A Bitch Called Hope (18 page)

What he didn’t say was no cop would ever want to partner with Lennox again. She blew it. And her partner died trying to protect her. A wave of grief and shame swept over her. “I know I was wrong. I loved him.”

Ham patted her hand. And reached into the bakery box.

“Now I’ve got Dan who’s doing a dandy impression of a thief,” she said.

“Maybe his mother authorized it.” Ham repeating himself.

“I’ve had a crush on this man since I was five,” she said.

“Just wait,” Ham said. “Finish the investigation. If he’s worth a damn, he’ll understand.”

Something like a sob escaped from her throat. It startled the hell out of both of them.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s enough heart-to-heart.”

He handed her the voodoo head. “I’ll finish with Father Mac,” Ham said. “Then what?”

“Dan,” she said. “Then the doc. Is there any way we can get at his patient list?”

“I don’t see how.”

“After we’re done here, I’ll talk to Aurora again. Doctor E is part of their social set. She’s got to know more than she’s told me. Then there’s Priscilla. What are we going to do about her?”

“She’s a signer on Scott’s credit cards,” Ham said. “She takes theater classes at the community college. No job.”

“I’m thinking Priscilla hears about the will from Scott. Even with Father Mac it’s not enough money to live well. She’s not the kind of girl who’d take to living on ramen,” Lennox said.

“What else?” Ham said.

“We’re down to five,” she said. “Something’s got to give.”

Chapter 28

Aurora answered the door barefoot, dressed in black yoga pants and a spandex top, her face freshly scrubbed and shiny with moisturizer. She headed back towards the bathroom, told Lennox over the new-agey temple bells playing on her stereo, to help herself to coffee.

Lennox poured herself a cup and stood before the glass wall overlooking the city. Aurora’s particular view was of the Willamette River, the Steel Bridge and the turquoise glass towers of the Convention Center. On a good day, which is to say a clear day, you could see Mount St. Helens and the Cascade Mountains. Today it was raining. It had been raining since October. The light was watery and weak but there was so much of it, living in the sky as her mother did.

Aurora was just like Delia: a privileged woman, a woman with a view, who believed that crime was the province of the lower classes and the people who fought crime were right there alongside the criminals at the bottom of the pyramid. On the valley floor. Aurora had cried when Lennox enrolled in the police academy. Is that what Lennox wanted— to be downwardly mobile?

Below Lennox a man in a brown shirt and trousers pushed a handcart stacked high with boxes towards the outdoor gear shop. Aurora returned to the living room at a brisk trot, a speck of toothpaste in the corner of her mouth. “Couldn’t this wait, darling? I really don’t have time now.”

Lennox said, “How well do you know Doctor Engstrom?”

Aurora affected a bored voice. “That’s why you’re here?” She turned and moved to the closet in the foyer, slipping shoes on her poor old lady feet, more clawed than human. She disappeared behind the coats and yanked out a yoga mat, telling Lennox, “Maybe we could do a late lunch?” Her voice was muffled in the closet.

“Aurora, you need to take this seriously. Delia is facing trial in two weeks without a credible defense. Kline keeps telling me to use you as a source. What could be easier? Obviously, he doesn’t know you.”

Aurora brushed past her. Lennox blocked her escape, her back braced against the door. Aurora wasn’t going anywhere until she got some answers.

“I’ll be locked out,” Aurora said. “Althea doesn’t permit lateness.”

Lennox was fed up to here with her mother, with Delia, Kline, these people who lived above it all. “I’m not going anywhere until you answer my questions. Don’t you realize what will happen to your best friend?”

“The waitress murdered Bill.”

Lennox told Aurora she was sick of this Upstairs, Downstairs bullshit. Someone close to Bill murdered him. Someone who knew about his medicine and where it was kept. The family.

“The Pike boys? Lennox, you grew up with those kids.”

Lennox didn’t remind her mother that a whole lot of growing up had happened from the last time Lennox had seen the family until now.

Aurora’s wall clock chimed the hour. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, now I’ve missed my class,” she said. Mumbling, she turned, stomped to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a pack of Parliament 100’s and a lighter. Without looking at Lennox she slid the glass door open out to her balcony. Suddenly the living room was filled with the sound of the city beneath them. A second later the acrid smell of cigarette smoke blew in.

Lennox joined her mother outside. A fine mist fell from the sky. From out here Lennox could barely make out the stereo’s Gregorian chant. Aurora blew streams of gray smoke into the gray air.

“I refuse to believe Delia’s boys had anything to do with Bill’s death,” Aurora said.

“So tell me about Doctor Engstrom: when did he become Delia’s special friend?”

“I didn’t know they had a relationship.” Aurora took a long pull off her cigarette and exhaled into the city smog. She said, “All these years, Delia sharing with me every little thing. I knew what she thought about her sons’ girlfriends and when Bill had strayed, or at least when Delia thought he had. When she had that cancer scare. Not a word about Michael.”

“When did she first meet the doctor?” Lennox said.

Aurora’s lips turned into a crooked half-smile. “I introduced them. Delia was looking for a new general practioner.”

“He’s your doctor, too?”

Her mother sagged against the iron railing, looking very unhappy. Nothing like getting slapped across the face with the truth. Of course he was her doctor.

“Who else do you know sees Doctor Engstrom?”

Most of her and Delia’s crowd. A few of them taking amphetamines for weight control. Doctor Engstrom believed that body fat was a conduit for cancer and other debilitating diseases, not to mention how it strained the skeleton and joints. “You want to live into your nineties, keep yourself lean,” Aurora said.

“If you want to live into your nineties, don’t smoke,” Lennox said.

Lennox recognized that look on her mother’s face. She’d seen the look on her own face in the mirror plenty of times after Tommy dumped her. It was the look of a disappointed woman. Doctor E had been her doctor and more.

“Were you friends with Doctor Engstrom?” Lennox asked the question knowing full well all the shadings of the word “friends.” Was the doctor someone who accompanied her to the symphony? Was he someone she told her secrets to over a cup of coffee? Had he touched her mother’s shoulder, helped her on with her coat? The thought sickened Lennox. He was odious.

“I thought we had an understanding,” Aurora said.

She stood looking out at the smudged horizon, the knobs of her spine visible beneath the spandex top. “Delia knew how I felt about him but she never said one word about them getting close. Not one word about wanting to marry him. I thought I knew her. I thought I knew Michael.”

“I’m sorry.” Lennox stepped closer to her mother and took the cigarette from her and stubbed it out in the planter. She enclosed her mother in a snug embrace. For once Aurora allowed herself to be hugged.

When Aurora stepped away Lennox said, “You’re better than him.”

Aurora nodded. She patted the package of cigarettes but didn’t take one out.

Dr. E had both her mother and Delia on a string. How many other privileged women? “Did he ever borrow money from you, Mother?”

Aurora’s lip trembled to keep from crying outright. “I’m finished talking about this,” she said and ran from the balcony into the condo. Lennox heard a door slam and walked down the hall. She stopped outside her mother’s bedroom door. Asked Aurora if there was anything she could get her. Aurora didn’t answer, so Lennox told her good-bye.

She rode the elevator alone all the way to the lobby. Outside, the sidewalks were crowded with suits talking on cell phones and shoppers headed to the next store. Lennox walked past the art galleries, wine bars and shops across Jamison Square on her way to her car. The water feature that fed the square’s tidal pools was shut off, and the limestone bricks were wet with rain. All the trees in the square were bare, the place deserted.

Lennox slumped on a wet park bench on the edge of the square. She wasn’t a crier. How could she be in her business? Just now, though, she felt like weeping in the worst way. Damn that guy for playing her mother. Aurora and Lennox, what a pair they were, both of them stupid about men. Both of them victims of good intentions, bad luck, bad timing and, admit it, bad judgment. Maybe once in a while you hit gold, look at her dad, but even a fool knows better than to count on luck. So how do you play the odds when it comes to men?

Two crows landed near her and flicked water from their glossy backs. It started to rain again. Lennox unfurled her umbrella. What had felt so rosy and right three short days ago with Dan now felt secretive and wrong.

Lennox was fucking up again. She knew it.

Chapter 29

Lennox sat at her desk feeling over-caffeinated, the last of the Voodoo donuts a doughy lump in her stomach. Talking to a subject’s employers, ex-employers, wives and ex-wives was all part of the job. Only these people were Dan’s ex-employers, Dan’s ex-girlfriend. And Lennox was still stinging from Dan lifting his old man’s credit card. If she were a normal woman she wouldn’t be digging through a guy’s trash. She would take the guy at face value. She’d sell shoes or enroll people for food stamps. She’d probably have a family.

Who was she kidding? She was a cop right down to the bone. So march, asshole. Pick up the phone and dial.

Start with the easy ones. Two investors in Dan’s business who had filed lawsuits against him. She called the first guy, Robert Fleishman, and identified herself. He hung up. Ditto with Frank Maas. So much for the easy ones.

March. Lennox took a deep breath and dialed Dan’s ex-girlfriend, Jillian Oster. Lennox told Jillian the purpose of her call. Counted four beats before Jillian answered, “What do you want to know?”

Jillian sounded tall. Tall with legs up to here. Lennox resisted the urge to ask her if she was blonde. Instead, she explained that she was investigating Bill Pike’s murder. “Dan is a bit of a stranger here,” Lennox said. “I’m hoping to get some insight into his character from people who know him as he is now.”

“Are you asking me could Dan kill somebody? No. He practically faints at the sight of blood.”

It hadn’t occurred to Jillian that not all murders involve blood, but she’d already moved on to Dan’s total capacity for lying, stealing and cheating. “I’ll never go out with a salesman again. I don’t care what he calls himself: broker, investment advisor, trader. Whatever. Give me a nice CPA any day.”

Lennox could hear ice clinking in a glass on the other end of the line. Was Jillian making herself a drink?

They were getting married, Jillian said. They had the date, June 13, she had the two-karat oval diamond with side diamonds and the Vera Wang wedding dress. “I’m still paying on the dress,” she said. Lennox felt her heart clench. There it was again. How
Will you marry me
was never a question asked of Lennox.

“What happened?” Lennox said.

“I couldn’t believe it. ‘I love you, I love you,’ he’s telling me. Meantime he’s lifting the blank checks from the back of my credit card statements and cashing them.” Her voice ratcheted up a couple notches, then she paused and Lennox heard the clatter of more ice cubes. “By the time I figured out what was going on I was sixty-two thousand in the red.”

Sixty-two thousand. Now they were talking grand theft. And if he could steal that much from his girlfriend, what about the Pike cookie jar? Mother of God, Lennox was half in love with a major felon. And when he got caught with his hand in the proverbial—what would he do then? Was he a murderer as well?

“Are you still there?” Jillian said.

“It’s just so much money.”

“Tell me,” Jillian said. Everything changed when his dad pulled out of Dan’s investment fund. It wasn’t like the stock market, Jillian explained. Dan invested the fund in mortgage companies, finance companies, places that paid the highest interest rates. Dan tells his dad you signed a contract. Dad says to hell with the contract. Dan scrapes together the money to cash out Dad only now he’s seriously undercapitalized.

“It got so I didn’t dare ask Dan how his day went,” Jillian said. “Every day was part of the ongoing train wreck. He started drinking more. I started picking up the dinner tab.”

It had gone on like that for close to six months. Dan told her to hold off on the wedding invitations. Then the credit card statements came.

“How long did it take before you realized?”

“Six weeks? It’s like he’d cheated on me.”

“I’m sorry,” Lennox said. So, so fucking sorry she could weep.

He had promised to pay Jillian back. Give me a week, just one more week. It was only when she hired a lawyer that he made good.

How?

“He’d run out of options, so he went back to visit his folks.” Jillian laughed, not in a funny way.

“I got the impression Dan came home regularly,” Lennox said.

“Uh-huh. You ever know a sales guy to be completely honest?”

Jillian had heard from Dan twice more after he left for Portland. Once to tell her his father’d died and that he had inherited. He’d pay her in full plus interest. The second time he called her he told her he was overnighting her money and thanked her for being patient. Thank you for being patient? Isn’t that how you would speak to any creditor?

“If you know anybody looking for a size-four wedding dress,” she said.

Lennox asked Jillian to fax the statements to her, then hung up the phone. Outside her window three crows perched on the telephone line. She sat staring at them, feeling like an idiot—thinking Dan was a sweet guy. Thinking they maybe had something. Dan was a felon, or would have been if his fiancée had pressed charges. Ultimately, it was Bill’s money that had kept both Pike sons out of prison. Assuming Jillian was telling the truth. There was always the chance she was an embittered ex-girlfriend out to destroy Dan’s good reputation.