Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  She led them through the living room, but didn’t stop at any of the conversation areas with couches and matching chairs. Instead she went up a half story to a room beside a huge window that looked out on a garden with a vine-covered stone wall. There was an asymmetrical polished burl table of some dark alien-looking hardwood. She sat at one end and gestured toward the other chairs beside it. She said, “Thank you for coming all the way here. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” said Ronnie.

  “Then maybe we should just get right to it,” Miss Tilson said. “What would you like to know?”

  Sid said, “Anything you can tell us about James Ballantine will help. There doesn’t seem to be much in the records of his case that’s useful.”

  Kirsten Tilson tossed her head, as though to get her hair out of her eyes so she could move forward. “I don’t know very much about him, really. I believe we recruited him away from Indiana University. It was about five years ago, give or take. He seemed to be a nice man, but he was a scientist.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Ronnie.

  “Since Intercelleron deals in research, we hire lots of them, and they usually tend to be a little shy and nerdy. They don’t open up much, so I don’t really know a lot about his life outside the office.”

  Sid looked at Ronnie and she gave a slight nod. Sid said,”One reason we’re here is that we interviewed Mr. Ballantine’s ex-wife. She gave us a list of women she referred to as her ex-husband’s girlfriends.”

  “Really. That’s a surprise. He didn’t seem to be the type.” Her mouth had suddenly become dry, so when she said it, there was a slight click of the tongue.

  “I have to tell you that you were on the list.”

  Kirsten Tilson’s body went rigid, but her face moved. As she tried out various responses, her facial muscles tentatively assumed the appropriate expressions, each in turn—shock, anger, amusement, confusion. That one seemed to suit her best, so her face held it. If she’d had better warning, she might have remembered she was in the presence of two people who had watched many people lie. But she didn’t appear to be aware that her facial muscles had already told them she was constructing a story in front of them. “I don’t know how that could be. I never met the woman. And I sincerely doubt that her husband told her I was his girlfriend. I certainly wasn’t.”

  Ronnie said, “I doubt that he did tell her. When the police were through examining his apartment for evidence, they would have released his belongings to his family.”

  “I had understood he was divorced from his wife.” She realized she’d revealed too much. “I don’t even remember who told me that. Maybe he wasn’t.”

  “He was. His only remaining heirs were his children. Since their mother had sole custody of the heirs, she also had responsibility for everything he had, whether she wanted it or not—his address book, any photos that were on his phone. Any videos.”

  Ronnie watched the reaction to the final word. Kirsten Tilson looked as though she had been punched. She turned paler for a few seconds, and then her cheeks reddened. She looked distracted, staring at the table. “I really should send someone to talk to her and let her know that this is just a misunderstanding.” She looked up at the Abels. “Perhaps you could explain it to her.”

  Sid had also seen her react to the word “videos.” He said, “If you’d like us to, we could pass it on. But I don’t think our telling her would have any effect. She was adamant.”

  “Well, she’s wrong. You said she gave you a list of names?”

  “Yes,” said Ronnie.

  Kirsten Tilson extended her hand. “Let me see the list. I can help you eliminate any other misunderstandings and save you some time.”

  “We can’t do that,” said Sid. “We’ve got to respect the privacy of the women on the list, just as we’re respecting yours.”

  She glared at him. “The board of directors hired you. You work for us.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sid. “We have responsibilities to other people too. Those women probably wouldn’t want to have that information shared. And as you said, it might not even be accurate.”

  “The directors of the company are paying you. All information I pay you to find belongs to me.”

  “No it doesn’t,” Sid said. “The board of directors of Intercelleron is a client of Abels, an independent contractor. That entitles the board to a written report when we’re finished. The report won’t include rumors, preliminary leads, or notes from interviews.”

  Ronnie said, “Maybe we should get back to you. We’ll pursue other avenues while you decide what you’d like to tell us.” She reached into her purse and took out a card. “This has our numbers.”

  Sid stood. “Good night, Miss Tilson. Thanks for your time.” He turned and walked toward the door, then waited there for Ronnie to catch up.

  They had nearly reached the door before Kirsten called out, “Wait. Come back.”

  As Sid and Ronnie walked back toward the table she said, “I want to find out what happened to James Ballantine as much as anyone does. I was the one who kept pushing the board to hire investigators after the police ran out of ideas.”

  “Why?” asked Ronnie.

  She looked at them for a moment. “I have to be sure this is absolutely confidential. That means you make no record of it, and you don’t tell anyone else.”

  Ronnie said, “We don’t violate people’s privacy. Why did you push the board?”

  “Because it was the right thing to do, and I didn’t want it on my conscience that I just shrugged off his death. I wasn’t James’s girlfriend. I was nothing of the kind. But I suppose that Selena had the right to call me that. I did know him well. We had reasons to keep that secret.”

  “What reasons?” asked Ronnie.

  “I was a member of the board of directors, and he was an employee of the company. We have guidelines to keep the company out of sexual harassment suits. Technically, I was far above him at the top of the hierarchy. Anyone in the company who figured out we were seeing each other could make terrible trouble—claim I had caused a hostile work environment, or discriminated against the people who weren’t sleeping with me. Or anything else their lawyers could dream up. The board would protect itself by throwing me out.”

  “Did you think at the time that’s what would happen if people knew?” Sid asked.

  “At first, I don’t think I cared. Later on, I had second thoughts. Right now I have no doubt at all. The reason I have a seat on the board is that my father was one of the founders. The stock he left me gives me a seat. But there’s a big advantage to getting rid of a member of the board. You get more power, and you can always find ways to convert power into money. I would have been insane not to keep James a secret.”

  “How did you meet Mr. Ballantine?”

  “The company threw a party to welcome James and a few other new hires. We held it at the Graysford Estate in Montecito. Do you know the place?”

  “We’ve seen it,” said Sid.

  “The company uses it a few times a year for important conferences, and once in a while for a reception like that one. It’s a beautiful place, and it’s about ninety minutes from here, so people aren’t likely to come for a few minutes and duck out, and it’s too far to drive home late at night. People are expected to stay over.”

  “Who introduced you?” asked Ronnie.

  “Nobody. I just noticed him. He was easy to notice. He was handsome, tall, very well built. He had extremely knowing and intelligent eyes. And of course, he was black.”

  Sid said, “‘And of course?’”

  “I’m sorry.” She frowned. “His race was the first thing I noticed, the first thing that I knew about him. And his blackness made me curious. I’ll admit it. Curiosity is, above all, an attraction. And there were other things about him that made him strange and different. He had been described to me as a brilliant chemist who had grown bored with academic life. But there was a sadness to his expression, and that
made me feel for him. As I watched him, I thought that, in this odd crowd that had been assembled, he knew nobody.”

  “Odd crowd?” said Ronnie.

  “When you assemble a group of scientists, you get a diverse group—lots of Indians and East Asians, a few Europeans, black people, or Latin Americans. But the upper management, the people serving as hosts at these gatherings, are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and if it’s possible for one group of those people to be whiter than white, these are. I had been told that he’d been offered a job, but hadn’t decided to take it yet. I thought about how isolated we must be making him feel. So I decided I’d pick up a fresh drink and go make him feel wanted.”

  “Just him?” asked Ronnie.

  “Him first. Him above all, because he seemed not to be mixing with the others. Most of them were very young—right out of grad school, and most of these were the sort who got PhDs in a couple of years, so they were even younger. James had been a professor for six years. He had a gravity, a reserve that made him seem mysterious, and he had that sadness. He was, by far, the most interesting one. And he wasn’t a boy genius; he was an adult. A prodigy is not very interesting. The only thing about him that’s remarkable you can’t see—his brain processes certain kinds of information very quickly. It doesn’t make him fun.”

  “I assume you managed to make him comfortable,” Ronnie said. “He took the job.”

  “He did,” Kirsten said. “Maybe because I overdid the welcome.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how much it’s necessary to say—how specific this has to be.”

  Ronnie said, “We’re a pair of old cops. There is hardly anything that a person can put into words that we haven’t seen with our own eyes. We need information badly. Any detail that you remember regarding James Ballantine might be important without any of us knowing it right now. So what did you mean, you overdid the welcome?”

  “I can’t characterize this simply, in abstract terms. I smiled as I approached. I introduced myself. You have to realize that when you’re a Southern California company, your biggest recruiting tool is the weather in the rest of the world. On the best day of summer Bloomington, Indiana, probably looks about as good as Southern California. Only here it’s always summer. And the Graysford Estate is like a dream of beautiful colors and luxurious self-indulgence mitigated by good taste. So I asked him what he thought of what he saw. And he told me that the most beautiful sight he could see was me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I laughed at him, but I couldn’t forget the words. When he looked at me, I could feel him thinking. He asked me to show him around the estate, so I did. I showed him the gardens, and he guided me along the path by putting his hand on the small of my back. Feeling that was like an electric shock, and the feeling didn’t stop—it was presumptuous, and yet so natural, so unforced. I showed him the public parts of Graysford House—the long dining room with the huge table and chandeliers, the library, and then I took him up the narrow back stairs to the third floor where the servants used to live. On the way back down those dim stairs, something came over me. There’s a kind of exhilaration you feel when you’re with somebody you never expected to be comfortable with, but are. It’s a victory—that you’ve won them over, I suppose. But it’s really a feeling of power. And power never affects people well. As we passed my suite, which was originally the suite of the oldest Graysford daughter, I offered to show him how big and luxurious it was. I unlocked the door, and when we were inside I turned around to close the door just as he stepped toward me. It was an awkward moment, but instead of disengaging, we kissed. And in about a minute he was taking my clothes off, and I wasn’t stopping him.”

  “And that grew into a relationship?” Sid asked.

  “That was the start. I don’t want you to think I was naïve, or that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I was the seducer, if anyone was.”

  “Did anybody see you going in, or learn about it afterward?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sure they didn’t.”

  “Was there anybody present at the event who would have been jealous or feel betrayed if they’d known?”

  “No. I wasn’t dating anyone at the time, and James didn’t know anybody. There were the other science hires, all of them practically teenagers, and a few members of the board, all of them from my father’s generation. People saw us talking during the cocktail party, but nothing else. Later in the evening I made a point of talking to the new kids, and I’m sure the other directors noted how good I was. They’ve always admired the way I handle these recruiting situations.”

  Ronnie said, “And what were your plans with James? Were you heading toward marriage, or did you think of it as a temporary fling? Was it exclusive?”

  “That’s a lot to think about, so I didn’t, at first,” Kirsten said. “But the next day, when we all went home, the doubts began to set in. I realized I had made myself vulnerable to disaster, and I began to worry. For a month I tortured myself. I stayed away from the company offices, because I dreaded running into him. I was afraid he had told someone, so whenever I spoke to any of the directors on the phone, I was mostly listening for some veiled reference to him, or some change in tone that would tell me they knew. I decided I had to talk to James and reassure myself that there was no danger. If he was a decent man, he would keep quiet and let the incident be over forever. So I waited until about eleven thirty one night and called his house.”

  “How did that work?”

  She shrugged. “He wasn’t a decent man. No, that’s wrong. He was far too bright and sophisticated not to know exactly what I was feeling and to see the rightness of it. He just wasn’t in the mood to behave decently. He said he wasn’t willing to talk about it on the telephone. He made me go to his house.”

  “Right then?” Ronnie said.

  “Right then. I won’t say I wasn’t fully aware of what he wanted, or that I was naïve. I knew. When I called him, I had been sitting around the house in a sweatshirt and pajama pants. When I hung up I ran upstairs and put on makeup, a cocktail dress, and heels. I drove over there at midnight, speeding all the way so I wouldn’t keep him waiting. That was the relationship.”

  “What do you mean?” said Ronnie.

  “I mean I wasn’t his girlfriend, or any kind of friend. We wouldn’t see each other for weeks. Once in a while one of us would call the other and we would arrange to meet somewhere—his apartment, a hotel—and have sex. We treated each other pretty badly.”

  “How did the relationship end?”

  “The attraction ebbed and flowed,” she said. “But it never ended. I talked to him on the day he disappeared. We agreed to meet sometime that week, but there had been a couple of big rainstorms, so we postponed the meeting.”

  “Do you remember who called it off?”

  “I think I did. I remember I was afraid the intersections near his apartment would get flooded and I’d be stuck there, maybe get noticed. I thought there would always be another day, but this time there wasn’t.”

  “I’m sure you’ve thought often about what happened to him,” said Ronnie. “Do you have any theories about the murder?”

  “Some. Do I think I know who did it? No. I don’t. I’m sure that what everybody told the police was what I told Detective Kapp—that James was a wonderful, nice person, and I couldn’t imagine how such a thing could have happened. That wasn’t exactly a lie. He could be nice. He could also be inconsiderate and selfish. He wanted what he wanted, and he wasn’t willing to be patient. He wasn’t especially interested in the other person at all.” She paused. “In me. I’ll admit that at times that suited me fine. Not having the responsibility of maintaining a connection with the other person—remembering his birthday, listening to his opinions, being polite when I didn’t feel like it—was liberating. But it didn’t make us close, didn’t make me like him. And it didn’t make me proud of myself, either.”

  “You were surprised to hear that there were oth
er women in his life, weren’t you?”

  “I didn’t know about them for sure, but it doesn’t surprise me. James was very good at compartmentalizing his life. This does widen the number of people who might have wanted him dead. I think he could have died by fucking people he had no business fucking—a woman being married or having a boyfriend wouldn’t have mattered to him at all. And since he wasn’t always very nice, the one who pulled the trigger could just as easily have been the woman.”

  15

  Nicole Hoyt woke up in the dark. She had an odd feeling that she couldn’t quite identify, because her memory went back only as far as the moment when she had opened her eyes. Before that there was a dream—not a nightmare, just the usual nightly amalgam of frustration and unease. In her dream she had been working somewhere and unable to understand the job, and had to try to hide her inability by performing tasks randomly and appearing busy.

  Something else must have caused her to wake. She kept her eyes open and waited for whatever had awakened her to be repeated. Then the memory of the sound came back to her. She had heard a car pull into the driveway and then sit there for a long period of time. She remembered the engine vibrating and the fan making a ticking noise. Finally the car had backed out of the driveway.

  Nicole analyzed what was bothering her. People often pulled into driveways to turn around. But this one had sat there for too long. She refined her impression. The driver must have just been pretending he needed to turn around. This was like those times when she had been on the street and seen a stranger turn his head too slowly. He was pretending to have his eyes merely slide across her on the way to somewhere else, but she knew when she saw him that he had been checking her out and she had caught him. The car that had been outside had come here to study the house.