The Confidence Woman Read online

  “She signed the lease on the house sixteen months ago. In an envelope along with the credit cards we found a list of personal property. Some of it was found in the house. Are you missing any personal property?”

  Claire had a few pieces of valuable family jewelry, but she either wore them daily or kept them in her safe-deposit box. “Not that I know of.”

  “There is a book on the list. The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville.”

  Claire owned a signed first edition of The Confidence-Man. The few books with Melville’s signature were valuable. “I have a copy of that book. I hadn’t noticed it was missing, but it’s possible. It’s worth about ten thousand dollars.”

  “That much for a book?” Amaral’s raised eyebrows contributed to his already startled expression.

  “That much. Was the book in the house?”

  “We didn’t find it there. You told me merchandise was charged to your credit card, but you didn’t say what it was.”

  “A large TV, an expensive stereo. Things I never would have bought for myself.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She charged lingerie and underwear at Victoria’s Secret. The first sign I had that something was wrong was when I received a package in the mail from the store.”

  “What was in it?”

  “A silky black nightgown.”

  “Would you be willing to look at a photograph of the deceased?” Amaral asked. “The body is badly decomposed. It will not be a pleasant sight, but you might see something that will help our investigation.”

  “If the body was decomposed, how were you able to identify her?”

  “Dental records matched.”

  Claire took the photo, which showed a disturbing image of swollen and rotting flesh sprawled across a kitchen floor. The corner of a stove was visible. Evelyn wore a turquoise blue dress with ethnic embroidery. Her hair was bleached blond. While Claire studied the photo, Amaral studied her.

  “Evelyn’s hair was blond,” she said, returning the photo. “That’s all I can really identify. Have you discovered yet what killed her?” Claire was thinking a heart attack or possibly a stroke. Evelyn was young for either of those, but she had been overweight and out of shape when she visited Claire.

  “Not yet. The OMI needs to do some further testing.” Amaral stood up. “Thank you for your time. May I call you if we need to talk further?”

  “Of course,” Claire said.

  She felt numb as Amaral escorted her down the hall to the door. Telephones were ringing in the police station and people were talking, but she barely heard them. She was relieved to step outside into a clear Santa Fe day. The City Different was fifteen hundred feet higher than Albuquerque. The sunlight was even brighter here, giving the shadows deeper definition.

  Chapter Three

  CLAIRE WALKED ACROSS THE PARKING LOT, let herself into her truck and sat down behind the steering wheel, grateful for the familiar shelter of the cab. She wasn’t ready to drive back to Albuquerque and considered what to do next. Ginny Bogardus lived in Santa Fe. Claire saw her a few times when she first moved to New Mexico and had been to her house near Acequia Madre. She circled downtown Santa Fe on Paseo de Peralta, turned onto Acequia Madre and off it again onto Ginny’s bumpy dirt road. In Santa Fe the better the neighborhood the worse the road. Ginny lived in an excellent neighborhood, close to the Plaza and full of old adobe houses. Claire had once heard it described as an adobe theme park, and it did have a too-perfect-to-be-true quality. But the lilacs were in bloom, the wind ruffled the blossoms, and today the neighborhood had the prettiness-in-motion appearance of an impressionist painting. She parked in the driveway, walked to the front door and rang the bell. Ginny answered with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It was only two-thirty in the afternoon, too early to be drinking in Claire’s opinion, but she knew that since she’d gotten divorced and moved to Santa Fe, Ginny had lived her life to the accompaniment of ice tinkling in a glass. It was one reason Claire avoided her. Ginny wore a flowered shift that concealed any weight gain. Her hair was layered in an expensive cut and tinted the color of champagne.

  “Clairier,” she cried. Ginny had nicknames for all her friends, even for people who weren’t her friends. “Isn’t it just too wonderful?”

  “Isn’t what wonderful?” Claire responded.

  “That Evie ripped us off and died, and now we’re being investigated by Dante. I love it!”

  Claire thought that Ginny had to be starved for excitement if she found this wonderful, but all she said was, “Dante? You mean Detective Amaral?”

  “That’s him. Muy suave, don’t you think? I called the police the minute I saw in the paper that Evelyn had died. He invited me to his office yesterday. I suppose that’s why you’re in town?”

  “It is.”

  “Come in.”

  Claire followed her into the house, which was surprisingly neat considering the carelessness with which Ginny lived. It was decorated with polished antiques and shiny silver. They got as far as a spindly legged antique table in the hallway, where Ginny stopped to rub her cigarette out in an already full ashtray.

  “What did Evie steal from you?” she asked.

  “My identity.”

  “She took all of our identities, or tried to. I mean what did she take from your house that you cared about?”

  “A book apparently. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man.”

  “You always did love books, didn’t you? I think she wanted to take something we all loved and identified with. I’m partial to jewelry myself, but the jewelry she took was an antique necklace that belonged to my ex-husband’s mother. It was pretty, but it wasn’t all that valuable. I didn’t miss it. I thought I had hidden it well in a fake head of lettuce in my refrigerator, but she found it. Dante described a necklace he discovered in Evie’s house that I was sure was mine. When I looked in the lettuce I saw that she had replaced the one I had with a cheap imitation. He said I could have the original back once the investigation was over.”

  “Why did she want to take something we valued?”

  Ginny shrugged. “She identified with us from the past. She wanted to get even with us in the present because we were doing better than she was. Her life was pretty miserable. We had a couple of drinks one night and she told me she’d developed a major crush on her boss, who didn’t reciprocate. He was married, of course. She got fired and she couldn’t find another job. I think she was also suffering from a hormonal imbalance. We’re at that age, aren’t we? I told Evie she ought to start taking Premarin. Are you?” Ginny focused on Claire over the rim of her glass.

  “No. Are you?”

  “Sure. I’ll take whatever helps. Evie told me she had enough money to retire on, but she had to have been lying about that. Did she send you a nightgown from Victoria’s Secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose that was some kind of message that she’d been in our house and had the goods on us. I didn’t pick up on it, did you?”

  “No. I found it hard to believe that someone I knew in college would rip me off.”

  “Me, too, especially Evie. She was too boring to be a thief. My nightgown was shocking pink. It was a size fourteen. Did you try yours on?”

  “No.”

  “I did. It made me look like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. How did Evie know I wore a size fourteen?”

  Claire wondered about that since the flowered dress concealed the details of Ginny’s figure. “She looked in your closet?”

  “Of course. You always were smart. What color was your nightgown?”

  “Black.”

  “Did you notice the turquoise blue dress Evie wore in the police photo? Awful color with that bleached hair. She’d gone ethnic. A lot of women do that when they come to Santa Fe.”

  “I didn’t pay much attention. I was so appalled by the state of the body.”

  “Gruesome,” Ginny agreed and lit another cigarette.

  “Did you know Evelyn was living i
n Santa Fe?”

  Ginny shook her head and the ice in her glass trilled an arpeggio. “No. When she visited me about a year ago, she told me she was thinking of moving here. Then I never heard from her again. It was months before she started using my credit cards. I didn’t connect her with the theft until I talked to Dante.”

  “You didn’t tell me that Evelyn had visited.”

  “You didn’t tell me either, did you?” she asked. “Actually I did call you, but you didn’t call me back. I suppose you were busy with your job and your life in Albuquerque. What was to talk about anyway? It was all so depressing. Having Evie in my house was like spending the winter in Seattle.” Ginny shivered. “My ex and I lived there. It was grim—always raining, always gray. If you ask me Evie was always depressing and she wouldn’t do anything about it either. I think she liked being miserable. But then what did she have to be happy about? No job, no money, no children, no love life.”

  “She didn’t have much self-esteem,” Claire agreed. It was easy enough for a woman to fall into that trap in a society where women were encouraged to dwell on their age and their weight, convinced they needed to buy more to feel better.

  “Me, when I get depressed, I pop a Prozac,” Ginny said.

  Claire recognized this as the moment to give a lecture saying Prozac wasn’t meant to be popped whenever you were in a bad mood. To be effective it had to be taken every day, and it should never be taken with alcohol, the mother in her wanted to scold. But she kept quiet and the moment passed.

  “Did Dante tell you who else she stole from?” Ginny asked.

  “Lynn Granger and Elizabeth Best. Why the four of us?”

  “We all lived in the same corridor back then. Maybe she felt closer to us than we thought. It could also be that she intended to rip off all the sisters and got to us first. Then someone ended that little plan. You’re still friends with Lynn, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s too nice to kill anyone, don’t you think? But Lizzie? She always was a bitch. I’ve been doing some investigating on my own, and I found out exactly where Evelyn lived on Tano Road. I drove up there after I read the article in the paper, and I saw the police tape around the scene. Would you like to see where she was living on our money?”

  “I would,” Claire admitted, hoping that looking at the house might somehow explain Evelyn’s behavior.

  Ginny reached for the car keys that were lying in a porcelain dish on the hall table.

  Claire stopped her. “I’ll drive,” she said.

  ******

  Ginny sat in the passenger seat smoking and sipping from her glass while Claire negotiated the way to Tano Road, another very desirable place to live. Acequia Madre was buried deep in the heart of town. Tano Road was in the foothills with a spectacular view of Santa Fe, which sparkled like a jewel box when the lights came on in the evening. The house was a sprawling, deceptively simple faux adobe hidden behind juniper bushes. Claire hated to speculate how much it had cost Evelyn to live here. Technically, it wasn’t her money that had paid the rent. It was MasterCard and Visa money. In a wider sense, everyone’s money. Still, since her good credit had been used, she would have preferred that the money had been invested and not wasted on rent.

  The house looked sad and empty. The windows, which were devoid of curtains and blinds, presented a blank face to the world. The fact that someone had died here could make it difficult to find a new tenant, Claire thought. On the other hand, there were New Age types in Santa Fe who might consider it a challenge to exorcise the spirit of the deceased.

  Ginny led Claire around the corner of the house to the kitchen, where a large rock lay on the ground beneath the window. Apparently someone had placed it there in order to see in. Ginny climbed onto the rock, but Claire was tall enough to look in without it. She saw the stove and the place on the floor where Evelyn’s body had been.

  “The last time I was here there was an outline of the body on the floor,” Ginny said.

  Claire didn’t need an outline; the decomposed body was clearly visible in her mind’s eye.

  Ginny climbed down from the rock and Claire followed her around the house, peering through the other windows. Claire wondered what Evelyn did all day in this house other than scheming to rip off her old friends. Was that enough to occupy her time?

  The furniture had the bare-boned look of a rental, and there wasn’t much of it. Once again Claire regretted that the money hadn’t been put to better use. The walls inside the house were totally blank—no photographs of family, friends or pets. There was no artwork. There were no books. When she came across the TV with the enormous screen and the wall full of stereo equipment in the living room, Claire began sinking into a black mood, but Ginny’s mood seemed to improve with each room that she inspected. She climbed up and down the rocks that had been placed under the windows without missing a step, even though she was wearing sandals that gave her ankles no support.

  “Seen enough?” she asked in a voice that was as relentlessly cheerful as the ice that tinkled in her glass.

  “Yes,” Claire said. “Evelyn could have died of natural causes.”

  “Possible,” Ginny agreed, although her tone lacked conviction.

  Claire got back into her truck feeling that all she had learned from this house was that Evelyn had lived a lonely life. They circled the city on Paseo de Peralta on their way back to Ginny’s. When they reached the Gerald Peters Gallery, Ginny asked Claire if she would pull in.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m doing nothing with my life here except going to gallery openings. I know that’s what single women in Santa Fe do, but can you imagine a worse place to find a man than a Santa Fe gallery opening? I have a job.”

  “Doing what?” Claire asked, honoring Ginny’s request and entering the gallery parking lot.

  “I write about the art scene for an online site called CultureVulture.com. The Peters Gallery has a lot of openings, and I cover them all. There’s a show of Renata Jennings’s abstractions that I wrote about last week. I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “You wrote about a show you haven’t seen?”

  “I have to. The notice goes up on the Web site before the show opens. Whatever people write about art, it’s all bullshit anyway, isn’t it? Besides, what can you say about a Renata Jennings painting? It’s red or it’s black.” She laughed. “I’d like to take a look at the exhibit to see if what I said is true.”

  Ginny stepped out of the truck with her glass in her hand. By now the ice had melted and she’d lost her musical accompaniment.

  “You won’t be allowed in the Peters Gallery with a glass in your hand,” Claire pointed out.

  “You’re right.” Ginny tossed whatever liquid was left on the ground and put the glass back in the truck.

  The size and scope of Gerald Peters made it seem more like a museum than a gallery. It was a monument to wealth and to beauty. Claire found herself speaking in hushed tones when she was inside.

  Ginny, however, wasn’t intimidated, aiming her finger, going “bang, bang” and making snide remarks about cowboy-and-Indian art as she led the way to the gallery that housed the Renata Jennings exhibit. Claire didn’t remember her being so rude when she was at the U of A, but she wasn’t drinking so much then. Sometimes Claire was amused by her outspoken, drunken honesty. Other times she couldn’t wait to get away from it. The loudmouthed excursion through the Gerald Peters Gallery made her want to run. They passed a suede sofa that Claire admired.

  “It’s worth more than my car,” Ginny said.

  They reached the exhibit in the rear gallery, minimalist paintings consisting of streaks of red and streaks of black.

  “There it is,” Ginny said. “Your basic red, your basic black. The very essence of picturelessness. Abstractions are either in the box or out of the box. These are in the box.”

  “That’s artbabble, Ginny,” Claire replied.

  “It’s descriptive, it’s now,” Ginny protested. “That’s
what CultureVulture likes.”

  “If you ask me, the Internet is ruining the English language,” the librarian in Claire responded. “Everything is written very fast. Nothing is ever proofread or even spell checked.”

  “I always spell check my submissions,” Ginny replied. Her tone was defensive, but her shoulders sagged and her mouth took a downward turn.

  Watching her spirits droop made Claire blame herself for being too critical. Although she was also aware that Ginny took her animation from the bottle and it could be time for a refill.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ginny said.

  Claire drove her home, not making any attempt to get out of her truck when they reached Ginny’s house.

  “Would you like to come in, have a little drink for the road?” she asked.

  “I better not,” Claire replied.

  “You could have a soda if you don’t want a real drink.” She stared at her fingernails, which Claire noticed had been chewed ragged. “I always feel down at this time of day, when darkness is coming on.”

  “The night skies in New Mexico are so beautiful. Do you ever go out and look at the stars?” Claire asked. “It might make you feel better about darkness and night.”

  “No,” Ginny said, putting her hand on the door. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

  It won’t be any easier to leave later than it is now, Claire thought. “I better go.”

  “Okay,” Ginny said. “Nice to see you, Clairier. Stay in touch.”

  “You, too,” Claire replied.

  On the drive back to Albuquerque, it occurred to her that it would have been wiser to have lingered longer. It was the hour when everyone was rushing to get home from work, and the setting sun beamed right in her eyes, magnifying every speck of dust and smashed insect on the windshield. At this hour Claire thought that no matter how carefully you managed to clean the glass, it would never be clean enough.

  Chapter Four

  WHEN SHE GOT HOME, NEMESIS WAS WAITING AT THE DOOR, expecting to be cuddled and fed.