August 7, 2017
Will Fraser’s scrutiny of Dwight Jenner’s bank records proved fruitful. In among the regular transactions were (a) two cash deposits of three thousand dollars and two thousand dollars within the last two months and (b) six card payments to budget hotels at various locations within the Bay Area for the same period, the most recent less than two weeks ago. Every one of them had date-correlative CCTV footage which showed him checking in (and out, after one night), apparently alone. Since then the account activity had returned to normal—except that there had been no activity since July 30.
“Wherever he is,” Will said to Valerie on the phone, “he’s not leaving a plastic trail.”
Valerie was seated in one of five ivory leather chairs in the lobby of Willard & Gould, Attorneys at Law. The space had a headachy green marble floor and soft overhead halogens. It smelled of cold corporate cleanliness. Fleetingly, it made her feel utterly exhausted by the whole concept of the Law, so much of which was in the dirty and dexterous hands of money. “Well, five grand in cash won’t last forever,” she said. “He doesn’t have a passport, so he can’t have left the country. Laura check the hospitals?”
“Nada. Needless to say, he didn’t show up for his meeting with Difalco. Or for Lady Liberty at the car wash, either. Anything on your end?”
“I’m talking to his colleagues. Nothing flags so far. His bank’s not being quite so prompt. I’ll wrap up here then head over to the Grants’. No sign of So Fee Ahh?”
“I’m starting on the hotels’ footage right now. Looking forward to meeting her. She sounds like my kind of gal.”
Valerie hung up. Natural things are disgusting. She couldn’t get the phrase out of her head.
“Detective?”
She looked up. A dark-haired woman in spectacles and a cream pantsuit had just exited the elevator. She was made up with precise understatement, nails French manicured, clothes pressed, shoulder-length bob full of controlled glossy life. She had the sort of poise that made Valerie straighten her spine.
“Fiona Perry,” she said, extending her hand, which arrived with a waft of perfume. “I wish you were here for a different reason. Everyone here is just devastated. We’ll go up and use Adam’s office.”
Adam Grant was—had been, rather—a senior partner, and his office reflected his position. A giant walnut desk stood on a large Persian carpet intricately patterned in pale blue and gold. The rear wall was glass. Two abstract canvases—shades of deep blue with gashes of silver leaf—hung on each of the flanking walls. The desk photograph was a close-up of Rachel and Elspeth, lying in a field of wildflowers. The room’s odor was of crisp technology and polished wood.
The first few minutes of the interview covered what Valerie needed by way of access to Adam Grant’s work calendar and correspondence, for which—predictably—Fiona Perry informed her she would need a warrant.
“You’ll get one hundred percent cooperation,” Fiona said. “But obviously protocols for a law firm require every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed.”
“We’ll have it tomorrow. But in the meantime, I want to ask you about Adam personally. You’ve been his secretary for the last three years, right?”
Fiona looked out of the window and didn’t answer. A slight slackening of her posture, as if a thin layer of professional propriety had fallen away. When she looked back at Valerie it was with a new candor.
“You’re going to ask me if I noticed anything in his demeanor suggestive that all might not be well,” she said.
“Yes,” Valerie said.
“You don’t buy the home intrusion narrative?”
“I buy it, but not as the whole story. Adam was in contact with Jenner for weeks before his murder. He say anything to you about that?”
“Christ,” Fiona said. “No. Nothing.”
“But you felt something was wrong?”
Fiona looked away again. Valerie wondered if Adam Grant had fucked her. She wasn’t particularly good-looking (“handsome” if you were being generous), but that didn’t prove anything. Only the sexual realist in Valerie wondered why, if Grant hadn’t cheated on his wife with her, Valerie, he would bother cheating on his wife with Fiona Perry. She wasn’t proud of the thought, but there it was.
“Adam seemed unhappy to me for a long time,” Fiona said.
“Yes?”
“Agitated. I doubt anyone else here would have noticed. But I saw him every day, just the two of us. Professionally he never missed a beat. But there were quiet moments … I don’t know. He snapped at me a few times, I guess, totally out of character. Some evenings he stayed late, there was a bottle of scotch on the desk. Between you and me that’s not groundbreaking news here, but I came in some mornings and it was obvious he’d been here all night, bottle empty. He didn’t seem right.”
“When did this start?”
“More than a year ago, I’d say.”
“You ever ask him what was wrong?”
“Once. He told me to mind my own—quote—‘fucking business.’ Came in the next day with flowers and profuse apologies. Said he couldn’t believe how he’d spoken to me. But I didn’t pry after that. It’s just that there were times when his mind was so obviously elsewhere.”
“You think someone had something on him?”
“As in blackmail?”
“As in blackmail.”
Fiona shook her head, not in denial, just in ignorance. “It’s hard to imagine,” she said. “But then we’re in the business of imagining the things that are hard to imagine.”
“Was he having an affair?”
“Not with me, if that’s what you’re really asking.”
“I wasn’t. But it’s noted.”
A crackle on the ether here. Fiona Perry didn’t like being an object of sexual speculation. And thereby sexual evaluation. It entailed, whether the two women liked it or not, an admission of mutual comparison. For a moment it was as if Valerie’s “handsome, if you were being generous” had been spoken aloud. Both of them knew where they stood. Fiona with resignation, Valerie with both annoyance that any of that mattered and in spite of the annoyance a flicker of pleasure because she knew she had what Fiona did not. The uneven distribution of beauty was a grand injustice. But since the injustice was here to stay, better to be its beneficiary than its victim.
“I’ll come back tomorrow with the warrant,” Valerie said. “Meantime, if you can keep everyone out of Adam Grant’s stuff, I’d appreciate it.”
“I’ll do what I can, but his caseload’s already been picked up by Dan Kruger.”
“I’m seeing him next. Just make sure the call logs and email correspondence stay intact.”
Will Fraser was having a pleasant afternoon, working his way through the CCTV footage from the hotels Dwight Jenner had checked into for his assumed liaisons with Sophia, if Jimenez’s memory of the name was to be trusted. Sophia. Cherchez la femme! Very occasionally actual police work paid homage to its fictional tropes. Not that that was the only pleasure. It was, Will admitted to himself, enjoyable just to watch people going about their business. The simple satisfaction of voyeurism, enhanced both by the subjects’ obliviousness and by the police knowledge that the vast majority of them had something to hide. Walk up to any random stranger, look them in the eye, and say, with absolute conviction: I know about it. Invariably there would be a secret “it” to which they would believe you were referring. It might not be criminal but it would certainly be shameful. Will supposed he thought of himself as one of the exceptions, but only because at some point years ago he’d ambled past shame and into the understanding that even his shameful things were wearily natural. Thanks to the job, yes, but thanks, too, to Marion, his wife, who had no time for being embarrassed by either his or her own imperfections. He had, for example, wanted to have sex with her the day of her father’s funeral. What kind of a lousy bastard are you? he’d wondered. What the fuck is wrong with you? He’d lain next to her that night trying to think of anything—anything—to dispel the aching hard-on that threatened to incriminate him if he turned to face her. It wasn’t even that he’d been indifferent to her father. He’d been fond of the old geezer. Nor was he numb to Marion’s palpable grief. Be that as it may, there’d been nothing he wanted more right then than to fuck his wife, preferably as filthily as possible. He’d hated himself for it, but there it was. They’d lain for a while in thudding silence. Then Marion had said: I know you want to fuck me. Will had felt the pointless denials massing—then falling away. He was transparent to her. It’s no big deal, Marion had said. It’s what death does. Makes you crave life. It doesn’t mean you’re the spawn of Satan. Don’t bother making a thing of it for yourself. He’d waited in stunned speechlessness. Then she’d said: Don’t get excited, either. I’m not going to fuck you. I’m not up to it right now. I just don’t want you making a goddamned psychodrama out of it and lying there staring at the ceiling as if you’ve betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss.
Will had loved her more then than at practically any other moment in their life together. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it then: that there was no other woman for him.
He took a sip of his cold coffee, yawned, gave himself a mental shake. On-screen he was watching a family checking in at the Civic Center Holiday Inn. Mother, father, one boy of about six, crying, uglily, and a toddler in a stroller. The father, a fat guy in a red-and-white bandana, Nirvana T-shirt, and ridiculous leather pants, was having a problem with his credit card. The clerk looked bored rather than uncomfortable. The mother, in an orange bikini top and sawn-off denims, yanked the squawking kid violently by his elbow and said something that made it clear she was out of patience—which just made the kid cry more.
A woman with voluminous blond hair and sunglasses so big they gave her the look of a fly walked past them and crossed to the elevators. Green chiffon dress and trim long legs in killer heels. Snakeskin purse. No jewelry. Beautiful. Not the kind of woman to be checking in anywhere that cost eighty-eight dollars per night. Not the kind of woman you’d forget.
Will hadn’t forgotten her.
He stopped the video.
Rewound.
Replayed.
Froze it.
Opened a second window on the desktop.
Ramada at the airport, three weeks earlier. He’d been logging the time codes for Dwight Jenner’s check-ins. He fast-forwarded to 12:27 P.M., watched Jenner exchange a few upbeat pleasantries with the girl behind the desk. No luggage beyond a backpack that looked more or less empty, as in all the previous check-ins. Will watched until he walked out of the shot. Then went methodically through the desk footage that followed.
At 1:19 P.M. he found what he was looking for.
Sophia was there again. Ivory silk dress this time. Same purse, same boudoir heels, same bluebottle shades. Straight past reception and across to the elevator doors.
Hello, lady.
There were, he knew, other steps to take. There was the business of confirmation. But her and Dwight being at the same hotel twice was enough to tell him what he needed to know.
No wonder Jenner looked upbeat, Will thought. If that was who he was spending his afternoons balling in a rented bed, it was a miracle he wasn’t walking on air.