After Roland Quillin had been released, Kate sat glumly with Taylor in the interview room.
“It was a good plan,” Taylor told her consolingly. “Laying it out to the Quillins was the only shot we had, Kate.”
“That may be,” she said, “but I have to tell you I’m having second thoughts. About Flora Quillin specifically. I warned her, Ed—but still, if she’s the only viable witness against him—”
“I’m not about to lose any sleep. Quillin figured we’d never link him to Dory, but if he does anything to sad sack Flora we got him by the short hairs and he knows it.”
“He might skip.”
Taylor shrugged. “Where to? He’s been playing Mr. Solid Citizen for too many years. If half the info he gave us on that five-ten is right, we got a dozen ways to sunset to track him. Besides, the guy’s no kid anymore to be running all over the countryside. Kate, we got nothing on him, he knows it. He seemed pretty sure about his wife, too—and he knows her a hell of a lot better than we do. I say let’s do what we can. Ship his description around to all our people. You can bet he’s been on the prowl since Dory left. What’s the statute of limitations on two-eighty-eight?”
“I need to check but I think six years,” Kate answered, nodding.
“So, any victims in all that time who described a husky guy with a scar on his left cheekbone, Mr. Solid Citizen gets to spend his time standing in lineups. Who knows? Maybe we’ll skin his ass yet.”
“I haven’t given up totally on his wife,” Kate said, remembering the fingernail marks cut into Flora Quillin’s palms. “Maybe something of what happened here got through.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Never underestimate a woman, right?” But Taylor looked dubious. “I figure if we don’t hear in the next day or two, we’ll never get a thing outta sad sack Flora.”
Kate nodded again. She herself hoped to hear from Flora Quillin tonight. She sat up in her chair, raised her arms, stretched her back and neck muscles. “God, I’m tired, Ed. Really bushed.”
“Let’s go home, partner,” Taylor said. “It’s been one damn long hell of a day.”
* * *
At her desk Kate took out the card Andrea had given her, picked up the phone. That she remain home tonight was imperative in case Flora Quillin called; but perhaps Andrea would come over.
Sorry, I can’t come to the phone right now. If you’ll leave your number after the beep, I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can. Thanks.
Sorely disappointed, feeling even more tired, Kate glanced at her watch: seven twenty. Probably Andrea was still out on a real estate appointment. She would leave a message…
Then she remembered the pleading voice last night, the ex-lover named Bev whom Andrea had avoided for two months by intercepting her calls on this heartlessly automatic answering machine. Repelled by the thought of leaving a message on the same machine, she hung up. She would call from her apartment; Andrea would surely be home by then…
* * *
Kate changed into jeans and a T-shirt, poured herself some scotch, slid a TV dinner into the microwave, put Sarah Vaughan on the tape player, and tried Andrea again. And tried her again at eight thirty.
Unsettled and depressed, she sat in her easy chair with her feet up, her head back and her eyes closed, listening to the caramel voice of Sarah Vaughan vibrate in the stillness of the room, feeling too tired to move when the tape finally clicked off.
Of course Andrea had a job that kept her confined and busy. Who better to understand that than she herself? All those times she’d spent long hours away from Anne with only a hurried phone call in explanation, and sometimes not even that… And Andrea could not call her—she did not have Kate’s phone number. Kate had not remembered to give it to her, nor, for that matter, had Andrea asked…
Stop this, she told herself. Stop being ridiculous.
She had only to be patient. She was in the same position as Ellen O’Neil had been in with her more than a year ago. What Ellen had wanted she could not give—surely not then, not five months after Anne’s death. Andrea was only two months away from breaking up her own long-term relationship, she was still in pain… The fact that she and Andrea had gone to bed together had been an aberrant event based on separate needs, just as that night with Ellen had been… The best and only chance for this new relationship was to give it time to grow, all the time it needed. To allow Andrea to finish processing through her breakup with the woman named Bev.
Still, it seemed that Andrea should be there tonight to take her call. Because they had gone to bed together—and what they had shared was not meaningless. Andrea had said she would be there. Of course, she had replied to Kate’s question would she be there. Her lengthening absence seemed to take away more and more from the significance of their night.
Kate looked broodingly across her dimly lit apartment, and finally pushed her thoughts away, exchanging them for anxiety over Flora Quillin. She became impatient with those thoughts as well. Nothing, there was absolutely nothing she could do about either Flora Quillin or Andrea Ross.
* * *
The phone rang. Kate came out of her light doze and leaped for it, glancing at the clock: nine exactly.
“Detective Delafield? This is Flora Quillin.”
“Yes,” Kate said eagerly. “Are you all right, Mrs. Quillin?”
“All right? Well…yes, I would say so…”
As Flora Quillin’s voice drifted off, Kate strained to listen; she could hear the rumble of an engine—perhaps a bus or a truck—then fainter traffic sounds; the indefinable conglomerate noise of a city street. Flora Quillin was at a pay phone.
“Mrs. Quillin, are you sure you’re all right? Where are you?”
“The reason I called,” Flora Quillin announced in a voice that was suddenly clear and distinct, “I want to know, where is the body of my daughter?”
“At USC Medical Center,” Kate answered, nonplussed. “Since it hasn’t been claimed, the coroner’s office—” There was the sudden blaring of a horn.
“Oh dear, that’s Roland,” Flora Quillin exclaimed, and hung up.
Kate replaced the receiver, staring at it. What on earth was happening? Where were the Quillins, and why? And what was going on in Flora Quillin’s head?
Perhaps the Quillins were en route to claim their daughter’s body—but why call from a pay phone to find out where Dory’s body was? Flora Quillin had not seemed troubled or agitated in the least; she had not seemed in any kind of danger. But something felt odd, something felt very wrong about that phone call.
Helplessly, Kate picked up the new Time from the coffee table. She switched on the television set and settled back into her easy chair. Then she focused on her other anxiety. She would wait, she decided, till nine thirty to try Andrea again. She flipped open the magazine.
At exactly nine thirty she poured herself another scotch and dialed Andrea’s number.
“Hello!” It was a soft, cheerful, female voice. Not Andrea’s voice.
Kate cleared her throat. “I’m calling for Andrea, is she there?”
“Hang on.”
A hand was placed over the receiver but Kate could hear the raised voice, the muffled words: “Phone for you, want to take it in there?” There was a pause, then the cheery voice said, “I didn’t ask, Andy.”
Kate now recognized the voice.
A receiver was picked up, apparently from “in there,” and the other receiver was hung up.
“Hello, this is Andrea.”
“It’s Kate.” She sat in her armchair staring numbly at the television screen, at a weatherman in front of a cloud-covered map of the western states. “I’m sorry to disturb you, I see you have…someone with you.”
“Yes,” Andrea said quietly. “I didn’t think things would move quite this fast, but they have. Bev is here.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “I recognized her from the answering machine last night.”
“You’re a very good detective.”
Kate heard the smile in Andrea’s voice. “At times I can be a terribly poor detective,” she replied.
The reason for Andrea’s formality this morning was so very transparent now—why had it not been equally clear to her then? All the evidence had been there. Andrea had said: I was never unfaithful to Bev the whole time we were together…
“Kate, we’ve known each other such a very short time,” Andrea said. “Not long enough for any hurt to come to either of us—am I right about that?”
“Right,” Kate said, forcing positiveness into her tone, closing her eyes.
After the way Bev was about my surgery she could never have been the first woman in my bed…
Maybe not the first woman, but surely the second.
For the first time in my life I needed validation as a woman. And I had to have it from you. Not from Bev…
She had received that validation. And it was all she wanted from Kate. It was clear why the answering machine had been on this evening, and where the “in there” was that Andrea had taken this call.
Kate said, “I wish you only the best. I think you have better things to do right now than talk to me.”
“Kate…Goodnight, Kate.” The voice was soft, sincere: “I hope we can be friends. Can we still be friends?”
“Of course. Good night, Andrea.”
Hands in her back pockets, Kate slowly paced her living room. She remembered the oddness of Andrea’s tone this morning when she had answered Of course to Kate’s question about being home tonight. She now recognized the tone: perfunctory. She had used the same tone herself in replying to Andrea’s question about remaining friends.
There was no way they would be friends. She would not flagellate herself by being around a woman she desired and had been in the process of falling in love with, knowing that that woman belonged irrevocably to another. And Andrea would not wish to be around the woman with whom she had slept—regardless of her justification for the act—to remind her of her unfaithfulness to the woman she truly loved.
Kate turned off the television. She could hear the faint whoosh of traffic on Montana Avenue; a car alarm ululated in the distance. The apartment seemed large, dark, echoingly empty.
She tossed Time back onto the coffee table, pulled the Law Enforcement Legal Reporter out of the magazine rack. Tucking the publication under her arm she walked into the kitchen and poured her drink down the drain. She did not feel like drinking. Or reading. Or watching television. Or thinking. Especially thinking. She would go to bed and try to read her periodical and perhaps she would fall asleep doing that.
She sat down on the side of her bed and picked up the framed photo from her night table and held it in both hands, gazing at the light-haired, smiling young woman in jeans and a red checkered shirt leaning up against a weathered gray fence, gray ocean in the background—the photo had been taken on a trip to Oregon.
“Why did you have to leave me?” she whispered. “Ever since you left, everything has just gone straight to hell.”