State’s Evidence Page 5

  “Does Tolson know that?”

  “No. I’d prefer you not tell him.”

  “I guess that’s his problem, isn’t it?”

  “I believe it is.”

  I looked at Blair. His jaw was knotted in determination, and more than a little masochism. He was a man who swam, if at all, only upstream, a man perpetually at odds with the world he had been placed in, impervious to all but the charms of his wife and of his adoptive culture. I wondered if he ever laughed, and at what.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” I said.

  “What beginning?”

  “Your wife’s.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know the beginning. Only the middle. I hope also to know the end,” he added wistfully.

  “I think you’d better explain.”

  “I simply mean that I know nothing about Teresa’s past. Purposely. From the first the present was always more than enough. The past could only detract. I made no inquiries; she made no confessions. It seemed to suit us both.”

  I thought of Blair’s description of the two islands. John Donne was wrong, apparently. “You must know something,” I urged. “Where was she born? Where did she grow up? Go to school?”

  Blair shook his head once again. “I simply lack that information. I know nothing of her family, of her adolescence, her education, nothing. As far as I know, none of that touches her any longer, except in the sense that we are all touched gently by our histories. She never mentions any of those subjects and, for my part, I have been content in my ignorance. She has traveled much; every place I have taken her has been already familiar to her. She had much expertise in … matters of the flesh, from sources I preferred not be identified. Other than that, I can tell you nothing, except the events after we met.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Six years ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. El Gordo.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “Nothing dramatic. A client of mine gave a party. I had declined his previous invitations to so many functions I felt compelled to attend this one. I was smitten first by Teresa’s beauty, then by her wit, then by my good fortune. I kept asking if I could see her again. She kept saying yes, even when I changed the question. As I said, we married two weeks later. She was, I hope you understand, like an elixir for me, a treat. A sin, if you will.”

  “Were you married before?”

  “No.”

  “Was she?”

  “No.”

  “What was Mrs. Blair’s maiden name?”

  “Goodrum. Teresa Goodrum.”

  “Who introduced you?”

  “I’m not sure. It was a large party. We simply introduced ourselves, I believe.”

  “Who was the client?”

  Blair frowned, hesitating for the first time. “Is that necessary?” he asked. “I’d prefer not to involve my business affairs in this. I don’t see how it can help.”

  “Neither do I,” I admitted, “but there’s only one way to make certain it can’t.”

  He considered. “No. There’s no point in that. My business is not involved in this and I won’t let it be.” He gave me a look that convinced me to leave it alone for the time being.

  “What was your wife doing when you met her?” I asked. “I mean for a living?”

  “Working. As a salesclerk in a boutique. Living alone. Crying a lot, so she said.”

  “Crying from what?”

  “Emptiness. She had no center.”

  I let the jargon pass. “What else? Friends? Hobbies? Manias? Clubs? Groups?”

  Blair rubbed his face. Although he must have been forty, the flesh was still taut, as unyielding as the cheek of a marble man. “She still works at the boutique, but now she is part owner. It’s quite successful. She has her own bank account, spends only her own money. She is an instinctive businesswoman, I’m told. She has friends at the store, of course. She and a woman named Verritt play tennis every day at the Racquet Club. They are close friends. Frankly, I think it likely the Verritt woman knows where Teresa is. If so, I’m the last person she will tell.”

  “Why?”

  “We disgust each other. Also, I believe Teresa may know the woman next door. A Mrs. Martin. I’m afraid we don’t socialize as a couple—I don’t enjoy it—so there really isn’t anyone else I can mention.”

  “No men friends?”

  Blair looked for my implication. I wasn’t sure I had one. “The co-owner of the boutique is a man named Elliott Farnsworth,” he said stiffly. “He and Teresa work closely together. All the other employees are women. I knew of no other men in her life above the level of fools and oglers.”

  Something in Blair’s voice made me think he didn’t enjoy the ogling part. I decided to press a little, to see what pressed back. “How about men who are more than friends? Past, present, or future.”

  Blair’s lips stiffened. “I know of none, and I resent the question.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re too smart for that. If she’s as alluring as you say, someone must have made a pass at her at some time or other. I want to know if anyone made a habit of it.”

  “If they have, it is of no consequence. Adultery is committed by the cowardly and the self-indulgent. Teresa is neither.”

  “How about the guy next door?”

  Blair seemed genuinely puzzled. “What about him?”

  “How did he and your wife get along?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. I can’t imagine they exchanged two words a month.”

  “Did your wife tell you anything about the Martins’ marital trouble?”

  “No. I know of no trouble.”

  With that I let it drop. For now it was enough to know that Teresa Blair didn’t tell all she knew to her husband. Perhaps she told him nothing. “What was your wife doing down on Oswego Street the day she saw Fluto run down the man?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “It seems ridiculous, I suppose, but no, I didn’t.”

  “Usually when people don’t ask questions it’s because they’re afraid to know the answer.” That platitude sounded hollow, even to me.

  Blair looked at me steadily, his voice icy when he spoke. “When you’ve known me a bit longer, Mr. Tanner, you will discover that there’s nothing at all usual about me.”

  Nothing I had seen so far urged me to doubt him. I eased off. “Do you have any pictures of your wife?”

  “How many will you need?”

  “A couple of good ones.”

  “You can have a couple of hundred if you wish. For a time Teresa modeled for her boutique’s advertising. She has an extensive portfolio. If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you.”

  We went through another sliding door and strolled down a hall that had blue tiles on the floor and gold paper on the walls. At the end of the hall Blair opened a door and stood aside to let me enter a chamber that was as different from the rest of the house as Miami Beach is from Kyoto.

  The room was vast. The sleeping area at the far end was dominated by a canopied bed, which looked like a pillow in a clam shell, and by a dressing table with more lights around it than the marquee at Loews. The sitting room was closest to me, and the decor would have rendered Blair’s favorite Zen master mute for a month. Supergraphics and chrome, Ultrasuede and shag, Breuer chairs and van der Rohe tables. The desk was glass, the chairs plastic, the prints Warhol and Lichtenstein.

  “This is Teresa’s room,” Blair explained with a mixture of apology and wonder. He didn’t enter, but peered around the door jamb, like an urchin at the circus. “I rise early, for aikido training,” Blair continued. “I prefer to get to the office by seven. Teresa is a night person, as she calls it. We early on decided to sleep separately. As you can see, this also serves as her office. I have not entered the room since we married. It is the sanctuary she insisted upon and I granted.”

  “I’d say your wife gets her philosophy from somewh
ere closer to Reverend Ike than Siddhartha,” I said.

  Blair smiled, affection showing through even in the midst of trappings that were a burlesque of everything he believed. “Do not misjudge her, Mr. Tanner,” he said. “She is a free spirit, but she knows the limits I insist upon.” The smile vanished. “I have tried not to get in her way,” he added. “Sometimes it has been difficult.”

  “May I look around?” I asked.

  Blair nodded. “I will be in the living room, if you need me. You understand I would not normally allow anyone in this room. However, the circumstances seem to warrant an exemption to my pledge. Her portfolio is against the wall by the desk.” Blair left me to my job, his gown flapping behind him.

  I did a quick once-over, pawing in simian fashion through the accessories to the life of a woman I had never seen. There were soft and frilly things in the drawers—sheer things, fragrant things, enticing things, things I had never seen before. Fashion magazines spilled off the bookshelves and onto the floor, where they reclined beside pop psychology paperbacks, soft rock records, and a horde of bite-size Tootsie Rolls. There were enough clothes in the closets to outfit the membership of NOW for a year. Her jewels lay on velvet trays and winked at me like collected eyes. Her shoes were spike-heeled and plentiful, her hats few but bombastic. There were see-through things and shiny things and shorty things and I shivered when I touched it all, though not from desire. There is nothing less noble than fumbling through a living human’s clothes.

  When I was through with the closets and dressers and shelves, I knew that Teresa Blair liked color and flash, liked to be noticed, liked to be hip, liked to be liked. But there was no hint of what lay beneath the veneer, and no relics of a treasured past. The woman lived entirely in the moment.

  Before tackling the desk, I picked up the artist’s portfolio, placed it on the bed, and unzipped it and spread its contents like a deck of playing cards. A hundred faces looked up at me, faces that pouted and preened, faces that smiled and scowled, faces that seduced and abandoned, and they were all the same face, although I had to look closely to confirm it. Teresa Blair was not a classic model, there was too much of her for that, but if she wouldn’t sell any Givenchys or Balenciagas to the New York elite, she would certainly sell a hell of a lot of Anne Kleins and Halstons to the trendy young matrons of El Gordo.

  The problem for me was that her hair was so variously coiffed, her lips so variously painted, her cheeks so variously rouged, her eyes so variously shadowed, I couldn’t tell which of the faces was real. I picked a couple of shots that seemed more natural than the rest, then put the folder away and walked over to the desk and looked through the drawers.

  Teresa Blair was obviously the buyer for the boutique. There were catalogs and price quotations and invoices stuffed helter-skelter through the drawers, without rhyme or reason. These plus the normal litter of writing materials and business correspondence was all I found until I came to a check register, old but not very. It seemed to be a mixed business and personal account. The average balance was over a thousand dollars. At times it got up to five times that.

  There wasn’t much of interest among the payees—grocery stores, drug stores, gas stations, credit card companies, Racquet Club, dentist. Just a few things caught my eye. Mrs. Blair made a regular payment—three hundred dollars every other week—to someone named Mary Quilk. And another—over two thousand dollars every month—to something called the Silver Season. She made a deposit of fifteen hundred dollars on the first of every month and a deposit of twelve hundred dollars on the fifteenth. Both without fail. Also, she gave to CARE and the United Way.

  I replaced the register and stood in the center of the room. I was about to leave when I noticed something out of place. It was a magazine, but not a new one, an old Vogue, dated June of 1965. I picked it up and leafed through it. Nothing but glamour caught my eye, but as I got toward the end, something slipped from between the pages and fell to the floor. It was a picture of a man, a confident, darkly pretty one who was attempting to please whoever took the picture. There was nothing in or written on the back of the snapshot to indicate where or when it had been taken. I checked to make certain Blair hadn’t returned, and slipped it in my pocket.

  Blair was in the living room, as promised. I showed him the pictures of his wife I had taken from her portfolio and asked if they were good likenesses. He told me they were. I asked how old his wife was and he told me she was thirty-nine. I asked if he’d checked to see whether anything of his wife’s was missing. He said he had, that she had too many clothes to be certain about them but that her favorite necklace was gone, as well as her toothbrush and her nightgown. If Tony Fluto had grabbed her, he had given her time to pack a trousseau.

  I asked Blair if the names Mary Quilk or Silver Season meant anything to him. He hesitated, then said they didn’t. I asked if he had any idea where his wife would have gone to hide, either from him or from Fluto or both. He said he didn’t know. I asked if he knew how much his wife earned at the boutique and he didn’t know that, either. The snapshot in my pocket grew warm, but I left it where it was, and called it quits.

  5

  There were several places to start my search, none exactly laden with promise; I started with the friend.

  The only Verritt in the book was named Tancy, and it was after ten when I called her from the first phone booth I came to after leaving James Blair and his hillside shrine. As I pulled up next to the booth, I checked to see if I was still being shadowed by Grinder’s men. There was no green car, but there were a lot of stiff-necked men with lidless eyes who glanced my way as they drove past. As far as I could tell, they all kept driving.

  The voice that answered my call was flat, female, and massively oppressed, the voice of taxi dispatchers and doctors’ wives. I said who I was, but let the reason for my call remain vague enough for Ms. Verritt to assume I was a man on the make who had been steered her way by her friend Teresa Blair. She made the assumption quickly enough herself, anyway.

  I tossed off some flattery, added a boast diluted with a dash of humility, and the mixture intoxicated her. She became quite willing to talk about whatever I had in mind, and within seconds she had decided she was perfectly happy to see me and all, but unfortunately not that night. A friend was dropping by. A late date. I understood, didn’t I, love? I mean, it was such short notice. She was forgiven, wasn’t she? Just this once?

  Sure she was. I asked what time would be convenient to meet. She told me to be at the El Gordo Racquet Club at eleven the next morning. She didn’t say so, but she obviously wanted to look me over in the light of day before committing her time or anything else to my cause.

  I asked where the Racquet Club was and she told me. I said something semiknowledgeable about Borg and McEnroe and the conversation immediately started to bore her. Then she asked what I did for a living and I told her I found things that were lost. That perked her up. I left it to her to decide whether I was a bounty hunter or a psychoanalyst or something in between.

  I drove back to the city that night still free of Grinder’s minions as far as I could tell, was early to bed and early to rise, and spent some time the next morning on the phone with Peggy, my part-time secretary and full-time confidante, reviewing some old business, which mostly consisted of Peggy trying to convince me that about a third of my active cases were lost causes and my attempting to deny it. When I told her I’d probably be spending the next couple of nights in El Gordo, she told me my absence wouldn’t jeopardize anything at the office. I told her I knew that already.

  Before heading south I spent some time trying to get a line on Mary Quilk and the Silver Season. I started with the telephone book. There were a half-dozen Quilks, but none lived within twenty miles of El Gordo. There was no Silver Season listed. My source at the electric company was on vacation, so I called the secretary of state’s office, to see if Silver Season was a registered corporate name in California. It wasn’t. But something about that name poked at the under
side of my consciousness. I closed my eyes and tried to become receptive to the memory that was chipping away, but I guess I didn’t give it enough time or a big enough pick. After my fourth cup of coffee I locked the apartment and injected myself and my Buick into the stream of traffic heading down the Bayshore. By ten forty-five I was parked behind the ten feet of wall that surrounded the El Gordo Racquet Club, between a blue Corvette and a red Interceptor.

  El Gordo is not one of your upper-crust California towns—not a La Jolla or a Pebble Beach, a Hillsborough or a San Marino—but all California towns of whatever crust have people with big money living in them, and people with big money always build playpens for themselves, to ease the burden of all that cash. The playpens come in various styles—concert halls, art museums, social clubs, golf courses, tennis ranches, health spas—but they all manage to have one thing in common. They all manage to be deductible.

  The El Gordo Racquet Club was a very private playpen. Five signs nailed to five palm trees reminded me it was open to members only. I strolled to the door anyway, a cross between Joshua and a shoe shine boy.

  The clubhouse was long and single-storied, with a thick limestone face and narrow, recessed windows and a tile roof the color of a three ball. There were large brass rings on the twin front doors, but before I got to the doors I got to the guardhouse, a red, peak-roofed booth with a man wearing a white pith helmet sitting inside it. When he saw me coming, he eased off his stool and came out to meet me, his limbs moving haphazardly, like an unmanned puppet. I guessed he was seventy.

  “Who is your host, sir?” he said as he approached. He was too gaunt to be menacing and he knew it. Above his beaked nose his eyes shifted with embarrassment.

  “How do you know I’m not a member?” I asked pleasantly.

  “I know all the members,” he said sternly.

  “My name’s Tanner. I’m here to see Miss Verritt. She’s expecting me.”

  “I’ll have to check the list.”

  He shuffled back to his booth and riffled through some papers, then came back. He was still more alert than he would have been if my suit were in style, but he told me I could go on in.