Wall of Glass (5 page)

The main house, off to my right, was a fortress of adobe and glass, flanked on either side by wings that extended along the courtyard walls. I walked up the flagstone walk, went up the steps, and pushed the doorbell. From inside I could hear a chime sounding the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth. I don't want
ding dong
, Sammy, I want
class.

After a few moments, the door was opened by a young girl, sixteen or seventeen years old. Tousled blond hair, a formless gray sweatshirt, baggy jeans, battered running shoes. One day she might be pretty, maybe even beautiful. Now she was wearing braces and thick-lensed horn-rimmed glasses and she moved inside her body as though it were something she'd ordered from Spiegel's, and she didn't know yet whether she wanted to keep it or send it back.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm here to see Mr. and Mrs. Leighton.”

Her gray eyes blinked behind the glasses. “You're the private detective?”

“Yep.”

“Come on in. Dad's on the phone, but my mother's waiting in the living room.”

I followed her through a large foyer and down some broad red tile steps to a huge sunken living room. Three walls were of stippled white plaster, hung with the kind of subdued modern oil paintings that drew attention not to themselves, but to their owner's subdued good taste. The fourth wall was of glass and looked out on the plot of land that was forever England. There was a brick floor beneath me, and
vigas
overhead, long stripped pine logs that ran across the high ceiling. A stone fireplace, broad and round, sat in the center of the room beneath a cylindrical copper chimney with a wide conical mouth. Piñon logs were burning inside, presumably to counteract the chill put out by the air conditioner.

“He's here, Mother,” the girl announced.

A woman stood up from a long white sectional sofa, crossed over to me, and held out her hand. Horizontally, so I could kiss it or shake it, whichever I fancied.

“Mr Croft?” she said, as I shook it.

“Yes.”

“I'm Felice Leighton. I'm very pleased to meet you.” Judging by the trace of accent in her voice, she had attended one of the Eastern colleges that teach women how to wear Harris tweed and talk with their teeth clenched.

Tall and handsome, she wore black pumps, tight pale blue designer jeans, and a tight gray lightweight cashmere sweater opened at the neck to show a strand of pearls. Her body was impressive, with round muscular breasts, a narrow waist, and no excess flesh at all. Her hair was frosted blond, medium length. Her lips were full, her nose straight, and her eyes a deep dark sapphire blue. The color was fake, and had to come from contact lenses, but it did go nicely with the gray of the sweater. Her skin was taut, perhaps a shade too surgically taut over the aristocratic cheekbones, and it had the kind of color that meant weekly visits to the tanning salon. From across the room, she had looked twenty-five. Up close, the figure and face said thirty-five. Only the hands and neck said otherwise.

She held my hand for just a shade longer than necessary, then released it with a smile.

“Please,” she said, “sit down.” She indicated the sofa. I sat on it, and so did she, a few feet away, folding her left leg beneath her and putting her left arm up on the sofa's back, all of which did some fairly interesting things to the sweater.

“My husband will be with us in a moment. He's on the phone to London.”

“To all of it at once?”

She laughed. It was a good laugh, easy and genuine. “Sometimes it honestly seems that way. Would you care for a drink while we wait?”

“No thanks.”

“Coffee? Tea?”

“Tea would be fine.”

She turned to the young girl, who stood off to the side, no doubt mesmerized by this scintillating adult conversation. “Get that, would you, Miranda? And I'll have a small Scotch and water. And for heaven's sake, darling, stand up straight.”

“
Mother
,”, the girl said, and rolled her eyes theatrically. Then, without changing her posture that I could see, she turned and marched from the room.

“She's hopeless,” Mrs. Leighton told me with a rueful smile.

I nodded sagely. You narrow your eyes and you move your head up and down.

The woman seemed to me, from the way she treated her daughter, to be the sort who liked to control, and to be seen controlling, her environment. Maybe that was why she tended toward the rough trade that Hector had mentioned. Men like Biddle, who would take what they wanted without asking and without much subtlety. Maybe it was a relief, a kind of deliverance, to shrug off all that responsibility.

As though she knew what I were thinking, she looked me over slowly, up and down. It felt a bit like being frisked. “So,” she said. “You're with Mrs. Mondragón.”

“That's right.”

“What a tragedy that was. She was such a beautiful woman.”

“She still is.”

“Yes, of course. Of course. I only meant that it must be difficult for her. The confinement.”

I nodded.

“How long have you worked with her?”

“Almost three years now.” I reached into my jacket pocket and slid out my notebook. Reached into my shirt pocket and slid out my pen. “Would you mind, Mrs. Leighton, if I asked you a few questions about the burglary?”

“Why no, not at all.” She smiled. “But please,” she touched my shoulder lightly with tapered fingers, “it's Felice.”

I nodded. “Romero told me that you normally kept the necklace in a safe-deposit box.”

“That's right, yes. We have a duplicate, quite a good one, cubic zirconium, and that's the one I kept here. But there was a terrible mix-up, all my own fault, really, and I got the two of them confused.”

“When had you last worn the genuine necklace?”

“On Thursday, the day before. Derek and I had gone to the Governor's Ball. And then on Friday, Derek brought the duplicate back to the bank. Thinking that it was the genuine necklace, of course. I realized just before we left that afternoon that I'd made a mistake. And the banks were closed, naturally, so we couldn't get to the box and exchange them. Derek planned to go on Monday. I put the necklace in my dresser, where I normally kept the duplicate.”

“So who would've known that the genuine necklace was here?”

“Only Derek and I. And Kevin, our son. Miranda had already left.”

“This duplicate,” I said. “Would it be good enough to fool a burglar?”

She smiled. “Well, I don't know a great many burglars personally, but I should think so, yes. It wouldn't fool a jeweler, of course. But after all, it fooled me.”

“Some cash was taken, too.”

“Yes, about two hundred dollars. Ah, here are our drinks. What took so long, Miranda?”

“Elena couldn't find the tea,” the girl said. She was carrying a silver tray, which she set down on the coffee table. She stood back and brushed the hair away from her eyes.

“Thank you, darling,” said Mrs. Leighton.

The girl nodded, turned, and padded off.

“And a gun was taken,” I said. “That was yours?”

She handed me the cup and saucer. “Yes. A pistol my husband had given me.”

“Thirty-eight caliber.”

“Yes. A Colt, I think. I'd never fired it, and it wasn't loaded. My husband bought it as a joke several years ago.”

“A joke?”

She smiled and sipped at her drink. “We were having an argument once, I don't even remember now what about, and I got so angry I told him that if I had a gun I'd shoot him. The next day he gave me the gun.”

Very droll. The rich
are
different. “It wasn't loaded when he gave it to you?”

“No.” She smiled. “I think Derek felt that would've been carrying the joke a shade too far.”

I nodded. “According to Romero, there was no one in the house that night.”

She shook her head. “I'd given Elena, our housekeeper, the weekend off. Miranda was staying with Nancy Garcia, a friend of hers, and Kevin was over at the Palmers' house, across town.”

“Has Elena been with you for any length of time?”

“Years and years. Since we moved here. And that was, oh, nineteen-seventy, I think. I'd trust her with my life. And besides, the police talked with her last year. She was home with her mother and brother.”

“Did she know the code for the alarm?”

“Of course. But didn't Allan tell you that the alarm hadn't been set?”

I nodded. “Yeah, he did. Why was that?”

“I'm afraid that Kevin forgot to set it before he left. He was the last one to leave that day. He'd had some friends over, and they'd been drinking. You know how boys can be sometimes.”

That seemed to call for another sage nod, so I provided it. “It isn't possible that one of them took the necklace?”

She looked at me as though I'd suggested an unnatural act. Probably from her point of view I had. “Certainly not. They're all fine boys. And besides, Kevin never told them the necklace was here.”

I nodded and sipped at my tea. Earl Grey. “According to Romero, you were the one who discovered the burglary.”

“Yes. I came home on Saturday morning. Derek was staying over in Albuquerque and planned to fly back that evening. I didn't even notice when I came in that the window was smashed. That one.” She pointed to a panel in the wall of glass. “I went straight to my room to unpack, and then I saw it. All my things, lingerie, my dresses, scattered around the room. And then I realized, of course, that we'd been robbed. You hear about it—it's even happened to friends of ours—but you never believe it can happen to you. I ran over to the dresser, all the drawers were open, and I saw that the necklace was gone.”

I nodded.

“I went to call the police,” she said, “and the phone wasn't working. Later, of course, the police told me that the wires had been cut. I had to drive down the road to our neighbor's, the Wheatfields', to call them.”

“Was anything else taken,” I asked her, “besides the necklace and the cash and the gun?”

“No, nothing. I suppose we were lucky in that respect. But that's not the way I saw it at the time. I was heartbroken. And I had this horrible sense of having been violated.”

“The police think that Frank Biddle was involved.”

She sipped at her drink. “Yes, so one of them told me. A Sergeant Nolan.”

“Would Biddle have known you kept a necklace, genuine or otherwise, in your room?”

She looked at me blankly. “How could he have?”

“What
is
this?” A man's voice, angry, off to my left.

FOUR

D
EREK
L
EIGHTON
stood in the doorway. He was a few years older than his wife and quite a bit taller, a big man midway through the process of going soft. His gray hair had been styled in artful curls that did a good job of concealing how little of it was left. He wore a brown silk Western shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, and a pair of brand-new blue jeans that, like all brand-new blue jeans, looked vaguely pathetic. Beneath them were a pair of cowboy boots that had cost a large family of lizards their lives. His skin was red, less from the sun, I suspected, than from alcohol. Or possibly apoplexy.

“Derek,” said the woman, “this is Mr. Croft.”

I set down the cup and saucer and stood up. He came into the room without offering his hand. His face was tight with displeasure. “The police went through all this a long time ago.”

“In order to help locate the necklace,” I said, “I need to know as much as possible about the burglary.”

“Garbage,” he said. “Get to this hoodlum Killebrew and beat some sense into him. It's as simple as that.”

Mrs. Leighton stood up, smiling. “Mr. Croft is only doing his job, darling. You sit down and relax, and I'll get you a drink. More tea, Mr. Croft?”

“No thanks.”

“Please. Sit down. I'll be right back.”

I sat, careful not to watch the tilt and sway of nicely rounded buttocks as she walked away. Her husband glowered at me as he sat down in a white padded chair across the coffee table.

“I'm not employing you,” he said, “to come here and badger my wife.”

“I'm not badgering your wife,” I said. “And you're not employing me. No one is. Mrs. Mondragón and I have a speculation contract with Atco.”

“I'm paying the bloody finder's fee, assuming you do your job and find that necklace.”

Something Allan Romero hadn't mentioned. “That's between you and Atco.”

He put his head back as though he'd suddenly smelled something unpleasant. “Are you always this impertinent?”

“Weather permitting.”

“This is why,” he said, his red face growing redder, “this is exactly why I told Romero to send you over here. I will not have a repetition of what happened last time. People disturbing my wife, my children. Probing into our private lives, asking us questions as though we were the criminals. I know how you two-bit private detectives operate—”