The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

“Did you have a relationship with Ms. Durand?”

  “What?” Bennett said quickly. “What sort of question is that? No. God, no. Are you kidding? She was a young woman. I’m forty-two. I have a wife and children and a successful business practice. I’m an honest man.”

  “You were never intimate with her?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “So you didn’t meet her in your car in the parking garage across from Craig Lerner’s office?” Rivas asked.

  “I may have taken her to lunch a few times without Craig, if that’s what you mean. And we probably took my car.”

  Frames studied Bennett’s face as he had seen Rivas do. He noticed the tension around Bennett’s eyes give way and a smile start to form. “So if you were seen on the parking garage’s security camera having sex with Ms. Durand in your car, you’re going to deny that?”

  “Security camera? There’s no—” Bennett sat up in his chair. “Okay. Hold on a second. This has now gone too far. It isn’t right. You can’t—I came in here to help you.”

  Bennett turned to Rivas. “Are you the one in charge? Can we turn that recorder thing off for one fucking minute? I have something to say.”

  Rivas looked back silently.

  Bennett took a deep breath. “All right. But everything I say from now on has to be in confidence. This cannot be made public. You understand, it cannot be part of any…public record or whatever you people call it.”

  He tapped the table with the index finger of his right hand. “I did not do anything to hurt Elise. I swear to God. I could never hurt her.”

  “Was she going to tell your wife?” Rivas asked.

  “No. It wasn’t anything like that.”

  “What was it like?”

  “We met in my car a few times and…made out. That’s all it was. It was stupid and immature and a betrayal of my marriage.”

  Frames suddenly thought he understood Rivas’s method: Keep your own body still. Watch the other guy’s eyes and body language. Pay attention to each word. “You made out? What? Like teenagers?”

  “Do I need to be graphic?”

  “Did you have intercourse with the victim?”

  “That’s such a crude way to say it.”

  “Did you?”

  Bennett looked at the tabletop. “Okay. Yes, but it wasn’t anything serious. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “So Ms. Durand didn’t think it was serious either?” Rivas asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you argue with her?”

  “Sometimes, sure. She was doing a lot of drugs. Oxy, some E. All sorts of stuff. I didn’t think it was good for her.”

  Frames could hear a tone in Bennett’s answer, explaining something obvious to the dumb Mexican. Why do people always think cops are stupid? Frames wondered. Does their size make them seem less intelligent? Or, does the work look easy? “When was the last time you and Ms. Durand were together?”

  “A couple weeks ago. I don’t remember exactly.”

  “We have the security camera tapes.” Frames sighed. “We’re going to find out.”

  “Last week. But for a few months now, we haven’t been together as much. I think she was seeing another guy.”

  “Did she say who?” Rivas asked.

  “No. I asked, but she wouldn’t say.”

  “That must have pissed you off.”

  “A little, sure. She thought it was funny that I wanted to know. She made jokes about it.”

  Frames could hear Rivas coaxing Bennett, letting the guy throw himself over the edge. “But it wasn’t funny to you, was it?” Frames said.

  “I just wanted a straight answer, and the more I asked, the more games she played.”

  “Drove you crazy, didn’t it? She was just a young girl.”

  “I was the one taking all the risks, with everything to lose.”

  “So last week was the first time you saw her in a while? What happened?”

  “We talked. I said I wanted to see her. But she wouldn’t…commit.”

  “Did things get a little physical?” Rivas asked. “You grabbed her, to get her attention?”

  “No, I did not do that.”

  “She hit her head. It wasn’t intentional. It just happened.”

  “No, I told you. I—did—not—hurt—Elise.”

  Something there, Frames thought. Too much denial. How much more can we get from this guy before he asks for a lawyer? “What kind of car do you drive?”

  “What? A Lexus. Why?”

  “How about your wife?”

  “Lincoln Navigator. You haven’t answered my question.”

  “You know anyone who owns a vintage Mercedes? Early sixties?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you Monday evening?” Rivas asked.

  “Monday? I was home. I had dinner with Lynn and the kids.”

  “All evening?”

  “Yes.”

  That last bit was too quick, Frames thought. Bennett’s eyes sought the safety of the wall behind them. “Your wife’ll confirm that?” Frames asked.

  “My wife? Is that really necessary?” Bennett tried Rivas but gave it up. “Okay. I went out later for…something.”

  “Something? What was it?”

  “It’s not important. I was gone for maybe an hour. I went out about ten and was back by eleven.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “It’s not relevant…and you know what?” Bennett folded his arms across his chest. “That’s all I’m going to say. I want to speak to my attorney.”

  Frames watched Bennett sitting stiffly in his chair, as if bracing himself against an approaching wave.

  Rivas pushed himself up and stood to face Bennett. “Tell your attorney to meet you here. And tell him or her we’re seeking warrants to search your car, your office, and your home. You understand?”

  “My home?” Bennett looked stricken. “Come on, guys. Between us, can you give me a little latitude here? Can I at least talk to my wife first?”

  Rivas stared at Bennett and waited. “I need you to answer for the recording.”

  Bennett sat back in his chair. “Yes,” he said softly.

  (ii)

  (WEDNESDAY, 3:00 P.M.)

  They were in Thackrey’s home in Dry Creek Valley, a half hour north of Santa Rosa. Thackrey sat in a leather chair, facing an open French door that looked out to the back lawn. He threw a tennis ball to the two dogs waiting on the lawn. “She was scared Monday night. Elise…she was scared.”

  Russell squatted on the floor in the middle of the living room, rubbing a section of the floor with a damp rag. “For good reason, as it turned out.”

  “When I picked her up after work, she argued about getting into the car. She knew something was up. She asked where you boys were, didn’t want to be alone with me. She said, ‘Please, Benny, can we be together some other time? I need to go home.’ But I had some OxyContin, and I said she could have it if she got in the car.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  Thackrey shrugged. “Doubt it. Nothing to see. Just a guy giving his girl a ride. By the way, what’s that doing to the wood grain?”

  “It’s not recommended for hardwoods, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Smells like hell.”

  “Oxygen bleach. Only thing that makes blood traces invisible even if the police use luminol. I cleaned the blood off the coffee table. Is that where she cut her head?”

  “Hmmm. Made an awful sound.”

  “The problem is cleaning out the seams between the wood planks. If the cops remove the planks, they’ll find traces. You’re lucky the area wasn’t larger.”

  “Yeah, lucky.” The larger of the two mastiffs ran inside with the tennis ball. Thackrey threw it again.

  “Where
’d you pick her up, office or home?” Russell asked.

  “Office. But out on the street, not in the parking garage. The garage has a security camera.”

  Victor joined the others, a large plastic trash bag in one hand. “It would help if we knew exactly where she was in here Monday night. I found her stuff in the guest bedroom and bathroom.”

  “She was everywhere,” Thackrey said. “She was always everywhere. But the drugs made it particularly bad Monday night.”

  The other dog ran through the open door with the ball in its mouth and slid into Victor, who kicked the dog away with his foot. “Can’t you keep these things outside?”

  Thackrey took the ball and threw it out to the lawn again.

  “The Oxy didn’t calm her down?” Russell asked.

  “She was too impatient to wait for it. In the car on the way home, I saw her swallow something else. She was supposed to be taking Depakote, but when she couldn’t find it, she grabbed whatever was in the bottom of her purse.”

  Victor knotted the top of the plastic trash bag. “Speaking of medications, Ben, how’re you and your Adderall getting along? Your pupils dilate any more, you’ll qualify as an anime character.”

  Russell laughed. “Yeah, buddy, you know your right leg hasn’t stopped twitching for the last twenty minutes? And I heard you throw up in the john this morning.”

  Thackrey turned to face the other two men.

  Victor looked back at him. “You haven’t slept since what? Sunday? You can’t talk straight. You’ve been throwing that stupid ball for an hour. With that gun stuffed in your waistband, you’re going to shoot your nuts off.”

  “You really think it’s a good idea to be a junkie when the cops get here?” Russell asked. “Dial it back, Ben. It’s for your own good.”

  Thackrey turned away and lobbed the ball to the dogs on the lawn. “Nothing’s for my own good. Could you just finish cleaning up here?”

  Victor shook out an empty trash bag. “Okay. What’d you do with the clothes you were wearing that night?”

  “Already dumped. Trash pickup was yesterday. They’re in the county landfill.”

  “Your shoes?”

  “Jesus, yes. The shoes. Pair of thousand-dollar Johnston & Murphys. Speaking of clothes, what’s that thing you’re wearing, Victor?”

  Victor raised his arms. “Called a kurta. Traditional Indian shirt. Very comfortable. Just the thing to wear when cleaning up after a murder.”

  “Very metrosexual.”

  “By the way, I checked the keystroke logger a few minutes ago. The cops identified the body as Elise. And they’ve talked to Craig Lerner, who knows you.”

  “Never met him,” Thackrey said. The big mastiff returned the tennis ball to him.

  “Doesn’t matter. He knows you and will get around to mentioning it. They’ve also interviewed your girl’s roommates and searched her apartment.”

  “Well, God knows what the cops’ll find, but I was never there.”

  “You don’t think Elise ever told her roommates about you? We finish here, Russ and I are getting on a plane.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Thailand. Place called Ko Lanta. It’s an island off the southern coast.”

  “Let’s get back to Monday night. Did you stop anywhere on the way home that night?” Russell asked.

  “Straight home. When we got here, I put on some Sinatra and cooked dinner. That song ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ came on, and I made her dance with me in the kitchen. She was still scared. She freaked out at first, didn’t want me to touch her. Something about a dream she had. But I held her, and we danced. All around the kitchen. I taught her a couple swing steps, and I sang to her.”

  “Sounds magical.” Victor rolled his eyes. “Can we dig the rounds from your gun out of the sheetrock in the living room?”

  “Knock yourselves out. Not sure what difference it makes. I told you, Elise fired the gun, not me.”

  “Let’s not give the cops too many story lines.”

  “Dancing with her, I remember thinking how smart she was. That webpage she did for DivingBell was like a lesson in color theory. The blue and the orange together, opposites on the color wheel, make the images pop. Everyone who sees the site, that’s the first thing they notice.”

  “What about traces of her in your car?” Russell asked.

  “Steam cleaned this morning. Nothing left but what I remember.”

  Thackrey leaned back in his chair. “That’s what’s so maddening. She could be wonderful. One night after Christmas, we had dinner with friends. Went to an Italian restaurant called Acquerello off Van Ness in the city. She entertained us for an hour. Told a story about how the English artist Turner added beeswax or something to his paints. Then she talked about a letter that Keats wrote. She knew things like that. When she was on, she was…glorious. So different from Reggie.”

  “Didn’t save her from ending up like Reggie, though, did it?” Victor said.

  Thackrey fired the tennis ball at Victor, who missed catching it and was nearly knocked over as the mastiff slammed into his legs to retrieve the toy.

  When the dog returned to his side, Thackrey rubbed the top of its head. “But Elise was crazy, too. Crazy and messy. Nothing would change that—she was always going to be crazy. And we were wrapped up with each other, entangled, and I didn’t know how to separate us. No matter what I did, we kept…being together.”

  Thackrey looked out the open door. “Odd, isn’t it?” he said. “All the poetic wisdom in the world about falling in love, one soul finding another, but no poetry to help us know how to remove someone from our lives.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  (i)

  (WEDNESDAY, 4:09 P.M.)

  Coyle parked at an apartment building on the city’s west side—the address for Jessica Alvarez, a former roommate of Elise Durand.

  Alvarez, a woman in her twenties, answered the door. She showed Coyle through a corridor to a bright, uncluttered living room. The apartment smelled of new paint and carpets. They sat on opposite sides of a sofa.

  “I’m still in shock,” Alvarez said. She had designer glasses and wore a cotton plaid shirt and jeans. “I’ve never known someone who was murdered. It’s…I don’t know…scary.”

  Coyle saw wariness in the woman’s eyes. He’d seen the look before and knew that he had brought this thing, this threat, into the room with him, almost like he was coated with a stain. His face and clothes now embodied for Alvarez another world from her own, a nighttime place she locked her door against—a dirty, ugly world where a girl’s body was found in a park.

  He nodded, as if he agreed that the murder of her friend was scary, as if he remembered his own innocence. He took a notebook and pen from his pocket. “We’re hoping you can help us. Anything you can tell us about the victim.”

  “Elise and I were friends. Good friends. I think I was the only one allowed to call her Elise. She was trying to make everyone else call her Lisa.”

  “You shared a house for a while?”

  “For about a year. I moved out to be with Greg. We lived at his old place before we found this apartment. But Elise stayed in touch. We were very different, and she had her problems. She was my wild friend. I guess I got to be a little wild by knowing her.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Bipolar disorder. Huge highs, where she was off-the-wall manic. Then terrible depressions, where she’d cut herself. I picked her up at the ER once after she accidentally hit an artery in her ankle and almost bled out. That was, like, a year ago. I think lately she was trying to get a handle on that whole thing.”

  “How?”

  “Medication, mostly, and therapy. She was seeing a psychiatrist named Bittner. She talked about that.”

  Coyle made a note.

  “With Elise, it all went back
to her dad. He was French. A classical musician, but I got the feeling he never really made it. She said he gave her the name Elise, after the Beethoven music. You know, the song ‘Für Elise,’ that kids play when they’re learning piano? She said when she was little, the name made her special, but later she hated having to explain it. Anyway, when she was three, her father left the family. Like, packed up and went back to France or something.”

  “Was she in touch with him?”

  “Not much. I think he wrote letters. She adored him, even though it seemed one-sided. She was like some of my other friends with divorced parents. After her father was gone, Elise got to make up who he was. He sent her books of poetry. When she talked to me about him, the poems got all mixed up with her father. She thought he wrote them, and she was always trying to understand what the poems meant so she could understand her father and why he left. She never got over his leaving. She was still a little three-year-old girl whose father left her behind. She was just alone and…lost.”

  Tears suddenly rolled down Alvarez’s cheeks, and she wiped at them with the palms of her hands. She looked away from Coyle. Then something shuddered through her, and she bent over and wept with deep, heaving breaths.

  Coyle leaned toward her but stopped. He had been taught a single, unalterable consolation: I’m sorry for your loss. The sentiment always sounded to Coyle like something tested by attorneys to be safe from misunderstanding or repercussion. No longer capable of imbuing it with sincerity, he had grown to hate the expression. But he also knew the dangers of touching a young woman alone in her apartment. He said, “I’m sorry…this happened.”

  The words came out in a whisper. He wasn’t sure she heard him. He was no good at reassurance. He was the computer guy, too small and thin to represent any kind of protection.

  After a while, Alvarez calmed. She sat up straight and ran fingertips across her wet cheeks. “I’m sorry about that. You’re just doing your job. You must hate all…this.”

  Coyle shook his head. “Please take your time.”

  Alvarez breathed in deeply. “I’m ready.”

  “You were talking about poetry. We found a line of a poem written on Ms. Durand’s leg.”

  Alvarez smiled. “She was always doing that. On her arm or leg. Or she repeated a line of poetry over and over. Some bit that meant something to her. There was one special line by a poet named Frank somebody: ‘the catastrophe of my personality.’ I’ll never forget the way she said it. She was so…vulnerable, always close to falling apart.”