Invasion of Privacy

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  In the parking lot, through her sunglasses, Nina watched the colorful dots whizzing down the white hill. She felt afraid for the skiers, as if there might be an avalanche any minute.

  The case was like a damn avalanche, too full of people and facts to get a handle on it, and she felt buried in an airless tomb of snow, unable to dig her way out, suffocating on too many billowy suppositions.

  She brought an odious thought from the interview to consciousness. Why didn’t Jonathan Sweet want the film made? What was he hiding? The statistics on murders of women consistently showed that many knew their killers.... How far would Mrs. Sweet go to protect him?

  Had Sweet killed his own daughter?

  27

  "HEY, MAN. YOU DRIVE LIKE A CRAZED BRONCO," Wish said, hanging on to the ceiling strap with both hands as Paul sped down the steep Kingsbury Grade in the gathering dusk.

  "Thanks," he said. "But this is a gen-u-wine Dodge Ram. Nina has the crazed Bronco." He flicked on the headlights to reveal two deer directly in his path.

  "Look out!" Wish shouted. Paul twisted his driving arm hard to the left and sped on along the shoulder, leaving the deer to look after them in amazement.

  "Reflexes," he said peacefully. "I notice you’re much more talkative when your mother’s not around."

  "Wouldn’t you be?"

  "I get your point."

  "You oughta get back in the right lane." They were already there, doing sixty-five on a silvery stretch of mountain road, bounded on both sides by the silhouettes of the forest.

  Paul opened the window and breathed deeply. "Ahhh. Look at that big yellow moon, rising out there over the Carson Valley like a shiny Krugerrand."

  "You’re makin’ me cold, man."

  "Put on your sweatshirt. So. Getting back to Michael Ordway. You were saying you know him."

  "I know him. He raises cattle and sheep out here, about a mile past Gardnerville. He has about a hundred fifty acres of desert, good water supply. Some kids. Flirty wife."

  "Doreen Ordway, born Doreen Benitez. How long have they been married?"

  Wish shrugged. "I don’t know that kind of stuff."

  "Well, what do you know?"

  "The pay is good. He treats his workers right."

  "Okay, that’s something. You can tell everything about a man from the way he treats his employees."

  "He’s all right, for a foreigner."

  "A foreigner? Oh, you mean because he’s English."

  "Yeah. But he doesn’t act English. You know."

  "No, I don’t know," Paul said. "I’d be very curious to hear what that means."

  "Well, he doesn’t mind getting dirty, even though he’s the owner. He doesn’t sit around playing lord of the manor," Wish said.

  "I see." They slowed down as they passed through the lonely hamlet of Minden. The big, bright town casino was the only business open. As soon as they came down the eastern side of the Sierra on the Grade, they had entered high-altitude scrub desert. The trees disappeared, and the sky took over. The night was still.

  "Gardnerville," Wish said a minute later. "Now you see it, now you don’t. Nice hotel there. That’s where the shepherds eat. Good food."

  "The shepherds."

  "Yeah, the Basques. They live all over here. Take a left at the dirt road there."

  They bumped down the road in second gear, between barbed wire fences. The moon rode serenely above, staying right with them. Paul said, "We could eat at that hotel afterward. On the expense account."

  "Oh, man, I love this job."

  "You haven’t done anything yet. Let’s review your private eye lesson."

  "Listen and observe," Wish said. "Keep my mouth shut while you talk. Go to the bathroom and check the medicine cabinet for pills. Try to have a look at the bedroom, see if there’s a desk and what’s on it. Snoop around but always have an innocent explanation. Leave the tape recorder playing in my bag right next to you the whole time. Steal the glass or can he uses if possible."

  "Do all that, I’ll see you get a big bowl of mutton stew," Paul said.

  They drove into a big dirt lot with several broken-down trucks and a tractor. Two small brown terriers came running out, barking, tails wagging. Behind them came a man in overalls and muddy boots.

  "Michael Ordway," he said, shaking hands.

  A good-looking woman with long legs in a pair of faded cutoffs came out behind him. "My wife, Doreen. Marley, Watson, down! Get down, boys!" At the door, Ordway took off the boots, and they followed his socks into the house, the dogs trotting along- side.

  "Sit down," Doreen Ordway said. They sat at the cherry dining table, looking around at the hutch full of flowered china, the Persian rug, the landscapes on the walls. "Very nice," Paul said. "Not what you’d expect at the end of this road.’’ He looked right at Doreen as he spoke, and she looked back.

  Doreen gave him a smile bigger than the compliment deserved.

  "I wasn’t sure we should talk to you," Michael Ordway said. "But we are both very curious about all this. "

  "I appreciate it," Paul said. "It shows you are open-minded people."

  Doreen liked the answer. She said, "Can I get you anything? A cup of tea or some coffee?"

  "Coffee sounds good," Paul said.

  "Where’s the loo?" Wish said. Paul kicked him under the table, first for jumping the gun before the pleasantries had been exchanged, second for using the word loo.

  "Oh. I don’t have to go after all," Wish said quickly.

  Paul kept himself from rolling his eyes and said, "I hear you’re a transplanted Englishman."

  "Born in the shadow of the Tower of London," Ordway said. "But I’ve been here many years. We took a trip to England for our honeymoon. Ghastly weather. Drizzled the whole time. But, of course, the British Museum made up for it."

  Doreen said, "Can you imagine? We spent the entire time looking at mummies and dusty old manuscripts."

  "How did you folks end up in the desert, ranching?"

  "My father, actually," Ordway said. "He moved the family out of Tahoe not long after Tamara disappeared. He grew up watching cowboy movies back in jolly old, and he finally decided to try it himself. Turned into a fine calf-roper. Rest his soul."

  "Been married long?"

  "Ten years," Doreen said, pouring him his coffee. She had an enticing low-slung set of knockers under her T-shirt. Paul tried not to look. She noticed him not looking, and casually brushed against him with her hip. "We have four-year-old twins. Annie and Sarah. They’ve gone to bed. So you’re a private detective. Like Sam Spade and Lew Archer. I’ve never met one of you before. Do you like your work?"

  "It beats police work," Paul said. "Do you help Mike with the ranching?"

  "Michael. My hands are full with the girls. He runs the ranch."

  Paul drank some coffee, asked a few more questions, nudged Wish’s big foot under the table again. Wish jumped up.

  "It’s right through that door, first door on the left," Doreen said. "You know, I want you to tell Ms. Reilly something," she said, turning back to Paul. "About the invasion of privacy case. Jessica called me this morning and told me it’s all over. Tell her thanks. It wasn’t so much what the film made us look like, it was what was done to Tam. Tam was my friend. That film Terry London made was just sick. We had to do something."

  "The film," Ordway said, shaking his head. "She was good. She got us to say things we really regretted later. Like my crack about poor Mrs. Sweet being a boozer. It infuriated me to see myself on the screen with my words taken out of context and twisted into nasty insinuations. We felt like right fools to have agreed to be filmed without some sort of power to veto the finished product. I suppose I should be grateful the Sweets didn’t sue us." He had a friendly, open face, long and narrow, carefully shaven. His nails were clean and his thick brown hair recently cut. The very picture of a gentleman farmer, thought Paul.

  Doreen said, "Jessica Sweet called me today and told me that Terry knew Tam before she disappeared. D
id Terry have something against her? Do you know, Mr. van Wagoner?"

  "Call me Paul."

  "Okay," she said, smoothing her hair behind her ear with an arm that just brushed a nipple sticking up through her shirt. Wavy blond-streaked brown, her hair made a sexy contrast to her shapely black eyebrows. Paul mentally ripped off the shirt, enjoyed the sight, and dressed her again. She went into the kitchen, moving her hips in a most unwifely manner.

  "I’m afraid I can’t get into that," Paul said. "So you’re saying the girl in the film was nothing like the real girl."

  "Well, the film accentuated the negative. Tam was a smart girl, very pretty," Ordway said. "She loved horses, and she wanted to become a vet."

  "But she did throw a drink into your face the night she disappeared."

  "I deserved it," Ordway said. "I ... you might say I had been pressing my attentions on her. She really wasn’t interested, but I was too self-absorbed to see that. She had rather suddenly stopped seeing Kurt Scott, or so she said. By the way, I saw his picture in the paper, and I recognized him. I’d met him once with her. He was just out of college then, I remember she told me that, and he was a few years older."

  "Her father never liked her boyfriends," Doreen called from the kitchen.

  "Her father was trying to keep his little girl at home," Ordway said. "She had all these rules to follow. I’ve always thought she just left. She wanted to see the world. She was bored with school and angry at her parents. It happens all the time. She’s probably a typist in Melbourne, and we’ll hear from her one of these days."

  "Maybe," Paul said. "On the other hand, it’s un- usual that she would make no attempt to call home in all these years, if she’s still alive. Something else I was wondering. Had you ever met Terry before she contacted you about the film?"

  "No. We never saw the woman before last year. We talked to her at the studio once, and then she came out to the ranch to film Doreen. We were just high school kids twelve years ago, you see, and she apparently lived at Tahoe, but she was quite a bit older, late twenties back then, I’d say. Anyway, Jessica asked us to cooperate with her and the filming, so when Terry called we said fine, we’ll come up and talk to you. She seemed so pleasant at first, but after a while I did start feeling a bit uncomfortable around her," Ordway said.

  A crash came from the bathroom. "It’s nothing, don’t come in," they heard Wish call in a muffled voice.

  "Is your, uh, associate ill?" Ordway said.

  "No, no, he just drank a quart of Gatorade on the trip down the hill," Paul said.

  Ordway cocked an eyebrow, but didn’t get up. "What else did you want to know?"

  "Tamara made a phone call from the pay phone that night, just before she left. Who would she have been calling?" Paul said.

  "The police asked us that too," Doreen said. She had turned off the light in the kitchen, and returned wearing a green frilly apron over her clothes. The curtains were drawn across the main window, and the house felt warm and cozy. Ordway fit his house, but Doreen Ordway didn’t. She looked all wrong in that apron, like a scorpion hiding behind a pile of laundry. "It had to be a boy," she was saying. "I mean, who else would she be calling? I suppose she could have picked up with Kurt again, but if it was Kurt, why wouldn’t she talk about it with me? We stayed at Manny’s for a couple of hours after that, but no one else showed up there."

  "The bartender at Manny’s said you left a few minutes after she did."

  "What did he know?" Ordway said. "I never understood why he lied like that." Wish was taking a long time, and Paul could see Ordway was about to go check on him.

  Quickly, he said, "Have the police contacted you regarding Terry London’s death?"

  "This morning. They came out to the house. They wanted to know where we were on the night Terry was shot. They can’t really think we’d hate the film so much we’d shoot her, can they? I told them we were home in bed, where we belong."

  "Right," his wife said, nodding her head like a good wife, but nevertheless oozing sexiness out of every pore.

  "I’d sure like to get a copy of your statements, when you receive them for signing," Paul said.

  "Sure, I’ll send them along." Ordway got up, looking toward the hall.

  Two identical small girls with glorious blond ringlets, in identical Princess Jasmine nighties, came running in from the hall. "Mommy! Daddy! There’s an Indian in our bedroom!"

  "Wish must have gotten lost," Paul said.

  "I’ll just go and see what’s up," Ordway said, but then Wish appeared, his head scraping the low ceiling. "Sorry to scare the kids. I got disoriented coming back out."

  "In a two-bedroom house?" Ordway asked.

  "Yeah, well, just got lost, I guess."

  Doreen took the little girls back to bed, giving Wish a wide berth.

  "I’m terribly sorry not to be able to invite you to dinner," Ordway said in a final tone. Paul had no choice but to take the hint. He offered his hand again, but Ordway’s whole manner had changed, Paul and Wish found themselves outside the warm house and back under the moonlight, Wish saying, "Sorry, man."

  On the drive back up into the mountains, Wish said, "You want me to drive?"

  "Nobody but me drives my van," Paul said. "Okay. What was all the crashing in the bathroom?"

  "Oh. I was trying to weigh myself on the scale, and I lost my balance and grabbed the shower curtain, and the rod fell into the tub. I almost got hurt."

  "Fine," Paul said. "Just fine. Anything at all connected to the case?"

  "A tin can from the trash for her, and a used shot glass from the sink for him," Wish said, bringing the items, wrapped in a red bandanna, out from somewhere inside his denim jacket.

  "Maybe he opened the can, and she tossed back the shot."

  "Women don’t drink straight Scotch," said Wish firmly, "and men don’t open cans of spinach."

  "Aren’t you forgetting Popeye?" To say nothing of the few dozen serious female drinkers he’d met in a lifetime.

  "Who’s that?"

  "Never mind. They were in the studio last year, so the prints aren’t going to help much. Anything else?"

  "There was a set of handcuffs and keys in her bottom drawer. Very suspicious. And a little switch, like for a pony," Wish said. "Do you think that means anything for the case?"

  And then he reached inside the denim jacket and pulled out the items. The handcuffs fell clanking onto the gear shift between them.

  "I took them for Nina," Wish announced. "They could be important." He flicked the toy whip at the dashboard. "What’s the matter? Why are you making those funny noises?"

  28

  "NINA. IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU," KURT SAID INTO HIS phone. He directed a short smile at her, catching her eyes once, then letting them out of his hold.

  He looked worse, very tired, unshaven. Outside the jail, the world was summery and warm, and after seeing Kurt, Nina would stop by her favorite doughnut shop and eat a cinnamon roll. He would return to the permanent twilight where time was inconsequential, and the future held no promise.

  She smiled back, and tried to pass on a silent message. She would try to get him out of this. She would try to save him. Sometimes he seemed to hear her. Other times she knew he did not.

  She couldn’t help reacting to him, the sight and sound of him. She couldn’t help remembering his touch and the scent of his skin. When he smiled, she wanted to smile. When he despaired, she felt a wave of the same feeling. A new relationship was growing as they discussed his case and pointedly ignored the currents that passed through the glass between them, each protecting the other. There was no time for love or sex or any feelings at all between them. They bowed to the mutual understanding that there was only time to try to save his life.

  "I watched the copies of the arrest video and the Tamara Sweet film and the death video with the transcript you sent over," he said. "The death video was horrible stuff. She was faithful to the end, I see. Saying I pulled the trigger. Talking about the Angel of Death.
After everything, I shouldn’t be surprised. But I just keep thinking, how could she? How could she lie like that? It’s an incredible piece of work, just like she was. Maybe she thought everyone would enjoy watching her death as much as she would have enjoyed it."

  "I wasn’t going to show you the death video at first. Did you notice anything in the video that might help us?"

  "What can I say? If the transcript’s right, she lied, or she was out of her head."

  "Okay. What did you think of the Tamara Sweet film?" She saw the answer in the way he grimaced and shook his head. "You think Tam’s dead."

  "Yes, I do."

  "Why?"

  "I saw it the first time through. At the end. She found some actress to play Tam walking into the woods in the twilight. The resemblance from the back was creepy. She even had Tam’s walk. Terry coached her well. Then Terry had the girl walking up the path. Did you see where she goes?"

  "Off in the woods somewhere."

  "Didn’t you recognize the area?"

  Nina thought back. "No."

  "The girl goes up a wide trail. That’s the path that winds around up toward Angora Ridge. I know that trail. "

  "Okay. So she takes the path up to the ridge."

  "She sits down on a rock. It’s getting dark and she’s looking around. Remember how the camera panned up from her on that flat piece of granite, leaving her behind? I think Terry knew Tam was dead when she made this film. And I think there’s something up there ... something that will tell us where Tam is, maybe even her body. I think Terry intended to reveal something with that scene. It would amuse her to actually film the place Tamara died, if she—if she killed her. Very few people would be able to identify it from the shot."

  "Kurt. Talk about wild guesses. You see a rock on a path in twilight, and you think you know the rock?"

  "I’m a naturalist. I work ... worked in a forest. I notice things about nature. I recognized several landmarks. Somebody has to go up there."

  "Don’t you see, Kurt? All the people who have seen the film, and you’re the only one who says he knows where that rock is and wants to go looking around there? What if the girl is up there? Is anybody going to believe you didn’t know she was there all along? I’ll pass on your thought—after the trial."