The Confidence Woman Read online

  It occurred to Claire that Ginny’s word didn’t have to be the last word about the dinner with Elizabeth. She found the Forest Watch URL and typed it into her computer. The Web site came up. The board members were shown, including Elizabeth Best. Claire couldn’t disagree with Ginny’s assessment that they all looked like they had benefited from trust funds. For someone whose wineglass was always half full, Ginny was capable of acute observations. The man who ran the organization was named Brian Duval. There was a photograph of him and the rest of the staff, all of whom seemed to be young, good-looking and athletic. Forest Watch had a workshop coming up in Albuquerque on the spotted owl, and Elizabeth Best would be leading that workshop.

  Claire looked up her number and called. “Has Detective Amaral been in touch with you about the night of April twenty-first?” she asked.

  “Yes. I told him I was in Santa Fe that night having dinner at Santa Café with Ginny. I have the credit card receipt to prove it.”

  “I had lunch with Ginny yesterday.”

  “Was she sober?”

  “She didn’t appear to be. She told me you’re involved in the Forest Watch endangered-species program.”

  “Didn’t I tell you that myself?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “When I talk to Ginny about Forest Watch, she makes rednecked remarks like the only good wolf is a dead one.”

  “She enjoys ticking you off.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “I read that you’re leading a workshop in Albuquerque on the spotted owl.”

  “I am. Next week.”

  “Is it open to the public?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to come if that’s all right with you.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Could we meet for dinner afterward?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have time for dinner, but you’re welcome to come to the workshop. Let’s have a drink anyway.”

  “Do you need a place to stay when you’re in town?”

  “No. I’ll be staying at the Hyatt where the workshop is taking place.”

  ******

  When Lynn’s video of Miranda Kohl arrived, Claire made a bowl of popcorn and played it on her VCR. One of the pleasures of being single was that she could eat popcorn and watch videos whenever she wanted to. This one began with the Lemon Pledge commercial. An old woman in a faded dress slowly polished her furniture. She wore her white hair in a topknot and had the shuffling movements that came with osteoporosis and advanced age.

  “Let me help you with that, Grandma,” said a sweet little girl in a party dress.

  “I’ve always used Lemon Pledge,” the grandma said.

  “That’s why your furniture is so beautiful,” the little girl said, smiling at her reflection in a highly polished table. “I can see my face in it.”

  The commercial was as saccharine as overly sweetened tea. Claire played it several times, hitting the pause button whenever Miranda faced the camera. In the old woman’s face she still saw something of the wide-eyed ingenue she had known.

  She watched the rest of the video. Most of the segments were bit parts in TV series. In one Miranda played a mother. In another she played a hard-edged businesswoman in a power suit. Claire supposed those were the two roles that were available for actresses in their fifties. As the mother, Miranda’s hair was russet-colored and curly. The businesswoman’s was slick and black. Claire thought she was more successful as the mother than the businesswoman. Miranda’s ingenuous quality didn’t serve her well when she played hard-edged. Elizabeth had called her a space case and the Miranda Claire remembered had been a rather vague and dreamy person. When Elizabeth had confronted her, she hadn’t fought back. She dropped out of school rather than stand up for her innocence, yet she’d had the spunk to go after parts. Perhaps because she could play a role and didn’t have to be herself. It was easy enough to assume an actress wasn’t what she pretended to be, but most likely the sentiments expressed in her e-mail were honest. Her life had turned out better than Evelyn’s. Lynn continued to be proud of their friendship and to follow her career with interest. She thought Miranda lived a more exciting and expressive life than she did, but if Miranda’s life was so satisfying, how to explain Erwin Bush? To be fair, Claire had remained married to Evan for twenty-eight years, and she’d always have trouble explaining that.

  She remembered that somewhere in her house she had a photo album full of sorority pictures. She searched through bureau drawers and closets until she found it buried on the floor of the guest-room closet beneath a box of family photos. It was a U of A photo album with a photomontage of the campus on the cover. Claire opened the album and came across photographs of Evan when they first started dating in her junior year after she got back from a semester in Europe. A window that opened on her life in Europe closed once she met him. He looked serious and preppy then and he looked serious and preppy now, although with more stomach and less hair. But Claire liked to think that she had changed.

  She found a class photo from junior year when all the sisters whose lives had recently intertwined lived in the same corridor on the third floor. Except for Evelyn they all looked surprisingly fresh and prettier than she had remembered. As she recalled, all had boyfriends then except for Evelyn. Had they been cruel to her without being aware of it? Had rejection by the boss in Denver triggered some unhappy memory of an earlier rejection?

  Looking beyond the sixties clothes and hairdos, Claire stared into the faces seeking some indicator of what they had become. The firmness of Elizabeth’s chin indicated she was already accustomed to getting her own way. Ginny was the perpetual little sister with short hair who tagged along behind the boys. Claire remembered her as being athletic. Somehow her positive energy had turned sour and she had become a woman who drank too much. Lynn had a sunny smile, but Claire knew the darkness behind the sun. Until she met Steve, she had been filling the void with some very worthless men. In this photograph Miranda’s theatricality was apparent. Her hair was dark and curly and she wore it in a tangled hippie mop. A long scarf was tossed casually over her shoulder. Claire studied her own picture and found her smile to be more confident than she remembered. She always considered herself a late bloomer. It took a while to grow into her bone structure and discover her personality and her looks. Much of the transformation took place while she was traveling around Europe with Pietro Antonelli. As her mother told her after she came back, “You were a sweet child, but you’re much more interesting now.”

  Evelyn was in the center of the group, a plain, overweight lump even then, a woman men were not likely to notice. She looked older than the other sisters, possibly because she was the only one who wasn’t smiling. When had a not-wanting-to-please attitude turned into a wanting-to-harm attitude? Claire wondered. Would anyone have thought then that she was a thief or that someone else in the photo could turn out to be a murderer? When this picture was taken, Evelyn might already have been robbing her friends. Could theft have become an addictive behavior, a drug that she turned to in times of stress?

  Chapter Eleven

  CLAIRE HEARD NO MORE FROM DETECTIVE AMARAL and fell into the routine of dealing with books and avoiding Harrison Hough at work, of doing tai chi and tending to her rose garden at home, hoping the detective’s investigation had taken him elsewhere.

  She went to Elizabeth Best’s presentation on the spotted owl, which was held in an upstairs conference room at the Hyatt Regency. Claire liked the Hyatt; it had an elegance that was uncharacteristic of Albuquerque and reminiscent of Arizona. Elizabeth was late so Claire had time to study the rest of the people in the room. It was a large room and was nearly full, not surprising since people in New Mexico had strong opinions about preservation of the spotted owl. The people in this room—younger environmental activists as well as older birders—were on the preservation side.

  Just at the point when the audience began to get restless, Elizabeth swept into the room
followed by a man Claire recognized as the Brian Duval she’d seen on the Web site. The center of a whirlwind with a man in her orbit was exactly where Elizabeth liked to be. While Brian took the mike and introduced Elizabeth as “one of the foremost environmentalists in the Southwest,” Claire wondered whether Ginny would classify him as a hunk. He had the height and the curly blond hair but wore the narrow, thick-rimmed glasses of an intellectual. She thought he was better looking on the computer screen than he was in person.

  Elizabeth thanked him for the introduction. She began her presentation by saying, “One of the things I hate about this country is…” Then she read from a prepared statement without looking up. As she spoke it became clear that what she hated about this country was that not everyone saw things the way she did. Her hand made choppy gestures while she demonized the opposition, the loggers who opposed protecting the spotted owl on the grounds that protection cost them their jobs. Forest Watch was often accused of being a group of idle rich people indifferent to the needs of others to earn a living. In some respects Elizabeth’s performance was that of a woman unwilling to make any concessions to the opposition or even to her audience. She seemed to have little experience with public speaking. Claire was an academic and academics learned how to speak before an audience, to look up and make eye contact, to pause for emphasis, to speak slowly and distinctly, to pace themselves. Speaking in public was how most academics earned their living. Environmentalists were more likely to be amateurs. Although people put money into the environmental movement, few took any out. Claire supposed Brian was paid a salary, but she doubted it was much of one.

  In spite of the unprofessional presentation, the audience gravitated to Elizabeth after it was over. Her looks and her passion for her subject made her a magnet. Claire stood at the back of the room and waited while Elizabeth basked in the glow. She was conscious of time and didn’t like to be left cooling her heels. As time passed she got annoyed. If it hadn’t been so important for her to talk to Elizabeth, she might have walked out.

  After Elizabeth had given everyone else their due, she looked up. “Claire,” she said. “We were supposed to be having a drink, weren’t we? I’m so sorry I forgot.”

  The remark had the effect of making Claire feel belittled, which she supposed was the intent. She wondered whether Elizabeth’s rudeness was simple arrogance or the sign of an insecure person unconsciously seeking the rejection she felt she deserved. When it came to human motivation, Claire was more inclined to accept the complicated than the simple. If she had been trying to renew an acquaintance with Elizabeth, she would have gone no further, but motive and character were critical in the death of Evelyn Martin, so she swallowed her anger and asked, “Do you have time?”

  Elizabeth looked at her watch. “I can give you half an hour.”

  “Let’s go down to the bar,” Claire said. Elizabeth wasted precious minutes stopping to talk to people she saw on the way downstairs, but when they got to the bar, she spent an hour at a table with Claire. Elizabeth had an elastic sense of time that expanded when it served her own interests. They began by talking about the spotted owl. Claire was in agreement that endangered species should be protected whatever the cost. She thought Forest Watch’s tactics were unnecessarily confrontational, but she didn’t say so. Eventually she was able to direct Elizabeth’s attention to Amaral’s investigation.

  “I assume asking about our alibis means he suspects one of us,” Elizabeth said.

  “That would be my assumption,” Claire replied. “Did he give you a description of the woman the runner saw arguing with Evelyn?”

  “No, but she must resemble us or why would he be asking for our alibis? The person he ought to be investigating is Miranda Kohl. She has a better motive than any of us do.” She sampled the bar nuts, grimaced and said, “Too salty. Have you got anything else?” she asked the waiter, who went off to do her bidding.

  “Amaral contacted Miranda,” Claire said. “Her alibi is that she was on location in Mexico.”

  “How did he find out about her?”

  “I told him,” Claire admitted.

  “You? Why?”

  Claire felt that telling Elizabeth the truth would make her vulnerable, but lying was not her forte. She didn’t trust herself to do it well. “Self-interest, I suppose. I don’t have an alibi. I was home with my cat on April twenty-first.”

  “Really?” said Elizabeth, turning the spotlight of her attention on Claire. “Well then I can see why you’d want to direct Amaral’s attention toward Miranda. I have a very good alibi myself.” Her tone suggested she thought Claire was dim for not concocting her own alibi.

  “To tell you the truth, it struck me as rather convenient for you and for Ginny,” Claire replied.

  “Oh? Well, I was in Santa Fe at a Forest Watch seminar that day. I have a credit card receipt for dinner at the Santa Café.”

  “Which wouldn’t prove you had dinner with Ginny.”

  “Ginny told you we had dinner together, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, and she was drinking when she said it.”

  The waiter came back with a bowl of unsalted nuts. Elizabeth sampled them and thanked him.

  “Surely you’ve noticed that Ginny likes to drink.”

  “Was she drunk when you got together?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Most likely.”

  “What time did you have dinner?”

  “We started with drinks at five. Dinner went on till nine or ten o’clock, I’d say.”

  “That’s a long time for you and Ginny to spend together.”

  “We had a lot of catching up to do.”

  “You sent her out into the dark after dinner and let her drive home drunk?”

  “I suppose I did. She wouldn’t have given me the car keys so what was I supposed to do? I wasn’t prepared to wrestle them from her.”

  Claire believed that part of it—she couldn’t imagine Elizabeth trying to wrestle the keys away from Ginny—but she didn’t believe the two of them had enjoyed a long dinner.

  “You ought to spend more time establishing your own innocence instead of questioning mine,” Elizabeth said. “You’re the one with no alibi.”

  Claire had noticed that Brian Duval was leaning against the doorway watching them and apparently waiting for the conversation to end. Elizabeth’s back was to the door and she hadn’t seen him yet.

  “Brian Duval is here,” Claire said.

  “Is he?” Elizabeth smiled. “Are we done?” she asked.

  “I’m done,” Claire said.

  “Me, too,” Elizabeth replied. She stood up, went to the door and walked down the hall with Brian, leading Claire to think that was who she was having dinner with.

  Claire had made plans to meet her coworker Celia Alegria at the KiMo Theatre, a short walk from the Hyatt, to see a production of The Barber of Seville. The drink with Elizabeth had taken longer than she expected and it was almost time for the show. She left her car downstairs in the Hyatt parking lot and walked to the KiMo, a wonderfully ornate theater and one of her favorite buildings in Albuquerque. The Duke City had miles of undistinguished architecture interspersed every now and then with a jewelencrusted treasure like the KiMo.

  Celia was waiting for Claire in the lobby. She always dressed with style, even at work. Tonight she was wearing a red velvet Navajo dress with a broomstick pleated skirt and a necklace made out of oversized silver beads. The color complemented her long black hair. Claire thought of Celia as a macaw among the sparrows at the library. She held her own in the KiMo.

  “You look great,” Claire said.

  “You’re looking good yourself,” Celia replied.

  “Me?” Claire wore a gray dress with an antique silver pin from Mexico. “I think I fit in better in the Hyatt than I do here. Here I feel like a plain Jane.”

  “Never think that,” said Celia. She stepped back and examined Claire. “You have a simple style that works for you.”

  They entered the theater, took their
seats and waited for the curtain to go up.

  “How was your meeting with your friend?” Celia asked.

  “All right. Elizabeth is a person who gets her own way regardless of the effect on anyone else, one of those complicated people you either spend your lifetime trying to figure out or you run away from as fast as you can. She doesn’t get along very well with women, but there’s usually a man around willing to put up with her.”

  “Capable of murder?” Claire had confided in Celia her fears about the death of Evelyn Martin. She trusted Celia not to talk about it at work.

  “Who? Elizabeth? Or the man?”

  “Either one.”

  “I don’t think the murder was a premeditated act. If it was committed in fear or anger or self-defense, I suppose Elizabeth was as capable as any of us. More capable, maybe, than some of us. She has a temper. As for a man, a woman was spotted at Evelyn’s house the night she supposedly died.” Considering that a man might have been involved cracked open a few doors in the house of Evelyn Martin’s death, but the opera began and distracted Claire from opening them any wider.