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Haydon arrived at Jennifer Quinn’s address in northern Bellaire shortly after eight o’clock the next morning and pulled the car to the curb in front of the house. Farther down and across the street, a light tan car sat under a camphor tree, the low sun glazing its dirty windows. A hand and forearm came out of the driver’s window and made a slow arcing acknowledgment. Haydon didn’t respond but looked through the passenger window of the Vanden Plas at the house.
It was in an older neighborhood with small, neat houses that had been homes for the young families that swelled the nation’s population following the close of World War II. Haydon immediately decided that the place was Powell’s. It was a zinc white Spanish stucco affair that belonged in Glendale in the 1940s. It had a flat roof, an arched recessed front door with a wrought iron porch light. Two ragged Mexican fan palms sat on either side of a red cement step-up porch that was only slightly wider than the sidewalk. Carpet grass of a rich thick green was neatly trimmed and spread from house to house in both directions, broken only by sidewalks and the two parallel ribbons of cement that served as driveways. The Jennifer Quinn that Patricia Beamon had described seemed out of place here.
Haydon got out of his car and started down the sidewalk. He had come early deliberately, hoping to wake her. Down the block someone started a lawn mower. Haydon pushed the yellowed doorbell button, but it didn’t seem to work. He opened the screen and knocked on the door. Around the corner of the house the compressor on a window air conditioner kicked in. He knocked again and heard a telephone inside the house begin ringing, then stop abruptly. When he knocked again a little slot opened behind a square grill in the wooden door.
“Yes?” The girl’s voice was husky, unemotional.
“Jennifer Quinn?”
“Yes.”
Haydon held his shield up to the grill and introduced himself.
“May I come in?”
“Now?”
“Please.”
“Well, I just got up. You woke me.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m sure you know why I need to talk with you.”
There was a pause. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “Just a minute.” The slot behind the grill closed.
Haydon looked around toward the unmarked car down the street. A few houses over, a woman in a housecoat was standing in the middle of her yard momentarily preoccupied with the headlines of the newspaper she had just picked up. Without looking up, she turned and slowly started back to her opened front door.
In a few minutes the wooden door opened, and Haydon turned around as the girl pushed open the screen.
“Come on in,” she said. He stepped past her through the door, and she leaned to look outside. “Where’s your car?”
“In front. It’s not a department car.”
“That’s for sure,” she said. “Have a seat. I’m not going to be able to talk to you until I get some tea.”
She wore a long sleeved khaki safari shirt with epaulets, tucked into a pair of pleated khaki pants. The shirt was freshly pressed, with creases in the sleeves. She rolled back the cuffs as she walked into the kitchen. The boxy little house had been remodeled so that the dining room and living room were one large area. The wall between the kitchen and the dining room had been cut in half and served as a bar that allowed the kitchen to look into the larger room. A skylight had been added, giving the expanded spaces an even more open feeling. There were bookshelves, a fireplace, and a huge xylophone next to one wall. Camera equipment, tripods, and a variety of lenses were scattered around over the furniture and in corners.
Haydon watched her moving around in the kitchen. She put water in a copper kettle and put it on the stove to heat. Opening the refrigerator, she took out two eggs and cracked them into a dinner glass. She added two spoons of what Haydon guessed was protein powder, and then filled the glass with milk. She beat the mixture rapidly and then, while the drink was still swirling, lifted it and drank it all without stopping.
“Lousy!” she said, leaning on the countertop. She shuddered, rinsed the glass in the sink, and put it in the dishwasher. She took two cups and two saucers from the cabinet, set cream and sugar on the bar, and then disappeared into the back of the house. He heard water running. In a moment she came back into the kitchen still patting her face with a yellow towel. Her timing was perfect; the kettle had just begun to whistle.
“What kind of tea do you want?” she asked. “We have Darjeeling, Ceylon pekoe, Bengal Bay Black, Earl Grey, English Breakfast.”
“Earl Grey.”
“Cream? Sugar?”
“Cream.”
“How much? Well, look, why don’t you come fix it the way you want it.”
Haydon did, and then she came around from the kitchen and they went into the living room. She motioned Haydon to the sofa, and then she sat to his left in a modern chrome chair with black leather straps for the seat, back, and arms. She sat a little forward in the chair and balanced her teacup on her knees.
“I feel like I should be asking you questions,” she said quickly. “This has been a little crazy. The New Orleans police contacted me yesterday and told me what had happened. I was on a job, and they came out on location to tell me. They suggested I might want to come home immediately, and I went straight back to my hotel. I had to call my office here and arrange for someone to go down there and replace me.”
She started to sip her tea, but it was still too hot. “They didn’t tell me anything. Can you fill me in?”
Haydon had watched her closely. Mooney was not quite right about her hair. It was not really red. She was almost a strawberry blonde, but not quite that either. There was more honey in it than that, and it was wonderfully thick with what looked to be natural wave. She wore it shoulder length, and this morning had quickly brushed it straight back from her forehead and let it fall naturally on either side of a center part. Her complexion was not the kind that tanned well, and he guessed she protected it religiously from the sun. It was creamy and immaculate. Her eyes were green enough to inspire vanity, and though she had a strong, almost square jaw, she did not have the angular beauty of a model. Rather, she seemed to be all soft curves.
“Not really,” he said. “We were hoping you’d be able to help us gain some perspective on the circumstances.”
“I don’t even know the circumstances,” she said, her green eyes widening for emphasis. “How do I help you gain perspective? God, I don’t even know what happened to him. Was he shot?”
“No.”
“Well?” She looked at him impatiently for the particulars. More often than not people were not satisfied until they had them. It seemed to be a psychological need for corroboration, as though it couldn’t be real in their minds until they knew “how.”
“His throat was cut. It looked like there’d been a struggle.” She showed no reaction to this except to look away.
“Had you lived with him for a long time?” he asked.
She looked at him and took a deep breath as she straightened her back. Her high full bust strained at the khaki shirt. She seemed resigned to setting the scene for Haydon.
“Wayne moved here from California just after Christmas last year. Between Christmas and New Year’s. A friend out there had told me about him, that he was coming to Houston and that I should get to know him because he had this wonderful experience in the motion picture business. I’m interested in what goes on behind the camera, not in being in front of it,” she added parenthetically, as if to second guess him. “He was a contemporary of Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, and that bunch in the film schools out there during the sixties. He knew Scorsese, worked with Coppola a few times. My friend said I could learn a lot from him because he was good. I said great, and she gave him my number. When he got to town he called me.”
She sipped the tea. “One thing led to another.” She seemed to think that over. “Actually, I was impressed because he had worked with a lot of big people,” she said, more candidly. “He put the rush on me. We ended up here, but the relationship didn’t last any time. Wayne wasn’t a very mature person.” She blew on her tea. “Once he got it through his thick skull the sexual thing was over, we got along fine. Anyway, the arrangement worked well, and we stayed with it, but it was strictly business.”
She looked at Haydon. “Does that clear up a lot of guesswork for you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. Did he get you the job where you work now?”
She smiled wearily and shook her head. “No.”
“Do you know if he was involved in anything that might have a bearing on his murder? Was he involved in trafficking narcotics, even small amounts for friends? Gambling? Anything that might give us some direction?”
“No.”
“He didn’t use narcotics?”
“Yes, he did. You asked if he was involved in traffic.”
“Who was his source?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like drugs. I don’t use them. He never bothered me about it.”
“He’d been in town only six months, you said. How did he get the job with Langer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he have it when he came?”
“Yes.”
“He never told you how he got it?”
“Okay, let’s see . . . it was a friend. A friend helped him get it. Couldn’t you find that out from the Langer people?” she asked impatiently.
“Did you know any of his friends? The people he worked with?”
‘‘I’ve been up to the Langer offices a couple of times to see Wayne.
I met his supervisor once, but he’s the only one. I didn’t have any reason to go there.”
“He dated?”
“No one steadily that I knew about. Wayne was a Happy Hour man. It was his social element. All his girls were Happy Hour girls.”
“I understand he did freelance work on the side, using Langer’s facilities at night. In fact he was doing some when he was killed. Do you know anything about that?”
She looked at him, but he didn’t understand her expression. Was she puzzled, hesitant to speak of something she thought was risky? Was she simply remembering something, making a connection between things that her mind had not associated before? Haydon’s mouth was cottony from the tannin in the tea. He set his cup and saucer on an end table by the sofa.
“Do you know anything about his night work?” he repeated.
“No, I don’t.” She seemed to think of something but held it back.
“I just never noticed.”
“You never noticed?”
“No, I never paid much attention.” She was curt again, but a pretty hand had moved up to her chest, and she began fiddling with a button on her safari shirt.
“Can you show me where he slept?” Haydon asked suddenly.
The green eyes widened slightly and then relaxed again.
“Sure,” she said. She put her cup and saucer down on the same end table with his and stood. He followed her past the kitchen to a hallway that joined another that ran the width of the house. Plate glass windows formed the outside wall of the hall and looked out onto a courtyard that occupied the entire area between the two wings of the house.
She stopped. “I live on that side.” She gestured to the left. “We each have a large bedroom and a full bath.”
They turned to the right, and he followed her into Powell’s bedroom. The room was dark and smelled musty since the air conditioner unit in one of the windows had been off for several days. Jennifer Quinn flipped on the light switch and stepped to the windows and opened the Venetian blinds. The bed, across the room, was unmade. Above it a gigantic color photograph covered most of the wall. It was taken from inside the curl of a wave, the water forming a luminous aqua tunnel in the center of which a surfer, arms outspread, was barreling down the sheer wall of water. The photograph had been blown up so many times the grain was outsized, making the picture seem almost pointillistic.
Below the windows that looked onto the courtyard was a row of shelving crammed with records. The stereo sat in the center with the speakers at either end. The opposite side of the room was mostly closets, the folding hollow core doors askew to reveal the nearly empty shelves. Powell’s clothing needs were modest. There were jeans, shirts with a slightly western flair, T-shirts. There was one sports coat, a couple of dress shirts, a few pairs of dress pants. Camera equipment was scattered around the room.
“He wasn’t a neat person,” the girl said. She had folded her arms and was leaning against the doorframe.
Haydon walked over to the bed. A 35mm Canon had been tossed onto the sheets. He lifted it by its strap and looked at the frame counter. It was empty. He laid it back on the sheets. Walking over to a bureau that had most of its drawers pulled out at odd angles, he started at the top and worked his way down, noticing the dark smudges of graphite left by the lab men. There were very few clothes. One drawer contained girlie magazines, another incidental camera parts, another a few letters from a girl in California. On top of the chest was an assemblage of junk: beer coasters, sticks of gum, a bottle of drugstore cologne, a matchbook from a club, a package of shoestrings, some change, an ashtray with candy wrappers wadded into little pellets.
“Do you know Cindy Thomas?” he asked, holding up one of the letters without turning around.
“An old flame. Totally burned out.”
Haydon went to the closets and nudged back the doors that weren’t fully opened. There was an old electric guitar in one corner with a dusty amplifier. In the opposite corner photography magazines were tossed in a pile. Most of the closet space was empty. Haydon turned around and looked at the room. On the wall beside the door a jumble of photographs were attached to the wall with thumbtacks. He walked over.
“You know these people?”
“Almost all of them are California people.”
“Do you know anything about them?”
“Not the California people.”
“Who isn’t from California?”
She walked over, studied the group a minute.
“This one.” She pointed to a girl on a beach wearing a pair of tailored green shorts and nothing else. She was clutching a beer bottle, which she pointed at the photographer as she sprayed the foamy brew in his direction.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know her name. He never told me. I just know he brought the film back from a weekend trip with some girl, and this was from that group. He showed it to me and laughed about it.” She leaned over and looked at the picture too. “She’s not much, is she?”
“When did he take this picture?”
“Fairly recently. Maybe six weeks ago.”
“Anyone else?”
She reached across and put her finger on an 8 x 10 that looked as if it had been blown up from a smaller print. A shirtless Asian man wearing sandals and white ducks stood on the edge of a swimming pool between two women who had their backs to the camera and had bent over so that nothing showed but the backs of their legs, shapely bottoms, and the tiny triangles of their bikinis. He was grinning, as he stood with one foot casually crossed over the other at the ankle and his forearms resting on the girls’ hips. His hands had disappeared inside their bikinis.
“That’s Ricky Toy. I’ve only met him a few times, but I know he’s another friend from Wayne’s film school days. He’s supposed to be a crackerjack combat photographer with lots of Vietnam experience. Wayne saw him quite a bit.”
“He lives in Houston?”
“Yes. He’s originally from California, but he moved here several years ago, I think.”
“What does he do?”
She shrugged. “He used to be with Reuters. Wayne said he does freelance work.”
“You don’t know him well?”
“No. Wayne introduced us, but it just didn’t happen that we mixed socially. Actually, I think Wayne told everybody like that that we were an item.”
“Did that bother you?”
She shook her head. “The people he put that on weren’t the kind of people I worried about. If he wanted to be a big man with them that was his business. I couldn’t have stopped him from saying it anyway.”
“Who are the two girls?”
“Ricky’s roommates. Two Asian girls whose faces are just as luscious as what you see there.”
“Anybody else?” Haydon asked, looking at the wall again.
She looked over the remaining photographs. “No. I imagine some of those are Houston girls, though.”
Haydon began pulling the tacks out of the two photographs. “Where did Powell keep all his prints? Doesn’t he have boxes of pictures somewhere? Negatives?”
“He was mostly involved with motion picture work. He didn’t have any more stills around than the average person. Maybe not as many. I assumed his reels stayed at his office. We don’t even have a projector here.”
Haydon held the two pictures in one hand and looked around the room.
“I guess that’s it,” he said.
As they walked down the hall to the living room, Jennifer Quinn said, “The house is his. I guess I’m going to have to move out?”
“You know where it’s financed?” She nodded.
“I’d talk to the people there.”
“What do I do with his things?”
“Nothing for a while,” Haydon said. “We may want to go through everything again. Just keep the door closed. We’ll get in touch with his family on the West Coast, and they can arrange to do something with it.”
“Do I have to stay in the city? What if I get another assignment?”
Haydon stopped by the sofa before starting toward the door.
“Why don’t you call me before you go anywhere.” He took one of his cards from his wallet and turned it over and wrote his home telephone number on the back. “Try this number,” he said, and handed it to her.
“Will you want to talk with me again?”
“Probably.”
She looked at the card. He noticed again how she filled out the safari shirt. Her fingernails were in perfect condition, unpainted, with clean white cuticles.
“Okay,” she said looking up. Her green eyes were richer at close range.
“You didn’t care for him much, did you?” he said.
The remark made her a little uneasy, but not contrite.
“You think I should be more remorseful?” she asked, looking at him evenly. “I can’t help it. He was a slob. He may have been a great technician, but as a person he was no good.”