Barbara rose abruptly. For a minute she looked as if she might do violence. “I’ll be downstairs,” she said after a long moment, her voice almost a growl.
Stevenson watched her leave. “I hired an ex-Treasury agent,” he continued, “who used to specialize in that kind of thing. He’s one of the best there is. We’ll work that side of the street. You work yours.”
The meaning was clear. He objected to my presence. He didn’t dare cross the widow Peters, but he didn’t have to like me. He would provide the barest help and cooperation, if that.
“And one more thing. Claire’s vulnerable right now. She doesn’t need you trying to get into her bed. You understand that?”
“I understand, Mr. Stevenson.”
“Fine. That’s fine. You do your part and I’ll do mine. It’ll be a kind of contest.”
“Well, I’ve got one thing going for me that you don’t,” I said, getting up and walking toward the door, following Barbara Klein.
“What’s that?”
“I believe her.”
5
Barbara met me at the elevator. It came as I joined her and we walked right in, no time for conversation. Two elderly women occupied the car, so we descended in silence. I felt an intense gaze and glanced down into a pair of round, highly magnified eyes framed by gold rims and wispy gray hair. The woman studied me intently. I smiled, trying to look friendly.
“Are you one of those football players?” she asked in a tremulous voice.
“No, ma’am. I’m too old and too small. Those guys are all a lot bigger.”
She lowered her stare. “They must be giants,” she confided to her companion.
The doors opened and Barbara and I waited for the two women. I went ahead and opened the exit doors for them and we followed them into the bright sunshine.
“I’m sorry,” Barbara said once we were alone on the way to the car. “I don’t like the man. I don’t understand how Paul and Claire could do business with him.”
“He’s not honest?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think he’s ineffective, all bluster and no depth. He promises more than he can deliver, and, you know, his stance on women! He talks like he just fell from a tree!
“Claire knows how I feel, but he continues to represent her. Even now.” She put her hand on my arm. “Let’s forget about Joe. You had to meet him. Now forget him. You’re here because he’s been unable to get off the dime. The only time you’ve got to see him is when you need more money.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Claire’s my very good friend and she’s been through a very rough time. I wasn’t the one watching their funds, and even if I had been, it may not have made a difference. There are all kinds of reasons why an account can gradually decrease over a period of time. As long as there’s operating capital plus a reserve, we usually ask no questions. I won’t be around now. She needs someone in her corner and when I leave, there’s no one else.”
We arrived at a new black two-seater Mercedes that chirped when she squeezed her key chain. I opened her door.
“Oh, Claire told me about last night. She apparently tried to make a pass at you.”
“Or two. Or three.”
“She can be insistent. Don’t feel that she’s some virginal … never mind. You were a gentleman. I don’t believe there are many like you anymore.”
“Never kept count.” I closed her door after she swept her legs into the car. Nice legs. Long. She rolled down her window and smiled at me behind dark sunglasses.
“I’ll be at the four-one-five number if you need anything. Or if Mr. Macho makes too much trouble for you to handle. But I have a feeling you won’t call. You seem fairly self-sufficient.”
“Fairly,” I admitted, stepping back from the curb and watching her drive away.
I walked back to my car, dodging panhandlers, and sat in the leather driver’s seat of the Range Rover. It was time to decide where to start. If Peters really did die in Mexico, the Mexican policía would be the logical place. I took out the file and leafed through it until I found Teniente José Enrique de la Peña’s telephone number.
The cellular telephone was in a padded leather box between the seats, the speaker and the microphone in the sun visor. I punched in the numbers.
My call was answered at once. I started talking but realized I’d reached a voice-mail beeper and waited until the gruff Latin voice finished his instruction and the familiar tone sounded, then punched in the number of the Range Rover’s cellular phone and hit the pound sign. A recorded voice thanked me in Spanish and I disconnected.
The phone rang immediately.
“Lieutenant de la Peña?”
“No, this is Claire. Already working, I see.”
“Gotta start somewhere.”
“How was the meeting?”
“Interesting.”
There was silence; then she said, “Thank you, again, for last night. I’m sorry about … I’m not … it’s not like that.”
“You’ve been under stress—”
“No excuses. I’m sorry. I apologized. I did not make an excuse. The proper response is, ‘You are forgiven.’”
“You are forgiven.”
“Thank you. Can you come over here? I’ve been thinking, and you need to know some things I didn’t tell you last night. Things I’m sure Joe didn’t tell you.”
“I’m on the way.”
“Thank you, Mr. Caine.”
“It’s John.”
I took the long route to Point Loma, cruising the wide highway squeezed between the harbor and the airport, hoping de la Peña would return my call. The winter sun was bright, but the light felt both weaker and harsher than my gentle Hawaiian sun. Otherwise, San Diego and Honolulu were similar cities. Of the two, San Diego was possibly the more lovely.
De la Peña hadn’t called by the time I pulled the Range Rover into the circular drive in front of the Peters mansion, perched on a hill overlooking the harbor, a Spanish mission-style estate with a rolling front lawn that could have provided enough lots for an entire subdivision.
Juanita, the housekeeper whose help I’d enlisted the night before in prying the merry widow from her BMW and into the house, appeared at the door. A huge smile lit her face when she saw me. I wondered if she was remembering my comic attempts to get out the door with my virtue intact.
“Good morning, Meester Caine. Mees Claire said to poot you in the den.” She smiled all the way, and the last thing I saw of her was a wide, white-toothed smile as she backed out of the room and closed the door.
Claire had had too many bottles of chardonnay, and she was what you might have called amorous to the extreme. When I got out of the house, I had felt both relieved and disappointed in my fierce moral strength.
“You could have had her, boy,” my evil side said, leering all the way back to the hotel.
“And it would have been wrong,” preached the little angel on my right shoulder.
“Maybe,” said the devil on my left, “but it sure would have been fun.”
“But you don’t get anywhere schtupping the boss lady,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
Claire entered the den dressed for tennis, all in white except for a flaming strip of color integrating both the top and the skirt, some designer’s idea of what the tennis set wore this year. The short, pleated skirt showed off her legs. I judged them magnificent, on a scale of one to ten, about a ten and a half. She had good shoulders, too, the kind professional players develop after years of practice.
“I was having a conversation with myself,” I said. “Regretting my actions of last night.”
“But you were a gentlemen.”
“Exactly.”
She laughed, a good, hearty laugh, straight from the belly. “And now you regret it?”
I shook my head. “Only partly. I don’t go around—”
“Schtupping the boss lady?” Claire’s eyes sparkled with amusement.
“Y
ou heard that?”
“Just that.”
“Yeah. It’s bad for business. But it may have been nice, in other circumstances.”
She nodded, looking at the floor, avoiding my eyes. “You don’t hurt my ego,” she said quietly. “But thanks again. It would have been wrong.”
She walked across the room, trailing her finger along the back of a leather couch. It would have been an incredibly sensual act except for the fact that my sensual receptors were deadened and the red-alert signals were going off in my brain. When she reached the opposite side of the room, she turned and looked at me with the same direct, challenging stare she had used the night before. “I don’t know you very well, Mr. Caine, but I feel as if I can trust you. Well, aside from your belated admission, I know I can. It was important last night, what you did. Or what you didn’t do.”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. I tried not to stare. “Juanita told me some of it this morning. At first I was ashamed of myself, and then I thought, what the hell. It might make it easier for him to believe me.”
“I do believe you.”
“Joe doesn’t.”
“I know.”
She blinked. “He told you that?”
“Not in so many words, but he made it clear he thinks I am superfluous.”
“Are you?” Once again that open stare accompanied the challenge. This woman reminded me of Kate in many ways.
“Not if you’re telling the truth.”
She nodded. “That son of a bitch.”
“He thinks you know more than you’re telling him. He didn’t say that, either, but I understood that he’s going through the motions with you.”
“I felt that,” she said, biting her lower lip. “You really think I’m not lying?”
“Why would you?”
She thought about it, uncrossing her arms and then recrossing them again. “Yeah. You’re right. What motive would I have?”
“If you’d planned this with your husband, if the two of you set out to loot your own accounts and run away, there’s no reason to fake it. Cash in and get out. A lot of people do that. If you did do it, why broadcast that he’s still alive? It has no logic.”
“Put that way, it doesn’t. But the IRS and the state of California apparently don’t think that way.”
“Linear thinking is not a bureaucrat’s greatest attribute, Mrs. Peters.”
“Call me Claire.” She leaned against the back of the leather couch, hiking the tennis skirt up a few inches, exposing more of a tanned, firm thigh. I stared her right in the eye. “And Joe doesn’t believe me,” she said, matching my stare.
“Apparently not.”
“I wonder why. It seems like he’s always been a friend. I thought he was my friend.”
I decided not to mention Barbara’s opinion. “How long have you known him?”
“Paul met him five years ago at a tax seminar, just after the company started growing. Joe represents a lot of sports people and Paul was always attracted to that kind of thing. Although he couldn’t play the games, he loved to watch. Joe represented something glamorous to Paul. He introduced us to quarterbacks and boxers, all kinds of people you read about on the sports page. He used to play for Pittsburgh.”
“Not the Chargers?”
“No. He played two years for the Steelers and then quit. Some kind of broken something in his leg that made them cut him. So he went to law school and specialized in tax law for rich athletes. He moved to San Diego when Tyrone Crenshaw took him on as a client.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know Tyrone Crenshaw.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Hawaii. And I don’t follow professional sports.”
“Tyrone Crenshaw came out of the slums and was the number-one draft pick six or seven years ago. He signed a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract and did well for the first season. Then he dropped out. He just quit. He didn’t show up for training. Blamed it on drugs, blamed it on his manager, blamed it on everyone but himself. He committed suicide about a year later. Hung himself in a cheap hotel room downtown. He was broke.
“No one could understand how a bright young man could spend all that money so fast. Joe did what he could for him and for his family. He paid for the funeral out of his own pocket, I heard. Everyone believes that all the money went to cocaine.”
“This happen while Joe was watching your finances?”
“No. It was before.”
“Any other clients of his have problems?”
“What an odd question. Of course not.”
“Just covering the bases. It wouldn’t be the first time a lawyer skipped out with the funds.”
She shook her head. “That would have been impossible. Joe’s a good friend. Besides, there’s no way he could get his hands on any of our money. He was an adviser, nothing more. None of the funds went through his accounts.”
Her eyes flashed. When she was angry, they seemed to turn from blue to a pale emerald green. “Just because you don’t think he needs you is no reason to attack him!”
Here was a boundary I was not supposed to cross. I raised my hands in surrender. “I’m just asking questions. That’s why you hired me.”
She shook her head again: “No. That’s not why I hired you. I hired you to find my husband and to find out why he took the money!”
“Whoa! I didn’t come here to fight with you. You said there were things I needed to know.”
“Well, now I’m not so sure!” The emerald gaze was forceful enough to sting all the way across the room. I was glad I wasn’t close. I might have been burned.
“Okay,” I said. “You decide. But decide right now, because if you don’t like the way I work, you can fire me. I haven’t cashed your check.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, this is getting us nowhere.” She uncrossed her arms and looked down at the tops of her Nikes. I waited, standing fifteen feet away, but feeling her heat. I hated the fact that she felt so alone.
“Thank you,” she said after a minute. “I had to get control of myself. I hate losing my temper.”
“Me, too.”
“But you didn’t. You were, once again, a perfect gentleman.”
“Don’t you just hate that?”
Despite the emotions boiling within, she smiled, a kind of forlorn and ragged smile, but genuine. “Yeah. It could give me a case, wondering about you.”
“So where do we go from here?”
“Come on,” she said, walking across the room and taking my arm. “There are some things I need to show you. After that, I’ll stop interfering with what you’re doing. But you really can’t start a serious investigation without knowing these things.”
She tugged me toward the door. “You’ve been acting like one, so I’ll treat you like one.”
“Like one what?”
“A priest. You are so uninvolved and distant. I need to make a full confession,” she said. “And you’re Father John.”
She led me out of the den to the hallway, pulling me up stairs.
6
“This was his bedroom.” Claire Peters pushed me into something that might have been put together by the set designer for Out of Africa. Decorated in dark woods and rich, brown leathers, it was masculine-macho, the kind of bedroom you might expect to see in the home of a man unsure of what he was, or of a child pretending to be a big-game hunter. A child with an unlimited allowance.
Half-closed wooden shutters blocked out bright sunlight. Green tropical plants shaded the glass, giving the impression the room was somewhere in the middle of a dark jungle.
The head of a magnificent male lion dominated the far wall, surrounded by the heads of other trophy cats and game animals. A zebra skin was artfully thrown across the bed, and a tiger skin lay diagonally across the plank floor, green glass eyes tracking us as we entered.
They reminded me of Claire’s eyes.
“You didn’t sleep here.”
She barked a harsh, brittle laugh. “Not on
ce.”
In an alcove, unseen from the door, were half a dozen Nautilus machines. The latest models.
“He use these much?” I asked, remembering what Stevenson had told me about Peters’s physical condition.
“Only at first. It was his passion for a while. To get in shape. But he lost interest. That was about the same time he started taking all those vitamins and herbal remedies.” Claire’s eyes closed, while she peered into the past. “Now Juanita dusts them every day. That’s the only activity they get.”
A gun cabinet stood against the wall next to the lion. “Did he shoot these?” I asked, pointing toward the animal heads.
Claire shook her head. “No. He bought them from an estate sale. He bought the guns, too, but he never fired them. It was all part of the look, I guess.”
I opened the cabinet. “May I?”
She shrugged.
I took from the rack a short, double-barreled rifle that looked like a shotgun, but the walls of the stubby barrels were thicker. I opened it. It was a .505 Gibbs, an elephant gun, guaranteed to drop anything that walked on any number of legs on any continent. It had been well used and well maintained. I’d never fired one. Never wanted to. The kick from this thing would be punishing.
I replaced the Gibbs and picked up a long, scoped rifle, something I was more familiar with, a Remington 700 ADL in 7mm Magnum, bolt-action with a variable scope. Not an elephant rifle, but still a lot of gun. I used to be fairly good with one of these back in the bad old days when I’d been assigned as a sniper in some rotten, stench-filled jungle half a world away. Holding the weapon brought back memories I’d have rather kept buried. I put both the rifle and the memories away and closed the cabinet. All the other rifles and shotguns looked new.
“He never fired any of these?”
She shook her head. “Not to my knowledge. He had some pistols, too. A twenty-two he took with him on the boat and a thirty-eight he kept here, but I don’t think he ever fired a gun in his life. It just made him happy to have them, so I thought, good for him. I was a good wife.”
“You sound wistful.”
“Just resigned, I guess.”
“Why did you show me all this?”
Sand Dollars Page 4
