She got up. She picked up her bag and leaned on my desk. “And you better hope it doesn’t lead back to Aubrey, my dear!” she spat.
And then she was gone, leaving behind her the faint aura of whiskey that I’d just caught on her breath.
I hauled out my typewriter and wrote a detailed report for Julia, itemizing expenses for the last couple of days. I needed time to assimilate what Beverly had told me about Aubrey. It was like the paradox of the jungle tribes where one always lies and the other always tells the truth. How could one ever determine which was which? Aubrey had told me Beverly was Mr. Hyde when she drank. She had told me he was certifiably mad, but she’d apparently been drinking when she said so. I hadn’t the faintest idea which of them was on the level and I wasn’t sure how to find out. I didn’t even know if it mattered. Was Elaine Boldt really dead? It had certainly crossed my mind more than once, but I hadn’t imagined that Beverly or Aubrey might be at the heart of it. I’d been looking in the opposite direction, assuming somehow that Elaine’s disappearance was linked to the murder of Marty Grice. Now I’d have to go back and take another look.
I went home at lunchtime and did a run. I knew I was just treading water at this point, but in some ways I had to wait it out. Something would break. Some piece of information would come to light. In the meantime, I was feeling tense and I needed to work that off. The run was a bad one and that put me in a foul mood. I picked up a stitch in my side at the end of the first mile. I thought I could shake it. I tried digging my fingers in, bending at the waist, thinking that if it was a muscle cramp it might ease. No deal. Then I tried expelling breath after breath, again bending from the waist. The pain was no worse, but it didn’t go away either. Finally, I slowed to a walk until it subsided, but the minute I started to jog again, my side seized up, stopping me in my tracks. I’d reached the turnaround by then, but running seemed futile so I walked the entire mile and a half back to my place, cursing to myself. I hadn’t even broken a sweat, and my frustration, instead of dissipating, had doubled.
I showered and dressed again. I didn’t want to go back to the office, but I forced myself. I was going to have to start all over again, go back to the beginning and cast a new set of lines in the water to see if I could get a bite somewhere. I had just about used up my whole bag of tricks, but there had to be something else.
When I let myself into the office, I saw the message light blinking on my machine. I opened the French doors to let some air in and then punched playback.
“Hi, Kinsey. This is Lupe, over at Santa Teresa Travel. It looks like you hit the jackpot on that luggage trace. I put a call through to Baggage Claim at TWA and had the agent check it out. The four bags were sitting right there. He said he could put ‘em on a plane this afternoon if you like. Could you call me back and let me know what you want to do?”
I snapped the machine off and shook both fists in the air, mouthing “All riiight!” to myself with a big grin. I put a call through to Jonah first and told him what was going on. I was jazzed. It was the first good news I’d had since I tracked down the cat. “What should I do, Jonah? Am I going to need some kind of court order to open those bags?”
“Screw that. Look, you have the claim tags, don’t you?”
“Sure, I’ve got ‘em right here.”
“Then go down to Florida and pick up the bags.”
“Why not just have them flown out?”
“Suppose she’s in one,” he said.
That certainly conjured up an image I didn’t like. I could feel myself squirm. “Don’t you think someone would have noticed by now? You know, an odor… something dripping out the side?”
“Hey, we found a body once had been in the trunk of a car for six months. Someone had shoved a high heel down some whore’s throat and she ended up mummified. Don’t ask me how or why, but she didn’t decompose at all. She just dried up. She looked like a big leather doll.”
“Maybe I’ll get on a plane,” I said.
By ten o’clock that night, I was back in the air again.
Chapter 19
It was drizzling and the temperature was already in the seventies at 4:56 A.M. EST when we touched down. It was still dark outside, but the airport was filled with the flat light and artificial chill of a space station orbiting a hundred and ten miles out. Dawn travelers walked purposefully down deserted corridors while doors shushed open and shut automatically and the paging system seemed to drone on and on without hope of response. For all I knew, the whole operation was mechanical, running itself at that hour without any help from humankind.
The TWA baggage-service office didn’t open until nine, so I had time to kill. I hadn’t brought any luggage of my own, just a big canvas bag where I kept a toothbrush and all the odds and ends of ordinary life, including clean underpants. I never go anywhere without a toothbrush and clean underpants. I went into the women’s room to freshen up. I washed my face and ran my wet fingers through my hair, noting how sallow my skin looked with the fluorescent lights overhead. There was a woman behind me, changing the diaper on one of those oversized babies who looks like a solemn adult with flushed cheeks. The child kept his eyes pinned on me gravely while his mother attended to him. Sometimes cats look at me that way, as though we’re foreign agents sending silent signals to one another in an out of the way meeting place.
I paused at a stand and picked up a newspaper. There was a coffee shop open and I bought scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and juice, taking my time about breakfast while I read a human-interest story about a man who’d left all his money to a mynah bird. I can’t cope with the front section before seven A.M.
At quarter to nine, having walked the airport from end to end twice, I stationed myself near Baggage Claim with a portable cart I’d rented for a buck. I could see Elaine’s bags, neatly lined up at on end of the locked glass-fronted cabinets. It looked as if someone had hauled them out from the bottom of the pile in readiness. Finally, a middle-aged man in a TWA uniform, with a big set of jangling keys, unlocked the small cubicle and started turning on lights. It looked like the opening curtain of a one-act play with a modest set.
I presented myself and the baggage-claim tags and then followed him out to the storage cabinets and waited while he extracted the suitcases and stacked them on the cart. I expected him to ask for identification, but apparently he didn’t care who I was. Maybe abandoned bags are like litters of unwanted kittens. He was just grateful to have someone take them off his hands.
When the Penny-Car Rental desk opened, I rented a compact car. I had given Julia a call the night before so she knew I was flying in. All I needed to do now was find the highway again and drive north. Once outside, I pushed the cart toward the slot where the rental car was parked. The drizzle settled on my skin like a layer of silk. The morning air was hot and close, smelling of rain and jet exhaust. I loaded the bags in the trunk of the car and headed toward Boca. It wasn’t until I reached the condominium parking lot, unloading the suitcases one by one, that I realized all four were locked and I had no key. Well, how very cute. Maybe Julia would have a plan. I lugged them over to the elevator and went up to the third floor, hauling them to Julia’s front door in two trips.
I knocked and waited a long interval while Julia thumped her way to the front door with her cane, calling encouragement.
“I’m coming. Don’t give up. Six more feet to go and I’m bearing down hard.”
On my side of the door, I smiled, peering over at Elaine’s apartment. There was no sign of life. Even the welcome mat had been taken inside or thrown out, leaving a square of fine sand that had filtered through the bristles.