Watching the pale Latina beauty sample and buy that hideous fragrance had aroused him then, just as thinking about it was doing now. He had imagined a girl like that would wear something evanescent, something floral and innocent. He had almost passed her by when the Chanel called out to him, taunting him. Dazed, he had followed the scent through three departments in Bloomingdale’s, wanting to be certain she was the vehicle through which he’d fulfill his divine mission. Flustered, he turned away from the detectives in his kitchen and asked if this Yustina person was involved in the booster ring, needing to say something to distract himself from his growing erection.
The room was silent for a moment, then Firestone said, “You say that like she’s dead, Mr. Nolent.”
“I didn’t intend to,” Christophe replied, exhaling all at once. “I just assumed two detectives coming here on a Saturday morning wasn’t just because she stole some clothes.” When they didn’t reply, he decided to take another tack, and made a show of racking his brain before remembering an Afro-American guy hanging around one of the racks, mumbling something as the women walked by. “Maybe he was controlling Yustina and the others.”
Truesdale fixed him with an off-kilter gaze, asked if there was any reason he’d remember that particular Afro-American guy. “He called me a faggot,” he’d replied, the childhood memory of his mother taunting him with the epithet adding some heat to his response.
After a few more questions about where else he shopped in the mall and how he spent the rest of the day, they seemed to be satisfied, when suddenly Truesdale asked to use his bathroom. “Too much tea,” she’d explained. As the housekeeper directed her to one of the downstairs powder rooms, Christophe watched Firestone go to the sink and deposit their earthenware cups, the detective’s beefy hands violating his collection of antique iron teapots and the sushi knives in the wooden block. “You have a lovely home, Mr. Nolent. I like the Japanese theme, right down to the accessories. It’s, I don’t know what to call it…”
“Peaceful? It took quite a bit of effort to transform it after Mother died.” And a lot of his mother’s money, which made the effort that much more enjoyable.
“Well, you’ve done an outstanding job, and I gotta tell you, I’ve seen some nice houses in my days as a detective.” Firestone gazed out the window, past a jumbled collection of ceramic pots and a grove of Japanese maples that led to the garages. “Do you keep your mother’s car collection on the property?”
“Some of it,” he’d replied, impressed that this hick cop would have heard of it. “There are over a hundred cars, all totaled. We couldn’t possibly store them all here.”
Firestone wheedled out of him that there were a dozen scattered in three garages on the estate before he asked about the 44 Roadster, the one everyone wanted to see.
“Actually, my mother owned three Bugattis – a ’27 Bugatti 44 she bought after her company went public and a couple of T-57 Cs she bought to celebrate her divorces.” Besides the money, the cars were the only aspect of his mother’s estate Christophe enjoyed, as much for the power and status they conferred on their owners as for their design or performance. And the Bugattis were the ne plus ultra of cars, like the three-hundred-dollar sushi dinners at Urasawa or the Divine Droplets, a sake the chef there kept for him that cost more than a bottle of Dom.
“I’ve never seen a Bugatti,” the detective said wistfully. Seeing Christophe’s hesitation, he pleaded, “Just a peek, man. I’ll tell Detective Truesdale to wait in the car. Chicks just don’t get cars the way us guys do, you know what I’m saying?”
Reluctantly, Christophe escorted Firestone to the garages, where the detective whistled at and ogled the cars like they were those murdered women, suddenly brought back to life. But twenty minutes later, he was still at it, time enough for Detective Truesdale to get tired of waiting and wander into the garage, where Firestone crouched near the 44 Roadster, admiring its pristine running board. “Christophe here – you don’t mind if I call you that? – was just showing me his mother’s Bugattis. Tell her about the yellow one.”
Christophe began reciting the car’s features and the races it had won over the years. Firestone asked him to show her the others in the adjacent garages while he went to stand under the maple trees between the house and garages to make a call. He caught up with them a few minutes later, dropping his phone into his pocket and buttoning his jacket. “I need to get back to my office,” he announced. “There’s been a break in the case.”
Worry pricked at the nape of Christophe’s neck. “So you don’t need me to provide a description of the guy in the lingerie department?”
“I can come back later for that.”
Truesdale cast a look at Firestone, then said, “There is one question you can answer for me, Mr. Nolent – who’d you buy the nightshirt for?”
“Uh…” The question had caught Christophe flat-footed. What should he say?
“Let’s go, Detective,” Firestone said.
“It was for a friend, uh, a girlfriend’s birthday.”
“That’s odd,” Truesdale replied, consulting her notes. “The salesperson swore you said it was for your mother. But that couldn’t possibly be, could it? Your mother’s been dead for six years now.”
Christophe suddenly felt light-headed. “I think you should both leave now.”
“Let’s go, Detective,” Firestone repeated, flapping his hands in his jacket pockets to urge Truesdale along.
He’d gotten her into the car and her door was almost closed when she asked, “And your girlfriend’s name is…?”
Christophe crossed to Firestone’s side of the car, as far from her prying questions as possible. “I’d rather not say.”
Firestone leaned out the driver’s-side window and grasped Christophe’s suddenly damp hand. “If I had a girlfriend in the habit of wearing dowdy nightshirts like that saleslady showed us,” he whispered, “I wouldn’t say either. I’m a silk-teddy man myself.”
Looking back on that interview in the days and weeks that followed, Christophe decided his wealth and breeding had made him an enemy of the two detectives, fueled their middle-class rage, and started a vendetta against him that had almost cost him his freedom. But as the Bentley pulled into Christophe’s mother’s, no his, estate, he thanked God it had all backfired, and in such a spectacular fashion that he knew they would never bother him again.
“I CAN UNDERSTAND your defending your client,” Steve muttered as Michelle Dunn passed him on her way inside the jail, “but did you have to ruin my reputation in the process?”
Dunn shrugged, raindrops dripping off her eyelashes. “It wasn’t personal, Detective. We had to get that nightshirt excluded from the evidence. Our focus groups indicated that Yustina Flores’s and Tiffany Rutherford’s DNA on that nightshirt were enough to get our client convicted, regardless of his family’s brand-name recognition.”
Steve spat on the ground in front of her. “Criminal trials are like making movies or selling cars – nobody makes a fucking move without their focus groups.”
Dunn took the insult calmly. “That’s why I’m getting out of defense work. Retire and open a yoga studio or something.”
Tall and lean, she didn’t seem old enough to retire, but he didn’t give a shit about what she did from here on out. “How can you live with yourself, knowing you put a twisted fuck like Nolent back on the streets?”
She took a step toward him. “The better question is – how can you, knowing if you hadn’t removed evidence from Nolent’s home and tried to replant it later, he might be on his way to death row?”
As Dunn click-clacked her way back inside the jail, Steve asked himself again what the hell he was supposed to do. He’d glimpsed some strips of fabric he was pretty sure came from that nightshirt – the brown stains almost obliterating the pink fabric beneath – behind some ceramic pots near the maples in Nolent’s garden, and was faced with a dilemma: should he identify the fabric right then and there, take Christophe Nolent in, only to have him claim they belonged to his gardener or his driver? Nolent was a smart guy. Smart enough to have an alibi prepared for every moment of his morning, noon, and night on the day Yustina Flores was murdered, as he would, Steve knew, for that of Tiffany Rutherford and any of the other murders they might accuse him with. And if Steve had left those scraps of nightshirt behind, how long would it take for Nolent to destroy them after the way Truesdale went after him on the girlfriend lie? Faster than Truesdale could get a search warrant signed and be back at the house to discover them, that was for damn sure.