“Thanks.” I crossed the room, went back outside. Daniel was by the far railing, his arm around a woman in a barebacked yellow dress with blonde hair cascading to her waist. I stepped up behind him. “Kev, I need to talk with you.”
He started, swinging around, and a few drops of wine from his glass splashed over its rim and onto his fingers. He recovered his poise quickly and said, “Can’t this wait till tomorrow? As you see, I’m entertaining.”
“It’s to your advantage that we talk now.”
“… All right, then. Will you excuse us, darling?”
The woman nodded. “I see Marnie and Bart have arrived. I’ll go catch up on all their news.”
Daniel watched her go, then turned to me, his face stony. “Let’s take this into my study.” He grasped my elbow and guided me inside, through the big room, and down a hallway. Shoved open a door and motioned me into a room that was furnished in massive leather pieces and lined with shelves of books in elegant bindings-the kind that pretentious people buy in quantity to impress others, but not to read.
After he shut the door behind us, he said, “All right, what’s so important that you’ve come out here and crashed my party?”
I selected a chair, sat down, took my time about settling into it. “Laurel Greenwood. I know you arranged for false identification for her. I want to know if she confided her plans to you, or if you know her present whereabouts.”
“The old case you’re working on? How the hell would I know anything about that? It happened twenty-two years ago. I was-”
“A recent parolee, right here in SLO County.”
He set his glass on a side table. Ran his hand over his chin. “Okay, you’ve got me there. It’s a matter of public record.”
“But it’s not a matter of public record that you met with Laurel at the Sea Shack in Cayucos the day she disappeared and gave her the identification she needed to assume another woman’s name.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. About six months ago Emil Tiegs, the man who forged the ID, tried to extort money from you to keep silent about it. He recently sold the information to me.”
Daniel sat down across from me, spread his hands on his thighs, and rubbed them up and down. “When?”
“Noon yesterday.” When he didn’t speak, I added, “I have a tape of my conversation with Tiegs. It won’t stand up in court, but it will make the sheriff’s department take a close look at you.”
“… All right, I helped Laurel. When I got out on parole, I called her, gave her my phone number in Cayucos, thinking she’d help me get some more of my work into this San Luis gallery that had sold a couple of my pictures. A few days later she called me back, asked if I had any contacts who could doctor an ID. I’d run into Tiegs the week before; I knew he was her man.
“I didn’t want to get mixed up in something illegal, but Laurel was a wonderful woman and, from what she said, trapped in a miserable marriage. She’d been very good to me when I was taking her class in prison, and I felt I owed her. And I suppose in my young, impressionable way, I was a little in love with her.”
Sly glance from under his thick eyelashes. Kev Daniel was probably used to charming his way out of sticky situations-particularly situations involving women.
I asked, “Did Laurel tell you where she was going?”
“She said it was better I didn’t know.”
“She must’ve said something. Jacob Ziff saw the two of you with your heads together at the Sea Shack.”
“Ziff.” He shook his head. “When my partners insisted on using him to design our new tasting room, I was afraid he’d recognize me, but I should’ve known better. Way back then, all he saw was a scruffy young biker, not the man I am today.”
“About your conversation with Laurel…?”
“It was so long ago, I don’t remember much of it.”
“But you do remember that I have the tape of my conversation with Tiegs.”
“I’ll deny everything.”
“Still it’ll be a hassle, could damage your reputation.”
Silence.
“Look, Kev, you committed a minor crime, and the statute of limitations on it ran out long ago. I’m only concerned with finding Laurel, and I never reveal my sources.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“From Mike Rosenfeld at the
Daniel raised his eyebrows. “He told you I gave him the story about you?”
“No,” I lied. “He’s as protective of his sources as I am of mine. I just guessed it was you. Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know; it was a dumb move. But at the time I thought the publicity might impede your investigation. I didn’t want that shit dug up. All I did was help a friend.”
“You also thought shooting at me would scare me off.”
He tensed. “I had nothing to do with that.”
“I’ll accept that as the truth-even though we both know it isn’t-and let it drop if you tell me about your conversation with Laurel.”
“All right, let me think a minute.” He relaxed some, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. “She said she shared the same profession with the woman whose name she’d appropriated-somebody Smith. The first name, I don’t remember. She hadn’t worked at whatever it was in a long time, but the other woman had, and her license was current. So it would be easy for her to earn a living. She had a fair amount of money, anyway. I asked about her kids-Laurel’s, how she could leave them-and she told me her whole family would be better off without her because she was a terrible person. She wouldn’t tell me why. Before she left, she gave me a postcard and asked me to mail it. That was the last I ever saw of her.”
“Did you read the card?”
“Yeah. It was to her husband, telling him not to look for her. She sounded pretty much on the edge.”
I pictured the postmark on the card; it hadn’t been delivered to the Greenwood home until two days after Laurel’s disappearance. “When did you mail it?”
“Not till the next day. I went down the street to the box by the liquor store, but they’d already made the last pickup, so I decided to hold on to the card in case Laurel changed her mind. I mean, it was such an extreme step, running out on those little kids. I lost my mother when I was very young, and I know how badly a kid can be affected by something like that. I hoped Laurel wouldn’t go through with her plan. But when I called her house the next afternoon, a guy answered and said she wasn’t there and demanded to know my name. He sounded like a cop. As it turned out, he was. I hung up, took the card to the post office, and dropped it in the slot.”
“Anything else you remember about your conversation?”
“Nothing of any importance. Laurel talked a lot about me, how I should keep up with my art, that I had real talent.”
“Have you worked at it?”
“Nah, I’m too busy making money and having fun.” Daniel grinned, once more the rich, self-assured vintner.
“Well, I appreciate the information,” I said. “But we’ve got something else to discuss.”
“Sharon, my guests-”
“Emil Tiegs.”
Daniel’s expression grew wary. “Tiegs? What about him? The little weasel came out here with that fat wife of his last February, trying to make trouble for me. I blew him off. I know you paid him five thousand dollars yesterday, but that’s your problem.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I was pretty stupid to fall for that, especially since he had so little information.”
“Tiegs was the one who was stupid. Thought he could rip off both of us.”
“You mean when he tried to hit you up for fifteen thousand.”
“How do you know about that?”
“His wife told me.”
