Wall of Glass

by Walter Satterthwait

  “He’s here, Mother,” the girl announced.

  A woman stood up from a long white sectional sofa, crossed over to me, and held out her hand. Horizontally, so I could kiss it or shake it, whichever I fancied.

  “Mr Croft?” she said, as I shook it.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Felice Leighton. I’m very pleased to meet you.” Judging by the trace of accent in her voice, she had attended one of the Eastern colleges that teach women how to wear Harris tweed and talk with their teeth clenched.

  Tall and handsome, she wore black pumps, tight pale blue designer jeans, and a tight gray lightweight cashmere sweater opened at the neck to show a strand of pearls. Her body was impressive, with round muscular breasts, a narrow waist, and no excess flesh at all. Her hair was frosted blond, medium length. Her lips were full, her nose straight, and her eyes a deep dark sapphire blue. The color was fake, and had to come from contact lenses, but it did go nicely with the gray of the sweater. Her skin was taut, perhaps a shade too surgically taut over the aristocratic cheekbones, and it had the kind of color that meant weekly visits to the tanning salon. From across the room, she had looked twenty-five. Up close, the figure and face said thirty-five. Only the hands and neck said otherwise.

  She held my hand for just a shade longer than necessary, then released it with a smile.

  “Please,” she said, “sit down.” She indicated the sofa. I sat on it, and so did she, a few feet away, folding her left leg beneath her and putting her left arm up on the sofa’s back, all of which did some fairly interesting things to the sweater.

  “My husband will be with us in a moment. He’s on the phone to London.”

  “To all of it at once?”

  She laughed. It was a good laugh, easy and genuine. “Sometimes it honestly seems that way. Would you care for a drink while we wait?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Coffee? Tea?”

  “Tea would be fine.”

  She turned to the young girl, who stood off to the side, no doubt mesmerized by this scintillating adult conversation. “Get that, would you, Miranda? And I’ll have a small Scotch and water. And for heaven’s sake, darling, stand up straight.”

  “Mother,”, the girl said, and rolled her eyes theatrically. Then, without changing her posture that I could see, she turned and marched from the room.

  “She’s hopeless,” Mrs. Leighton told me with a rueful smile.

  I nodded sagely. You narrow your eyes and you move your head up and down.

  The woman seemed to me, from the way she treated her daughter, to be the sort who liked to control, and to be seen controlling, her environment. Maybe that was why she tended toward the rough trade that Hector had mentioned. Men like Biddle, who would take what they wanted without asking and without much subtlety. Maybe it was a relief, a kind of deliverance, to shrug off all that responsibility.

  As though she knew what I were thinking, she looked me over slowly, up and down. It felt a bit like being frisked. “So,” she said. “You’re with Mrs. Mondragón.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What a tragedy that was. She was such a beautiful woman.”

  “She still is.”

  “Yes, of course. Of course. I only meant that it must be difficult for her. The confinement.”

  I nodded.

  “How long have you worked with her?”

  “Almost three years now.” I reached into my jacket pocket and slid out my notebook. Reached into my shirt pocket and slid out my pen. “Would you mind, Mrs. Leighton, if I asked you a few questions about the burglary?”

  “Why no, not at all.” She smiled. “But please,” she touched my shoulder lightly with tapered fingers, “it’s Felice.”

  I nodded. “Romero told me that you normally kept the necklace in a safe-deposit box.”

  “That’s right, yes. We have a duplicate, quite a good one, cubic zirconium, and that’s the one I kept here. But there was a terrible mix-up, all my own fault, really, and I got the two of them confused.”

  “When had you last worn the genuine necklace?”

  “On Thursday, the day before. Derek and I had gone to the Governor’s Ball. And then on Friday, Derek brought the duplicate back to the bank. Thinking that it was the genuine necklace, of course. I realized just before we left that afternoon that I’d made a mistake. And the banks were closed, naturally, so we couldn’t get to the box and exchange them. Derek planned to go on Monday. I put the necklace in my dresser, where I normally kept the duplicate.”

  “So who would’ve known that the genuine necklace was here?”

  “Only Derek and I. And Kevin, our son. Miranda had already left.”

  “This duplicate,” I said. “Would it be good enough to fool a burglar?”

  She smiled. “Well, I don’t know a great many burglars personally, but I should think so, yes. It wouldn’t fool a jeweler, of course. But after all, it fooled me.”

  “Some cash was taken, too.”

  “Yes, about two hundred dollars. Ah, here are our drinks. What took so long, Miranda?”

  “Elena couldn’t find the tea,” the girl said. She was carrying a silver tray, which she set down on the coffee table. She stood back and brushed the hair away from her eyes.

  “Thank you, darling,” said Mrs. Leighton.

  The girl nodded, turned, and padded off.

  “And a gun was taken,” I said. “That was yours?”

  She handed me the cup and saucer. “Yes. A pistol my husband had given me.”

  “Thirty-eight caliber.”

  “Yes. A Colt, I think. I’d never fired it, and it wasn’t loaded. My husband bought it as a joke several years ago.”

  “A joke?”

  She smiled and sipped at her drink. “We were having an argument once, I don’t even remember now what about, and I got so angry I told him that if I had a gun I’d shoot him. The next day he gave me the gun.”

  Very droll. The rich are different. “It wasn’t loaded when he gave it to you?”

  “No.” She smiled. “I think Derek felt that would’ve been carrying the joke a shade too far.”

  I nodded. “According to Romero, there was no one in the house that night.”

  She shook her head. “I’d given Elena, our housekeeper, the weekend off. Miranda was staying with Nancy Garcia, a friend of hers, and Kevin was over at the Palmers’ house, across town.”

  “Has Elena been with you for any length of time?”

  “Years and years. Since we moved here. And that was, oh, nineteen-seventy, I think. I’d trust her with my life. And besides, the police talked with her last year. She was home with her mother and brother.”

  “Did she know the code for the alarm?”

  “Of course. But didn’t Allan tell you that the alarm hadn’t been set?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he did. Why was that?”

  “I’m afraid that Kevin forgot to set it before he left. He was the last one to leave that day. He’d had some friends over, and they’d been drinking. You know how boys can be sometimes.”

  That seemed to call for another sage nod, so I provided it. “It isn’t possible that one of them took the necklace?”

  She looked at me as though I’d suggested an unnatural act. Probably from her point of view I had. “Certainly not. They’re all fine boys. And besides, Kevin never told them the necklace was here.”

  I nodded and sipped at my tea. Earl Grey. “According to Romero, you were the one who discovered the burglary.”

  “Yes. I came home on Saturday morning. Derek was staying over in Albuquerque and planned to fly back that evening. I didn’t even notice when I came in that the window was smashed. That one.” She pointed to a panel in the wall of glass. “I went straight to my room to unpack, and then I saw it. All my things, lingerie, my dresses, scattered around the room. And then I realized, of course, that we’d been robbed. You hear about it—it’s even happened to friends of ours—but you never believe it can happen to you. I ran
over to the dresser, all the drawers were open, and I saw that the necklace was gone.”

  I nodded.

  “I went to call the police,” she said, “and the phone wasn’t working. Later, of course, the police told me that the wires had been cut. I had to drive down the road to our neighbor’s, the Wheatfields’, to call them.”

  “Was anything else taken,” I asked her, “besides the necklace and the cash and the gun?”

  “No, nothing. I suppose we were lucky in that respect. But that’s not the way I saw it at the time. I was heartbroken. And I had this horrible sense of having been violated.”

  “The police think that Frank Biddle was involved.”

  She sipped at her drink. “Yes, so one of them told me. A Sergeant Nolan.”

  “Would Biddle have known you kept a necklace, genuine or otherwise, in your room?”

  She looked at me blankly. “How could he have?”

  “What is this?” A man’s voice, angry, off to my left.

  FOUR

  DEREK LEIGHTON stood in the doorway. He was a few years older than his wife and quite a bit taller, a big man midway through the process of going soft. His gray hair had been styled in artful curls that did a good job of concealing how little of it was left. He wore a brown silk Western shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, and a pair of brand-new blue jeans that, like all brand-new blue jeans, looked vaguely pathetic. Beneath them were a pair of cowboy boots that had cost a large family of lizards their lives. His skin was red, less from the sun, I suspected, than from alcohol. Or possibly apoplexy.

  “Derek,” said the woman, “this is Mr. Croft.”

  I set down the cup and saucer and stood up. He came into the room without offering his hand. His face was tight with displeasure. “The police went through all this a long time ago.”

  “In order to help locate the necklace,” I said, “I need to know as much as possible about the burglary.”

  “Garbage,” he said. “Get to this hoodlum Killebrew and beat some sense into him. It’s as simple as that.”

  Mrs. Leighton stood up, smiling. “Mr. Croft is only doing his job, darling. You sit down and relax, and I’ll get you a drink. More tea, Mr. Croft?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Please. Sit down. I’ll be right back.”

  I sat, careful not to watch the tilt and sway of nicely rounded buttocks as she walked away. Her husband glowered at me as he sat down in a white padded chair across the coffee table.

  “I’m not employing you,” he said, “to come here and badger my wife.”

  “I’m not badgering your wife,” I said. “And you’re not employing me. No one is. Mrs. Mondragón and I have a speculation contract with Atco.”

  “I’m paying the bloody finder’s fee, assuming you do your job and find that necklace.”

  Something Allan Romero hadn’t mentioned. “That’s between you and Atco.”

  He put his head back as though he’d suddenly smelled something unpleasant. “Are you always this impertinent?”

  “Weather permitting.”

  “This is why,” he said, his red face growing redder, “this is exactly why I told Romero to send you over here. I will not have a repetition of what happened last time. People disturbing my wife, my children. Probing into our private lives, asking us questions as though we were the criminals. I know how you two-bit private detectives operate—”

  “Three-bit,” I said. “Inflation.”

  “I’m warning you, Croft,” he said, leaning forward and pointing a thick index finger at my face. “You do what I tell you and keep your nose out of my family’s business.”

  “Mr. Leighton,” I said, “that finger is going to look pretty silly buried in your ear.”

  He stared at me for a moment and then abruptly stood up. “Get out of my house.” He said it through clenched teeth. Maybe he’d gone to one of those Eastern colleges himself.

  I nodded. Chalk up another triumph for diplomacy. Just as I stood, Mrs. Leighton returned with a drink in each hand. She looked at her husband, looked at me, looked back at her husband. “What on earth is going on?”

  “Croft was just leaving, Felice,” he said.

  “Thanks for the tea,” I told her, and slipped the notebook into my jacket, the pen into the pocket of my shirt.

  It might have been my imagination, but her blue eyes seemed to grow brighter. Her left eyebrow rose in an arch and a small smile appeared on her lips.

  Happy families are all alike.

  I turned to Leighton. “Don’t bother showing me out.”

  I walked across the brick floor, up the steps, through the foyer, and out the front door.

  FROM MY HOUSE, I called Rita and told her what’d happened. She suggested I might have been more patient with Leighton and his sensitivities. I said she was probably right. She predicted that Mrs. Leighton, sooner or later, would get in touch with me. I said she was probably wrong; hubby wouldn’t let her. I told her that I’d spend the rest of the day trying to pick up some background on the Leightons, and that I’d talk with Hector tomorrow.

  I called Peter Ricard, the one man I knew in town who could probably give me reliable information on the Leightons; but he was out. I called the police station, and Sergeant Nolan of the Burglary Investigation Unit was available. After I mentioned a few names—Rita’s, Romero’s, the Leightons’—he told me that if I made it down there right away, he might be able to spare me a few minutes. It was too gracious an offer to refuse.

  His cubicle at the station was identical to Hector’s, but Nolan himself looked less like a cop than a bank clerk. He was in his mid-thirties and he was short, not over five foot five. His light brown hair was cut close to the skull and parted on the left with the precision of a razor scar. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, a pale yellow shirt, and a tropical-weight light gray suit whose vest almost hid the beginnings of a small round belly. His tie was banded with red-and-yellow regimental stripes. It hadn’t come from the same regiment as Romero’s, but I got the feeling, after talking to him for a few minutes, that he and the insurance investigator had probably gotten along splendidly.

  He offered me a dry, businesslike hand, and then he offered me a chair. He sat down, pulled a pocket watch from his vest pocket, frowned at it, slid it back, and then patted the pocket twice, as though to reassure himself that the watch hadn’t slipped into a time warp and disappeared.

  “Normally,” he said, pushing his glasses back with the tip of his index finger, “Sunday is off-time for me, but we’ve got a trial coming up and I had to finalize some reports for the A.G.’s office. I was just leaving when you called.”

  “I appreciate your giving me the time.” It seemed like the thing to say.

  He nodded once, in recognition of my appreciation, and said, “I spoke to Allan Romero a few minutes ago, and he’s verified your bona fides. As I understand it, you’ll be interfacing with Atco on a contingency basis.”

  “Right,” I said. I admire a man who can use interfacing with a straight face. I hadn’t seen a straighter face than Nolan’s in some time.

  He picked up a ball-point pen from his desk blotter and began to tap it lightly against the desk. “Sergeant Ramirez assures me that you’re more honest than most private investigators, but I do want to caution you about one thing. Any hard data you obtain regarding the perpetrator of the Leighton burglary, or for that matter of any other burglary, is to be input to this office at once.”

  There would’ve been more—warnings of the dire consequences to me and my license if I failed to comply. He was taking a break, about to get started, when I interrupted. “Absolutely,” I said. “Hector tells me you had Frank Biddle and Stacey Killebrew figured for the theft.”

  He nodded curtly. “Sergeant Ramirez is correct.” With only the faintest emphasis on Sergeant to remind me that despite my friendship with Hector, I was still a civilian.

  I said, “Biddle was out of town the night the necklace was stolen.”

  Another curt nod. “
Yes. The burglary took place on October sixteenth of last year. And Biddle had left for Amarillo, Texas, on the thirteenth.”

  “Hector tells me that you think Biddle was involved with Mrs. Leighton.”

  Still tapping the pen, he nodded again. “I had evidence to corroborate that belief.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  He shook his head. “Privileged information.”

  And I wasn’t among the privileged. “All right,” I said. “Leighton fires Biddle, Biddle gets angry, organizes the theft with Killebrew, then sets himself up an alibi by going to Amarillo. That the way you see it?”

  “Yes. The connection between Biddle and Killebrew is established. Neither one of them denied it—they’d known each other since high school in Amarillo. The M.O. of the burglary matches that used in others we know Killebrew committed. And certainly Killebrew is one of the few burglars in town with access to a fence professional enough to dispose of the necklace.”

  “Good fences make good neighbors.”

  Nolan smiled faintly. “The majority of thefts here in Santa Fe, both commercial and residential, are committed by drug users, primarily heroin addicts, who steal to support their habit.”

  “Free Enterprise,” I said. “The American Way.”

  He frowned. And still kept tapping away with the pen—despite the prim exterior, he had a lot of nervous energy tumbling around inside. “The point I wish to make is that Stacey Killebrew is not a part of this system. He is not a drug user who steals to support his habit. He is a professional, full-time burglar who steals only your high-ticket items, primarily artwork and jewelry. Goods that the average Break-and-Enter people could never dispose of because the items are too easy to identify, or because the receivers in this town don’t have the cash to pay for them.”

  “You make him sound like Raffles.”

  “Don’t let his appearance deceive you. He’s sly and he’s shrewd and he’s extremely competent at what he does.”

  “He can’t be all that competent if he got busted.”

  Nolan shook his head. “We arrested him only because of a tip from someone who lived near the apartment where the goods were cached. And the burglary counts were ultimately dropped. All we had were the recovered goods, and although they were demonstrably in Killebrew’s possession, we had no way of proving his participation in their actual theft.”