“She was forced to resign after she was caught stealing.”
“That’s not unheard of,” Tess said, remembering the custodian’s cynical talk about cops who helped themselves to souvenirs from murder scenes, but also remembering Gretchen’s take on her history, which was markedly different.
“Yeah, but she was taking stuff from her fellow officers. Out of their lockers and shit. She’s virtually a klepto.”
“Well, as I said, she was in Bobby Hilliard’s apartment. Probably Pitts and Ensor, too, pretending to be cops before they took their act on the road and tried it on the Hilliards. Anyone who spoke to the custodian, as I did on Friday, would have recognized his description of Yeager.”
“SoyouwereinHilliard’sapartment.”Rainer chewed the inside of his cheek with a few quick, rapid strokes. “Well, then, I could definitely charge you with… something. If I put my mind to it.”
The simple phrase gave Tess pause. If I put my mind to it. The image it conjured up was of a tiny pea trying to move a large boulder. Rainer didn’t frighten her. The person she feared was lurking at the periphery of her life, unseen and unknown. He had called her on the phone, knowing she would be there, waiting for him. Someone had been watching her all this time, someone secretive at best. And at worst? She couldn’t bear to think of it.
“Look, I’ll cop to my real mistakes,” Tess said. “When we first spoke, the only thing I didn’t tell you was that a man had come to me, intent on unmasking the Poe Toaster. That’s why I was at the grave that night. I feared someone else had taken the job, and I didn’t want to see the Visitor revealed. I honestly believed it was a petty dispute.”
“But when it turned out to be a homicide, it didn’t seem so important to you to mention this fact to me?”
She had anticipated just this question, knowing the truth would not set her free. She could not afford to tell Rainer she had questioned his very competence, his ability to protect a citizen from the media hounds.
“I behaved unprofessionally,” she said. “I was sleep deprived and feeling contrary, I suppose. Also-the man who called himself John Pendleton Kennedy simply isn’t the kind of person you associate with murder. My plan was to find him, ask him a few questions, and decide for myself if he could have been involved. When I found out he had given me a phony name, I got caught up in the chase. And when the flowers appeared-”
The flowers. They looked at the items spread out on the table. For, along with her provisions, she had brought everything: the now-wilted flowers, the half-full bottle of Martell’s, the increasingly elliptical notes, even the rose petals she had found in the bottom of her mailbox. Strangely, it gave her a pang to release these things to Rainer, even as it made her skin crawl to think about the person who had left them for her. Not the Visitor, not even a visitor, not some benign soul leading her toward a solution, but quite possibly a killer. “They’re worth killing for,” he had told her. “You know that now.”
“The flowers…” Rainer shuffled his notes. “Yeah, I got the chronology on that stuff. Tyner told me on the phone. But it’s been a week since you found out that the guy who visited you was Arnold Pitts and that we were looking into his burglary as a connection to this case. Why didn’t you think that was important enough to come tell us? Does it take two deaths for you to take something seriously?”
Tess squelched another inappropriate response- No, but it helps-and moved on. “He threatened me. He said he would tell you I had tried to extort him, offered to keep quiet for money, and turned him in only when he wouldn’t play.”
“Yeah, so what? He would have been lying, right?”
Tess counted the sesame seeds on her bagel, unable to think of an appropriate response. There was no point in telling Rainer what he wouldn’t admit about himself, that he was small enough to believe lies about people he disliked. She decided to throw him a bone, pretend to be the person he had accused her of being.
“I honestly didn’t believe I could weather a siege of bad publicity right now. Meanwhile, I kept getting these notes, and I thought if I did what the notes suggested… I don’t know. I was caught. I made some bad decisions. But I didn’t do anything illegal.”
She pulled a Federal Express package from her backpack. This was the only thing that had kept her from coming in on Monday morning first thing, because she had to call Pennsylvania and ask Vonnie Hilliard to change her plans and head for the nearest overnight delivery service instead of the bank. The bracelet had arrived this morning, still in its Christmas wrapping.
“When Arnold Pitts came to me, he said the Visitor had sold him a bracelet, claiming it was a historic piece that had once belonged to Betsy Patterson Bonaparte.” She saw Rainer frown, unwilling to ask questions when he didn’t know something. This was a bad quality in a homicide cop. It was a bad quality in anyone.
“The name didn’t mean anything to me either,” she assured him. “She was a local belle, married to Napoleon’s brother for a while. The way Pitts told the story, he had the bracelet but was angry because it was worthless. Yet Bobby Hilliard had given this bracelet to his mother for Christmas and told her it was the real thing.”
“You think two men are dead because of this,” he said, poking it with a pencil, as if it were a snake, and lifting it from the cotton padding. The bracelet resisted, but it eventually surrendered its hold on the cotton. “I mean, I don’t care if Queen Elizabeth wore it, this thing wouldn’t bring a thousand dollars at a Baltimore pawn shop. How do you fence something like this?”
“A knowledgeable person might pay dearly for it. I don’t know. I have to assume it’s what Pitts and Ensor were looking for, at Bobby’s apartment and his parents’ farm. What else could it be?”
Rainer was thinking hard. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “But Pitts said he had the bracelet.”
“Pitts said a lot of things. The man who called me Sunday night said ”they‘ were worth killing for. He could have been talking about people, or principles, or material possessions. He could have been talking about anything. This is an “it,” singular. Are “they’ Hilliard and Yeager? Pitts and Ensor? I don’t know. I’ve told you everything I know. I think you should tell me what you’ve found out.”
Rainer’s face was glum. It was the purest expression Tess had ever seen on him.
“None of it makes sense, not a goddamn piece. We get so close, and then it falls apart. The fact is, we got no evidence that the two things are connected, Hilliard and Yeager. The only thing they’ve got in common is we got damn few leads on either one.”
“So you were just yanking Tess’s chain all this time, trying to make her feel guilty for sport?” Tyner was angry on her behalf, but Tess wasn’t. Nor was she comforted. She might not accept blame for Yeager’s death, but she also wasn’t ready to embrace the idea that the timing of her Sunday night call had been a coincidence.
“Please.” Tess didn’t feel comfortable touching Rainer in any way, so she tapped the bracelet, which still dangled from Rainer’s pencil. “Please tell me whatever you know. I’m clearly at risk. Is it too much to ask that you help me protect myself?”
“You got yourself into this,” Rainer said, ever sanctimonious.
“Yes and no. I didn’t solicit Arnold Pitts’s business. I didn’t invite some stranger to stalk me and start leaving gifts and notes at my home and office. I’m scared to go home, Rainer. Do you know what that’s like? Crow and I moved into his studio apartment yesterday morning, with a greyhound and a Doberman yet. Two humans and two dogs in one room. You may have a triple homicide on your hands soon.”
Rainer got restless easily and needed to move. Now he stood and began making circles around Tess and Tyner, small aimless swoops, like an addled hawk who can’t decide if it’s spotted prey or merely something shiny in the grass.