in the cosmetic scheme of things?"

  "Proves it's not her nail."

  "Absolutely not?"

  "Russ, nails aren't absolute. But you don't do them pink, then leave town for two weeks with red and white."

  "Oh my, I can almost hear this in court," noted Chet.

  "She might have forgotten it," I said.

  "Might have."

  "Or carried the pink in a handier place, like her purse."

  "I already looked," said Amber. "She didn't."

  Naturally, I had thought about another possibility. Amber looked at me, her eyes steady but rife with the same dire inklings that must h
ave been visible in my own.

  "Grace's color?"

  "Women don't have just one color, Russ. Remember our bathroom?"

  I did, a veritable makeup department, an entire warehouse of paints and polishes, shadows and liners in every hue and shade; solvents, removers, applicators, brushes, tissue: swabs, lighted mirrors, hand-held mirrors, magnifying mirror: wall mirrors. (It was our favorite place in the world to make standing, carnal, untender, image-drunk love.)

  I said that I had not forgotten our bathroom.

  "Well," she said, "then you know."

  "Bag the nail," said Chester. "Perhaps, at some point it will match nine others that we find in Mr. Parish's possession. They are probably among his 'evidence' right now at County."

  I bagged it and continued on through the dusty rubble in front of me. A few minutes later, we were done. We placed the filter and contents in one large evidence bag. Chet arranged the bag in his case with the others after labeling each.

  "You didn't get what you wanted, did you?" asked Amber.

  "Maybe. Hairs. I don't know. A lot of it depends on the good graces of Mr. Singer."

  "Mr. Singer cannot analyze what he does not possess.'

  "Did Alice wear a watch, or eyeglasses?" I asked Amber. I had not forgotten the tiny screw I had removed from the nap of the carpet here just a few nights ago. It was still inside the cap of my pen, with my own spares.

  "I hadn't seen her in twelve years, Russell. What now?

  "Grace's."

  Amber studied me. "To find what?"

  "If Parish has been there, doing the same thing he did here, we need something to prove it. If there's a 'police investigation' tape up, it's too late."

  There was no tape, and Amber had a key supplied to her by the private detective she had hired to find Grace.

  It was the first time I had been inside my daughter's home. I stood in the short entryway, holding the batch of mail I'd gotten from her slot in the lobby, wondering again how I had managed to miss her life. The condo was not only expensive to start with but the furnishings and accents were expensive, too—all financed by Amber, as she reminded me. The carpet was a thick cream Berber, the sofas and chairs heavy rattan with white cotton cushions, and two of the three living room walls were hung with original oils by Laguna artists whose styles I recognized. The east wall was mirrored to extend the depth of the room; the west was all glass, including a sliding door that opened to a long but narrow balcony overlooking the yacht basin and restaurants. The kitchen was done in Euro style, which means everything is the same shape and color (black) and you can't tell the oven from the dishwasher. The bedroom had a big four-poster and was done in pinks. The whole place was organized, clean, neat.