Forty Thieves Page 14

  “He got job offers, and I got job offers. The difference was I was pregnant and he wasn’t. We decided it would be best to let him take his best offer, and move to Bloomington, Indiana, together. He would be a professor, and I would have the baby and keep my name out in the world by working a little bit as a consultant, mostly from home.”

  “Did you resent that?” asked Ronnie.

  “No. I wanted kids, and I loved them. We were happy for about five years, before it ended badly.”

  “What went wrong?” Now Ronnie’s eyes were filled with concern.

  “Just about everything,” said Selena. “First James got his official fifth-year notice that he was not going to be granted tenure.”

  “I thought that was seven years,” said Ronnie

  “Legally, if they let you teach for seven years, they’ve given you de facto tenure. So they make decisions early and give notice. At the end of five years you get an evaluation. They tell you either that you’ll be getting tenure, or that while you’re teaching for your sixth year, you’d better also be looking for a job.”

  “And that’s the notice James was given?”

  “Yes. It was devastating, and not just to James. I had stepped out of the career track for five years. I had been satisfied that I’d done the right thing. I had two beautiful children to show for my decision. But if I was going to sacrifice my career, I at least wanted it to buy him the career he loved so much.”

  “What did you do?” asked Ronnie.

  “I did nothing for a few days, just kept my feelings to myself while he grieved. Then I sat him down and we talked about what to do next. Academic life was effectively closed to him once he had been denied tenure. So we made a list of companies for him to write for jobs. I helped. I wrote to contacts, friends, and colleagues all over the country. He got quite a few interviews.”

  “Quite a few interviews doesn’t sound like good news,” Ronnie said. “It means he didn’t find a job right away.”

  “Very perceptive,” said Selena. “The job search took most of his sixth year at Indiana. He would finish his last class of the week, pack up the papers for grading, and get on a plane to another city for an interview. He would be back the morning of his first class. He was tired all the time. When he finally got a good offer at Intercelleron in California, I was so relieved I could hardly contain myself. That lasted awhile.”

  “Only awhile?” Now Ronnie’s expression was sad.

  “We made a plan. In June he was to go out to California, start work at Intercelleron, and find a house. That way he would have no lapse in paychecks, and start getting the bigger income the company was paying. I would stay in Indiana with the kids, sell the house we had in Bloomington, and then wrap up our affairs, pack up, and join him.”

  “That’s a lot to do.”

  “It was,” said Selena. “But people do it. The first problem was that our house didn’t sell. I listed it as soon as we knew we were leaving, but it was a buyer’s market. We had to put off everything—buying the new house, and moving out to join him. James was out there in Los Angeles working, and he found plenty of houses, but we needed to sell the old one to get the down payment for the new one. It dragged on, and then the summer was gone and fall started. I would go to the market and see people we knew from the university, and it would make me feel sick. I had promised myself I’d never see these people again, but there I was. ‘What’s James doing these days?’ It was awful.”

  “It must have been.”

  “He would fly home to see us every two or three weeks, but while he was there he wasn’t much use in selling the house. He liked visiting with the kids, but they were small, and they were getting a little too used to his being away all the time. So was he. When he was there, it was like he was babysitting. One weekend was particularly bad, and when he left, I made a new plan. Over the next week, I packed everything up and had it moved to a storage facility so the house could be scrubbed and painted and put on the market empty. The kids and I got on a plane and flew out to join Daddy at his apartment.” She paused and shook her head slowly, and Ronnie and Sid could tell it was an involuntary response to a bad memory.

  The Abels waited. They had each interrogated thousands of people. They both recognized that they had reached a delicate moment. If they pressed too hard, she might decide to resist and say nothing more specific or personal. But she had told most of this incident, and she would be feeling the need to get the rest out. After a minute she started again.

  “We went to the apartment he had rented, but he wasn’t there. It was already late, and I didn’t want to call another cab to take us to a hotel, so I went to the manager’s apartment and asked her to let me in. I had my ID, and no burglar brings a four-year-old and a two-year-old. So we got in. He didn’t come home that night. He came in at seven a.m. to shower and dress for work. He was in a big hurry, and said he’d been at a get-together for a retiring colleague and had too much to drink, so he’d stayed overnight instead of driving. It was true and it wasn’t. He had been drinking. I could smell it. But the party was between him and one woman, who wasn’t nearly old enough to retire. When I looked at him I knew it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ronnie said.

  “He had changed. I think what happened was that he had the nice beaten out of him. He had sacrificed all his life to become a certain kind of man, but it didn’t work. He was fired—not from a job, but from a life. Right after he heard he wasn’t going to get tenure I watched him secretly for signs that he was going to commit suicide. I needn’t have bothered. The man I had married wasn’t there anymore. The new James was different.”

  “How was he different?” asked Ronnie.

  “He had decided that his whole life had been a mistake. The way to live was to deny himself nothing. He didn’t just make some drunken slipup or get tempted when he was lonely. He had at least four other regular women. He was spending a lot of money on them, but mostly on himself. New clothes, new car, new friends. When I watched him, I realized he had lost interest in the kids. He went through the motions, but he really didn’t want to spend any time around them.”

  “What about you?” Ronnie asked. “Was he still interested in saving the relationship?”

  “By then there was nothing much to save. I put up with the new James for about three months, and then filed for divorce, took the kids, and came here to Houston to start looking for a job. He didn’t try to stop me, and didn’t try to bring me back afterward. When I had to fly to Los Angeles over the next few months for meetings with the lawyers and trial dates, we barely spoke. The lawyers did most of it.”

  “And after that?” asked Ronnie. “What about more recently?”

  “I’ve been working here for about four years. James visited the kids a few times during the first year, but after each visit the kids were less interested in the next one, and so was James. After that there were some excuses, and then even the excuses stopped. When the Los Angeles police told me he had died, I hadn’t seen him in three years. All I could say was, ‘Too bad.’”

  Ronnie placed her hand on Selena’s, and Selena didn’t pull away. She sat staring at the carpet for a moment, then seemed to straighten and looked at Ronnie again.

  “But I did mean what I said—too bad. James had started living a different way. He was out very late at night, sometimes alone, and sometimes not. He ran into the sort of people you meet that way, and one or more of them killed him.” Selena Stubbs stood up. “I wish you luck in your investigation. Now I’d better get back to my office.”

  “Thank you for your help,” said Ronnie. “I know talking about this is painful. But just one last question. Do you happen to know the names of any of the women he was seeing?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thanks for thinking of that. I made a list of the names and addresses for you, and I would have been disappointed later if I hadn’t remembered to give it to you.” She reached into her purse and took out a plain sheet of white paper from a computer printer with a dozen
lines of print and handed it to Ronnie. “Maybe one of them knows more than I do.”

  14

  The Abels flew from Houston to the Long Beach airport instead of LAX or Burbank, and rented their next car at the airport lot. They drove into Los Angeles on the Long Beach Freeway and then took a series of surface streets to make their way to a new hotel they’d reserved from Houston. They parked in the lower floor of the underground lot, checked in, and took the elevator to their floor.

  When they entered their room and locked the door, Ronnie said, “When we come home from a trip it makes me sad not to be able to go into my own house and my own bedroom and flop on my own bed.”

  Sid put his arms around her and held her while she rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Sid said. “We’ll have them again. I promise.”

  “Will we?” Ronnie said. “I’m worried that having a house makes us too easy to kill.”

  “We can make it much harder from now on.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “But that house meant a lot to me. Not the things, or the money, or whatever. It was a feeling. In a way the place was me, or at least my memory. A big part of our lives happened there. I could sit in a room and remember things—sights and sounds from some particular day twenty-five years ago. It feels as though I’ve lost that.”

  “Houses don’t matter. We matter, and we’re still okay. At some point this case will be over, and then we’ll either build again on that lot, or find a nicer house and buy that one. The old memories will come back, and we’ll have new ones.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. “Don’t forget. You promised.”

  “I did.”

  She said, “Okay. For now, we live in hotels. If we get to work, we may be able to correct that. We’ve got to start catching up. There are a lot more things to know about James Ballantine.”

  Sid said, “You know what this reminds me of? Those cases where some ordinary law-abiding schmuck gets hit on the head, and suddenly his whole personality changes.”

  “I know,” said Ronnie. “Getting fired from the university seems to have had a traumatic effect on his brain. And come to think of it, we don’t know he didn’t also get literally hit on the head. He was away by himself for weeks at a time, and then he was single. Nobody would know.”

  “We’ve got to take a new look at everything about him,” Sid said. “All this time we’ve been looking over our shoulders and trying to stay alive, so we haven’t even had a chance to figure out who Ballantine really was. Nobody seemed to know anything.”

  “And now we’ve got a list of four women who knew him really well.”

  * * *

  At 5:00 a.m. the streets of Los Angeles were already filling up. There was never a time when the roads were empty, but a change of people occurred before dawn, with the last of the night people giving up and going indoors to sleep until their next chance occurred at sundown, and the day people charging out to take their turn. Sid and Ronnie had worked both day shifts and night shifts as police officers, so they were good at recognizing which group a person belonged to. They drove through Griffith Park and up into the hills of Los Feliz, then took a winding road higher until they found the right house. It was modern, tall and narrow, built into a hillside right at the edge of the street. “Nice house, nice neighborhood,” said Sid. “She’s got some money.”

  They continued down the street a few hundred feet and then pulled over to the curb, leaned back comfortably against the headrests of their car seats, and adjusted the rearview mirrors so they could watch the house without being noticed from a distance.

  “Well, here I am again,” said Ronnie. “Sitting in the car and looking at somebody’s darkened windows while they get the sleep I want and richly deserve.”

  “There,” Sid said. “A light just came on upstairs.”

  “An early bird. Maybe I’ll like her.”

  They watched the house while Kirsten Tilson got up, turned on a light in a textured window near the back of the house that had to be a bathroom, and prepared for her day. At six twenty the upstairs lights went off and others went on downstairs. At seven they all went off. The garage door slid open.

  “Watch for her,” Sid said.

  The front door opened and a woman came out and walked toward the garage. She could not have looked more different from Selena Stubbs Ballantine. She was short, with long red hair and very pale skin. She wore high heels, but she walked in them without tottering or taking short steps as some women did. Her knee-length skirt was subdued and stylish. Ronnie watched her walk to the car. “Well, she’s sort of a surprise.” She waited, but Sid said nothing. “Isn’t she?”

  “I’m withholding opinions.”

  “When we blow this case you’ll have a great career in diplomacy.”

  The woman got into her black Audi, performed an expert sweep of her left hand to bring her skirt in with her, and shut the car door. The car backed out of the short driveway into the street and then moved forward.

  The Abels followed her at a distance, watched her go up an entrance to the Hollywood Freeway and merge into the stream of cars before they entered too.

  They followed her to the Intercelleron lot, watched her enter, went past the gate, and kept going. “It looks like we’ve got a woman who also works for Intercelleron.”

  “An office romance. How sweet,” Ronnie said, her voice even and unenthusiastic. “Just like us.”

  “We never worked in the same station, let alone the same office,” Sid said.

  “I don’t mean as cops. I mean now. Of course, we no longer have an office.”

  “That’s just temporary.” Sid stopped the car, turned around, and pulled to the curb where they could see the front of the building.

  Ronnie took the binoculars from the glove compartment and watched as Kirsten Tilson got out of her car, tossed her head to make her hair hang the way she wanted it to, and strode in the front entrance of the building, past the uniformed guard at the counter.

  “Did you see that?” said Ronnie.

  “What?”

  “That guard looked at her and bowed, practically. She must be important.”

  “That could be a problem. She might have underlings we have to get through to talk to her.”

  “I’ll look her up in the directory and see what we’re up against.” Ronnie took out her phone, found the e-mail from Hemphill, and scrolled down through the names.

  “Here come the t’s,” said Ronnie. “And here she is. Damn. She’s not a regular employee.”

  “Then what is she?”

  “A member of the board of directors.”

  Sid took out his cell phone. “Read me her office number.”

  Ronnie read the phone number from the picture of the directory while Sid punched in the digits. He put the phone on speaker.

  “Intercelleron, Miss Tilson’s office, Ellen Ryder speaking.”

  “Hello, this is Sid Abel. May I please speak with Miss Tilson?”

  “Can you tell me what this is in reference to?”

  “She’ll know my name. A-B-E-L. I’m a partner in a company the board is dealing with.”

  “Please hold.” There was a sudden lack of sound.

  While the assistant was gone, Sid covered his phone. “How did I sound?”

  “Dumb,” said Ronnie. “You ended your sentence with a preposition.”

  “She asked me what this was in reference to. I was just trying not to embarrass her. I want her to like me.”

  “You’re a master of subtlety.”

  There was a return of ambient sound, and then another female voice. “Hello, Mr. Abel. This is Kirsten Tilson. How can I help you?”

  “I’m calling as part of our investigation of James Ballantine’s death. We would like to meet with you briefly as soon as possible. It won’t take more than an hour of your time.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m surprised by your call. I’m not really the right member of the board—not the one who’s handling thi
s. We asked the CEO to take care of the Ballantine issue, and I think that he assigned Mr. Hemphill to serve as the company’s contact person. Would you like his number?”

  “No, thank you,” said Sid. “We need to speak with you personally. We just have a few questions about Mr. Ballantine, and it’s best to do these things in person.”

  “Well, I had met Mr. Ballantine, but—”

  Sid interrupted. “Yes, I know. We’ll be talking to everyone who knew him or worked with him. If you’d like to do it now, we can be at your office in ten minutes.”

  There was a moment of silence. “My schedule is very full when I’m here. I think I’d prefer to meet sometime away from the office, where we won’t disrupt the schedule and distract the office staff.”

  “If you’d prefer it, we could meet at your home this evening.”

  She was taken aback. “This evening?” She thought for a moment, and then conceded. “I can be available at eight.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  “Would you like the address?”

  “We have it,” Sid said. “See you at eight.” He ended the call.

  Ronnie looked at him. “You certainly didn’t give her much space.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” said Sid. “We can’t let this investigation get delayed and sidetracked any longer. Every day, we’re putting ourselves in front of people who want to kill us, and seem to have a lot of ways of doing it.”

  “Let’s hope that after we’re through interviewing her, she doesn’t become one of them.”

  At eight Sid and Ronnie walked up to the front door of Kirsten Tilson’s house. They had arrived just after nightfall and parked near the end of the block so they would see anyone driving along the street from either direction. They watched the house for a half hour before they got out of their car and rang her doorbell.

  When she came to the door to let them in, she was wearing a dress in a blue-and-white print that accentuated her red hair and blue eyes, and made her look softer and more feminine than her business clothes had.

  The interior of the house was modern and spare, and everything in it looked expensive. There were white stone pedestals of different heights in the foyer, each holding a single object—a celadon vase that was beautiful in its simplicity, a small bronze statue of a Thai dancer in a pointed headdress, a stone mortar and pestle. The bookshelves held antique leather-bound volumes, interspersed with a few eye-catching curiosities—a clear orange glass ball, a framed daguerreotype miniature of a young girl in a bonnet and dress with pantaloons, a cameo brooch in a velvet box.