The Confidence Woman (3 page)

“Of course. You always were smart. What color was your nightgown?”

“Black.”

“Did you notice the turquoise blue dress Evie wore in the police photo? Awful color with that bleached hair. She'd gone ethnic. A lot of women do that when they come to Santa Fe.”

“I didn't pay much attention. I was so appalled by the state of the body.”

“Gruesome,” Ginny agreed and lit another cigarette.

“Did you know Evelyn was living in Santa Fe?”

Ginny shook her head and the ice in her glass trilled an arpeggio. “No. When she visited me about a year ago, she told me she was thinking of moving here. Then I never heard from her again. It was months before she started using my credit cards. I didn't connect her with the theft until I talked to Dante.”

“You didn't tell me that Evelyn had visited.”

“You didn't tell me either, did you?” she asked. “Actually I did call you, but you didn't call me back. I suppose you were busy with your job and your life in Albuquerque. What was to talk about anyway? It was all so depressing. Having Evie in my house was like spending the winter in Seattle.” Ginny shivered. “My ex and I lived there. It was grim—always raining, always gray. If you ask me Evie was always depressing and she wouldn't do anything about it either. I think she liked being miserable. But then what did she have to be happy about? No job, no money, no children, no love life.”

“She didn't have much self-esteem,” Claire agreed. It was easy enough for a woman to fall into that trap in a society where women were encouraged to dwell on their age and their weight, convinced they needed to buy more to feel better.

“Me, when I get depressed, I pop a Prozac,” Ginny said.

Claire recognized this as the moment to give a lecture saying Prozac wasn't meant to be popped whenever you were in a bad mood. To be effective it had to be taken every day, and it should never be taken with alcohol, the mother in her wanted to scold. But she kept quiet and the moment passed.

“Did Dante tell you who else she stole from?” Ginny asked.

“Lynn Granger and Elizabeth Best. Why the four of us?”

“We all lived in the same corridor back then. Maybe she felt closer to us than we thought. It could also be that she intended to rip off all the sisters and got to us first. Then someone ended that little plan. You're still friends with Lynn, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“She's too nice to kill anyone, don't you think? But Lizzie? She always was a bitch. I've been doing some investigating on my own, and I found out exactly where Evelyn lived on Tano Road. I drove up there after I read the article in the paper, and I saw the police tape around the scene. Would you like to see where she was living on our money?”

“I
would,” Claire admitted, hoping that looking at the house might somehow explain Evelyn's behavior.

Ginny reached for the car keys that were lying in a porcelain dish on the hall table.

Claire stopped her. “I'll drive,” she said.

******

Ginny sat in the passenger seat smoking and sipping from her glass while Claire negotiated the way to Tano Road, another very desirable place to live. Acequia Madre was buried deep in the heart of town. Tano Road was in the foothills with a spectacular view of Santa Fe, which sparkled like a jewel box when the lights came on in the evening. The house was a sprawling, deceptively simple faux adobe hidden behind juniper bushes. Claire hated to speculate how much it had cost Evelyn to live here. Technically, it wasn't her money that had paid the rent. It was MasterCard and Visa money. In a wider sense, everyone's money. Still, since her good credit had been used, she would have preferred that the money had been invested and not wasted on rent.

The house looked sad and empty. The windows, which were devoid of curtains and blinds, presented a blank face to the world. The fact that someone had died here could make it difficult to find a new tenant, Claire thought. On the other hand, there were New Age types in Santa Fe who might consider it a challenge to exorcise the spirit of the deceased.

Ginny led Claire around the corner of the house to the kitchen, where a large rock lay on the ground beneath the window. Apparently someone had placed it there in order to see in. Ginny climbed onto the rock, but Claire was tall enough to look in without it. She saw the stove and the place on the floor where Evelyn's body had been.

“The last time I was here there was an outline of the body on the floor,” Ginny said.

Claire didn't need an outline; the decomposed body was clearly visible in her mind's eye.

Ginny climbed down from the rock and Claire followed her around the house, peering through the other windows. Claire wondered what Evelyn did all day in this house other than scheming to rip off her old friends. Was that enough to occupy her time?

The furniture had the bare-boned look of a rental, and there wasn't much of it. Once again Claire regretted that the money hadn't been put to better use. The walls inside the house were totally blank—no photographs of family, friends or pets. There was no artwork. There were no books. When she came across the TV with the enormous screen and the wall full of stereo equipment in the living room, Claire began sinking into a black mood, but Ginny's mood seemed to improve with each room that she inspected. She climbed up and down the rocks that had been placed under the windows without missing a step, even though she was wearing sandals that gave her ankles no support.

“Seen
enough?” she asked in a voice that was as relentlessly cheerful as the ice that tinkled in her glass.

“Yes,” Claire said. “Evelyn could have died of natural causes.”

“Possible,” Ginny agreed, although her tone lacked conviction.

Claire got back into her truck feeling that all she had learned from this house was that Evelyn had lived a lonely life. They circled the city on Paseo de Peralta on their way back to Ginny's. When they reached the Gerald Peters Gallery, Ginny asked Claire if she would pull in.

“I don't want you to think I'm doing nothing with my life here except going to gallery openings. I know that's what single women in Santa Fe do, but can you imagine a worse place to find a man than a Santa Fe gallery opening? I have a job.”

“Doing what?” Claire asked, honoring Ginny's request and entering the gallery parking lot.

“I write about the art scene for an online site called
CultureVulture.com
. The Peters Gallery has a lot of openings, and I cover them all. There's a show of Renata Jennings's abstractions that I wrote about last week. I haven't seen it yet.”

“You wrote about a show you haven't seen?”

“I have to. The notice goes up on the Web site before the show opens. Whatever people write about art, it's all bullshit anyway, isn't it? Besides, what can you say about a Renata Jennings painting? It's red or it's black.” She laughed. “I'd like to take a look at the exhibit to see if what I said is true.”

Ginny stepped out of the truck with her glass in her hand. By now the ice had melted and she'd lost her musical accompaniment.

“You won't be allowed in the Peters Gallery with a glass in your hand,” Claire pointed out.

“You're right.” Ginny tossed whatever liquid was left on the ground and put the glass back in the truck.

The size and scope of Gerald Peters made it seem more like a museum than a gallery. It was a monument to wealth and to beauty. Claire found herself speaking in hushed tones when she was inside.

Ginny, however, wasn't intimidated, aiming her finger, going “bang, bang” and making snide remarks about cowboy-and-Indian art as she led the way to the gallery that housed the Renata Jennings exhibit. Claire didn't remember her being so rude when she was at the U of A, but she wasn't drinking so much then. Sometimes Claire was amused by her outspoken, drunken honesty. Other times she couldn't wait to get away from it. The loudmouthed excursion through the Gerald Peters Gallery made her want to run. They passed a suede sofa that Claire admired.

“It's worth more than my car,” Ginny said.

They reached the exhibit in the rear gallery, minimalist paintings consisting of streaks of red and streaks of black.

“There
it is,” Ginny said. “Your basic red, your basic black. The very essence of picturelessness. Abstractions are either in the box or out of the box. These are in the box.”

“That's artbabble, Ginny,” Claire replied.

“It's descriptive, it's now,” Ginny protested. “That's what CultureVulture likes.”

“If you ask me, the Internet is ruining the English language,” the librarian in Claire responded. “Everything is written very fast. Nothing is ever proofread or even spell checked.”

“I always spell check my submissions,” Ginny replied. Her tone was defensive, but her shoulders sagged and her mouth took a downward turn.

Watching her spirits droop made Claire blame herself for being too critical. Although she was also aware that Ginny took her animation from the bottle and it could be time for a refill.

“Let's get out of here,” Ginny said.

Claire drove her home, not making any attempt to get out of her truck when they reached Ginny's house.

“Would you like to come in, have a little drink for the road?” she asked.

“I better not,” Claire replied.

“You could have a soda if you don't want a real drink.” She stared at her fingernails, which Claire noticed had been chewed ragged. “I always feel down at this time of day, when darkness is coming on.”

“The night skies in New Mexico are so beautiful. Do you ever go out and look at the stars?” Claire asked. “It might make you feel better about darkness and night.”

“No,” Ginny said, putting her hand on the door. “Sure you don't want to come in?”

It won't be any easier to leave later than it is now, Claire thought. “I better go.”

“Okay,” Ginny said. “Nice to see you, Clairier. Stay in touch.”

“You, too,” Claire replied.

On the drive back to Albuquerque, it occurred to her that it would have been wiser to have lingered longer. It was the hour when everyone was rushing to get home from work, and the setting sun beamed right in her eyes, magnifying every speck of dust and smashed insect on the windshield. At this hour Claire thought that no matter how carefully you managed to clean the glass, it would never be clean enough.

Chapter
Four

W
HEN SHE GOT HOME
, N
EMESIS WAS WAITING AT THE DOOR
, expecting to be cuddled and fed.

“Not now,” Claire said, skirting the cat and heading for her bedroom, where the walls were lined from ceiling to floor with books. Bookshelves formed a mantel across the doorway and circled the windows. Books were a form of insulation that kept the outer world from disturbing her inner world.

From the doorway she could see that there were no empty places on her shelves. If
The Confidence-Man
had been stolen, it had been replaced by another book. She went to the M's in her Americana section.
The Confidence-Man
was exactly where it belonged, but as she reached for the shelf, she saw that it was not her copy. This book was the Oxford World's Classics edition with a critical introduction and explanatory notes, twenty-five years old and worthless.

“Goddamn it,” Claire said.

It could be an expensive loss, but she insured her valuable books and expected the insurance company to cover it. It wasn't the value of the book or the loss of it that bothered her most. What disturbed Claire deeply was that Evelyn Martin had violated her sanctuary. She could get over someone wantonly using her credit cards. It was harder to get over a classmate and houseguest entering her bedroom and stealing from her.

Claire was becoming ever more convinced that Evelyn's motive went beyond financial need. There were other valuable items in her house and in Ginny's. Evelyn had gone to the trouble to replace her book and Ginny's jewelry, but she did it with poor imitations that would be obvious as soon as the victims went to the trouble to look for them. She seemed to be taunting her old friends, and there was a level of chicanery going on that might have amused her.
The Confidence-Man
was the story of a con artist with a constantly shifting identity who traveled the Mississippi on a riverboat ripping off the other passengers. Evelyn had been acting as a confidence woman herself by conning Claire while she robbed her house. But Claire had never seen much humor in Evelyn Martin, and she hadn't seen much confidence either.

She might well have been motivated by envy and anger, feelings fueled by despair and an empty life. “Look at
you,”
she had said to Claire.
“You're
doing so well.” In a financial sense Claire
was
doing well. Her salary at CSWR was modest, but she had an inheritance and she had investments. She didn't have a devoted man in her life, but she no longer had the drain of an unfaithful one either. Her work, her friends and her children gave her satisfaction and joy, but she had created that situation herself by taking
careful
steps moment by moment, day by day. To quote one of her favorite poems, “acting in the little ways that encourage good fortune.” Claire liked to believe that people were handed a piece of clay at birth, although not the same piece of clay. Some got a piece that was more malleable. Some got more clay than others. But everyone's task was to make the best sculpture she possibly could out of her piece.

At that task Evelyn had failed miserably. Not only had she died unmissed and unmourned, but she had left a mess of deceit behind. All that she had created from her clay was bitterness and envy. Claire supposed that sooner or later the other victims would reach the same conclusion she had—Evelyn robbed them because on one level she envied them and on another level she hated them.