Noah left Nolie Burr crying on Adam McKinney's sofa, wondering if Burr's "friends," who had not yet arrived, really existed. Carolyn had come back into the room when she head Noah closing the interview and walked her to the sunken entrance hall where they visited a minute by the front door. Noah learned that she had seen nothing out of the ordinary, no one coming or going from Lauralee Dowey's home during the past several days. Carolyn appeared to be in her mid-forties, with dark, kindly eyes and the figure of a woman less than half her age. She said she would see the Burr got home safely. Noah wondered about these two Good Samaritans and their willingness to help. He had noticed that Carolyn had worn no wedding ring.447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGfZRICyGnc
It was almost noon when he walked out into the heat and bright sunlight again and saw the rear of the morgue van going away from him under the overhanging trees at the far end of Long Street. Yung and Pittman's car was already gone, as well as one of the patrol cars. He crossed the street and nodded at Ball and another patrolman still lingering in the shade of the magnolia. They would stay there until it was decided the scene could be left alone. Noah walked into Dowey's condo through the front door, which had been left open. Someone had turned up the thermostat.
He returned to the bedroom where Overpeck was standing in Dowey's large clothes closet taking notes.
"How'd it go?" he asked, not looking up from his notepad.
"She was pretty upset. Where's Ball? His van's still outside."
"Him? He's in one of the back bathrooms, getting the sink traps."
"Was he able to get anything from the bathroom floor?"
"I think so." He looked at Noah, his eyes winking with an amused smile. "That was pretty fancy, what you did earlier."
"You mean smart aleck," Noah said, walking over to Overpeck.
"That too."
"Sorry, but I wasn't about to let Yung take it away from us."
"Fine with me. You did good. Here," he said, leaning out of the closet and handing Noah a brown leather address book, the gauzy sleeve of a peach negligee caught on his left shoulder. "Thought you might like to go through this first thing."
Which is precisely what Noah did. Stanley Needham's name was there, his address and two telephone numbers. the book obviously was not used for her business accounts because, with the exception of a liquor store, a dry cleaner, a shoe shop, a pharmacy, a hairdresser, and a few other similar personal-use commercial businesses, all the other names were of individuals. And in most cases only the first names were entered and no addresses were given.
"Burr told me about an ex-husband," Noah said. "It wasn't a good divorce. he's in here, address and telephone number. I'm going to have a patrol unit go by and see if he's home."
"Fine," Overpeck said from the closet.
Using the telephone on a bedside table, Noah called the dispatcher and made the request and then dialed the second number under Needham's name, thinking it might be his business. There was no answer. He dialed the first number, but again no answer. He dialed information, which had no listing for Stanley Needham and did not show an unlisted number. He put the address book in his pocket.447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0D68kZSP7A
"Burr claims she doesn't have the foggiest notion of what might've happened here," Noah said, looking around. He saw smudges of ferric oxide all over the room, like patches of mold that seemed to be everywhere once you began looking for it. Ball had already removed the sheet from the bed and sealed it in a paper bag which he'd placed near the door along with a number of other paper packets of various sizes, sealed and labeled. "She really got upset when I asked her if I knew anything about Dowey's 'private life.'"
Overpeck looked up from his notebook. "Oh? She seem particularly upset about that? You mean her sex life?"
Noah nodded.
"That's interesting," Overpeck said, pulling down the corners of his mouth. "Take a look over here in the bottom drawer of her bureau."
Noah stepped around the end of the bed, feeling a nagging depression at the sight of the bare mattress and its few sallow stains. No place, no matter how expensive or exclusive, no matter how pure or important its occupants, was free of stains----of one kind or another.
The scattered bottles of cosmetics and perfume on the top of the chest had been disturbed and darkened with more patches of ferric oxide. Ball was through. He looked in the small top drawer first and saw that Ball had taken samples of the lipstick, the eye shadow, everything that might've gone onto Dowey's face. Then he bent down to the bottom drawer and pulled it open. There were some sweaters, cotton ones. He lifted them.
The paraphernalia was diverse, some of it homemade, some of it commercial: soft leather bondage cuffs and keys, panic snaps, a riding crop, nipple clips and clamps, a box of white candles. Tiger Balm, spiky dog-grooming brushes and rakes, a hand dildo and an electric stepped-down low-ampere dildo, enema bag and rubber hose, a straight razor, a variety of weighted nipple rings, K-Y jelly, surgical gloves, a cluttered drawer full of instruments and accessories. He was familiar with all of it from working vice but now, as then, the devices seemed strangely scientific and clinical to him as well as illicit and malign, as if they were the instruments of a death-camp gynecologist.
Kneeling on one knee in front of the drawer, he stared into it. Secrets. Noah would wager that Dowey had never dreamed that strangers---this morning five or six of them at least----would casually go through her hidden cache of erotica. Sudden death, unexpected death, Noah had learned, had a character of its own. It didn't come to every man, only the mysteriously chosen, and it arrived with a large measure of irony. It exposed secrets, Arcanum arcanorum, as Sister Celestine would have said. In one unexpected instant, sudden death perversely unveiled everything that had been meant to be concealed, hidden things that people jealously guarded with constant vigilance and all the duplicity they could devise. It teaches: you control nothing, not even your own secrets, which at any time can be snatched out of the darkness and thrown into the light like black glitter against the sun.
Noah thought of Overpeck behind him, probably with his head bent to his notebook, but with his eyes cut to one side, watching him.
"There was nothing like this with Vicki San Felipe," he said needlessly.
"How do we know?"
The question stunned him. Overpeck had figured it out in an instant. Naturally they had not gone though San Felipe's home as they were doing Dowey's. She had been killed in a hotel room, and her husband and children were still living in the home. It was true that Toby San Felipe hadn't mentioned anything like this in all the lengthy interviews they had had with him, but then he probably wouldn't have. Certainly not if he'd been involved himself. And probably not even if he hadn't been involved or even aware, but had discovered something like this while going through his wife's personal belongings after her death. He was pretty much of a straight arrow; he wouldn't have told. He would've carried it around with him as his own personal cross of shame, seeing it, of course, selfishly, as an embarrassing testimony to his own real or imagined sexual inadequacies, proof that she'd had to go elsewhere, had had to seek something other than what he could give her. Her secret, and now his secret. Noah understood something of the fragile egos of strong men, that sometimes they had the appearance of stone and the substance of thin glass.
"We need to photograph and dust this stuff," Noah said, and then glimpsed the corner of a manila envelope in the bottom of the drawer. She carefully pinched its corner and pulled it out from under the gear, trying to avoid disturbing it. He opened the envelope and dumped an assortment of photographs onto the floor, black and white, and color, some that appeared to be recent, others perhaps several years older and showing evidence of frequent handling. There were seven photographs that he spread out in front of him.
In each of the three black and white 8x10s, a woman who seemed to be in her late forties posed nude in a variety of pornographic postures with an anatomically correct male mannequin. The mannequin wore a leather S&M mask and held a straight razor in one of its plaster hands, its partially visible phallus an enormous exaggeration which the woman seemed to accommodate with an ostentatious anguish. Each photograph was a positional variation. But Noah was not interested, as he had already recognized Dowey's face in the colored pictures.
Dowey was in each of the four colored photographs, which were 4x6s and seemed to have been taken with a cheap camera. In the first photograph she was tied to a bed with practically every device in her bureau drawer attached to her or inserted in her, her hair pulled up on top of her head and tied to the headboard of the bed, causing her neck to arch in response to the tension as she strained to turn her grimacing face away from the camera. Her body was covered with red blotches from blows, burns or constrictions recently delivered. The other photographs of her were variations of the same pose----in two of them she was tied facedown---the devices variously and ingeniously applied.
But something else arrested Noah's attention. In three of the colored photographs a second person was partially visible, wearing a black leather hood that masked the face. In the first of these, only the head and part of a shoulder were visible in profile, but so close to the camera that they were slightly blurred and washed out by the flash. In a second picture the same masked head, or one like it, was protruding out from under Dowey's bed, lifting off the floor to look at her, mouth open, tongue extended, eyes rolling white. This time the image was sharp. In the third photograph, the masked head could be seen sticking up from behind the opposite side of the bed, spewing a mouthful of bright red liquid in an arching stream onto Dowey's splayed body.
Was this the reason Nolie Burr was so distressed at Noah's questions about Dowey's personal life? Did she know of Dowey's sadomasochism? In light of the pictures and the paraphernalia, it was no longer a mystery as to how Dowey could have been tied up without a struggle.
But what about Vicki San Felipe? To imagine her in these circumstances was something else again. Noah immediately through of San Felipe's two children, a daughter in the third grade a little boy in the first. He thought of San Felipe in an Episcopalian shelter for the poor and her active membership in the parent groups of her children's private school. She had supported her husband and his career, dutifully entertained his associates at their home when it expected of her, chaired fund-raisers for the Martin Luther King Academy's music program, and sweated herself into a size eight which she maintained by avoiding most of the things she truly wanted to eat. In short, it was doubtful that any woman could more accurately represent the upper-middle-class, all-American woman than Vicki San Felipe. And she was a sadomasochist? Noah couldn't see it, but he knew a few radical feminists who'd argue that San Felipe's lifestyle, her wholehearted submission to her husband and his career, certainly qualified her as a masochist at least.447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ74ZL0ZgjBP
"God-damn!" Overpeck had stepped out of the closet and was looking at the photographs over Noah's shoulder. "This puts a new face on things."447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnNBiOVadlN
After one moment Noah carefully gathered up the photographs and returned them to the envelope, stood, and handed them to him. "We're going to have to talk to Toby San Felipe again. What do you think? You want to bet he hid something like that from us?"447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡV9oRMODtOR
"No, I wouldn't touch it." Overpeck shook his head and looked at the envelope.447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbJdkhL70vF
"But if he was hiding something-----" Noah stopped, lost in thought, staring at the mattress where Lauralee Dowey had lived her strange pleasures and died her strange death.447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtCswNEcs0x
Overpeck nodded. "Yeah, it would be a break. Something to go on."447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9i5vrlbHUV
Noah didn't feel exactly right about it, but some part of him was hoping that upon closer examination Vicki San Felipe would turn out to be as extreme as the Marquis de Sade.447Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUCY9T2v58n
