“Then you talked to him,” I said.
“Talked to his wife. He’s out of town and has been for the past two weeks.”
“Where was he supposed to have been when I saw the car in Williamsburg?”
“His wife said she wasn’t sure of his schedule. Seems he sometimes hits a different city every day, buzzes all over the place, including out of state. His territory goes as far north as Boston. As best she could remember, around the time you’re talking about, he was in Tidewater, then was flying out of Newport Mews, heading to Massachusetts.”
I fell silent, and Marino interpreted this as embarrassment, which it wasn’t. I was thinking.
“Hey, what you done was good detective work. Nothing wrong with writing down a plate number and checking it out. Should make you happy you wasn’t being followed by some spook.”
I did not respond.
He added, “Only thing you missed was the color. You said the Lincoln was dark gray. Aranoff’s ride is brown.”
Later that night lightning flashed high over thrashing trees as a storm worthy of summer unloaded its violent arsenal. I sat up in bed, browsing through several journals as I waited for Captain Montana’s telephone line to clear.
Either his phone was out of order or someone had been on it for the past two hours. After he and Marino had left, I had recalled a detail from one of the photographs that reminded me of what Anna had said to me last. Inside Jill’s apartment, on the carpet beside a La-Z-Boy chair in the living room, was a stack of legal briefs, several out-of-town newspapers, and a copy of the New York Times Magazine. I have never bothered with crossword puzzles. God knows I have too many other things to figure out. But I knew the Times crossword puzzle was as popular as manufacturer’s coupons.
Reaching for the phone, I tried Montana’s home number again. This time I was rewarded.
“Have you ever considered getting Call Waiting?” I asked good-naturedly.
“I’ve considered getting my teenage daughter her own switchboard,” he said.
“I’ve got a question.”
“Ask away.”
“When you went through Jill’s and Elizabeth’s apartments, I’m assuming you went through their mail.”
“Yes, ma’am. Checked out their mail for quite a while, seeing what all came in, seeing who wrote them letters, went through their charge card bills, that sort of thing.”
“What can you tell me about Jill’s subscriptions to newspapers that were delivered by mail?”
He paused.
It occurred to me. “I’m sorry. Their cases would be in your office . . ..”
“No, ma’am. I came straight home, have ’em right here. I was just trying to think, it’s been a long day. Can you hold on?”
I heard pages turning.
“Well, there were a couple of bills, junk mail. But no newspapers.”
Surprised, I explained Jill had several out-of-town newspapers in her apartment. “She had to have gotten them from somewhere.”
“Maybe vending machines,” he offered. “Lots of them around the college. That would be my guess.”
The Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, maybe, I thought. But not the Sunday New York Times. Most likely that had come from a drugstore or a newsstand where Jill and Elizabeth may routinely have stopped when they went out for breakfast on Sunday mornings. I thanked him and hung up.
Switching off the lamp, I got in bed, listening as rain drummed the roof in a relentless rhythm. I pulled the covers more tightly around me. Thoughts and images drifted, and I envisioned Deborah Harvey’s red purse, damp and covered with dirt. Vander, in the fingerprints lab, had finished examining it and I had looked over the report the other day.
“What are you going to do?” Rose was asking me.
Oddly, the purse was in a plastic tray on Rose’s desk. “You can’t send it back to her family like that.”
“Of course not.”
“Maybe we could just take out the charge cards and things, wash them off and send those?”
Rose’s face twisted in anger. She shoved the tray across her desk and screamed, “Get it out of here! I can’t stand it!”
Suddenly I was in my kitchen. Through the window I saw Mark drive up, only the car was unfamiliar, but I recognized it somehow. Rummaging in my pocketbook for a brush, I frantically fixed my hair. I started to run to the bathroom to brush my teeth, but there wasn’t time. The doorbell rang, just once.