Anything for You--A Novel Page 7

  13

  Valerie was in Adam Grant’s study when Nick put his head around the door. The room was full of warm sunlight.

  “Hey, Skirt,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Er … my job? We’re taking Grant’s computers, as requested by you.”

  “I thought you just sat in the basement like a spider and waited for your minions to bring you the gizmos.”

  “I do. But sometimes I get lonely.”

  He kissed her. Valerie had a little traffic jam of images: sucking Adam Grant’s flaccid cock; Elspeth painting her mother’s nails; Kyle Cornell’s dark arms; herself living alone in the desert in an adobe hut, bare feet in the dust and a bottle of tequila and bleaching sunlight. Her inner life was roiling these days. So what? So nothing. The natural things are—

  “For God’s sake.”

  They separated, guiltily, and turned to see Nick’s colleague, Nathan, in the study doorway.

  “You guys carry on,” Nathan said. “Don’t mind me. I’m just the removal guy. Once I’ve cleared the desk there you can spread out.”

  He hefted the first of the three unplugged hard drives Valerie had earmarked, along with two laptops. “By the way,” Nathan said, “there’s an old dude here asking about the Grants.”

  Valerie went into the hall to find a tall, white-haired guy in his late seventies in a blue plaid shirt and khaki pants, standing just inside the front doorway with a look on his face somewhere between apology and bemusement.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Hello, yes … I was wondering how Rachel’s doing? I’m her neighbor. Vincent Lyle.”

  Valerie rapid-scrolled. Lyle. Senior. Insomnia. Saw the perp in the backyard.

  “Hello, Mr. Lyle.” She extended her hand. “Detective Hart. I’m leading the investigation. Rachel’s stable, recovering well. She should be home in a few days.”

  “Oh, that’s good to hear,” Vincent said. “What about poor Elspeth? Who’s taking care of her?”

  “She’s fine. She’s with family.” Leave it vague. His concern was genuine, but there was the predictable fascination as well.

  “And the man who did this?” he asked. “I suppose you’re not allowed to say. I saw the photograph on the news.”

  “He’s still at large,” Valerie said. “But we’ll get him. I understand you saw the suspect in your backyard on the night of the incident?”

  “I did. It was … as with all such moments, simultaneously prosaic and surreal.”

  “Do you know the Grants well?”

  “Not terribly. Rachel more than Adam. We have reading in common. And insomnia. We wave to each other in the small hours, like a pair of sentinels. She’s been very sweet about books, seeking my opinion and so on. All redundant, since she knows by her own lights what’s good and what’s trash. My son’s machinations are behind it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I believe Lucas recruited her to the cause: reengaging the moribund literary brain.”

  Nick and Nathan went past, carrying the last of the tech hardware out to the van. Vincent Lyle observed, with obvious curiosity.

  “But you didn’t know Mr. Grant well?” Valerie asked him.

  “Not really. He kept himself to himself. Struck me as a bit abstracted, in fact, on the few occasions I met him.”

  “Abstracted?”

  “Mind elsewhere. But then I know from Rachel he was a workaholic. To be honest, I hadn’t seen him much of late.”

  “Was Mrs. Grant worried about him?”

  Lyle thought about it for a moment. Not, Valerie decided, because he had anything useful to contribute, but because he didn’t want their conversation to end. The literary brain might be moribund but it was a rare mind the murder-next-door couldn’t hook. Over his shoulder she saw Nick give her a quick nod farewell then get into the van and pull away.

  “She never said anything like that to me,” Vincent Lyle said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I ask everything. It’s my job.”

  He thought about it again. Reached the same conclusion. “No. She never said anything like that to me.”

  “Well, as I said, Mrs. Grant should be home in a few days. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Of course, of course. I’m taking up your time.”

  Valerie watched him walk away down the drive. She remembered he was a widower. Not long back she and Nick had had a conversation about getting old. The challenge was to find good things about it. They’d only come up with two. The first was that they’d care even less than they did now what anyone thought of them. The second was they wouldn’t be expected to do anything on New Year’s Eve except stay home and get drunk and watch dumb TV. It occurred to her now that they’d both only imagined growing old together. All these assumptions that did nothing but tempt the gods to prove them false.

  She closed the front door (the Halligan’s damage had been repaired with a steel plate and new lock) and put her back to it. She had, at last, what she wanted: the opportunity to move alone and undisturbed through Adam Grant’s house.

  14

  This was a pleasure that went beyond the job. In fact the job was (à la Rebecca Beitner’s) a rationalization of a condition that preceded it, namely, the desire to snoop around other people’s lives. Valerie had always been that way. Even as a child she loved poking around her family’s and friends’ rooms when they weren’t there, not with malice or strategy, but out of a fascination with the otherness of others, their things—and the narratives she could dream up to explain them. In her early teens she’d dated a guy who had a fetish for getting into buildings when they were unoccupied. Together they broke into (or concealed themselves in until after hours) their school, the bus depot, the local swimming pool, a couple of cinemas, and three or four private residences. They did no damage, took nothing. Just went through various drawers and wardrobes and cupboards, barely exchanging a word. Neither of them knew quite why, but it was irresistible. Incredibly, they never got caught.

  Now there was no getting caught. Snooping was what she was paid for. Being Police was a backstage pass to the world behind the world, the people behind the people, the lives behind the lives. The dirty thrill of it had never diminished. Finding what was hidden. The dark secret. The awful treasure. That was the force that drove her. Justice was an incidental by-product.

  She left the hallway and went upstairs to Adam and Rachel’s bedroom. The scene hadn’t been formally released but all the work was done. She was excited to be alone. She cut the tape and opened the door. She didn’t know what she was looking for. The truth was that if she hadn’t had the failed one-night stand with Adam Grant she probably wouldn’t even be here. Dwight Jenner had killed him. Therefore her job was to catch Dwight Jenner—end of story. There were unanswered questions, yes—but there were always unanswered questions. Adam Grant talked on the phone a dozen times to the man who eventually murdered him. Snapped at his secretary and seemed unhappy. Occasionally got shit-faced and didn’t go home. Didn’t get chummy with Professor Insomnia next door. So what?

  Jenner got five grand in cash from someone and maybe it was Adam Grant. Jenner was punching above his weight with hot, blond Sophia. Jenner’s half brother was probably lying. Again, so what? It didn’t alter the central fact: Dwight Jenner killed Adam Grant and advertised his culpability by dropping off the grid. Motive might be more obscure than simple revenge, but means and opportunity were beyond doubt. Therefore, aside from corralling the tech hardware there really was no good reason for her to be here.

  It didn’t matter. She was used to the job’s rogue gravities and long past accountability to her rational self.

  She spent a few minutes examining the master bedroom’s wall of black-and-white photographs, all of which—initialed “A.G.”—she assumed had been taken by Adam Grant. (Very vaguely she remembered him mentioning photography somewhere in the middle of their doomed evening, when the booze was already softening the boundaries an
d swirling the conversation.) To Valerie’s eye they were what would once have been regarded as good pictures (in the days before apps gave us the power to make any old shit look like an album cover) albeit with predictable subject matter: desert landscapes, city architecture, a stack of old tires, a burned-out car. A series of high-contrast shots of a derelict ranch surrounded by scrub and saguaro, shadows very black, sand very white. Several portraits of people unknown to Valerie, but many of Rachel and Elspeth, either solo or together. In one shot Rachel was standing looking out the window of a rustic kitchen, wearing nothing but a man’s white shirt with sunlight coming through to expose her silhouette. In another Elspeth had been surprised reading a book. You could imagine her father saying, “Hey”—and the girl looking up, not expecting the camera, the puppet eyes inquiring. A second later she would probably have said: “Jesus, Dad, stop doing that,” but just at that moment she was caught perfectly, without attitude or performance, artless, herself. Valerie imagined her secretly rather loving the photograph.

  The guest room directly across the landing had, along with luxury white linen, high ceiling, and blood-and-gold abstract canvas above the bed, two walls of books and a square bay window with a box seat, which, having sat in it, Valerie found gave a view over the alleyway (and bamboo) into the Lyles’ sprawling backyard. There was the conservatory, Vincent Lyle’s retreat in the small hours. Presumably it was from here that Rachel waved to him when they shared the insomniacs’ graveyard shift. We have reading in common. Valerie couldn’t remember the last time she’d begun a book, let alone finished one. Being Police shunted so many things into the hard shoulder. You told yourself you’d get around to them. You never did.

  Like having a kid.

  One of the things that annoyed her was that sex with Nick now was definitively shackled to reproduction. It had to be vaginal, penetrative—every time. A serviceable hand job was sperm-squandering sacrilege. When he went inside her these days she had an image of the school diagram of the female reproductive organs in cross-section. (Which unfortunately had always looked to her like a drawing of a sheep’s head.) Hardly a turn-on. Couples complained having kids killed their sex lives. It was worse than that. Trying to get pregnant killed your sex life.

  Maybe you just don’t want a child?

  Maybe I just don’t.

  She was enjoying herself, like a stray dog among the trash cans. The license to snoop, of course—the house was so grand and established, so rich with the Grants’ detail that the sense of privileged intrusion went through her like a fabulous drug—but also because it was a family home which, courtesy of the randomly ugly world (the world she knew, the world she dealt with, the world she depended on) would never be the same again. The Grants had had it all. And now look: ruin. They might never recover. Elspeth’s face, the shock. Rachel’s face, worse, the knowledge that she would have to go on. The fewer people you loved the less you had to lose.

  Yes. Quite.

  She went aimlessly through the generous, sunlit rooms. Aimlessly, but with casual clairvoyance fueled and prepped. There was an art to it. To knowing when not knowing didn’t matter, when the absence of knowing was necessary, in fact, to leave room for the spookier intuitive forces—in which she both believed and did not believe. This was the deal with getting older, apparently. Every year gifted you a new paradox or koan. Like (again!) her desire for and dread of motherhood. Do you have children? Even in her ravaged state Rachel Grant had asked the question in the way all mothers did, with a smug flourish of gender credentials and a complacent challenge to yours. Do you have children? Once, drunk at a dinner party, Valerie had answered a particularly annoying woman: No, I’m afraid my cunt hasn’t gone on to the Higher Calling. It’s still wasting its time fucking for pleasure.

  She went into Elspeth’s room. The girl’s interrupted life was here. She and it had been in tremendous cahoots, the goth jewelry, the tweets, the likes, the clothes, the music. Now the life knew that when she came back it wouldn’t recognize her. Valerie sat on the bed. I was nothing before I had Elspeth, Rachel Grant had said. Valerie could feel that in here, too, the mother’s love like an invisible organic architecture underpinning every hair tie and fad and sulk—now faced with the task of making the unbearable bearable. If anything happened to her, Rachel Grant had said. If she’d been there that night … I keep thinking … If she’d been there … Yes. Exactly. If she’d been there she’d be dead. Maybe raped, maybe mutilated, maybe you made to watch. Then what would all that love be except proof that love couldn’t save her? If you’d really understood you could always lose her like that, would you have had her in the first place?

  Prosecution rests.

  Valerie went downstairs. Through the living room window she saw the maples’ shadows were longer on the lawn. But still she lingered. She went through all the drawers in Adam Grant’s desk. Innocuous. For a while she sat on one of the two vast, L-shaped couches in the living room just listening to the birdsong and absorbing the domestically serviced ether of the Grants’ formerly comfortable life.

  Then, in the basement, she found the darkroom.

  The basement itself had been turned into a fully equipped home gym. Whitewashed walls, blue exercise mats, concrete floor. When she tried the steel door between the bench press and the rowing machine she expected a broom closet or boiler room. But it opened into a darkroom, and she realized with a little adrenal “oops” that the let-in light might just have ruined Adam Grant’s final photographic work. Thinking it was probably redundant now, she found the safelight switch, closed the door behind her, and turned it on. Soft brown-red illumination that seemed to pixelate the air and within moments made her feel uncomfortably hot.

  The place was tidy. The chemistry trays might have been lined up by a robot. The wastepaper basket looked virgin. Enlarger brand-new, leather swivel chair factory fresh. It looked like a darkroom set up for someone as a gift—then never used.

  Of course the clairvoyance twitched. She dismissed it. Pavlovian. The lone photographer in his windowless room of brothel light was the villain in too many movies. The mere word “darkroom” suggested secrecy, deviance, subversion, deceit. In any case Adam Grant was the victim, not the perp. An honest voice in Valerie reported that she wasn’t searching for the reason he was murdered. She was searching for some clue—however remote—to why in God’s name he hadn’t fucked her when he’d had the chance. She wasn’t surprised at herself. She’d grown used to the lawlessness of her motives, which had long since drifted free of their ethical anchors. She was monstrous in many ways. Of course she was. But so was everyone else, more or less. Being Police was learning to find room for everything—even yourself.

  Regardless, she was here, so she might as well take a look. Two steel cabinets with ten shallow drawers stood to either side of the door. She began going through them from top to bottom, starting with the one on her right. Print paper stock, mostly, organized according to grade, finish, and size, but also large black ring binders containing hundreds, actually thousands, of plastic-sleeved proof sheets, transparencies, and prints, labeled, as far as she could tell, chronologically and going all the way back to what she guessed were Adam Grant’s college years. A vast variety of images, some of them so heavily abstracted that their original object was hard to guess, plus more of the strictly figurative type displayed on the bedroom wall. The bottom two drawers had a lock, but the lock was open. The drawers were empty.

  The cabinet on her left contained more contact sheets, ring binders, grease pencils, loupes, mattes, scissors … Nothing unexpected. Mild orneriness kept her checking all the way to the bottom two drawers.

  Which, unlike the neighboring pair, were locked.

  Not much from the clairvoyance. A wry smile, perhaps. Still, there was no not getting them open, now.

  Naturally none of the keys on Rachel’s bunch fit the lock. Valerie went back upstairs. Adam Grant’s keys were in an ovoid lapis lazuli bowl on his desk. Aside from house and Audi there were four o
thers on the fob. Two Yale, one brass skeleton, and one tiny stainless-steel key that looked about right for the cabinet. She went back to the basement.

  It didn’t fit.

  She smiled. Now it was a little game with the clairvoyance. She had lockpicks in the car. For a moment she considered just forcing the drawer. Decided that wasn’t in the spirit of the game. Up she went again, her thighs asking if she was aware this was the fourth time they’d done this trick in practically as many minutes.

  The heat outside surprised her after the house’s air-conditioning. The afternoon had swollen. Hot asphalt and the sun-struck Taurus like a big black jewel. The neighborhood was silent, as if the green lawns had absorbed all the sound.

  She took the kit and went back inside.

  It didn’t take long. The first of the two drawers was empty but for a scatter of paper clips and a lump of Blu Tack.

  The second contained two packs of unused manila envelopes, neatly stacked. Nothing else. She was disappointed, but not surprised. She riffled the stack nearest to her.

  Stopped.

  The clairvoyance bristled, then settled in her like a curled-up cat.

  One of the envelopes wasn’t empty. Its weight had messed up her riffle. She slid it out. From the feel of it, two or three prints inside. She went back to the lockpick kit and selected a thin file. Slit the envelope and pulled out the prints.

  In the red safelight, the colors were annihilated. But the representational content was clear. The first photograph was a rear view of a blond woman in nothing but black stockings and high heels bending over a desk. She was looking back at the camera with her pale hair half covering her face. The one eye that was visible was heavily mascara’d and, Valerie suspected, false-lashed. Glossy lips in a half smile, half pout.

  In the second she was leaning against a kitchen sink, head thrown back, blouse open, left hand caressing her breasts, right hand shoved inside her panties.