Nora removed six hangers from the rod and folded the dresses across her left arm. She removed another handful and laid them on top of the first. She carried them downstairs and out to the car, loading first the trunk and then the backseat. The gowns were surprisingly heavy, well constructed, many of them so densely embellished with crystals and beads that the weight of them was palpable. It took her six trips before she’d successfully stripped her closet of all her evening wear: full-length gowns, cocktail dresses, the entire collection of haute couture fashions in every shape and size. The provenance didn’t matter. Nora removed every garment that might have been at all suitable for the dinner dance that night.
It cheered her enormously to imagine the sequence of events. Thelma and Channing would leave the office early, maybe 5:00 instead of the usual 7:00 P.M. The drive home would take an hour or more at the height of the rush hour traffic, which would be particularly heavy along Pacific Coast Highway. By the time they arrived at the house, it would be 6:00 or 6:30, and all the nearby dress shops would be closed. Maybe they’d have a drink before getting dressed. Maybe they’d make love and then take a shower together. Eventually Thelma would turn her porcine attention to what she’d be wearing that night. Buoyed at the prospects, she’d fling open the double doors to the closet. Right away, she’d realize something was wrong. Baffled, she’d open the climate-controlled closet-within-a-closet, which was virtually empty. Thelma, the buxom, lumbering, pot-bellied slob, would find herself with nothing to wear. Not a stitch. She’d shriek and Channing would come running, but what could either of them do? He’d be as horrified as she was. Someone had entered the house and walked off with thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of formal wear. What would he tell Nora? And how would he appease the wailing Thelma, whose evening was ruined? Her crappy little condominium was in Inglewood, thirty miles southeast, not far from the Los Angeles International Airport, so even if (by some miracle) she had something adequate at home, she’d never make it in time. The dinner dance was being held at the Millennium Bilt-more in downtown L.A., forty-nine miles away, distances it would be hopeless to navigate at that hour.
Nora would have given anything to see the look on Thelma’s face. Neither she nor Channing could lay the issue at Nora’s feet even if they figured it out. What would they chide her for? Removing her own clothes from the premises to prevent Thelma from squeezing her way into them the way she’d squeezed her way into the rest of Nora’s life?
Nora locked the house and went out to the car. She looked at the clock on the dashboard, noting that it was only 3:56. The traffic north to Montebello might be slow, but she’d be home by 7:00 at the very latest. Plenty of time to dress and meet Belinda and her sister at the concert hall. How perfect was that?
11
Once Marvin left, I set up a file for Audrey Vance. Ordinarily, I’d have had Marvin sign a boilerplate contract, specifying what he’d hired me to do and agreeing to my rates. In this matter, we were operating on a handshake and my assignment was open-ended. He wrote me a check for fifteen hundred dollars as a retainer, against which I’d bill. If my charges exceeded the total, he had the option of authorizing additional expenses. Much would depend on how effective I’d been. I made a copy of his check, tucked it in the file folder, and set the check itself aside to be deposited.
In essence, I was doing a background investigation on a dead woman. In terms of our attitudes, he and I were at odds. I thought he was in denial, resisting the truth about Audrey when it didn’t tally with his hopes. I had my suspicions, but I understood his hanging on to his belief in her innocence. He didn’t want to think he’d been played for a fool. I was convinced she was a professional crook and he’d been duped. I simply hadn’t proved it yet. At the same time, I was irritated with him for being too stubborn to admit he’d fallen in love with a skunk. I’ve done the same thing myself, so if you want to consider the underlying motivation, you might say I was acting in his behalf as a way of taking care of myself. Psychobabble 101. In the past, when I was embroiled with rogues, I’d been as blind as he was and just as intractable. Here, I had a chance to take action instead of sitting around in a stew of misery. Anger is about power. Tears are about weakness. Guess which category I prefer?
I put a call through to Cheney Phillips at the STPD. Cheney was a fabulous resource and usually generous with information. I thought I’d start with him and work forward from there. Lieutenant Becker picked up the call and told me Cheney’d just gone out for lunch. Lunch? I checked my watch, trying to figure out where the morning had gone. It was clear I’d have to go hunting for him. I knew his favorite haunts-three restaurants in a four-block radius, within walking distance of the police department. Since my office was in the area, the trek couldn’t have been easier. I tried the Bistro first, the closest of the three eateries. I struck out there and struck out again at the Sundial Café. My efforts finally paid off at the Palm Garden, which was located in a downtown arcade, replete with art galleries and jewelry stores, leather shops, high-end luggage and travel goods, along with a boutique that sold trendy clothing made of hemp. The palm trees, for which the restaurant was named, survived in large square gray boxes, responding to their cramped conditions by sending out air roots that crept over the edges like worms. Really appetizing if you were sitting next to one.
Cheney was at a table on the patio, accompanied by Sergeant Detective Leonard Priddy, whom I hadn’t seen for years. Len Priddy had been a friend of my first ex-husband, Mickey Magruder, who’d been killed two years earlier. I’d met and married Mickey when I was twenty-one years old. He was fifteen years my senior and working for the Santa Teresa PD. He left the department under a cloud, as they say, accused of police brutality in the beating death of an ex-convict. On the advice of his attorney, he resigned long before he went to trial. Eventually, he was cleared in criminal court, but not before his reputation had sustained major damage. Our marriage, shaky from the start, imploded for largely unrelated reasons. Nonetheless, Priddy had seen my leaving Mickey as my abandoning him when he needed me most. He’d never said as much but on the rare occasions when our paths crossed, he made clear his contempt. Whether his attitude toward me had softened was anybody’s guess.
I’d heard plenty about him because his career had taken a similar left-hand turn after a shooting incident in which a fellow officer had been killed in the course of a drug raid gone sour. Len Priddy was a maverick to begin with, written up on more than one occasion for violations of department policy. Twice he’d been the subject of a citizen’s complaint. During the months-long Internal Affairs investigation, he was suspended with pay. IA finally concluded the shooting was accidental. He’d salvaged his standing with his colleagues, but his career had stalled out. It was nothing you could put your finger on. Rumor had it, if he took an exam, hoping for advancement, his grades weren’t quite good enough and his annual reviews, while acceptable, were never sufficient to rectify the blow to his good name.
Mickey swore he was a stand-up guy, someone you could count on in a fight. I had no reason to doubt him. In those days, there was a posse of cops known as the Priddy Committee-Len’s boys, rowdy, rough, and given to busting heads when they thought they could get away with it. Mickey was one of them. That was the era of the Dirty Harry movies, and cops, despite protests to the contrary, took a secret satisfaction in the lawlessness of the Clint Eastwood character. The department had changed radically over the years, and while Priddy had hung on, he hadn’t been promoted since. Most cops in his position would have moved on to other work, but Len came from a long line of police officers, and he was too identified with the job to do anything else.