dinner; the third time when they had dropped in to pick up the keys to the house on Crooked Mile Road.
'Which is it?' Fenn asked. 'A couple of times, or six?'
'Six.' Davey said. 'Don't you remember, Nora?'
Nora wondered if Davey had visited Natalie Weil by himself, and then dismissed the thought. 'Oh, sure,' she said.
'When was the last time you were here, Mr Chancel?'
'About two weeks ago. We had Mexican food and watched wrestling on TV - right, Nora?'
'Um.' To avoid looking at the detective, she turned her head toward the house and found that she had not been mistaken after all. The uniformed policeman she had seen earlier stood in the bedroom window, looking out.
'You were friends of Mrs Weil's.'
'You could say that.'
'She doesn't seem to have had a lot of friends.'
'I think she liked being alone.'
'Not enough she didn't. No offense.' Fenn shoved his hands in his pockets and reared back, as if he needed distance to see them clearly. 'Mrs Weil kept good records as far as her job went, made entries of all her appointments and that, but we're not having much luck with her personal life. Maybe you two can help us out.'
'Sure, anything,' Davey said.
'How?' Nora asked.
'What's in the jar?'
Nora looked down at the jar she had forgotten she carried. 'Oh!' She laughed. 'Mayonnaise. A present.'
Davey gave her an annoyed look.
'Can I smell it?'
Mystified, Nora unscrewed the top and held up the jar. Fenn bent forward, took his hands from his pocket, placed them around the jar, and sniffed. 'Yeah, the real thing. Hard to make, mayonnaise. Always wants to separate. Who's it for?'
'Us,' she said.
His hands left the jar. 'I wonder if you folks ever met any other friends of Mrs Weil's here.'
He was still looking at Nora, and she shook her head. After a second in which she was tempted to smell the mayonnaise herself, she screwed the top back onto the jar.
'No, never,' Davey said.
'Know of any boyfriends? Anyone she went out with?'
'We don't know anything about that,' Davey said.
'Mrs Chancel? Sometimes women will tell a female friend things they won't say to her husband.'
'She used to talk about her ex-husband sometimes. Norm. But he didn't sound like the kind of guy-'
'Mr Weil was with his new wife in their Malibu beach house when your friend was killed. These days he's a movie producer. We don't think he had anything to do with this thing.'
A movie producer in a Malibu beach house was nothing like the man Natalie had described. Nor was Holly Fenn's manner anything like what Nora thought of as normal police procedure.
'I guess you don't have any ideas about what might have happened to your friend.' He was still looking at Nora.
'Nora doesn't think she's dead,' Davey said, pulling another ornament out of the air.
Nora glanced at Davey, who did not look back. 'Well. I don't know, obviously. Someone got into the house, right?' she said.
That's for sure. She probably knew the guy.' He turned toward the house. This security system is pretty new. Notice it the last time you were here?'
'No,' Davey said.
Nora looked down at the jar in her hands. What was inside it resembled some nauseating bodily fluid.
'Hard to miss that sign.'
'You'd think so,' Davey said.
The system was installed a little more than two months ago.'
Nora looked up from the jar to find his eyes on hers. She jerked her gaze back to the house and heard herself saying, 'Was it really just two weeks ago we were here Davey?'
'Maybe a little more.'
Fenn looked away, and Nora hoped that he would let them go. He must have known that they had not been telling him the truth. 'Do you think you could come inside? This isn't something we normally do, but this time I'll take all the help I can get.'
'No problem,' Davey said.
The detective stepped back and extended an arm in the direction of the front door. 'Just duck under the tape.' Davey bent forward. Fenn smiled at Nora, and his eyes crinkled. He looked like a courteous frontier sheriff dressed up in a modern suit - like Wyatt Earp. He even sounded like Wyatt Earp.
'Where are you from, Chief Fenn?' she asked.
'I'm a Bridgeport boy,' he said. 'Call me Holly, everybody else does. You don't have to go in there, you know. It's pretty bloody.'
Nora tried to look as hard-bitten as she could while holding a quart jar filled with mayonnaise. 'I was a nurse in Vietnam. I've probably seen more blood than you have.'
'And you rescue children in peril,' he said.
'That's more or less what I was doing in Vietnam,' she said, blushing.
He smiled again and held up the tape as Davey frowned at them from beside a bank of overgrown hydrangeas.
One of those men who expand when observed close-up. Holly Fenn filled nearly the entire space of the stairwell. His shoulders, his arms, even his head seemed twice the normal size. Energy strained the fabric of his suit jacket, curled the dark brown hair at the back of his head. The air inside Natalie's house smelled of dust, dead flowers, unwashed dishes, the breath and bodies of many men, the reek of cigarettes dumped into wastebaskets. Davey uttered a soft sound of disgust.
'These places stink pretty good,' Fenn said.
A poster of a whitewashed harbor village hung on the wall matching the one covered by their Chancel House bookshelves. In the living room, three men turned toward them. The uniformed policeman for whom Nora had mistaken Holly Fenn came into the hall. The other two wore identical gray suits, white button-down shirts, and dark ties. They had narrow, disdainful faces and stood side by side, like chessmen. Nora caught the faint, corrupt odor of old blood.
Fenn introduced them to Officer Michael LeDonne, and Mr Hashim and Mr Shull, who were with the FBI. Hashim and Shull actually resembled each other very little, Mr Hashim being younger, heavier, in body more like one of Natalie's wrestlers than Mr Shull, who was taller and fairer than his partner. Their posture and expressions created the effect of a resemblance, along with their shared air of otherworldly authority.
'Mr and Mrs Chance were friends of the deceased, and I asked them if they'd be willing to do a walk through here, see if maybe they notice anything helpful.'
'A walk through,' Mr Shull said.
Mr Hashim said, 'A walk through,' and bent over to examine his highly polished black wing tips. 'Cool.'
'I'm glad we're all in agreement. Mike, maybe you could hold that jar for Mrs Chance.'
Officer LeDonne took the jar and held it close to his face.
'These people were here recently?' asked Mr Shull, also staring at the jar.
'Recently enough,' said Fenn. 'Take a good look around, folks, but make sure not to touch anything.'
'Make like you're in a museum,' said Mr Shull.
'Do that,' said Mr Hashim.
Nora stepped past them into the living room. Mr Shull and Mr Hashim made her feel like touching everything in sight. Cigarette ash streaked the tan carpet, and a hole had been burned in the wheat-colored sofa. Magazines and a stack of newspapers covered the coffee table. Two Dean Koontz paperbacks had been lined up on the brick ledge above the fireplace. On the walls hung the iron weather-vanes and bits of driftwood Natalie had not so much
