The Confidence Woman Page 14

  Miranda

  Claire turned off her computer feeling that a fish had flopped onto her desk. In a way, her earlier e-mail to Miranda had been a fishing expedition. She went through her mental album of the U of A days but found no photo there of a very angry Miranda. The Miranda she remembered from the incident with Elizabeth remained evasive, not confrontational. The recollection in this e-mail was not Claire’s recollection. It would be interesting to investigate what that meant, but Erwin seemed to consider himself the guardian at Miranda’s gate. Wondering if there was any way to get around him, she called Lynn in Cave Creek.

  “How are you doing?” Lynn asked. “Anything new on the investigation?”

  “Not really,” Claire replied. “I had another e-mail from Miranda. Have you talked to her recently?”

  “Not recently.”

  “Do you have her phone number in Mexico by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen Erwin?”

  “He was here a couple of days ago. He asked about you, how you were doing, whether you were still under investigation.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t know how the investigation was going, but I thought you were fine.”

  “How did Erwin know I was under investigation?”

  “Steve told him. Are you still under investigation?” Lynn asked in a hesitant voice.

  “Yes,” Claire admitted. “In fact I’ve hired a lawyer.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  The conversation moved on to other things. Claire got off the phone as soon as possible and called Erwin.

  “Erwin, this is Claire Reynier.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, Claire Reynier, and how are you?” The gruffness in his voice seemed to have been smoothed by oil.

  “All right, and you?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “Lynn said you’d been asking about me?”

  “Nothing special. Just wondering how you were.”

  “I’d like to talk to Miranda. I was wondering if you could give me her number. Is she still on location in Mexico?”

  “Still in Mexico. In fact, I am going down there this weekend to see her. She’s so busy it’s hard for her to talk on the phone. Why don’t I have her call you? Let me have your number at work just in case she gets a break and finds it easier to call in the daytime.”

  Asking for her work number struck Claire as the kind of fine detail a liar would use as a diversionary tactic. She didn’t really expect Miranda to call her at work or at home, but she gave Erwin the number.

  ******

  Sid Hyland’s secretary called Claire on Friday morning. “Could you come into the office this afternoon?” she asked. “Sid wants to talk to you.”

  “What about?” Claire asked.

  “You’ll have to ask him,” the secretary replied.

  On her way to Sid Hyland’s office, Claire got stuck in traffic on Central, and her feeling of apprehension increased by the minute. Trying to get through the canyon of downtown was stop, go, stop. She was stuck behind a van and couldn’t see far enough ahead to find the cause of the problem. At one long delay, she found herself sitting opposite a woman in a car heading east. The woman stared straight ahead, and Claire had nothing else to do but study her. They were approximately the same age. The woman’s hair had been frosted blond. Her face was tense. The unforgiving New Mexico sun showed the lines in her neck and the sags beneath her chin. Claire wondered if that was what she looked like when she didn’t put on a face for the mirror. Frustrated? Worried? After fifty did women turn into clones, indistinguishable from one another? Her future depended on being able to differentiate herself from a woman who superficially resembled her. Sitting opposite a stranger who fell into the same category didn’t give her much hope. The traffic lurched forward, and she drove past the woman, never discovering if they had something in common or nothing.

  Although she had left early, she got to Hyland’s office late and found him standing behind his desk. She tried to judge what this meeting was about from his manner. Her first impression was that he didn’t seem to be as invincibly confident as he had on their previous meeting.

  “Have a seat,” he said, waving his hand in the direction of a chair and sitting down himself.

  “What is this about?” she asked.

  Hyland leaned back, brushed the hair from his collar and paused, seemingly for effect. Claire supposed that was a litigator’s prerogative.

  “Amaral found the murder weapon,” he said.

  Claire felt relieved, thinking that was bound to exonerate her. “What is it?” she asked.

  “A cast-iron frying pan.”

  “I’m not surprised it was something from the kitchen. Where was it found?”

  “A member of a road crew working on the southbound side of I-25 found it inside a plastic trash bag, apparently tossed from a vehicle. It was a huge break for the police. It could have taken years for anyone to locate the bag in that area, if it was ever found at all.”

  Hyland didn’t need to remind Claire that a person driving from Santa Fe to Albuquerque would be in the southbound lane. But then so would a person heading from Santa Fe to Arizona.

  “He found a set of partial prints on the frying pan that matched Evelyn Martin’s and another set that he hasn’t been able to identify yet.”

  Claire had never owned a cast-iron frying pan so she knew the prints couldn’t be hers.

  “The blood on the frying pan matched the victim’s.” Hyland leaned forward, placed his forearms on the desk and focused his attention on Claire. “There’s one more thing. The frying pan was wrapped in a pink towel. Hair and blood samples found on the towel match those of the victim. The towel was embroidered with the initials CRB.”

  “Oh, God,” Claire said, feeling that her own head had just come in contact with something hard and unyielding.

  “Do you own such a towel?” Hyland asked.

  “Yes, and my married name was Burch. I received a set of embroidered towels as a gift from my husband’s mother when we were still married. I used them in the guest bathroom. Evelyn must have stolen one when she stayed at my house. If she took it from the linen closet, I wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “Apparently the towel was used to mop up the victim’s blood or possibly in an attempt to wipe fingerprints from the murder weapon.”

  “Or to implicate me if the weapon were ever found.”

  “That’s possible,” Hyland agreed.

  “If I went to Evelyn’s house to kill her, would I have taken my own towel?”

  “Unlikely, but you might have found your towel there and thought it wise to dispose of it. I’m not saying that’s what happened, only that’s how a prosecutor could see it. Human motivation is murky, but fingerprints don’t lie.” Hyland paused again. “Prints taken from the book that Amaral found in your office also match those of the victim. He wants to fingerprint you.”

  “My fingerprints won’t be on that book, but they could be on something else Evelyn took from my house. Do I have to agree?”

  “Only when Amaral gets a court order, which he is sure to do.”

  “If I offer to be fingerprinted, would that make me appear more cooperative and less guilty?”

  “It might,” Hyland said. “But I prefer to make the police do the work.”

  “It will mean more waiting on my part.”

  “Waiting can work for you, if you don’t let it get to you. It’s always possible exculpatory evidence will turn up in the meantime. My advice would be to take the weekend off and try to think about something else.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Hyland stood up. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  Claire stood up, too, and looked into his eyes, trying to read whether or not he believed she was guilty. She suspected that he didn’t care. What mattered to Sid Hyland was what he could prove, and there she began to see doubt.

  Chapter Sixteen

  WHEN CLAIR
E GOT HOME SHE WENT TO THE LINEN CLOSET immediately and counted the towels with the initials CRB embroidered on them. It was a compulsive act, she knew, since it was already obvious that Evelyn had stolen one from her house. She found eight bath towels and seven hand towels in the closet. Having Amaral find the murder weapon wrapped in the missing towel and knowing that the prints on The Confidence-Man found in her office matched the victim’s made her feel that someone was pulling her strings. Having Amaral ask for her fingerprints made Claire feel that the strings had been jerked tight.

  It took a long time to fall asleep. Claire woke up in the middle of the night with confidence men and women on her mind. The next time she woke up, darkness indicated it was still night, but the numbers on her clock read five-thirty—early morning. She felt a need to get out of the house and take a lone drive to clear her head. She had planned to work on a publish-or-perish article over the weekend, but she could take her tape recorder along and dictate her thoughts as she drove. The urge to be on the highway was so strong she skipped tai chi, had a cup of coffee and put out some food for the cat. It was a cold, windy morning, so she put on her windbreaker before she went out the door.

  When she backed out of her garage, she saw the sun cracking open the sky behind the Sandias with a yellow light. It was always better to keep one’s back to the sun when driving. West was Claire’s preferred direction anyway; east led to Texas, west led to Arizona, where she might find the answers to some oppressive questions. She took Paseo del Norte across the Rio Grande, turned south on Coors and headed west on I-40. When she reached the top of the West Mesa, she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw that the sun had risen to a point where it appeared to be sitting on top of the Sandias.

  Eighty miles later she stopped at the Stuckey’s exit, had another cup of coffee, then turned south onto Highway 117, which passed through El Malpais National Monument where the red cliffs were marked by the striations of weather and time. It was a part of New Mexico that Claire loved, and she had come here before when searching for the answer to a question. She clicked on her tape recorder, but instead of recording her thoughts about collection development at CSWR, she began recording her thoughts about Evelyn Martin. The tape recorder whirred as it listened. It didn’t measure up to talking to an old friend, but until Claire had figured out what role her old friends had played, she was no longer comfortable talking to them.

  It was only nine-thirty when she came to the town of Quemado, and she still had most of the day ahead of her. She turned west on Route 60, one of the most open of New Mexico’s open highways. When she reached the Arizona border, she crossed it. There was no interstate here and this part of Arizona was crisscrossed with state highways that mirrored the lay of the land. From the air the roads looked as serpentine as rivers and canyons. Driving them was a challenge that required full concentration, so Claire clicked off the tape recorder and put it in the pocket of her windbreaker. She abandoned Route 60 for Route 260 at Show Low, climbed the Mogollon Rim and entered a forest of ponderosa pine. At Payson she turned north on a meandering road that eventually came out on Interstate 17 at Camp Verde. From here it was eighty miles south to New River. A series of choices or an inner compass had led her near the town where Miranda lived when she was not on location.

  She drove south on I-17 and got off at the New River exit. The citizens here were about to lose control of their town. Soon there would be a huge planned community at this exit, but for now it was as rural as Cave Creek had been when Lynn moved there twenty-five years ago. The desert here was unexpectedly green. Claire loved the vegetation—the saguaro, the prickly pear, the ocotillo and the teddy bear cholla, a plant that always appeared to be backlit. In Phoenix the desert had been reduced to landscaping, but here it was a force. She found it interesting to contemplate where people who could live anywhere—people who had money or whose jobs didn’t tie them to a specific locale, people who could turn their houses into islands—chose to live. This was a town Claire might have chosen herself if she hadn’t had to work or to live alone. The desert here offered more than warmth or sunshine. It offered a wild and rare beauty.

  She stopped at a Fina station to ask for directions to 203 Javelina Lane, the address she had found for Miranda Kohl and Erwin Bush. The directions involved numerous turns on unmarked dirt roads and were complicated enough that Claire wrote them down. The houses were low, nearly hidden by the vegetation, and separated by acres of green. The area was a mix of small houses, trailers and large houses. The lack of landmarks gave Claire the sensation she was negotiating a maze and that the deeper she immersed herself, the harder it would be to find the way out.

  She hoped there was some truth at least to Erwin’s statement that he would be away for the weekend. He might have been lying about going to Mexico, but it would be far better for her if he had gone somewhere. A coyote ran out in front of Claire, chasing something she couldn’t see and so intent on the chase that it paid no attention to her truck. The path she took kept bringing her closer to Apache Peak. She came to another unmarked road, glanced at the directions she had written down and took a left. A half mile later she saw a stone at the edge of a driveway with Miranda’s number painted on it. No dwelling was visible from the road, but if there was a driveway there had to be a house.

  Claire began to wish she had a rifle balanced across her rear window or had brought a bodyguard. This was a very lonely place to be confronting a possible murderer. Her premise for some time had been that Evelyn’s death was either accidental or self-defense, that someone had confronted Evelyn with the truth, that Evelyn had attacked and the murderer had fought back. She had come to that conclusion by putting herself in the murderer’s shoes, easy enough to do once she became a suspect. As she continued down the driveway, she had to consider the possibility the murder had been committed with intent. If that were the case, what was to stop a person who had killed once from killing again? The driveway was barely wider than Claire’s truck and surrounded by thorny vegetation that made it impossible to turn around. There was no choice but to continue. She was almost relieved when she reached the house and it appeared that no one was home.

  The doors were all shut. No dogs barked or ran out to greet her. She stepped out of the truck and the sound of the door closing behind her fractured the silence. The house had been designed to blend into its site with the skill of a Frank Lloyd Wright building. There was no landscaping. The desert came right up to the door. It was close to the ground and the exterior had been stained subtle desert colors. At first glance it appeared as modest as a bungalow, but that was deceiving. It was actually a very large house that sprawled like a centipede across the desert. It was totally isolated—a place one could live for years and have no contact with neighbors.

  Sometimes when Claire tried to evaluate how well she was doing vis-a-vis an old friend, she would compare their living situations. This was a place she would have taken in a minute for the beauty of the setting and the subtlety of the architecture. It made her own house seem like a tract house. If Miranda was referring to this house when she said she had been doing well, she’d been correct.

  Claire went to the front door and rang a brass bell shaped like a lizard. She heard a melodious ring deep within the house, but it was not followed by anyone calling out “I’m coming” or by the pad of footsteps. She waited a few minutes, rang again and heard nothing but silence. She walked to the garage, which had a side window, and peered in. There was room for three cars, but the garage was empty, which gave her the confidence to circle the house. She could always say she was looking to see if anyone was at the pool if an owner showed up. Claire followed a path around the house expecting to come to a pool, and eventually she found one surrounded by a patio with weathered wood furniture, pink umbrellas and pots of flowering plants. It was what she thought of as an infinity pool; the water appeared to drop off the edge and disappear. An empty glass sat on a poolside table, the first sign that anyone was in residence.

  “Hello,�
� Claire called, but there was no answer.

  She climbed onto the patio and walked up to the house. Most of the windows were on this side facing toward the mountains and away from the sun. At first Claire could see nothing but reflections in the tinted glass, which had a sort of bronze glow that made her own reflection appear to be a gilded statue. She had to get close to the glass in order to see through it. It was hard to tell exactly what purpose the room she saw served in the scheme of a very large house, but it was beautiful and elegant enough to give Claire a tinge of envy. The ceiling was high, but not overwhelming. The room was beautifully proportioned and furnished in a subtle style she admired. The tile around the fireplace had ghostly figures that resembled petroglyphs. It was a room with soft colors, a room that whispered. This wasn’t an outside house like the Grangers’, but an indoor house that encouraged fantasy.

  Claire wondered why Lynn hadn’t told her how exquisite Miranda’s house was. For a moment she wondered if she could even have gotten the wrong house, but then she remembered how inattentive Lynn was to decoration. This house reflected the Miranda she had known—imaginative, creative, beautiful. If it inspired a bit of envy in her, it could have caused devouring envy in the unstable Evelyn. Of course there was no indication that Evelyn had ever been here. Or perhaps she should revise that to Erwin had implied she had never been here. A raven cawed, broke the silence, then flew over the roof and dive-bombed the patio.

  Claire moved on, following the path around the other side of the house and peering through windows as she went. Unlike Evelyn’s bare-boned rental house, every room in this house showed signs of Miranda’s exquisite taste, although little sign of Miranda. Claire saw books and artwork, but all the clothes or objects she spotted appeared to be Erwin’s. In the largest bedroom the bed was unmade, and a man’s khaki pants and Topsiders lay on the floor. The master bath had a Jacuzzi with a skylight above it for watching the stars and the moon. Towels were wadded up and tossed on the floor. The kitchen had an open bag of chips and a half-finished Corona on the counter.