It was as if Tara, the plantation house from Gone with the Wind, had been whooshed up in a tornado and plopped down on a city lot. It had no yard to speak of, just a rim of land along the sides so narrow you could barely push a lawnmower between the wall and the neighbor’s fence. White columns stood sentinel on a porch where Scarlett O’Hara could have held court in full view of the traffic on Sprague Street. The house made her think of Johnny Silva in the old neighborhood, and how he had blown his first paycheck on a cherry-red Corvette. “Trying to pretend he’s not a loser,” her father had said. “Boy hasn’t even gotten around to moving outa his parents’ basement, and he buys himself a fancy sports car. The biggest losers buy the biggest cars.”
Or build the biggest house in the neighborhood, she thought, staring at Tara-on-Sprague-Street.
She maneuvered her belly out from behind the steering wheel. Felt the baby tap-dance on her bladder as she walked up the porch steps. First things first, she thought. Ask to use the restroom. The doorbell didn’t just ring; it bonged, like a cathedral bell calling the faithful to worship.
The blond woman who opened the door appeared to have wandered into the wrong residence. Rather than Scarlett O’Hara, she was your classic Bambi-big hair, big boobs, body sausaged into a pink spandex exercise outfit. A face so unnaturally blank of expression that it had to be Botoxed.
“I’m Detective Rizzoli, here to see Terence Van Gates. I called earlier.”
“Oh yeah, Terry’s expecting you.” A girlish voice, high and sweet. Okay in small doses, but after an hour, it would be like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard.
Rizzoli stepped into the foyer and was immediately confronted with a mammoth oil painting on the wall. It was Bambi dressed in a green evening gown, standing beside an enormous vase of orchids. Everything in this house seemed oversized. The paintings, the ceilings, the breasts.
“They’re renovating his office building, so he’s working from home today. Down the hall, on your right.”
“Excuse me-I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Bonnie.”
Bonnie, Bambi. Close enough.
“That would be… Mrs. Van Gates?” asked Rizzoli.
“Uh-huh.”
Trophy wife. Van Gates had to be close to seventy.
“May I use your restroom? I seem to need one every ten minutes these days.”
For the first time, Bonnie seemed to notice that Rizzoli was pregnant. “Oh, honey! Of course you can. The powder room’s right there.”
Rizzoli had never seen a bathroom painted candy-cane pink. The toilet sat high on a platform, like a throne, with a telephone mounted on the wall beside it. As if anyone would want to conduct business while, well, doing their business. She washed her hands with pink soap in the pink marble basin, dried them with pink towels, and fled the room.
Bonnie had vanished, but Rizzoli could hear the beat of exercise music, and the thumps of feet bouncing upstairs. Bonnie going through her exercise routine. I should get in shape one of these days too, thought Rizzoli. But I refuse to do it in pink spandex.
She headed down the hall in search of Van Gates’s office. She peeked first into a vast living room with a white grand piano and a white rug and white furniture. White room, pink room. What came next? She passed another painting of Bonnie in the hallway, this time posed as a Greek goddess in a white gown, nipples showing through diaphanous fabric. Man, these people belonged in Vegas.
At last she came to an office. “Mr. Van Gates?” she said.
The man sitting behind the cherry desk looked up from his papers, and she saw watery blue eyes, a face gone soft and jowly with age, and hair that was-what was that shade? Somewhere between yellow and orange. Surely not intentional, just a dye job gone wrong.
“Detective Rizzoli?” he said, and his gaze fell to her abdomen. Got stuck there, as though he’d never seen a pregnant cop before.
Talk to me, not the belly. She crossed to his desk and shook his hand. Noticed the telltale transplant plugs dotting his scalp, sprouting hair like little tufts of yellow grass in a last desperate stand of virility. That’s what you deserved for marrying a trophy wife.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said.
She settled into a slick leather chair. Glancing around the room, she noticed that the decor in here was radically different from the rest of the house. It was done up in Traditional Lawyer, with dark wood and leather. Mahogany shelves were filled with law journals and textbooks. Not a whisper of pink. Clearly this was his domain, a Bonnie-free zone.
“I don’t really know how I can help you, Detective,” he said. “The adoption you’re asking about was forty years ago.”
“Not exactly ancient history.”
He laughed. “I doubt you were even born then.”
Was that a little poke? His way of saying she was too young to be bothering him with these questions?
“You don’t recall the people involved?”
“I’m just saying that it was a long time ago. I would’ve been just out of law school then. Working out of a rented office with rented furniture and no secretary. Answered my own phone. I took every case that came in-divorces, adoptions, drunk driving. Whatever paid the rent.”
“And you still have all those files, of course. From your cases back then.”
“They’d be in storage.”
“Where?”
“File-Safe, out in Quincy. But before we go any further, I have to tell you. The parties involved in this particular case requested absolute privacy. The birth mother did not want her name revealed. Those records were sealed years ago.”
“This is a homicide case, Mr. Van Gates. One of the two adoptees is now dead.”
“Yes, I know. But I fail to see what that has to do with her adoption forty years ago. How is it relevant to your investigation?”
“Why did Anna Leoni call you?”
He looked startled. Nothing he said after that could cover up that initial reaction, that expression of uh-oh. “Excuse me?” he said.
“The day before she was murdered, Anna Leoni called your law office from her room at the Tremont Hotel. We just got her phone record. The conversation lasted thirty-seven minutes. Now, you two must have talked about something during those thirty-seven minutes. You couldn’t have kept the poor woman on hold all that time?”
He said nothing.
“Mr. Van Gates?”
“That-that conversation was confidential.”
“Ms. Leoni was your client? You billed her for that call?”
“No, but-”
“So you’re not bound by attorney-client privilege.”
“But I am bound by another client’s confidentiality.”
“The birth mother.”
“Well, she was my client. She gave up her babies on one condition-that her name never be revealed.”
“That was forty years ago. She may have changed her mind.”
“I have no idea. I don’t know where she is. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“Is that why Anna called you? To ask about her mother?”
He leaned back. “Adoptees are often curious about their origins. For some of them it becomes an obsession. So they go on document hunts. Invest thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache searching for mothers who don’t want to be found. And if they do find them, it’s seldom the fairy-tale ending they expected. That’s what she was looking for, Detective. A fairy-tale ending. Sometimes they’re better off just forgetting it, and moving on with their lives.”
Rizzoli thought of her own childhood, her own family. She had always known who she was. She could look at her grandparents, her parents, and see her own bloodline engraved on their faces. She was one of them, right down to her DNA, and no matter how much her relatives might annoy her or embarrass her, she knew they were hers.
But Maura Isles had never seen herself in the eyes of a grandparent. When Maura walked down a street, did she study the faces of passing strangers, searching for a hint of her own features? A familiar curve to the mouth or slope of the nose? Rizzoli could perfectly understand the hunger to know your own origins. To know that you’re not just a loose twig, but one branch of a deeply rooted tree.