Three minutes later I was at Heather Press’s place. Nice little eightplex on the corner. Probably had good molding and hardwood floors. The lawn in front of the building was well manicured, but underneath the front left bay window was a full-on garden. It contained some bright flowers I didn’t know the names of and some sort of exotic-looking plants, even a little row of tomatoes. And at the end, right by the door, some flowers I did know the name of. Some California poppies. Those small yellow cups with a hint of gold that, while far from rare, are quite fetching and very evocative of California.
My detective’s intuition told me that this little garden belonged to Heather, because, you know, she was a gardener. I was really earning my money so far. A redbrick sidewalk took you up to the central entrance to her building. I parked my car across the street and down a bit, got out, hit the sidewalk. The door at the end of this charming little walk wasn’t locked, so I went right in. Inside was a dark, carpeted alcove with an apartment door on the left, one on the right, and two just like it down the hall, and, I guessed, four matching ones up the stairs right in front of me.
From Peter, I knew that Heather lived in apartment A, and I now saw that A was the apartment to my immediate left, the one with the garden. Hey, I was right. But I have to tell you, you do have to be careful, because it’s just that kind of assumption that trips you up in my game all the time. You go, She’s a gardener, so the place with the garden has to be hers. And then it turns out not to be. And then you go, Shit, really? But this time I had confirmation. All right, moving on.
I knocked. Nobody home.
I walked back outside. I put my face right up to the front bay window. Nice Crate and Barrel–type apartment. Nobody inside sitting there petulantly, refusing to answer the door. I walked around to the side of the building and looked in the bedroom windows. Had to look through a crack in the blinds to discover—drumroll, please—nothing. Nobody home.
I went back around front, got in my car, and sat there.
What to do? What to do?
Call her? Nope. Won’t recognize the number. Won’t pick up. And even if she did, she might not answer my questions. And even if she did answer my questions, I wouldn’t be able to read her. Also, she might not agree to see me today, and I wanted to see her today. Wanted to try something on this one that I thought might work. No. Not calling her. Might have to call her later, if she doesn’t show up eventually. But not now. Not yet.
And then I thought: I know, I’ll go get some lunch, then sit here and wait. Now that, that, is a plan. I walked over to Beverly Drive—not Beverly Boulevard, which is also close by, but Beverly Drive. It’s very easy to mix up the two, even if you’ve lived here forever. Yes, it’s annoying. And confusing. But either way, Beverly Drive was two blocks away and lined with a bunch of coffee shops and lunch spots, so it was for sure the place to go to complete my mission. I walked over, hit a little deli, and picked up a turkey-and-Swiss with spicy mustard, mayo, lettuce, and pickles and a cold, canned Fresca. I know what you’re thinking. Seriously, I really think I know what you’re thinking: Was it Peach or Original Citrus? It was Original Citrus, unfortunately. Still delicious, but not truly sublime. Not that mix of citrus and peach that somehow tastes, in the best possible way, like baby aspirin. My Original Citrus Fresca was, however, ice-cold, so that worked. I walked back over to my car, got in, and took down the sandwich and the beverage.
And then I sat there. And waited. I put my seat back a bit. Yeah, might be a long wait. Music. Time for some music. I put on Cheap Trick’s first album. I listened to “Hot Love” twice in a row, with some volume, then turned it down a bit and let the album play. I was at ease, relaxing a bit while on the job, enjoying the comfort of my still-pretty-new car. I lease a new car every three years or so. I always get random, borderline-generic American cars that nobody really notices. Helps in my line. Really does. Thing is, the cars I lease are still pretty nice, and, like I said, comfortable. Right now I’m driving a 2014 Ford Focus hatchback. You’ve rented one. Mine’s Oxford White, which in plain English means: white. The Focus also comes in White Platinum, which in plain English also means: white. For some reason I love the fact that it’s a hatchback. I’m not sure why. And I really love telling people that it has five doors. That is the highlight of my day every time someone asks me how many doors my car has. Which is rare. But it does happen.
Two hours later a new pickup truck, with a woman behind the wheel, drove right by me. The driver didn’t notice me or my Oxford White Ford Focus. As the truck slid by, then disappeared into the alley behind Heather’s apartment, I noticed some gardening tools in the bed of the truck. About a minute later, a young woman who looked an awful lot like the driver of the truck walked around from the back of the building and headed up the little path I’d been on a couple of hours earlier. She was wearing a white T-shirt, shorts, bright blue socks, and brown work boots. She had a backpack over one shoulder that made her tilt, just slightly, to one side. I liked her outfit, liked her style.
I quickly got out of the Focus and walked over.
When the woman had just about reached the main entrance I said, “Hello. Excuse me. Heather?”
She turned to look at me. She was probably forty, attractive, tan from working outside, dyed-blond hair tied up, and pretty, catlike green eyes. Her face held the emotional scars of a tough childhood, disappointment, parents who made her unsure and uneasy. It made her more attractive. Was it a common little face? A little, perhaps, but I realized now that that was just Muriel Dreen insulting Heather in a way that Heather couldn’t really defend against. Muriel was wellborn and Heather wasn’t. It was a fact, not defendable, really, so Muriel used it to hurt her. Bitch.
Heather said, “Yes?”
She was smiling. She wasn’t worried. Maybe she was used to being approached as she worked outside, by people who wanted to hire her or ask her about plants. Or maybe she just wasn’t that freaked out by a stranger saying hello. I hoped it was the latter.
“Hi, Heather. My name is John Darvelle. I’m a detective. I was hired by your old boss, Muriel Dreen. She thinks you stole a ring from her.”
Very quickly, almost without missing a beat, she smiled in a knowing way and said, “Oh god, this again?”
“Yes. This again. Except this time, it’s not going to be a couple of tired cops looking through your drawers, not finding the ring, then closing the case. It’s going to be me figuring out what happened.”
It came out hot. Which is what I wanted.
She frowned and shrunk into herself a bit and said, “What does that mean?”
It was a curious response. It wasn’t: There’s nothing to figure out. It was: What does that mean? It was a good question. I liked it.
I softened my tone and said, “I’ll explain. But first, here.”
I took out my wallet. I showed her my detective’s license and my driver’s license. I handed them both to her. She looked at them quizzically and then handed them back.
I said, “So here’s what it means. Heather, if you took that ring, I’m going to find out. If it’s hidden around here somewhere, I’ll find it. If you sold it, I’ll figure out who you sold it to. But I doubt you would have done that. Maybe, but I doubt it. Too soon. Paper trail.
“Anyway, it’s not going to be like when the cops came by. With a case like this, they just want to check a box and go back to the station house. With or without the ring. But more important, they have to play by rules that I sometimes don’t have to play by. Like, I can break into your house when you’re not home. Or I can break into your truck when you’re at Home Depot, buying some new gloves or something. And I would do that. I will do that. And then I have ways to make it look like nothing illegal ever happened. Or I’ll just tell the cops—who I know, by the way—my version of the story. You know what I’m saying? My version of the story.
“But I don’t want to do any of that. Because if I do, in the end you’ll get in trouble. Maybe serious trouble. And I don’t really want that. You seem li
ke a nice person. I don’t know, there’s just something about you. I’m on your side. I’m not sure why, but I’m on your side. People do things they shouldn’t do. Like steal rings. And sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—those people deserve a pass. So if you did steal it, just give it to me. You won’t get in trouble. I will make sure you don’t get in trouble. I promise. Muriel Dreen won’t even know you took it. But if you did steal it and you don’t give it to me, I will find it. I will find it. And in this version of the story, you will get in trouble. I promise that too. Okay? I just want to be done with this. I want to go back to my office. I’ve got a Ping-Pong table in it, and some really good speakers. I like being there. And I want you to be able to go back to your job too. I want you to be able to go make some other mean old lady’s yard look nicer.”
After a long pause she smiled and said, “You’ve definitely met Mrs. Dreen.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Then, after another long pause, perhaps she was thinking of her next move, she said, “I need to put this bag down.”
She took the backpack off her shoulder and put it on the bricks right in front of the main door. Then she looked at me again. Thinking. Thinking about what to do. I was pretty sure of it now.
I said, pointing to the California poppies in her garden, “Those are California poppies.”
She smiled and said, “Very good!” I think she was glad that I had a tiny bit of knowledge about her field, and that I was helping her kill some time. But I think, I really think, it was more the former.
“It’s the state flower, right?”
“That’s right. Do you know what the other yellow flowers are called, the ones with the black center next to the tomatoes?”
“I do not. I’m afraid I’ve given you most of my flower knowledge.”
“They’re called black-eyed Susans.”
“I’ve known a few of those.”
“Ha,” she said. “They’re pretty, but I like the name more than I like the flower.”
She kneeled down and adjusted a few of the black-eyed Susans. Untangled them a bit to make them look more presentable. Then she stood up and looked at me again. Thinking. Thinking again.
“The ring,” I said.
Without directly addressing what I’d just said, she asked, “Do you want to talk inside?”
“Yeah, sure.”
She grabbed her bag and we went in the main door. Outside her apartment door she said, “Do you mind taking off your shoes?”
“No problem.” I took off my brand-new black Adidas running shoes and put them by the door. She took off her boots and did the same. And we walked in. Her apartment was astonishingly clean. I mean absolutely perfect. And she must have done it herself. She wouldn’t have a staff like Muriel Dreen.
She said, “Would you like something to drink?”
“Do you have any beer? Like, Bud Light? Coors Light? That type of beer?”
“Really?” she asked.
I couldn’t tell if she was saying “Really?” because now this stranger in her house was asking for alcohol. Or because it was only about three in the afternoon. Or because of the kind of beer I preferred. Light, cheap, American. As opposed to, you know, a pumpkin amber ale with hints of pine made by a guy with a three-foot beard in his backyard in Portland.
So I just said, “Yeah.”
Heather walked from the main room through a little dining room, into her kitchen.
I sat down, carefully, on the very clean, cement-colored couch.
Heather reappeared with a bottle of Bud Light. Before, I had been pretty sure I liked her. Now I was certain. She sat down in a chair across from me.
I said, “This might be the cleanest apartment I’ve ever seen.”
“I like to clean,” she said.
And I thought: That really is the trick. Learn to like things you’re not supposed to like. Learn to embrace them, enjoy them.
I took a big swig of the beer. It was cold, light, delicious. I wanted to have eleven of them and listen to Heather tell me more about her apartment-cleaning concepts.
She said, finally ready to talk, to address what I’d said, “I have a question. You think I took Mrs. Dreen’s ring. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said all that stuff. Why do you think I took it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why did you?”
“Ha,” she said, for the second time since I’d met her. “That’s not what I meant. I meant . . . You know what I meant.”
I took my third sip of the beer, almost finishing it. “Truth is, Muriel’s the one who convinced me. The ring doesn’t move, so she didn’t misplace it, and the rest of her staff has been there a while. Simple, but it makes sense. I think she’s right. I think you took it.”
“Well, because I don’t really want you to break into my house or my truck, let’s say she’s right and you’re right. Would I really not get into trouble?”
“You really would not. I’d return it to Muriel and Peter, and I wouldn’t tell them that it was you who took it. I’d tell them something else.”
“Why? Why would you do that?”
“Because that’s the deal we’re making.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Why don’t you give me the ring, Heather.”
She looked at me. She stared at me. And then she smiled and held the smile on her face for a long, long time. I think she was contemplating again, maybe for the final time, whether she could trust me. I got the feeling that she had trusted people before and it hadn’t worked out all that well.
“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.”
We got up and walked out the door into the little central alcove. We put our shoes back on and went back outside.
Heather walked into the garden beneath her bay window. She dug her hand down into the soil next to one of the tomato plants and pulled out a small plastic ziplock bag. She walked back over to the sidewalk where I was, then brushed the soil off the bag, opened it up, and pulled out the ring. She handed it to me. I looked at it. A square diamond, emerald cut, I think, about one and a half carats, with deep blue triangular sapphires on either side of it.
I had to side with Muriel Dreen on this one. It was pretty. Classic. Classy.
Heather Press said, “The police didn’t look in the garden.”
“The place that makes the most sense, yet somehow is ignored. There’s some kind of poetry to that.”
She didn’t respond. She just looked at me again. Giving me the green cat eyes, her mouth now a straight, serious line. And her face now saying “I trusted you” as she said, “I’m not going to get in trouble.”
It was a statement, not a question. But it was still a question.
“Scout’s honor,” I said.
I’d never been a Boy Scout. I just said that for some strange reason. You ever do that? Just say a saying that you never really say, or maybe have never said even once? It just basically emerges out of freaking nowhere and it feels weird coming out of your mouth and sounds even weirder? Have you ever done that? You’ve done that. What is that?
I looked at Heather and said, “Thank you. For the beer . . .” I held up the ring. “And for this.”
She nodded. I turned, walked over to the Focus, and got in. I buckled up, then cranked her up. Then I looked to my left, and there was Heather’s face. Inches away from mine, framed by my window. I powered it down.
“You know how you asked me why I took the ring?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I think I know why. Muriel Dreen is the meanest person I’ve ever met. She’s so mean to all the people who work for her. All the people who have been there forever, as she likes to say. And she was mean to me too. She would threaten to not pay me. And, see, she always talked about her ring. She would go on and on about how tacky everyone is nowadays, and for some reason she would always bring it back to how tacky everyone’s engagement rings are today and how her beloved engagement ring from Inman was the kind of ring a classy girl gets. And she’d say
it to me like I was the kind of girl who would never get a ring like that. I’ve never stolen anything in my life. It was an impulse. Just this out-of-the-blue impulse. I thought if I took her ring . . .”
I looked at her. Her face darkened with shame. But also defiance. And the beautiful vulnerability I’d seen right when I met her.
She continued, “I thought if I took her ring it would hurt her. Hurt her back. For hurting her staff all the time. And for hurting me.”
I nodded and said, “She won’t know you took it.”
She nodded just a little bit, and I said, “Bye, Heather.”
I powered up my window and took off, headed for the Dreen house, Muriel’s ring sitting in the empty cup holder next to the one holding my empty Fresca can.
4
I called Peter Caldwell and said I was headed back to the house. He said he was running an errand but that he’d head back too. I got there first, then waited thirteen minutes for Peter to pull up in his BMW. Outside the front door, I told Peter I had an idea and that I wanted to look in Muriel’s bedroom. He nervously agreed, then escorted me inside.
We walked through the house to the bedroom. I went over to the dresser next to the bed, the one that had housed the ring. I put my hands on top of the dresser and gave it a long, pensive stare. Then I got down on the floor and looked underneath it. I scooted my whole body over and looked underneath the bed. Unlike most beds, there was nothing, nothing, underneath it. No dust. No spare blankets or linens. No boxes filled with old, cracked coat hangers and half-filled photo albums. Nothing. I reached my arm way back under the bed and then, in a dramatic show, got my head, and then the whole top half of my body, under there too. Then I reverse-scooted out, stood up, opened my hand, and showed Peter the ring.
“There you go,” I said. “Under the bed. Problem solved. Case closed.”
“I don’t understand. You’re saying you just found the ring under there?”
“That’s right.”
“Um, Mr. Darvelle, we looked everywhere in here. Including under the bed. The ring wasn’t there.”
The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin Page 2
