by Thomas Perry
Entry to the Teason house would not be much work. She had seen the nanny drive the German shepherd away from the house in her little Mini Cooper the previous afternoon. The nanny had put a dog bed and a couple of rubber chew toys into the cargo compartment and returned later without dog, bed, or toys. A mature male German shepherd was a big dog, so the doggie door would be the same. It would be closed while the family was gone, but the only potential intruder that couldn’t figure out how to get in a closed dog door was a dog.
When Elle arrived she went straight to the kitchen door, slid her pocketknife under the hard plastic insert that closed the dog door, pushed it up out of its frame, and slithered in.
She sat on the kitchen floor near the door and did her usual careful look around for electric eye beams, cameras, and interior doors that might have alarm circuits activated. Each device had its own particular limitations. A trap circuit had to be installed on a door that wasn’t used much—a door to a furnace room or storeroom or basement, or simply a prop door that opened onto a view of the insulation in the wall. She assumed that in a house with lots of glass there would be alarms that were triggered by the sound of glass breaking. But those were almost always mounted in a living room or dining room, where glass didn’t often break. The public parts of the house and the entryways were also where the cameras would be. They were usually trained on doors and were seldom installed in the bedroom and bathroom areas or the hallways in between.
After a few minutes of cautious exploration she knew where every alarm feature was, and by studying the best approaches to the equipment she had been able to unscrew or disconnect or cover everything.
Now it was time to learn about the house. She tried to form a general impression at a glance. She began in the foyer with her back to the front door, as though she were just coming in. She could look through the foyer to a wide, tall curved entry arch. Beyond it was a back wall, really part of a passageway that ran from the private areas of the house on the left toward the dining room and living room on the right. On this wall there were movie posters, which were something she had expected.
For people in the movie business, posters were like the diplomas hanging in a doctor’s office. They held not only the name of the movie but also the person’s credits—what he’d done on the movie—and the credits of the people he had worked with. She looked from left to right and saw a line of identically framed movie posters hung at the same height, probably in chronological order. Any guest heading for the living room or dining room would relive Santo’s career. The first two were in Portuguese, the next three in Italian, and the rest in English, all the titles familiar to people in Beverly Hills.
She moved closer and looked at some of them. Santo had an impressive career, she conceded. He was only in his early fifties, and he’d accomplished a lot. As she turned to move up the passageway toward the living room, she saw that where the passageway began to have two walls, the right wall, which faced away from the front door, had another set of posters.
They were posters of Valerie McGee, and the earliest ones seemed to be patterned after the covers of paperback books. In the first one, a very young Valerie was wearing a dress with one strap torn off and the skirt tattered at the hem and ripped upward to the hip on one side. She was held around her very thin waist by a man in a suit carrying what looked like an Ingram MAC-10 automatic weapon. Had she been a Bond girl? No. That wasn’t any of the James Bonds Elle had ever seen. It was a low-end thriller, with the title Forced Entry.
There was another with Valerie dressed in a nun’s habit, also torn in a way that indicated to Elle that in the movie Valerie’s character wasn’t really a nun. In the next poster Valerie wore a pair of cutoff jeans short enough to seem structurally unsound and carried a shotgun that was also sawed off short enough to defy practicality. This movie was called South of Valdosta. Then there was Satan’s Sorority, with Valerie dressed as a cheerleader. Some of the posters had Valerie in the center, clearly the female lead, and others had her picture small and in a lineup of other women. In a few of the earliest ones, a monster was the lead character, and Valerie’s name was buried among the credits.
Elle never stopped walking, because she didn’t want to waste time. She moved on to the left, where she guessed the private areas of the house were. Just past the end of the open part of the passageway there was a staircase, so she climbed.
There were a couple of public rooms, one an office and another a sitting room, then the kids’ rooms—an exercise room and a room with a mirror and a barre that was devoted to dance—and then three bedrooms for the children and two for adults, presumably the kids’ caretakers. As usual in this part of the city, the master suite was a door at the end of the upper hallway and took up both sides of the wing. This was where Elle had been headed from the beginning.
The bedroom was large, with light gray walls and heavy, luxurious furniture—oversize bed, couches, easy chairs, and a chaise longue. The only pictures on the walls were big dreamy black-and-white photographs that seemed to be abstractions of natural objects, like earth features seen from above. These were soft curves that might have been sand dunes in a desert or magnified dollops of vanilla cream, but they weren’t. They were pictures of the skin of Valerie McGee Teason’s nude breast, back, and hip, taken from inches away and vastly enlarged. Valerie had been a lucky woman. Elle caught herself thinking it, and then, But of course she wasn’t. But she had been. She just wasn’t anymore.
Elle moved on, looking for anything that she had not expected to see. The clothes in Valerie’s closet had been treated like Anne’s: the ones with price tags or cleaners’ wrappers on them were left, but the ones she had worn were not there.
She went to work on the husband’s closet. He was the one she had come here to investigate. She opened every built-in drawer and cabinet in the closet. She had only a faint hope of finding anything conclusive, but there were facts in her favor. The killer had used a silencer and pistol on the first three victims but had not thrown them away. He had used them a second time on Sharon and Peter in Sharon’s apartment, almost a week later. If he had gotten away with using them on two occasions, why would he throw them away? He still had Elle to kill.
Elle found two pistols in a top drawer on the inner wall of the closet. One was a big one that looked like an antique out of a western movie—a long-barreled revolver with bone handles. There was engraving on it, so she used her flashlight to read it. “Santo Teason, Montana Wild, 2015.” It was a keepsake, apparently given to him by somebody who had worked on the movie. It was not loaded, looked and smelled as though it had never been fired, and didn’t appear to be accompanied by any bullets. The other pistol looked more recent, a Browning M1911 .45. This one was engraved “Santo Teason, A Pair of Aces, 2005.” It was also not loaded—it had only the magazine that was in it and there were no bullets for that either—and there was no silencer. There seemed to have been somebody in the cast, crew, or executive suite who liked to buy these keepsakes. The wording was too similar to be a coincidence. They were gifts given at the end of production.
She found an accordion-style envelope that tied with a string. When she opened it and ran the flashlight over the papers inside she saw they were photocopies done on a computer printer. Each sheet was a copy of an unlined page of an artist’s notebook. Teason had made drawings and charts of scenes and camera angles, sets that would need to be built, and locations to be selected and had written notes on everything pertaining to the production in Rome. There were also miscellaneous scribblings of all sorts, including notes on phone calls, appointments, and meetings.
The vast majority of these things seemed to be information about the topic he’d thought about the most—his working life. Right now, and apparently for the past year or more, that was the adaptation of Robert Graves’s book. He had almost certainly taken his notebooks with him to Rome. These were backup copies in case the originals were lost.
Elle thought for a few seconds. She was not in a position
to read them now. Should she take them with her? That would be a terrible thing to do to him if he lost the originals, and he was probably an innocent man. But the notebooks had dates and times of calls and meetings, the places where the meetings were held, and any number of other things. She might be able to prove or disprove where he was at the time of the murders or other events she didn’t know about yet.
She felt the phone in her pocket. She placed the pages in a neat pile, took a picture of the first one, set it facedown beside the pile, and took the next, the next, the next. It took her a long time to be sure that they were all taken, all framed, and all in focus. She kept at it until the pages were all duplicated, put the pile in order, and returned it to the envelope where she’d found it. Then she continued with the closet.
There was nothing remarkable about Santo Teason’s clothes. He was rich and famous, so he owned some really good suits. He was also a free agent who worked as an independent contractor instead of an employee, so he had a lot of clothes that were less formal than the suits. He had jeans, summer blazers to go with them, soft leather shoes for wearing without socks, fancy walking shoes, sneakers, slippers, and sandals. He had loose pants with drawstrings. And he was foreign, so he could wear brighter colors than an American could, or wear T-shirts under sport coats without being considered affected. Nothing he owned made him seem guilty of murder.
She kept at the work, looking at everything methodically. She felt that she was learning and expanding her powers of investigation, but not fast enough. She had done several burglaries since the murders, but not with the intention of taking anything. Instead she had needed to study these people’s lives. She was desperate.
She spent a half hour searching the master bathroom, which was huge, with the usual three-quarters of the space devoted to the wife’s things. But everything seemed to blend at the edges, so the sharing seemed friendly. She searched the medicine cabinet and drawers. Valerie seemed to have had an IUD inserted. There was a reminder sticker on the inner side of the medicine cabinet door that said her next checkup with her ob-gyn was in April, and the sticker was a free one with the logo of an IUD company. She and Santo must have been healthy, because all the prescriptions were for passing illnesses—a dispenser for liquid topical antibiotic for pinkeye a year ago, a painkiller that was three years old and didn’t seem to have been used, a decongestant, another expired antibiotic that was taken as pills. There was nothing revealing.
This would probably be her only chance in the Teason house, and she had to make the most of it. She now knew that Valerie had not been expected to pick the kids up at their activities or lessons on the day of her death. The direct care of the kids had not been in her job description, apparently, so something else had to be. People who didn’t have to do chores or earn a living always did something with their time. Elle studied the master suite, searching for some kind of work space. There was plenty of space but nothing that seemed to be used for work. If there had been some kind of clothing that pertained to an activity—tennis outfits, golf shoes, gardening clothes—it had been taken out.
She went back down the hall to take another look. She went past the kids’ rooms, the caretakers’ rooms, and stopped at the room that looked like an office. She had assumed that since it was at the end of the hall near the kids’ rooms, it must have something to do with their studies. She realized she’d been wrong.
The room had one large wooden desk with an empty top surface. It was made of a dark exotic wood that had been polished like the finish of a car. There was a matching file cabinet with four drawers that had little silver frames for cards to be used as labels. They had all been typed and printed on card stock: LACMA, MOCA, LA PHIL, and BREMMER.
Elle opened the file drawer marked LACMA, which was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The files were very neat, with hanging file folders like those business offices used and little white tabs on the hangers—BOARD MEETING AGENDAS, BOARD MINUTES, VISITING SHOWS, FUND-RAISING LISTS. The MOCA drawer was for the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the files had similar headings referring to board meetings, board activities, and art exhibitions. The L.A. Philharmonic drawer was full of information about concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and the Disney Concert Hall. There were seating charts for weekly series, more fund-raising lists, and numerous schedules.
Elle couldn’t help thinking it might be worth having copies of those season ticket lists and seating charts for particular series. Having a list of the names and addresses of people who bought thousand-dollar tickets and would never be home on Thursday nights could be valuable to a burglar, and at some point Elle was going to have to return to her profession to earn a living.
She selected a few oversize sheets from the files, laid them open on the desk, and photographed them. While she was doing that she glanced at some of the minutes from board meetings and saw that Valerie was on the boards of both museums and the philharmonic.
Elle was reluctantly impressed with Valerie. She had been well past the time of life when she could make a living as the most vivid girl in a bad movie. Apparently during her twenties she had not gotten famous enough to compete for roles as a character actress in her thirties. But she had broad cultural interests and must have had genuine knowledge of art and music. The other board members of these organizations would not have put up with her if she hadn’t, regardless of the size of the checks she wrote. Half the members of art museum boards seemed to be crusty old artists who were always offending each other and denouncing the people whose only qualification was money, unless it was billions.
Elle sensed that she was getting closer to understanding what the three victims had in common. They all seemed to have an interest in art and a background as art fanciers, but no trace of artistic talent. None of the houses had a studio or even an easel. It was art-loving as a study and maybe a form of greed.
Elle knelt on the floor to examine the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. This was the one that said BREMMER. Elle had known what that name meant since she was a child, and this was not the first house she’d broken into with connections to it. The Bremmer School was an institution that had always struck Elle as comically alien to the spirit of Los Angeles. As the seal on the stationery pointed out, it was founded in 1883. It was a private school, originally for boys only, and patterned after the prep schools in the East, but it became coed in the 1940s by means of a takeover of l’École des Filles. Elle had pictured that event as a Rape of the Sabine Women, boys in short pants in the role of Romans, carrying off girls in saddle shoes, kilts, and sleeveless sweaters.
A school directory in the file drawer confirmed that all three of Valerie’s kids were enrolled at the Bremmer School. She had apparently been a big deal there, because her name was listed as the contact person for a couple of parents’ committees. Elle didn’t have any personal experience with private schools and felt a vast distance from ones like the Bremmer School, which was unabashedly for the children of the rich.
Elle leafed through the directory some more and found that Valerie had been a trustee of the school but had served her term. But it was someone else who caught Elle’s eye. She almost missed it because the other name was listed as just plain Anne Mannon. The newspaper had called her Anne Satterthwaite Mannon. Apparently her kids went to Bremmer too. Elle checked the directory again. Neither of the husbands was listed as belonging to the school’s power structure. They were listed only beneath their children in the general alphabetical entries of families.
Elle got distracted reading the names of other families whose kids went to the school. There were actors—many in pairs—local politicians, musicians, and people with surnames that were the brand names of anything from stores to clothes to banking and insurance empires. She took pictures of a few of the pages, because the addresses were included, and some very rich people were careful about disseminating that information. But by now she had more names and addresses of the rich than she could use in a lifetime.
She closed the drawer and
moved back up to the LACMA drawer. She pulled some of the hanging files forward on their frames so she could get a look at the files nearer to the back, and then she felt something hard and familiar. She carefully drew it out and looked at it. Valerie had hidden a Glock 17 in the back of the top file drawer. Elle released the magazine and looked at it—loaded. She found a second magazine and a box of 9-mm bullets at the back of the drawer. This was not a prop or an antique or a souvenir. It didn’t commemorate some movie she had worked on. It was real and fully functional, and had been cleaned and oiled not too long ago. But it wasn’t the murder weapon either. She would have recognized the distinctive Glock shape if it had been on the recording. Also, it had no silencer or raised sights to see over one. What she’d seen when she’d frozen the recording had looked more like a pistol based on the classic M1911 .45. And once again, all the bullets in the box, the gun, and the magazine added up to fifty.
This was an odd place for a gun, in Elle’s opinion. Most people who had guns for protecting themselves and their families from intruders kept them somewhere near their beds. This one was far from Valerie’s bed in an office she shared with nobody. If she was afraid of something, it was specific to her. Was she waiting for her husband to gather enough evidence on her to want to kill her? Did she think somebody else was after her who would come only for her and leave her husband and kids alone?
Elle got up and went to the office door. There was a lock like the ones on the other doors in the house, which were pretty good. But in here there was also a dead bolt. There had not been one of those on any of the other interior doors. Maybe it was because of the gun that she’d had the extra lock installed. But if she’d kept the filing cabinet locked, it would have kept the kids away from the gun even without a door lock. Maybe having two locks was just the best she could do to be a responsible mother.
