Boldt 04 - Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  Harriet Magpeace kept her graying hair short over her ears. She had Irish coloring and a long elegant neck, around which she had fastened a string of pearls. She was dressed in gabardine slacks and a black cotton sweater, nice but not showy. Her daughter, who had inherited her mother’s Irish green eyes, was wonderful to look at. She wore a modest gray suit, appropriate for her job in a downtown advertising firm. If Dorothy had looked anything like her sister, she had been a beauty.

  The mother removed a small group of photos from a Coach purse and slid them disdainfully across the linen toward Boldt, as if not wanting to see them herself. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the police station or my home,” she apologized, glancing around. “This is better.” She did not look comfortable.

  “We do want to thank Detective Matthews for telling us about the arson before the press got hold of it,” the daughter said meekly. Matthews was not a detective; she was the departmental psychologist, a lieutenant, but Boldt did not correct the woman.

  “Obviously it’s a shock,” the mother said. She tensed, and Boldt worried that she wouldn’t hold up.

  A violent death was more than a shock; he understood this well. It was an invasive event that pried open the victim’s life in a sterile, analytical way that was like shining too much light onto a face or into a room. It bared all. It left the victim defenseless to explain the hidden bottles of vodka, the nude videos, the love letters, the stash of crisp hundred-dollar bills. It rolled the rock off the dark places of a private life. He hated to do this to Dorothy Enwright.

  Boldt explained, “This is a lousy job at times. This is one of those times. I have to ask questions that imply I don’t trust the quality of Dorothy’s character. I want you to know right off that that is not the case. I would love to approach this a different way, but I’m afraid the truth is often more elusive than any of us would believe. What my experience has taught me is that none of us want to be here, and that by getting to the point we get it over more quickly, which is what we all want. Again, I do this only for the sake of getting to the truth, not because I’ve formed any advance opinions of Dorothy.”

  “I think we understand,” the dark beauty said. Her mother nodded.

  Boldt said, “If she was murdered”—at which point Harriet Magpeace twitched violently—“then we start first with looking at people close to her: a husband, a lover, a co-worker. Since the house may or may not be involved, itself a victim, we might want to look at repairmen, contractors, service providers. What I need from you is a snapshot of Dorothy’s life, including, but not limited to, the events that led up to the day of the fire.”

  The older woman stared at Boldt sadly. “Yours is a morbid life, isn’t it, Sergeant?”

  Boldt winced. He didn’t appreciate his work—his life—being reduced to such a statement, hated it all the more for the truth of it. Death was a way of life for him, it was true; but for Boldt it was seen as a means to an end, the only acceptable end being justice and the imprisonment of the party responsible. An investigator who relied upon the victim to tell the story—a man who even lectured on the subject—Boldt understood the intricacy of the relationship between victim and killer. That he exploited this relationship was nothing he tried to hide or make light of. That it often bordered on the grotesque was inescapable.

  “I’m sure my mother means that sympathetically,” Claudia interjected, attempting to lessen the blow and come to her mother’s aid. “We certainly appreciate all you’re doing to find Doro’s killer—if that’s actually what happened. I have to tell you, the whole thing is a little fantastic. Arson? Murder? Doro? I mean, come on!”

  Boldt was prepared for disbelief. He hesitated to tell them that no one—no one!—ever anticipated murder, except on television. Even the parents of known drug dealers were stunned with surprise to learn of their child’s death. Boldt said the few words he would rather have not said. “Can you tell me a little bit about Dorothy?”

  The mother blinked rapidly. This was where business and the nature of that business collided. Claudia filled in quickly. “Doro was divorced two years ago. Bob’s an architect. Doro writes—wrote—for garden magazines and a few of the food magazines as well. She … it was Doro’s fault—the divorce.”

  “It wasn’t her fault!” the mother snapped.

  “She fell in love with another man, Mother. It certainly was her fault.” To Boldt, Claudia said, “The boyfriend died of cancer a few months after the separation; she lost him. It was awful. For everyone,” she added. “Dorothy lost the child in the divorce. She only got visitation rights. It was miserable.”

  “She was miserable,” corrected the mother.

  “But there was no hostility on her part. She understood the judge’s ruling, as much as she hated it. We talked about it. It’s not like she threatened Bob or anything.”

  “She was a lovely girl,” the mother mumbled.

  “You spend all those years with someone,” the sister said, “and you just expect them to be around. And then they’re not. There are so many things I want to tell her.”

  Boldt nodded. This, too, he had heard a hundred different times.

  Claudia said, “I know what you’re looking for, Sergeant. At least I think I do. But I just don’t see it. Bob would never, ever, do such a thing. Not a chance.” She hesitated, studied Boldt, and then rattled off Bob Enwright’s office and home phone numbers, knowing Boldt would want to talk with him. She was right.

  The sergeant asked, “Did she own the house?”

  “A rental,” the sister replied. The mother looked lost. Claudia said, “You were thinking insurance, weren’t you? She burned it for the insurance and got caught in the fire? No chance.”

  “We consider every possibility,” Boldt said.

  The mother said, “Someone murder Dorothy? Why?”

  “That’s why the sergeant’s here,” Claudia said perfunctorily.

  “Don’t patronize me, dear. I’m your mother. I know perfectly well what we’re trying to do: to give someone a reason to kill Dorothy. It’s absurd, don’t you see?” she directed the question to Boldt.

  “The child had last visited the mother—”

  “The day before,” Harriet answered.

  “Two days,” Claudia said in disagreement.

  That also was to be expected, Boldt thought. Take down five eyewitness reports of the same crime and be prepared for five different stories—occasionally, completely different stories.

  Claudia said firmly, “It was two days before. Remember dinner, Mother?”

  The mother squinted, considered this, displayed an expression of self-disappointment. “Two, you’re right.”

  “The father picked up the child?” Boldt asked.

  “Not typically. I would doubt it.”

  The mother said, “No. Dorothy dropped him off.”

  Claudia explained, “Doro was the more flexible of the two.”

  If given half a chance, if at all average, they would lie to get custody of the child; they would be eager to conspire against the former husband. Boldt had come prepared to see through this. When they failed to make any such attempt, Boldt felt somewhat disappointed. Could Dorothy Enwright have committed suicide? he wondered. Watching out for the sister, he said, “Dorothy was a gardener. Obviously a good one. One would assume she stored fertilizer, used various fertilizers in her work.”

  “In the shed, not the basement.” Claudia added, “She wasn’t in the habit of making bombs, if that’s what you’re driving at. Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”

  “Making bombs?” the mother inquired.

  The daughter answered, “You can make a bomb out of fertilizer and gasoline, Mother. The detective is implying—”

  “Nothing,” Boldt interrupted, cutting her off. “I’m not implying anything. Asking questions is all. It might be easier for everyone if we could just deal with the questions rather than jump to conclusions.”

  “I see where you’re headed with this,
” the victim’s sister cautioned, ignoring his suggestion.

  “I don’t,” the mother interjected.

  “He thinks maybe Doro was plotting something sinister. He’s a policeman, Mother. They’re all suspicious by nature.”

  “Not by nature, by occupation,” Boldt corrected, meeting the daughter’s eye. “I think we’re off to a bad start,” he said. He directed the next question to the mother, hoping to avoid the sister for a moment. The mother glanced at her daughter disapprovingly. “Do you know of any work being done on the house? By the landlord, perhaps?” Boldt asked.

  Harriet replied, “No. Not that I’m aware of. She was quite happy there.”

  Wanting this over, Boldt asked Claudia, “Any boyfriends out of her past? Anybody you think I might want to speak with?”

  “I know you’re only doing your job, Sergeant. I respect that. I apologize. I just don’t think there’s anything to tell you. Doro was a wonderful, loving person. She didn’t deserve this.”

  “We don’t know, do we,” the mother asked, “that it was my Dorothy? In the fire, I mean. You people haven’t confirmed that, have you?”

  This was the sticking point Boldt had hoped to avoid. The tea and scones were delivered, sparing him an answer. The pit in his stomach had deepened, changing to an ache. The room had lost its glitter; the waitresses had lost a step. The piano sounded a little out of tune on the low end. The glue that held his world together had softened. He felt tawdry, cheap, a gumshoe who lacked empathy and compassion. A woman was dead. No one wanted to talk about it—or even admit it, for that matter. She had had a sad life of late and a sad death and Lou Boldt understood damn well that all the investigating in the world wasn’t going to bring her back. The mother would go on living with her hope that it had been someone else in that fire. The sister would go on defending where no defense was necessary. Boldt would go on with his questions. The victim ruled all his investigations, but ultimately it was not about the victim, it was about the killer, about balance.

  Boldt had seen a dead cat by the side of the road earlier in the day, and it had overwhelmed him with a sense of tragic loss. In his mind he transferred Dorothy Enwright, the woman in the photographs before him, to that same place on the side of the road—naked, face down, struck dead. He sat there with his notebook, his pencil, and a haunting determination to find the person responsible. Death made people give up; it made Lou Boldt sit up. He felt bad about that; he didn’t like himself. Dorothy Enwright had no obvious enemies. Boldt could create a dozen scenarios accounting for that fire and that woman in it, but only because he did so day in and day out; his job was to create such situations and pursue them to their outcome, to turn a woman like Enwright into something he could work with.

  “You’re not eating,” the mother told him.

  “No.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  Did she mean the scones or the investigation? he wondered, realizing quickly that it didn’t matter; he had the same answer on the tip of his tongue. “No,” said Boldt. With the victim’s finances, correspondence, and paperwork lost in the fire, Boldt requested permission to contact Dorothy’s banks and auditors and look over the accounts. The mother saw nothing wrong with that and agreed.

  “I have an image of Doro out in her garden,” said the sister. “You know? The sunlight slanting across her face. She was quite beautiful. Hands working the soil. Weeding, planting. She laughed a lot, Doro did. Used to,” she added. “The last two years took a lot out of her. But I think of her as laughing nonetheless. You know, I have this image, and I don’t even know if it’s real or something I made up to remember her by. And the funny thing is, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s the image I’m left with. The smile. The contentment at being outdoors and working with plants. The joy of being a mother. She loved little Kenny.”

  “It broke her heart when the judge took Kenny away,” the mother said. “I don’t think she ever fully recovered.”

  “Was she depressed, drinking, anything like that in the days before the fire?”

  Claudia cautioned, “She did not kill herself, Detective. Not intentionally, not accidentally. She kept her gardening supplies in the back shed. You’re out of line.”

  “Is that a yes or no to the depression?” Boldt asked, irritated. He kept seeing the cat by the side of the road, then Dorothy Enwright. If there was one thing he had learned early as a homicide investigator, it was how fragile life was, how easily lost. Men stepping out into traffic. Kids playing on the rocks in the hills. Women going home at night to an empty house. One day here, the next day gone. And if the death came with questions attached, it was Lou Boldt’s job to answer them, or to help others to answer them for him. All he needed was a few answers. He couldn’t picture the woman setting fire to a rental house. People did not use fire as a method toward suicide. But he had other problems with Dorothy Enwright. Of chief concern to him was why she had not run from the house when it caught fire; it had not exploded. She had been seen walking inside the house, presumably of her own volition, moments before the blaze. He thought she must have had an opportunity to escape, given the way the fire had burned from a central core outward. It had not trapped her by sealing the doors. Why then had she not escaped?

  Had there been someone else in the building with her?

  “Dorothy was having problems,” her mother told him, “but she was surprisingly cheerful, wouldn’t you say, dear?”

  “Absolutely,” Claudia agreed. “She was a remarkable woman, Detective. She had a great attitude.”

  “Who would want to kill her?” the mother blurted out, too loudly for the soft buzz of conversation in the Garden Court. Heads turned. Fortunately, only Boldt saw this.

  The two women who sat with him did not see. Their eyes were filled with tears.

  8

  October second came and nearly went without Ben’s taking any notice of it. Had it not been for Emily, he might have failed to remember its significance. But when he arrived at Emily’s late on the afternoon of the third, she sent him by bus all the way up to Steven’s Broadway News on the corner of Olive and Broadway, where he used the money she gave him to buy copies of the Seattle Times, the Intelligencer, the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Everett Herald.

  Back at her purple house, the two of them read headlines and lead paragraphs, back and forth, until Ben asked, “What exactly are we doing?”

  “The military man,” she said. “Do you remember him? May thirteenth, 1968.”

  “Who?”

  “The bad hand.”

  Ben remembered the hand.

  She said, “He came back for his reading about a week later. You must have been in school. I told him that the stars looked good for a business deal on October second. He was real nervous about it, and I got the feeling his business wasn’t exactly legitimate.”

  “So we’re looking for something he might have did.”

  “Might have done,” she corrected. “Yes. He’ll be back, that one. Very superstitious. I’d like to know what it was he did.”

  “And you think we may find something in the papers, something about what he did?”

  “If it was criminal, we might.”

  “You think he’s a criminal!” Ben felt a pang of excitement in his chest. He didn’t know any criminals.

  Turning a page she said, “He had something going on the second. I tested if it had anything to do with love and got nothing back from him. I tested money and got a definite reaction—lots of body language, discomfort. He’s selling something or buying something, and it wasn’t anything he wanted to talk about. If I identify it, and he walks back in here and I can tell him about it, I’ll have a customer for life. That’s the way it works, you know, Ben. You give people what they want, and they’re yours forever. He wants me to be able to see his past and his future.”

  Ben read more carefully. Each article that dealt with any kind of crime he read aloud. Together, they cut the articles out of the paper with scissors and put them
in a pile. The papers were full of various crimes. Ben said, “Nothing much good.”

  “No. Nothing very good.” She pushed the papers aside and looked at Ben and said, “Tell me what you remember about him, Ben.”

  This was a test. She did this every now and then—made him exercise his memory skills. She claimed it would make him smarter. He reeled off all that he could recall about the beat-up pickup truck, the camper shell, the contents of the front seat. He told her how he had been tempted to get a look inside the camper through the skylight. He gave her a detailed description of what he had seen through the peephole: buzz-cut hair, pinpoint eyes, the fingers on his right hand.

  “How old did he look?” she asked.

  Ben knew exactly how to answer this. It took him a moment to subtract the numbers. “Twenty-eight,” he answered, using the birth date she had already supplied.

  She reached over and rubbed the top of his head, messing his hair, which was Emily’s way of saying how much she cared about him.

  She said, “He wore black military boots. He had a faint red stamp on the back of his left hand that read COPY—probably from a bar or nightclub. When he paid me, he pulled out his wallet. He carried a pass to the PX, a discount shopping center on the base, which means he’s either active or works there. His driver’s license was from Kansas; I couldn’t make out the town or city. He had a ticket to the Seahawks in with his money.”

  “He wore a big silver buckle,” Ben remembered. “Like a rodeo guy.”

  “Very good!” she exclaimed. “Yes. That caught my eye as well. And did you catch it when he turned to leave?”