"How badly have you contaminated this scene?" he asked.
I stood back and let him in. "Nice to see you, too, Chet. Chester Singer-Amber Mae Wilson."
He regarded her momentarily. "You're somewhat larger than on the hair-conditioner bottle," he said without a trace of humor. "And lovelier, too."
Wearing fresh latex gloves, we used clean paper towels to check the drains for blood, and found none. Surely Parish had washed up here, but surely he was careful enough to run the water long and wipe the grills himself. The hand and bath towels looked fresh, but Chet took them down, laid them on the tile counter, and worked them over with a magnifier. They revealed nothing. I felt stupid.
"What about fingerprints?" Amber asked.
"He wiped the gate knob on his way out, so he probably wiped everything else, too."
"We'll spray and dust to our hearts' content," said Chet.
"Even a homicide captain can leave a mistake behind. In fact, I am reminded of Martin's earlier days as a detective-he was always just a little bit impatient and contemptuous of the crime scene specialists. He was not a man who worshiped detail, would not be surprised at all if Mr. Parish managed to leave us something… telling."
"What about the weapon?" Amber asked.
"He likely removed it when he removed the body," Chester said patiently.
"How did he get her into his car without the neighbor seeing?"
"I can attest to your privacy here, Ms. Wilson. Your nearest neighbors are two hundred yards away. It was dark. It was late. How big is this lot, by the way?"
"Three point five acres."
"Have you searched it, Russell?"
"No."
"Well, we may have to."
"What about tire prints in the driveway?" Amber asked
"You used it when you came home on the fifth," I said.
"Your manager used it when he came here, looking for you.
Chester glumly shook his big head. "Russell, review for me the night you found Martin here, in his… informal wear.
I told him everything I could remember about that bizarre encounter on July the Fourth.
"Why do you assume he was intending to enter Ms. Wilson's bed?"
"He told me he'd done it before. And the bed was still made."
"But maybe he was finished and had already made back up."
"That's true." I considered Amber's bed, the prolific pink pillows, the scented silk and satin. Chet worked over the pillows and discovered two short gray-brown hairs worked into a sham, hairs almost certainly not belonging to Amber or Alice. He put them in evidence bags, carefully labeling each. A little ripple of hope wavered up through me. We got another one from the top sheet, up near the pillows. Down about halfway, Chet found a short curly hair that could have come from about any crotch in the world. Chester bagged and labeled it. We looked for semen on the sheets-few acts have made me feel lower on the evolutionary scale-and found none.
Amber watched us in minor horror. "He wouldn't really have done that, would he?"
"You tell us, Amber," I said. "You were married to him."
"Jesus, I'm really not so sure. But you know something? I lived with him for over a year, and he's the most fastidious anal-retentive I've ever known. He'd brush out the toilet with disinfectant after he peed."
Chet ran a clean tissue under the toilet bowl's lip, for exactly what purpose, I wasn't sure. Clean. I remembered the shaving cut on Martin's Adam's apple the afternoon of the fourth and examined the razors-plastic, disposable-in the bathroom drawer. Dumb, I thought: What would possess anyone to stop in the middle of a murder and cover-up, then shave?
"Do you have anything to drink?" I asked.
"Gin."
"Light, ice."
"Make mine a little more substantial," said Chester.
We wandered the house. The carpet near the entrance was spotless, as it was inside the sliding screen door on which the mesh had been cut open as a nod to the Midnight Eye. We studied the stereo setup, in which Parish-after piecing together phrases from the tapes left at the Fernandez and Ellison homes-had left his dub. He would certainly have left no prints to go along with it. I saw an image of him, grim with purpose using some rinky-dink boom box in his office before the murder recording bits of monologue from tapes he had surely copied days ago, before they were booked into evidence. Amber delivered the drink to me with a guarded stare.
In the study, I noted the lamp and magazines I'd knock over. In the kitchen, we prowled around under the sink, in the broom closet, the trash compactor, the cabinets.
I began to feel tricked, anticipated, suckered. Marty had already done all this, I thought-cleaned up evidence of his and replaced it with evidence of Grace. Probably ran the fucking vacuum cleaner, I thought, and it actually sounded like something that anally retentive Martin would do.
"Where's your vacuum?"
"Corner of the den. Behind the room divider."
Chester smiled mildly. "Sometimes the obvious is best."
He pulled it out from beside an ironing board, popped off the back panel, and felt the bag.
"Empty," he said.
"Then he didn't use it," said Amber.
"Please get me some clean paper towels."
Chet worked off the roller and flicked the brush over a clean chain of towels. I used my pen to fan the bristles. What speckled down onto the white paper looked an awful lot like dried blood.
"Is that what I think it is?" Amber asked.
"Yes," said Chester. "The bag is empty because he used the machine, then put in a new bag. We are closer."
"And took the old bag with him?"
"Probably. It would depend on how calm he was able remain, on whether the bag might mean an extra trip back into the house for him. Show me where your trash cans are."
Of course I had already been through the trash, in search of a painter's mess. But this time through, we removed each item individually, bringing to our labor an attention that an onlooker would have found comical. The task was made more difficult by the fact that most of Amber Mae's trash had been run through the compactor. Not only that, but the garbage was over a week old because Amber had failed, with her disappearance, to have it taken out to curbside. The smell was not good.
The bag was, of course, nowhere to be found.
"Well," said Chester. "Another roadblock."
We all looked at one another rather gloomily.
"It wouldn't hurt to check the filter," Chet said finally.
We used a clean white towel that Chester carried, neatly folded, in his case. We spread it in the middle of the living room floor. Chet unscrewed the vacuum cleaner's lid and worked out the filter, which is engineered to keep large debris from the motor compartment. He cradled out the screen and laid it down on the towel carefully, as if it were an infant. What we had before us was a dusty mulch that covered almost a square foot of terry cotton, a bounty of dirt, dust, hair, fiber, more dust, a broken rubber band, a paper clip, a penny, more dust, a length of string, a wad of green dental floss that had somehow missed the brush, a warped postage stamp, and a great deal more dust.
"What a job," Amber noted.
Chester removed a bundle of evidence bags from his case and we began. "Ms. Wilson, we could use two standard tablespoons, rinsed and wiped."
First, we separated and bagged anything that might be useful. Several hairs could have been Martin's. Nothing else seemed indicative, even suggestive. The idea crossed my mind that I was a fool. We bagged the broken rubber band, which seemed to confirm this. Amber sighed. Using a spoon, I made little S patterns through the silt, disgusted.
"One of the hairs may help," I said, fully aware that you can't establish 100 percent identification of a human being with hair samples-not in court, anyway.
"What's that?" asked Amber.
"I said, one-"
"No. What's that?"
Amber's hand hovered over the towel, forefinger extended. I followed the aim of that finger, thinking-yes, even at this hour, even after this day, even after everything my dear Isabella had suffered at least in part for me-that if the entire promise of the female form could be contained in one finger here it was, a perfect digit, graceful, firm, strong, lovely in composition and utility, the skin slightly tanned, the flesh full with its slender contours, the nail bold and bright and domed imperiously, red as blood, pointing now at something in the dust.
"There," she said.
"I can't see it from here."
"Then give me the spoon, Russ."
She reached with it and dipped the outer lip as if for soup. She jiggled the utensil, worked it down through the gray matte She lifted it, tilting off a wad of nonspecific material that floated slowly back down to the towel. She presented the spoon to me handle first. I took it and spilled the contents onto a clean paper tissue.
What I saw at first, I still couldn't identify-it was a U shaped concave shell the size, roughly, of a fingernail. One end was jagged and looked as if it had been torn away from something else. The other end was smoothly rounded. It was covered with dust, but under the dust I could see pink.
"Turn it over, Russell," said Chet.
I flipped it with my pen. It was a fingernail-pink, tapered chipped noticeably at the round end. I looked at Amber, who looked back at me.
She shook her head. "Not one of my colors."
"Alice's?"
"How would I know? I don't suppose when you-"
"No."
Chester keyed in on this truncated exchange, his patient eyes searching first my face, then Amber's.
I returned his stare with what innocence I could fake, while trying in my mind to recreate that night, and I could see Alice's rigid outstretched arms inviting me into the freezer, could feel her icy-slick weight on my back as I bore her up the mountain, but I could not for my life see her fingernails.
I touched it with my pen. "Fake?"
"Yes," said Amber "It was torn off. Maybe in a struggle. There's probably some real nail on it. Does that help?"
"Definitely. Get Alice's makeup stuff and bring it in here."
Amber returned a moment later with her sister's overnight case. She dug through and found two bottles of nail polish in a shiny black plastic kit. One was red, the other an opalescent white.
"Amber, what does this suggest… in the cosmetic scheme of things?"
"Proves it's not her nail."
"Absolutely not?"
"Russ, nails aren't absolute. But you don't do them pink, then leave town for two weeks with red and white."
"Oh my, I can almost hear this in court," noted Chet.
"She might have forgotten it," I said.
"Might have."
"Or carried the pink in a handier place, like her purse."
"I already looked," said Amber. "She didn't."
Naturally, I had thought about another possibility. Amber looked at me, her eyes steady but rife with the same dire inklings that must have been visible in my own.
"Grace's color?"
"Women don't have just one color, Russ. Remember our bathroom?"
I did, a veritable makeup department, an entire warehouse of paints and polishes, shadows and liners in every hue and shade; solvents, removers, applicators, brushes, tissue: swabs, lighted mirrors, hand-held mirrors, magnifying mirror: wall mirrors. (It was our favorite place in the world to make standing, carnal, untender, image-drunk love.)
I said that I had not forgotten our bathroom.
"Well," she said, "then you know."
"Bag the nail," said Chester. "Perhaps, at some point it will match nine others that we find in Mr. Parish's possession. They are probably among his 'evidence' right now at County."
I bagged it and continued on through the dusty rubble in front of me. A few minutes later, we were done. We placed the filter and contents in one large evidence bag. Chet arranged the bag in his case with the others after labeling each.
"You didn't get what you wanted, did you?" asked Amber.
"Maybe. Hairs. I don't know. A lot of it depends on the good graces of Mr. Singer."
"Mr. Singer cannot analyze what he does not possess.'
"Did Alice wear a watch, or eyeglasses?" I asked Amber. I had not forgotten the tiny screw I had removed from the nap of the carpet here just a few nights ago. It was still inside the cap of my pen, with my own spares.
"I hadn't seen her in twelve years, Russell. What now?
"Grace's."
Amber studied me. "To find what?"
"If Parish has been there, doing the same thing he did here, we need something to prove it. If there's a 'police investigation' tape up, it's too late."
There was no tape, and Amber had a key supplied to her by the private detective she had hired to find Grace.
It was the first time I had been inside my daughter's home. I stood in the short entryway, holding the batch of mail I'd gotten from her slot in the lobby, wondering again how I had managed to miss her life. The condo was not only expensive to start with but the furnishings and accents were expensive, too-all financed by Amber, as she reminded me. The carpet was a thick cream Berber, the sofas and chairs heavy rattan with white cotton cushions, and two of the three living room walls were hung with original oils by Laguna artists whose styles I recognized. The east wall was mirrored to extend the depth of the room; the west was all glass, including a sliding door that opened to a long but narrow balcony overlooking the yacht basin and restaurants. The kitchen was done in Euro style, which means everything is the same shape and color (black) and you can't tell the oven from the dishwasher. The bedroom had a big four-poster and was done in pinks. The whole place was organized, clean, neat.
"I guess she got my housekeeping style instead of yours,"
I said.
"What she got was a maid I pay for."
"How come you keep reminding me who pays the bills?"
"I think you should know."
"If I remember correctly, my child-support checks came back."
Amber looked away from me, visibly perturbed. She glanced at Chester, whose presence had started to resemble that of some acute and silent conscience.
"Say what you need to say," he said. "You don't have much that will surprise these old and increasingly hairy ears.
"I provided everything I could, Russ. I still do. That's what I mean. And that's why this whole thing she's fantasized hurts me so deeply. I don't expect a medal, but it would be nice if my only child tried thanking me instead of recreating her life with me as some kind of hell."
"Amber," I said, "not everything is about you."
I considered Amber's misty eyes, her quivering chin, was right, I thought-not everything was about Amber. Nor about myself. This was about Grace, and how we might keep her from Parish's tightening net.
Chester broke the silence. "Ms. Wilson, begin in the bathroom and research what you can on your daughter's nail: Russell and I will try to find some sign of Mr. Parish. Since you are more familiar with her home than we are, anything you notice that wasn't here before, anything that seems out of place might be of help to us. Remember, Martin Parish's goal is to demonstrate that Grace was in your home the night of July the third. Our goal is to demonstrate that he was here."
Chester began in the cupboards of the kitchen, no doubt wondering whether Parish had had the audacity to plant something incriminating there-the club, perhaps.
I went into the bedroom. Grace's nightstand held a leather-bound Bible with her name embossed in gold on the cover. Midway through Leviticus was a color postcard of the Champs Elysees, with the words, "Our city welcomes Grace with an open heart." It was signed "Florent." It had not beer mailed. Hand-delivered to her hotel, I figured, by Florent himself or perhaps a friend, just in time for Grace to take it back with her to Orange County.
Under the Bible was a notebook that was mostly empty. Grace had made a few journal entries-May 2,4,10,21-then stopped. I read them, learned nothing except that her job was boring and she wanted to travel again.
There were two photograph albums at the bottom of the stand drawer. I took them out and looked through: London, Paris, Cannes, Rome, Florence, Rio, Mexico City, Puerta Vallarta, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Most of the shots were faces that appeared once, then never returned. Only a few were actually of Grace. A girl's record of travel, I thought-the sights, the strangers, the obvious. Not one picture was of Amber. Strange.
I closed the drawer and pressed the message button on the answering machine that sat atop the stand. I wrote down in my notebook the names, messages, and numbers. Three calls from Brent Sides. Two from work. Eight from people I didn't know. Three from me, four hang-ups. One from Reuben Saltz, asking after Amber.
I lifted the cordless phone and pushed redial. A recorded voice told me that I had reached the home of Brent Sides. The last call Grace made from home, I thought. I wondered.
For a long moment, I stood there and studied the stuffed animals that crowded Grace's bed and bed stand, covered her two chests of drawers, rested on her windowsills and bookshelves, even the floor. There must have been a hundred of them. The idea struck me that I was more interested in getting to know my daughter-at this late date-than I was in finding some trace of Martin Parish's presence in her house. I tried to concentrate: What could Parish have left behind? What did he transfer from this home to Amber's in order to find it as 'evidence' later?
I dug into Grace's jewelry chest, wondering whether Parish could have had the cunning to remove the tiny screw and leave it at Amber's. If he had, I could not match the screw to any piece of jewelry or to any of the several watches in the chest. Everything seemed… natural.
Chester continued his more objective path: He checked the closets for incriminating clothing that Parish might have put there; I heard him throwing open all the kitchen cupboards and drawers, doing likewise in the laundry room.
I opened the window, sat in a chair, and lighted a cigarette The clock said 11:35. I watched the smoke slide through the window screen, felt the nicotine surround my brain, and realize how exhausted I was. The sounds of Amber's bathroom search issued down the hallway from the bath. Chester had joined her and I could hear their voices, muffled, through the walls. Gad knows what she was telling him. I heard them leave the place and assumed they were headed down to the dumpster. What a pleasant business. I looked across the street to the dark water of the harbor. A rage continued to build inside me, directed at Martin. Had Martin done what he did so that I didn't have to? Had he been chosen for darkness, just as Izzy was chosen for disease and Ing for madness? Did it matter?
I was in no mood for understanding or forgiveness. No, I was much more in the mood to line up all the Parishes and Ings and tumors and evils in the world and bash out their live with my ax handle. I would bash until I could bash no more. I would loose an ocean of blood upon which I would tread-my head held high. My wife would rise and walk to me and we would embrace. We would begin our family. My daughter would smile, thrive. We would have a son. My first-person account of the Midnight Eye would be a best-seller, receive awards, become a major film. My stilt house would become a museum after I died. Izzy would live to be 103, remember me fondly in blockbuster of her own, marry a rickety old man who wore bow ties and adored her.
"Are you going to be sick?"
The voice was Amber's.
"Oh." I focused my eyes, which revealed my ankles and shoes, crossed before me on the carpet. My cigarette had burned out and dropped its ash. "No. I'm fine. Resting."
She was standing directly beneath a recessed ceiling bulb, the light from which lent her a specific radiance. "Look what we found downstairs."