“Did you notice what she did as we were leaving the store?” she asked Ray.
“Who?” Ray passed in the left lane, doing ninety, headlights in front flashing by, headlights behind eating his dust. Kat held on tight.
“The woman at the register. The one with the big hooters.”
“She looked good.”
“She looked at the old man.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. I might be imagining this. But I thought she gave him a signal, sort of a wink. As if she’s not worried about Leigh, not taking this seriously. Would they really have shined us on like they did if they didn’t know Leigh is okay?”
“Yeah, sure, she’s fine,” Ray said. And Kat managed not to look at him this time, but she was wondering again, wondering what was really in his mind, whether he knew exactly where Leigh was. She remembered a California murder case in which an adulterous husband, Scott Peterson, killed his pregnant wife and threw her body into the Berkeley harbor. In the absence of much direct evidence, the jury had been mightily influenced by his conduct during the subsequent search, his calls to his girlfriend, his purchase of new toys.
Was Ray just making a case for himself, using her?
Kat, exhausted, barely spoke to him when they finally pulled into the driveway in Topanga. “Rappaport,” she said, fished out her car keys, climbed into her tin can of a car, and drove off, buckling her seat belt for another stretch before she’d be home in Hermosa.
Ray pulled the Porsche into the garage, watched the door lower, and went through the inside garage door into his house, beat through and through.
Something felt strange. The door led into his laundry room. He couldn’t see anything out of place there, but he had an instantaneous impression that something was not right. A smell? A peculiar air, not his.
Setting his jacket gently down on the floor instead of on its usual hook, he made his way slowly toward the darkened living room. “Who’s there?” His voice reverberated hollowly along the hard surfaces.
Nobody answered but the clock his mother had given him for his mantel. It chose this moment to let out its muffled chime.
Midnight. How perfect. He remembered Kat’s scare at Idyllwild and told himself to get a grip.
Rather than march directly into the living room, he sidestepped into the kitchen, where he had a view of the front room but some protection if he needed it, and flipped on the overheads: he chose a low counter to hide behind. He took his big chef’s knife out of its special place in a drawer, taking care to keep the drawer quiet. Stopping to see anything he could view from the kitchen, he moved silently into the living room and fumbled for the light on his Palmetti lamp.
Vomit desecrated his custom bamboo floor. The mess had been hastily wiped, with ugly gobbets left behind. Ugh. A throw had been moved from his bed to one arm of the sofa, and dragged sloppily on the floor.
Ray moved in closer. Who? Who would invade his home then sleep there? Certainly no typical burglar. Not the police?
Leigh?
Martin?
Now he walked rapidly through the house turning on lights, holding the knife tightly-but he wouldn’t need it, there was nobody there, not even an open window, no other signs of major disturbance.
Back in the living room he examined the pillow on the couch, silk, that had been taken from a nearby chair. A hair, mid-length, gray-rooted, lay at the center.
He drew a final conclusion easily when he spotted her favorite sweater draped over a chair. His mother had come, crashed in his living room, and left again. She had thrown up. She was sick.
After Ray cleaned up the mess, placing the rags he used directly into the washing machine with copious amounts of detergent and bleach, he drank coffee he probably didn’t need in spite of his lack of sleep.
His mother had slept here, tossed her cookies.
She never drank. Could she be ill? But he wasn’t quite ready to call her.
A quick perusal of the kitchen told him that she had invaded the cupboard above his refrigerator and the mirrored bar. A bottle of vodka Leigh had bought months ago that had gathered dust was less than one-fourth full. Last time he had noticed, the bottle had been three-quarters full. Even if Leigh made several of her favorites, cranberry and vodka, she hadn’t drunk that much that fast in all the time he had known her.
Had he driven Esmé to this?
They had always had such a reliable relationship, loving in the way a mother and son had to love, superficially distant with an understood undercurrent. Now, the real nature of their relationship nagged at him like sinister whispers. What went on in her heart? What went on in his?
He tried to put himself in his mother’s position. He had risen up like a cobra hiding behind tall grasses, awaiting the right moment, attacking, determined to tear to bits her hard-won privacy. He had been very hard on her recently, denigrating the effect of all those years of love. Regret stabbed at him.
Afraid, he picked up the phone and called the house on Close Street in Whittier. She didn’t answer. He would have to drive over there, but he was too damn tired.
He left the shirt and the peanut shells in the trunk of the car and lay down just for a second on the living room couch.
And then it was Monday morning.
Esmé still didn’t answer.
He called the office. “Denise, my mother’s ill.”
“You have Mr. Antoniou at one!”
“Yeah, okay. Can you take the group of drawings on my desk and get them copied this morning? I made a few last-minute changes. Sorry.”
“Oh, man. That’ll cost extra for a rush job. You’re coming, though?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Because Martin’s here and he’s had a bad night and he’s rampaging around waiting for you.” She lowered her voice. “But screw him. I’ll take care of him.”
“Thanks, Denise. You’re a real-”
“Friend. You have quite a few here, Ray.”
He took twenty minutes to shave and get dressed, then called Detective Rappaport.
“Been trying to call you,” Rappaport said. “What’s wrong with your cell phone?”
“Why?”
“We checked on your bank account and found an ATM withdrawal, Mr. Jackson. From nine days ago.”
“Yes. I got the statement. That’s one of the things I wanted to tell you.”
“We have the videotape from the ATM machine for that date.”
“Is it Leigh?”
“We can’t tell. You may be able to help.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell?”
“Don’t shout, Mr. Jackson. It’s hard to identify the person. The tape is not the best quality.”
“I guess this is a case now.”
“An investigation has been opened.”
“I found some things at the cabin at Idyllwild. They’re in the trunk of my car.”
“What?”
“I’ll bring them in.”
“I’m sending a car over to get you. What have you got?”
“Don’t send a car. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
Back inside the Porsche with its candy wrappers on the passenger side floor and the scent of Kat’s floral cologne, he decided that if this kept up he would need a bigger car, since this one had somehow become familiar as a second home. Unfortunately, the amount of time he had spent cleaning up his living room forced him into competition with every commuter on the planet earth, or so it seemed.
The Boxster crawled through a long morning’s heat.
An hour and a half later, when his mother still did not answer her doorbell in hot, smoggy Whittier, he used his key to get into the house.
He looked around in astonishment. She obviously hadn’t lifted a finger to clean in days. Wine bottles, several, sat or lay on the kitchen counter and floor. Lipstick-edged glasses decorated most of the tables she usually kept dust-free and gleaming.