It was a little past six p.m. and dusk was in the air. I had to wait until it faded to black and the party was in full swing before I could escape my confines.

  I’d expected that Marsh would be in on this little caper, but he’d left me a voice message saying he was going to be unavailable for an unspecified period of time. It was inconvenient, but not unusual. Every once in a while, Marsh disappeared for days, if not weeks. He always came back and refused to talk about where he’d been. I assumed that he did work for some deeply secret government or private club or other clandestine and borderline-nefarious organization, but when I tried to question him about it, the only response I got was an enigmatic smile.

  I was as close to him as anyone on Earth, his best friend in fact, and since he had no long-term lover, although his young live-in Tom was still auditioning for the role, you’d think he would want to unburden himself.

  But you’d be wrong. Marsh was Marsh. And you had to leave it at that if you wanted to be in his life. Some day he might open up, tell me all his deep, dark, soul-tormenting secrets, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

  I couldn’t picture anything tormenting Marsh’s soul. I couldn’t picture him having a soul.

  I opened up the latest James Lee Burke, Dave Robicheaux mystery and continued reading, engrossed in Burke’s lyrical prose while I waited for night to fall fully. Or is it fully fall?

  Upstairs in the Wambaugh residence, the numberless rooms and their adjoining hallways seemed endless and full of too much quiet.

  I’d entered the house through the kitchen about an hour after the party started, after Bo signaled it was clear of any family members. There was a back stairway off the kitchen that led to the upper floor and all its bedrooms.

  The lights were off, so the only illumination came from the starlight filtering through the occasional window in a cubby, or an open bedroom, or several small skylights punctuating the ceiling in an orderly geometry.

  Dim and shadowy, but enough to navigate without bumping into the walls or tripping over any creatures lying in wait.

  From below, the low thrum of a vast throng reverberated in my shoes. A loud shout, a raucous laugh, the rattling clink of ice in a cocktail glass occasionally reached my ears.

  A faint smell of perfume—flowery, fruity, a little stale—along with a slightly sour ammonia smell drifted around me as I passed an open doorway disclosing another unused bedroom. I’d passed five of them so far with no signs of life. I was heading toward the northwestern corner of the house where Mrs. Wambaugh’s master bedroom lair was located.

  Marsh had gotten a copy of the house’s architectural blueprints from twenty years ago. I hoped that she used the room on the plans that had the initials MB drawn in the center.

  I passed another room, this one’s portal shut tight. I pressed my ear against it for few seconds but could hear nothing.

  I continued on, my heart gently bumping against my chest. I was used to this kind of thing by now. I didn’t know if others of my relative ilk found it necessary to trespass on occasion, but it seemed to be one of the necessary hazards of the job, an imperative every now and again if you wanted to get insight into people’s secret lives. The only way to get information required to solve a case, or save a life, perhaps your own.

  Not a pretty thing to admit, but like many ugly truths, it was true nonetheless.

  Or at least that’s how I justified it to myself.

  I was alert, but not overly fearful, cautious but not panicky.

  Finally, I reached the end of the hallway and faced another closed door. I put my ear to this one and got the silence I expected. I knew Mrs. Wambaugh was down with her guests, reveling in bragging rights to Rope Rivers.

  I hoped Rope kept himself in check. He had a low tolerance for bullshit and a high likelihood of saying whatever the hell he felt like saying. I’d asked him to please be nice to Mrs. Wambaugh, until at least after he was sure that I was gone.

  “Nice,” he said, as if it the word was a poorly prepared soufflé.

  I knocked softly three times on the door, while glancing back over my shoulder to look down the empty hallway.

  I opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind me.

  The room, or rather, rooms, were big.

  There was an anteroom with a glittering mirrored ceiling and a white marble floor leading into the main bedroom, the size of a standard professional basketball court.

  The rooms were tastefully decorated with loads of inlaid Italian marble, expensive area rugs in muted patterns, and teak and mahogany accents.

  Massive Tiffany lamps provided most of the illumination. Couches, loveseats, and chairs were all upholstered in beige leather with matching pillows. A baby grand Steinway piano took up one corner of the room and a giant golden harp another.

  The bed was massive, round, and elevated on a high platform with modern sleek lines, plain and simple in its oversized luxury.

  Next to the bed, light poured into the dim room from the skylight above a bathroom bigger than Q’s house. You could have bathed one of Caligula’s Roman legion in the jacuzzi tub.

  On the opposite side of the bed was a gigantic closet stuffed with Mrs. Wambaugh’s clothes and a separate room for a shoe collection worthy of a queen.

  I found the computer in a little office beyond the main bedroom. It also had a marble floor and plain white walls, a teak and walnut loveseat, and a business-like desk with a comfy black vinyl chair on which a twenty-seven-inch iMac sat at rest.

  I sat down, paused, listened intently for a few seconds. Nothing but the low hum of the party down below.

  I woke the Mac up and started exploring files and folders.

  It didn’t take long as it appeared Mrs. Wambaugh didn’t spend a lot of time online. Not too unusual for a woman of her generation. Especially one as rich as she was and who probably had a secretary and a bookkeeper and an accountant to take care of her mundane financial affairs.

  There were photos of Christopher and Rachel, mostly taken in the past few years at various parties and charity events. None from their childhoods, but digital photos weren’t taken as much around back then. I expected to come across folders full of kiddie shots when I searched the rest of the room.

  I combed through her emails on AOL. There were a few message trails involving clubs and organizations she belonged to—Garden Club, the Republican Party, the Sharon Heights Gold and Country Club, the Menlo Circus Club (looked like they played Polo there). The only evidence of online shopping were occasional Amazon orders for books or office supplies or protein bars, a standing order.

  I put the computer back to sleep and looked around. The desk had two side drawers, and I started with the top and smaller one. Pens, paper clips, blank notepads, envelopes, and some loose photos, grainy and faded shots of what looked like Hawaii. Most of the photos were of Mrs. Wambaugh twenty or thirty years younger. She wasn’t attractive, even as a young woman. I didn’t hold that against her. There were plenty of unattractive men and women who were admirable and wonderful human beings and who found love and sex and fulfillment.

  In a couple of the pictures, she stood beside a handsome, large, muscular man probably five to ten years younger, with a full head of brown curly hair. He towered above her, his arm cradling her shoulder. He looked both surprised and sardonic, out of place but content to be there.

  To put it bluntly, looks-wise, he was out of her league. Not all that extraordinary, but usually it goes the other way. Old, ugly men with power and money attracting younger, finer females.

  I slipped one of the photos into my coat pocket.

  The larger, lower drawer was full of hanging manila files.

  They were all labeled: Home, Medical, Utilities, Phone, Projects, Contractors, and the like. I fumbled through each file, there were about twenty of them, finding nothing of other than passing interest, until, one folder from the last, I withdrew one labeled WF.

  Inside I found what I’d been looking for. It wasn’t a huge stash, just a few papers regarding interactions with the elusive William Fogerty, husband and father. And only one of them was important as it disclosed his address, a penthouse at the Palazzo Resort Hotel in Las Vegas, as of eight months ago when Mrs. Wambaugh had sent him a letter. Conveniently, a photocopy of the letter itself was clipped to the back of the folder.

  I skimmed it, stopped, caught my breath. Went back to the beginning and read the whole thing. I took out my phone and snapped a photo of the letter and the address, making sure the print was large enough to be legible. I tidied up the file, put the folder back in its proper place, and closed the drawer.

  I sat there for a moment thinking. The risk of coming here had paid off. These crazy law-breaking live wire acts often don’t. I had what I needed, an important part of the missing puzzle. More importantly, I knew what my next step had to be. Soon as I wrapped up a couple of loose ends in here and found someone to watch over Frankie, a road trip to Sin City was in the offing.

  My eyes fell upon a pile of receipts pierced savagely by a spike stick at the rear of the desk, almost hidden by the computer. I pulled them gingerly up and free of the spike, and as I quickly sifted through the papers, there was a slight shuffle of steps outside. I froze.

  The muffled twang of the doorknob turning, the mild thrwoosh of the door opening. I leaned my head around the office doorjamb in time to see light from the hallway spill in a rectangle at the entrance to the bedroom.

  I couldn’t have picked a worse place to be interrupted. There was no place to hide. I could only hope she wasn’t heading back here.

  Should I stay, or should I go. The Clash’s song lyrics played through my mind along with the layout of the bedrooms. Without thinking further, I danced around the office wall adjacent to the closet and disappeared inside.

  Mrs. Wambaugh, marching toward her bathroom with single-minded purpose, didn’t catch my fleeting shadow.

  I hid in the furthest reaches of the closet, behind heavy winter coats unlikely to be of use to her that evening.

  Still, I ran through logical explanations if I was discovered inflagrante delicto.

  The list was short and pathetic, and I put it out of my mind while listening for approaching footsteps. I could hear her in the bathroom. She was humming. It was Sondheim’s, Children Will Listen.

  I reassessed my view of the woman. She had some taste after all. Sondheim and choosing me to help her solve this case were at least two gold stars on the right side of the merit ledger.

  She left the bathroom. Her footsteps moved toward me. But she went right past the closet and into the office. I winced, feeling the big stack of receipts in my right hand. Maybe she wouldn’t—

  “What the—” she almost shouted, stopped. Silence momentarily.

  “God damn it. Who’s been in here?”

  I thought about making an all-out run for it. I was pretty fast. She’d never catch me. If I put on one of her elaborate hats and a heavy winter coat, she’d never be able to identify me—

  “Rachel!” she spat. “That girl better not…” Her voice trailed off. She rose, and I heard the chair bang against the desk. Mrs. Wambaugh stomped out of the room, moving quickly, a woman on a mission.

  I stepped out of the closet. Looked at the wad of papers in my hand. Oh well, no use putting them back now. I shoved them inside my coat pocket and followed Mrs. Wambaugh’s trail out.

  But instead of stomping, I glided stealthily.

  Once in the hallway, I had another decision to make. My plan had been not only to invade Mrs. Wambaugh’s privacy but Christopher’s too. But I didn’t know which room was his, and that might take a little time to determine.

  I didn’t know whether the old lady would confront Rachel now, in which case the two women would probably be back up here shortly.

  But I decided that the confrontation would most likely wait until the party was over as she couldn’t tolerate an embarrassing scene at this important event, especially with society reporters there and all the gossip that might hit the papers tomorrow.

  I figured Christopher’s room would be as far away from his mother’s as he could manage. Nevertheless, I checked each doorway that I passed and found them all to be neat, clean, dust free, and empty of all but barely used furniture.

  I found Christopher’s room exactly where I expected. At the opposite end of the hallway from Mom. Once again, I paused for sounds of approaching steps before I took a deep breath and shut myself inside.

  His room was as stark as hers was elaborately modern. A nice oak bed and desk set anchored the space. There were photos of Christopher playing baseball and tennis. Some trophies and ribbons, mainly for tennis. A few family photos, the three of them in Disneyland when they were much younger, or in front of a lakeside resort. I saw no photos of his father. There were lots of photos of Christopher and Rachel though the years. Playing together, sitting together on lawns, or at the beach, or at dinner tables of various sorts. In some, they were toddlers holding hands. In a prominent place next to his computer, there was a striking photograph taken on the tennis court outside at dusk, a lovely orangish hue created by the setting sun.

  Christopher smiled with his arm wrapped protectively around his sister’s shoulder, an enigmatic look on her face.

  I sat down at his desk and started searching his MacBook Air. I moved quickly. I found what I expected to, but not much more.

  He had some folders full of correspondence and bills in a drawer on the right side of his desk, just like his mother. I read through them all, forming a more accurate picture of the young man.

  After I finished, I sat there for a couple of minutes thinking about what I’d found.

  Then I rose and listened at the door. Hearing nothing, I slipped back into the hallway, just as someone switched on the light above my head, and Christopher Wambaugh appeared at the top of the stairs.

  Twenty-Four

  We stood there for a moment, our eyes parrying. He was perhaps fifty feet away from me.

  For a moment, he looked confused and glanced back down the stairway. I feared he was going to call down for whatever cavalry was close at hand, but instead, he turned back to me and gave me a searching glance, as if to make sure I was really there. Finally, he blinked, curled his hands into fists and shouted, “Hey, you, what are you doing here?”

  There was no apt response, so I didn’t bother. Instead, I tried to recall the details of the house blueprint that was tucked inside my coat. The stairway back down to the kitchen was half way down the hallway, past the spot where young Christopher stood shooting daggers.

  Well, nothing to be done about that. I marched forward with conviction. I’ve found that acting confidently sometimes intimidates your antagonists.

  Sometimes not.

  But I wasn’t too concerned about Christopher. The jig was up, my presence no longer a mystery. Nothing I could do about that now. I just needed to vanish before any of the local constabulary was called.

  I was sure to be getting a visit from them soon, but preferred dealing with them on my home turf. I was a little worried since Marsh was incommunicado and he usually provided the legal help in these instances, but I’d deal with that when the need arose.

  Christopher watched me approaching and stepped directly in my path. I stopped when I was arms’ distance from his chest.

  “What are you doing up here? What are you doing in our house? You weren’t invited to the party.”

  Two questions and a statement of fact.

  “Christopher, I’m trying to help. You and your mother haven’t been honest with me. You left me no options. I’m trying to protect Sarah.”

  “You have no right—”

  “No, I don’t. But you had no right to shoot her, Christopher, did you?”

  He looked blindsided, but desperate times call for desperate words.

  The party had gotten a lot louder, alcohol lubricating and disinhibiting inhibitions. Shouts and cries and raucous laughter along with the thumping rhythm of the Rolling Stones made it unlikely that any noise from up here would reach the celebrants below.

  “A counselor and two kids identified you as being at the Children’s Network the night that Sarah was shot.” I was ad-libbing, but, by the look on his face, hitting home.

  “I chased your shadow into that building; I just didn’t know it was you at the time. And I just found the receipt for the gun you bought last month. I’m sure the police have identified the bullet and gun it came from and—”

  He lunged at me, caught me in a bear hug, and we tumbled to the ground and rolled around in a chaotic tangle for a few seconds. I grabbed his shoulder and forced him away from me, angling my right arm so I could punch him in the midsection, but suddenly, he started sobbing, letting me go, folding in on himself.

  I crawled away from him, watched him break down, fall apart. He kept murmuring, “I didn’t…I wouldn’t…you don’t understand.” He sobbed, wrapped his arms around his shoulders, rocking back and forth. “You don’t—”

  “Christopher!” Mrs. Wambaugh shouted from below.

  I jumped to my feet, touched his shaking shoulder with my fingers for a moment, trying haplessly to steady him, then hurried to the stairs leading back down to the kitchen and out the back door.

  Bo had left the motorcycle at the edge of the Wambaugh property, about a hundred yards from the house, near a massive sprawling oak tree that must have covered a quarter acre of lawn.

  I jumped on the pedal, and the engine roared like a panther, settling back into that pretty purr that pleases me from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. Glancing back from whence I came, I saw a woman on the porch that ran the length of the front of the house. Mrs. Wambaugh stood stock still, her hands limp at her sides, staring directly at me.

 

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