Nancy spoke up. “She would roll with anything we told her, somehow. That’s my observation. You ever see that show, on cable, the one with the fat guy in glasses who does improvisations?”
The three men looked at her-Lenhardt and Willoughby completely lost, Infante clued into Nancy ’s vague pop-culture shorthand from their time as partners. “That piece of shit? You couldn’t pay me to watch it. Although I did like it when the black guy, the super nice one, made fun of himself on that other show. Does Wayne Brady have to choke a bitch ? That was funny.”
Nancy flushed. “Hey, you get up with a baby in the middle of the night and see what you watch. I only bring it up because she reminds me of that. She’s quick, she thinks on her feet, and she gets what a lot of liars don’t, that it’s okay to make mistakes, because people do say the wrong stuff all the time. Like with the crickets? She didn’t miss a beat when I pointed out it was March. She knows I caught her in a lie at that moment. But she kept going. Sergeant’s right. You try that bones story on her, she won’t blink.”
The elevator opened, and Miriam Toles, after a quick look around the lobby, recognized Infante. Last night, when Infante met her at the airport, he had expected someone dressed more…well, Mexican. Not in a sombrero-he wasn’t that ignorant. But perhaps one of those tiered skirts in bright colors, or an embroidered blouse. He also assumed that she would look older than her age, which records put at sixty-eight. But Miriam Toles had that sense of style that he’d seen in New York City women when he went into the city as a kid-silver hair in a severe, chin-level bob, large silver earrings, no other jewelry. He saw Nancy glance down at her own outfit, a pink shirt worn with a khaki skirt that was meant to hang a little looser than it did, and knew she was feeling dowdy and hickish. He bet that Miriam Toles often had that effect on other women. She wasn’t truly pretty-she had probably never been pretty. But she was elegant and she had the remains of a killer figure.
Next to him he was conscious of Chet Willoughby straightening up a little, even sucking in his gut.
“Miriam,” the old detective said, his manner a little stiff. “It’s good to see you again. Although, obviously, not under these circumstances.”
“Chet,” she said, holding out a hand for a shake, and the old detective deflated. Had he been hoping for a kiss on the cheek, an embrace? It was weird, seeing this sixty-something guy all quivery with a crush. Didn’t this ever end? Shouldn’t it end? Lately, when every other commercial seemed to be about impotence-ED, as the ads called it, as if that were better-Infante had found himself thinking that it was silly to fight the body, that it must be almost a kind of relief to have your dick lie down on the job, done at last. His would never give up the ghost, of course, he knew that much about himself, and it would be a burn if you got impotence as a side effect of some medication. But he’d been counting on, even hoping for, the end of the emotional insanity, that giddy rush of caring what another person thought of you. Watching Willoughby, he realized that it ended as everything else did-with death.
MIRIAM STARED DOWN at the lackluster fruit she had plucked from the breakfast buffet, hard little pieces of things not quite in season. She didn’t want to be one of those tiresome people who was forever championing her way of life, but she already missed Mexico, the things she had come to take for granted over the last sixteen years-the fruit, the strong coffee, the lovely pastries. She was embarrassed by this paltry brunch, much as the quartet of police officers seemed to find it a treat. Even the young woman was eating lustily, although Miriam noticed her plate was all protein.
“I would have come anyway,” she told them. “Once I heard the detail about the purse. True, I wish your information were more…definitive at this point, that you knew one way or the other. But even if this isn’t my daughter, she clearly knows something about the day my daughters disappeared. Perhaps everything. Where do we go from here?”
“We’d like to put together a comprehensive biography of your daughter, filled with details that only she could know. The layout of the house, family stories, in-jokes. Anything and everything you can remember.”
“That would take hours, maybe even days.” And break my heart a thousand times over. For thirty years Miriam had understood that she had to share her family’s saddest secrets with investigators-her husband’s failing business, her affair, the roundabout way that Sunny and Heather had come to be their daughters. But she was jealous of the happy memories, the mundane, quotidian details. Those belonged to her and Dave exclusively. “Why don’t you tell me what she’s told you so far, and see if any of that rings false with me? Why won’t you let me see her?”
The female detective, Nancy-it was overwhelming for Miriam, meeting so many new people-flipped through her notes. “She’s been consistent on birthdays, the schools they attended, your address. Thing is, most of that is on the Internet or in news accounts, if a person is inclined to dig deep enough, pony up for the archive searches. At one point, she said something about vacations to Florida and a person named Bop-Bop-”
“That’s right. Dave’s mother. She coined that hideous name for herself because she couldn’t bear to be anything matronly. She hadn’t enjoyed being a mother and being a grandmother really discomfited her.”
“But that’s not exactly proprietary, is it? Heather could have told that to kids at school, for example.”
“Yet would it be remembered thirty years later?” Miriam asked, then answered her own question. “Certainly you wouldn’t forget Bop-Bop if you ever met her. She was a piece of work.”
Willoughby smiled.
“What, Chet?” Miriam asked, sharper than she intended. “What’s so amusing to you?”
He shook his head, not wanting to say anything, but Miriam caught his gaze and held it. She shouldn’t be the only person answering questions this morning.
“You’re just so very much as I remembered. The…candor. That hasn’t changed.”
“Gotten worse, I would think, now that I’m an old woman and don’t care what anyone thinks of me. Okay, so this person knows Bop-Bop, she knows what Heather’s purse looks like. Why don’t you believe her, then?”
“Well, there’s the fact that she doesn’t remember seeing the music teacher, when he was adamant that he saw her,” Nancy said. “And in the original notes you told investigators that Heather had a little box in her room where she kept her birthday and Christmas money, but the money-somewhere between forty and sixty dollars, by your recollection-was missing. So Heather took her money to the mall that day, but when we asked for the contents of the purse-”
“The purse was empty when it was discovered.”
“Right. We know that. However, Heather wouldn’t, unless she emptied it herself and threw it down, and no one thinks that happened. This woman didn’t mention it, however. She said there was a little cash, a brush, and a Bonne Belle lip moisturizer because she wasn’t allowed to wear real lipstick then.”
“We didn’t have rules about makeup per se. I told her it looked silly on young girls, but it was her choice. Bonne Belle sounds right, however. Plausible, at any rate.”
Nancy sighed. “Everything she says sounds plausible. At least when she describes the day, what happened. It’s when she describes the abduction and…” Her voice faltered.
“Sunny’s murder,” Miriam prompted. “You have avoided speaking of that part to me.”
“It’s just so lurid,” the young woman said. “Like something out of a movie. The details of the day-what they had for breakfast, how they took the Number Fifteen bus to the mall-again, something that’s in the news accounts, as is the usher who remembered them getting kicked out of Chinatown-those things ring true. But being kidnapped by a cop who takes them to a deserted farmhouse and decides to keep Heather instead of killing her after she witnesses the murder of her sister? When she gets to that part, all the details fall away, and the story no longer rings true.”