Empty Places, page 8
Pictures were ripped from the walls and thrown to the ground. One frame lay shattered, its right angles turned into a trapezoid. Even the mattresses on the big brass bed had been yanked out of the frame and lay at angles on the floor.
I heaved the mattresses back onto the frame and sat on them, wondering why a burglar would tear apart a bed this way. The big golden bed had been the one luxury Robin and I allowed ourselves in an otherwise low cost, hand-to-mouth lifestyle. I ran my hand along its shining yellow metal, recalling how I would watch Robin's reflection in the large bulbous bed posts as we made love, her head bent forward, her straight hair hiding her face, her arms stretched out, hands grasping the railing as she slowly rocked back and forth.
My fingers found something sticky on the slick metal. Two small pieces of masking tape were stuck to one of the thick brass poles. I found two more pieces stuck to the frame below the mattresses. The tape was fresh. It hadn't yet turned brittle, and it pulled cleanly off the metal.
Across the hall from the main bedroom was a smaller bedroom we used as a study. We had furnished the room with a cheap desk we found at a yard sale. It was a child's desk, really, too small to handle a heavy workload, but it held a typewriter and had enough drawers to keep typing paper, pens and a few files. The typewriter had been replaced by a personal computer and printer, but otherwise the room remained the same.
I stood at the door to the study, not knowing what to do next. I came to Palm Springs to bury Robin and take care of her belongings. Now I was investigating her murder. As I stood in her apartment I didn't know whether I should try to find some boxes and start packing her clothes or search the apartment for clues.
Frankly, I didn't relish the idea of going through Robin's belongings, either to pack them away or to look for leads. Whatever feelings were stirred up inside me by watching Robin's videotape, I knew, were only remnants of the sweeter part of our lives together, the early part which was the only part I missed. I was afraid of what I might find, afraid of the pain it might resurrect. There was little difference in the two exercises, except one involved carting away what was left of Robin's life in boxes. That was more than I could deal with just now, I decided. Besides, I had no boxes.
I sat down at the desk and turned on the computer and began going through a box of diskettes sitting next to the machine.
There wasn't much on the small floppy disks. One contained scripts of news reports, including the ones I had seen on her audition tape. Another contained a copy of her resume and a list of the stations to which she had sent copies. The rest of the disks were blank.
The desk drawers revealed just as little—pens, paper, and several more copies of Robin's photograph. The bottom drawer had been locked, and obviously had been pried open with a screw driver or knife. Again, there were no files.
I played that fact over in my head. For a journalist not to have files bulging with the details of past and future stories is like a detective going to court with no evidence, or the CIA not having any secrets.
Either Robin had discovered a new way of doing her job, or someone had taken her files from her office or her home, or both.
The telephone rang with an annoying electronic warble. That was a new addition to the apartment. Maybe if it had been an old-fashioned bell phone I wouldn't have hesitated answering it. The electronic gizmo caught me off guard, like an unexpected burglar alarm, and I suddenly felt like an intruder in the place that used to be my home.
The warbling stopped before I could respond, and what I heard next nailed me to the floor and turned my spine into a cold rod of ice. It was Robin's voice answering the phone.
"Hello, this is Robin," she said. "I can't come to the phone right now. But if you leave a message, I'll get back you to as soon as possible."
Another new addition to my miasma of memories.
The answering machine was attached to the kitchen phone. I rewound the tape and played it back. There had been several phone calls to Robin, but no messages left. I played Robin's taped greeting again, just to listen to her voice. "But if you leave a message, I'll get back to you as soon as I can," she said again. I turned the machine off and muttered: "But don't hold your breath."
I went back to the study and looked through the closet. Several boxes stored there had been gone through by the intruder. I rummaged through the same boxes but found only old clothing and other artifacts of Robin's life. Few of the items were recognizable to me, a sign of the distance a few years can put between two people who had once been intimate. The sole exception was an album of photographs I found at the bottom of a box stored at the back of the closet.
I knew what I had in my hand before actually seeing it. I recognized the feel of its cheap vinyl cover. There was no intrinsic value to the album itself; it was just an inexpensive photo book purchased from a drug store. But I had spent hours arranging and rearranging the photographs, placing them in proper sequence, enlarging some, cropping others, creating a pictorial of the life Robin and I shared.
I sat on the floor of the study, my back against the wall, with the album propped on my knees and began turning through the pages. The first several pages were filled with scenes from our wedding and honeymoon, if a civil ceremony and three days in Laughlin, Nevada, could be called a wedding and a honeymoon.
It had been Robin's idea to go to Nevada. Once we had made the decision to marry, she acted desperate to get it done. "Please, Peter," she urged. "Let's do it. Let's do it now. I don't want a big wedding."
"Why the rush?" I teased. "Are you afraid I'll leave you at the altar, or something?"
Robin slapped me playfully on the shoulder. "Don't you even think of it!"
I caught her wrist and pulled her close to me. Robin's arms went around my neck as mine encircled her waist. I didn't require a lot of coaxing. I was as eager to get married as she was, anxious to get our love legally sealed as if that would guarantee its endurance. "All right," I said. "You win. No big wedding. We'll just go down to city hall or wherever for a civil ceremony."
"That'll still take days, maybe weeks, for the blood tests and the license and everything," Robin said. "We could get married tonight in Nevada." She kissed me softly, then looked at me with a feigned pout and asked in a childish voice: "Can't we go to Nevada, Peter?"
That weekend we each took a personal day from work and drove east on Interstate 10 across the desert, laughing nervously then falling into an uneasy quiet as we thought about our futures, then touching and smiling, and laughing again. We took the ferry across the Colorado River from Arizona's Bull Head City to Nevada's Laughlin—a smaller version of its northern cousin, Las Vegas—and took our civil vows in a small wedding chapel on the edge of town. We spent the rest of the weekend playing the slots, sunning ourselves by the hotel pool, and making love.
It was all recorded there in the pictures. One in particular, a fading Polaroid turning gray with age, showed the two of us outside the chapel. We were casually dressed and smiling happily, our arms interlocked. It was a souvenir photograph, compliments of the wedding chapel, our first picture taken together as husband and wife.
The second large batch of photos was taken in Laguna Beach where Robin and I spent a week's vacation. We stayed in a rundown hotel where the paint had been allowed to dry and flake, and the pool had been left drained indefinitely. But the room was clean and sunny, and the beach was only a block away. In the mornings we would run down to the sea to swim and lie in the sun before the wide stretch of sand became clogged with other vacationers and the young locals who seemed to live, work and study at the shore. Later we would eat at a small breakfast cottage, then spend the day walking through the town's artisan district or lying naked together on the cool white sheets of the hotel room's large bed.
That vacation was the last of the good days for Robin and me. Things seemed to start falling apart soon after we returned to The Springs.
The rest of the photographs in the album recorded various parties and award ceremonies we attended together. I quickly flipped through those until I came to empty pages, then closed it. I held the album for a moment, wondering if I should keep it or burn it. I decided to keep it and tossed it toward the desk. It landed on the edge of the desk, teetered, then fell to the floor fanning its pages. As it hit the carpeting, an envelope fell out.
It was a business envelop, stamped with the TV station's logo. Inside were three newspaper clippings, the largest of which I recognized immediately. It was an investigative piece I had done for the local paper about drug smuggling activities in the Coachella Valley. At the top of the clipping, above the headline, were four words written in what I recognized as Robin's hand writing. The first two said simply: Call Peter. The second set seemed to be written as an afterthought: But where?
The other clips were photographs cut from the paper. One, from the paper's society section, showed a man in his fifties, his hair combed straight back, still thick but completely white. He was dressed in black tie. A wide smile showed perfect, capped teeth. The caption identified him as Carlos Tinnerman and described him as a "local entrepreneur." He was obviously successful at his entrepreneurial activities. His arm was wrapped around a beautiful woman at least two decades younger than himself whom the caption identified as his wife, Anita. She appeared tall in the photo, as tall as Tinnerman anyway. The tight-fitting, low-cut evening gown left no doubt as to the perfection of her figure. If I had my arm around that woman, I'd be smiling, too.
The second photo showed a fleet of medium-sized turboprop commuter aircraft parked in front of a hangar at the Palm Springs airport. Its caption said the aircraft belonged to Desert Air, a commuter airline owned by "local entrepreneur" Carlos Tinnerman. It went on to say that one of the planes in the fleet had crashed that morning on a return flight from San Diego. All aboard had "perished," the caption said, using the newspaperman's delicate euphemism for being torn apart and burned to crispness by the explosion and fire.
There was no writing on either of the photo clips except for the date of publication. Both photographs were about five months old, with the picture of the aircraft having the earliest publication date. The only other mark on the photos was a circle drawn in red ink around the tail section of one of the airplanes.
The telephone started its warble again. I dashed into the kitchen and answered it. The voice at the other end was female, and somehow it knew who I was.
"Hello, Peter?" the voice asked. "Finally! I've been calling this number all day long!"
"I'm sorry," I replied. "Who is this?"
"Laura Hall, from your old alma mater," she answered. "People called me Laurie."
"From my what?"
"Your old alma mater, the newspaper."
"I never knew a Laurie or Laura Hall when I worked for the paper here," I told the caller.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I meant I work for the paper now. We don't know each other. I know about you, though. I was a friend of Robin's."
"What can I do for you, Miss Hall?" I asked.
"Well, I heard about the break-in at Robin's place yesterday, and I'd like to ask a few questions about it."
"Sorry," I said. "I don't know any more than what's in the police report and you can get that down at the cop shop."
"Well, I did, actually." The woman changed the subject. "I also heard that you and a private eye were investigating Robin's murder." I said nothing. The quiet telephone line sounded hollow and empty. "Well?"
"Well what?"
"Are you investigating Robin's murder?"
Reporters make their living being nuisances, calling when you don't want them to call, asking questions you don't want them to ask. But the people with the least amount of patience for a reporter's meddling are other reporters.
"I'm sorry, Miss Hall," I said. "I don't have time to play detective or answer questions. I'm here to pack up what's left of Robin's life and the only subject I want to deal with now is where the hell I can get some boxes. So, if you will excuse me, I'm sorry, but I have to go. Goodbye."
I hung up the phone and went back to the study. There was nothing of interest in the closet, sentimental or otherwise.
Fifteen minutes later, Laurie Hall was knocking on the door.
CHAPTER 11
SHE WAS MY HEIGHT, just under six feet, which made her tall for a woman. She had dark olive skin and darker eyes that seemed deep and inviting yet able to look right through me at the same time. Her thick hair was jet black, cut stylishly short and swept back. Sharp, aristocratic features molded her face, giving her a haughty, bitchy look. But that supercilious disdain gave way completely to a wonderful wickedness when she smiled. Her sensual lips parted, revealing perfect white teeth, her chin dipped and her dark, dark eyes sparkled invitingly. That smile made me feel she was saying more than just hello.
"Hi, I'm Laurie Hall," she said.
I realized I had seen her before. "You're the woman with Luce at the funeral."
"That's me," she said. "I smiled at you but you didn't smile back. I assumed that was because of the occasion. I'd hate to think you didn't like me."
"I don't know you," I said. "And I told you on the phone I had nothing to say."
"You told me on the phone you needed boxes. I brought you boxes."
She bent down to pick up a half-dozen boxes stacked together. The skirt she wore was short and bending made it shorter. Her legs matched her face, long and aristocratic.
"Here," she said, handing me the boxes.
Laurie Hall back pedaled me into the apartment. I put the boxes on the dining table and turned to find Laurie standing in the living room staring at Robin's picture on the shelf. The smile was gone from her face, replaced now by a tightly set mouth. She sensed me watching her and turned, her mouth tugged by an embarrassed smile lacking its earlier invitation. Gone, too, was the sparkle in her eyes. Now they looked like deep empty caves.
"It's kind of strange, isn't it?" she said. "I mean being here in Robin's apartment, with her being dead."
"If you think it’s strange for you to be here," I said, "imagine how I feel."
Laurie laughed. It brought back the deep glisten of invitation to her eyes. I couldn't stop myself from thinking how beautiful she was. Her figure was slender, her waist almost inconceivably small. Her bare arms were long and well-toned from exercise. When she cradled them against her chest, they drew the flimsy fabric of her blouse taut against small but full breasts cupped in the nearly transparent frill of a lacy brassiere. Just looking at her made the back of my throat grow dry, and my breathing quick and shallow.
"I think it's wonderful of you to—" Laurie groped for an appropriate phrase, "—to help Robin this way."
"It wasn't my idea." I forced my gaze from her and walked toward the door. "And like I said, Miss Hall, I don't have anything to say to the press." I stood by the door the way impatient hosts do, waiting for their last guests to leave. In the back of my mind, though, I was hoping she wouldn't go.
"Please, Peter, I'm not here for a story," she said. "I'm here because Robin was a friend."
Laurie walked toward the door. I thought she was leaving, but she stopped short of it, close to me. So close, I felt my throat grow even drier, my breathing even quicker. A cold sweat trickled down my back, and it wasn't from the outside heat pushing its way inside. She put her hand on the door and tried to move it, but my own hand held it in place.
"Please, Peter," she said, with those eyes of her saying so much more to me. "Close the door. It's hot."
She tried to move the door again, and I dumbly let her close it.
"That's better," she said. "No story, Peter. I just want to talk about Robin. And about you. She told me a lot about you."
The idea of Robin talking about me—about us—ruined my mood.
"That must have been good for a few snickers," I said, none too pleasantly.
I was suddenly gripped by the need for a smoke and a drink, knowing full well both were futile gestures to hide my embarrassment. I lit a cigarette, stepped into the kitchen, and began banging through the cupboards. I found vodka and Southern Comfort, a typical bar menu for a woman's house. I chose the vodka, poured two fingers into a bucket glass and added ice.
"Do you want a drink, Miss Hall?" My voice was uncontrollably sharp.
"Robin usually had some Southern Comfort." I held the whiskey bottle up impatiently. "I'll have that and some Diet Coke."
"Together?" The thought of drinking the sickly-sweet whiskey was bad enough; the thought of mixing it with cola made my stomach turn.
"It's what everyone drinks in the clubs," she said defensively.
I shook my head, turned to the refrigerator and found the Diet Coke. The concoction smelled too sweet to endure. I handed the glass to her, arm out stretched, two fingers gripping the contaminated mixture.
"Thank you." She took a sip and made a face. "You mix strong drinks."
"How can you tell with that stuff?"
Laurie didn't answer me. She tilted her head to one side with a slight arch of her brow, then turned and walked a few steps into the middle of the living room. She surveyed the room while I surveyed her. I moved to the counter that served as a breakfast nook and sat on a stool.
"Were you and Robin happy here?" Laurie asked. I said nothing. She turned to me. "Were you?"
"Not really," I finally said. I sipped my vodka not intending to say any more, but something made me add more. "At one time, yes. In the beginning, or at least I thought so. Not at the end." I took another sip. "That," I added, "is why we got divorced."
Laurie's dark skin showed a slight blush. "Stupid question, wasn't it?" she said. "I'm sorry. I was just trying to make small talk."
"That's okay, " I said. “Reporters are known for asking stupid questions."
That made Laurie laugh, and she showed that amazing, alluring smile of hers. It was my turn to blush, and I felt a rush of warmth down the back of my neck and deep in my stomach.
"So, how long have you worked for the paper?"
