Dead Lift (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

I didn’t feel like returning Richard’s call.

I dropped Vince off, killed the radio and drove away in silence. The chatter in my head was overwhelming again, demanding that further input of any kind be stopped—whether that was the Top Forty on my radio or Richard’s theories about Claire’s case.
All rooms full
, my brain said.
Try again later
.

Bothered, edgy, and physically tense, I wondered what was wrong with me.

On autopilot, I turned toward the YMCA and, when I realized my mistake, I figured my subconscious was trying to tell me something and decided, for once, to listen to it.

It was almost two o’clock, way too hot for an outdoor run, but I did have a swimsuit, cap, and goggles in my trunk. The mindless repetition of dozens of laps would free me to think. Exercise, I knew, would bring me out of my worsening mood.

The pool turned out to be packed. In the shallow end, kids tossed diving sticks or clung to kickboards. Four lane ropes had been removed to make room for a water aerobics class—all stocky grandmothers, near as I could tell. Two lanes remained, both occupied, but I knew the etiquette for sharing. I lowered myself into a lane, disappointed to find the water temperature almost as warm as a bath.

I stretched my latex cap around my head and pushed my ponytail underneath it. My goggles, scratched since the day Annette had commandeered them as space-explorer lenses, were tinted and water tight. Wasting no time, I pressed them over my eyes and submerged. My feet got a strong push off the wall, and I headed out for Lap One, which I’d decided would be devoted to Platt’s fish.

Nobody had questioned my walking into the gym with a fish. I didn’t want him to boil in the car, so I’d carried him inside and put him in my locker, along with my purse and clothes. Fish, I figured, would be neither claustrophobic nor afraid of the dark so he shouldn’t mind. There’d be time to clean the bowl before Jeannie and Annette got home from their movie. I hoped the surprise pet would earn some points.

My breathing found its rhythm and I began to reach longer on my stroke than usual, really working on stretching out my back muscles each time. I gave myself over to the buoyancy of the pool and let my head relax. The muscles in my neck relaxed too. It was quiet in the water. Except for bubbles when I exhaled, the pool was silent. I started to form a list.

Webmail
. Later that day I’d explore Claire’s e-mail history. If possible, I’d do it without Jeannie reading over my shoulder proffering her wild theories.

Old letters from Diana
. Diana and Platt may have been lovers thirty years ago or as recently as last week. Did it matter either way?

Platt’s will
. She’d been named in his will, so maybe it did matter. If Platt had left her a large sum, and if she’d known beforehand, maybe she killed him for the money.

His Caller ID log
. Making cold calls to a bunch of strangers didn’t excite me—I was fairly sure I’d botch it—but unless I wanted to bring Richard into the mix, this job would fall to me. The prospect would be less frightening if I could assume all the people on the list already knew he’d died. What worried me was ringing up those who had no idea.

Mr. B
. Even as my tension surrendered to the work-out and mental clarity made its slow return, I knew I should have gone back to Mr. B’s house instead of coming to the pool. He’d been home this afternoon and I’d passed up a perfect opportunity to approach him. There was no guarantee he’d have anything useful to offer, but I berated myself for not following through. Mr. B was a lingering stone I meant to turn.

My spooky e-mail
. Learning someone’s e-mail address was neither difficult nor expensive, but last night’s e-mail put me on high alert anyway. If someone from last spring’s ordeal were involved in this case, no matter how remotely, through an association with Mick Young, it was possible I was dealing not with a single menacing criminal but with a network of them. I wanted to believe I was being paranoid, but if I’d learned anything from working with Richard, it was not to underestimate paranoia. I lost count of my laps thinking about that e-mail.

Then two girls ducked under the lane ropes to cross the pool and my rhythm was broken. I stood and moved to the wall, watching them, and took a moment to catch my breath. My own little girl would be their size in a couple years. With a strange mixture of shame and regret, I realized she was also on my list.

Annette
. I pushed off the wall and resumed. The world fell silent again except for my breathing. The
world
, I remembered, was twenty-five thousand miles in circumference. I pictured my daughter and me on the Earth, only a few feet apart. Rather than close our gap by walking toward each other, it seemed we’d head opposite directions and meet thousands of miles later, clear on the other side of the planet. Loving her, I feared, would always mean taking the long way.

***

My apartment smacked of acetone and I knew Jeannie had given Annette a full-service manicure, pedicure, or both. I was relieved to find her note:
At movies. Back for dinner
. It meant I still had a few hours to deal with Diana’s old letters, Claire’s e-mail, and Platt’s call list.

I took care of the nasty fish bowl first so Annette would come home to a cheerful pet. Then I set it next to me at the kitchen table, among used-up cotton balls and assorted nail polish bottles, and booted up my laptop. Logging into another woman’s e-mail account felt vile.

I typed “Wendell Platt” into the search box and nothing came up. That didn’t necessarily mean anything though, because everyone seemed to use some form of alias these days. With millions of people using these free accounts, any given name was likely already taken. I tried variations but nothing hit.

For good measure, I scrolled through her Sent and Deleted folders and read an exhaustive series of messages, but nothing to or from Platt. I checked her Contacts list and it was equally useless. If she’d ever e-mailed him, the messages had been purged. It’d take a subpoena to pull them off Yahoo’s servers.

I weighed Diana’s statement that Claire had been pining after Platt, haranguing him with e-mails. She’d either tried to mislead me or she hadn’t. I was more bothered by the possibility she’d told the truth. Claire denied ever having written Platt, a claim her e-mail history supported, and I believed her. If Diana believed otherwise, her information had come from
somewhere
and the only sources I could think of were Platt or someone in the HPD. So either I was a fool or someone was spreading rumors.

Taking that a step further, it didn’t make sense that Platt would tell Diana about e-mail messages that didn’t exist. The only reason to do that would be to garner sympathy or jealousy and Platt seemed too mature for either. That left someone involved with the investigation. If a detective had leaked this information, I could hardly draw a conclusion. I’d heard of officers holding information back from the public, but I didn’t think they ever leaked false details. That was a question for Richard.

I dismissed the remaining possibility, that Claire had known Platt after all and did, in fact, e-mail him. By all indications, she was an adept liar, but my operating assumption was that she wasn’t lying to
me
. It didn’t fit that a guilty person would offer full run of her house and free access to her e-mail account. Most
innocent
people wouldn’t do that.

Then it occurred to me that she might have multiple e-mail accounts. Perhaps she’d offered up access to one that was clean. The house, too, could have been volunteered for my search if she knew that nothing inside would be linked to the crime.

I studied the Betta and envied his grace. The Claire-Diana-Chris love triangle, squirrelly history between Diana and Platt, and unsettling e-mail from the night before squelched my second-guessing. No, no, and
no
, I told myself. Claire was not lying. Something fishy was going on, and not just in the bowl beside my keyboard.

I moved on to Diana’s letters, struck by the difference in how Claire and Platt stored their special papers. Claire had stashed hers in an elaborate curio box lined with purple velvet, probably an antique. Platt had opted for a twenty-one-cent office folder.

Reclined on my sofa, legs stretched, I made my way through Diana’s old notes.

Similar letters came that year from Milan, Paris, and London. It wasn’t clear from her notes how long Diana had been jet-setting the globe in the name of high fashion, but she was certainly committed to make the most of her travels, often describing the landscape and buildings in great detail. In 1981 she’d have been in her early twenties and I was impressed such a young woman would expend as much effort as she had to absorb every morsel of the world that she visited. I tried to imagine her then—energetic and hopeful, more worldly than most women twice her age. Platt, only a few years older, had probably been in medical school during Diana’s burgeoning modeling career. There was no indication how or when they’d met, but it was probably a safe assumption that any man who knew Diana back then never forgot her.

The lines had been scrawled on a postcard with progressively-shrinking characters until she’d run out of room. Her closing sentences wound across the bottom of the card and up the right side until they blended with his address. I stared at the phrases “look us up” and “you and Melissa” and wished I had information that would bridge 1981 to 1983. The last item in the stack was a Christmas card. Two black bears in sweaters hauled a decorated tree into their den.

Maybe it was the fresh sting of divorce, but the tone of the card sounded more like the Diana of today. The mid-eighties were possibly when Diana’s nature deteriorated from exuberant to prissy. I thought this was a shame.

What did it mean that Platt had saved these notes? Had she sent more that he hadn’t kept, or was this it? Plenty of folks kept boxes upon boxes of worthless, forgotten crap in their attics or basements. Ask them what was in any given box and they never knew without opening it.

But this wasn’t the case with Platt. His home was Spartan and crisp, organized to a fault. He didn’t accidentally keep anything, and that worried me. For thirty years and through a marriage, he’d saved Diana’s letters—maybe hidden them—and then had kept them in a safe spot, reserved only for them, until the end. Why?

I stacked them neatly and returned them to their folder, then pulled his phone log list from my purse. I skipped what appeared to be business calls—those from places like Baylor College of Medicine, a local music store, Tone Zone, and Purple Heart. Of course, the Tone Zone calls might have been Diana calling, but if that were so, then calling that number back wouldn’t get me anywhere anyway. That left a list of sixteen personal calls.

I needed to figure out an excuse to use when I called these people. Some might not even know Platt was dead. Contacting them, probing for their history with him, would require delicacy and tact—scripts that, for me anyway, required a few drafts.

I went to my kitchen junk drawer. Platt would have frowned at the Chap Stick, luggage tags, burned out night lights, freebie magnets, expired coupons, and spare guitar strings I shoved aside before finding a notepad and pen.