Liar (7 page)

There were a crucifix and a rosary on a nightstand next to the bed, and above it, a print known to any Catholic school child. An angel with flowing blond tresses and a white star above her head hovers serenely behind two barefoot children, a little boy in a straw hat and his sister, who carries a basket over one arm and comforts her brother with the other. Dark woods rise in the background as the children cross a dilapidated bridge over a treacherous river, but we fear not-their guardian angel will see them to safety.

The nightstand also held a plastic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary that was about ten inches high, the type that has a little night-light bulb in the base and glows from within when plugged in, although this one wasn’t. But even with these items, the bedroom had less the feel of a religious articles store display than the front room.

“Is this you?” Rachel asked, holding out a small, framed snapshot.

I took a look. “Yes, with Barbara. Judging from the missing front teeth, I was probably about seven, so Barbara was about twelve.”

Barbara and I were a study in contrasts-she, a redhead with green eyes, was looking at the camera with a bored, half-pouting regard: how awful to be asked to pose with her little sister. I, with dark hair and blue eyes, looking more like the Kellys-my father’s side of the family. In the photo I was grinning up at the lens with my goofy gap-toothed smile, oblivious to Barbara’s sullenness.

I began studying the other photographs. One was of a thin, gray-haired woman with a cane, standing next to a priest, in front of a church. I saw the family resemblance and thought perhaps this was a photograph of my grandmother, in Kansas, until I noticed a palm tree in the background. A closer look made me realize-with a shock-that this must be Briana herself. In that instant it was brought home to me that she had not stopped aging when my mother died; that while my mother would forever be fixed in my mind as a woman in her early forties, Briana had gone on, had become a woman in her sixties. She was my mother’s younger sister by a number of years, but I could not remember exactly how many, and now, looking at the photo, I wondered what my mother might have looked like at a similar age, had she lived.

Even taking a high estimate of Briana’s age, she could not have been past her early sixties. The years, I was sad to see, had not been kind.

Another photo showed her when she was younger, looking much as I remembered her-probably in her late thirties or early forties-holding a toddler. Travis, most likely. There were several photos of Travis at various ages, sometimes with other adults and children, other times alone. None showed Travis with his father, Arthur. There were no photos of Arthur.

I looked for the most recent of Travis, which seemed to be a senior yearbook portrait. I picked this one up and studied it, trying to be objective. With dark hair and light-green eyes, Travis resembled Arthur to a great degree-but some of the Maguire looks were also in his features. Perhaps he had not grown up to be quite as handsome as his father, but he wasn’t hard to look at.

“Your cousin?” Rachel asked.

“Yes. This must be from high school. He’s in his mid-twenties now.”

“He looks like his dad?”

“For the most part. You’re wondering if Arthur was the man who was trying to pick the locks on the front door?”

“Yes. Do you think it could have been him?”

“It’s possible. Allowing for a few changes since I last saw him, he’d probably fit the description-but so could any number of other men.

The age would be about right. If it was Arthur, why wouldn’t he just knock on the door?“

“He could have been looking for something she didn’t want to give him.”

“What? A copy of
Butler’s Lives of the Saints?
A pink rosary? An old tin of cocoa?”

“We haven’t looked through this desk yet. Maybe he wanted something that had to do with the murder of his first wife-”

“Only wife, as far as I know. And that was more than a dozen years ago,” I said.

“Was he ever tried?”

“No. Never even charged.”

“Look at it another way,” she said. “If he had been tried and acquitted, he’d be protected.”

“Because of double jeopardy-he couldn’t be tried twice for the same crime.”

“Right. So he’d feel safe. But as it is, he’s still vulnerable. No statute of limitation on murder.”

“So if she blew his alibi apart… but this is nonsense,” I said. “She wasn’t the only one who alibied him. They were at the emergency room that night with Travis.”

She crossed her arms and tapped a toe. “You know the details of the murder case?”

“Not really. I wasn’t living around here then. I was working up in Bakersfield.”

“But… well, that’s your business,” she said, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “And what’s done is done.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, you ignored your aunt for more than twenty years, and there’s not exactly any way to make up for that now, is there?”

I didn’t answer.

“Sorry,” she said.

I studied the photo of Briana and Travis, the one taken when he was a toddler. Like my mother, Briana was a redhead. Her eyes were blue, her smile shy. “She was timid,” I said. “Quiet and unassuming, for the most part. I’ll admit she could have changed over the years, but it’s hard for me to imagine her blackmailing Arthur.”

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“So you think he came around here and tried to shut her up?”

“Right,” she said. “A possibility, anyway.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe she had some kind of proof that he did it, alibi or no alibi. Otherwise, what the hell would anybody try to steal from her? I mean, even the most rabid Georgette Heyer fan wouldn’t go to the trouble of prying off the bars on the back windows to steal these paperbacks.”

“Georgette Heyer?”

“The author of these genteel Regency romances,” I said, pointing to the books. “Not the sort of reading that leads to a life of crime.”

“No, I guess not.”

“It wasn’t a random break-in, though. He was looking for her place specifically-Esther said he had been watching the apartment, checking mailboxes.”

“Bene.
We agree.”

“Tell you what. Let’s take a quick look through whatever papers McCain left in the desk and then pack up here. If we have time, maybe we can find the little market she was walking to, try to locate the place where the accident happened. It’s supposed to be close to here.”

“Sounds good. Monday morning, I’ll see if I can learn anything more from McCain.”

“You don’t need to get involved-”

“You think you can keep me out of this? Besides, your aunt Mary was right. You’re going to need to find your cousin-and fast. If the alibi can be broken, he’s probably next on his dear old dad’s hit list.”

Just as she said this, we heard an urgent knocking on the front door.

I opened it to see Ruby looking flushed and excited. “He’s here!” she shouted.

“Who’s here?” I asked, still thinking of Travis.

I heard a car driving off just as Esther, hurrying down the stairs, hollered, “Damnation, Ruby! You scared him off. Didn’t even get a chance to look at the plates!”

“Who are you talking about?” I asked, stepping out of the apartment to look up and down the street. Rachel joined me, but neither one of us saw any moving vehicles.

“The one who tried to break into the apartment!” Ruby said. “I noticed him first,” she added, glancing back at Esther with a look of reproach. “Maybe if I hadn’t taken the time to call Esther, we would have been able to surprise him.”

“Did you get a better look at the car?” Rachel asked.

She blushed, then shook her head.

“The color?” I asked.

“Green!” she answered quickly.

“Brown!” Esther countered.

I asked them to wait, then went inside the apartment to get my purse, pulled out a couple of business cards and a pen. I wrote my home phone number on the backs of the cards, then handed them to Briana’s neighbors. “If you see him again, call me-doesn’t matter what time of day.”

“You’re a reporter?” Ruby asked. When I said yes, Esther began to give me some ideas for improving the
Express
-although she admitted that she had stopped taking it about ten years ago-continuing until Ruby said, “For crying out loud, Esther! She works there, she doesn’t own it. They ever ask you how the wing on a plane ought to be built when you were answering phones at Douglas? If the answer is yes, I’m never going to fly anywhere again!”

Rachel started laughing, which made Esther put her chin up in the air. I did my best to smooth her ruffled feathers, thanked them both, and Rachel and I went back into the apartment.

“Think he’ll be back?” Rachel asked as she shut the door.

“No,” I said. “Not unless he thinks we failed to find whatever he’s looking for.”

She looked around the room thoughtfully, eyeing the ceiling, walls and floor as if looking for a secret compartment.

“You said your aunt Mary arranged for movers to pick up the furniture?” she asked.

“Yes, they’re coming Monday. And she’s hired a cleaning crew to come by on Tuesday. So we’re just taking the personal items-clothing, papers, dishes, pictures-things like that.”

“Yeah, all right,” she said absently.

I wasn’t surprised when she started pulling the built-in drawers all the way out, inspecting the bottoms, looking for hiding places. I started doing the same to the furniture in the bedroom as I packed Briana’s things away.

Even with this check for secret compartments, packing up the meager contents of the apartment took little time. I didn’t search through the items we were taking-the actual contents of the drawers and cabinets-figuring I could do that later. Like Rachel, I wanted to have a look at anything we weren’t taking with us.

Only once was I tempted to linger over the contents of a drawer- when I found one that was filled with photographs, including some black-and-white photos of my mother and grandmother. But I heard Rachel working steadily in the other rooms, and rather than reminisce while she worked, I boxed the photos gently but quickly.

The desk had an assortment of loose papers in it, no more organized than the photographs in the drawer. I took a quick look at the papers, but none seemed to have blackmail potential, nor did they immediately identify Travis’s whereabouts.

None of my searching revealed any secret hiding places, but when I was ready to start loading the car, I couldn’t find Rachel. I went from room to room, and didn’t see her. I glanced out at the car, thinking perhaps she had already started loading it, but she wasn’t there. I walked into the apartment again, this time loudly calling her name. Her voice came back muffled, as if through a wall. I found myself wondering if she was in a secret passageway, perhaps having pressed some button on a built-in bookcase. But her voice had seemed to come from the kitchen, not the bookcases.

In the kitchen, though, I still couldn’t see her. I called out again and when I turned toward her voice, she startled me by briefly popping her face up in the window over the sink. “Out here!” she shouted. I looked out. She was standing beneath the window, in the backyard. As I started to unlatch the sash, she shouted, “Don’t! Don’t move it! Come back here-I want to show you something.”

I went outside, down the porch steps and through a side gate to a small backyard shared by the four tenants. It was basically a patch of grass with a couple of rusted metal lawn chairs on it, but Rachel wasn’t touring the gardens. She was staring at the window.

At first I didn’t see what was holding her attention, but as I drew closer, I saw that she was studying some sort of strange symbol, drawn in pencil on the windowsill, near the bars. It was small, not more than a few inches wide, and looked like a rectangle with the bottom side missing; a small, single straight line rose perpendicular from the top side:

“A gang symbol?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not really in that style, and it’s way too small. But maybe it had some meaning to the burglar.”

“Why do you say that?”

She pointed to tool marks left on the bars of the window. “I think it marked this window as the one to break into. Or maybe it marked your aunt’s apartment. Or maybe it was left here as a kind of warning to your aunt.”

“Awfully small warning in an obscure place. She might not have ever come out here, or seen it if she did. And it could have been drawn a long time ago. Some kid could have drawn it.”

“Not too long ago,” she said, pointing at, but not touching, other areas of the sill. “See? Someone wiped at the dust on the sill before they drew it. It’s less dirty than these other places. And rain or more time would have left it looking like the rest of the sill.”

“Hmm. And now that I think about it, I guess no little kid drew it. Not up this high.”

“No. Older kid, maybe, but you’d expect more than one little mark if some teenager wanted to doodle.” She studied it for another minute and said, “I’ve got a camera in the car. Mind if I take a photo of this?”

I shrugged. “Be my guest.”

After she had photographed the drawing (at one point making me hold a ruler near it), we began loading boxes into the car.

When we had finished, Rachel peered into her trunk. “Been a long time since I could fit all my worldly possessions into the trunk and backseat of a Plymouth.”

“Look, if you’re hinting that I ought to feel ashamed of myself-”

“Hey, relax! I’m sorry about what I said earlier. Nobody’s trying to blame you for anything. All right?”

“Sorry. Guess I’m on edge. Maybe it’s because your friend McCain
is
trying to blame me.”

She closed the lid of the trunk a little more forcefully than necessary. “Let’s see if we can find this little grocery store,” she said, opening the driver’s side door.