Claude smiled. "It was great to get away for a few days, and we tried a different restaurant every meal. Unfortunately, my stomach's been upset ever since." He grimaced as he spoke.
After we'd talked about Hot Springs and the hotel where he and Carrie had stayed, and about how much of his stuff he had left to pack up to move into her house, I explained my errand while Claude absently rubbed his stomach. He listened with half his usual attention.
"So," Claude rumbled in his slow, deep voice, "you think this tape is the one Becca is missing?"
"Might be. And she and her brother are leaving on vacation tomorrow, I guess after the funeral. Would you mind just going in the apartment with me to see?"
Claude pondered that, then shrugged. "I guess that'd be okay. All you're doing is getting the one tape. If there isn't anything in the machine?"
"Then I'll shut the door behind me and take these keys to the sheriff."
Claude glanced at his watch. "I told Jump I'd be in sometime this afternoon, but I wasn't real specific. Let's go."
As we went to the stairs, through the narrow glass panes on either side of the back door, I saw the Whitleys getting out of Becca's car. They'd been to the gym, I figured from their clothes. Becca's hair was braided. The brother and sister were talking earnestly.
By the time I heard them coming in the back door, we had unlocked Deedra's apartment and stepped in.
Half-dismantled, dusty and disordered, the apartment was silent and dim.
While Claude fidgeted behind me, I turned on the television and the VCR. The voice of the man on the Weather Channel sounded obscenely normal in the dreary living room, where a few boxes remained stacked against the wall and every piece of furniture subtly askew.
The tiny icon lit up. There was a tape in the machine. I pressed the REWIND button. Within a second or two, the reverse arrow went dark, and I pushed PLAY.
John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted, filled the screen. I nodded to myself. This was one of the shows Deadra always taped. In his painfully earnest way, Walsh was talking about the evening's roundup of criminals wanted and criminals caught, of the things he would show us that would make us mad.
Well. I was already mad. I started to pop the cassette out and give up on my search for Becca's tape, but instead I thought I'd fast-forward through the commercials and see if there was something else on the recording.
Ads went by at top speed. Then we were back into America's Most Wanted, and John Walsh was standing in front of mug shots of a man and a woman. Walsh shook his head darkly and jerkily, and the film of a crime reenactment began to play. I hit another button to watch this segment.
"... arson," Walsh said with finality. In the reenactment clip, an attractive brunette woman with hawklike features, who somewhat resembled one of the mug shots, rang a doorbell. An elderly man answered, and the young reenactment actress said, "I'm from TexasTech Car Insurance. Your car was named by one of our insurers as being involved in an accident that dented his car. Could you tell me about that?"
The elderly man, looking confused, gestured the young woman into his living room. He had a nice home, big and formal.
The actor playing the older man began to protest that his car hadn't been involved in any accident, and when the young woman asked him if she could have an associate examine the car, he readily handed over his keys.
He was a fool, I thought.
So was I.
On the screen, the young woman tossed the keys out to her "associate," a large, blond young man with impressive shoulders. He strode off, presumably in the direction of the homeowner's garage, but the camera stayed inside the house while the owner continued expostulating with the woman. To show us how shifty this woman was, the camera dwelled on her eyes flicking around the attractive room while the homeowner rattled on. She drifted closer and closer, and when the man announced his intention of calling his own insurance agent, the young brunette dropped into a classic fighting stance, drew back her left fist into the chamber position, and struck the man in the spot where the bottom ribs come together. He stared at her, stunned, for a second or two before collapsing to the floor.
I was barely conscious of a shuffling of feet behind me.
"Excuse me, Lily," Claude said abruptly. "I'll be in the bathroom."
I didn't respond. I was too shocked.
Now the camera showed the man lying limp. He was probably meant to be dead.
"While their victim lay on his own living-room floor, breathing his last, Sherry Crumpler and David Messinger systematically looted his house. They didn't leave until they had it alclass="underline" money, jewelry, and car. They even took Harvey Jenkins's rare-coin collection."
Show the mug shots again.
As John Walsh went on to detail the couple's string of similar crimes, and urged viewers to bring these two murderers to justice, their heads filled the screen once more.
I peered at the face of the woman. I paused the picture. I put my hands on either side of her face. In my imagination I painted all the colors in brightly.
"I thought I heard someone up here," Becca Whitley said from the doorway.
I hit the OFF button immediately. "Yeah, Lacey asked me to work up here some more. I shouldn't have been watching television," I said, trying to smile.
"Watching television? You? On the job? I don't believe it for a second," Becca said blithely. "I'll bet you found another tape."
She turned and spoke into the hall behind her. "Honey, she knows."
Her brother came in. He was the other mug shot. He was much more recognizable.
"Where is the real Becca Whitley?" I asked, glad they couldn't hear how loudly my heart was pounding. My knees bent slightly, and I shifted my feet for better balance. "And the real Anthony Whitley?"
"Anthony got into a little trouble in Mexico," David Messinger said. "Becca is a pile of bones in some gulch in Texas hill country."
"Why did you do this?" I asked. I waved my hand to indicate the apartment building. "This isn't riches."
"It just dropped from heaven," the woman I still though of as Becca said. "David had been romancing Becca for months when he had to leave the country for a month or two. Things were getting too hot for us to stay together. David talked Anthony into going with him. Becca was a real straight arrow, but Anthony was a bad boy. You ever wonder why the apartment building was left to just Becca? Because Anthony was in jail. In fact, that's where Dave and Anthony met. While they were down in Me-hee-co, the guys went boating together, and when the boat came back in, why, there was only one man on it. And that man had all Anthony's papers." Becca smiled at me, her hard, bright smile that I'd grown nearly fond of. "I'd remade myself, as you can see. The best wig I could buy, and a lot of makeup. While I was hanging around with Becca in Dallas, being her best friend since I was gonna be her sister-in-law, she thought, her uncle died here in Shakespeare. She'd told me about him, about his apartment building and his little pile of cash. And she told me about the great-grandfather, too. I needed a place to be, a quiet place where no one would bother me. So after she'd quit her job and given up her apartment to move here, Becca and I took a little drive together."
Her smile was genuine and bright.
Sherry Crumpler and David Messinger were between me and the only door, and as I watched, David shut the door behind him. He was really big. She was really good at combat.
They were wary.
"What about the keys, did you take the keys?" How long would Claude's stomach be upset?
"I knew I'd have to give mine up to the sheriff, at least temporarily, and I couldn't be sure Deedra hadn't left some kind of message. So I stole the whole purse, and I took her extra key from the umbrella in the car stall. I came up here right when I got back from the woods, and took the TV Guide, because it was marked. But people started coming back from the weekend then, and I had to stay in my apartment. After that, I had a chance to come up here twice trying to find any trace she'd left about us, but I decided she hadn't left anything. Until I saw you carry out all the tapes. Then I realized she'd probably taped the show. I was watching AMW that night. You can imagine how I felt. But I was sure no one would recognize me. Then I saw Deedra on the stairs the next morning when she left for church. I was shocked when I could tell she knew who I was."