The Confidence Woman Read online

  Next she considered Amaral’s precision with words, and Sid Hyland’s “concentrate on your job and leave my job to me.” Today was Saturday and she didn’t have to consider her job. She had all day to do whatever she wanted to do, but before she made plans for the rest of the weekend, she added one more phrase to her list, Pietro’s “cara mia, te amo.” It was a beautiful phrase in sound and in spirit, far more lyrical than the occasional stilted “I love you” she had coaxed out of Evan. She put all the papers in a manila folder and filed it in her desk. The file contained more questions than answers, but she was willing to put the questions aside and give the answers time to develop.

  Turning her attention to what to do with the rest of the weekend, Claire checked her calendar and found two blank pages for Saturday and Sunday. She began poking through the pile of mail and newspapers on her desk to see if she could find something interesting to do. In the mail she found an invitation to the Rocky Mountain Booksellers annual dinner in Santa Fe that night. The booksellers who would be there were people she felt comfortable with. The hour drive to Santa Fe was a good chance to think.

  ******

  The Rocky Mountain Booksellers dinner was held in a motel on Cerrillos Road, the fast-food strip outside Santa Fe where the City Different became the City Clone. Except for the green chile on the burgers, Cerrillos Road could have been anywhere in America and the same could be said for the motel. The cocktail party before the dinner was held in a large and anonymous room filled mostly with casually dressed booksellers. Awards were presented at this dinner for numerous categories of Western writing. The award for fiction was going to a well-known male writer whose macho cowboy heroes were more popular with women than they ought to be. Claire recognized him standing at the center of a group of women holding a glass of whiskey in his hand. From the waist down he was a cowboy in worn Levi’s, scuffed boots and a leather belt with a silver buckle. From the waist up he was a city slicker in an expensive blazer, a white shirt and a red ascot looped under his chin. His upper body said “I’m a powerful dude.” His lower body said “I’m a cowboy who doesn’t care about this upper-body bullshit.” Both were roles women found appealing, but a role women found truly irresistible was the drunken bad boy in need of a good woman to straighten him out. The writer played that one to the hilt, smoking, laughing, sipping the whiskey in his glass.

  On her way to the bar to get herself a glass of wine Claire walked by his group and overheard him say, “I was getting ready to shoot that dude, but then I remembered that you can’t smoke in prison.” It wasn’t hard to overhear him; the author had a boisterous voice followed by a hearty laugh. After he made this statement, he glanced around him to gauge the reaction of his audience, most of whom reacted exactly as he expected they would by laughing. He smiled benevolently, then happened to catch the eye of Claire, who wasn’t smiling. The male author shrugged, grinned and tipped his glass.

  While she waited at the bar for her glass of wine, Claire thought about his behavior. The cigarette, the glass, the humor, the outrageous statements, the bravado from a bottle reminded her of Ginny, but there was a level of detachment and irony in the author that she hadn’t observed in Ginny. The way that he seemed to be standing apart and watching himself might indicate he was more intelligent than Ginny was or it might indicate that he was less drunk.

  The author sat on the dais during dinner along with the MC and the other nominees. Claire sat at a round table with booksellers she knew. The food was the basic banquet dinner. The talk was familiar. Nothing at her own table required her full attention so she kept an eye on the male author during dinner, noticing that he rarely sipped at his drink, that after he finished eating he took a cigarette from a pack and tapped it against the table, but he never lit it. She often saw him studying the room with an amused detachment.

  After dinner the MC, a bookseller unpracticed at the art of public speaking, stood up and began talking in an annoyingly deliberate voice. Five winners sat on the dais and all five of them were scheduled to speak, which would make for a long night. Claire wanted to hear the male author’s speech—she was sure it would be entertaining—but she had something more important to do. She checked her watch.

  It was nine o’clock, a good time to ask one question for which she’d been seeking an answer.

  She said good-bye to her bookseller friends and left the room, trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She walked outside, got into her car and drove toward the Plaza, turning right on Paseo de Peralta. At Acequia Madre, she turned right again, continuing on to Ginny’s street. The adjacent houses were dark, but Ginny’s house blazed like a planet alone in the sky.

  Claire parked her car, walked to the door and rang the doorbell. Ginny could well be drunk and angry. She had some anxiety about confronting her alone at night, but felt it was something she had to do. When there was no response, Claire rang again. Eventually, she heard Ginny yell, “I’m coming. Okay? Goddamn it, I’m coming.”

  She unlocked the dead bolt, opened the door and blinked while her eyes adjusted to the darkness outside her house. Her dress was deeply wrinkled. Her hair had fallen into the tousled style known in Hollywood as bed head.

  She squinted in Claire’s direction. “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s me, Ginny.”

  “Who me?” Ginny replied.

  “Claire Reynier.”

  Ginny rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. “Clairier,” she said. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

  “It’s not the middle of the night. It’s nine-thirty.”

  “Nine-thirty? But it’s so dark out there. It looks like the middle of the night,” She wagged her finger at Claire. “Not good to be out alone at night. I never go outside after sunset. Come in.” She slammed the door shut after Claire stepped inside and snapped the dead bolt into place.

  “I was in town for a booksellers dinner,” Claire said. “I thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

  “Hello,” Ginny said, mimicking Claire. “Come in. Have a little drink with me.”

  Claire followed her down the hallway into the living room and watched while Ginny collapsed on an overstuffed sofa. A half-full wineglass sat on the floor, but she had forgotten her offer to get Claire a drink. Just as well, Claire thought.

  “I have DADS,” Ginny whispered in a confessional tone. “Have you ever known anyone who has DADS?”

  “What is it?” Claire asked.

  “Deathly afraid of the dark or damn afraid of the dark. Take your pick.” She fumbled with a pack of cigarettes. “I always had it. Even when I was little, I slept with the lights on, but it got really bad when I lived in Seattle. Our house was on an island. My husband was gone all the time—business, he said. It was always dark and gloomy. My melatonin is all fucked up, which is one reason why I moved here. I need the sunlight, artificial light, any kind of light. Everybody’s afraid of something, aren’t they?” She plucked a cigarette from the pack and lit it. “What is it you’re afraid of? Tell me, Clairier.”

  “Dying alone,” Claire replied. It was a legitimate fear, but not her greatest fear. At the moment her greatest fear was that she would be charged with murder.

  “Everybody dies alone,” Ginny said. “It’s not the alone part. It’s the dying part you’ve got to worry about.”

  “Did Evelyn Martin die alone?” Claire asked.

  “No. She died in the company of whoever killed her.”

  “Was that you, Ginny?” Claire asked, leaning forward and trying to create a web of intimacy. Unlike Ginny she hadn’t had the bar of her inhibitions lowered by alcohol. She had to jump a high hurdle of her reserve to ask this question, but she made herself do it.

  “She was killed at night, wasn’t she?” Ginny asked.

  “Supposedly.”

  “It couldn’t be me. I never go out after dark. I don’t even go out at twilight because that would mean I have to come home after dark.”

  “But you had dinn
er with Elizabeth Best the night Evelyn was killed, didn’t you?”

  Ginny exhaled, flicked an ash from her cigarette, then dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I can’t stand Elizabeth Best. She’s far too PC for me.”

  “But you told Detective Amaral you had dinner with her,” Claire persisted.

  “That was Elizabeth’s idea. She said it would give both of us an alibi. I was home. She was with her boyfriend here, the blond guy. She didn’t want that to come out because she has another boyfriend at home in Tucson. How does she do it?”

  “She has a lot of energy,” Claire said.

  “I don’t have any energy,” Ginny said, putting her feet up on the sofa and resting her head on a pillow. “Lock the door when you leave,” she mumbled before she fell asleep.

  Claire made sure the cigarette was out, picked up the wineglass and the pack of cigarettes and carried them into the kitchen. Her own impulse would have been to turn the lamps off, but in deference to Ginny’ s phobia she left them burning. She wondered whether Ginny would recall this conversation in the morning. If she remembered it at all, she might remember it as a dream. Claire couldn’t lock the dead bolt behind her without a key, but she made sure the knob in the door handle was locked. After she left the house, she tested it. There was enough ambient light in Santa Fe to block the view of the stars. When she looked up from Ginny’s driveway all she could see was a murky glow.

  But once she reached I-25, the sky became the ceiling of a vast black cave. A sliver of new moon hung over the Ortiz Mountains and Venus was a beauty mark below it. It made Claire glad all over again that she lived in New Mexico. Driving the state’s empty highways created the illusion that the road belonged to her. For a few minutes she felt in control sitting in the cocoon of her truck listening to Mozart. But her serenity was shattered when she came across the lights of the state pen glaring in the east. She imagined what a cell there would look like and feel like—the total lack of privacy, the endless noise, the hostile inmates. The thought that she could end up spending time there made the cab of her truck feel less like a cocoon than a cage on wheels.

  She should be leaving her defense to her cowboy lawyer, but she was having a hard time relinquishing control of her fate. There were ways in which her knowledge of the other suspects and her amateur status gave her investigation an advantage over Amaral’s. Information elicited from a drunk would have no standing in court, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t accurate. In fact, Claire thought that statements made in unguarded moments were more likely to be truthful. Claire hoped she hadn’t taken unfair advantage of an old friend and came to the conclusion that if she used this information to prove her own innocence she wouldn’t be, but if she used it against Ginny she would.

  She couldn’t entirely eliminate Ginny and Elizabeth as suspects in her own mind, but she moved them to a back room. Elizabeth was with Brian. Ginny was afraid of the dark, unlikely to go out at night, and most likely would have been too inebriated to have pulled the murder off. That left Lynn, Miranda and their husbands in the parlor. If she was going to find evidence against any of them, she might have to use the same surreptitious means she had used with Elizabeth and Ginny. Was there any point in pursuing this if the information she elicited couldn’t be used in court? Was her goal to prove her legal innocence or her moral innocence? She hoped that one might lead to the other.

  When she got home, she went to her computer and composed a carefully worded e-mail to Miranda.

  Recent events have made me think a lot about the past and our days at the U of A. I saw Elizabeth recently. I feel that I have changed and I imagine you feel the same way, too. But Elizabeth seems to have changed very little. She still has a nasty temper. I saw her treating her boyfriend’s daughter badly, and I remember how horrible she was when she found you wearing her jacket and how angry that made you. I hope you are doing well on location, that the series will be a success and that I will get to see it on television.

  Your old friend,

  Claire

  Chapter Fifteen

  ON MONDAY CLAIRE HAD DINNER WITH CELIA at Olympia Café and went to a concert at Popejoy. After the concert she recalled there was a book in her office she had intended to take home with her, and she returned to pick it up. As she was leaving the center, she saw that Harrison was ahead of her. He walked through the door, turned left and continued down the hallway, presumably heading for the lot behind the library where the staff parked their vehicles. She stayed a respectful distance behind, not following him exactly since they were both going in the same direction. Yet the fact that it was night and no one else happened to be in the hallway gave her the sensation that she was a hunter stalking a prey. If she intended to confront him about his dissertation, this could be the moment. He walked past the bookstore and an exhibit of photographs on the opposite wall and went out the door. She followed him down the sidewalk, listening to the sound of her own footsteps and wondering if he heard them, wondering if he suspected that he was being followed. He might imagine that someone wanted to confront him or even rob him, but she doubted it would occur to him that anyone had the power to cast doubt on words he had written years ago. He never turned around, just kept on walking toward the parking lot at a measured pace. He seemed tired to Claire, which added to his vulnerability. When he got to the lot, he clicked the remote that unlocked the door of his SUV. Claire approached as he put his hand on the door.

  “Good evening, Harrison,” she said.

  He spun around. “Claire. I didn’t know you were behind me.”

  “I came back to my office to pick up a book,” she replied. “Were you working late?”

  “Yes.” He paused. They were alone in the parking lot after dark. It was a perfect time for confidences if there were ever going to be any. He cleared his throat. “Is there anything new in the murder investigation?” he asked.

  “Not really,” Claire replied, wishing he hadn’t used the word murder.

  “I don’t suppose your copy of The Confidence-Man has turned up?” His expression was covetous. His long white fingers clutched the door handle.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “What will become of the one that was found in your office?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re quite convinced the signature in that book is fraudulent?”

  “I believe it is a fraud, but it would take an expert to prove it one way or the other.”

  “There are very few signed copies of The Confidence-Man and they are expensive.”

  “That’s another reason I think the signature was forged. It would be far easier and cheaper to find an unsigned copy and fake the signature than it would be to locate a signed copy. You told me you did your dissertation on Herman Melville, didn’t you?” That sentence made its way from the back of her mind to the tip of her tongue and slipped out without any conscious effort on her part.

  “Yes,” he replied, opening the door to his vehicle.

  If Claire intended to speak, this was the moment, but what would she say? I’ve discovered that you plagiarized parts of your dissertation, and I can prove it? That sentence did not roll off her tongue.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Harrison said.

  “Good night,” Claire replied.

  ******

  She drove home wondering whether her failure to mention the plagiarism should be considered wisdom, kindness or cowardice. As she turned into her subdivision she saw the Sandias silhouetted against the sky and was reminded of how wild the mountains became at night. It was too late to let Nemesis out. He protested by meowing and rubbing against her legs. Trying to ignore him, she went to her office, picked up the Oxford World’s Classics edition and replayed the conversation with Harrison, wondering all over again who had placed the copy of The Confidence-Man in her office. Any of the suspects could have located a copy of that book, forged Melville’s signature and put it on her shelf. Claire believed she had accounted for Ginny and Elizabeth’s wherea
bouts on the night in question. If neither one of them had killed Evelyn, then neither one of them had a motive to frame her. As for the other alibis, she had Lynn’s word that she had been at home with Steve, Miranda’s word that she had been on location. Apparently Amaral believed them, but maybe his investigation hadn’t gone far enough.

  She checked her e-mail before going to bed, looking for an answer from Miranda but not finding one. It didn’t arrive until three days later.

  “Hi Claire,” it began.

  Sorry it took so long to get back to you. Still muy busy here. The show is going well. Is that detective ready to charge anyone with the death of Evelyn Martin? It won’t be you, I hope. Of course I remember how horrible Elizabeth was about the jacket. You’re right. I was furious and I wanted to strangle her, but I got over it. As time went by, I bore her no grudge. I hope all is well with you. Stay in touch.