“During most of it? So there was a moment she showed emotion?”
“Twice. After she’d almost completely undressed, she hesitated before taking off… her panties. She was a modest woman, Joe. That’s one more weird thing about all of this.”
Eyes closed, holding his cold glass of 7-and-7 against his forehead, Bob said, “Even if…even if we accept that she was so mentally disturbed she could do this to herself, it’s hard to picture her videotaping herself naked…or wanting to be found that way.”
Clarise said, “There’s a high fence around the backyard. Thick bougainvillea on it. The neighbors couldn’t have seen her. But Bob’s right…she wouldn’t want to be found like that. Anyway, as she was about to take off the panties, she hesitated. Finally that dead, slack look dissolved. Just for an instant, this terrible expression came across her face.”
“Terrible how?” Joe asked.
Grimacing as she conjured the grisly video in her mind, Clarise described the moment as if she were seeing it again: “Her eyes are flat, blank, the lids a little heavy…then all of a sudden they go wide and there’s depth to them, like normal eyes. Her face wrenches. First so expressionless but now torn with emotion. Shock. She looks so shocked, terrified. A lost expression that breaks your heart. But it lasts only a second or two, maybe three seconds, and now she shudders, and the look is gone, gone, and she’s as calm as a machine again. She takes off her panties, folds them, and puts them aside.”
“Was she on any medication?” Joe asked. “Any reason to believe she might have overdosed on something that induced a fugue state or a severe personality change?”
Clarise said, “Her doctor tells us he hadn’t prescribed any medication for her. But because of her demeanor on the video, the police suspect drugs. The medical examiner is running toxicological tests.”
“Which is ridiculous,” Bob said forcefully. “My mother would never take illegal drugs. She didn’t even like to take aspirin. She was such an innocent person, Joe, as if she wasn’t even aware of all the changes for the worse in the world over the last thirty years, as if she was living decades behind the rest of us and happy to be there.”
“There was an autopsy,” Clarise said. “No brain tumor, brain lesions, no medical condition that might explain what she did.”
“You mentioned a second time when she showed some emotion.”
“Just before she…before she stabbed herself. It was just a flicker, even briefer than the first. Like a spasm. Her whole face wrenched as if she were going to scream. Then it was gone, and she remained expressionless to the end.”
Jolted by a realization he had failed to reach when Clarise had first described the video, Joe said, “You mean she never screamed, cried out?”
“No. Never.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“Right at the end, when she drops the knife…there’s a soft sound that may be from her, hardly more than a sigh.”
“The pain…” Joe couldn’t bring himself to say that Nora Vadance’s pain must have been excruciating.
“But she never screamed,” Clarise insisted.
“Even involuntary response would have—”
“Silent. She was silent.”
“The microphone was working?”
“Built-in, omnidirectional mike,” Bob said.
“On the video,” Clarise said, “you can hear other sounds. The scrape of the patio chair on the concrete when she repositions it. Bird songs. One sad-sounding dog barking in the distance. But nothing from her.”
Stepping out of the front door, Joe searched the night, half expecting to see a white van or another suspicious-looking vehicle parked on the street in front of the Vadance place. From the house next door came the faint strains of Beethoven. The air was warm, but a soft breeze had sprung up from the west, bringing with it the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. As far as Joe could discern, there was nothing menacing in this gracious night.
As Clarise and Bob followed him onto the porch, Joe said, “When they found Nora, was the photograph of Tom’s grave with her?”
Bob said, “No. It was on the kitchen table. At the very end, she didn’t carry it with her.”
“We found it on the table when we arrived from San Diego,” Clarise recalled. “Beside her breakfast plate.”
Joe was surprised. “She’d eaten breakfast?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Clarise said. “If she was going to kill herself, why bother with breakfast? It’s even weirder than that, Joe. She’d made an omelet with Cheddar and chopped scallions and ham. Toast on the side. A glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. She was halfway through eating it when she got up and went outside with the camcorder.”
“The woman you described on the video was deeply depressed or in an altered state of some kind. How could she have had the mental clarity or the patience to make such a complicated breakfast?”
Clarise said, “And consider this — the Los Angeles Times was open beside her plate—”
“—and she was reading the comics,” Bob finished.
For a moment they were silent, pondering the imponderable.
Then Bob said, “You see what I meant earlier when I said we have a thousand questions of our own.”
As though they were friends of long acquaintance, Clarise put her arms around Joe and hugged him. “I hope this Rose is a good person, like you think. I hope you find her. And whatever she has to tell you, I hope it brings you some peace, Joe.”
Moved, he returned her embrace. “Thanks, Clarise.”
Bob had written their Miramar address and telephone number on a page from a note pad. He gave the folded slip of paper to Joe. “In case you have any more questions…or if you learn anything that might help us understand.”
They shook hands. The handshake became a brotherly hug.
Clarise said, “What’ll you do now, Joe?”
He checked the luminous dial of his watch. “It’s only a few minutes past nine. I’m going to try to see another of the families tonight.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“I will.”
“Something’s wrong, Joe. Something’s wrong big time.”
“I know.”
Bob and Clarise were still standing on the porch, side by side, watching Joe as he drove away.
Although he’d finished more than half of his second drink, Joe felt no effect from the 7-and-7. He had never seen a picture of Nora Vadance; nevertheless, the mental image he held of a faceless woman in a patio chair with a butcher knife was sufficiently sobering to counter twice the amount of whiskey that he had drunk.
The metropolis glowed, a luminous fungus festering along the coast. Like spore clouds, the sour-yellow radiance rose and smeared the sky. Only a few stars were visible: icy, distant light.
A minute ago, the night had seemed gracious, and he had seen nothing to fear in it. Now it loomed, and he repeatedly checked his rearview mirror.
8
Charles and Georgine Delmann lived in an enormous Georgian house on a half-acre lot in Hancock Park. A pair of magnolia trees framed the entrance to the front walk, which was flanked by knee-high box hedges so neatly groomed that they appeared to have been trimmed by legions of gardeners with cuticle scissors. The extremely rigid geometry of the house and grounds revealed a need for order, a faith in the superiority of human arrangement over the riot of nature.
The Delmanns were physicians. He was an internist specializing in cardiology, and she was both internist and ophthalmologist. They were prominent in the community, because in addition to their regular medical practices, they had founded and continued to oversee a free clinic for children in East Los Angeles and another in South Central.