Out at Night (25 page)

“Of course she knew him. She and Frank saw him the day he died. I told you that. Bartholomew attacked Frank at Gerry Maloof’s. It’s high-end. Great linen pants.”

“Jeanne knew Bartholomew years ago, Grace. They were lovers, and, we believe, co-conspirators in trying to blow up a dam in Northern California, a forest genetics lab, and two electric power stations.” He shoved the toothpick into his mouth and clamped down on it. “Some other stuff, too.”

Grace closed her eyes. She patted for her face and missed.

“They had different names back then, Grace. She called herself Erica, Marie, Sonya. She didn’t settle on Jeanne until she went on the run. We lost her for years, and then we got a lucky break on this one.”

It hurt to swallow. It was as if a metallic ball was lodged in the back of her throat.

“Jeanne saw Bartholomew the day he died at the men’s clothing store. Easy transfer for genetic material. That’s where Bartholomew picked up Helix’s dog hair.”

“Except we found more of your dog’s hair at Bartholomew’s house.”

Grace blinked. “Same deal. Bartholomew gets the dog-hair transfer in Gerry Maloof’s over by the linen pants, and goes back to his house, sits down someplace, there it is.”

“Jeanne was there, herself, later that day. That’s the way we think it went down. Knowing what they discussed would go a long way to clearing your friend, but so far, she’s clammed up tight.”

“What a minute, you think she might have killed him?”

He was silent.

“That’s not possible.”

Her uncle chewed the toothpick. He tipped the wastebasket next to a supply closet, and spit the toothpick in.

“We monitor the line at the agency after hours, especially now, so even if nobody’s available to pick up, we get to them pretty fast. We got a call in for you, last few minutes, from somebody named Jewel. She said you’d know where to find her. She sounded—how do I put this—angry and distraught.”

Grace grew silent. Jewel would be gone now, but tomorrow, same time, she’d be carefully navigating the glittering staircase at the Follies.

“I’ve got her home number, if you need it. The Follies are closed Mondays.” He looked at her carefully. “Jewel’s not that common a name, Grace, especially Jewels who have sons named Nate who work as teaching assistants for dead professors. We ran a check on the cell phone number and the connection popped right up.”

“I visited Nate. His mother probably wasn’t too happy.”

“What did you learn?”

A police detective stuck his head into the room. “Agent Descanso. Sorry. Didn’t realize you were here.”

“Need anything?”

“Cartridge and patience. Printer blew.” He came into the room, a big guy in navy with a Glock at his side, his movements easy. The closet opened onto shelves of boxes: yellow tablets, pens, bottles of water.

“Can I have some water?”

She was asking her uncle, but the policeman snagged one out of a box and passed it back to her.

“Thanks.”

She cracked the cap off and drank, using the familiar solidity of the plastic bottle to anchor her in the present moment. They waited as the officer pawed through a box, found what he needed, closed the supply door and left.

“Grace, two people have died badly and I promise you we’ll find out who did it, and if it turns out Jeanne’s involved, then God help you if you’re withholding information.”

“Nate thinks Bartholomew was iced by an agent or a cop.”

Pete laughed at that. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh in years. It wasn’t pleasant.

She put the bottle down and worked on a piece of the label, ripping it off. “I called you tonight, Uncle Pete—Detective Zsloski, too—because I do have something. Couple things, actually.”

The door cracked open and Mike Zsloski came in. He’d changed out of his shorts into long brown pants. He pulled a chair next to Pete, squaring off, his movements tentative as if under the pants, he’d sunburned his knees.

They waited, looking at her. She felt tired. She’d promised Vonda she wouldn’t tell her father she was in labor. But Grace never promised not to talk about what Vonda had traded to extract that promise.

“I got something from Vonda.”

Her uncle’s index finger on his left hand twitched; otherwise, he looked the same, his legs stretched under the table, his hands relaxed, folded on his stomach.

“She said friends of hers were getting together, doing some target practice. With crossbows. She’s not sure, but she thinks maybe one of them killed a transient. She heard bits—nothing concrete. Wouldn’t give me names.”

Pete’s face grew still. He kept his eyes down, as if he were tracking some interior quarry, going deeper into the recesses of his own heart, hunting something elusive and shadowy, going so deep, no one could follow.

“She part of that?”

Grace shrugged. “I don’t see how. Physically, she wouldn’t be able to shoot a crossbow, at this stage of her pregnancy. I don’t think Stuart’s involved. He’s got rheumatoid arthritis in his fingers. Pulling a crossbow would be excruciating. He’s wildly upset at Vonda for putting their family at risk, protesting. He loathes her friends. It’s mutual. They loathe him back.”

Pete was silent. He looked as if his face were collapsing inward.

“I met these three old guys—myself, I call them the Breakfast Boys—had breakfast with Bartholomew three times a week for the last couple of years, ever since his wife died.”

She flipped through her notebook and found the sheet with their names and phone numbers. Zsloski reached across the table and copied the information.

“He was dating a waitress named Janey and dumped her when he got fascinated with Nate’s mother, Jewel. Came to the Follies two or three times a week, just to see her.”

Zsloski raised his shaggy eyebrows. “Mutual?”

Grace shook her head. “She only tolerated him because she thought it might be a way in to help her figure out her son.”

She leaned in. “Jewel said that Bartholomew had a face recognition problem that he’d worked hard to keep hidden. That’s why he had the room with the pictures and names. He studied the incoming class, every year, to try and get a handle on it. She said Nate ran in on him once at school, poring over a chart of faces and names.”

“Where’s the chart now?” Zsloski shifted his bulk and rubbed the back of his knee.

“She said Nate got rid of it when Bartholomew was murdered. This face thing. I studied that some in med school. Prosopagnosia. One of the four hundred or so neurological conditions we had to identify on an exam one week.”

She looked up to see if they wanted her to go on. They didn’t stop her.

“Like everything, it’s on a scale of intensity. It can start with a brain injury, or be present from birth and something a person gradually becomes aware of. Usually there’s a certain amount of shame attached. Nobody wants to talk to somebody at a party for an hour, and a week later, not recognize that person when they stop on the street.”

“That’s what happens?” Mike Zsloski’s face drooped, like it had been out in the sun too long and melted.

“It can. The point here is, it widens the suspect pool. Nate could even be good for it. When I saw him, he was acting like a prisoner who’d finally earned yard time. My guess is that Nate had carried Bartholomew for years, doing his scut work. The other thing is, if Bartholomew had a photo of Frank Waggaman in his wallet, it could be that’s because his face just kept getting ‘unstuck’ from Bartholomew’s memory, and he had to carry a visual reminder to jog it. Also, if Frank showed up in odd places…”

Her uncle leaned in, suddenly animated. “Like at Riverside U, for example.”

She nodded. “He might remember that link if he saw him around campus a lot, especially if Frank ever audited any of his classes, but he’d be completely clueless about remembering Frank’s connection to agriculture, outside of that. He’d disconnect those two parts. And as far as a name—forget about it.”

“Then why did he remember yours?” Not melted, Zsloski’s face, more like the color of liver.

“That article in the Desert Sun. He had it on his wall. He’d remember names in writing. He wasn’t trying to pick me out of a crowd or a lineup of a bunch of thirty-something Portuguese-looking women. Just the name.”

She took another drink.

“So that means he called me into the case because of the work I do. Something at the lecture is a tie-in to solving this case, if we can figure it out.”

Her uncle tapped the table with his fingers. They were a builder’s hands, broad, agile.

“Jeanne told me she didn’t kill anybody,” Grace said. “That’s all I know.”

Her uncle slid an evidence baggie out of his shirt pocket and held it out.

She took it.

Inside the baggie was an old Kodak print, the kind with scalloped edges.

She stared at it a long moment.

“You understand what that is, right?” His voice was gentler than before, as if he were talking kindly to a child.

She shook her head.

He took back the baggie and told her.

Chapter 30

Grace found a seat in the back at a conference table, poured a glass of water, and scanned the delegates sitting at tables, taking notes. Onstage, an African delegate from Somalia passionately argued that the war on hunger wouldn’t be won by genetically modifying crops, but only by addressing the poverty behind it, and for that reason, everything the United States was sending abroad was categorically tainted.

An American delegate from Iowa sat onstage, pressing his hands under his legs as if that was the only way to stop from leaping up and wresting away the microphone.

Grace made her way along the wall toward a side exit where Frank was sitting. She clamped a hand on his shoulder and he jumped.

“I need to talk to you.”

__

“You heard.” His skin looked pink along the scalp and around the eyes and nostrils, as if the pigmentation had been spread a little too thin at the edges.

“I saw.”

“How’s she doing?”

“As well as she can. What do you know?”

He shook his head. He looked like he was wearing the same shirt as the day before. He reminded Grace of a hurricane or tornado victim, numb, eyes blank.

“When Bartholomew was killed, I didn’t even tell Jeanne it had happened in my field. I didn’t want her to worry. She worries all the time about me.”

Frank Waggaman had a stack of newspapers on his desk. Grace wondered if he’d opened any of them. The top one was dated the day the conference started and had a photo of policemen in helmets with visors and nightsticks, bean bag ammunition slung over their shoulders. In the background, a handcuffed naked man was being escorted away from a crowd of protesters dressed as ears of corn.

“I sent her home, after that thing happened with Ted in the store. I realized it was selfish, my wanting her here with me. She promised she wouldn’t come back until it was over.”

Frank plucked at a newspaper corner. He smoothed the page down next to a headline: BIOTECH INSISTS ITS GENES ARE GREEN. His nails looked dirty but Grace knew it was the way fingers looked over time in soil, as if they belonged there.

“Yesterday she came back to Palm Springs.”

“They must have dragged her back.”

Grace was silent. She was hoping that’s the way it had happened, but she wasn’t going to tell Frank that.

“Police come to your house after Bartholomew’s murder?”

He nodded. “I expected it after how public everything’s been. I thought they were looking for prints. Then they asked me if I had a dog. Helix had been there with Jeanne for a while, when you were in the Bahamas.”

His jaw worked. His teeth were blunt. He chewed an imaginary mouthful of something that didn’t agree with him. He swallowed, winced, knuckled his diaphragm as if he were being cored by heartburn.

“You think I liked not being able to tell Jeanne that the police had stopped by? I was under orders, Grace, to comply.”

“Nice. You know German, too?”

“Yeah, I do, actually, and that’s uncalled for.”

“How did this start with Bartholomew?”

“He protested the use of migrant workers tending the GM crops we were producing for the convention. Then it got really nasty. Letters to the editor, threats.”

“Did Bartholomew ever come after you for anything you were doing genetically?”

Frank refolded the newspapers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You did work at Riverside U, modifying soy that eventually ended up in the experimental plots. Whose lab were you in?”

“I don’t see what difference—”

“What lab?”

“Dr. Denise Bustamonte. I did the work there. She gave me space last summer to finish it, but I’ve been there off and on for a couple of years.”

“Bartholomew ever attack you there? Threaten you?”

Frank inhaled. “Nothing. Not anything, really.”

Grace put down her pen. “Okay, Frank, here’s my problem. I don’t have a handle on what’s happening here, but Jeanne’s been tagged, and that means I’m not stopping until I know the truth, and so far, the only truth is, you’re not leveling with me.”

Frank gripped his hands, rocked. “Ted Bartholomew followed me to the parking garage at Riverside U and yelled at me. A security guard had to talk to him.”

“Name.”

“What?”

“The name of the security guard.”

“I never filed a complaint. It would have been early last summer. It was just after I started work in the lab again.”

“Time of day?”

“What? Oh. Afternoon, I guess. No, maybe morning. No, night, it was night.” He smiled apologetically. “We don’t get natural light in the lab, everything blurs together.”

“And then what?”

Frank turned away from her as if it was hard looking at her and thinking up a lie at the same time. Katie always did that when she was making up a big one.

“Then the nice parking lot guy gave him a talking to and—no, maybe he didn’t. Maybe I just wanted him, too. Maybe I didn’t stop at all.”

Grace stared. Frank shifted. “Are we almost done?”

“I meant threat. What was the next threat.”

“Oh. A dead canon wren on my patio. Thought maybe it had crashed into the window. Happens sometimes. I found the note next to this potted cactus near the back door. ‘
If you know what’s good for you, stop
.’”