Hess slid open the closet. A soft puff of perfume and leather. Half her clothes were still wrapped in plastic from the cleaners. Suits and trousers, dress blouses and casual ones. Lots of blue jeans. Toward the back was a black leather bodice of some kind, with big stainless zippers. There was a hanging shoe rack with each compartment occupied. A hamper held the things you would wash at home. In the bathroom he found her prescription medicine: an outdated antibiotic for cough and some ointment for a rash. He looked in the shower at her soaps and hair care products. Under the sink he found the bulk-sized bottles she refilled them with. Frugal, he thought. Organized. Efficient. Good at living alone.
End of messages.
He found her banking statements and canceled checks in a cardboard file in the spare bedroom. It was more or less an office, with a bed for guests. Her checking account had just over $3,000 in it. A savings account had $15,500 and her KEOGH was just over $65,000. Doing all right, he thought, especially for thirty-two. Living well. Drinking Brunello. Saving some. Friends. Good job. Going to the mall late for a new CD and makeup remover.
He went through her cleared checks and wrote down the names of the garage where she took her car, all service people — hair stylist, landscape maintenance, plumber — and a few others that caught his eye for reasons he neither understood nor questioned.
Hess read the Macy’s shoe clerk’s description of Janet Kane as she left his store, the last known person to see her alive: “Average height and weight, dark hair worn up, a black skirt and white blouse and two-inch heels.” He would know the height of the heels, wouldn’t he? That was 8:43 P.M. She was dressed nicely. She was alone. The clerk saw a thousand women walk through his store that night but he identified her from a picture.
He found a description of Lael Jillson supplied by her husband, who had been at home with the children when Lael went to South Coast Plaza for hosiery. She had been wearing a blue woolen dress from Nordstrom. White shoes and the white purse. Hair up in a white plastic clip, a white woolen jacket with her but not on her when she got in the car.
Her hair was up, too, thought Hess.
He replaced the bills and checks and put the accordion file back where he’d found it. He put her mail on the kitchen table, beside a stack of Publishers Weekly and a black-and- white ceramic cow creamer, a cow sugar bowl and cow salt and pepper shakers.
Kitsch.
Art.
Bulk beauty aids.
High heels and her hair up.
Hess went into the living room and sat down on the big red sofa. He put his head in his hands and thought about Janet Kane, then dozed a moment, then thought about Janet Kane again. The fact that she had black-and-white checked linoleum made him feel irrationally bad.
For a moment he thought about himself, picturing the dead cells dying, the good ones multiplying by the millions. The doctor had said he was in a battle for his life and that’s how it felt.
A few minutes later he got up and locked the door behind him. He turned off the garden water and walked past the white and purple flowers to his car.
“We were closing,” said the Macy’s men’s shoes clerk. His name was Drew Allen and he was twenty-two years old, a student at a local junior college. “And I’d pretty much finished up, just had to run the vacuum. She came down the center of the store there, because it leads to the exit. She was just beautiful. A beautiful face. She looked over and she knew I was watching her and she smiled. That doesn’t happen much. Most women catch you looking they don’t like it. Anyway, when someone that beautiful smiles at you, you remember. At least I remember. I looked at my watch and it was exactly 8:43. Tuesday. You make kind of an event out of some things. On a job like this. I remember thinking I’d watch that walkway at 8:42 every night from then on out. I started dreaming up ways to find out if she was married, maybe ask her out, but I couldn’t come up with anything good. No point in that now, right?”
No suspicious men.
Nothing unusual.
Except for Janet Kane, just another boring night.
Robbie Jillson answered the door in shorts and a T-shirt and acknowledged Hess with a tired nod. He was a handsome young man with a surfer’s bowlish haircut and the first touches of gray appearing just above his sideburns. Hess noted the big knots built up on the tops of his feet by years of lying on a surfboard. Part owner of a beachwear company, Hess remembered, “Pure Risk” or “Risk All” or something like that. Had the brains to leave his wife’s car undisturbed because he knew she’d been taken.
“The kids are at camp until six,” he said.
Hess was pleased but not surprised that Robbie Jillson had gotten together the things he’d asked him to. Robbie showed him into the library. It had a view of the hillsides to the east. There were high bookshelves with ladders to get to them and a very large burnished desk. On the desk were pictures of Robbie and Lael Jillson and their children. It was the prettiest family Hess had ever seen. He thought they were just the kind of people you’d expect to find in this house. It was a good family until the mother got careless and thought she could go shopping alone.
Robbie brought Hess a fruit drink and closed the door behind him. Hess could feel the waft of the air conditioner on his scalp, and the drink made his teeth feel like they were being squeezed. He ran through the cleared checks and listed the same kinds of parties he’d listed in Janet Kane’s house. He’d hoped for some connection between the two cars, but there was none he could find. Nothing popped. There was an overlap in bottled water service — Mountain High Springs — but a call to the company confirmed that the delivery routes were different. Yes, Hess elicited from the district delivery manager, it was possible that a fill-in driver could have delivered at both residences. Yes, all new drivers started as fill-ins, to get experience. But the manager said it was impossible to check back for a year, even six months, because every quarter the weekly route schedules went back to corporate. Hess would have to take it up with them and she gave him the number. He thanked her because patience was the linchpin of any investigation and of Hess’s soul.
He was surprised to find Lael Jillson’s diary included in the box full of personal, medical and financial information that he had requested. There was a gummed yellow tag on it that said, “I’ve never looked at this, but you can if it will help — RJ.”
He opened to the last entry and read in Lael’s graceful hand:
June 2 — A rare afternoon alone in the house here. Robbie and the kids gone surfing at Old Man’s but I didn’t want to go this time. Too much sun these days, feel like I’m drying up. Sometimes I like it just like this: me and the mansion and the air conditioner off and the windows open and a giant G&T or two, and just me. No talk, no noise, no nothing. For about an hour, maybe, then I start missing them. Sometimes I think there’s not quite enough of me to entertain me for long. It’s a problem, I know, but I’ve chosen to raise children rather than develop myself. Robbie says children shouldn’t be an excuse. But then Robbie has never complained about my lack of a me, either. Sometimes I don’t know why he loves me. Sometimes, like today, when I look around me I see all this bounty I don’t deserve and I wonder if it’s Ike they say — what goes around comes around and karma and all that stuff — and someday everything you don’t deserve in the first place will be taken away and then some. Because if you have so much more than you deserve to have what’s to keep you from losing more than you deserve to lose? Oh well, too much G&T and quality skunk weed. One more puff on the pipe and I’ll sign off. ’Til next time, thank you Lord for this embarrassment of riches I call my life. I love it!