Shimmer (11 page)

‘Still living with his dad, though.'

Grace shot her a sideways glance. ‘I hope you're not planning on taking this negative attitude to lunch.'

‘I'm just telling you how I feel,' Claudia said. ‘Or have I lost that right too?'

Grace slowed the car a little. Traffic on this section of Collins was even lighter than usual today, which meant they were going to be there in no time, and she wanted to get past this before they reached the Golden Beach house.

‘What are you talking about, sis?' she said. ‘What rights have you lost?'

Claudia's hands clenched into fists in her lap. ‘I've strayed,' she said, tautly. ‘I've committed adultery. I've been a total fool. I've abandoned my sons and left my husband to fend for himself without so much as an explanation.' Her eyes filled. ‘I've lost the right to be
me
.'

Grace saw a turning up ahead into a small hotel car park, glanced in the rear-view mirror, then swung in and stopped the car.

‘Come here.' She put out her arms, and Claudia leaned against her and began to weep. ‘You've lost no such rights at all,' she told her. ‘You've been human, that's all. Don't cry, baby.'

‘But what I've done to Dan is so terrible.'

‘You've done it to yourself too,' Grace said. ‘And I know you'll find the way to put it right again, if that's what you want to do.'

‘By telling him, you mean,' Claudia said desolately. ‘But what if he can't forgive me?'

‘I think he will,' Grace said. ‘Because I'm guessing that he loves you way too much to want to lose your marriage.'

‘So long as I don't wait too long.' Claudia pulled away.

‘You're going to have to judge that for yourself, sis.'

Only one of many judgement calls that Claudia was going to have to make, Grace supposed. And no sign of Jerome Cooper since yesterday morning, but still . . .

‘Are you really up to this lunch?' she asked.

Joshua, who'd been awake but content until now, who was in general an excellent traveller, gave a sudden squawk of impatience.

‘It's OK, sweetheart,' Grace told him. ‘We'll be on the move again in a minute.'

‘We don't need a minute,' Claudia said. ‘I'm OK.' She opened her purse, found a tissue and wiped at her eyes. ‘I'll be fine.' She looked back at her nephew and smiled. ‘It'll do me good to focus on someone else for a change, won't it, Joshua?'

And Joshua beamed at his aunt, sealing the deal.

‘Let's go visit with family,' Claudia said.

29

Sanjiv Adani's home was no crime scene. Anjika, having given Sam and Martinez nothing further to work with, their subsequent search, warrant obtained, of her late brother's apartment – a second floor walk-up in a two-storey house on Bay Road, a few blocks from the Lincoln Road Mall – provided little more in the way of clues.

The essentially intrusive task of sifting through the remains of a dead person's life had never come easily to Sam. When the victim was as tidy as Sanjiv Adani, the job could be at least more swiftly accomplished, but the results, all too often, tended to be nothing more than skin deep. No tell-tale stains, no unwashed crockery to provide prints or DNA, no old garbage to sift through, no give-away, or at least, intriguing Post-it stickers on the refrigerator door.

Adani had been a neat, hygienic man and also, on the face of it, a conventional one, his home showing the influences, the detectives felt, of both his upbringing and his good hotel training.

‘There's order and quality here,' Sam said. ‘Not just show.'

‘How does falling for a male nightclub dancer sit with that?' asked Martinez.

‘Maybe he just fell in love,' Sam said.

‘Let's don't forget lust,' Martinez said.

The photographs on display in Adani's sitting room were all of family, but his bedside table drawer yielded a black-and-white publicity shot of a bare-chested, well-muscled but lean and darkly handsome young man, signed in thick blue pen:
For Sanjiv, from your crazy boy, Eddie.

‘He kept it after the break-up,' Martinez said. ‘So I guess maybe love.'

‘Or infatuation,' Sam added.

They found nothing in the apartment to indicate a wild lifestyle. Tylenol and an old, unfinished bottle of Valium were the only pills in the bathroom cabinet, alongside a couple of decongestant nasal sprays and a collection of colognes, body balms and antiperspirants. An old Dominick Dunne novel with a scarlet leather bookmark thirty-two pages in, sat beside the bed, which was neatly made with clean blue linen, nice quality pillows and no bedspread. A black linen shirt, laundered and pressed, lay on the top sheet.

‘A reject, maybe,' Sam conjectured, ‘while he was getting ready for his last night out.'

‘Sharp,' Martinez said.

‘Maybe not as sharp as what he actually wore,' Sam said.

They found no hints of where he might have been heading on Thursday evening. Nothing on his computer – which they would, of course, still take away for more detailed inspection – no journal, nothing marked on his
New Yorker Cats
calendar.

‘Not even his mom's birthday,' Martinez pointed out.

‘He might not have needed to mark that down to remember it,' Sam said. ‘Or maybe he keeps another calendar at the hotel someplace we didn't get to see.'

They already knew that Adani had no office or even a personal drawer at the Montreal; only a steel locker, in which they'd found a clean pair of Y-fronts, a pressed white cotton shirt, a wine-coloured tie with the hotel's M motif embroidered on it and a book about the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

‘Is this all a little antiseptic?' asked Martinez now. ‘Kind of dull?'

‘Maybe,' said Sam, taking another look around the sitting room. ‘Or maybe it's just like we figured: he was a good, well-trained son.' He paused. ‘With dreams of his own.'

‘And a horny dancer ex-boyfriend,' Martinez added.

Eddie Lopéz had a rap sheet. Minor stuff, mostly – reckless driving, felony possession and prostitution misdemeanors.

‘And one arrest for domestic battery,' Sam noted, back at the office.

Which sent Lopéz to the top of their list of one, but with Satin – the Little Havana nightclub mentioned by Anjika Adani – not set to open till evening and no one there responding either to the doorbell or their phone calls; and with too many Eddie, Eduardo and Edward Lopéz listings in Miami-Dade to start trawling through until they had no choice, Sam and Martinez decided to head back over to the Hotel Montreal instead.

It was a nice enough place, a three-star hotel, superficially well-run and maintained; a fair bet for a young man planning an upward learning curve in the business. The manager, Carl Lundquist, had only good things to say about Adani, but Gloria Garcia was still the most loquacious and, at least on the face of it, the most caring that her colleague had been murdered. Though neither she nor anyone else on duty had anything immediately helpful to offer the detectives.

No quarrels between Adani and other personnel that anyone was willing to talk about; no run-ins with hotel guests; no promotion over another colleague that might have left a sour taste. No complaints or even grumbles against the dead man. No love affairs originating in the hotel. No one knowing that much about Adani, described by two people as ‘private'.

They wrote down names, addresses and telephone numbers, took lists of off-duty personnel, of shift and agency workers, copies of the recent guest register and duty rosters for the last two months; anything that might help them to assemble as full a picture as possible of the victim's working life.

On the way out, they passed Gloria Garcia in reception.

‘I just remembered something,' she said.

‘Please,' Sam said, hope rising, ‘go ahead.'

‘I remembered the boyfriend's name was Eddie,' she said.

‘Nothing else?' Martinez said.

‘I know it isn't much,' she said.

‘Anything you remember is a big help,' Sam said.

And hoped she hadn't seen the exasperation in his partner's eyes.

30

David Becket, grey-haired, hawk-nosed, even more rumpled-looking these days than he had been prior to his semi-retirement, had always possessed a wonderful knack with people. With children especially, making him – his medical skills aside – such a popular paediatrician, and with the adult patients, too, who'd flocked to the free walk-in downtown clinic he'd run with a colleague for a number of years. He had fine, sensitive instincts, usually knowing when to push troubled people and when to leave them in peace. Which was a gift Grace liked to think she shared, but which she'd also had to learn to set aside on occasions as a psychologist with less than an hour at a time to draw her patients out.

Saul had it, too, this gift of warmth.

‘Hey,' he said, coming out onto the driveway as they arrived. ‘All my favourite people.' And then he swept his baby nephew up in his arms, and Joshua squealed with pleasure.

‘Almost all,' David added.

‘Sam sends you both big hugs,' Grace said.

‘Cops,' Claudia said. ‘Always working.'

And then she flushed, remembering Saul's lost love, who had also been a cop.

‘Don't be so sensitive,' Saul said, easily. ‘I'm not.'

His voice was still huskier than it had been, a legacy of last year's horrors along with the scars on his neck and some residual stiffness in his right shoulder, but Saul was alive and well and content with his ever-growing ability to create beautiful and useful items out of fine wood.

‘It worries me sometimes,' David had said to Grace a month ago, ‘that he's never going to get properly back out there while he's working and living with his old man.'

‘He gets out,' Grace had told him. ‘And I have absolutely no doubt that he'll leave when he's good and ready. You worry too much.'

Now, David looked across his living room at Saul, sitting on the floor with Joshua's aunt and the baby, all playing with fabric bricks and a big stuffed dog.

‘What's up with Claudia?' he asked quietly.

‘She has a few problems,' Grace said.

‘I'm sorry to hear that,' David said. ‘Anything I can do?'

‘I don't think so,' Grace said. ‘I think she'll be OK.'

And wished for that to be true.

31

Sam and Martinez were at Satin a half-hour before opening.

‘Lopéz quit.' The manager, Manuel Vega, was tall and bald, his open-necked shirt wet with perspiration, feeling impatient and not troubling to conceal it.

‘When did he quit?' Martinez asked.

Vega shrugged. ‘A few days ago.'

‘We need a date, sir,' Sam said.

‘It's about a week ago.' The manager mopped his face with a checked handkerchief, then stuffed it back in his pants pocket. ‘You need details, it'll take some time.'

‘About a week' meant before the killing.

Not what they'd hoped for.

‘We need them,' Martinez said, anyway, glad to piss the guy off.

‘Why did Mr Lopéz leave?' Sam asked.

‘Like I said, he quit, I didn't fire him.'

‘Didn't he give you a reason?' Sam persevered.

‘Dancers like Lopéz are a dime a dozen.' Vega shrugged again. ‘He didn't tell me zip, I didn't ask.'

‘He get a pink slip?' Martinez wanted to know.

‘Sure,' the other man said. ‘Everything legal here.'

‘Glad to hear it,' Martinez said.

‘I don't want any trouble.' Grudging respect shown for the first time.

‘We're not here to give you any, sir,' Sam said. ‘But we would appreciate any information you can give us on Mr Lopéz.'

‘I can find you the address he gave us,' Vega offered.

Sam thanked him, then asked if Lopéz had been friendly with any of the other dancers or staff at the bar.

‘Go ask them.' Vega pulled out his handkerchief again, mopped his glistening forehead. ‘I gotta take a shower before we open up.'

‘We'll ask them OK,' Martinez said. ‘Right now we're asking you.'

Manuel Vega glowered at him, then turned to Sam. ‘I don't recall him being special pals with anyone, but I mind my own business. So long as the dancers dance and the bartenders pour drinks, we all get along.'

‘You haven't asked,' Martinez said, ‘why we're interested in Mr Lopéz.'

‘Like I told you,' Vega said, ‘just another dancer.'

‘Yeah,' Sam said. ‘A dime a dozen. You told us.'

They were getting nowhere.

No one at Satin had anything helpful they were willing to share, not even the slightest hint of subtext or innuendo. Lopéz, they all said, had been easy enough to get along with, but had kept himself to himself.

‘Private,' Sam remarked between interviews. ‘Like Adani.'

‘Not a hanging offence,' said Martinez.

And so it had gone on, no one giving them anything, except for one waitress, a pretty young woman called Trina, who thought he'd been in a relationship, but if he'd ever mentioned the other guy's name, she couldn't remember it.

‘But he said it was a guy?' Martinez said.

Trina shrugged. ‘He didn't need to.'

No joy at Lopéz's apartment either, a third floor walk-up two blocks from the club. No answer at his front door, his mailbox on the first floor unlocked and overflowing with junk mail and bills, and none of the dancer's neighbours responding to their knocking either.