by Thomas Perry
The air had the satisfyingly stale smell she’d expected because the house had been kept shut for a while. She checked the places where she had left the baby powder, and there were no new footsteps until she came to the front door, where the floor had one big print. She examined the door and guessed that someone had come in with a key or picked the lock. She let her shoulder go limp to slide her bag off onto the table and went to the slide-in hidden spice rack in the kitchen. She opened the jar of turmeric, looked to see if the two thumb drives she’d hidden there were in it, took one out, closed the jar and put it back, and slid the spice rack out of sight.
She dropped the thumb drive into her purse, turned to take a look around, and walked. When she reached her bedroom she found the note on her pillow. It said, “Call me. Nathaniel.”
Nathaniel was her cousin, one of the few relatives she still acknowledged and went to see voluntarily. She put the note into her pocket and went around to the various doors blowing new powder on the hardwood floors. She had given Nathaniel a key after she’d moved in because she didn’t want to die someday and have nobody find her. Five in the morning was too early to call any number but 911, so she spent time attending to other business.
She put on her surgical gloves and took out of her purse the thumb drive copy of the murder of Kavanagh, Mannon, and Teason. She wiped the drive for prints and turmeric, and then used her fine-point pen to write, “HOMICIDE: PLAY THIS,” on a small piece of paper, which she taped around the drive. She put the drive into the envelope, wrote the address of the L.A. police headquarters, and put the stamps on the envelope.
She drove to the post office on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, dropped the small envelope into the interior slot, and left. The cameras certainly caught her, but they would record the dozens of others who mailed things this morning, and the cops would not know which one had mailed that envelope, who she was, or maybe, with her baseball cap, if she was male or female. She wasn’t positive that the police didn’t already have the tape of the murder, but now she was positive they would have it. She would know their lack of progress wouldn’t be her fault.
Elle returned to her house. She had searched the online version of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter each morning. Today she found the item she had been waiting for: “New ‘I, Claudius’ Shoots in Rome on 23rd.”
She glanced at her phone to verify that today was the sixteenth. Then she took off everything except the belly band that held her Rohrbaugh pistol and went to bed. She woke in the afternoon, put her hand on her pistol, walked around and verified that nobody had been in her house and nobody was outside waiting for her, and then relaxed. She did what she could to refresh and replenish herself for whatever the next stage of things was going to be.
She washed a load of laundry consisting of the contents of her suitcase, hid more money in the suitcase and the purse, charged her phones, cleaned her pistol, cleaned and polished her shoes, and spent some more time trying to learn what she could about Santo Teason from public sources. Next she used her phone and looked at photographs of Teason’s house from the street and from the air, and studied the neighborhood for the best ways in and out.
At three thirty she judged that it was a decent hour to call Nathaniel. She punched his number into her cell phone. In a second she heard, “Elle?”
“Hi, Nathaniel. It’s nice to know you haven’t lost my key.”
“Not me,” he said. “You haven’t been in your house in at least a week, and it’s clean. Is something wrong?”
“Just avoiding somebody. But you’re the one who got in touch. What’s the occasion?”
“Louisa wants to talk to you.” Louisa was the name of his mother, one of her mother’s two sisters who had lived in the big old house in South Pasadena while Elle was growing up. Elle had always thought that the way her aunt had Nathaniel call her Louisa was an excellent accommodation for them both. He got to seem older, a contemporary of his mother’s, and she got to seem younger, a contemporary of her son’s. Elle remembered the way they’d seemed when she was a teenager, Aunt Louisa with striking red hair hanging loose almost to her waist like a woman in a pre-Raphaelite painting—beautiful—and Nathaniel much taller and always serious looking, like a man.
“I’d like to talk to her too. Do you have a current number for her?”
“Not on the phone. She wants to see you. At the old house. Can you do it tonight at around ten?”
“I’ll be there on the dot.” There was a slight pause, and she knew they both wanted to hang up, so she did. She thought for a moment. She certainly didn’t want Aunt Louisa in this house when she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t going to have another visitor. And there was an odd attraction to going back to the old house now. She hadn’t been there in ten years, and she felt a mild curiosity about it.
That night as she was driving she thought about Aunt Louisa. She had been so pretty, with her long red hair and fair complexion and green eyes. Whenever people said, as they did say often, that Elle’s mother was the prettiest of the three sisters, Elle had looked at Aunt Louisa. How could anybody have been prettier than that?
The Stowell sisters had been kind to Elle, but even as a child she had felt a difference. They were passionately attached to their own children, her cousins. They babied and fawned over and slapped and screamed at them. To her the aunts were unfailingly kind, as they might be to the little girl who lived next door, but what she did could never make their hearts either swell or break. She didn’t have to make up for their mistakes in life, surpass them at anything, or even love them.
At the end of that era, when her grandmother died, the sisters both went away with their current boyfriends, taking their children with them. Elle had been out on her own for a few weeks foraging for money to contribute to the household. The morning she returned to the house it was deserted. The big dining room table was still there, and all twelve matching chairs, and a few that weren’t, and the sideboard with the mirrored back. The couches and overstuffed chairs in the living room were there. But as she walked through the house listening for human noises, she also noticed that certain things were gone: the carving knives in the butcher block and the radio in the kitchen, the television set in the living room, some framed photographs in the hallway and on the staircase.
The beds were still there, but the sheets were not. She remembered looking into the room where she had slept, and the sheets and pillow were gone even from her bed. That night she had tried sleeping there, using abandoned clothes from the closets as blankets and pillow. But at around two, right after the bars had closed, she heard men laughing and talking on the street outside, and then men’s heavy, hard boot heels on the porch. She heard their voices until just before daylight.
When she came by the house a month later, hoping that some part of the family might have come back, she found broken windows and a tall chain-link fence around the property, and the green lawn had become a patch of weedy ground where people had begun to throw little bags of dog shit and the wrappers and Styrofoam from fast food.
A few months later Elle had found Nathaniel’s half of the family by asking around at stores where Nathaniel and his brother had once bagged groceries or bought food and at houses where they had once done odd jobs.
Tonight when Elle pulled up a few dozen yards from the house, she was surprised. At some point, before the house could fall into a pile, somebody had taken an interest in it and done serious work on it. The yard was a bit smaller, and it had a high steel fence that looked as though it were made of spears planted vertically in the ground. The house itself looked almost exactly as it had looked when she was fourteen. It had two full floors of rooms, a porch that went around it all the way like an apron, and a low-ceilinged attic on top. The clapboards had been replaced, but they were the same dark green color, and the white trim was whiter than it had been in her lifetime. There were lights on in the upper floors, and the driveway, once two parallel strips of concrete, was now made of paving stones. The two cars parked on
them were a Mercedes and a BMW.
She saw a car arrive ahead of her and Nathaniel swing his long legs out and walk toward her rented SUV. The passenger door opened and she recognized the slim silhouette of Aunt Louisa, who hurried ahead of Nathaniel, tugged open Elle’s passenger door, and climbed in. She had always been startling, but now, when she must be fifty, she looked about thirty, her hair now dyed to maintain its color and the pale skin of her face preserved with a highly skilled application of makeup. Around her neck was a beautiful silk scarf, and her arms looked as slim and graceful as always under the long sleeves of her black pullover. Her appearance was both a revelation and a disguise—things shown and things hidden. Her bright green eyes were glaring at Elle in the dome light, kept on by the door she held half open. “You remind me so much of Ellen. Your mother. You look a lot like her.”
Elle said, “I always heard I missed out on her looks, but I guess I’m not as stupid either. It’s a fair trade.”
“Stupid?” Louisa said. “She wasn’t stupid.”
“It’s okay. It won’t hurt my feelings. I never even knew her, remember?”
“So where’d you get that idea?”
“I heard Grandma say it. Just about every time her name came up, Grandma would say, ‘So pretty, just like a little doll.’ Or a little angel. Or a little fairy. ‘But so stupid.’ ”
Louisa’s neck and shoulders seemed to relax, and she smiled. “She didn’t mean stupid like not intelligent. She meant something else. You knew Mother for plenty of time before she died.”
“Until I was fourteen.”
“So you knew my mother was a crook. She stole from people. It would be hypocritical to criticize her now, because that was what kept us alive. Everything we had was stolen. Even the house.” She pointed at it. “That’s some job of gentrification, isn’t it? That’s part of why I wanted you to see it. The effect is kind of spooky, because it’s the same place, but it’s not.”
“Yes,” said Elle.
“The reason we had to get out so fast after my mother died was that the place turned out not to be hers. She had worked for an old lady that she knew was going to die. The lady didn’t have any relatives that visited her or called or wrote. Mother took care of a lot of the things she needed, and one day the lady died. Mother arranged her funeral and got her buried, but kept coming to work each day. After a while she decided nobody was ever going to come. So one day when she came to work she brought her stuff—mostly her three daughters. She kept everything going until she died, and then somebody took a look at the address on her death certificate. The city took the house.”
“I hadn’t heard how the house came or how it went. But why did she always say my mother was stupid?”
Louisa sighed. “Because Ellen was amazingly beautiful. Nobody ever denied that. She was also cheerful and funny and quick. She could have been the biggest thief, the biggest trickster, in the country, and that was what our mother tried to raise her to be. She knew from experience that being a small-time thief is a lot of work, and danger, and disappointment. Sometimes you get caught and people hurt you. Being a big-time thief is the opposite. It’s like being a queen. Men all want to give you things. They do your fighting for you, and if you fail or lose, they take the blame for you. She wanted that for Ellen. And she wanted that for herself, to have Ellen support us all in a way she had never been able to. Ellen wouldn’t do it. She felt sorry for people. That’s what my mother meant by stupid.”
“Did Grandma put pressure like that on you?”
Aunt Louisa slowly shook her head. “Didn’t have to,” she said. “She had three favorites—the smartest ones, she said.” Louisa’s expression was grave. “Herself. Me. And you.”
Elle watched as tears blurred Louisa’s face. She pretended to sneeze, looking away. Then she wiped her own eyes. “The air is dusty tonight.”
Louisa said, “Well, I wanted to see you, and I’m glad I could. I’m moving soon.”
“Where are you going?”
“North Carolina,” she said. “I know some girls who have moved there and don’t know how certain games are played. They need my help, which probably will mean someone older to give them permission to do things they know instinctively but haven’t dared to try. I’ll be out of Los Angeles for a while. I always felt bad that we all moved out of this place in a hurry and had to leave you behind. We didn’t think of it that way, because you were already just like a grown woman, but it must have seemed different to you. I didn’t want to do that again.”
“Wow. North Carolina seems like a big change.”
“Well, Mother did come from there, and she always said nobody south of the Mason-Dixon line had a brain bigger than a cat’s. We should do fine.”
Elle said, “I’ll bet you could use some travel money to get there.” She reached into her purse and produced an envelope she had just packed at home. It was thick and the bills inside were all hundreds. She put it in Aunt Louisa’s hand.
“That’s so sweet of you, honey,” Louisa said. The envelope had already disappeared somewhere on her body, under a scarf or a sleeve or a waistband. Aunt Louisa’s sensibility was too delicate to let her count the money in front of Elle or even look at it. She got out of the car, so Elle did too.
She hugged Elle, looked into her eyes once more, and then turned. “It was a treat to see you, honey,” she said in Elle’s general direction as she walked toward Nathaniel’s car.
Nathaniel appeared from the darkness and gave Elle a hug, then took a step after Louisa.
Elle said, “Are you going too?”
He half turned. “I took some vacation time. I’ll just get her settled down there and come back. See you.” He trotted to catch up, but when he did, all there was to do was get in the driver’s seat and drive his mother away.
18
Elle stared at the empty road where Nathaniel and Louisa had been, then took a deep breath and started her car. What she felt was a little bit like her feelings on the day when she had come back here to the empty house and known she’d be alone forever. Maybe if Louisa had asked her to go to North Carolina tonight she would have felt better, but she would never have gone. She had other things to do.
It was time for Elle to turn her attention to Santo Teason and try to figure out if he was the murderer. She would have to find a way into the Teason family home.
She spent most of her time over the next few days casing the house and observing the family. The house was in a wooded area on a road between two ridges above North Beverly Drive, with two houses above it, on the slope of the north ridge, and a lot that was still covered with brush and a few scraggly California oaks but would, within a year or so, be the site of a third house. Elle used a small grove sheltered by a rise in the land as an observation point. The weather was hot, so the shade of the grove was welcome during the day. She often stayed until late evening, because the house had very large sliding glass doors and some windows that gave big views, both outward and inward.
Teason and his children were visible in and around the house often during that time. There were two boys, aged around twelve and eight, and a girl about ten. The house held a lot of people. There was a nanny who seemed to work exclusively with the little girl. She drove her to lessons and parties and back. The boys had their own adult minder, a man who seemed to be assigned only to them. He drove them everywhere, threw footballs with them, spotted them on the trampoline and the monkey bars and when they lifted weights, and jogged with them. He was the lifeguard when they swam. From Elle’s perspective, their lives outside school were like a gym class.
The Teasons—both Santo and the late Valerie—seemed to have delegated most of their children’s needs to other people. Besides the two minders, there were tutors, music teachers, and others who came for some limited purpose. There was even a dance teacher. Elle saw her once teaching the little girl to dance to popular music the way the big girls did, and not necessarily the high school honor students. Another afternoon she was teaching
the boys ballroom dancing, with the little girl’s nanny as the second partner. Since the nanny and the dance instructor looked like actresses selected by friends of Santo’s in the casting business, it occurred to Elle that before long the boys might have a hard time settling for girls of their own ages.
On the twenty-first of the month, Elle arrived before dawn to see the employees working to load two cars with suitcases. Elle drove to LAX and parked in the structure at the Tom Bradley International Terminal, then walked to a bench near the ticketing counters and sat down to wait. The cars pulled up after about a half hour, and the girl’s minder, both drivers, and the boys’ minder all worked to get the luggage loaded onto carts and into the building. Santo and the kids and the two minders all got in line at Alitalia, picked up boarding passes, and proceeded with their carry-on bags toward the security checkpoint.
Elle was feeling good about what she had seen as she walked along the first-floor area toward the door to the crosswalk and her rental car. She had thought it unlikely that Santo Teason would bring the kids to Rome for his shoot. Most Hollywood parents would have left the kids in the house and trusted the people who were raising them anyway to amuse and supervise them during the few dead times between sleepaway camp and the start of school. Clearly this father was making an exception because their mother had died, but she liked Teason better for it anyway. For the next couple of months he would be strategizing in the evening and spending his days bullying and cajoling an army of actors, extras, and technical people into reliving a series of Roman crises that the Romans didn’t handle very well the first time. Kids were going to be a responsibility and a distraction, but he seemed to be handling the whole thing as gracefully as possible.
Elle expelled the thought from her mind. She was planning to evaluate him and figure out whether he had murdered his wife. She was not going to be swayed by his kindness to his kids. Every monstrous wife-killer she’d ever seen in television documentaries was eager to get custody of his kids. And since she had learned the three people who had been looking for her were not cops, maybe they were connected with him. Maybe he was affable because he had them doing the ugly stuff.
