35
I WAS HALFWAY OUT THE DOOR WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG.
“Trade? It's María López Zepeda. I'm afraid I've got some bad news. J.B.'s insisting on the lie detector test.”
“You don't think he'll pass it?”
“He's sure he will, but who knows? As I've said, they're fairly unreliable. But he's the client.”
“You're not going to let him do it, are you?”
“Well …” I heard the hesitation in her voice. “I sure don't want him taking one of theirs, so I guess we don't have much choice if he's determined to do it. We'll use one of the private firms.”
“What if he flunks?”
“The results will be confidential if we do it this way. The police will never have to know that he even took one.”
The defense attorney had a lot more faith in the confidentiality thing than I did. The downtown community was pretty tight and I wasn't so sure that J.B.'s test results would remain a secret.
“I'm trying to schedule him now.”
I groaned.
“He wants out of jail and the judge won't bond him so he sees this as an out. If he passes the thing, he thinks a case can be made for setting bond.”
“Do you agree?”
“Not necessarily. And I told him so, but we have a pretty stubborn client.”
I liked the way she said “we.” At least I wasn't in this alone.
“María, will you let me know the results when you get them?” I asked, wondering what I'd do if he flunked the damn thing.
“Sure,” she promised before hanging up.
I knew finding Clarice Martínez at home was going to be a total crapshoot, but I got lucky. I found her sitting in a patio under the misters near her aviary of flitting finches. She was wearing what looked like one of her husband's white dress shirts and just under the long tails I spotted a hint of faded denim shorts. She was sitting reading and sipping an iced tea.
“Well, look who's here!” She dropped the latest copy of Vogue on the table as she jumped out of the heavy wrought iron patio chair and greeted me warmly.
“Honey, can I get you some tea?”
“No thanks.” I held up the bottled water I frequently carry with me in summer.
“Too hot? Shall we go inside?”
“This is fine,” I said, settling into a patio chair.
“Well, then, how's everything going?”
“It's getting more intriguing all the time.” I watched her closely. “Have you figured out why I'm here?”
“Why no.” Her hands fluttered, not unlike a flight of her beloved tiny birds. “Should I?”
“I called Hornisher's telephone number,” I said. “And it was very interesting.” I paused for effect. “I found out he's not a plastic surgeon at all. He doesn't even do lips.”
“Oh.” It was as though the air had been let out of her. Tiny to begin with, she seemed even more diminutive in the heavy metal chair.
“He's a neurological specialist,” I continued. “Lou Gehrig's disease. Does any of this sound familiar?”
To her credit, she didn't try to evade my question. Her big blue eyes watered as she nodded. “I promised,” she whispered.
“Who did you promise?” I leaned across the table and patted her thin freckled arm. “Abby?”
She nodded, withdrew her arm and brushed the tears away with the tips of her fingers. “She didn't want anyone to know. I was stupid to leave that message on her machine, but I didn't know that she was going to die.”
“No, of course you didn't,” I said gently. “How could you?”
“I was hoping that you'd let it go, that you wouldn't find out about Dr. Hornisher.”
“I almost didn't,” I admitted, thinking of how close I'd come to ignoring the answering machine message.
“But then I figured out that Abby didn't need collagen implants in her lips. I finally called Hornisher's office this morning. Do you want to tell me about it?”
“God, I promised.” She lifted the tail of her long white shirt and rubbed her eyes with it.
“Clarice, Abby's dead. What you know may help me find out how and why she died.”
“And who killed her?”
“Maybe.”
She sighed heavily. “If I tell you, you have to swear you will not breathe a word of this to a single living soul.”
“I can't do that. After I called Hornisher's office, I began putting the pieces together.”
She thought about this for a moment and then began talking.
“About three months ago Abby started noticing that she wasn't feeling right. Her hands were getting stiff and cramping, stiffer than she thought they should with just the normal arthritis.”
“And she began dropping things.”
“You knew about that?”
I nodded.
“She felt like she was getting weaker, although there was no reason for it, and that scared the pants off her.”
“Did she tell J.B.?”
“Honey, are you crazy? Abby was terrified of getting old, of getting ugly. She'd seen her mother go through a terrible, disfiguring disease, and that was the last thing she wanted for herself. And she sure didn't want to share the news with J.B. any sooner than she had to.”
I let the reference to Madeleine pass for the time being.
“There was no way on earth she was going to tell that young husband of hers that she was getting weak and feeble, no way at all.”
“Was she ever diagnosed?”
“Oh, sure. Her regular doctor ran a number of tests and had just come up with Lou Gehrig's right before she died. While they were running more tests, I was checking around trying to get some names for her. When I found Leland Hornisher right up the road in Phoenix, I left the message, but I had to be sneaky about it since Abby didn't want anyone knowing. That's why I mentioned the collagen.”
It was a smart deception. After all, I'd almost fallen for it.
“You mentioned her regular doctor, was that Samuel Mullon?”
“Uh huh. He was going to give her some referrals too. Wasn't it freaky that he died the same night as Abby?” Now that she had confided in me about Abby's disease, it was as though a huge load had been taken off her and she was eager to talk.
“Freaky,” I agreed, but in my mind I wasn't finding Mullon's death coincidental at all. Had the information he had on Abby's Lou Gehrig's killed him? Could someone have wanted to make sure he didn't pass that on? And if so, who and why? “Who else did Abby tell?”
“No one.”
“Not even her brother?”
Clarice shook her head and the filtered light picked up copper highlights in her short red hair. “She was really definite about that. Said she didn't want anyone to know about it until she'd decided what to do.”
“What's to do with Lou Gehrig's?” I asked. I didn't know a lot about the disease, but I knew enough to know that it was a progressive thing and that most people, once they had it, had no way out.
“Not much,” Clarice agreed. “That thing is surely unkind. It kills your body but your mind still works. By what she was gonna do, I just meant that she wasn't sure who was going to treat her, or how. She was just destroyed by the news.”
“That's when she went on the Prozac,” I guessed. She nodded. “It helped with her depression. Her doctor wasn't one to pull punches, and he told her what she had to look forward to. He didn't paint a pretty picture, honey.”
“I don't imagine he did.”
“She told me she couldn't stand the idea of being in a wheelchair, drooling and breathing through a machine. That she'd rather be dead than go through that.”
“Well, it looks like she got her wish,” I said. “Only it sure wasn't suicide. Clarice, have you told anybody about Abby's illness?”
“Lordy, no.” She was shocked.
“Although she's dead, I think it would be a good idea if you kept this to yourself.” I didn't want to scare her, but I was concerned that there was a possibility that whoever had killed Abby and Dr. Mullon might come after her.
I reached in my purse, pulled out the copy of the New York Times article on the Van Thiessen fire and handed it to her. It was folded back to the second page with the picture of Peter and Gloria. “Do these kids look familiar to you?”
She glanced at the clip and handed it back. “Sure. That's Peter's hero picture.”
I remembered that Clarice had told me she'd known Abby since they were babies, that their nannies had been friends and had strolled together in Central Park. “And Gloria Covarrubias is also in it.”
She wasn't at all surprised.
“You never mentioned that she grew up with Abby and Peter.”
“Well, frankly, it really wasn't like that. Glory didn't live there or anything. She stayed with an aunt in the Bronx while her mother worked. She really wasn't involved in Abby's and Peter's lives so I guess that's why I forgot to mention it. It was only after Lala Chukker died—that was her mother—that she came to work for Abby. Maybe ten, twelve years ago.”
“But you led me to believe that Madeleine Van Thiessen died of cancer.”
“No.” She was very definite. “Honey, I told you she had cancer in her jaw and that she died when we were thirteen. That's all I said. After the fire, none of us ever talked about that day again.”
Of course she was right. I was the one who had stupidly made the assumption that the cancer had killed her.
As I drove out her driveway, I was haunted by the irony of all of it. Jackie Doo Dahs, J.B.'s ex-wife, had lured him to meet with her under the pretext of illness. Yet Abby, his wife, really was ill and hadn't shared that with him.
By the time I hit Oracle Road I'd thought a lot about Abby's disease and come to the conclusion that like many people with troubling news, she might have shared it with her minister. Since I had a little time to kill I drove out to the Church of Brotherly Love.
I found Lateef Wise standing next to a tall ladder in the chapel. I was again struck by how absolutely huge he was. The skinny young girl with braces was on top of the ladder holding a wire basket with what looked like an industrial size light bulb in it.
“You're a day late,” Wise said, but he was smiling.
“And a dollar short,” I said. “I thought of a few things I wanted to go over with you.”
“Sure. Marly, you can come down now, we'll change it later.”
The girl climbed down from the ladder. When she dropped from the last rung, instead of hitting the floor, she landed on Reverend Wise's foot.
“Watch it!” He snarled in what I thought was an overreaction. He had to have a hundred pounds on the skinny little thing.
“Sorry,” she smiled, showing a mouthful of metal. “I'll go finish those letters now,” she said as she skipped out of the chapel.
“Doggone thing won't hold me,” Wise said, nodding at the ladder.
“Well that wouldn't be a graceful fall,” I said, pleased with my pun.
“Shall we go to my office?”
“This won't take long.”
“All right.” As he dropped onto the front pew the wood creaked with his weight. He motioned for me to join him.
“During the course of my investigation I've run across a few things.”
His hooded eyes were focused on my face, but they gave nothing away.
“Did Abby ever mention to you that she was sick?”
“Well, I knew she was depressed about that business with her husband, if that's what you mean.”
“No. She had Lou Gehrig's disease.”
One of his eyebrows shot up. “That's terrible. I had no idea, none at all.”
“I thought with you being her minister and all, that maybe she would have talked to you about it. It's a very debilitating thing.”
“Yes, I know. But as I told you last week, Abby's church attendance had fallen off lately. We weren't as close as we once were.”
“But she was still sending money to the church,” I said, remembering the healthy checks she'd written.
“Yes.”
I wondered if her disinterest in his Sunday services had worried him. Of course if he'd killed her the giving would have stopped entirely. But what if he'd known about her will and the five million dollars before her death? Wouldn't he be concerned that if she wasn't going to church that she might change her mind about that? Five million bucks any way you cut it was a pretty good motive for anything. Even murder.
“Before she died did you know the church was in her will?”
“Yes.” He was leaning on his knees and he rubbed his face with his huge hands, his gold and diamond Super Bowl ring sparkling, caught by the light from the windows. “But I didn't know the amount.”
It was quiet in the chapel with only the occasional hum of the air-conditioning refrigeration as it kicked in.
“Aren't you going to ask me?” He trained those dark eyes on me once again.
“Ask you what?”
“About Cherry.”
I exhaled. “Yeah, I was going to get to it.”
“I supposed you would. I've been waiting for you to return. There have been some things that I have done in my past that I'm not proud of, the good Lord knows. And my treatment of my ex-wife is at the top of the list of the sins I will have to one day atone for.”
Ten days in intensive care. I sure hoped he was going to have to answer to someone for that.
“I was an angry young man back then. Full of fear and hate. It was before I found the Lord.”
“There haven't been any other incidents?”
“No.” His head was back in his hands. “Nothing. I have learned to channel my energies in more productive ways.”
Since I'd just witnessed his overreaction to the teenager's accidentally stepping on his foot a few minutes earlier I was skeptical.
“I still attend anger management classes once a week,” he admitted before standing up. “And now, Miss Ellis, unless you have further questions, I believe I should get back to doing the Lord's work.”
I'd called Peter Van Thiessen before leaving Clarice's and he'd agreed to meet me for lunch at the Tohono Chul Tea Room on the northwest side of Tucson. I got there early and strolled through the gift shop.
It turned out he was late. He'd been running again up on Mt. Lemmon. It was too hot to eat in the front courtyard or the back patio so we were seated inside.
We'd just ordered when I got down to business.
“I'd like to talk to you about your sister's relationship with Gloria and José Covarrubias,” I began.
“She was fond of both of them.”
“But more fond of Gloria than her husband?” I prodded, seeing if he would bring up the fire.
“You're looking at the extra money Abby left Gloria, aren't you?”
“That's one thing.”
“She'd been working for Abby for several years before she married José so my sister was closer to her. I think that's probably why she left her more.”
“Twenty-four thousand dollars more?”
“And because Laurette didn't work very long for her, she only got five thousand.” He glanced at his watch.
With the mention of Laurette Le Blanc's name I was tempted to delve into his relationship with her, but decided against it. Until I was sure who the players were, I was going to hold my cards pretty close to my chest.
I stayed quiet as the waitress deposited our sandwiches.
“Gloria Covarrubias opened a separate bank account about three months ago.”
His hands, with the sandwich in them, stopped inches away from his mouth. “What bank account?”
“One separate from the one she had with her husband. The interesting thing is that about the same time, large deposits started appearing in that account.”
“Well, that's certainly surprising.” His eyes narrowed. “How large?”
“About twenty-eight thousand dollars all together. So I'm wondering if there's a connection between that money and Abby's death.”
“You think Gloria might have had something to do with it?”
“I'm not saying that, not yet.” I held up my hand.
“Maybe someone died and left her money,” Peter offered before taking another bite of his basil, tomato and fontina cheese sandwich.
“When that happens there's usually a large single deposit, not money trickling in in different amounts over three months.”
“I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about the Covarrubiases' financial arrangements with my sister, or any of their other sources of income. Maybe you should talk to Gloria about it.”
“I'll do that.”
We ate quietly for a few minutes before I changed my approach.
“Peter, why didn't you tell me that Gloria's mother was your nanny?”
“Why would I?” He took another bite of his sandwich, not missing a beat.
“Well, when I asked you how long Gloria had worked for Abby you just said a long time. I was surprised when I learned you that you all grew up together.”
“Not hardly.” He laughed, and looked at his watch again. “She was our nanny's daughter, that's all. We weren't encouraged to play with her and she was rarely around anyway.”
“But you were a boy hero,” I said, smiling. “From the picture I saw it looks like Gloria suffered some pretty serious burns on her hands.”
“That was an awful day. I don't talk about it.”
I suppose I could have prodded him, but didn't see the need to. At least he hadn't lied about the fire when I'd asked. That was better than nothing, but not as good as telling me about it from the get-go. I switched direction again.
“Did you ever notice that Abby was sick in any way, maybe taking medications or dropping things?”
“God, we've been through this,” Peter Van Thiessen said, an edge to his voice. “You were with me when we found the Prozac. I didn't know my sister was taking that or anything else for that matter. What's this about dropping things?”
“Well, Ramona Miller mentioned that Abby was having trouble. Then at the bar the night before her death the bartender said she'd dropped a bottle.” I watched him carefully. “She was having trouble holding on to things. Her hands were getting stiff and cramping.”
“I never noticed anything like that.”
“So you didn't know your sister had Lou Gehrig's disease?”
“What?” He coughed and pieces of his sandwich flew out of his mouth. He wiped his lips with his napkin. “My God, what are you talking about?”
“Lou Gehrig's. Your sister was sick.”
“That's impossible. She would have told me.” His hand trembled as he lifted his iced tea glass. “I would have known.”
“According to my sources”—I used the plural to cover Clarice—“only her doctor and a few friends knew about it.”
“Lou Gehrig's. That's the one that paralyzes you, isn't it?”
“I can't believe she wouldn't have told me.”
“You were close,” I said, remembering my first conversation with Clarice. What had she said? They were tighter than ticks, because of that mother they had.
“Obviously not as close as I thought we were,” he said dryly. “I guess you've talked to her doctor.”
“Unfortunately not. He was killed the same weekend Abby died.”
“God. How did that happen?”
“He was shot at his home.”
“But you know for sure that she had this disease?”
I nodded. It was kind of a bluff, but coupling Hornisher's specialty with what Clarice had told me, I felt that I was on solid ground.
“She told one of my sources that she'd rather be dead than debilitated.”
“What are you saying, Trade? Do you think she drowned herself?”
“Not likely.”
“So I don't get it.” His voice was harsh. “Am I supposed to feel better about my sister's murder because she was going to die anyway?”