Defense for the Devil (3 page)

He found the brochure and began to read, then he whistled. “It’s only seven rooms to rent out, but pretty fancy. The lady loaded?”

“With seven rooms? Not likely. I think she must work pretty hard at it.”

“Says her breakfasts are four-star events.”

She sighed. She might have known Maggie would be a great cook.

“About ten miles south of Newport,” Bailey said. “You should have gone up and out through Corvallis. Quicker that way.” He put the brochure on the dashboard. “You going to give me any more than that?”

Traffic picked up; it was always heavy in the summer, and it would be worse coming back. The road was still straight, here on the outskirts of Eugene, but it would start snaking around hills, then mountains in the Coast Range, up and over and around for thirty miles, posted anywhere from ten miles an hour all the way up to thirty. She began to fill Bailey in on the details. When he began asking questions, she had few answers.

“Bailey, I just took her on as a client yesterday. Late yesterday.”

“Be nice to know,” he said gloomily. “See, the car could have been stolen. But if the ex got the car, and there was a gun locked up in the glove box, that’s something else.”

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.

It was twelve o’clock when she pulled into the drive to Folsum
House. Another time, she wanted to come back and explore the little town of Folsum, but not today. A white three-story building came into view, gleaming in the sunlight. There were several cars in front of the building, and as she got closer, she could see mattresses stacked at the top of several stairs that led to the open front door.

Maggie came out to meet them. She was hot and sweaty, her hair was tied up in a high ponytail to keep it off her neck; she looked years younger than the thirty-five she had admitted to. The deep shadowed hollows under her eyes were less noticeable, as if she had gotten some sleep the night before.

“Let’s start at the top and work down,” Barbara said after introducing Bailey. Two young men emerged from the house with another mattress. Bailey was already taking photographs.

A woman came toward them from a long hallway when they entered the building. She was muscular and lean, forty or forty-five, dressed in chino pants and a plaid shirt. “Irene Lasker,” Maggie said. “This is the lawyer I told you would be coming. Ms. Holloway and her associate.”

Irene Lasker nodded. “I told her not to trust that insurance man,” she said. She stalked away again, muttering, “I hope they catch them and nail their hides to the wall, that’s what I hope.”

“Well, upward?” Barbara said, eyeing the stairs. Two men were starting down, carrying an upholstered chair; the seat, arms, and back had all been slashed, the stuffing pulled partway out.

“We’d better use the back stairs,” Maggie said faintly, watching the men wrestle the chair down the staircase.

It was carnage, from attic apartment all the way through. Paneling in the halls had been broken, storage spaces under eaves and stairs had been emptied, closets ransacked, drawers dumped, overturned. Worse than Maggie had described. Finally Maggie took them to her room, and closed and locked the door. Part of the room had been outfitted as an office; there was a twin-size bedframe, and clothing scattered everywhere. Papers were on the floor, drawers overturned on them.

Maggie went on to the bathroom, a large, oddly shaped room with hyacinth-blue and white tiles, a blue oversized tub, with a blue tile ledge in a sharply angled corner, blue cabinets…. Evidently a large flowerpot had been on the ledge; dirt, greenery, shards, were in the bottom of the tub. The cabinets had been emptied, hair dryer, towels, cosmetics, bowl cleaner…. A second door led to the girls’ room, Maggie said. On the wall opposite the window were floor-to-ceiling open shelves that had been swept clean, and a lighted mirror over a vanity table and small chair. Maggie went to that wall.

She moved an upturned clothes hamper out of the way, moved the chair and then the vanity. Then she opened a panel in the wall. “Dad added the bedroom and bath when my mother got pregnant the first time. She didn’t want an upstairs room and she wanted an adjoining room for a nursery. They angled it out for the view,” she added. “And that made the bathroom this shape. They squared off some of the corners, but still there was space left where the pipes come in, and it was unusable, I guess, so they walled it off but left access to the plumbing.”

She stood aside to let Barbara and Bailey get to the opening. It was too dark to see much. “Let’s get pictures first,” Barbara said, moving out of Bailey’s way.

While he was getting the photographs, she glanced inside the girls’ room. More carnage, more clothes strewn about. This room was lavender, and now she saw a painting of lavender flowers on the wall, a graceful spray of lilacs, and she recalled that every room had a flower painting. Lilacs, roses, sunflowers… She examined the painting; it was Laurence’s, and it was very fine. Each room was decorated with colors that matched the colors he had used. The lavender bedroom, blue tinged with lavender in the bath, rose in Maggie’s room. It must have been a very elegant bed-and-breakfast.

As soon as Bailey was done, he dragged the stuff into Maggie’s bedroom and took more pictures of everything.

“Tape and seal the suitcase and briefcase, will you,” Barbara said to Bailey. “I’ll get the paperwork out of the way. Not over the keypad locks,” she added. He scowled; he knew that, she understood. Maggie cleared enough space on her desk for the laptop, and very quickly Barbara filled in the information on the fee agreement, and then quickly keyed in another agreement, her obligations and Maggie’s. She finished almost as soon as Bailey was done.

“I want a look in the duffel bag,” Barbara said.

Very quickly Bailey said, “We should find something to dump it out in, something smooth.”

Maggie rummaged in the tangle of clothes and brought out a white blouse, which she spread on the floor.

After Bailey dumped the bag, they all gazed at a lead pipe and leather holder. “What…?” Maggie said, reaching for it. Bailey caught her hand.

“Don’t touch,” he said. He found a plastic bag in his gear, and latex gloves that he pulled on; then he carefully picked up the pipe and holder and put them inside the bag. He held it by the top and let them look. “Hair, fibers, blood, all that expert detective stuff.” He put the plastic bag back inside the duffel. No one commented as he picked up the other items and replaced them in the duffel bag. Dirty shirts, underwear, socks, shaving kit… After that, he made a note of the tailor’s name in the silk coat, then he counted the money in the clip. “Eighty-two hundred.” Maggie nodded. In the wallet they found $728 and identification in the name of Gary Belmont. Driver’s license, insurance card, Social Security card, all in Belmont’s name.

Barbara picked up a little notebook. “Okay if I keep this with me? Could help track him down.”

Maggie shrugged, and Barbara slipped the notebook into her bag and brought out the Rolex, which she added to the duffel bag.

“Is that Mitch?” she asked then, handing the driver’s license to Maggie.

“Superficially it resembles him. Dark hair, at least. The statistics are almost right: six feet two, a hundred-five pounds. Mitch is six one, and not that heavy.”

“Okay. I’ll write up an inventory of the stuff you’re turning over to me, explain the various agreements, then a quick look outside, and we have to beat it.”

It didn’t take long. She explained the various papers to Maggie and was pleased to see that Maggie was actually reading them. She feared for clients who didn’t read what they signed. A few minutes later they were ready.

“This end of the house can be closed off from the paying guests,” Maggie said at an outside door near her room. “We have a little privacy that way, and use this as a private entrance.”

“How close can we get my car?” Barbara asked.

“The driveway is over there, past my room,” Maggie said, opening the door to a terrace. “You can’t see it from here.”

Barbara could see why the room had been angled as it had been. One wall with many windows faced northwest, one faced southwest; the view in either direction was magnificent—ocean, beach, cliffs.

“Be right back,” Bailey said; he started around the house toward the garage.

“I want to walk out there a bit,” Barbara said. She left Maggie in the doorway. The house was two hundred feet in from the edge of the rocky cliff, which was like a peninsula jutting out from the mainland. At the edge she stopped to gaze down. It was almost a straight drop from here to the beach, about seventy-five feet down, although on both sides the cliff sloped in a scalable fashion. A rustic split-log fence outlined the edge in both directions. She followed it to a break, where a trail zigzagged downward.

When she returned to Maggie, she said, “Wow! It’s great!”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “It is. When there’s a storm, a real gale, spray comes up over the fence.”

Bailey came around the corner of the house. “Both cars torn apart,” he said morosely. “Walk over and look around. I’ll bring the car back to pick you up, and while you’re looking, I’ll load the stuff. What did you do with his car keys?” he asked Maggie.

For a moment she looked blank, then she paled. “Oh, God, I forgot all about the keys. They’re in my jeans. The jeans are—they were in the bathroom hamper.”

They all went back to the bathroom. Maggie pulled the jeans out from under other things and felt in the pockets. “They’re gone,” she whispered.

When they left the bed-and-breakfast, Barbara headed north and drove slowly past the day-use park. It was jammed full, and the cars were visible from the road, which was no more than a narrow access road to the park and the inn. A mile farther up, it joined the coast road, 101. At Newport, Bailey told her to pull in at a drive-through fast-food place. Then, eating hamburgers, they headed out of Newport, back toward Eugene. It was ten minutes to three. She waited until Bailey had finished his second hamburger to ask, “Well? Comments? Observations? Anything?”

“Two guys. They were searching and being fast and careless about it. One’s a lefty,” he added.

“How do you know one’s a lefty?” she asked, passing a truck. He groaned.

“Close your eyes and imagine—God help me, I didn’t say that! Just imagine, open-eyed, how you’d go about yanking stuff out of a closet. Which hand you open it with, which one you grab stuff with, how you toss it.”

She had no trouble visualizing it, but she had not seen it herself. “Gotcha,” she said.

“And he’s got the car keys,” he said gloomily.

A little later she said, “See what you can dig up about Belmont. Could be Arno’s alias. And if Mitch has a record. You know the drill.”

“Barbara, Belmont’s from New Orleans.”

“So? I don’t expect you to go there and pound on doors. Just dig a little.” She drove for a minute or two, thinking, then said, “Maggie will stay at the hotel for a while, and no doubt Trassi will get to her. He’ll probably give me a call tomorrow. It would be helpful if I had a little information before I talk to him.”

“Wish for the moon. Tomorrow?”

“It’s a thought.”

They got to her bank in Eugene ten minutes before it closed at five-thirty. There had been a log truck on the Corvallis road with traffic lined up behind it for miles. She parked illegally out front long enough to carry the stuff from the trunk inside the bank, then handed the keys to Bailey, who would move the car. When she was finished with the safe-deposit rental business, she made a Xerox copy of Maggie’s check and deposited it and two other much smaller ones, and she was done.

Bailey was waiting for her. “Now the notebook,” she said, but hesitated. He had to look through it, but where? Her office at the apartment was impossible; she couldn’t even close the door. Not her father’s office; the firm was closed by then, and she didn’t want to use her key to get in. “How about a drink?” she said finally.

“How about that,” he said with more enthusiasm than he had shown all day.

“Where’s the car?”

“Two-hour parking slot. It’s okay. Let’s walk over to the Park Bar and Grill.”

They crossed the street and walked through the small urban park with its big fountain, walked one more block and entered the cool, dim bar.

There, in a booth with a gin and tonic before her, a double bourbon on the rocks before him, they sat side by side and looked over the notebook.

“What the hell?” he said. “Foreign telephone numbers?” He flipped the page to find more foreign numbers. Not written by a European, Barbara thought; the sevens were all American, not slashed. Bailey flipped to the next page. “These I know. Seattle area codes. San Francisco.” He copied all the numbers in his own notebook.

There was a long string of numbers without any notation to indicate what they were for. Under them was a flight number. The letters
f
and
l
and the number.

A woman’s handwriting, Barbara thought, studying the two letters. At the bottom of the page, printed in capitals with a different pen, a felt tip, was the word PENELOPE.

Bailey closed his notebook and stowed it away in a pocket, and she slipped the other one back into her bag. They finished their drinks and walked to her car, and she drove to her apartment.

“I’d offer to give you a call,” he said at the car door when they got out, “but damned if I know where to call.”

“Shit! Look, I’ll see Trassi in Dad’s office. When he makes the appointment, I’ll leave a message on your machine. If you can get there half an hour or so before him, that should give us time enough.”

Bailey saluted and slouched away toward his own car, and she thought, Goddamn it! She would have to use the office, after all. There wasn’t any other place where she and Trassi could have a private talk.

When she opened the apartment door, the fragrance of spicy enchiladas hit her. The card table was set, with an unlit candle, a bottle of wine, and a rose in a glass, and John was hurrying from his office.

“You said you’d be home early,” he whispered into her ear, drawing her in close.