As soon as he was gone, she began to scan the rows of large wooden tiles on the walls, then spotted a row of metal bandstand chairs in dolly-mixture colours folded flat against one of the walls. She examined the floor in front of them, which, thanks to Harry Nathan’s secrecy, did not benefit from daily vacuuming. She could make out the marks where a chair’s sharp metal legs had indented the thick pile — deeper than one would have expected if someone had been merely sitting on it, but not if they had stood on it, particularly a tall and heavy man...
She pulled out a chair, set it up with its feet on the same marks, then climbed up on it. She pressed carefully along the vertical edges of the two large wooden tiles within easy reach, and swore under her breath when they remained still. Then she tried the horizontal axis. One of the tiles gave, just a quarter of an inch. It seemed to be spring-loaded on the other side to prevent it opening too easily and to keep it flush with the rest of the wall. She had to press hard but finally a wooden door opened. Behind it were pile after pile of tapes. Lorraine pulled one out. There was no title, only a date and the name ‘Cindy’.
‘What are you doing?’ Jose spoke suddenly behind her, and she almost fell off the chair. The man was standing in the doorway with what looked like a carving knife, Juana beside him.
Lorraine looked coolly at them. She had no idea what their intentions towards her were, but she had to try to face them out. ‘I was looking for evidence relevant to my client’s case, and it seems like I found it. My assistant and I are working closely with the police, and I will naturally be informing them as soon as possible. I imagine they will want to talk to you about how the house came to be torn apart today, and how this evidence came to be concealed.’ She willed her voice to remain calm.
‘We have nothing to do with this,’ Juana said immediately, angry and defensive, and Jose shot her a warning glance. ‘We were going to go to the police ourselves — tell her, Jose.’
‘Be quiet,’ he ordered. ‘There is nothing to tell.’
The woman’s eyes flashed. ‘How much longer are you going to hide that man’s dirt, Jose?’
‘Be quiet, woman!’ he repeated, but his wife stood her ground.
‘He is dead. We have nothing. Tell her the truth.’
The man sighed. ‘Perhaps it is better. Perhaps we should go downstairs.’
Lorraine relaxed. ‘I’d certainly be more comfortable. But I’d like to take the tapes. They become Mrs Nathan’s property, I believe, under the terms of Mr Nathan’s will, and as I just said, she has asked me to gather any evidence relevant to her case.’
Jose looked at Juana again. ‘Let her take them. I want them gone.’ There was a note of resignation in her voice.
Lorraine scooped into her arms as many of the tapes as she could hold and climbed down from the chair. ‘I’ll lock these in the trunk of my car before we talk.’
Juana nodded, a look of relief crossing her face. ‘I will make some tea.’
Lorraine made two journeys out to the Mercedes, doing her best to appear unconcerned, but prepared for any attempt the two servants might make to stop her. Neither approached her, though, and she could hear them talking in Spanish in the kitchen, Juana’s voice much more prominent than Jose’s. She locked the trunk before returning to the house.
Lorraine walked back into the hall and through to where she could hear Jose and Juana’s voices. The kitchen, which had the air of an operating theatre, was in monochrome black and white, and the table was set with crockery of almost transparent white porcelain in a variety of deliberately irregular shapes. ‘Mr Nathan certainly seemed to like the minimalist look,’ Lorraine said.
‘Mr Nathan was a criminal,’ Juana said, tight-lipped. ‘He was a thief Jose said nothing: his wife had clearly convinced him that their interests no longer lay in loyalty to their former employer.
She poured Lorraine a cup of slightly perfumed tea, and pushed a plate of home-made crinkle cookies towards her.
‘What makes you say that?’ Lorraine said, as she bit into a cookie, but before the woman could answer, the telephone rang.
Jose picked it up. ‘No, Mrs Nathan, I have no authority...’ he said mechanically.
Lorraine looked up at the mention of her client’s name. ‘Can I speak to her?’ she asked, but the man shook his head.
‘It is not Cindy,’ Juana said. ‘It is Kendall. She has been calling every day since Mr Nathan died. Cindy won’t let her in the house.’
Jose continued to say yes and no to a clearly pushy caller, and told her that Cindy had suffered a miscarriage and been taken to Cedars-Sinai.
When he hung up, Lorraine asked, ‘What did she want?’
‘What she always wants. She says there’s some property here of hers. Mr Feinstein has given instructions that she is not to be allowed to remove anything — I think it’s some of the paintings.’
Or maybe some tapes, Lorraine thought, wondering when Harry Nathan’s interest in home movies had started.
‘What were you about to say, Juana, about Mr Nathan’s having stolen something?’ she asked.
Juana looked at Jose, indicating that he should speak. He pulled at his tie. ‘Mr Nathan owed us a lot of money, Mrs Page. Our life savings, plus back salary. We were only here because we wanted to get paid. Six, seven years ago, he said he would invest it for us.’
Juana folded her arms. ‘For the first few years we didn’t question it. He said he had invested it for us and even paid us dividends, so it seemed our money had doubled, then trebled and then...’ She went on to describe how when Nathan had married Kendall, they had wanted to leave. ‘She was an evil woman, but when we went to him and asked for our money, told him we couldn’t stay, he... he told us that he’d had some bad news about his stocks and shares. He said he hadn’t been able to tell us because he was so upset about it — that he had lost everything as well.’
‘But that obviously wasn’t true,’ Lorraine said, jerking her head towards the rest of the house.
‘He said the house was remortgaged and he made us all these promises about selling his art collection. We stayed on here because we had no place else to go and no money to go anywhere with. At least by being here we could see if he did make any money and then we’d get paid. He promised us we would. He owed everybody he ever met,’ Jose said flatly. ‘Now we just hope that we’ll get something if his estate is sold.’
‘Does Cindy know about this?’
Juana shook her head. ‘That silly child knows nothing, and he’d made her so crazy anyway. We think he was going to leave her, find a woman with money, probably.’
‘Do you think she killed him?’
There was another exchange of looks, and then Juana sighed. ‘Yes, we do. She threatened it more than once.’
‘You were here in the house, though, weren’t you, the morning Mr Nathan was shot?’
‘Yes, but I was working in the laundry, and Jose was out back near the garages. We didn’t hear anything at all, not until Mrs Nathan started screaming.’
Jose went on to describe how he and Juana had tried to get Nathan’s body out of the pool, but it was so heavy they couldn’t lift it.
‘What was Cindy doing then?’
Jose thought for a moment. ‘She was sitting by the pool, and I shouted at her to help us. She just kept saying over and over that she didn’t do it — no, what she said was she didn’t think that she had done it. That’s a strange thing to say, isn’t it?’
‘But you think that she did?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Juana.
‘She had reasons,’ Jose agreed. ‘I think she knew he was going to kick her out. They did nothing but argue, and she was drinking heavily, and—’
‘Tell her,’ Juana said. ‘Tell her everything.’