When I asked to see Clyde or Irene, Jermaine’s dark face became stony. She crossed her arms, body language echoing her manner, which was clearly uncooperative. She said Mrs. Gersh was sleeping and she refused to wake her. Mr. Gersh was having “a little lay-down” and she refused to disturb him, too.
“This is really important,” I said. “All I need is five minutes.”
I could see her face set with stubbornness. “No, ma’am. I’m not about to bother them poor peoples. You leave them lay.”
I glanced at Dietz. The shrug was written in his face. I looked back at Jermaine and indicated the coffee table with a nod. “Can I pick up the papers I left here earlier?”
“What papers? I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
“For now all I need are the forms Irene and I were working on,” I said. “I can come back later for a chat with her.”
Her gaze was pinned on me with suspicion. I kept my expression bland. “Go on, then,” she said. “If that’s all you want.”
“Thanks.” Casually, I crossed to the coffee table and picked up the birth certificate and the entire document file. Thirty seconds later, we were out on the porch.
“What’d you do that for?” Dietz said as we headed down the steps.
“It just seemed like a good idea, I said.
22
I asked him to pull around the corner and park in an alleyway. We sat there in the dappled shade of an overhanging oak while I sorted through the contents of the Gershes’ “Vital Documents” file. Nothing looked that vital to me. There was a copy of the will, which I handed to Dietz. “See if this tells us anything astonishing.”
He took the stapled pages, reaching automatically toward his shirt pocket. I thought he was looking for a cigarette, but it turned out to be a pair of reading glasses with half-rims that he’d tucked there instead. He put them on and then looked over at me.
“What?” he said.
I nodded judiciously. “The glasses are good. Make you look like a serious adult.”
“You think so?” He craned so he could see himself in the rearview mirror. He crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, just to show how adult he could look.
He began leafing through the will while I glanced at insurance policies, the title to the house, a copy of the emission inspection information for a vehicle they owned, an American Express flight insurance policy. “God, this is boring,” I said.
“So’s this.”
I looked over at him. I could see his gaze skimming down the lines of print. I returned to my pile of papers. I picked up Irene’s birth certificate and squinted at it in the light.
“What’s that?”
“Irene’s birth certificate.” I told him the story she’d told me about the autobiography for her senior English class. “Something about it bothers me, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
“It’s a photocopy,” he said.
“Yeah, but what’s the big whoopee-do about that?”
“Let me take a look.” He placed it up against the windshield, letting the light shine through. The heading read: state of california department of health VITAL STATISTICS, STANDARD CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH. The form thereafter was comprised of a series of two-line boxes into which the data had been typed. He held it close to his face, like a man whose eyesight is failing rapidly. “Lot of these lines are broken and the type itself isn’t very crisp. We ought to check with Sacramento and track down the original.”
“You think it’s been tampered with?”
“It’s possible. Dab some kind of correction fluid on the original. Type over the blanks and then make a copy. It couldn’t be used for much, but it’d be sufficient for a school project. Maybe that’s why it took Agnes a day to produce the damn thing. The point of certified copies is that they’re certified, right?” He gave me that crooked smile, gray eyes clear.
“Wow, what a concept,” I said. “Wonder what she had to hide?”
Dietz shrugged. “Maybe Irene was illegitimate.”
“Right,” I said. “Can you think of anyone we can contact in Sacramento?”
“Department of Health? Not right offhand. Why not check with the county recorder here and have them call?”
“You think they’d do that?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Well, it’s worth a try,” I said. “Besides, if we do the research now, Irene will pay for it. Wait two weeks and she’ll forget she ever gave a damn.”
“Let’s give it a shot, then,” he said. “You want me to look at any other documents?”
“Nope. That’s it.”
“Great.” He handed me the will and the birth certificate, both of which I tucked back into the file. He started the car and headed out to the street.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Let’s hit the office first and call Rochelle Messinger.”
We parked in the back lot and went up the exterior stairs. Dietz was, as usual, paranoid about everyone within range. He kept a hand on my elbow, his gaze scanning the area, until we were safely in the building. The second-floor corridor was empty. As we passed the rest rooms, I said, “I need to pop into the ladies’ room. You want the office keys?”
“Sure. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” Dietz started to check out the ladies’ room and was greeted by a shriek of outrage. He moved on down the corridor while I went into the John.
Darcy was standing at one of the sinks, splashing water on her face. From her pasty complexion and the eyes pinched with pain, I gathered she was still hung over from the banquet the night before. She stared at herself in the mirror, hair mashed flat in two places. “You know you’re really in trouble when your hair goes out on you,” she remarked, more to herself than to me.
“What time did you get in?” I asked.
“It wasn’t that late, but I’d been drinking anisette and I was wrecked. I started upchucking about midnight and haven’t stopped yet,” she said. She rubbed her face and then pulled her lower lids down so she could inspect the conjunctivas. “Nothing like a hangover to make you long for death …”
A toilet flushed and Vera emerged from one of the four stalls. She was buttoning up an olive and khaki camouflage outfit, a jumpsuit with big shoulder pads and epaulettes, looking like she was moments away from a landing on Anzio Beach. The glance she gave me was not friendly. “What happened to you last night?” she said waspishly. I was exhausted and my nerves were on edge, so her tone didn’t sit well and neither did her attitude.
I said, “Well, jump right in, Vera. Agnes Grey died, among other things. I didn’t get to bed till after three a.m. How about you?”
Vera crossed to the sinks, her high heels snapping against the ceramic tiles. She turned the water on way too hard and splashed herself. She jumped back. “Shit!” she said.
“Agnes Grey?” Darcy said. She was watching our reflections in the mirror, her expression wary.
“My client’s mother,” I said. “She dropped dead of a heart attack.”
Darcy frowned. “That’s weird.”
“Actually it was weird, but how did you know?”
“Do you mind?” Vera said to Darcy pointedly. Apparently, she wanted to talk to me alone. It occurred to me belatedly that she and Vera had been discussing me just before I came in. Oh boy.
Darcy shot me an apologetic look. She dried her hands hastily under the wall-mounted blower, blotting the residual water on the back of her skirt. “See you later, gang,” she said. She took her purse and departed with a decided air of relief.
The door hadn’t closed behind her when Vera turned and looked at me. “I don’t appreciate the crap you told Neil last night,” she said. Her face was tense, her gaze fiery.
I felt a rush of heat go through me. I needed to pee, but it seemed inappropriate. “Really,” I said. “Like what?”
“I am not smitten with him. We’re strictly friends and that’s all it is. Get it?”
“What are you in such a snit about?”
She leaned against the sink, a hand on her hip. “I introduced you to the man because I thought you’d get along with him, not to have you turn around and . . . manipulate the circumstances.”
“How did I do that?”
“You know how! You told him I had a crush on him and now he’s behaving like an idiot.”
“What’d he do, break it off?”
“Of course he didn’t break it off! He proposed to me last night!”
“He did? Well, that’s great! Congratulations. I hope you said yes.”
Vera’s mouth turned down at the corners and she burst into tears. I was taken aback. For a sophisticated woman, she was bawling like a little kid. I found myself with my arms around her, patting her awkwardly. It’s not easy to comfort someone twice your size. She had to hunch down slightly while I raised up on tiptoe. It was not the full California body hug of longtime friends. Contact was limited to the upper portions of our torsos where we were linked like the two bowed wings of a wishbone.