Nine Days: A Mystery Page 15

  The Internet told me that Richard lived about an hour’s drive northwest. I went into the bedroom to get his keys off the bedside table where I’d dropped them last night, and then thought about where to hide the box of money while I was gone. Before I’d decided, the phone rang. I grabbed it up, hoping to hear Hector’s voice. Instead, it was Tova. “Connie can close any evening after six,” she said. “What works for you?”

  So much had happened since making the offer on the Ranch that it took me a second to remember doing it. “Sorry, Tova,” I said. The sixty thousand was now my running stash, until I sussed out my new circumstances. “I’m going to have to bow out of the deal. After all this stuff with Teresa, I’m not sure I’ll be staying in town.”

  She made an outraged noise. “You might have mentioned that when we spoke the other day.”

  “It wasn’t the main thing on my mind at the time,” I said, amazed that it required saying.

  “I’ve already spent several hours compiling the paperwork for the sale. My time is valuable.”

  I wanted to tell her what I’d been doing for the last two days, just to see what it would take to interest her in something besides herself. Instead I asked, “Have you heard from Hector?”

  “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “I haven’t been able to catch him at home or get him on the phone since we found Teresa, and he wasn’t at Enchanted Rock when I went out there yesterday.”

  “Went out there?” There was a catch in Tova’s voice. She paused to clear her throat, then said dryly, “It’s a shame Hector can’t bottle his sex appeal and sell it. None of us would ever have to worry about money again.”

  “I needed to talk to him about something.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  Her kitten-with-a-whip tone was actively repelling me now. “Something funny is going on with this downtown development thing. It might be connected to Teresa’s death.”

  I thought Tova had hung up, so total was the silence on the other end of the line. Then a snide snicker crackled in my ear. “Well, thank heaven you’re on the case, Miss Marple.”

  “What, you’re OK with this pinhead Maines trying to put your brother in prison?”

  Tova tsked. “Hector’s not going to go to prison.”

  “Look, you’re not going to be able to hide his PTSD from the lawyers, and even if the defense can spin it into an insanity plea—”

  “I’ve been related to Hector for almost thirty years,” Tova cut in. “If he were dangerous, I would certainly be aware of the fact. When he finds himself in stressful situations from which he can’t remove himself, he simply zones out. He doesn’t grab a knife and start stabbing people.”

  I tried to wade back in, but she wasn’t having it. “I’d prefer not to have to be the one to tell Connie, once again, that a prospective buyer has backed out. Please make a point of speaking with her directly.”

  Before I could reply, she hung up.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there, feeling unsettled, before I heard a low burble of something that sounded like people talking. I stood up, listening, and realized that it was coming from the basement. I hustled out of the apartment and down the porch steps. The basement door was closed, but flew open when I yanked on it.

  “Who’s down here?” I called into the musty darkness.

  There was no answer, and I didn’t hear the voices now. Cautiously, I stepped in and pulled the string on the single lightbulb next to the door. It lit up a low, wide room with a concrete mud slab and a forest of stone piers holding up the massive pine beams of the house overhead. A collection of cardboard boxes and furniture was stacked neatly in the center, away from the exterior walls.

  I strained my ears, but didn’t hear a car dying off in the distance, nor had I seen one leaving on my way down here. Apparently I was hearing things in addition to losing my ability to speak.

  I turned to go back upstairs, and caught sight of the doorjamb. It was worn with age but intact, and so was the lock.

  Leaning out of the light, I bent down to take a closer look. Except for some wear at the bottom where the door leaf scraped over the sidewalk, the entrance was undamaged. I straightened up, stomach tickling, and went around to check the six high windows, all glazed with wired glass. Each one was painted securely shut.

  Nobody had broken in here. Not in the last decade.

  A certainty began to blossom in my belly like ink meeting water. Richard hadn’t lost his keys. Someone had taken them, with or without his knowledge, for the express purpose of getting in here. On the same night, and around the same time, that Teresa had been killed.

  As usual, I had to do a mental backtrack to figure out how my gut had gotten there. If the keys had really been lost, a finder probably wouldn’t have known immediately that they were Richard’s. Even if they had, the odds of the finder also knowing that they included the only key to Teresa’s basement, and said finder also having a reason to want to get in here, were astronomical. Those keys had to have changed hands purposely. Whether that had anything to do with Teresa’s death, I declined to decide. I’ve erroneously assigned meaning to coincidence enough times in my life to be wary of doing it again.

  Just the same, I went over and had a look inside the cardboard boxes that weren’t completely buried. Clothes neatly folded into plastic vacuum bags, books organized by size, Christmas decorations heaped into a minty-smelling box with a festive green stain at the bottom, knickknacks and kitchen gadgets encased in Bubble Wrap. Nothing worth killing over.

  What if Richard had stashed something down here that was, though? Maybe something that proved his collusion with Jesse on the Milestone deal. Stashed it down here, thinking it was the last place Teresa would ever look, and then she’d outguessed him. Palmed his keys Thursday night in the bar and gotten her proof before Richard noticed that they were missing. That would explain why he’d been so frantic to find her when Jesse had told him he’d found the door open. I briefly considered digging out the boxes underneath the ones I’d already looked in, but realized immediately that whatever the proof had been, it was almost certainly long gone by now.

  XII

  Predictably, Richard’s subdivision was a gated community, a plastic approximation of some English country estate that had never existed outside a Jane Austen novel. It appeared to be engaged in a campaign, armed with Astroturf and man-made water features, to exterminate any inkling its inhabitants may have had that they lived in Central Texas. Everything was brightly lit in the early evening twilight, as if it were some sort of movie set. I could practically hear the fevered spinning of countless electric meters as I stopped at the gate.

  A uniformed person of indeterminate age and gender leaned out of a glowing glass booth and asked me what my business was. I considered saying I was casing the place for a break-in later, just to see what s/he’d do. Instead, I said I had an appointment at the Hallstedt residence, and I was issued a pass and let in. I wondered what the point was.

  Richard’s house was a stone-clad monstrosity big enough to play football in, with a semicircular driveway in front. I parked under the porte cochere and got out. As I came around toward the door, it opened, and a uniformed maid stepped out onto the stoop.

  “May I help you?” she asked, suspicious. She looked familiar, and I realized it was the young woman Connie and I had run into on the sidewalk in front of the bar, on our way out Thursday night. She wasn’t drunk now, but she had the shrunken hips and nervous hands of someone who soon would be. Again.

  “I’m here to see Richard.”

  She ran her eyes down to my feet, then back up, not impressed. “Are you a patient?”

  “That’s a pretty personal question.”

  She gave me a disapproving look. “He’s not here.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “What’s this regarding?” she snapped.

  Her unprovoked animosity was making my radar tickle. It wasn’t just a bad hangover. “Has he been home s
ince yesterday?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  We were going in circles, so I shut up and just stood there, waiting for her to come around the track again.

  “Did something happen?” she asked after a minute.

  “Yes,” I said.

  When I didn’t explain, she muttered, “I’m calling the police,” and slammed the door.

  I silently wished her better luck than I’d had, and started back around the truck. Halfway, I remembered my original pretext, and made a return trip to drop Richard’s keys through the mail slot.

  XIII

  It actually took some time for my eyes to readjust to the darkness again after I turned out of the glaring subdivision—I blame this for the fact that, forty-five minutes later, I had to admit to myself that I was lost. I have a lousy sense of direction, and without a map or visible landmarks to navigate by, it’s usually just a matter of time. When I realized that the road wasn’t even remotely familiar, I reversed direction, but whatever wrong turn I’d taken ran both ways.

  After winding around for what felt like hours in almost pitch darkness, a weak flicker of light appeared up ahead on the right. Relieved, I gave the gas a nudge, and was rewarded with a bump so hard my head hit the cab roof. I stamped the brake, and the engine light came on. Swearing, I pulled over onto the grass verge and got out to check below. Even in the dark I could see a fast drip of viscous fluid falling from the undercarriage.

  The lights weren’t far, so I got my wallet, locked up, and started walking. A few hundred yards later, the pale outline of a couple of small houses materialized out of the darkness. The road continued sloping down toward them, with what looked like a river crossing at the bottom. As I walked over it, I spotted a tall narrow house against a dark background of trees farther up a long hill and realized that I’d somehow come around the back way to Connie’s property.

  The light was coming from the small house next to the open shed. I went around and up onto the porch. The door was standing open, and the front room was empty except for a table draped with dark red velvet against the far wall. On top of the velvet, various items had been arranged in a tiered fashion. About half a dozen candles burned among them.

  I stepped cautiously inside. The walls and ceiling were bare boards, and the floor had been painted white, but not very recently. As I got closer to the altar, a whiff of dead fish and paint thinner caught my attention, at about the same time that I realized what the lumpy gray object on the center tier was: the dismembered hand that had appeared behind the bar on Thursday night.

  It was lying on a bed of fresh flower petals and surrounded by a collection of cigarettes, money, and candy. There were also some less familiar items—miniature bottles filled with colored water and stones, small bundles of oily-looking cloth tied up with red cotton string, and several pieces of dollhouse furniture, including a table with chairs and a tiny sideboard. Interspersed between these objects were piles of small oval dark green leaves. The flowers and decaying flesh together produced a sharp, raw smell.

  Something clamped on to my right biceps, and I started to turn, swinging a fist out by instinct, but was trapped by arms coming around from behind. I brought my heel down as hard as I could on the foot between my own. There was a loud yelp and the arms loosened; I jumped out of reach and whirled to face my attacker. It was Hector.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You’ve got to stop with this sneaking-up-behind-me thing.”

  He’d been knocked off balance against the wall, and now he got his feet back under him, aiming an alarmed look at me. As his eyes moved across my face, I saw something puzzled run across them and quickly disappear into the darkness. He glanced warily at the open door, then back at me. “How’d you get out here? I didn’t hear a car.”

  “Truck broke down on the ridge up there,” I said, waving toward the river. “I saw the lights and walked down. I think I knocked a hole in the oil pan.”

  His eyes widened. “Did it seize up?”

  “You don’t think I know better than to drive with the engine light on?”

  We stood there staring at each other for a minute, then Hector wiped both hands up over his face with a heavy sigh.

  I lifted my chin at the altar and asked, “How’d you get hold of that thing? I thought Teresa sent it off to a forensics lab somewhere.”

  He turned his head away, not saying anything. I waited, but he didn’t crack.

  I tried a change of subject. “Maines is getting a warrant for your arrest.”

  “Screw Maines,” Hector snarled. “He can arrest me all he wants. I didn’t kill her.”

  I looked pointedly over at the hand, then back at him.

  “You think I did it?” he demanded, his eyes flashing up like black firecrackers.

  “No, but my objectivity is in question.” It sounded a little querulous coming out of my mouth. I started to clarify, but then stopped. Let’s see what he did with it.

  Hector’s ferocious expression evaporated. He clomped across the floor, out onto the porch, and crackled off through the dry grass.

  It took me a while to realize that he wasn’t coming back. I stepped out of the dim room onto the porch to think.

  Down here, below the road, the only sounds were of a light breeze moving and the occasional growl of cattle in the distance. The clouds had moved off and the moon was frosting everything with cool light. The inside of my head felt like an empty echo chamber.

  Twenty minutes passed while I tried to make sense of the altar and the hand. Plainly Teresa hadn’t sent it off to the lab as promised, but that didn’t explain how Hector had gotten hold of it, or why. Naturally the thought occurred—again—that he’d killed her for it, but the radar still wasn’t having it. Which reminded me that I hadn’t yet figured out whether or not it could be trusted in my new circumstances.

  Realizing that standing out here alone in the middle of nowhere wasn’t going to solve that problem, I decided to walk up to the main road to see if I could hitch a ride back into town. As I stepped off the porch, I caught a whiff of fragrant smoke and saw a small orange glow arc through the darkness down near the river. I aimed for the light and found Hector leaning against one of the big cottonwood trees along the bank.

  “I’ve already gotten one person killed,” he said, continuing our conversation as if he’d never pretended to leave. “I’d rather you weren’t the second.”

  “Look, I’m not going to let that half-wit sheriff lock you up for something you didn’t do,” I said. “I’ll keep pushing on this thing until I get to the bottom of it, and I could really make a hell of a mess if I don’t know what I’m dealing with.”

  Hector sighed out a cloud of fragrant smoke, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and crushing it with the square toe of his boot. “Please, just leave it alone.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not offering you a menu of options. I’m telling you what’s going to happen. I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m wired.”

  I’ll give him credit; once he made up his mind about it, he didn’t hesitate. I was mashed up against him, getting the daylights kissed out of me, before I realized what was happening. Things moved fast from there. It was like rushing to put out a fire, our clothes tearing off, breath coming fast, hands and mouths all over each other. We sank to the ground, his hot weight pressing me into the prickly grass. He rolled away briefly, and I heard the crinkle of a condom wrapper; then that delicious first plunge—and it was over.

  “Damn it,” said, sitting up.

  I flashed to the backseat of a ’72 Barracuda and the humiliating revelation that my paramour was performing for a shot at Joachim’s good graces, not because he liked me. An old, hot anger rushed up as I felt around for my jeans.

  “I’m sorry,” Hector said, tending to himself. “I’m just—it’s been a while.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Two days is an eon.”

  He frowned over at me. “What are you talking about?” He w
as sitting with his elbows on his knees, still breathing hard, a sheen of sweat showing at his collarbone.

  I fought the urge to grab him and lick it off. “Come on, Hector. They found your DNA inside Teresa’s body.”

  He peered at me, baffled. “My DNA?”

  I nodded, and he sat there with a frozen expression for a minute, then got up quickly, muttering, “God damn it.” He caught a look at my face while yanking his jeans on. “Maines and Richard are setting me up.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, trying to grab him. He was whipping around, jamming his arm into the wrong shirtsleeve, getting his socks half on. “Your DNA doesn’t prove anything except that you two were having an affair, which isn’t exactly a secret—”

  “We weren’t having an affair,” he cut in. “We sort of dated, before she met Richard, but that’s been over for twenty years.”

  “So why does everybody in town think you two were—?”

  “Because she wanted them to,” he groaned, a scratchy desperation coming into his voice. He stopped dressing, closed his eyes and let his head fall back. “She liked pissing Richard off, and God help me, so did I. So I went along with it. It was just a joke, between old friends. He must have found out about her roof thing—”

  “What ‘roof thing’?”

  “She used to come across from her private office above the café sometimes. It was—she was—I don’t know, she just liked doing stuff like that. It was all part of the joke, for her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Maines that? It explains how she got up there.”

  Hector wiped a hand up over his forehead again, shaking his head mutely. I was standing up now, half dressed, a ripple of sorrow lapping at my ribs. It had a little undercurrent of derision in it. “This looks really bad for you.”