Obstruction of Justice Read online

  The forewoman, who Nina recognized as the local community college’s head librarian, stood up and, stumbling over the unfamiliar names, read out the verdicts as to each defendant.

  "Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty." Screams of joy from the relatives as each verdict was read. The defendants grabbed their lawyers and each other, one of them crying from relief. The jury looked unhappy. Collier—she couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders had hunched forward at each of the not guiltys, and she could imagine well enough how he felt. Barbara Banning actually put an arm around his shoulder, as if to steady him.

  It was going to be a very bad night for Collier. When Milne let them all go on the dot of five o’clock, she tried to catch up with him, but he was talking in the hall to several of the jurors. An expression of savage pain and humiliation crossed his face when he saw that she had been in the courtroom. His eyes went back to the jurors, who were saying they felt bad but the State just hadn’t beaten the reasonable doubt standard.

  He didn’t want to talk to her. She went down the stairs, worried about him.

  By seven, back at Caesars, Paul had showered and brushed his hair for an extra minute or two. Downstairs at the florist’s he had found a bunch of sunflowers from the valleys below, their huge heads languishing but still a luminous gold.

  Greeting him at the gate, brown and barefoot in the warm dusk of evening, Kim wore only a pale cotton sheath. As she turned and walked in front of him toward the lantern-lit courtyard there was a loaded moment as Paul previewed her nakedness beneath the flimsy dress.

  "How is your work coming?" she asked when they had settled behind a couple of martinis. Candles flickered around her face, their warm light playing along the brown throat with its necklace of amethysts.

  "The fins helped. I may have found the car." "I’m so glad. I feel stupid, not being able to describe things concretely. But the colors ... I have all the colors right."

  "There’s one color left in the picture we haven’t identified."

  "Yes. The green. In front. You noticed that. The driver was ... green. That’s the only way I can put it."

  "Wearing something green?"

  "I don’t remember the hair, or the face. Just the color. I don’t think when I paint. I never said ’This is the car, this is the blacktop.’ The blocks of color form themselves. What I painted was the emotion I felt. The white is tempered with grayish tones; the orange is shaded with blue; the green is an acid, almost metallic, green. The painting is violent and tragic in color. And yet some of the blocks obviously do represent what I saw, the car especially. So maybe the green does represent something real. I don’t know. It’s so frustrating!"

  "You’ve done very well," Paul said soothingly. He drew her hand with its pale almond nails to him, and held it, examining a faint blue stain of color in the crook between her thumb and forefinger. "Nice hands," he said, kissing that place. She let him turn it over and kiss her palm. "What have you been painting? Can I see it after dinner?"

  "A little picture of the cactus garden."

  Paul sucked on his olive. "I admire people who are creative."

  "It seems to me that your work can be quite creative."

  "Yeah. Actually, it is," Paul said, surprised. "I never thought of it that way."

  "You have to be willing to fail occasionally, to make a fool of yourself."

  "No problem. I do that all the time."

  She had a way of appreciating him with her eyes that he found extremely flattering. She was doing it to him again, hypnotizing him with her movements and eyes and scent. She wore a musing smile.

  "I’d like to paint you, Paul. In the nude," she said.

  He laughed, his mind springing involuntarily to her rendition of the old man cactus. He tried to imagine himself in the abstract, plunked down in those outlandish colors. He couldn’t.

  "I’m serious. Blond men are a challenge to paint, because the gradations in color are so subtle."

  "Me subtle? That’s a new one."

  Her eyes moved up and down on him. "Your name is Dutch, but you have the build of a Swede or a Dane, big-boned and muscular."

  Her objective attitude finally took hold of him. He listened to the soft words coming from her perfectly cut lips.

  "I’d like to paint you sitting there drinking a martini from that crystal glass in candlelight...."

  "Stark naked?"

  "Mmm-hmm. I wonder ... would you mind removing your shirt?"

  "Not at all," Paul said politely, and he had the polo shirt off his back so fast, he almost spilled his drink.

  She got up and approached him, moving languidly, her voice dreamy. "See how the light glints off the blond hair on your chest," she murmured, running a professional finger across his nipple.

  Paul’s shirt fell forgotten from his hand.

  "Please don’t move—I like to ... examine the effect."

  She touched him with fingers like feathers, dusting them patiently over his cheek, his hair, his shoulders, over a heart that thudded so mightily it seemed to leap out of his skin. Suddenly, somewhere down around his tenderly cultivated washboard abs, she hesitated.

  Scented hair floated around her head. He couldn’t see her face.

  "You know," she said, her voice faint as if she were far away, "it’s a lot to ask, but I’d really like to see your legs. Do you think you could—here, let me help." And she pulled his slacks and BVDs down his legs and right off him. The fingers started up again, cruising along his calf, migrating up his thigh.

  She knelt down in front of his colossal erection.

  And then, she picked up his foot. She held it, as if weighing it, and turned it this way and that. "If you don’t mind, Paul, lean back a little. That’s good. Close your eyes and relax your muscles. Put your arms behind your head, that’s very good ... yes, I like that very much...."

  A long silence ensued. Paul’s nerves strained for the touch of her velvety mouth. C’mon, baby, c’mon.

  Titillated beyond endurance, he waited.

  14

  "SO THEN WHAT HAPPENED?" HALLOWELL SAID first thing on Saturday morning in Paul’s room at Caesars. Paul sat cross-legged as usual on the bed with his coffee, but Hallowell seemed unable to sit down. He wandered from the window to the door, back and forth.

  Paul was shocked by Hallowell’s appearance. He seemed to be aging more every day. He hadn’t bothered to comb his hair and his eyes had the glazed look of the sleep-deprived.

  Paul had been reporting on his progress in the Meade case, but then he had veered onto something that he thought might cheer Hallowell up.

  "Nothing happened. I vogued like a Madonna stand-in, quivering all over, until I had to have a quick look. She had moved back to her seat without a sound and was tasting her drink, smiling. She said, ’Shall we have our salad?’ "

  "That’s all that happened? You’re not leaving something out?"

  "That’s it. ’Shall we have our salad,’ she says, cool as a ... an olive."

  "What did you do?"

  "We had our salad."

  "You had your salad?"

  "Lots of croutons. Fresh black pepper. Artichoke hearts. Tomatoes. Avocado. She wouldn’t let me touch her all evening."

  "She was teasing you."

  "She was toying with me as no man has ever been toyed with before. Righteously. I was so turned on, and she hardly laid her soft little paws on me. Each little touch was like—oh, man, when it does happen, it’s gonna be so good."

  "If it happens. She left a message at my office this morning. She wants to review her statement. She says she’s trying again to jog her memory."

  "What do you mean, if it happens?"

  "All I mean is—"

  "You think she’s just fooling around with me. Like you’re fooling around with Nina."

  "Nina? What has she got to do with this?"

  "Well, the deeper you get into your wife’s death, the less time you have for her. I hate seeing her hurt."

  Hallowell turned to l
ook at him, cocking his head. "Who are you, her brother from Montenegro?"

  "Yeah, that’s me. Her big brother," Paul said. "You’re letting this wear you down, man. You’re putting yourself under a monster strain. You’re in court all day with the creeps and the criminals, and you spend your nights in bed with a dead woman. Am I right?"

  Hallowell combed through his unruly mop with his fingers. He didn’t answer, so Paul said, "I look at you, and I see what everybody else sees: this highly respected deputy DA who’s got a lock on the next election for county district attorney—"

  "Maybe yesterday before court I did."

  "Something happened I should know about?"

  "Nothing to do with your work."

  "But now that I’m getting to know you, I also see you blowing it, living in the past."

  "Don’t psychoanalyze me, Paul. I don’t like it."

  "Have it your way."

  "Let’s get back to Anna."

  Paul remembered that Hallowell was his employer, and straightened up. He told him about the flight of the El-Baroukis into Egypt and the conversations with Gates and Mrs. Lauria.

  Hallowell said, "He’s out there, and he knows we’re looking. He won’t get away this time."

  "Could as easily be a she."

  "What about El-Barouki’s description of the man who sold the car?"

  "Maybe he made it up on the spot. He wasn’t going to give me any help on the seller at all. I think he already had it in his mind to collect what he could from me, then to go back to the seller and say, ’I’m going to give you up unless you buy me and my entire extended family tickets back to Egypt.’ He knew all along he was just using me to set up a blackmail payment."

  "There has to be something in the car. How long do we have to wait for some lab reports?"

  "I’ll be talking to Ginger today. I think it’s still too early, though."

  "I have to tell you I’m having a hard time believing what you’ve conjured up, all from Kim’s painting. I looked at that picture and saw just meaningless blobs of paint. Let’s hope you’re on to something there. What else can you do to find the seller?"

  "Call a friend at the DMV," Paul said. "I don’t know if there could be a way to get a list of every Catalina registered to a Tahoe owner three years ago. The DMVs getting up to speed with its computers now, but three or four years ago—I just don’t know. And other than that, I’ll call all the garages again to see if any of them remember working on a Catalina. It’s hard to believe a big car with fins could be cruising around here for a long time and no mechanic or gas station attendant would have noticed."

  "What if you don’t get a line that way?"

  "We’ll be deeply embedded in shit, buddy."

  Hallowell started rubbing his eyes with his fists like a little kid trying to wake up from a nightmare. He was realizing that the leads were petering out on them, that they might not succeed this time around either. Paul caught a glimpse of the gold band he still wore on his left hand.

  Paul thought about what he was going to say next, and decided there was no easy way to put it.

  "I have to go back to Carmel tonight," he said. "One week was all I could give you full-time on short notice. I really thought I could break it for you in a week. It could break yet, but ... anyway, I’m not sure when I can get back."

  Hallowell said, "Law enforcement lost big when you went out on your own, Paul. Let me know if you ever decide to come back in." He was trying to smile, but the smile turned into something else. "I’ll call Nina," he said.

  "Do that. Love is like a gun, you know? Whole lotta power, but you’ve gotta pull the trigger first."

  Collier had hardly gone when the hotel clerk called Paul to say he had an urgent message from Ms. Reilly to meet her at a certain address at a place called Happy Homestead. The name suggested a waitress in a gingham apron. Maybe she wanted to have a colleague-and-friend breakfast. He could manage that. He pulled on his shoes, whistling.

  Framed by a glorious morning, Nina was waiting for Paul at the address, the main gate of a cemetery, wearing dark glasses and a frown, her voluptuous self sneakily accentuated by the severe cut of her suit. His heart went pit-a-pat at the sight of her and he reminded himself sternly that she was a workaholic, a thick-skinned mouthpiece who had had the audacity to turn down his proposal. She waved and came to meet him when she saw him. Steady now, boy, he thought, they all do that thing with their hips when they walk. Remember the overdeveloped brain in that pretty cranium, that brain that keeps the hormones in check when it ought to be the other way around....

  "You came," she said. "I’ve missed you." She rose up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, which commenced to burning as though singed by a flamethrower.

  "I had to head this way anyway," he said. "So this is Happy Homestead. What are we doing here? What’s the story with the patrol cars out front?"

  "The caretaker got here at seven and noticed the ground in one of the plots had been disturbed. He called his boss and then the police."

  "Disturbed?"

  "Somebody dug up a grave. The casket’s intact, except ... it’s open. And the body is gone."

  "Whoa! Whose body?"

  "A man named Ray de Beers."

  "Ah. The guy who got struck by lightning the day you and Collier hiked Tallac."

  "A lot has happened since then. Paul, I’ve been fighting a motion filed by Ray’s father to exhume the body. We spent the day before yesterday in court haggling."

  "Who won the motion?"

  "Nobody. In the middle of the argument, my client fell apart and instructed me to drop the opposition, but I managed to get the whole thing postponed instead. Quentin de Beers, Ray’s father, was furious at my maneuver."

  "You think de Beers did this?"

  "I don’t know what to think. He was about to win, because my client wouldn’t fight anymore. But he might have had to wait a few days for his order. Maybe he thought my client might change her mind again and so he decided to take matters into his own hands. I’m flabbergasted, I truly am. I thought it would be nice to have your cool head."

  "Cool-headed colleague, that’s me," Paul said. "Lead on."

  They walked down the path together, Nina silent, apparently wrapped up in her thoughts.

  "How’s the house-hunting going?" he asked to bring her back. "Find anything that looks good?"

  She raised her eyes to his, then dropped them again, as if she enjoyed the contact but needed to keep it brief. "I seem to be looking for the wrong thing. Nothing I see feels right."

  "Keep looking," Paul advised. "One day you’ll walk into a place and voila! It’ll sing to you."

  "I’m going to wear out poor Mrs. Wendover’s tires. She’s really trying, unlike the realtor I started out with."

  They reached the clump of people at Ray de Beers’s grave site. A patrol car had driven right up onto the lawn, the red lights flashing, the radio squawking. "Who’s he?" Paul asked, pointing toward the gesticulating fellow who was helping them.

  "The caretaker. They’ve found something," Nina said in a low voice. A few feet from the site, a small group of people had formed, kept from getting any closer to the grave by crime tape and a uniformed patrol officer. They were watching a police forensics technician bag some large tool near the grave site in plastic. On the other side, a photographer from the Mirror competed with a police photographer for the best angles into the pit.

  A backhoe had been taped off-limits on the driveway, indicating how the digging had been accomplished. Paul slipped by the group when the patrolman’s back was turned, stood at the edge of the pit, and looked in. Down there he saw a black casket, hinged on the left, yawning open and revealing a stained white satin lining. Soft clods of dirt had fallen or had been knocked in from above.

  A man had lain there in what was supposed to be eternal darkness. It should have been raining or foggy or snowing, in keeping with the morbid scene, but this was California. The sun shone down into the pit, illuminating every crevic
e, pitiless, indecent.

  "Creepy, isn’t it?" the elderly man said. "I come to put flowers on my wife’s grave this morning, and this is what I see. Like an episode from Tales of the Crypt. The guy’s been buried alive, right, and he wakes up in the dark, he screams and screams, and then he tries to claw his way out—"

  "And it cuts to a commercial," Paul said. "I hate that." Stepping back from the pit, he looked around for Nina, who was talking to a tall, skinny woman with a mane of black hair who had just come up the walk.

  "Quentin did this," the woman told Nina.

  Nina turned and said, "Paul, I’d like you to meet my client. Sarah de Beers. I was just telling her about you."

  At first, the woman paid no attention to Paul. She raked the bushes with hypervigilant eyes as if she thought something lay in wait for her. Finally, she held out frosty fingers, grasped his hand, and released it with a jerk. "I called him. Quentin," she said. "His houseman said he didn’t come home last night." She looked over at the grave site. "I want to see."

  Stepping carefully over the fresh earth, she peered into the hole, bloodless hands clenched at her sides. After a few minutes, Nina and Paul joined her silent vigil.

  "Are you Mrs. de Beers?" the patrolman said, coming over to them. He opened his leather notepad and said, "This is your husband’s grave?"

  "Yes."

  "Any idea what happened?"

  "Quentin dug him up. He said he would, and now he has."

  "Quentin de Beers?" the young patrolman said, sounding intensely interested.

  Nina said, "Her father-in-law. The dead man’s father." She seemed to step between her client and the cop without moving a muscle, capturing his attention away from the quaking woman beside her. Paul took Mrs. de Beers’s elbow and steered her a few feet away. While she leaned her head against him, he listened as Nina calmly informed the patrolman about the court case that seemed to have led up to this debacle, and all she knew about Quentin de Beers, whom she had met at least once. The one in charge wrote it all down in a notebook. Finally Nina said, "Is that it? Because Mrs. de Beers needs to go home."