“Maybe your husband witnessed something?”
She smiles. “He’s in Nigeria. Consulting for an oil company. But you know who you should talk to? Emmet Mainz. He knows everything that goes on around here. He’s a sweet old man, and I’m sure he’d be happy to help.”
Emmet Mainz turns out to be a wealthy widower in his late sixties. From the housewife’s description I’d expected an elderly busybody, but Emmet is nothing of the sort. He leads me across glossy parquet floors, graceful in a sweater and loose wool trousers, into a room he refers to as the conservatory. The corridor outside is decorated with a series of double frames, each containing a typewritten letter on one side and a newspaper clipping on the other.
“My letters to the editor,” he says with a smile. “Now that I’m at leisure, I have to do something to keep busy, so I fire off these letters. Whenever one of them is published, it goes up on the wall. You’d be surprised how satisfying it can be.”
I scan the letters quickly. Most of them seem to be factual corrections or quibbles with the opinions expressed in book reviews. Once I’ve had a look, Emmet guides me into the conservatory, resuming his seat at a black piano, shuffling through the jumble of sheet music on the stand. He knows everything that goes on, he says, thanks to the fact that he sits on just about every neighborhood committee in existence and regularly hosts musical evenings.
“All I can tell you about that poor girl is that she had no ear for music,” Emmet says. “Joy brought her over once, sometime during the summer, and she banged out one of the worst performances of ‘Chopsticks’ I’ve ever heard in my life-and that’s saying something.”
To prove his point, he pounds a few discordant measures on the keyboard, smiling wickedly at the conclusion, eyes alight with mischief.
“You never met her husband?” I ask. “Or observed anyone visiting the house.”
His fingers move over the keys again, wringing out a few elegiac notes with the slightest pressure, letting them hang on the air. Gray light pours through the drawn curtains, etching faint shadows across the floor.
“What you must think of me,” he says, “asking questions like that. I’m not a peeping Tom. I’m afraid I can’t help you. I wouldn’t even have remembered her name if it hadn’t been in the paper.”
I thank him for his time and turn to go.
“Now, if you’d asked about Joy’s husband, I could have told you a thing or two. The girl he ran off with, she lived with them. I used to call her the au pair, but that was just my little joke. They didn’t have children, you see.”
“Dr. Hill’s husband left her for a girl who lived in their house?”
His fingers dance lightly over the keys. “The Polish girl. . Agnieszka. Now she was a beauty and very musical. A former student of Joy’s, too.”
“And Mr. Hill married her?”
“Oh, no.” He laughs at the thought. “She was only having her fun. He did marry another girl eventually, but no, Agnieszka dropped him, I’m afraid. She doesn’t visit anymore, but I know she used to work in a dress shop in the Village. She’s the sort of girl you’d want standing around in a dress shop, though she did more than stand around. Her dream was to be a designer.”
“Does she have a last name?”
Emmet nods. “And it’s full of consonants, too, but if you’re asking whether I remember it, again, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ask Joy, though, she’ll know.”
“She might be sensitive about that subject.”
“Not her,” he says. “I think you’ll find that Joy was relieved more than anything else. I know what it’s like to be trapped in a loveless marriage. For my wife and I, though, there were the children to consider. I’m sure Joy would have divorced him ages ago if she hadn’t been so consumed with work. She’s a very driven woman, but sometimes it’s the driven ones who are most complacent.”
“It sounds like you’re fond of her.”
“Does it?” He smiles and plays me another enigmatic tune. “The human situation has always fascinated me, which I suppose is just a fancy way of saying I like people, and the best sort of people in terms of entertainment value are the characters, the eccentrics. You must run into all sorts of eccentrics in your profession.”
“Not just the criminals, either.”
“You might just be one yourself-an eccentric, I mean, not a criminal. I don’t imagine normal policemen dress that way.”
“My wife’s father was the eccentric in this case,” I say, skimming my hand over the brown check jacket. “He was an attorney in Austin who had all his clothes made for him in England and shipped over. When he’d had too many gimlets, he used to tell me he could make my career by revealing where all the bodies in Texas politics were buried.”
He gives me the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, the first thing since “Chopsticks” I’ve recognized.
“That sounds like Lyndon Pellier,” he says. “Did you marry Charlotte or Ann?”
My stunned expression draws a melodious laugh. “Don’t be so surprised. After all, I do know a lot of people around here. I should have realized. He always was a snazzy dresser. So which girl was it?”
“Charlotte.”
He wags a finger at me. “The pretty one. I should’ve guessed.”
For the next ten minutes he regales me with stories of Lyndon Pellier, each punctuated by a tune on the piano, by which time I’m convinced that while he got the name right, he has confused the man. Either that or Charlotte has concealed from me some of the family’s juiciest gossip. Strangely enough, it’s hard to make excuses and leave when a chance personal connection like this crops up. My ringing phone eventually extricates me.
“I’m looking at the forensics report from your scene,” Bascombe says. “You want the summary, or are you coming back in?”
“Hold on just a second.”
I make my apologies to Emmet and head for the sidewalk. He follows me out, waving as I walk down the street.
“Sorry about that. Go ahead.”
“You’ve got nothing on the prints. Some belong to your victim, some belong to Dr. Hill, and there’s another set that doesn’t match anything in the system. We do have Young’s prints on file, by the way. He was arrested on a misdemeanor battery in 2004 after a brawl outside a nightclub. Pled no contest and did community service. That would have been before he married your victim in ’07.”
“Thanks, I did the math.” I fill him in on the story the Silk Cut manager gave us, which suggests a pattern. “Anything else?”
“We’ve got her cell phone records, so you can start working your way through. Just skimming through them I can see some recurring numbers.” He shuffles papers on the other end of the line. “And how about you, March? You got anything for me?”
Now that I have Aguilar’s confirmation on the photo from the Fauk scene, I’m half tempted to bring the subject up. But I decide to wait on that one for fear of setting him off again. “There is one thing.” I repeat the story Emmet Mainz told me about Joy Hill’s husband running off with a former student who lived in the house. “I have reason to believe she’s in much better financial shape than she let on-meaning she didn’t need a tenant for the money-and there’s also this: apparently she was named in some kind of sexual harassment suit a while back. I don’t have the details, but I’m thinking I should follow up.”