Diane was making overt JonBenet Ramsey finding-the-body references. They weren’t particularly welcome. I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t skip any storage rooms, either. I searched all the rooms. No train sets. One weird door, but every old basement has at least one weird door. I encountered a solitary surprise—Peter’s temperature-controlled wine cellar, a magnificent space he had designed and hand-built to hold and display a few dozen cases’ worth of his prized wine, had maybe twenty bottles in the slots nearest to the door. That was it.
Not much wine, I was thinking, for a wine nut who has a second home in Napa.
“Nothing back there,” I said to Diane as I rejoined her in the room nearest the door. “Weird rooms. But it looks like it always looked. Just less junky.”
“Alan,” she said as she placed her fingertips on each of my cheeks, “we’re not scouting for Dwell, we’re looking for Mimi.”
Although I assumed it was a dig, I didn’t know what Dwell was, something I wasn’t about to admit to Diane. She’d begun pressing buttons on the wall of the old kitchen that was opposite the door. The wall was close to the center of the room. No lights came on. She asked, “What do these do?”
“Nothing. Peter told me they’d been part of the second iteration of a dumbwaiter for the original kitchen. To move stuff up and down to the dining room and a sitting room on the second floor? It’s defunct.”
“What was the first iteration?”
“Ropes? Pulleys, I guess? It was the nineteenth century. The frontier.”
Diane said, “I can’t imagine.” She pointed at the door adjacent to the wall with the dead buttons. “I didn’t go into that room.”
“It’s the laundry,” I said. I walked in. She followed, comfortable that any danger would assault me first. Over my shoulder, I said, “Quasimodern—maybe mid-nineteen eighties. I think you’ll be okay in here.” My first impression was that it was much more orderly than it had been during Adrienne’s time in the house. The old washer and dryer—harvest gold—were still in place.
Mimi was not inside serenely folding towels.
The old wiseguy I had treated named Carl Luppo, the one who left us as caretakers to his miniature poodle, had once told me a story about how he and his gangster buddies had transported recently dead bodies by stuffing them into appliances. “You move a refrigerator into a building,” he’d told me, “nobody pays much attention when you move a refrigerator back out of the building.”
Small bodies, he’d added, could be transported inside washing machines or dryers. I had assumed at the time that those bodies would require some dismemberment in order to fit into the smaller spaces. Despite my unease, I had confirmed those suppositions with Carl. Dismemberment was not a topic that made him queasy.
I checked inside both the washing machine and the dryer. No bodies, no laundry.
“There’s a laundry chute,” Diane said. She was examining a curved sheet-metal pipe that terminated above the kind of canvas bin on wheels one might see in a small commercial laundry. The canvas bin was empty. “I told Raoul I wanted one in the new place.”
“One what?” I was having trouble letting go of the image of an armless, legless torso stuffed into the front-loader.
“A laundry chute.”
I said, “Your new place is a condo. It will all be on one floor, Diane.”
“Maybe it could be something pneumatic,” she said. “That would be cool.”
Diane was determined not to learn how to text. Her mobile phone was older than my daughter. She continued to e-mail as though it were 1999. But she was interested in having a compressed-air cannon installed in her new home so that she could launch her husband’s used underwear to her new laundry room.
I shook my head as we climbed the stairs from the basement to the main floor.
Diane remained in charge of turning on lights. She continued to overperform. I did the snooping. Since I was looking for something the size of an adult woman, my task wasn’t that difficult.
Some big boxes had been stuffed into the back of the walk-in pantry in the kitchen. A couple of them were large enough to hide a body. I lifted one—it was too light. The second one, I opened. It contained a big ornate hanging pot rack. Wrought iron.
The only area on the first floor that gave me any emotional pause was the guest suite. I was reluctant to go inside. And I was also anxious to go inside. When I did open the door, I felt instant dismay.
The room had been freshly painted. New art on the walls. New window coverings. None of that surprised. What caused my breath to go shallow when I gazed into the guest suite was the fact that the bed was stripped to the bare mattress. No mattress pad. No sheets. Nothing. A few more steps revealed that the adjacent bathroom was devoid of hanging towels or any other linens. There were no bars of soap in the shower or at the sink. No throw rugs or bath mats were on the floor, anywhere.
I sniffed the air. Both rooms reeked of chlorine and Lysol. I opened a small linen closet. It, too, was empty.
Diane stood in the doorway while I did my poking around.
“Is this the way Mimi would usually leave a guest room?”
“Not really. She’s fussy, but this is a little over the top. She probably hasn’t gotten around to it since she got back, that’s all.”
I wondered whether Diane was being disingenuous or whether she really didn’t know that one of her friends had spent the night in the guest room. “Has Mimi had guests already?” I asked.
Diane walked out of the guest suite without replying to my question. Her explanation about the sterile appearance of the room seemed vague. Something wasn’t adding up for me.
I found no one hiding under the bed—I stayed behind and checked—or stuffed in the wardrobe. The bathroom was unoccupied.
As I rejoined Diane near the fireplace, she looked at me for a second before she looked away. She said, “That took you a while.”
I nodded. “I’m trying to be thorough. I thought that was the point.”
She said, “Okay,” while she made a face that made it clear that she didn’t believe me.
We went up the stairs to the second floor. The upstairs rooms weren’t difficult to search. The only bedrooms the family had moved into were the master bedroom and the study/office. I opened a big linen closet that faced the hallway outside the entrance to the master bedroom. The closet was neatly stocked with bed linens and towels.
No Mimi.
As she climbed more stairs, Diane was growing more comfortable with our adventure. After she finished in the master suite and told me the office was “clear,” she wandered into Jonas’s old bedroom. “What’s this?” she called to me.
From the hallway, I responded. “A special place that Peter built for Jonas. Adrienne called it his cubby. Peter called it a knothole. Jonas loved hanging out up there.”
“How do you get in? It’s too high off the ground. Especially for a little kid. He was a little kid back when Peter was still here.”
Peter and Diane had a history I’d never learned about. I would ask Diane someday. But not that day.
I joined her in Jonas’s old room. She was standing in front of the knothole. On the other side of the room, a couple of dozen moving boxes were piled along one wall, but no furniture had been moved into the room.
“There’s some secret passage opening in the closet. Peter built it all himself. Jonas has never shown me how to get in. I’ve never pressed him on it.”
I reached up and pulled back the curtains so Diane could see all the details of what Peter had built into the knothole. “It’s empty,” she said.
“It’s a special, private place Jonas shared with his father. Or at least his father’s memory. There’s also a secret compartment of some kind hidden on the side with those shelves.”
Diane was shaking her head. “Must be a boy thing.”
“It’s like having an indoor tree house. A special cave. Look at the wood, Diane, the way all the grain comes together. The joinery. It’s great cabi
netmaking. Jonas used to keep all his little-boy treasures hidden in there. It was—is, really—a very special place for him.”
“Okay. Great kid place, I get it,” she said. “But a secret passage? Really?”
“That’s what Jonas told me.”
“He wasn’t pulling your chain? You can be kind of gullible, Alan.”
I considered defending myself, but didn’t. I could be kind of gullible. One rule of clinical practice that I’d learned the hard way was that the more skillful the sociopath, the less I should be his therapist.
Diane, of course, started digging around in the closet looking for the entrance to the secret passage. She was pressing on the walls, stamping on the floor, feeling along the molding and trim for hidden switches. Her efforts were futile.
“Come on, we’re done in here. No Mimi,” I said after giving her half a minute to solve the puzzle of Peter’s secret switches. “Let’s turn off some of the lights you turned on, lock up downstairs, and go.” She agreed.
I walked Diane to her Saab. She said, “You’ve been home since they got back from the airport, right?”
“Yes.”
“And neither you nor Emily heard a car come down the lane? Right?”
“Right.”
“Her car is here, but she’s not here. How did she leave? She’s not someone who would walk out of this neighborhood. She has to be around somewhere.”
I thought about the conundrum. “What if she left earlier with Mattin? He may have dropped her somewhere on the way to wherever he was heading when he got in the accident. He might have planned to pick her up later.”
“I didn’t think of that,” Diane said. “But that doesn’t explain why she’s not answering her phone.”
“It could be in her purse on vibrate. The battery may have died. Stuff like that happens all the time. It’s technology.”
“Which means she may not know why Hake hasn’t picked her up. She may not even know about the accident.”
“That is possible, too,” I admitted. “Unlikely, but possible.”
Diane pulled her phone from her pocket. She said, “No, it doesn’t make sense. She would have called one of her girlfriends if Hake hadn’t picked her up. If she couldn’t reach him, if she needed a ride. Someone would have called me. It’s the way . . . we do things. Us girls.”
I wished I didn’t need to ask Diane the next question, but I did. “You know how to use your voice mail, right? You would know if . . . your friends had tried to call you on your cell?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I had to ask,” I said.
“Whatever.” She pecked me on the cheek, I thought to indicate her forgiveness, and lowered herself into the car.
At that moment, I was facing down the lane, toward the north.
“Diane, look,” I said.
Emily began barking ferociously inside the house.
My guess was that Lauren still had the Glock nearby.
30
Someone was walking toward us on the downhill portion of the lane between the two bends of the S-curve.
Diane had pulled herself up to standing on the frame of the car door so she could see more clearly. She said, “It’s Mimi. That’s her coat.”
Even in scant moonlight, even from that distance, I could tell that the coat was dark, with a zebra-print collar. Distinctive enough to be recognized.
“So much for your theory,” I said. “It appears that your friend did indeed take a walk.”
Diane shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. Since Diane doesn’t like to be corrected, it would have been easy to write off her reply as defensiveness. I suspected there was more to it, though. She was struggling to make sense of an anomaly. She continued. “There’s some other explanation. This wasn’t an evening jaunt on country lanes. That’s not Mimi. She does not do that.”
“Okay,” I said. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I was trying to make it clear to Diane that I wasn’t arguing with her.
She said, “Why don’t you let me wait for her, Alan? I’ll stay with her tonight if she needs me to. I think it would be better.” She paused briefly, looking directly into my eyes. “If you, well, weren’t here.”
I laughed. I was appreciative of Diane’s bluntness. And not only did I have no dispute with her judgment, I was relieved that my compassionate duty was ending. I gave Diane a quick hug, told her it had been fun, and hurried inside the house.
Lauren, of course, wanted to know what had just happened outside that I’d found alarming enough to call for firearm backup. Before I filled her in on my misadventures, I asked her for any news about Raphe. Or Mattin.
She shook her head, leaned forward, and kissed me lightly on the lips. She pointed at her laptop on the kitchen counter. It was open to the Camera website. “It’s not good. He’s apparently been hurt pretty badly.”
That I knew from the cyclist grapevine. “Mattin?”
“My assistant just e-mailed me that Elliot is still at the police station. So is Casey. Investigators are still at the scene. Nothing’s been resolved.”
“Is it a national story?”
Lauren nodded. “Drudge, E!, Huffington Post, TMZ. It’s out there.”
“Shit.”
She smiled warmly and put an arm around my waist. “So, really, why did I need to be armed tonight? You find it kind of hot when I’m packing?”
It was the first sexual tease I’d heard from Lauren since I’d learned of her liaison in the Netherlands. Was it possible that the froth from that wave was finally receding into the sea? I kissed her, tracing her lower lip with my tongue. “Try me. But feel free to lose the clip first. My kinkiness has a limit.”
“But it’s so much more interesting when it’s loaded,” she murmured.
From down the hall, Gracie said, “So gross. Sooooo gross. Jonas!”
Lauren and I both laughed. I said, “I think I’m just spooked lately. Since Mattin and Mimi moved in, it hasn’t felt right up here. The whole Spanish Hills vibe is different. My world is off balance. I miss Adrienne.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
THE KIDS SENSED the change in affective tone in the house. Jonas lived with his most personal grief almost every minute of every day. I was curious how it felt for him to see it up close in someone else. But he didn’t ask what was going on, or wasn’t quite ready to kick open that door.
Gracie asked, of course. She went through life with no query unasked, no comment unmade. I told both kids that a friend of mine had been hurt badly in a bicycle accident. I didn’t mention the fact that our new neighbor was involved.
Gracie wanted details. Lots of them.
Jonas had only two follow-up questions. He asked if the guy on the bicycle had died, and if he had kids. I answered, my heart breaking for him a little more.
To my relief, both kids were cooperative about getting ready for bed.
I joined Lauren in our bedroom shortly after ten. She raised herself so she was sitting up against the headboard and stroked my neck while she ran her fingers through my hair. She didn’t know Rafael. He was someone I saw socially only when he and I were both on the road with a hard saddle between our legs. She asked some questions about him. Got me talking about Rafa, and about Kari, and their two kids.
I didn’t know Kari well, thought that I’d only met the two kids once or twice. It helped to talk, though. After a while, Lauren rolled onto her side and spoke softly in my ear. “I want to tell you what we know about the . . . problem after the party last Friday. The investigation . . . that the DA is doing.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s great. I would like to know. I’ve been worried . . . for you, for the kids.”
She didn’t tell me I had no reason to be concerned. She said, “This is one of those things I shouldn’t tell you. Just so you’re aware.”
Lauren didn’t often tell me things that she shouldn’t tell me. I wouldn’t say never, but it was close enough to never that I recognized the p
resent moment as an exception.
“I appreciate it. I will treat it that way.”
“Thank you. So far, everyone has done a remarkable job of keeping this quiet . . . while the investigation proceeds. If the fact that we’re even investigating this gets out, it would be a disaster for Hake. Probably for the accuser, as well. But definitely for Hake.”
If everyone else was unanimous in keeping things on the DL, I had to assume that Cozy was an advocate of keeping the investigation quiet, too. Cozy had a way of making his opinions known.
I was also recalling Sam’s long parable about Kobe Bryant in Cordillera, and his insistence that in acquaintance-rape investigations involving celebrities, all interests can be served by silence. Except, perhaps, the interests of justice.
“Mattin’s the focus of the allegation?” I asked Lauren, trying not to sound as disingenuous as I was being.
“Yes, he is. One of the female guests who was at the housewarming party accused him of rape.”
I took note of the lack of mince in my wife’s description. She didn’t sprinkle any of the sweetness of acquaintance on top of the fire of the word rape.
“Rape? At an open house full of people?” Was that too much? I wondered. I did not like the thickness, or really the thinness, of the ice I was on.
“Diane hasn’t told you any of this?” Lauren said. “I thought she might . . . because of your friendship.”
“And,” I said, “because she’s a world-class gossip. I’ve tried to get her to talk, to tell me what happened. But she won’t. Not about that night. Does she know?”
“I’m not sure what she knows. The timeline has her and Raoul already on their way home.”
“She’s been interviewed?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen the file. This is being done discreetly but it’s being done right.”
The Last Lie Page 24
