Killer Smile

by Lisa Scottoline

  Mary remembered. Cowboy country. Pluto.

  “Do you even know where Montana is?”

  “Somewhere to the left.” Mary watched the baby, almost in front of their bench now, holding on to his mother’s hand. He made cute little grunting noises from the effort, eah eah eah. He couldn’t have been more than eleven months old, but he wanted to walk so badly. You could see it.

  “Montana is directly under western Canada, Calgary, and it borders Idaho and Wyoming. Glacier National Park is there. It’s a beautiful state. Mountains, plains, great trout fishing, deer, elk, moose, and antelope. Have you ever seen an antelope?”

  “Sure. Looks like a dog with horns. Don’t you tire of being my straight man?”

  Judy smiled. “Montana’s great. You’d love it. I’ve fly-fished near Butte with my dad and hiked there, in the West, with my sisters and brother.”

  “Show off.”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t go. Go.”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Clearly.”

  “I have the money, I can buy an airplane ticket.” In fact, Mary had never even been on an airplane, which was the first of three secrets she kept from the world. The second was that she couldn’t swim. She fell silent, watching the baby take its wobbly steps. It passed right in front of them, tottering by. Eah eah eah.

  Judy was watching the baby, too. “Mare?”

  “What?”

  “Did you pay the baby to walk by us, just now?”

  Mary burst into laughter, and Judy laughed with her, which was when they became best friends again. “Isn’t it funny how things happen like that? Sometimes you’re thinking about something and then something like that happens, and they seem to connect? Like you hear a song. As if someone’s sending you a sign.”

  “You’ve lost it, Mare.”

  “Things like that are happening to me lately. Signs.”

  “No, they’re not. It’s spring, time for new babies and little lambs to walk around. They’re not signs, they’re just coincidences.”

  “Maybe,” Mary said, but she didn’t think she was wrong, or that lambs had anything to do with it.

  “You know, if you want to go to Montana, you absolutely should go. Maybe out there you’ll find whatever you’re looking for, and then you’ll be done with the case. Get Brandolini out of your system. Go. You can do it.” Judy paused. “Tell you what. If you decide to go, I’ll cover your desk and take Bennie’s depositions.”

  “You will?” Mary looked over, and Judy was herself again, grinning crookedly.

  “So, you gonna go?”

  “I don’t know.” Airplanes. Pluto. Montana scares me.

  “Of course, if I take those deps for you, you’ll have to do something for me in return.”

  “What?” Mary asked, but she already knew the answer.

  Twelve

  Mary spent the afternoon following up on the internee files that she and Judy had found, double-checking for references to Amadeo, and being ambivalent about going to Montana. She didn’t bother to run home, shower, and change for her blind date, not only because she was Definitely Not Trying, but also because somebody could have been following her, which was an excellent excuse.

  She took a cab from the office to Dmitri’s, a Greek restaurant in Olde City, which she liked on sight. Three rows of tables filled the small, unpretentious room, and an open grill was located behind a counter in the dining area, filling the air with the fresh smells of broiling fish and greens sizzling in olive oil. The tables were cozy, the dishware heavyweight, and every place setting had a spoon. Mary felt comfortable immediately and not only because nobody was colorizing her butt. She peeked over the top of her menu at her date.

  His name was Paul Reston. His brown hair was wavy, and his eyes smallish behind fairly nondescript horn-rims. He had a straight nose and a full mouth that gave his face an appealing, if not wildly handsome, look, and he was dressed in a tweed jacket over a white oxford shirt. She forgot what kind of pants he had on, but he was the Dockers type. Paul seemed more down-to-earth than her last blind date, which meant that she would have a harder time finding fault with him. Mary knew she could succeed, if she just put her mind to it.

  “Would you mind if I made a suggestion for an entrée?” Paul asked, looking over the top of his menu, and Mary smiled inwardly. If the scene felt familiar, it was. All of her blind dates started this way, then had the same middle and end, as predictable as a dialogue in high school French. Où est la bibliothèque?

  “What would you suggest?” Là-bas, près de la gare.

  “Everything’s good, the bluefish especially. I’d start with the avocado salad.”

  “Okay, sounds good.” Mary closed the menu and set it down on the tiny table, beside a flickering votive candle. Now if Paul would just order, they could eat and get out of here, go home to separate beds, then get up and go to work the next day.

  “You seem in a hurry.”

  Oops. “Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “Sorry.” It’s my forte.

  Paul set down his menu. “Judy tells me you’re her best friend.”

  “Guilty.”

  Paul smiled. “Judy and I grew up together.”

  “Judy’s still growing up.”

  Paul laughed. His laugh sounded masculine and deep, and it wasn’t a charity laugh either. He was her age, but he seemed more mature than she was, which wasn’t difficult. He could probably swim, too. “She’s worried about you.”

  “I didn’t realize you two were that friendly.”

  “We’re not, she’s just that worried, and she was trying to make excuses for why you keep canceling on me.”

  “Sorry.” Oh, oh. Bad to worse. Où est la salle de bain?

  “She said she had to put a gun to your head to go out tonight, that you made some kind of deal.”

  True. Mary also had to agree to baby-sit Penny next weekend. She was a lousy negotiator. “It’s not personal, obviously. I’m just busy at work, on this case.”

  “She also said you’re not allowed to talk about whatever that case is, and I’m supposed to get your mind off it and talk about my job.” Paul smiled. “She thinks you’re becoming dangerously obsessed.”

  Mary flushed. “I come with a lot of directions, it seems.” Wait’ll I get her. I’ll pierce her myself. “Okay. What do you do?”

  “I teach engineering.”

  “Interesting.” Actually, Mary didn’t even know what it was, not specifically. She was an English major, which meant all she could do was compare and contrast. “Where do you teach?”

  “I started in September at Penn.”

  “My alma mater! You’re a professor there?”

  “Yes. I am Professor Reston.” Paul nodded in a courtly way, and Mary laughed.

  “In the conservatory, with a wrench.”

  “Everyone says that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s three times you’ve apologized.”

  Mary hated that he kept count. Couldn’t he let her apologize in peace? The relationship was doomed. “Do you like teaching?”

  “Very much. It’s a challenge. The kids are smart, able, energetic. I like it.”

  “Great. It’s good to like your job.” Mary hadn’t liked hers, until Amadeo. But she wasn’t supposed to talk about that. “How do you like Philly? You have to say you love it.”

  “I do love it.” Paul smiled. “It’s hard to get to know people, but I’m getting there. This dinner is a good start. A great start.”

  Mary felt her face redden. Paul was making her job of hating him harder. Inconsiderate man. “Where do you live?”

  “A few blocks from here, in Bella Vista.”

  “Nice.” Bella Vista, in addition to being the immigrants’ name for Fort Missoula, was also a neighborhood near Olde City, but she couldn’t tell Paul about this coincidence because she wasn’t allowed to talk about work. Or suicide.

  “It’s a rental w
ith an option to buy, and if I get tenure, I’ll go for it. Real estate is a helluva lot cheaper here than the Bay Area.”

  “Jeez, your own house. That’s great.” Mary felt happy for him. She was working toward a house, too. But when you bought a house, people always said the same thing: “Owning a house is a lot of responsibility.”

  “That’s okay. I like responsibility.”

  Mary smiled. So did she. Then she realized that, so far, she hadn’t thought at all about Mike.

  Paul looked at her.

  Mary looked back at him. She sipped some water, impossibly cold. The candlelight flickered. An animated man at a nearby table burst into laughter. She felt suddenly fresh out of conversation.

  “Okay, I give up, tell me about your case,” Paul said, with a smile.

  “It’s just a case, sort of historical, but it seems a little sketchy, the way it’s unfolding.”

  “Judy said you’re way too involved with it. She says you’re showing an unusual interest in laundry and worshipping dead hair.”

  “It’s just the file!”

  “Tell me about it. I’ll keep an open mind.” Paul cocked his head, and Mary felt a tug in her chest. He was a nice man. He even had a nice voice, soft and deep. He was a good listener, better than the reporter, who just wanted his story. Paul didn’t seem to want anything from her, nor could he. It would take 38,270 more dates before she slept with him, and even then she wouldn’t enjoy it. Enjoying it belonged to Mike.

  “Well, I don’t know where to start.” Mary didn’t want to say the wrong thing. It was fast becoming her new forte, and since she wasn’t allowed to apologize, she felt disarmed. She needed a replacement forte.

  “Tell me about the hair.”

  “It’s hair I found in an old wallet, that’s all. My client’s wallet. He passed away in 1942.”

  “So your client is dead?”

  “Well, technically, his estate is my client, but I guess I think of him as my client.”

  “I see,” Paul said, without apparent judgment. “Whose hair is it? Is it his?”

  “I doubt it, but I don’t know. The hair thing isn’t as wacky as it sounds. Lots of people, traditional people like immigrants, carry hair with them or keep it somewhere. It’s a family thing, an old-time thing. It’s not that weird.”

  “Like when you save some hair from a kid’s first haircut?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “My mother did that for me. She showed it to me last time I visited, at Christmas. She even saved my baby teeth in an old envelope. They were disgusting, hollow with brown edges on the top.” Paul laughed, and so did Mary. Still, she felt uneasy. Old teeth and dead hair didn’t seem like good dinner conversation, though he wasn’t barfing yet. She decided to shift gears.

  “And there were drawings in his wallet, too. Judy thinks he just liked to draw or doodle, but I think they mean something.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people don’t save doodles, and he saved these. He carried them around in his wallet, with the hair, a saint’s picture, and some photos that meant a lot to him. He didn’t have a lot of possessions and he was a simple man. He kept the drawings in the billfold section, where money would be. So I think they were important.”

  “Okay, I’m with you there.” Paul nodded. “I put important papers in my billfold all the time. Bank deposit slips, ATM slips, store receipts.”

  “Me, too,” Mary said, encouraged. “And also they’re not just doodles. When I showed them to the lawyer who hired me, he got a little agitated. Nervous.”

  “So what are the drawings of?”

  “I don’t know. A reporter I know had no idea, either.”

  “What do they look like?” Paul leaned slightly forward on his seat. It was too dark to see clearly, but behind his glasses, his eyes seemed to sharpen. Mary couldn’t discern his eye color, but she thought it might be blue. Smart blue.

  “I don’t know. They look like a circle, with things on it. Different views of the same circle, over and over.”

  “Do you have the drawings with you?”

  “No.”

  “Just the hair?”

  “I don’t have the hair with me!” Mary yelped, but Paul’s sly smile told her he was Joking Around. Okay, she officially liked him. “I could draw the circles from memory, though.”

  “Be my guest, and I’ll order for us.” Paul extracted a ball-point from inside his jacket, passed it to Mary over the table, and flagged the waitress. She took the pen, opened her napkin, and began to draw a lame version of Amadeo’s circles. When the waitress arrived, Paul ordered them both avocado salads and grilled bluefish.

  “This is what one looks like.” Mary finished her drawing and handed him the floppy napkin. Paul held it up by both sides, squinting in the votive candle, then lowered it to reveal an unhappy professor.

  “I have no idea what this is.”

  Mary took the napkin and assessed her handiwork with a frown. Her drawing looked like a pepperoni pizza. “I didn’t draw it well enough.”

  “Where did you say the drawings are?”

  “At my office.”

  “So why don’t we have dinner and go see them?”

  Mary blinked. “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  Mary’s hopes soared. “I have a better idea. How hungry are you?”

  “Not very.”

  “Me, neither. So let’s go see the drawings and then have dinner. Would you mind?”

  Paul laughed. “Now I see what Judy meant,” he said, shaking his head, but Mary was already signaling to the waitress.

  It took them only fifteen minutes in a cab to get uptown, and Mary held on to the hand strap as the cab lurched and swerved. No one seemed to be following them, but the Escalade driver couldn’t have kept up anyway. Her knee, thigh, and arm touched Paul’s about 9,274 times, and when they pulled up in front of her office building, she could have sworn the cabbie was trying to marry them off. They entered the building, signed in with the guard, and took the elevator upstairs.

  The gleaming doors slid open, and Mary stepped off the elevator.

  And stood stunned at the awful sight.

  Thirteen

  “My God,” Mary said, uncomprehending as she surveyed the scene.

  The reception area of Rosato & Associates had been completely destroyed. The new leather couch had been slashed and its white stuffing yanked out, and the matching side chairs had been upended, their cushions sliced open. The glass top of the coffee table was broken in the center, and magazines had been thrown on the floor. Marshall’s desk had been overturned, and her correspondence, pencils, pens, and other stuff strewn on the rug. The desk drawers hung open, their contents spilled. Her chair lay on its side, and someone had even crushed her baby’s picture, shattering its glass. Amid the debris lay the green metal box they used for petty cash, open and empty. What else had been stolen?

  “Let’s get out of here,” Paul whispered. “They could still be inside.” He took Mary’s arm and turned to the elevators, but she wasn’t leaving.

  “No, call 911. Call security, too. The number’s taped to the reception desk. I’ll be right back.” Mary hurried from the reception area, stricken. She and Judy had told Bennie they’d hold the fort. Now they’d been burglarized. She had to know what else had been taken. The office was full of new laptops, fancy flat-screen monitors, fax and copier machines, even color TVs.

  “No, wait!” Paul shouted, but Mary hurried to the conference room, where her heart sank.

  Her WORLD WAR II ROOM sign had been torn down, and the umpteen cardboard boxes had been torn open and dumped. Documents from the National Archives lay all over the carpet, many of them ripped in two. Her notes, pens, legal pads, and old coffee cups from the conference room table had been whisked onto the rug, and the phone had been yanked from the socket, taking with it a chunk of new drywall. Somebody had evidently hurled a chair at one of the large framed Eakins prints behind the table, cracking it in a jagged n
etwork. The chair lay on its side in a shower of glass shards, next to a new thirteen-inch Sony TV that had been smashed, its gray casing split. Mary was appalled and confounded by the sight. It made sense that they stole petty cash, but why take the time to trash the place? It looked like they’d been enraged.

  Premenstrual Tom. Could it be him? How had he gotten upstairs in the first place? She flashed on the scene downstairs at the security desk. Bobby hadn’t been on duty tonight, and a new guard had signed them in. When Mary had asked him his name, he’d said he hadn’t gotten his name tag yet. What was going on? What other damage had been done? She ran down the corridor to the offices.

  “No! Mary! Wait!” Paul called, hurrying after her. “Mary! Stop!”

  Mary reached Judy’s office, the first one off the hall, marked by the sliding nameplate JUDITH CARRIER. Her heart in her throat, she peeked inside, then got good news. No damage! She looked around with relief. Judy’s desk, chairs, books, and papers were the same clutter as usual. Maybe the reception area and conference room had been the only places vandalized.

  “Mary!” Paul shouted behind her, but Mary darted to the next office off the hall.

  ANNE MURPHY read the nameplate, and the office was pristine! Maybe whoever had destroyed the reception area hadn’t come back this far. Even Anne’s laptop sat in the middle of her desk, undisturbed. Hope surged in Mary’s chest. Maybe hers and Bennie’s offices would be fine? She rushed down the hall to Bennie’s office, larger than those of the associates, and looked inside.

  Amazing! Nothing had been disturbed. Bennie’s desk and shelves were all in order; nothing in the office had been torn or broken. Mary felt elated. Okay, at least they’d have something good to report when they called Bennie with the news. It boded well for the state of Mary’s office, which was one past Bennie’s down the hall. She hurried past her nameplate to her door. But she freaked when she looked inside.

  It was a nightmare. Everything had been swept off her desk: phone, legal pads, Dictaphone, pencils, papers, and a Swing-line stapler lay all over the floor. Her desk drawers had been yanked open, turned upside down on the carpet, their contents dumped. Pencils, rows of staples, an old Great Lash mascara tube, scissors, and loose change lay everywhere. Her bookshelves had been wrenched from their metal brackets, and her law books, case reporters, and family photos covered the carpet. The accordion files she kept in alphabetical order on the credenza had been pulled off and emptied onto the floor. Confidential papers, trial exhibits, charts, depositions, and correspondence lay in a huge heap of messy paper.