“Nice house,” Tull said, as the couple welcomed them inside. The foyer was the size of the average Baltimore billiard hall.
“We haven’t finished decorating,” Patsy said. She had the supercilious air sometimes mistaken for a grand manner. Tess knew instinctively how she had come to be Mrs. Schiller, saw the transformation as clearly as a trailer in a movie theater. She must have been Dick Schiller’s secretary or administrative assistant, indispensable and sweetly officious. She had brought him homemade cookies on occasion, brushed up against him while handing him his phone messages.
And widower Dick Schiller, who made Bill Gates look as if he had a really good haircut, probably couldn’t figure out what to do with those breasts except marry them.
“We finished decorating, once,” he was saying now, his voice glum and weary. He understood this polite chatter could last only so long, that Tull didn’t want to break the bad news while they were standing in the foyer. “Then we started over, when we returned from our trip.”
“I thought it would cheer you up, getting rid of all that furniture Gwen’s mother had picked out,” Patsy said, patting his arm. “Besides, our decorator said those old things would never have worked in this house.”
Gwen’s mother, Tess noted. Not a name, not “your first wife,” which would have emphasized her connection to Dick. Just Gwen’s mother. Tull caught her eye, noting the same verbal tic.
They sat in the living room. For all the Schillers’ money, it looked like one of the high-end display rooms at Ethan Allen to Tess. The furniture was oversized, and so shiny it appeared to be coated with oil. But maybe there were subtleties in the surroundings that were lost on a little prole like her.
Now that they were seated, Tull spoke swiftly, giving the news the way a skillful doctor would administer a shot to a frightened child.
“We asked you for Gwen’s dental records because new information indicated your daughter might be the victim of a homicide, a victim we could never identify. I’m sorry to tell you the dental records establish she was, in fact, our unidentified victim.”
“Homicide?” her father said. Patsy furrowed her brow. Her surprise was genuine, but she didn’t have any other emotion to put behind it. “Murdered, my daughter was murdered?”
“Yes, sir,” Tull agreed, not bothering to make the kind of distinctions that judges did. Murder was a legal term. Henry Dembrow had been found guilty of manslaughter. “She was killed by a man who found her living on the street in Locust Point, and promised to help her out. This would have been about six weeks after she left the clinic.”
“Will you ever catch the person who did it?”
It was a logical question, one Tess and Tull had expected.
“We know who killed your daughter,” the detective said. “We arrested him, he confessed. But he couldn’t tell us anything about his victim, not even her name. We sent him to prison this year.”
Where he died, Tess thought. But she knew why Tull didn’t tell that part, not just yet. He wanted to give Dick Schiller the fleeting comfort of having an enemy.
“Who is this man?”
“Just a stupid punk kid. A huffer.”
“Huffer?” Dick Schiller echoed.
“A glue sniffer, someone who inhales paint and gasoline fumes.”
“People do that? On a regular basis?” Schiller looked amazed, but Patsy was nodding, almost unconsciously. Oh yeah, Tess thought, definitely a secretary who married the boss. She could almost pick out the zip code in Prince George’s County, one of the little working-class enclaves where the girls dream big, inspired by local heroine Kathie Lee Gifford. You can take the girl out of Bowie, but you can’t take the Bowie out of the girl.
“Yeah, I’m afraid they do.”
“I don’t know Locust Point,” Patsy put in. “Is it near Canton? We have some friends who live in the Anchorage. They have the prettiest view.”
“Other side of the water, ma’am.”
Dick Schiller, to his credit, did not wish to discuss Baltimore real estate. “The man who killed my Gwen, how long will he be in prison?”
Tess liked him for the use of the possessive.
“He’s dead,” Tull said. “He was stabbed to death.”
The room was silent, a silence that not even Patsy was foolish enough to fill. In less than five minutes, Dick Schiller had found out his daughter was dead, his daughter had been murdered, his daughter’s killer had been caught, her killer was dead. Most people complain justice is slow, but it had moved much too swiftly for Dick Schiller.
“Was Gwen using drugs, too?”
“No.”
The question had been Patsy’s; the emphatic denial came from Tess. She couldn’t help feeling fiercely protective of Gwen.
“I was just asking,” the stepmother said. “After all, she had…other issues.”
Tess studied the second Mrs. Schiller. She was so curvy, so pink and white, the colors of her outfit repeated in her fair, ripe flesh and carefully made-up face. She reminded Tess of the old-fashioned refrigerator cookie still found in some Baltimore bakeries, a round disc with pink swirls running through the vanilla dough.
It was a kind of cookie that looked better than it tasted.
“Mr. Schiller, how did Gwen’s mother die?”
“Ovarian cancer,” he said. “She went very fast. At least, that was her doctor’s frame of reference. It may have been fast in medical terms, but it was agonizingly slow for us.”
“Was she very thin, toward the end?”
“Yes.” He looked at Tess curiously, trying to figure out where she was going. “Yes, quite thin.”
Tess didn’t push it. It was just a hunch, an inexcusable, pseudo-psychiatric leap of faith. But it didn’t surprise her that a teenage girl who had seen her mother waste away, then watched her father bring home this strawberry sundae of a woman, had a complicated relationship with food.
“Do you have a photo of Gwen? In all the time I was looking for her, I’ve never known what she truly looked like. All I had was an artist’s sketch.” And a photocopy of a Polaroid of a corpse.
Schiller gave Tull a questioning look, as if he had already forgotten why she was here. “Tess is a private investigator. She’s the one who identified your daughter after the police department had given up. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for her efforts.”
He left the room and returned with a framed studio portrait, the eight-by-ten from a standard school package, with blue skies in the background. It was an old photo. Gwen had braces, the gawkiness of a middle schooler. The part in her hair was crooked, as was her smile, and her eyes were half-closed.
She was also one of the most beautiful girls Tess had ever seen. Like a painting, Sukey had said, or someone famous. Tess understood now. Gwen’s hair was glossy, as Devon had noted, her eyes dark and bright, her features perfect and yet not. Tess could stare at this photograph all day, dissect it a thousand ways, and never be able to explain why Gwen Schiller was so arresting. The dark hair, the fair skin, the lush red mouth. She could pass for Snow White.
And everyone knows what Snow White’s stepmother did when she found out she had competition in the fairest-of-the-land department. Tess would have bet all Schiller’s paper billions that Patsy had been the one who pushed for Gwen to be hospitalized, while she and her husband went on their extended honeymoon.
“She was lovely,” Tess said, handing the photograph back.