Susan seemed to take my indecision in stride. In fact, she seemed to misinterpret it as my savoring the process. “You’re right, dear,” she said. “This is too much fun to rush through on our first trip.” There was something ominous about hearing this outing described as if it were merely the beginning of a long series of similar outings, but I tried not to think about that. We left the store loaded down with catalogs, Peter trailing behind us, still on his phone.
I was relieved to note that not choosing anything for the registry hadn’t taken very long-it was barely four o’clock. Peter and I would be well ahead of schedule to meet up with Luisa and Ben. I was opening my mouth to thank Susan for her help when she opened her own mouth. “Saks is right here,” she said. “What do you think, Rachel? Do you want to take a quick spin inside and see what they have? I could use a few fresh things for summer.”
Given that summer in San Francisco seemed to call for the sort of clothing most people wore on Arctic expeditions, I had difficulty seeing how Saks would be the best place to find what she needed, but she was eager to continue shopping. I looked to Peter for help, but he didn’t even notice, intent on his ongoing cell-phone conversation. “Sure,” I said, summoning up a smile that I hoped appeared as eager as Susan’s.
She linked her arm through mine. “This is such fun. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I had a daughter to do girlie stuff with.” Peter had two older brothers, and they were both married, but one lived in London and one lived in Hong Kong-I guessed their wives didn’t afford Susan much in the way of regular daughterly companionship. Nor did I have the heart to warn her just how unfulfilling I was likely to be on the girlie front. I might not be able to describe my tastes in stemware, but I was fairly confident my tastes in apparel did not run to the girlie.
When Susan had said she could use a few fresh things for summer, she apparently had meant I could use a few fresh things for summer. Fifteen minutes later I was in a dressing room with an assortment of items she believed would look adorable on me. One would expect that someone like her, a respected attorney with a thriving local practice, would favor the tailored and professional, but everything she’d picked was either pastel or flowered, and several of her choices were both. I personally preferred black-it went with everything, which meant I never had to worry about my outfit clashing with the scenery, much less my hair, but I hadn’t wanted to rain on Susan’s shopping parade.
Unable to decide which pastel-flowered item to try on first, I closed my eyes, spun around once, and selected the first thing my hand touched, which turned out to be the pair of jeans I’d worn into the store. This was clearly an omen, but suppressing that thought I repeated the eyes-closed, spinning-around selection process. This time my hand landed on a pink sheath, nearly identical to the dress Caro Vail had worn the previous night and perfect for a tennis-playing blonde. I sighed and shimmied into it, all too aware that I wasn’t blond and that I sucked at tennis and all other activities requiring eye-hand coordination. Then I opened the dressing room door so Susan could see.
“I love it!” she cried, clapping her hands together. “Do you love it?”
I looked around for Peter. He was near the center escalators, still on his phone, but he saw me trying to catch his eye and gave a distracted smile and wave.
“See? Peter loves it, too,” said Susan.
She insisted on paying for the dress, signing the credit-card slip with a happy flourish that gave me a bad feeling about what would surely come next. “Now, we need to get you some shoes you can wear with that dress, dear,” she said. A pink dress was bad enough, but pink shoes were more than I could have dreaded. However, within twenty minutes a sales clerk was busily wrapping up my very own pair. All of my efforts to act like the perfect future daughter-in-law had resulted in my future mother-in-law dressing me up like a bridesmaid.
This was probably ironic on some level, but I was too conscious of being late to meet Ben and Luisa and too badly in need of a Diet Coke to figure out how. My head was pounding and my hands had started to twitch. I was rooting through my purse, hoping in vain that I’d stashed some Advil in there, when the photo of Iggie, Biggie and person-unknown fell out onto the sales counter.
Susan got to it before I did. “Here you go, dear,” she said, handing it to me, but then she paused, looking at the picture. “What a small world,” she said. “How do you know Leo?”
“Leo?”
“Leo. Here.” She pointed to the guy standing to the right of Iggie.
“I don’t know him, actually. The person in the middle is someone I know from college, Iggie Berhrenz. He was at the party last night.”
Fortunately, Susan didn’t ask why I was carrying around a picture of Iggie, as that would have been hard to explain, nor did she think it strange when I asked if she knew Leo’s last name.
“Now, what was it?” she mused. “I may have forgotten, but I’m not sure if I ever knew it. He was always just Leo.”
“Then how did you know his first name?” asked Peter, who had reappeared at my side far too late to intercede in Susan’s purchases on my behalf.
“From Berkeley,” she said, pointing at the building in the background. “That’s Sproul Hall, on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Remember when I taught a seminar at the law school there, a few years back? Leo was one of the graduate students who worked in tech support. You know, helping faculty when they had computer problems. He could fix anything, and he was always so nice about it. Once, he stayed up all night helping me recover a lost file, and he refused to let me pay him anything extra for his time. And he’s a friend of your friend. What a small world,” she repeated in wonder.
It wasn’t that small. After all, Iggie and his ex-wife had gone to graduate school at Berkeley, as well. But at least we now could put part of a name to the unidentified face, and it shouldn’t prove too hard to find out the rest of the name, or, I hoped, to track down its owner and ask him why he thought Hilary had felt it necessary to stash the picture in such a top-secret locale. He might even know where we could find Iggie. All we had to do was check with the university and ask them about former graduate students named Leo who had worked in tech support and helped visiting law-school instructors. With a name like Leo, it would be easy, I thought, pleased.
My pleasure was almost enough to blot out any concerns about just where Peter’s mother thought I’d be wearing my pink dress and matching shoes.
8
We said goodbye to Susan outside Saks after agreeing to meet for an early dinner in Chinatown. She offered to take the shopping bags home, which was nice of her, but it also meant I wouldn’t have the opportunity to accidentally allow my new outfit to be crushed under a passing cable car.
“Thank you for standing idly by while your mother dressed me up like Bridesmaid Barbie,” I said to Peter as we waited to cross Post Street.
“I thought you looked cute,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “The pink is amazing with your hair.”
I found his utter cluelessness about such matters to be part of his charm, so I didn’t bother to debate this with him. “What were all those phone calls?” I asked.
“The valet service tracked down the guys who parked cars at the party last night and had them get in touch with me. There were three in total-high-school kids who work for the service on weekends.”
“Did any of them remember Hilary?”
“Did I mention they were in high school? They all remembered Hilary. She’s the living incarnation of adolescent male fantasy.”
“I’m sure there were posters of women just like her decorating the walls at your frat house,” I said.
“It wasn’t that sort of fraternity,” he protested. “In fact, we were pretty nerdy. And why are you so surprised I was in a fraternity?” The light finally changed, and we hurried across the street.
Because fraternities are so normal, I thought but didn’t say, nor did I say I shouldn’t be surprised given how normal everything else was about
him and his family. “Was there a matching sorority?” I asked instead. “Where people wore a lot of pink?”
“Caro’s sorority was sort of like a sister sorority. And Caro likes to wear pink. So, yes, I guess there was a matching sorority where people wore a lot of pink.”
A mental picture of a sorority house filled with pastel-clad triathletes flashed before my eyes. I gave silent thanks that I’d lacked the spirit of adventure applying to a college in California would have required before returning to the matter at hand. “So what did the male adolescents have to say?”
“Ben and Luisa are right over there,” Peter said, pointing them out in line at a coffee cart. “Why don’t I wait and tell you all at the same time?”
The four of us purchased beverages and found a table on the plaza. It was a pleasant spot, especially during those fleeting moments when the sun managed to break through the clouds, and a breeze carried the faint notes of a saxophone accompanied by the occasional clang of a cable car’s bell or a barking dog. My seat faced directly onto the statue at the plaza’s center, a woman doing an arabesque atop a Corinthian column. She looked energetic and healthful, as if she hadn’t been deprived of vital carbonated and artificially sweetened cola refreshment. I, on the other hand, had the Rice-a-Roni theme song running through my head, courtesy of the cable cars, and was trying to make do with seltzer, which was doing nothing to relieve my withdrawal symptoms.
“This is a useless drink,” I said, jabbing at the ice in my plastic cup with a straw.
“Only forty-one hours left,” said Peter, his tone encouraging.
“You forfeited your right to comment when you let your mother trick me out like a prom queen,” I said to him.
“I thought it was Bridesmaid Barbie,” he said.
“The two are hardly mutually exclusive,” I said.
Luisa giggled.
I looked up, startled. Giggling was as unprecedented as blushing. “Did you just giggle?” I asked her.
“What can I say? It’s funny.” She pulled her cigarette case and lighter out of her handbag.
“I’m glad you’re taking such pleasure in my suffering,” I said.
“Who wants to debrief first?” asked Peter, wisely steering the conversation onto a more productive path. “Luisa, how about you? Did you find a way to reach Iggie?”
She shook her head. “I had no idea he was such a man of mystery. First I left messages at Igobe, and I even tried to send a couple of e-mails to obvious addresses like [email protected] and [email protected], but they bounced right back. Then I must have made calls to two dozen of our classmates, including everyone who lived on our hallway sophomore year, but even his old roommates didn’t know how to find him. They haven’t heard from him since college, and one of them is still harboring quite the grudge-I got an earful about how Iggie borrowed his autographed picture of Bill Gates and never returned it.”
“Bill Gates? As in the guy who founded Microsoft? That Bill Gates?” asked Ben, who had been silently sipping his latte up until now.
I nodded. “Iggie always used to wonder if he should bother sticking around until graduation. He said he already knew more than most of the professors and Bill Gates dropped out of college and did just fine without a degree. If you haven’t gathered as much by now, Iggie was never the sort to be paralyzed by self-doubt.”
“He was absolutely confident that he would eventually be as successful-if not more so-as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or any of the other technology moguls,” added Luisa. “And this was even before the Google guys or any of the other more recent Internet billionaires.”
“So was that it?” Peter asked her. “Nobody knows where he is or how to reach him, but his old roommate wants his Bill Gates picture back?”
“I do have one potential lead,” Luisa said, taking a cigarette out of her engraved case and tapping its end on the table. “Somebody mentioned she may know a way to get in touch with him. I’m going to follow up with her later.”
“Who’s that?” I asked. “Someone from college?”
“No, just a friend.” She busied herself with her silver lighter.
“Which friend?” I asked. I’d seen Luisa light cigarettes on countless occasions, and it had never required such concentration.
“Just a friend,” she repeated, finally releasing a lick of flame from the lighter and touching it to the tip of the cigarette.
It was unlike her to be evasive, but perhaps being evasive went with the blushing and giggling. And my withdrawal hadn’t completely compromised my powers of deductive reasoning. Putting together the blushing and giggling with the phone call Peter had fielded that morning indicated with abundant clarity that the “friend” in question was almost certainly Abigail-not that I had any idea as to why Abigail thought she could locate Iggie when nobody else could. It was also abundantly clear that Luisa hadn’t “overslept” on her own.
I was about to ask her who she thought she was fooling with her coy references when her phone rang. She dug hastily into her bag to retrieve it and checked the caller ID. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, jumping up. “Hi,” she said into the phone, her voice practically giddy. She walked toward the far side of the statue, but even at a distance I could see her cheeks redden.
I didn’t know what to think of anybody anymore. Fearsome, fearless Hilary was sending out distress signals and cynical, self-contained Luisa was behaving like a love-struck teenager. And I was supposed to make sense of it all without caffeine. It didn’t seem fair, but it did prove to me how far I’d come. I was definitely normal compared to the two of them.
I turned to Ben. “What about you, Ben? Did you get a chance to check out the security tapes?”
He nodded. “I spent the last couple of hours reviewing the footage from the different cameras.”
“How did you convince hotel security to give you access?” asked Peter. “Did you show them your FBI identification?”
Ben took another sip of his latte. “Uh, well, yeah. But I guess they took pity on me, too.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“I told them my girlfriend was cheating on me and I needed to prove it.”
That excuse must have been close enough to the truth to be embarrassing. Ben might be a bit slow sometimes, but he was really taking one for the team, I thought with growing respect. It was too bad Hilary couldn’t see how he was coming through for her. Maybe she’d rethink the potential for their relationship.
Luisa rejoined us, lowering herself into her seat and stowing her phone in her purse. Her cheeks were still flushed. “Where were we?” she asked with a bright smile.
“Ben was telling us about the security tape,” Peter told her.
“How’s your friend?” I asked.
“Did you see Hilary with Iggie?” Luisa asked Ben, ignoring my question and busying herself with lighting another cigarette.
“No, just Hilary,” Ben said. “She came in on her own a little before midnight. One of the cameras caught her at the lower lobby entrance. Another caught her going up in the elevator from the main lobby and getting off on our floor, and then another caught her getting into a different elevator a minute or two later with her laptop and notebook. And then the camera for the lower lobby showed her leaving. But I didn’t see Iggie in any of the footage.”
“Well, she definitely left the party with him,” said Peter. “One of the kids who works for the valet service remembered them leaving, and not just because of Hilary’s dress. Iggie’s driving a Lamborghini these days.”
Luisa whistled, which I assumed meant a Lamborghini was impressive. She felt about cars the way Hilary felt about Luke Perry.
“The crazy thing is, Iggie wasn’t the only one-somebody else at the party was driving the exact same make and model,” said Peter. “The kid couldn’t remember who. He only remembered Iggie because he was with Hilary, and he couldn’t understand what someone like her would be doing with a guy like him. He also said Iggie tipped him with a hundred-dollar
bill and told him to buy Igobe stock when it goes public.”
“So we’ve confirmed that Hilary left with Iggie and then went to the hotel to get her laptop and notebook, just like we thought. Did you see anything else of interest on the security tape?” I asked Ben.
“A couple of things, but I don’t know if they’re relevant. Somebody else from the party came and went about fifteen minutes after Hilary-going up to the same floor and then leaving a few minutes after that. I didn’t actually meet him at the party, but I have a good memory for faces, and I’m pretty sure it was the same guy.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“About our age. Medium height, brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses. Sort of an average-looking preppie in a blazer and khakis.”
Ben’s words were almost exactly the same as those I’d used to describe Alex Cutler to myself. “That sounds like your friend Alex,” I said to Peter.
“True,” he said. “But it also sounds like half the guys in the Bay area. And what would Alex be doing going in and out of the Four Seasons at midnight?”
“What else did you see?” Luisa asked Ben. “You said there were a couple of interesting things.”
Ben grinned, the first full-on smile I’d seen from him this weekend. “I’m not sure you want me to say.”
“What do you mean?” asked Luisa.
“Well, I saw you.”
“Oh,” she said, with dawning realization. Her blush had begun to subside, but Ben’s words seemed to reignite it.
“The security guards were pretty psyched,” said Ben. “They wanted to rewind the tape and watch it again.”
“Oh,” repeated Luisa, her cheeks reddening even more.
“Oh?” I asked.
“Who wants to know what was on the memory stick?” she said.
“Who wants to change the subject?” I asked.
“What was on the memory stick?” asked Peter, coming to Luisa’s rescue.
Luisa flashed him a grateful look. “Two files,” she said. “I think the first is encrypted somehow-no matter which program I used to open it, all I ended up with was a bunch of ones and zeros.”
The Hunt Page 6
