Liar Read online

  It was only then that I found the recorder. I softly repeated the little dialing song into the microphone, hoping I had it right. I was pretty sure it was Margot’s number, followed by the pound sign.

  I was going to try it out, but since the upstairs phone might also be equipped with line-in-use lights, I hesitated using the office phone while she might be standing near an upstairs phone. I would have to wait to verify that the tones matched her number.

  I moved back out into the kitchen. There was a set of hanging baskets near the sink, and one of them held three lemons and a couple of limes.

  I took one of the lemons, and then, turning to the island in the center of the kitchen, pulled a small paring knife from a wooden block.

  I heard water running upstairs just as I passed the kitchen phone. Seizing the opportunity, I set my little treasures down, pulled the recorder back out of my purse, then lifted the handset and replayed the tape. I pressed the numbers that matched the tones.

  There were two rings, ones I hoped were not awakening some perfectly nice stranger, then Margot’s voice on a recording. Her voice mail. I hung up. The number I had dialed was her own. She had called someone’s pager number, entered her own number, and was now waiting for a call back. Because she had a voice mail service, when I called her number from her own phone I got the service instead of a busy signal. It also explained the lack of an answering machine.

  Whom did she page? Someone who would respond at three in the morning. A lawyer? Perhaps. Or maybe it was the new boyfriend. And if the man who had been looking for me in the lobby of the Express was the bomber, I didn’t want to be around if he showed up. I began to wish I had brought Rachel along. I would have done it, but I knew Travis was safe at my home not because there was a patrol car outside, but because Rachel was inside—she would watch over him.

  Here at Margot’s, my plans had to remain flexible. A lot depended on what Margot did once she came back downstairs.

  I quickly searched the rest of the first floor and found one other bathroom. I checked the medicine cabinet—no bandages. I heard a door close upstairs and hurried over to the bar in the front room.

  By the time Margot came back downstairs in a blue Chinese silk jacket and loose-fitting slacks, feathery slippers and full makeup, I was mixing an Absolut and tonic. I offered her one, and she accepted.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I stole one of the lemons from the kitchen,” I said, holding it up.

  “No, of course not,” she said.

  I made her drink twice as strong as mine, sliced a couple of pieces of lemon and added them as twists. She sat on the leopard skin. I went for the white leather sofa.

  “Now, what’s all this about a bomb?” she said.

  I told her about the explosion, leaving out lots of details about Travis, merely saying that he was a visiting cousin who was severely burned while trying to rescue my cat. She looked genuinely horrified, which gave me hope for her.

  “That’s terrible,” she said. “But I don’t know why you think I had anything to do with it.”

  “Someone was asking for me in the lobby of the Express a few days ago—but you intercepted him.”

  She blushed, but didn’t say anything.

  “A man with a similar description—probably the same guy—tried to follow me when I was on my way to see Travis today. He was unsuccessful then, but it seems he finally managed to reach us at the one place where I’d hoped we would be safe—my home. My own home, Margot.”“

  “But you’re assuming it’s the same person!”

  “Margot, did you look up my address for someone recently?”

  She set down her drink, placed her hands in her lap. Her nails were perfect.

  The dogs took up barking again.

  “Yes,” she said, wringing the perfect hands, “but he wasn’t the one who—he wouldn’t have done something like that.”

  “If you didn’t have some doubts about that, you wouldn’t have let me in here tonight.”

  “Of course I would have let you in. We work together.”

  “Right, we’re such close pals. So for the sake of your old pal’s health— who is he?”

  She looked away from me.

  “Who is he?” I asked again.

  The phone rang.

  She shot up from the leopard skin as if it still had its claws. “Excuse me,” she said, hurrying over to the nearest phone—the one in the kitchen. “Probably my neighbor.”

  Right.

  “Oh, hello!” she said in a voice obviously meant to carry to my ears, “I’m so sorry if my dogs awakened you! I know it’s very late, but a dear friend from the paper needed to see me. Yes, of course everything is just fine. Sorry to disturb you. I’ll try to keep them quiet.”

  I glanced out the window. The neighbor’s lights were still out.

  I figured she was talking to her new boyfriend, and decided to resort to Plan B. I walked over to the bar, as if to make another drink. Margot was speaking more softly now, a quick murmur or two before hanging up.

  She came back into the room just as I took hold of the lemon, told myself it wouldn’t hurt as much as Travis’s burn, and nicked my finger with the knife.

  “Ow!” I shouted—beyond what the little sting called for. I immediately grabbed my hand and squeezed my finger so that the bleeding looked worse.

  “Oh, dear!” she said, quickly looking away.

  “Oh! What a klutz! Oh no, I’m going to bleed all over your white car-pet…

  That snapped her into action. “Come this way, there’s a bathroom right down this hallway.”

  I followed her, and managed to get to the bathroom sink without leaving any DNA on her floor. She was frantically searching for a bandage; of course I didn’t tell her there was a whole box of the things in my purse. I was also pleased to note that she scrupulously avoided looking at my hand.

  “My God, it’s deeper than I thought!” I said. Utter nonsense, but it worked on her.

  “Upstairs,” she said weakly.

  I followed her again.

  The master bedroom was huge and featured a king-sized round bed. I didn’t get to see much of it before she hustled me into the bathroom, where there were lots of jars and an array of cosmetics out on the counter.

  I held my hand over this sink, but still she avoided looking at my savage wound. I was kind of pissed about that, because I figured that if I had known what a daisy she was ahead of time, I wouldn’t have cut myself. I could have faked it.

  This time, while I surveyed the contents of this larger medicine chest over her shoulder, she found an adhesive bandage. She handed it to me at arm’s length, clearly squeamish about the entire business.

  “I—I don’t think that will do,” I said weakly. “Do you have any gauze?”

  “Yes, yes.” She reached for it, and some tape.

  “God, I think I see bone!” I screeched.

  She turned white, but shoved the first-aid items at me before stepping just outside the bathroom.

  I wrapped the finger rather artistically, then, in the shakiest voice I could manage, said, “I think I’m going to faint.”

  It was truer of her than of me. “Oh!” Her eyes widened. “Come and lie down for a moment!”

  I let her lead me over to the big dot of a bed and did my best to plop my rear down on that part of the circumference next to the fancy telephone on a nearby nightstand. I sat, then put my head between my knees.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said in a muffled voice. I lifted my head a little. “This is so embarrassing. I’ll go home in just a minute.”

  Now she really panicked. “Oh, no, no! Stay here a little longer. I insist.”

  I groaned. “Oh, maybe you’re right. Listen, would you mind getting my drink for me? I left it downstairs.”

  “Certainly, certainly,” she said, happy to get away from the wounded.

  The moment she was out the door, I checked out the phone. I didn’t bother with the last-number-dialed button—that would
just be Margot’s own number, entered for the pager. But to my delight, it had one of those “caller ID” features on it, the ones that record and store the numbers of incoming calls. The display showed the last call received as number seventy-five, with date and time stamped but indicating it was a “private call”—meaning her boyfriend had called from a phone that blocked caller ID. I hurriedly scrolled with the “review” button, going back to calls that started on Tuesday, the day she met Mr. Wonderful in the lobby. In the mix of calls, two showed up fairly often, and at hours when her society pals were probably getting their beauty sleep.

  Margot had a little notepad next to the phone; I took the top sheet off and slipped it in my pocket, just in case I might need to use old-fashioned methods—raising a number by rubbing a pencil over the indentations. No use outsmarting yourself with technology, I thought. I used the next sheet to write down the two numbers from the caller-ID display.

  By the time she had come upstairs, I had made a remarkable recovery.

  “Gotta go,” I said. “Sitting here reminded me that I’m up way past my bedtime.”

  She protested all the way down the stairs. At the front door, a little of my smug satisfaction at tricking her left me, and a sense of what I might have set in motion took its place.

  “Margot, listen to me. And I mean listen. Your life may depend upon it. If you’ve called the man who waited for me in the lobby—”

  “Called him? At this hour? Of course not!”

  “Listen! If you’ve called him, get out of here. Now. Don’t wait for him to come over. He’s dangerous. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “I don’t think he’s—”

  “Fine!” I said. “If you want to wait around here and have Mr. Goodbar make a house call, fine. Invite him in. When they drag the canal and haul up whatever bits and pieces are left of you, I’ll tell each and every salt-soaked one of them, ”I told you so!“‘

  “That’s a horrible thing to say!”

  “Yeah? Whatever it takes. In fact, if you insist on staying here tonight, at least let me take your Yorkies with me. I’m not as crazy about them as you are, but I hate to see animals suffer.”

  “Get out!”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Margot. Get out.”

  She opened the door.

  “Please, Margot.”

  “Get out,” she said, but it was softer.

  I tried to find some measure of hope in that as I drove off in search of a pay phone.

  17

  Since the nearest pay phones on Rivo Alto were on the single nonresidential street on the small island, I decided to drive a couple of miles farther, to an all-night supermarket on Pacific Coast Highway. The supermarket would be well-lighted and I could phone from indoors; better, for my purposes, than standing out in the open on a street Margot’s new boyfriend would be taking to get to her house. I was fairly certain she had invited him to come over.

  The phone was near the front entrance of the market. I took a quick look around; at the checkout stand, there was an old man buying a bag of potato chips and a can of dog food, and one young couple with an infant buying baby formula. Otherwise, everyone I saw was an employee. The aisles of the store were crowded with pallets of shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes. Stocking hours.

  I went back to the phone and, playing a hunch, rubbed a pencil over the paper I had taken off the notepad. The results were good enough to reveal a third and different number. I dropped a couple of coins in the phone and tried this number first. After two rings, a recorded voice said, “The subscriber on the LA Cellular System that you have called is unavailable, or has left the coverage area. Please try your call again later.”

  So much for hunches. I tried one of the numbers from the caller-ID display.

  It rang for a long time, no answer.

  I got lucky with the third number.

  “You’ve reached the voice mail of Richmond & Associates. We’re not in the office right now, but you can leave a message of any length, or enter your phone number and then press the pound key, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

  I hung up. The name Richmond seemed familiar, but then again, it wasn’t a rare name.

  I had decided to use a pay phone instead of my home phone because my initial plan was to page Margot’s friend from a number he wouldn’t recognize, and which couldn’t be traced back to me. But telling him off over the phone wouldn’t get me anywhere, and now a better plan occurred to me. I dropped another round of change into the phone and called the computer room at the News-Express.

  Jerry Chase answered on the sixteenth ring. The newsroom of the Express is usually empty between one and six-thirty in the morning, but those are the hours the computer staff works on repair, maintenance and on freeing up computer memory. Usually there are two computer staffers working those hours, Jerry Chase, who does most of his work in the computer room, and Olivia Sledzik, his recently hired assistant, who is often working in other parts of the building. I had helped Livy get the job, so I had been hoping she’d be the one to answer. Those are the breaks.

  Given the time it took Jerry to pick up the phone, I figured I had caught him at one of his three favorite pastimes: going up on the roof for a smoke, talking to his girlfriend on the phone or playing around on the Internet.

  “Computer room,” he said, a little breathlessly. Rooftop.

  “Jerry? It’s Irene.”

  “Oh…” It was a sound of relief. I was sorry not to hear the excuse he would have given one of the bosses about the time it took to answer the phone.

  “Nice night out. How was the view?”

  He laughed. “Terrific. It’s their own damned fault for making it a smoke-free building. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to find out who owns a phone number. Can you look it up for me?”

  “Sure. What are you doing up at this time of day?”

  “Long story.”

  He sighed. “Aren’t they all?”

  “Yes. Listen, I just need to have you find out who owns a number for me. Actually, I know who owns it, but I need the address and type of business.”

  “Sure. Local?” I could hear him typing on his keyboard, accessing the database program he’d need to use.

  “Yes, within our area code.”

  “Okay, let me have it.”

  I read it off to him.

  “I love it,” he said, almost immediately. “An easy one. It’s a business— Richmond and Associates. Licensed private investigators.”

  “Investigators?” I repeated blankly.

  “Yes. By the way—Olivia is great. Thanks for letting us know about her.”

  Of course she’s great, I thought. Livy probably knew more about programming when she was in ninth grade than you did when you got out of college. And she does ten times as much work as you do and… and I reminded myself that he was doing me a favor.

  “Glad it worked out, Jer.”

  “Yeah, me, too. I’m learning from her. She’s bringing me up to date.”

  That made me feel a little better about him. “Livy’s sharp,” I agreed. “You have the address for Richmond and Associates?”

  “Yes, in Los Alamitos. Owner is one Harold Richmond.”

  Suddenly I remembered where I had heard the name “Richmond”— it was in the articles about Gwendolyn DeMont’s murder. Harold Richmond had worked for the police then; he had been the detective assigned to the case.

  “Still there?” Jerry asked.

  “Yes—sorry.”

  He read the address to me. I wrote it down, then said, “As long as you’re in that program, Jer, could you look up one more number for me? Probably a residence.” Sure.

  I read off the second number, and again he got a quick hit. “Not a residence, though,” he said. “The Wharf.”

  “Someplace down in the harbor?”

  “No, it’s in Los Alamitos, too. The Wharf is just its name. It’s a bar.”

  “A bar? You’re sure?�
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  “Well, I’m not sitting in it, having a drink and a much-needed smoke, but unless the database is wrong, the place is a bar.”