Anything for You--A Novel

by Saul Black

  Hester Fallon looked so much like Adam Grant that Valerie felt resurgent shame warming her skin. As if, by virtue of resemblance, she had been in the room with them on the night of failed sex four years ago. The effect was claustrophobic, incestuous. Valerie had the urge to open the window.

  None of them recognized Dwight Jenner from the picture.

  “Who is he?” Rachel asked, when Hester and Elspeth had left the room.

  “Someone your husband put in jail more than six years ago. We found his prints on the murder weapons, on the French window, the balcony rail. You won’t remember, but the hospital swabbed your fingernails when you were admitted. DNA confirms another match. You said you tried to get him off Adam. In terms of physical evidence, it’s conclusive. All we have to do now is find him.”

  “What?”

  “He’s disappeared, but it’s only a matter of time. His picture’s out with law enforcement nationally. We’ll get TV coverage as well. Everything we know about Dwight Jenner tells us he doesn’t have what it takes for invisibility.”

  Valerie was watching Rachel, who couldn’t stop staring at the picture. Here he was, the man who had butchered her husband and left her for dead. Just a man, who brushed his teeth and drank beer and watched TV and emptied his bowels. Ordinary in every way—except for his ability to commit murder. Valerie had seen it before, the victim’s fear and disgust and hatred and grief—and, like it or not, fascination, when confronted with the mundane fact that a person had done this to them. Not lightning or fire or a heart attack. A person, who might have chosen not to.

  “This might be difficult for you to hear, but phone records show Dwight Jenner was in contact with Adam over the last two months.”

  “What?”

  “They spoke several times. Usually not for more than a couple of minutes, but there was definitely communication. You’re sure Adam didn’t mention this to you? Anything about an inmate getting out?”

  “No, nothing. But he wouldn’t. He knew how much I worried about the enemies his job made him. I told him … I told him…”

  Rachel shook her head, swallowed. Refused to cry. Valerie let her ride it out.

  “Another difficult question, I’m afraid,” she said. “Is it possible that Adam was in some kind of trouble? Financial? Legal?” she hesitated. “Personal?”

  Rachel didn’t look at Valerie. Just let the implications settle.

  “Why in God’s name would you think that?” she said quietly.

  “I don’t think it,” Valerie said. “I’m just trying to find a basis for their communication. Of course it’s possible Jenner called with threats—threats that escalated, obviously. But it’s unusual. Especially since any direct threat would only lead to increased vigilance.”

  “You mean if you’re going to murder someone why give them advance warning?”

  “Yes.”

  “A man comes into our home and does this—leaves all this … his fucking fingerprints and DNA, and you’re asking about fucking telephone calls?”

  Valerie was surprised by the shift of gear, but she remained calm. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Grant, I know this is difficult. But as I said to you before, we ask the questions so we can build the strongest possible case. In this case, the evidence we have is the best we ever get, short of catching someone in the act. But I don’t want any surprises when this goes to trial. I don’t want the slightest possibility that a mysterious relationship, even a few phone calls, between the perpetrator and your husband, could shift a jury away from a conviction for first-degree murder.”

  Rachel closed her eyes. Breathed through her nose. Subsided. Opened her eyes again, though she still wouldn’t look at Valerie.

  “I don’t know,” she said, defeated. “I don’t know anything.”

  I don’t know anything. No, Valerie thought, you don’t. It came to her again that her position was untenable. She imagined Adam Grant getting home from their abortive night worried she’d left her scent on him. Pictured him scrubbing himself in the shower. Washing away the incriminating evidence. She’d been wrong to take the case. Yet the more clearly she understood that, the more she knew she couldn’t, now, leave it alone. It had a dark gravity. As did all the richly wrong decisions in her life.

  “I need your permission to take a look through Adam’s stuff,” she said.

  “What stuff?”

  “Computer, emails, correspondence, bank records.”

  Rachel shook her head—in disbelief. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “If he was in touch with Dwight Jenner it might give us a clue to his whereabouts.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious about getting Jenner. I’m sorry, Mrs. Grant, but we have to look at every possibility. We’ll be doing the same at his office.”

  Rachel shook her head again, exhaled: resignation. “Do whatever you want,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  Valerie got up and went to the door.

  “Detective?” Rachel said.

  “Yes?”

  For the first time in the interview Rachel Grant looked at her with focus. “Whatever you have to do, do it,” she said. “But leave my daughter out of it. She’s thirteen years old.”

  “Of course,” Valerie said. “How’s she doing?”

  “How do you think she’s doing?”

  “Yeah, dumb question,” Valerie said. “You know we have officers on watch with her at your sister-in-law’s, right?”

  “Yes.” A pause. “I just need to get home with her.”

  “You’ll both have protection until we bring Jenner in. How long before you get out of here?”

  “They’re saying another three days. I’m not staying here for another three days. I’m fine. I need to be with Elspeth.”

  “She seems a bright girl.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “No.”

  Saying it laid another veil of guilt on Valerie. I don’t think I’d make a very good mother.

  “I was nothing before I had Elspeth,” Rachel Grant said. “I was a waste. If anything happened to her…” The composure went again. “If she’d been there that night … I keep thinking … If she’d been there…”

  “Don’t torment yourself,” Valerie said. “She wasn’t there, and she’s safe.”

  Rachel Grant recovered. Smiled. Empty calm. “It’s disgusting, isn’t it?” she said. “My husband’s dead and I can still feel thankful … thankful for something.”

  “It’s not disgusting,” Valerie said. “It’s natural.”

  “Natural things are disgusting,” Rachel said.

  Valerie didn’t answer.

  Rachel looked away, out of the window. “Ignore me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  12

  August 7, 2017

  Will Fraser’s scrutiny of Dwight Jenner’s bank records proved fruitful. In among the regular transactions were (a) two cash deposits of three thousand dollars and two thousand dollars within the last two months and (b) six card payments to budget hotels at various locations within the Bay Area for the same period, the most recent less than two weeks ago. Every one of them had date-correlative CCTV footage which showed him checking in (and out, after one night), apparently alone. Since then the account activity had returned to normal—except that there had been no activity since July 30.

  “Wherever he is,” Will said to Valerie on the phone, “he’s not leaving a plastic trail.”

  Valerie was seated in one of five ivory leather chairs in the lobby of Willard & Gould, Attorneys at Law. The space had a headachy green marble floor and soft overhead halogens. It smelled of cold corporate cleanliness. Fleetingly, it made her feel utterly exhausted by the whole concept of the Law, so much of which was in the dirty and dexterous hands of money. “Well, five grand in cash won’t last forever,” she said. “He doesn’t have a passport, so he can’t have left the country. Laura check the hospitals?”

  “Nada. Needless to say, he didn’t show up for his meeting with Di
falco. Or for Lady Liberty at the car wash, either. Anything on your end?”

  “I’m talking to his colleagues. Nothing flags so far. His bank’s not being quite so prompt. I’ll wrap up here then head over to the Grants’. No sign of So Fee Ahh?”

  “I’m starting on the hotels’ footage right now. Looking forward to meeting her. She sounds like my kind of gal.”

  Valerie hung up. Natural things are disgusting. She couldn’t get the phrase out of her head.

  “Detective?”

  She looked up. A dark-haired woman in spectacles and a cream pantsuit had just exited the elevator. She was made up with precise understatement, nails French manicured, clothes pressed, shoulder-length bob full of controlled glossy life. She had the sort of poise that made Valerie straighten her spine.

  “Fiona Perry,” she said, extending her hand, which arrived with a waft of perfume. “I wish you were here for a different reason. Everyone here is just devastated. We’ll go up and use Adam’s office.”

  Adam Grant was—had been, rather—a senior partner, and his office reflected his position. A giant walnut desk stood on a large Persian carpet intricately patterned in pale blue and gold. The rear wall was glass. Two abstract canvases—shades of deep blue with gashes of silver leaf—hung on each of the flanking walls. The desk photograph was a close-up of Rachel and Elspeth, lying in a field of wildflowers. The room’s odor was of crisp technology and polished wood.

  The first few minutes of the interview covered what Valerie needed by way of access to Adam Grant’s work calendar and correspondence, for which—predictably—Fiona Perry informed her she would need a warrant.

  “You’ll get one hundred percent cooperation,” Fiona said. “But obviously protocols for a law firm require every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed.”

  “We’ll have it tomorrow. But in the meantime, I want to ask you about Adam personally. You’ve been his secretary for the last three years, right?”

  Fiona looked out of the window and didn’t answer. A slight slackening of her posture, as if a thin layer of professional propriety had fallen away. When she looked back at Valerie it was with a new candor.

  “You’re going to ask me if I noticed anything in his demeanor suggestive that all might not be well,” she said.

  “Yes,” Valerie said.

  “You don’t buy the home intrusion narrative?”

  “I buy it, but not as the whole story. Adam was in contact with Jenner for weeks before his murder. He say anything to you about that?”

  “Christ,” Fiona said. “No. Nothing.”

  “But you felt something was wrong?”

  Fiona looked away again. Valerie wondered if Adam Grant had fucked her. She wasn’t particularly good-looking (“handsome” if you were being generous), but that didn’t prove anything. Only the sexual realist in Valerie wondered why, if Grant hadn’t cheated on his wife with her, Valerie, he would bother cheating on his wife with Fiona Perry. She wasn’t proud of the thought, but there it was.

  “Adam seemed unhappy to me for a long time,” Fiona said.

  “Yes?”

  “Agitated. I doubt anyone else here would have noticed. But I saw him every day, just the two of us. Professionally he never missed a beat. But there were quiet moments … I don’t know. He snapped at me a few times, I guess, totally out of character. Some evenings he stayed late, there was a bottle of scotch on the desk. Between you and me that’s not groundbreaking news here, but I came in some mornings and it was obvious he’d been here all night, bottle empty. He didn’t seem right.”

  “When did this start?”

  “More than a year ago, I’d say.”

  “You ever ask him what was wrong?”

  “Once. He told me to mind my own—quote—‘fucking business.’ Came in the next day with flowers and profuse apologies. Said he couldn’t believe how he’d spoken to me. But I didn’t pry after that. It’s just that there were times when his mind was so obviously elsewhere.”

  “You think someone had something on him?”

  “As in blackmail?”

  “As in blackmail.”

  Fiona shook her head, not in denial, just in ignorance. “It’s hard to imagine,” she said. “But then we’re in the business of imagining the things that are hard to imagine.”

  “Was he having an affair?”

  “Not with me, if that’s what you’re really asking.”

  “I wasn’t. But it’s noted.”

  A crackle on the ether here. Fiona Perry didn’t like being an object of sexual speculation. And thereby sexual evaluation. It entailed, whether the two women liked it or not, an admission of mutual comparison. For a moment it was as if Valerie’s “handsome, if you were being generous” had been spoken aloud. Both of them knew where they stood. Fiona with resignation, Valerie with both annoyance that any of that mattered and in spite of the annoyance a flicker of pleasure because she knew she had what Fiona did not. The uneven distribution of beauty was a grand injustice. But since the injustice was here to stay, better to be its beneficiary than its victim.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow with the warrant,” Valerie said. “Meantime, if you can keep everyone out of Adam Grant’s stuff, I’d appreciate it.”

  “I’ll do what I can, but his caseload’s already been picked up by Dan Kruger.”

  “I’m seeing him next. Just make sure the call logs and email correspondence stay intact.”

  * * *

  Will Fraser was having a pleasant afternoon, working his way through the CCTV footage from the hotels Dwight Jenner had checked into for his assumed liaisons with Sophia, if Jimenez’s memory of the name was to be trusted. Sophia. Cherchez la femme! Very occasionally actual police work paid homage to its fictional tropes. Not that that was the only pleasure. It was, Will admitted to himself, enjoyable just to watch people going about their business. The simple satisfaction of voyeurism, enhanced both by the subjects’ obliviousness and by the police knowledge that the vast majority of them had something to hide. Walk up to any random stranger, look them in the eye, and say, with absolute conviction: I know about it. Invariably there would be a secret “it” to which they would believe you were referring. It might not be criminal but it would certainly be shameful. Will supposed he thought of himself as one of the exceptions, but only because at some point years ago he’d ambled past shame and into the understanding that even his shameful things were wearily natural. Thanks to the job, yes, but thanks, too, to Marion, his wife, who had no time for being embarrassed by either his or her own imperfections. He had, for example, wanted to have sex with her the day of her father’s funeral. What kind of a lousy bastard are you? he’d wondered. What the fuck is wrong with you? He’d lain next to her that night trying to think of anything—anything—to dispel the aching hard-on that threatened to incriminate him if he turned to face her. It wasn’t even that he’d been indifferent to her father. He’d been fond of the old geezer. Nor was he numb to Marion’s palpable grief. Be that as it may, there’d been nothing he wanted more right then than to fuck his wife, preferably as filthily as possible. He’d hated himself for it, but there it was. They’d lain for a while in thudding silence. Then Marion had said: I know you want to fuck me. Will had felt the pointless denials massing—then falling away. He was transparent to her. It’s no big deal, Marion had said. It’s what death does. Makes you crave life. It doesn’t mean you’re the spawn of Satan. Don’t bother making a thing of it for yourself. He’d waited in stunned speechlessness. Then she’d said: Don’t get excited, either. I’m not going to fuck you. I’m not up to it right now. I just don’t want you making a goddamned psychodrama out of it and lying there staring at the ceiling as if you’ve betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss.

  Will had loved her more then than at practically any other moment in their life together. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it then: that there was no other woman for him.

  He took a sip of his cold coffee, yawned, gave himself a mental shake. On-sc
reen he was watching a family checking in at the Civic Center Holiday Inn. Mother, father, one boy of about six, crying, uglily, and a toddler in a stroller. The father, a fat guy in a red-and-white bandana, Nirvana T-shirt, and ridiculous leather pants, was having a problem with his credit card. The clerk looked bored rather than uncomfortable. The mother, in an orange bikini top and sawn-off denims, yanked the squawking kid violently by his elbow and said something that made it clear she was out of patience—which just made the kid cry more.

  A woman with voluminous blond hair and sunglasses so big they gave her the look of a fly walked past them and crossed to the elevators. Green chiffon dress and trim long legs in killer heels. Snakeskin purse. No jewelry. Beautiful. Not the kind of woman to be checking in anywhere that cost eighty-eight dollars per night. Not the kind of woman you’d forget.

  Will hadn’t forgotten her.

  He stopped the video.

  Rewound.

  Replayed.

  Froze it.

  Opened a second window on the desktop.

  Ramada at the airport, three weeks earlier. He’d been logging the time codes for Dwight Jenner’s check-ins. He fast-forwarded to 12:27 P.M., watched Jenner exchange a few upbeat pleasantries with the girl behind the desk. No luggage beyond a backpack that looked more or less empty, as in all the previous check-ins. Will watched until he walked out of the shot. Then went methodically through the desk footage that followed.

  At 1:19 P.M. he found what he was looking for.

  Sophia was there again. Ivory silk dress this time. Same purse, same boudoir heels, same bluebottle shades. Straight past reception and across to the elevator doors.

  Hello, lady.

  There were, he knew, other steps to take. There was the business of confirmation. But her and Dwight being at the same hotel twice was enough to tell him what he needed to know.

  No wonder Jenner looked upbeat, Will thought. If that was who he was spending his afternoons balling in a rented bed, it was a miracle he wasn’t walking on air.