Dark Tort

“Since the beginning of this year.”

“Have the cops found any connection between Charlie Baker and Dusty that could have spelled trouble for her?”

“Not yet. But they’re looking into it.”

We worked in silence for a while. I set the heavenly scented bearnaise sauce over barely simmering water and hoped Arch and Gus would arrive home soon. The October evenings were already rushing toward early darkness, and with someone who might have sabotaged my van out there, I felt uneasy.

“Look,” I said, “I keep going back to my van. If I hadn’t been late to the H&J office, then what? Would I have been strangled, too? Or could I have saved her?”

“I already talked to Arch about the van this morning. He is absolutely sure, completely positive, that he turned off the radio, because he’d come to the end of a Dave Matthews song. Then he remembers picking up his book bag, opening the passenger door, and slamming it shut. He remembers the slamming because he said he was in such a bad mood. Plus, he recalls staring at the car for a minute, making sure he had everything he needed for his homework.”

“Right. And I suppose he’s absolutely positive he locked it, too.”

“No, that he’s not sure of. In fact, he thinks he didn’t, because his hands were full with his book bag and books.” Tom stopped laying down hard-boiled egg halves and waited until I met his gaze. “He’s sure he didn’t leave the radio and lights on. He’s sure he didn’t remember to lock the van.”

“So you do think somebody tampered with my car. Or my son has a conveniently slippery memory.”

“The former. My theory is, someone was watching you, knew your schedule. Knew when you left for the firm to go make the bread for the Friday-morning meeting.” He finished the salad and covered it with plastic wrap. “I told the investigators to send our guys out to canvass our neighbors, check if anyone saw somebody, anybody, messing with your car. We need to know if a neighbor saw someone scouting you out. I also told our guys to look at any folks who might have seen an odd, as in out of the ordinary, vehicle over by H&J that late at night.”

Someone scouting you out. I tried to rid myself of the memory of Vic Zaruski and his long, furious face, of his boatlike white convertible, and of the many times it had been parked in the Routts’ driveway. In the Routts’ driveway or on the street. He wouldn’t have messed up my car, would he? He wouldn’t have strangled a girl he cared about, or had once cared about, would he?

“Goldy?” Tom queried. “Think. Look back at that scene you came upon in the office. Something missing? Something out of place?”

I sighed. I’d already told the investigators down at the department that I couldn’t tell if the place had been robbed, that I’d been concentrating on Dusty…and then I remembered I hadn’t yet told Tom about the bracelet. Where was my mind?

“Tom,” I began, “I need to talk to you about a piece of jewelry that Dusty was wearing last week.” Tom raised his eyebrows and cocked his chin, as in Go on. I told him all I’d shared with Britt and how I’d been unsure whether Dusty had been wearing the opal and diamond piece around her wrist when I’d found her.

“You don’t know where she got it?” Tom asked.

I shook my head. “She promised to wear it last night, and to tell me about it.”

“And you can’t remember whether she had it on when you found her.”

“Nope. It’s as if the memory is just out of reach.”

He told me to sit down, then pulled up a chair for himself. Then he took my hand and told me to shut my eyes. This I did.

“Now picture the office after you tripped and got up,” he said softly, “and describe every aspect of it to me.”

I did this, too. At one point Tom told me to imagine that I was seeing Dusty, and gently rolling her over.

“Was the bracelet there?” he asked.

In my mind’s eye, I looked at Dusty’s wrists. They were empty. I said, “No. There’s no bracelet, no watch, nothing.”

“Now open your eyes and talk to me.”

I hesitated. “Do you think Sally Routt would tell us if she’d seen Dusty wearing an expensive bracelet?”

“She might tell you. I doubt very seriously she’d tell me, or any cop, for that matter, given her attitude toward law enforcement.” Tom stared out the window, where new snow clung to every pine needle, every branch of aspen leaves. “The last few weeks or days,” he said finally. “How did Dusty seem? Didn’t I hear Sally Routt talking to you about that?”

“Sally said Dusty had been secretive.”

“And was she? I mean, apart from dodging the bracelet question?”

I stopped to think. “She did seem like…like someone with a secret.”

“Or secrets,” Tom said, his voice low.

Gus and Arch were not due back for a while, so I slipped back over to the Routts’ house. Sally was still crying incessantly. I said I had something important to ask her, and she quieted for a moment. Had she seen Dusty wearing a bracelet? I asked. Opals interwoven with diamonds? I drew a quick sketch on a piece of paper offered by Sally’s father, who tapped his way to the kitchen and opened a drawer to pull out a single sheaf. For a blind man, he could get around remarkably well, but he undoubtedly had every inch of the house memorized. Sally blinked at my crude drawing. She said she’d never seen anything like it, on Dusty or anywhere else. When she described the bracelet to her father, asking if he had felt anything on Dusty’s forearm when she hugged him, he simply shook his head.

“Dusty didn’t tell us everything,” Sally told me, handing the paper back. “And as I told you before, she’d been keeping something to herself, or so it seemed to me, lately. Of course, I was always worried when it came to our relationship. You know, I’m a single mom who’s made a bunch of mistakes. She knows I didn’t want another repeat of the Ogden mess.”

“Um, did the cops take everything from her room? Jewelry box, everything?”

“Yes,” Sally said, with a sharp intake of breath. “She had a jewelry box, but they showed it to me, and there was just an old silver charm bracelet in there. I told them they could take it, but they didn’t. They did turn her mattress upside down, since that’s the main place people hide things, apparently. They looked in our freezer, too. Second place people hide things. Nothing there either.”

“Yeah. Well. If there’s anything you think of, Sally, anything she might have said to you, anything she might have been keeping that seemed strange to you, would you please tell me? It would help.”

Sally bit her bottom lip so hard I thought it would bleed. But she merely nodded before she began weeping again. I told her I could see myself out.

Back at the house, I told Tom I’d come away empty. Did this mean the killer had stolen the bracelet? I asked.

“Not necessarily,” he replied.

“Maybe it was in her purse,” I said numbly. “Did the cops find her purse?”

“Yeah, they did. I think they would have told me if they’d found a real expensive piece of jewelry in there.” I must have looked despondent because then Tom said, “Why don’t you give me your Picasso there, and I’ll fax it down to the department with a note? They alert all the pawnshops, in case something turns up. A twenty- thousand-dollar bracelet ought to raise a few eyebrows on East Colfax, in any event.”

“Aren’t there pawnshops anywhere else in Denver?”

“Just a figure of speech, Miss G.” He finished his note to the department and punched in the fax numbers. “It’s always a good idea to cover all your bases.”

I was wondering if that was a figure of speech, too—did it mean you had to have a guy on each base defending it, or did it mean you had to cover the bases if it started raining—probably not that one, I reasoned— when the boys returned. It was already five forty-five. Gus clutched such a large handful of twenties and checks that when he slapped them triumphantly on the kitchen table, a third of them drifted to the floor. Behind him, Arch, cautious as ever, had folded his much smaller take into a careful package that he placed on the counter, along with the magazine order form. Gus’s blond-brown hair, several shades lighter than Arch’s toast-colored locks, framed his face, halolike, as he grinned, ebullient. The two of them resembled the faces of Janus: Arch ever worried and