And, of course, there were pictures. There were eight of them, and they were grainy, like images transferred from video. But they were clear enough to see the players and follow the action. Everyone looked so young-Helene, Nassouli, Trautmann, and a blond girl who couldn’t have been fifteen.
I took the package out to the living room and turned on the TV and the VCR. I didn’t watch much, enough to know that the pictures came off the tape, enough to revise my estimate of the blond girl’s age downward, and to wonder if she’d been there willingly, or if she’d even known where she was. Enough to see that Alan Burrows hadn’t lied about the production values; even the sound quality was good. The dialogue was limited and repetitive, but the voices were distinct.
I hadn’t heard Nassouli speak before, or seen him except in photographs. His voice was medium-deep, with a trace of an English accent, but it was otherwise unremarkable. The sleek, ursine look he had in photos was there on tape too, and so was his camera awareness. Here, he was less an active participant than a director, a manipulator, a watcher. Yet he was also aware of being watched, and he seemed to pose and preen for his unseen audience. Quite a piece of work. I stopped the tape and put everything back in the envelope and sat on my sofa, sick and tired. Disappointed, but somehow not surprised.
I wanted to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head and stay that way for a week or two. But I couldn’t, not yet. I checked the time. I changed the dressings on my wrists. I made a tuna sandwich and heated some soup from a can and ate. I read the paper. I checked the time again. Finally, the phone rang. It was Randy, as good as his word.
“It’ll be three years in April that the place changed hands,” Randy told me. “April 10 was the closing date, in East Hampton. Buyers name of Dooley, from the city; local lawyers on both sides. Need the names?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “You know how long it was on the market before it sold?”
“Hang on a sec, I got that here.” There was a ruffling of papers. “Here we go. It was fast. Went on the market March 14; they got an offer on the sixteenth and accepted it the same day. The way they priced it, I’m not surprised. It was an easy two hundred grand under market for back then. Like they say in the trade, it was priced to move. You need anything else?”
“Let me have the address again,” I said, and he gave it to me. I thanked Randy and promised to put his check in the mail today. We said our good-byes.
I went to my laptop. I pulled up my case notes and read through them and looked at the date Randy had given me. I went back online. It didn’t take long for me to find a detailed map of the area around the address I’d gotten from Randy. I sat there looking at it for a while, and then I pulled up driving instructions from that address to Cedar Point Park. The instructions were short and simple, and why not? The trip was barely half a mile. I pushed back from my table and looked out the windows at the bars of bright sunlight and blue shadow that fell on the buildings across the way. I rubbed my eyes.
It was wild conjecture and circumstantial bullshit, and I knew it-or at least a part of me did. No cop or prosecutor would waste a brain cell on it. Yeah, there was motive, more than enough. It was sitting in an envelope on my kitchen counter. It was easy to imagine a scene, three years back, of Gerard Nassouli waving a sample of that stuff in front of Pierro, in an attempt to finance the fugitive life he was about to embark on. And it was easy to imagine a murderous response. But that’s all it was-imagination.
Pierro had a motive; Mrs. Pierro did too, for that matter. But so, it seemed, did virtually everyone who’d run across Gerard Nassouli. There were forty or fifty envelopes in those boxes back at Trautmann’s place, and who knows how many more that went up in his bonfire. Forty or fifty people with motives, some perhaps better than Pierro’s. But how many of them had had houses half a mile from where Nassouli’s body was found? And how many of those had put their houses up for sale a week after Nassouli disappeared? How many of those houses had been priced to move so quickly?
“A fucking fairy story,” I heard Shelly DiPaolo’s voice say in my head. And she’d be right. I didn’t even have a schizo to back me up on this one. But another part of me was unconvinced, troubled by the coincidences, and thinking about how one might trace the Pierros’ movements on a March day nearly three years back.
“A fucking fairy story,” I said aloud. And one that nobody cared about. Nobody mourned Gerard Nassouli; he’d left behind no family. And nobody would argue that the world wasn’t a better place without him. I rubbed my eyes again and got up and drank a glass of water.
Maybe it was my own ruffled feathers fueling this. Maybe I was pissed off because they’d lied to me, both of them, from the get goPierro about being clean, Helene about everything else. But that wasn’t a surprise, not really. Clients do it all the time, and I’d half-known that these clients were no different. Maybe it was because I’d thought better of Helene. I’d liked her. I’d liked the way she was with her kids, and I’d liked her photographs. I’d liked her style. I’d thought she was smart, and that she had better judgment than this, or at least better taste.
The intercom buzzed. She was right on time.
Helene walked in with her big shearling coat on her arm and her cheeks red from the chill outside. She wore snug, suede pants in a fawn color, a pink cashmere sweater, and low boots. A brown leather tote bag hung from her shoulder. She looked around.
“This is nice, John. Wonderful light, and great ceilings,” she said. She was smiling and her brown eyes sparkled and her chestnut hair was loose and glossy. She looked brand-new. Her makeup was nearly invisible and a faint perfume moved around her, something with roses.
Helene focused on me, and her pretty smile faded, replaced by an equally pretty look of concern. “Oh lord, your wrists, your face-you’ve been hurt again, haven’t you? It was over all this, wasn’t it? Oh, John, I’m so sorry. Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. I just need some more sleep.”
Her brow furrowed deeply. “This is too much, really. I… I’m so sorry, John.”
I shook my head a little and told her to sit. I offered her a drink. She sat at the kitchen counter and asked for a seltzer. I poured two. She drank some of hers and set it down. She propped her elbows on the counter and rested her chin atop her clasped hands and looked at me. I looked back. The manila envelope was on her right, not three feet away. She never glanced at it.
“There’s some news since we spoke this morning,” I said. A frown moved quickly across her face and vanished, like a breeze rolling across a pond. She stared at me, waiting for it. I told her about Mills and Trautmann and who’d killed whom. She thought about it for a while, her face blank, then she gave a tiny shrug.
“I should think he’d be easier for the police to track down than that Trautmann,” she said, without much concern. She sipped at her drink some more. I shrugged back at her.
“Maybe.” Helene was quiet, watching the bubbles rise in her glass.
“We’re so grateful, John, Rick and I both,” she said, finally. I nodded.
“Is Rick still in San Francisco?” I asked.
“He’s taking the red-eye home tonight. But he’s so happy after talking to Mike, he could probably fly back under his own steam. Speaking of which… we wanted you to have this.” She reached into her bag and drew out a small envelope. She handed it to me. It was heavy, ivory-colored stock. Inside was a check. It was a big one, and it was made out to me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s just a token, really,” she said. “We’re so lucky that we had you to stand by us. I don’t know what we would’ve done otherwise.” I handed the check back to her.
“Thanks, Helene, but no thanks,” I said. She looked surprised and confused. “It’s a nice gesture, but not a good idea. Technically, I work for Mike. He pays me well and passes along those costs to you, probably with a hefty markup. It’s because I work for him, and not you, that what I do can stay confidential. Taking money from you complicates things.” But Helene was insistent.