SUMMER of FEAR (33 page)

She lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. "I had a
rather long meeting with State Attorney General. Allen Boster. In Sacramento. I
spent the night."

I felt my heart flutter and become light as I considered the
possibilities of the
People
v.
Martin Parish.
"And?"

"There's a chance he'll open an investigation of
Martin.

"What did you tell him?"

"Just about everything. He'll take my deposition soon. You will be
called later."

"We'll still need the evidence."

"Then let's go get it, Russ."

I looked at her, unable to decide whether this new direction would lead
to exoneration for myself or to even more pressure from Martin.

I could only
assume she had written Martin Parish out of his five hundred grand. Perhaps she
had written me out, too. I could blame her for neither. And she had gone to the
top to get what she wanted. Very smart. Very Amber.

In Amber's house,
the heat was stale and suffocating, but the sense of dread raised in me was
even worse. How clearly I remembered that night of July 3, my anticipation of a
secret life, my innocence, my stupidity, my desire; how clearly I remembered
the smell of human flesh so strong, the sight of Alice, the painted walls, the
resounding echo of insanity.

Amber's room. I worked the carpet on my hands and knees, with a
flashlight and a comb. It was unreasonably clean. I rolled the bed away to get
under it, but it wasn't likely that a piece of Martin Parish would be under the
bed, and there wasn't. I inspected the fresh coat of paint, under which the
spray-painted red of
awaken or die in
ignorace
was still scarcely visible. I checked the trash cans in the
side yard for some clue to this artist—a can of paint, a brush, a mixing stick,
a spattered shirt or drop cloth—and discovered not one useful thing at all. I
tried the garage and found more of nothing useful. He'd probably loaded it all
into his car by the time I saw him that night—
-yes,
he was wiping his
final fingerprints from the gate knob!—then stopped behind a store on his way
home to use the dumpster. Could I match a dried drop of paint from the lining
of Parish's trunk to the paint on Amber's wall? I couldn't match shit shinola,
I reminded myself, but someone like Chet Singer could. But Chet Singer
wouldn't. I thought of driving Parish's route home and trying the dumpsters,
but they'd have been emptied by now. I began to feel just a little bit sick. I
desired a large quantity of alcohol, and I was hungry. My face was sore. Amber
hovered, wordless.

When the doorbell rang in the cavernous entryway, I could feel the
length of its diminishing echo all the way down my back. We were standing in
the master bedroom. I looked at my watch. It was 9:45
p.m
. Amber searched my face with a worried that looked close
to panic. I pointed to her purse, which she had hung over a bedpost. She
retrieved a little .32 and handed it to me, and I nodded her downstairs, toward
the door.

The doorbell rang again as we walked across the marble floor. Amber
peered through the peephole, then looked at me with a quizzical expression. I
looked myself. Narrowed to the point of caricature, seemingly yards away, stood
the plump and forlorn figure of Chester Fairfax Singer. He was toting an
ancient misshapen leather suitcase.

"How badly have you contaminated this
scene?" he asked.

I stood back and let him in. "Nice to see you,
too, Chet. Chester Singer—Amber Mae Wilson."

He regarded her momentarily. "You're somewhat
larger than on the hair-conditioner bottle," he said without a trace of
humor. "And lovelier, too."

Wearing fresh latex gloves, we used clean paper
towels to check the drains for blood, and found none. Surely Parish had washed
up here, but surely he was careful enough to run the water long and wipe the
grills himself. The hand and bath towels looked fresh, but Chet took them down,
laid them on the tile counter, and worked them over with a magnifier. They
revealed nothing. I felt stupid.

"What
about fingerprints?" Amber asked.

"He wiped the gate knob on his way out, so he
probably wiped everything else, too."

"We'll
spray and dust to our hearts' content," said Chet.

"Even a
homicide captain can leave a mistake behind. In fact, I am reminded of Martin's
earlier days as a detective—he was always just a little bit impatient and
contemptuous of the crime scene specialists. He was not a man who worshiped
detail, would not be surprised at all if Mr. Parish managed to leave us
something... telling."

"What about the weapon?" Amber asked.

"He likely removed it when he removed the body," Chester said
patiently.

"How did he get her into his car without the neighbor seeing?"

"I can attest to your privacy here, Ms. Wilson. Your nearest
neighbors are two hundred yards away. It was dark. It was late. How big is this
lot, by the way?"

"Three point five acres."

"Have you searched it, Russell?"

"No."

"Well, we may have to."

"What about tire prints in the driveway?"
Amber asked

"You used it when you came home on the fifth," I said.

"Your manager used it when he came here, looking for you.

Chester glumly shook his big head. "Russell, review for me the
night you found Martin here, in
his...
informal wear.

I told him everything I could remember about that bizarre encounter on
July the Fourth.

"Why do you assume he was intending to enter Ms. Wilson's
bed?"

"He told me he'd done it before. And the bed was still made."

"But maybe he was finished and had already made back up."

"That's true." I considered Amber's bed, the prolific pink
pillows, the scented silk and satin. Chet worked over the pillows and discovered
two short gray-brown hairs worked into a sham, hairs almost certainly not
belonging to Amber or Alice. He put them in evidence bags, carefully labeling
each. A little ripple of hope wavered up through me. We got another one from
the top sheet, up near the pillows. Down about halfway, Chet found a short
curly hair that could have come from about any crotch in the world. Chester
bagged and labeled it. We looked for semen on the sheets—few acts have made me
feel lower on the evolutionary scale—and found none.

Amber watched us in minor horror. "He wouldn't really have done
that,
would he?"

"You tell us, Amber," I said. "You
were married to him."

"Jesus, I'm really not so sure. But you know something? I lived
with him for over a year, and he's the most fastidious anal-retentive I've ever
known. He'd brush out the toilet with disinfectant after he peed."

Chet ran a clean tissue under the toilet bowl's lip, for exactly what
purpose, I wasn't sure. Clean. I remembered the shaving cut on Martin's Adam's
apple the afternoon of the fourth and examined the razors—plastic,
disposable—in the bathroom drawer. Dumb, I thought: What would possess anyone
to stop in the middle of a murder and cover-up, then shave?

"Do you have anything to drink?" I asked.

"Gin."

"Light, ice."

"Make mine a little more substantial," said
Chester.

We wandered the house. The carpet near the entrance was spotless, as it
was inside the sliding screen door on which the mesh had been cut open as a nod
to the Midnight Eye. We studied the stereo setup, in which Parish—after piecing
together phrases from the tapes left at the Fernandez and Ellison homes—had
left his dub. He would certainly have left no prints to go along with it. I saw
an image of him, grim with purpose using some rinky-dink boom box in his office
before the murder recording bits of monologue from tapes he had surely copied
days ago, before they were booked into evidence. Amber delivered the drink to
me with a guarded stare.

In the study, I noted the lamp and magazines I'd knock over. In the
kitchen, we prowled around under the sink, in the broom closet, the trash
compactor, the cabinets.

I began to feel tricked, anticipated, suckered. Marty had already done
all this, I thought—cleaned up evidence of his and replaced it with evidence of
Grace. Probably ran the fucking vacuum cleaner, I thought, and it actually
sounded like something that anally retentive Martin would do.

"Where's your vacuum?"

"Corner of the den. Behind the room divider."

Chester smiled mildly. "Sometimes the obvious is
best."

He pulled it out from beside an ironing board, popped off the back
panel, and felt the bag.

"Empty," he said.

"Then he didn't use it," said Amber.

"Please get me some clean paper towels."

Chet worked off the roller and flicked the brush over a clean chain of
towels. I used my pen to fan the bristles. What speckled down onto the white
paper looked an awful lot like dried blood.

"Is that what I think it is?" Amber asked.

"Yes," said Chester. "The bag is empty because he used
the machine, then put in a new bag. We are closer."

"And took the old bag with him?"

"Probably. It would depend on how calm he was able remain, on
whether the bag might mean an extra trip back into the house for him. Show me where
your trash cans are."

Of course I had already been through the trash, in
search of a painter's mess. But this time through, we removed each item
individually, bringing to our labor an attention that an onlooker would have
found comical. The task was made more difficult by the fact that most of Amber
Mae's trash had been run through the compactor. Not only that, but the garbage
was over a week old because Amber had failed, with her disappearance, to have
it taken out to curbside. The smell was not good.

The bag was, of course, nowhere to be found.

"Well," said Chester. "Another
roadblock."

We all looked at one another rather gloomily.

"It wouldn't hurt to check the filter,"
Chet said finally.

We used a clean white towel that Chester carried, neatly folded, in his
case. We spread it in the middle of the living room floor. Chet unscrewed the
vacuum cleaner's lid and worked out the filter, which is engineered to keep
large debris from the motor compartment. He cradled out the screen and laid it
down on the towel carefully, as if it were an infant. What we had before us was
a dusty mulch that covered almost a square foot of terry cotton, a bounty of
dirt, dust, hair, fiber, more dust, a broken rubber band, a paper clip, a
penny, more dust, a length of string, a wad of green dental floss that had
somehow missed the brush, a warped postage stamp, and a great deal more dust.

"What a job," Amber noted.

Chester removed a bundle of evidence bags from his case and we began.
"Ms. Wilson, we could use two standard tablespoons, rinsed and
wiped."

First, we separated and bagged anything that might be useful. Several
hairs could have been Martin's. Nothing else seemed indicative, even
suggestive. The idea crossed my mind that I was a fool. We bagged the broken
rubber band, which seemed to confirm this. Amber sighed. Using a spoon, I made
little S patterns through the silt, disgusted.

"One of the hairs may help," I said, fully aware that you
can't establish 100 percent identification of a human being with hair
samples—not in court, anyway.

"What's that?" asked Amber.

"I said, one—"

"No. What's
that?"

Amber's hand hovered over the towel, forefinger extended. I followed the
aim of that finger, thinking—yes, even at this hour, even after this day, even
after everything my dear Isabella had suffered at least in part for me—that if
the entire promise of the female form could be contained in one finger here it
was, a perfect digit, graceful, firm, strong, lovely in composition and
utility, the skin slightly tanned, the flesh full with its slender contours,
the nail bold and bright and domed imperiously, red as blood, pointing now at
something in the dust.

"There," she said.

"I can't see it from here."

"Then give me the spoon, Russ."

She reached with it and dipped the outer lip as if for soup. She jiggled
the utensil, worked it down through the gray matte She lifted it, tilting off a
wad of nonspecific material that floated slowly back down to the towel. She
presented the spoon to me handle first. I took it and spilled the contents onto
a clean paper tissue.

What
I saw at first, I still couldn't identify—it was a U shaped concave shell the
size, roughly, of a fingernail. One end was jagged and looked as if it had been
torn away from something else. The other end was smoothly rounded. It was
covered with dust, but under the dust I could see pink.

"Turn it over, Russell," said Chet.

I
flipped it with my pen. It
was
a fingernail—pink, tapered chipped
noticeably at the round end. I looked at Amber, who looked back at me.