“About what?”
“Well, for one thing, she said her husband was a big-deal musician before he died, but I knew about Leo Ackerman on account of my brother working the Strip. Leo was a fourth-rate guitar player who got canned by every crummy room in town and finally OD’d on bad smack. Jude also said she’d published her poems in fancy magazines and had a book of them coming out, but Chrys told me her only poems were in the binder she kept in her nightstand. Sometimes I’d see Jude reading them, but she wouldn’t show them to anybody. There were other lies, lots of them, all told to impress people, but we saw right through them.”
“Okay, what about Chrystal? What kind of relationship did she have with her mother?”
“Love-hate, like it is with mothers and daughters sometimes. They argued a lot. Jude didn’t like Chrys’s line of work, and Chrys would tell her to quit ragging on her because it was her earnings supplementing Jude’s Medicare. Jude would lay into her for being an ungrateful kid and complain that she always cared more for Leo — he was only a stepfather — than for her. Jude... Well, the complaints were endless.”
“She must’ve been difficult to deal with.”
Sandy Viera smiled wearily. “My job, everything’s difficult to deal with. Anyway, don’t get me wrong. Jude and Chrys didn’t argue all the time. Sometimes they’d be kinda nice to each other. Chrys’d get out this pretty silk scarf she bought her mother — must of cost a couple hundred bucks — and tie it around her neck. And then she’d brush her hair. Jude had long red hair, and even though it’d turned brittle and thin and washed out, she wouldn’t let us cut it. Chrys gave her one of her drawings, too — hung it on the wall by her bed. Jude loved it, was always staring at it, and Chrys kept asking her why. She said it wasn’t her best, so why did her mom want it?”
“Why did she?”
Sandy Viera shrugged. “She never would say. Just smiled kinda sad-like and said Chrys had great talent if only she’d develop it.”
“When was the last time Chrystal visited her mother?”
The nurse considered. “I’d say last Monday. The Saturday before Jude had a bad seizure. Came out of it really weakened and asked for Chrys. That night they talked for a long time with the curtain pulled around the bed. When Chrys left she was kinda dazed, like Jude’d given her some bad news. But when she came back that last time, she was different. Kinda hyped, if you know what I mean. She shut the curtains again and stayed till the end of visiting hours. Walked out of there without saying a word to any of us. Never visited her mother again.”
“The Bartlow kid was lying about at least two things,” Guy said.
He and Rhoda were seated at a window table in a bar atop the Hotel Franconia, a small, elegant establishment a few blocks off the Strip, where he’d stayed on previous visits to the city. On the way back from Sean Bartlow’s expensive apartment on the northwest side — not all that far from Better Care, but light-years in terms of luxury — he’d attempted to amuse her by driving her past some of the more outrageous casinos. Dusk was falling, and the neon glitter was coming into its own: The Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas seemed nearly the genuine article; the Statue of Liberty at New York — New York — which, as a native of that city, he found hilarious — stood in gauche relief against the signature skyscrapers and red, looping roller coaster. But the spectacle had had an adverse effect on Rhoda’s mood, and finally he’d brought her to this oasis of civility.
The dazzle of the Strip was still with them, however, and all around the city the desert lay dark and implacable. A silent warning that this land had once been barren and could be rendered so again. Surely would be, Guy thought, if it continued to grow at the current rate of nearly four thousand people per month. Water supplies were not limitless, air quality could not last. Another L.A. in the making? Or would it simply implode someday in one frightening flare of light that left the survivors scrambling back to wherever they’d come from?
Rhoda hadn’t responded to his statement about Bartlow. She slumped in her chair, staring out the window. There were weary lines at the corners of her mouth and her lips drooped. When the waiter set their drinks on the table, she straightened and sighed.
“Guess I’m just a country girl at heart,” she said.
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Isn’t there? All this” — she motioned at the window — “makes me feel insignificant. I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. Yet somehow I feel I should.”
No way to talk her out of her depression, so he wouldn’t try. Instead he repeated his comment about Bartlow, adding, “His first lie was about not knowing what business Chrystal had in Soledad County. She told him at least part of it, and he was interested enough to loan her his car in exchange for being cut in on the deal, but apprehensive enough to switch the plates and remove the registration papers.”
“He said he didn’t know where the plates came from.”
“His second lie. Bartlow probably has a collection of plates, because he’s dealing drugs in an amateurish fashion.”
“How do you conclude that?”
“He claims his father keeps him on a tight financial leash, but that apartment and its furnishings are expensive, as are calls to Dial-a-Pal and services such as Chrystal provided him. He answered the phone five times in the forty minutes we were there, rather than let the machine pick up. Each conversation had a surreptitious tone, ending with a promise to let the caller know later where he’d meet him. And after each call he acted nervous.”
“Okay on the dealing, but where do you get the amateurish fashion?”
“Because, until he loaned it to Chrystal, he made his deliveries in a classic car, thinking that switching its plates would conceal his identity in case someone was running a surveillance. Mr. Bartlow’s not too bright, and I hope he doesn’t tangle with the real pros, or someday he’ll be nothing but picked bones in the desert.”
Rhoda shook her head. “You got all that from sitting in on my interview with him? I ought to study your methods. I learned nothing useful.”
Guy started to preen, but anticipated Diana’s reproving voice. “Well, I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said, and thought he heard the faint words False modesty. “So what do you make of Jude Ackerman’s photo album?”
Rhoda picked it up and paged through it, then handed it to him. “Those first pictures of the three of them were taken at the cabin on the ridge. The rest are with the families in the canyon. Given the number of photos, I’d say they were close friends. I recognize everybody in them except for this man.” Her finger tapped a tall, lanky man who posed with Devon Wynne, his arm around her shoulders.
“Devon’s boyfriend.” He explained what Gregory Cordova had told him about the man who had left the canyon two weeks before the killings.
“Odd,” she said. “We had no idea he’d ever been there. And another thing that’s odd is that all the pictures in this album were taken during the time the Ackermans spent in Soledad County. Didn’t Jude have other photographs?”
“Maybe that time was special to her, and that’s why she brought this particular album to the nursing home.”
“Maybe.” Rhoda picked up the loose-leaf binder and paged through it. “Each of these poems is dated. The first was written in December the year before the murders, the last in January three years after.”
Guy checked his watch. “We’d better get over to the airport. We’ll read the collected works of Jude Ackerman on the plane.”
“Interesting.”
Rho looked up from the sheaf of scribbled pages. “What?”
“There’re plenty more blank pages in this binder. Did she just quit writing?”