When Noah got to the diner ten minutes early, San Felipe was already sitting in a booth next to the front windows overlooking the front parking lot. As he walked inside the diner he was relieved for San Felipe's sake to see that the place was sparsely populated. It was too late for the dinner crowds that characteristically came to this reincarnation of a 1950s diner, and it was still too early for the equally faithful late-nighters. San Felipe was nursing a chunky cup of coffee, looking slightly apprehensive.551Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡEoLXCHaNWD
He stood as Noah approached his booth. He was a tall, thin man, always neatly dressed, but not a clotheshorse, tending toward Tolurmura's desert version of the Eastern post-collegiate simplicity. he had a long face and the kind of physiognomy that retained its youthfulness beyond its allotted time and which his wife, had she lived, eventually would have found hard to compete with.
"I hope you've got something new," he said quickly. The waitress was on her way over with the coffeepot and the extra cup.
"We don't," Noah said. He paused while the waitress poured his coffee and San Felipe looked at him with puzzled anguish. He was still taking his wife's death very hard, and it didn't help that the circumstances were as strange to him as if he'd been swallowed by a python in their church choir.
"You don't?!" he said, leaning toward him as the waitress left. "What the hell is my tax money paying you guys for?" He was agitated, impatient.
"The truth is, Mr. San Felipe, that something has come up in another case and we're wondering if it's somehow related to the circumstances of your wife's death."
"I don't understand, Mr. Bain. What 'circumstances'?"
"Let me ask you this," said Noah. "When you were going through your wife's things, did you come across anything that you hadn't known about? Something that she possibly had kept hidden from you, that might have seemed totally out of character for her?"
Toby San Felipe was not naïve. One of the peculiar things about being a homicide detective was that your encounters with the survivors of the deceased often took on an intimacy normally reserved for one's doctor, priest, or spouse. This was even more likely if the victim was a member of the white middle class, which was rarely touched by things like this, and if the murder had sexual overtones, as did Vick San Felipe's. The ordeal was so far removed from the normal experience of such persons that the shock of it rendered them emotionally vulnerable for a long time afterward. The homicide detective becomes the "expert' to whom they can turn for help, from whom they hoped to hear answers to questions that they had never dreamed they would have to ask.
Toby San Felipe had already had to confront the numbing fact that his wife had probably gone voluntarily to the hotel in which she was found dead. This kind of discovery was not the kind of thing many people had to face, and it was not the kind of thing many people would be able to face without extreme emotional strain. San Felipe had run the gamut of emotions during the final two weeks, and Noah had been with him during much of that time. Even now, he still looked haggard. His wife's mother, a widow, had come from out of state to stay with the kids while San Felipe tried to pick up the pieces and get on with the rest of his life. But the unknown circumstances of his wife's death, the realization that in all likelihood she had had some kind of other life behind his back, were taking their toll on the man.
Still leaning forward, San Felipe stared at Noah with his expression of impatience frozen on his features, his eyes opened inquiringly, his head cocked slightly to one side. In the ensuing silence between them, while the cook far off in the kitchen began signing a vibrato of Joe Cocker's "Up Where We Belong," while the voices of a man and a woman a few booths away rose slightly in argument and then subsided, while the waitresses across the room gathered near the glass-fronted pie cabinets and rested their tired hips against the Formica counter, Toby San Felipe's face slowly changed from defiance to defeat as tears welled in his eyes and all the innocence of what he once had thought his life to be passed away from his memory in the dark shadow of disillusion.
"Jesus." His voice cracked, and his mouth drew tight, betraying the strain he felt as he struggled for self-control. "Jesus," he repeated, and it was almost a sob, but he caught it, and sat against the back of the booth and quickly looked away as his eyes suddenly spilled over. He wiped them quickly with his fingers and stared stupidly at the glittering lights of the traffic that passed by on either side of the diner.
"I'm not going to have anything left," he said. "Nothing. I don't even known who the hell she was anymore."
Noah ached for him. The man had been dying by degrees, one or two a day for nearly three weeks, drying up inside so that every moist piece of his fiber was growing brittle and crumbling, changing him forever. Cruelly, Noah kept his silence. He had to talk to him, and he had to hurt before he would talk.
Toby was breathing heavily, almost wheezing, and then he cleared his throat. But he kept his eyes toward the window.
"In any other context they would have been common items," said Toby. "But when I found them together----in a black lacquer box, for Christ's sake, I knew. A string of large pearls. Small---clips, rubber-coated. An electric massager----with an attachment. I don't know----do I have to go through all of it?"
"No," Noah said. "No, it's not necessary. What did you do with them?"
"I threw the goddamn things away. The box----all of it." Toby's head was still turned away. He couldn't look at Noah. His Adam's apple was working to keep back the sobs building in his chest.
Damn, sometimes what Noah had to do seemed really too cruel. "Can you tell me," he said, trying to sound controlled, but not heartless, "did you have the impression that these things were----did any of them seem to be intended for sadomasochism?" Noah couldn't image how this might have sounded to him, and he didn't want to think about it too much.
Toby didn't react with any particular emotion. Maybe the well was dry, as he'd already taken a lot out of it. He shook his head wearily and continued to shake it seemingly unaware that he was doing it.
"No, not really," he said. "I didn't have that feeling. Just the feeling that----you know, that...." His voice thickened. "Why didn't I know? Why----would she keep it----? We weren't prudish about sex. It was good. I mean, I don't think I ever----denied her anything in that way. Jesus, I've been over and over it. I can honestly say----as far as I know---that it was very good." He finally turned to Noah. "I mean, as sincerely as I can evaluate it, it was good for her. She never, ever, indicated the slightest----discontent about it. And I was attentive. I mean, I was aware of the indictment, you know, about men's selfishness in that, and I tried to be sensitive about that. I didn't have my head in the sand about those kinds of things. I----honest to God.....I thought everything was---very good in that area."
Toby stopped and took some paper napkins from the dispenser on the table and rubbed his eyes. He said "Jesus" again and took a drink of coffee.
"You told us before that you haven't any idea who she might've been seeing. Has that changed now?"
"Hell, no," he said without anger. "If I was in the dark about this----then I'm really at a loss on who she might've been seeing. If you'd found me dead in that hotel room you could've found people willing to speculate. Little flirtations people might have seen at the office or something. I mean, you could have made a case that I might have been seeing someone. But with Vicki, no. And as I can say this I realize how it must sound, that it can't carry much weight in light of what I didn't know about her. But I can't think of a single possibility there. I just can't. I've never seen her come on to anybody. It just wasn't like her."
This of course had been corroborated by countless interviews with her friends, women she had worked with in her charity activities, women who had been in her exercise classes, in the parents' organization at her children's school Everyone had the same assessment, with one caveat. No one was really close to her, no one really knew her "that" well. She was a good, responsible mother and wife, fulfilled all her social duties, but had no "best" friend.
"Have you ever heard of a woman named Lauralee Dowey?"
San Felipe shook his head, wiping his eyes again.
"How about Nolie Burr?"
"No."
"Was there anything else, however small, you might've come across in her things? Addresses jotted down somewhere that you didn't recognize, telephone numbers that weren't familiar?"
"We've already done this," he reminded Noah.
"I know, but sometimes things come to you."
Noah studied him while the latter man looked at his coffee cup. He looked gaunt. Was Toby San Felipe holding something back? How labyrinthine was this thing? He took a drink of coffee.
"Going through her things," San Felipe said, shaking his head again. "I did that when my father died. I went through his things because my mother couldn't do it. It was tough. But this----At first I just couldn't do it. If you hadn't said it was important I still wouldn't have gone through her stuff. The box, I didn't find until the last. Actually, it was an accident. She'd hidden it at the back of her closet, inside an air conditioning duct. She hadn't put the vent grill back right."
Thinking back, San Felipe said, "But then, once I'd found that I couldn't stop. I went through everything again and again. I didn't know what the hell I was looking for, but I was obsessed with finding something else. I even went over the seams of her dresses thinking she might've hidden things in there. I went through every page of her books looking for notes, messages. I took the caps off her cosmetics, her perfume bottles, her eyebrow pencil, nothing was too insignificant. I even----I even took apart the tampons I cold find. I thought, you know, that she would have thought that I would never look in a place like that. And I was terrified the whole time that I would find something. It was like getting into my head that someone had let loose a poisonous snake in the house. I was scared to look for it, and afraid not to."
The waitress dutifully made her rounds, poured fresh coffee for them, and San Felipe added cream and sugar again, thinking of something else the whole time. Noah didn't know what to ask him next. They'd been over everything already, and Noah had even gone back to see him on a couple of fishing expeditions, but the case had been at a dead end right from the beginning. If San Felipe was right---and telling the truth----the toys in his wife's little black box hadn't had anything to do with sadomasochism. She was just a little more sexually exuberant than San Felipe had thought.
Neither man spoke for a moment and then San Felipe said, "It was nuts, but I did it. I don't know if it made me feel better----or worse. You know, something like this, it----it's totally disorienting. At first you're so stunned by the dead, and then that it's murder----not a car wreck, an aneurism, or cancer----but murder, then you learn that it's this kind of thing. You lose your wife, the one you had, and then you lose the one you thought you had. You end up with a head full of doubts, not even able to hang on to the memories because you're not sure they were valid. What about all those things you said and did together over the years? Which parts of your life with her were truthful, which were the lies?" He stopped, resorted to his coffee again, taking a disinterested sip to wet his throat, which had been tightening. "I'm not dealing with this very well at all. I know that."
"Nobody deals with this very well," Noah said. "Not at first, anyway."
"I'm talking about the whole thing." The cook started up with Joe Cocker again, and San Felipe listened for a minute. "I only returned to work yesterday. I had to take some time off, and they were nice about it. And then when I returned everyone bent over backwards. But I knew everyone was wondering about it: What the hell was she doing in a hotel? All of them sorry for me, sorry that it happened, but: What the hell was she doing in a hotel? And Vicki's mother. The woman's dying inside. We don't even talk about it. I can't; she can't. We talk about everything in the world, we talk too much, but not about Vicki. Not about the goddamn hotel."
He stopped suddenly as if he'd caught himself getting out of line. He looked disgusted with himself, turned away from her and then looked back. "You said something about another woman."
Noah nodded. "That's right. Another victim, there are some similarities of circumstance."
"Was she in a hotel room, like Vicki?"
"No, but there are other things."
"Like what?"
"I can't really get into that with you," Noah said, starting the routine, but then something stopped him. Was he being too cautious? They needed a break, and if he confided in San Felipe even a little it might scratch the surface of something. "I'll give you some of it, but you've got to keep it to yourself."
San Felipe nodded curtly and frowned at him, impatient for him to get on with it.
"She was four years older than Vicki, a divorcee. She was found at her home, on a bed like Vicki, same marks on her wrists and ankles, same battering, the works, except this was more severe. She lived alone, worked for a computer firm and..."
"What firm?"
"TechCube."
"Jesus, I know people at TechCube. A lot of people. We're one of their largest software clients. What was her name?"
"Lauralee Dowey. I asked you about her earlier."
San Felipe said the name to himself several times. "Christ? Dowey? She spells it Dowee, it's a nickname, but she pronounces it dow-WEE. Yeah, I do know her. She calls on our division at Alphacom. I sign off on all our purchases from TechCube for our division, and I've seen these yellow-flag notes: 'Thanks----Dowee!' Stuff like that. First time I saw it I didn't know what, you know, it was: Dowee, that didn't make sense to me. I asked about it and the woman who handles the account laughed and told me. And then I met her. That was maybe three years ago. I don't see her much, but I know her. Goddamn!"
"You see her?"
"Not really, but I know who she is. I don't deal directly with the salespeople, but I see her at the parties. You know, company parties, Christmas, the annual picnic, holidays."
"Did Vicki know her?"
"No----I mean, I can't imagine she would. Although I guess she might have met her at one of the parties, a Christmas part one time, or one of the company picnics."
"You don't know, though?"
"I have no idea. But I guess she could've. That's pretty strange, isn't it?"
Damn right, Noah thought. "I guess it's not all that unusual," he said. "What was she like?"
"Very outgoing, almost aggressive in a way, but very friendly. You don't really get to know anyone at those parties."
"Did she come alone?"
"I don't know."
"Do you remember if she associated with anyone in particular?"
"No."
"I mentioned another woman, too. Nolie Burr. She works at TechCube with Dowey."
"Something happened to her, too?"
"No. She found Dowey; they were good friends."
San Feliipe looked at Noah. "No, not at all. I don't know that name."
"Were there any other circumstances where you and Vicki might have come into contact with TechCube employees?"
"No," he answered without hesitating. "Just those times. That was it. Maybe two times a year."
Noah thought for a moment. "Do you think they could have run into one another somewhere else?"
"Where?" San Felipe's face registered some kind of connection, as if he were reading some significance into this. Noah wondered whether to take it seriously. The significance he saw might exist only in his imagination, like seeing ghosts, or searching the hems of dresses for poisonous snakes. "What if they did?" he said suddenly.
"I don't know." Noah really didn't. But he knew in his own mind that he was going to assume that they had, and then he was going to try to prove it.
"Look," Noah said. "Work on this, give it some thought, but don't talk to anyone about it, okay? It's very important that you don't tell anyone about any of this. If something else comes to you, but sure and give me a call."
"Sure," San Felipe said, nodding. He was still thinking about his wife and Dowey. He was going to give it a lot of thought. "I'll call you."
Noah pulled his billfold out of his rear pants pocket and started to open it.
"No, I'll get it," San Felipe said. "I'm going to sit here a little while."
"Thanks," Noah said. It sounded inane. "If we come up with anything at all, I'll get in touch with you."
San Felipe nodded, and Noah slid out of the booth. He walked away from Toby San Felipe, leaving the other man to ponder new possibilities, and went out the front door into the muggy midnight. As Noah walked to his car through the rippling shadows of the small parking lot he thought about Anna-Diana and the attorney with the long chestnut moustache he had found her with. He remembered how it had been right after that, how it still was something wondering over and over about the details, how they moved and touched, and if the perp had done the same things to that woman that he'd done with her.551Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxlACyxPL4f
