“I’ll be right with you,” Mr. Brennan replied.
Her cooperation led to first my release and then Rachel’s-and oddly, Deeny did not seem to recall much of anything that happened just before she was hit on the head, but specifically denied seeing any special burglary tools on Ms. Giocopazzi’s person, no matter what was claimed by Gerald. By then McCain and Detective Reed Collins from Las Piernas had made the trip to Los Alamitos, and Gerald was officially placed under arrest.
I called the paper and phoned in a story that made Morey decide I could be excused for another day or two while I healed a little. The acting news editor told me he was assigning a couple of other people to write follow-up stories from less personal angles. Fine with me.
Mr. Brennan drove Rachel over to the hospital, where she arrived not long before Travis was ready to go home with us.
“I want to grow up to be like my cousin,” he said to me, walking stiffly and trying to act as if the broken ribs, black eye, fat lip and lump on his forehead were nothing. He held up his cleanly swathed right hand. “And look, you don’t have to change the bandage for me today.”
“We have a specially air-conditioned Volvo to take you home in,” I said, and after we all thanked Mr. Brennan again, we were on our way, sans driver’s side window, but happy.
We arrived at my house to see two men getting out of a Yellow Cab. “Oh shit,” said Rachel. “Now we’ve had it.”
“Who is it?” Travis asked.
“Our husbands.”
But she was wrong if she thought they were angry. After several hours of trying to reach us at every possible number, they were so glad to see us, they didn’t even bitch about the cab fare from LAX.
I awakened at about seven in the evening, as the last of the early summer sunlight was fading. After a few moments of enjoying the sensation of being held possessively by my sleeping husband, I gently extricated myself from his grip. He rolled over but didn’t awaken, and soon was snoring again. I stood and listened to it for a while after getting dressed.
I checked on Travis, who was sleeping soundly, despite being propped up at the angle the broken ribs required. Uncomfortable, but better than getting pneumonia, the doctors said.
I fed the animals and started making dinner. I put a chicken in the oven and started straightening the living room. I came across the Virgin Mary night-light and smiled. It reminded me of one my mother had once had, too. I tried plugging it in, but it didn’t light up. I unplugged it, and unscrewed the base-no bulb.
I went into the kitchen, checked on the chicken and, after a brief search, found a spare night-light bulb. My husband came out of the bedroom, and I became distracted by some nuzzling until he said, “Uh-oh. What papist trappings are you decorating the house with now, Catholic girl?”
I laughed and told him that the night-light was apparently the one gift that had survived the years during which my aunt purged her home of every other reminder of Arthur, save Travis himself. He cocked his head to one side for a moment, but made no wisecracks, so I went back to replacing the bulb.
Travis came slowly down the hall and Frank, who had already taken a liking to him, offered to help him get settled in a chair.
“No thanks,” Travis said. “The thought of trying to get up again makes me want to stay on my feet.” He saw what I was working on and smiled a misshapen grin. “What are you doing to the Virgin Mary?”
“I was going to surprise you,” I said, trying to concentrate on what was becoming a frustrating effort to reattach the base to the statue. “You know-replace the bulb and set this in your room-have you wake up to a glowing religious night-light.”
Frank groaned.
“Hey, Mr. Episcopalian,” I said, handing the two parts to him. “Instead of making rude sound effects, why not see if you can get this back together?”
Frank took it from me as Travis said, “Well, you do almost have to grow up with it, Irene.”
“Tell that to her sister,” Frank said, peering up the hollow Virgin Mary’s plastic gown. “She keeps trying to talk me into converting.”
“Maybe I’ll put off meeting Barbara,” Travis said, and Frank laughed.
Frank started poking a finger into the statue. “Hold it,” I said. “There’s a limit-”
He looked back into the bottom of the statue, ignoring me. “Get me a pair of tweezers.” Tweezers!
“Please.”
Well, it was the magic word, after all.
With tweezers in hand, he began picking at something inside the statue.
“What is it?” Travis asked.
“The reason the bulb won’t fit. There’s something rolled up inside here.”
Travis looked over at me.
“Travis, you said this was the only thing among your mother’s possessions that your father had given to her…”
“And he gave it to her to protect her,” he said softly. “To protect her from Gerald?”
Frank soon began complaining that if we didn’t give him some elbow room, he wouldn’t be able to get the object-something made of metal wrapped in paper-out without tearing the paper.
But a few minutes later he succeeded, and handed a short flat key and what at first appeared to be a scroll of thick paper to Travis.
“Is that a safe-deposit box key?” I asked.
“Too short,” Frank said. “Maybe a cash box, something like that.”
Travis, who had taken a seat next to Frank on the couch, handed the scroll back to him. “Could you help me unroll it?”
Frank carefully unrolled the scroll, which turned out to be a small envelope. It was the size of the envelopes invitations and thank-you notes sometimes come in, about four-by-six inches, and it was addressed to Arthur Spanning at an address I didn’t recognize at first, but marked “Personal.”
The address was written in black ink in a rough hand. There was no return address, no stamps, no postmark, but at the top of the envelope, a different hand had penciled in the number twenty-five and circled it.
“The office address?” I asked Travis, finally remembering.
“Yes. He told me that he had most of his mail sent there, not only because W would read it to him, but because it was the one place he would be every day-otherwise, he alternated between our house and the farm, and later between his apartment and the farm. But even if he couldn’t get into the office during the day, most evenings, he stopped by to check his mail.”
“Ulkins was there all the time?”
“No. Ulkins would tape-record the mail, usually just summarizing it. See this number twenty-five? Ulkins wrote that. He numbered the envelopes, then said on the tape, ”Letter one is from so-and-so, regarding x and y…‘ and so on. My father would listen to it as soon as he got a chance, whenever he had a moment. Sometimes that was in the afternoon, but usually it was late in the day.“
He explained who W/Ulkins was to Frank as he turned the envelope over. There were two red ink marks on the back, from a pair of rubber stamps. One was the figure of a hand.
“Hand-delivered,” Travis said, pointing to it.
The other stamp was a date-all numerical. “Date received,” he said.
“The day Gwendolyn DeMont was murdered,” I said.
“Should I-should I be handling this?” Travis asked.
“Probably no prints, but just to make sure, here,” Frank said, and using the tweezers but making the barest contact otherwise, he removed five index cards and the page of a calendar from the envelope. All were as curled as the envelope, but using the eraser end of a pencil to hold down one end and the tweezers to hold the other end, Frank held them open.