He'd ended up not only sharing Garza's supper, and privately accessing Garza's interview tapes and notes, but admiring and respecting the detective. Then later, when the case was closed, Max Harper had thought enough of Garza to ask him to join Molena Point PD. Garza had jumped at the chance to get out of San Francisco for the last five years of his service.
"She'll be taking her maiden name again," Garza said, "R. Flannery. She wants no part of Rupert, except to be paid for her half of the business. Said she doesn't want to see me or her sister for a few days, either, until she gets herself together. That's the way she is. Hardheaded independent."
"Don't know where she got that," Harper said, grinning.
"One thing," Garza said, shuffling the cards. "She drove one of the company trucks down, to haul her stuff. Said the brakes were really soft." He looked at Clyde. "Would you…?"
"First thing in the morning," Clyde said. "Tell her we open at eight."
"Likely she'll be waiting at the door." Garza paused, surveying his cards. "She did say something strange-she asked about Elliott Traynor. Said she'd heard the Traynors were in the village, asked if I'd met them. Said they'd spent a month in San Francisco last fall. Before Traynor got sick, I guess. They flew out from New York, apparently on business. She and Rupert met them through mutual friends."
At mention of the Traynors, Charlie looked quickly down at her cards. Laying her cards facedown, she bent her head to retie the ribbon that bound back her kinky hair, hiding her face, concealing some swift and uncomfortable reaction that made Joe Grey watch her with interest. Was there a look of guilt on her freckled face? But why would Charlie feel guilty about Vivi and Elliott Traynor?
As Clyde dealt a hand of five card draw, Joe's attention remained on Charlie. They played three more hands of stud before Clyde mentioned the break-in at Susan Brittain's. "Have you found the guy yet? Or found his body?"
"Nothing," Harper said. "One set of prints isn't on record."
"That's unusual."
"Very," Garza said. "Information on the other set hasn't come back yet."
Clyde sipped his beer, setting the can on a folded paper napkin. "How did Susan handle the break-in? Was she pretty shaken?"
"Not at all," Garza said. "In fact, very cool. She seems a straightforward woman. She thinks she might know the man. She saw only his back, but when she thought about it awhile, she was certain he looked familiar." He paused, waiting for Clyde to bet. Charlie raised Clyde, and Garza and Davis folded. Harper raised Charlie, winning the pot with three jacks, giving her a superior look that made her laugh.
"So who is he?" Clyde said.
"She thinks he might be an early morning dog walker she's run into, a newcomer to the village, a Lenny Wells. Young man who just moved down from San Francisco. About thirty, six feet, maybe a hundred and seventy, she thought. Light brown hair. She stopped for coffee with him a couple of times when they were walking the dogs, said she told him a little about the village to help him get settled."
Juana Davis dealt the next hand, upping the ante on seven card stud. Clyde showed a pair of aces, but when the hand was finished Davis raked in the pot on three eights. Their poker was never high-powered, with the keen attention and subtleties of a serious professional game, just a friendly excuse to get together. The conversation turned to the remodeling of the police station and how soon the contractor would be finished. "An equation," Harper said, "arrived at by squaring the original four months to completion time."
Joe thought about Susan's break-in, and about the grungy white box that Richard Casselrod had snatched from Cora Lee French. He saw again the shocked, angry look on Cora Lee's face when Casselrod swung the box and hit her, saw her dark eyes blazing with hurt surprise.
He wanted a look at that box, he wanted to know what made it so valuable.
Richard Casselrod's antique shop was in a tight building, not easy to get into, after hours, even for an expert at break-and-enter. But there was one high, attic window that Joe meant to check out.
He'd as soon not slip in during the day and hide until they closed up. There was something about Richard Casselrod that did not invite close proximity among closed doors and solid walls.
He came to attention when Charlie raised on a pair of sixes, though Juana had three jacks showing. Was Charlie bluffing? Did she have two sixes in the hole? Or was she merely preoccupied? Wake up, Charlie. Pay attention. What are you thinking about?
Charlie saw her mistake and watched Juana rake in the pot, her mind uncomfortably on Elliott Traynor. How strange that Garza's niece should know Traynor. And how interesting that the Traynors had so recently been in San Francisco. Maybe that explained the envelopes with San Francisco postmarks that she'd found in Traynor's wastebasket.
When you're cleaning for such interesting tenants, and when they're gone most mornings, it's hard not to snoop. At least it was hard for Charlie, when the snooping involved an author whose work she so greatly admired. The Traynors had been in the village for over two weeks. She cleaned their cottage each morning, did the shopping and the laundry, put the dinner and breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, and sometimes started lunch or something for dinner with Vivi's written instructions. She was at the cottage from eight until twelve, quite often alone because Traynor wrote at night, and they went to the theater some mornings, or out walking. When she did see him, he seemed dour and unresponsive.
Traynor was a wide-shouldered man in his late sixties. Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a nice tan despite his illness, strong-looking square hands that she could imagine handling a sail and jib or a hunting rifle. Friendly green eyes that seemed to analyze and weigh her far too closely The eyes of a writer, exhibiting a nature intriguing but too intimately curious for comfort. An unusually virile-looking man, considering that he was suffering from some serious sort of cancer-she hadn't asked what kind. Not that it was any of her business. The times when she did see him, he would look her over in that too interested, piercing way, then would turn remote and unsmiling.
Well, she was, after all, only the cleaning woman. And he had to be preoccupied-from his cancer treatments, and working on his new book, and overseeing the production of his play. His medical treatments alone could make him feel too ill to be civil. Very likely it was all he could do to handle his work and find time for the theater; surely there was nothing left over with which to be courteous to some housekeeper.
Except, much of the time, he wasn't civil even to his wife. That relationship, on both their parts, seemed cold and rigid-certainly not in keeping with what Gabrielle and Cora Lee had told Wilma, that at the theater, meeting with the producer and directors, Vivi clung to Elliott so attentively that he could hardly move.
The six envelopes that Charlie had pulled from the trash in Traynor's study-just to have a quick look, out of innocent curiosity, she told herself-had not been wadded up but simply dropped into the leather wastebasket all together. Lifting them out to put them in her trash bag, she had flipped through them, her face warming with embarrassment at the transgression.
All were from San Francisco, all but one from antique dealers, maybe answering some research questions about the furniture or artifacts of the period in which his novel was set. At first she thought there were no letters, just the envelopes, all handwritten and sent first class. But then she saw the one letter, tucked under the flap of the last envelope. It was also from the city. Both the letter and the envelope were typewritten, from Harlan Scott of the San Francisco Chronicle, a book reviewer whom Charlie usually read. Had Scott written about a review? Did authors have their work reviewed before they finished it? She read quickly.