Cold Case (5 page)

The absence of capital letters, the random placement of words on lines, the use of commas, seemed similar in both pieces. That was all I could say, except that I liked her work enough to read it aloud. To wonder what Aunt Bea would have said if she sat rocking in her needlepoint-cushioned chair, listening.

My attempt to set Thea's verses to music failed. I play Delta blues. The old stuff, written by slaves and sharecroppers, people with names like Blind Blake, Smilin' Cora, Robert L.

I got a new pair of surgical gloves from the box, slid them on my hands, working the fingers down into the finger holes till my hands were clasped like I was praying. First I shook the manila envelope, then gently squeezed it open, peered inside. Nothing. No hint of where it had come from, whether it had been protected in plastic or stacked on a shelf. I grasped the chocolate notebook by the binding, using thumb and index finger to dangle it over my desk. A loose sheet drifted to the floor like a spent paper airplane.

More poetry, a brief verse.

berlin, now

without a wall

can

you break down

the glistening gates?

always

keep the western wall,

the body cries

for wailing walls

(not in jerusalem)

It was Mayhew's cited proof: “berlin,
now
, without a wall.” Must have been written in or after 1989. The glorious penmanship seemed the same, the paper identical. Why was this one sheet detached? Had Mayhew added it, separating it from a later notebook, part of a series that made up the complete manuscript?

Thirty-five pages of the notebook had been used to write Chapter One. Fifteen remained blank. The Berlin page was extra, an addition. Was a single poem sufficient to pinpoint a year? Couldn't the young Thea have visualized Berlin without a wall?

“berlin,
now
”

I replaced the page in the notebook, the notebook in the envelope, locked the whole shebang in my desk drawer. Peeled off the gloves and tossed them in the trash.

Before I went to sleep, I called a Web-connected friend on the coast and got a home listing for Thurman W. Vandenburg. I dialed his number, just for the pleasure of waking him, breathing heavily, and hanging up.

Whoops, shouldn't do that, I thought, replacing the receiver as though my hand were on fire. DEA might have a bug on his phone, a high-tech trace. Vandenburg might have a phone that flashed the caller's number. If I boasted a clientele like Vandenburg's, I'd get myself every available gadget; cost—no object.

I'd have to find another method to get information on Carlos Roldan Gonzales, another way to convince his attorney to share.

5

Early the next morning I found Roz—my tenant, housecleaner, and sometime assistant—sniffing around my desk as though she could smell the cash I'd rejected the night before. Roz started out simply as my tenant, then requested reduced rent in exchange for house-cleaning, a task I despise. I accepted, immediately and gratefully. Had I tested her cleaning skills, she'd be paying more for her room. Had she left in a snit, I'd have been deprived of her karate training, post-punk art, and intuitive computer expertise. Not to mention her wide range of ever-changing fashion images.

Dressed in shiny black bike shorts and a tie-dye halter salvaged from a sixties headshop, she was updated for the nineties with cone-shaped inserts à la Madonna-does-Dietrich and hand-scrawled graffiti. “Boobs are Back,” she'd lettered across her left breast. A tattoo of sexually entwined eagles decorated her awesome cleavage. She was barefoot so I could appreciate her toenails, each a different shade of green: chartreuse to forest and beyond.

“Paying client?” she inquired, totally unabashed at being caught in apparent espionage. Maybe she'd crack a locked drawer or two while I watched. Roz has no shame.

“What makes you think so?”

“I heard you chatting last night. You coulda been talking to yourself, I guess. In two voices. Maybe you've got multiple personality disorder.”

Roz watches daytime TV talk shows. I try not to hold it against her, but I figure it contributes to her general delinquency.

“Privacy is nice,” I said.

“I wasn't eavesdropping,” she replied, a bit huffily for somebody practically ransacking my desk. “I was setting camera angles.”

“What?”

“Never mind. The guy want to hire you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Retainer?”

“Not yet.”

“Carlotta, ya gotta get the bucks up front,” she said.

“Man's good for it,” I replied.

“Something I could help out on?”

“Hard up for cash?” It's wise to know in advance when your tenant can't make the rent. Roz has never had financial problems before; far as I know she's a trust-fund baby whose fabulously rich parents will ante up any amount provided she doesn't appear at their fancy digs with magenta-and-blue striped hair, tattoos, and multiple nose rings.

“It's not like I'm flat broke,” she muttered. “I have a hanging,”

“A hanging?”

“A gallery show. At Yola's in the South End. Woman's crazy about my stuff. Says I'm gonna be the next Boston artist to score.”

“Score as in money?”

“Like I must be doing something wrong,” she said sadly. “I told the lady, yeah, like she can sell this batch of shit, but I'm never doing anything remotely resembling it again. I'd take it all back, but, like, I need bucks because of the film.”

“The film,” I echoed.

“I'm branching out,” Roz said.

“Into cinema?”

“Sort of.”

“You have actors?”

“Me.”

“Ah,” I said, repenting my foolish query. Who more could she need?

“I priced rentals. Cameras are like totally out-of-this-world expensive. Editing equipment, bummer.”

“The show, the ‘hanging,' won't bring enough?”

“It's consignment. She may not sell a single item.”

“Ya gotta get the cash up front, Roz,” I echoed cheerfully. I did not ask what the all-purpose word “item” entailed. I don't discuss Roz's appearance. I don't discuss the content, shape, or form of her artwork. I'm scared if I ever got started I'd never stop. I'm still suffering from her
art trouvé
period. Loosely translated: found art, and she found most of her stuff in my kitchen. I didn't think I'd attend this particular opening. It would be disconcerting to find my cheese grater hanging on the wall with a price tag on it. And I can't figure out where the hell else that cheese grater could have gone. I'm an investigator. I find things; I don't lose them.

“So you want work?” I asked Roz.

“Anything.”

“Run a check on an Adam Mayhew. Here's the address and phone. Brother-in-law of the posh Dover Camerons. Check the whole family. One's running for governor so it's not exactly low profile.”

She rubbed her thumb and forefingers in an international moolah gesture that allowed me full view of her fingernails, the reds and oranges clashing wildly with the toenail greens. “You get in good with
those
Camerons you can start a whole new game here. Rent an office. Pay your operatives a living wage.”

I handed over the precious manila envelope containing the possible Thea manuscript. I'd dusted the whole business for prints. The shiny paper and smooth cardboard cover defeated me. Not even a smudge to offer a more experienced technician. The rough manila envelope boasted plenty of prints. Alas, when I compared them to prints on the leatherbound folder Mayhew had reluctantly given me, they matched in so many particulars that I knew I'd detected my client's presence. I'd expected as much. In fact, I'd only done the fingerprint bit as an exercise. Used it as an excuse to keep the original documents. Where, precisely, was I supposed to come up with a genuine twenty-four-year-old Thea Janis print?

Maybe nobody'd cleaned her room since she'd left.

“While you're out,” I said to Roz, “Xerox this. Two copies. Don't lose it, okay?”

“Handle the Camerons right,” Roz advised, “and you can buy your own Xerox machine. The super-duper color model. Print your own money.”

“CopyCop's barely half a mile from here.”

“Line's half a mile long, too.”

“Then don't let me waste your precious time.”

“Lend me a Widener ID card.”

Widener is Harvard's main library.

“They allow you in the hallowed doors dressed like that?” I asked, tongue in cheek.

“You kidding? Half the Harvard kids look tons weirder than I do. I pick up style pointers.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I said, gazing at her attire.

“Believe it.” She sighed. “Money. Root of all evil, hah! You can get some good shit with it, I'm telling you.”

“Money is not the root of all evil,” I informed her automatically. “The desire or lust for money is—”

“Same thing, right?”

“Not exactly.”

“Picky, picky,” she said.

“Wear shoes,” I suggested. “The pavement's hot.”

“Right,” she said.

“Roz.” I was suddenly reluctant to let the notebook out of my sight. “I'll do the copying.”

“I didn't mean to bitch and moan. I really need a few bills. I'll do it, Carlotta.”

“Check the Camerons. Emphasis on the uncle, Adam Mayhew.” I fished another phony university ID card out of my collection. “Then head over to B.U., make like a grad student, and Xerox a few pages of genuine manuscript, if you can, handwritten by Thea Janis. Got it? Thea Janis.”

Roz thrust both cards into her cleavage. “Truly, I don't mind CopyCop. Line or no line.”

“Nothing personal,” I said, taking possession of the envelope.

Some things you need to do yourself. Roz is basically reliable. But “basically” didn't seem strong enough for Thea Janis's first message to the land of the living in twenty-four years.

6

Roz departed, stepping over a morning
Globe
that the delivery boy had forgotten to toss in the bushes. Balanced precariously in high-heeled mules that hid the weird toenail polish and accentuated everything else, Roz didn't bother to pick it up. I did. Picked it up and carried it into my office, where I searched each column for mention of the mysterious disappearance of Paolina's dad, the reputed Colombian drug lord, Carlos Roldan Gonzales. I double-checked every two-inch foreign news brief. For all the details Vandenburg Esquire had dished, the man could have been murdered in Sri Lanka.

Nothing on Roldan Gonzales.

The Camerons owned the front page, everything except the headline and a slim right-hand column, which were duly devoted to the latest Balkan disaster. Boston's other paper, the
Herald
, wouldn't have bothered to give the Balkans the lead. They'd have plunged straight to the nitty-gritty: Was Marissa Cameron ditching her husband in the midst of a gubernatorial race?

And who was I to criticize the
Herald?
I didn't even scan Serbs vs. Croats before wallowing in the details of Garnet Cameron's domestic brouhaha. I especially enjoyed the article's lofty tone, with the
Globe
earnestly implying that it merely covered such sordid fare because other, lowlier, tabloids considered it newsworthy. I wondered when the
Globe
would start picking up on the pregnant-by-aliens death row inmates.

Normally I can leave the peccadilloes of the rich and famous alone, thank you very much. But this same Garnet Cameron, who couldn't seem to hang onto his second wife, was brother to the missing Thea. So I took a gulp of orange juice and waded in.

At twenty-three, Marissa Gates Moore Cameron had been wed two years. Before that she'd briefly attended an Ivy League college, and taken stabs at acting, modeling, and singing careers. A photo caught her campaigning in her “trademark yellow dress,” a blond Miss America type, the girl-next-door with pizazz. Dazzling smile, sweet perfection, she looked as if she could twirl a baton while jogging as far as the nearest Elizabeth Arden spa.

Yesterday, she'd missed a scheduled interview for a glossy women's magazine, as well as the opening of a pet-project senior citizens center in Brockton.

Sounded to me like she was throwing a spoiled-brat tantrum. Maybe Garnet forgot to send her flowers. Maybe her yellow dress had a ketchup stain acquired at a campaign-sponsored weenie roast.

Her family background—the toney yet sporadic education, the European travels, the near-misses at film stardom—was all trotted out as though she were a fledgling Princess Di. The
Globe
got in another dig at the other paper by suggesting that a recent
Herald
column speculating on the state of the Camerons' May-December marriage might have been the last straw in this perilous Would-they-stay-together-for-the-sake-of-the-campaign? drama.

I tried to care. My folks didn't even stay together for the sake of the kid. They did try to avoid divorce for the sake of the money—my mother being too poor to support us, my dad knowing he'd have to shell out more for separate accommodations than he did for rent on our crummy Detroit apartment.

I doubted Marissa or Garnet found continuing financial stability an overwhelming concern.

I downed a third glass of orange juice. I could have used more sleep. I get nasty when I don't sleep.

Thea's curious novel-cum-journal had kept me awake. Both her prose and her poetry had a strange uneasy power. Thirty-six pages made me want to know everything about her, discover the smallest detail about her disappearance.

Or death.

No smiling author's face decorated the dust jacket of
Nightmare's Dawn
. The photo Adam Mayhew had given me was professional work. A thin, waiflike creature stared forth from an arty black-and-white eight-by-ten, all wistful eyes and exquisite cheekbones. It wasn't a perfect face. It had flaws. The lips were immensely wide, full, pouty. The chin was too small to balance the mouth. She wore a short white dress, a flowered sun hat, a knowing look that contrasted sharply with her virginal knees-together pose.