An Absence of Light

Chapter 31

Paula sat in the passenger seat and used a flashlight to locate Valerie Heath’s address on the Key Map while Neuman drove, heading south out of the city on the Gulf Freeway toward Galveston. It seemed that Heath and Sheck both lived in the same area on Houston’s extreme southeastern edge, a suburban sprawl of several incorporated cities that had grown up around NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the shores of Clear Lake which was connected to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow, crooked channel. In recent years Clear Lake had become a burgeoning sport and recreational playground for Houstonians who migrated from the city to the area’s numerous yacht clubs, marinas, and restaurants.

Valerie Heath lived on a peninsular development across the lake from two of the larger yacht clubs, not far from the channel that led into Galveston Bay. The peninsula had been scored with canals along either side of which homes had been built with individual docks for each house. The streets in front of the houses ran straight into the mainland.

They found the street Heath lived on, and Neuman slowed to a crawl as they looked at the addresses perfectly stenciled on the curbs in front.

“Jesus,” Neuman said as they eased past the spotless lawns, the magnolias and palms and sprays of oleanders. “This isn’t the kind of neighborhood I’d expect a couple of hardworking secretaries to be able to afford on sharesies.”

“Oh, really?” Paula said. “You would know?”

“Hey, not this, “Neuman insisted.

“There it is,” Paula said, leaning across to peer at a house on Neuman’s side of the street “Miami Vice,” she said. It was a modern white stucco affair with a clay tile roof and a tile circular drive. There were palms scattered in front of it, and a sprinkler system was throwing up a mist that floated across the lawn in a shimmering drizzle punctuated by landscaping lights that shot up the trunks of the palms to burst into green sprays at the crowns. The windows were lighted in several rooms of the house.

Neuman went to the end of the block and turned around and came back, parking in front of the house next door.

“Look at that,” Neuman said. “We must’ve had three inches of rain in the last ten days. They’ve got that damn sprinkler system on automatic, and they just forget about it.” He cut the motor. “She drove a what?”

“A Dodge van.”

“Well… that’s not a Dodge van in the driveway,” Neuman said. The black Corvette was glistening from the mist that floated out of the green light. “And there’s no garage. If they’re going to park at this house, they’ve got to park there.”

“Maybe it’s the roommate’s.”

Neuman leaned over and popped open the glove box and started digging around. “How about some light?”

Paula flicked on the flashlight. “What are you doing?”

“I keep some IDs and stuff in here,” Neuman said, fumbling through a clutter of maps and envelopes, vitamin bottles and flashlight batteries until he found something in a single-fold leather holder. He put it in his pocket He undid his tie and grabbed his sport jacket which lay between them. “Come on.”

They got out and walked to Heath’s driveway, following it up behind the Corvette to avoid the lawn sprinkler.

“This thing is spanking new,” Neuman said. He bent down and looked at the small metal dealership logo on the lower left side of the trunk. “Bought it in El Paso.”

They went around the car and into a courtyard to the front door. The night air was sticky, coming off Galveston Bay less than three hundred yards behind them. The mumbling of an inboard motor started up somewhere in the canal behind the house, and they could hear people calling to each other, friendly voices, a woman’s laughter. The sound of the inboard grew deeper as it began moving along the canal. Neuman rang the doorbell and quickly checked the mailbox, which was empty.

“This is too damn late,” Paula objected quickly.

The woman who came to the door looked to be in her early forties. She had dark hair chopped off short and kind of ragged at the neck and was wearing a pale blue terry cloth romper set She was barefooted and holding a spatula in one hand.

“Valerie Heath?” Neuman asked.

“Yeah.” The woman looked at Neuman expectantly and then took in Paula with a quick up-and-down of her eyes.

Neuman held up the ID he had gotten out of the glove box. “I’m Raymond Stuffier and this is my assistant Gail Aldridge. We’re with American Universal Life Insurance Group-”

“You gotta be kidding,” Heath interrupted him. “You people must be desperate.”

She was closing the door, but Neuman’s hand stopped it as he said:

“Ms. Aldridge is the woman who called you today about Colleen Synar.”

The door stopped, the woman’s face went slack, and her eyes returned to Paula. She opened her mouth, but said nothing.

Neuman didn’t wait. “Ms. Heath, I’ll quickly explain,” he said, talking fast. “We are client locators for American Universal. Ms. Synar’s father died five weeks ago. He had a thirty-thousand-dollar policy with us and had named Ms. Synar as the beneficiary. Now we’ve got to find her within the next forty days or so or she forfeits being able to collect. We are obligated by our charter to make every effort to find these beneficiaries, but, frankly, you’re the closest we’ve been able to come to Ms. Synar.”

The woman’s mouth was hanging open slightly, and she seemed to be trying to decide what to do. The smell of frying food was coming out of the house.

“Do I smell something burning?” Neuman asked.

“Oh, shit.” The woman turned, leaving the door open, and fast-walked back into the house.

Neuman looked at Paula. “She’s sure as hell not the woman in the photograph on Synar’s Contributor ID sheet.” He turned back and shouted into the house.

“Can we come in, Ms. Heath? Thank you very much…”He looked at Paula again and tilted his head for her to follow. “I really appreciate this,” he said, keeping his voice loud so that she would know he was coming in, though he counted on her being too busy to object “This isn’t going to take but just a minute of your time. We’re out of the Baltimore office, Ms. Aldridge and I are, but we’ve been from one side of this country to the other looking for Ms. Synar-”

“Look, just wait a damn minute…” the woman was saying. She was standing at the stove frantically taking up whatever it was she was cooking. The stove was behind a bar that looked out into a family room at the end of a broad entrance hall through which they had just walked. Neuman and Paula were standing in the middle of the room looking at her across the bar. In the brighter light of the kitchen Neuman could see that Valerie Heath’s hair was an unnatural pitch black and though he still guessed her to be in her early forties, he could see now that they must have been a hard forty years.

Neuman quickly assessed the contents of the house. The place didn’t look as if it was occupied on a regular basis. There were only a couple of pictures on the walls, generic seascapes, and only the bare minimum of furniture. The bar behind which Valerie Heath was trying to rescue her food was bare, no personal items such as a few favorite seashells or goofy ceramic knickknacks or photographs of people or pets. The house looked like it was a time-share property and no one ever lived there long enough to really make it feel like a home.

Valerie Heath finally got the stove under control with a good deal of banging and flinging, and then she came around the counter where they were standing in the middle of the room. Smoke was filling the kitchen, and she marched over to a glass wall and pulled apart double sliding glass doors to open the family room to a stone patio and the canal. There were a lot of banana plants and potted palms and the glimmering lights of other houses across the narrow canal. A cabin cruiser was docked immediately across from them.

“Now listen to me,” she said, turning away from the doors and planting herself in front of them, hands on her hips. The terry cloth romper had seen better days. It was stretched out of shape, and its elastic top, having been hoisted up many times too many over her pendulous, sun-speckled bosoms, was oozing down with each flounce of her body. “I don’t know a goddamned thing about… Colleen Synar,” she blurted, one hand flying up from her hip to poke around in her matte black hair before going back to her hip. “I’ve told her”-she nodded at Paula-”all I know about it… her… Synar.”

“Ms. Heath”-Neuman twisted his head around, stretching his neck as if it was stiff-”if you could give us just five minutes…” He let his shoulders slump. “We’ve been working night and day on this; I mean, that’s why we’re here so late. We’re under the gun on the deadline on this thing. If we don’t put an all-out effort into this it could look bad, you know, like American Universal didn’t try to find the beneficiary so we wouldn’t have to pay out the indemnity.”

Valerie Heath stood in front of them and studied them. She was practically devoid of eyelashes, which made her common brown eyes smaller in a face otherwise dominated by generous features, a rather wide mouth-with a tender-looking fever blister in its right corner-heavy cheekbones, and a nose that was somehow masculine in its proportions. Her skin had forfeited a lot of its resiliency and whatever beauty it might have had to the unforgiving Texas coastal sun. She was angry and didn’t try to hide it, but Neuman knew that she had to be curious too. Pissed and curious.

“Five minutes,” she snapped.

“I appreciate this, Ms. Heath,” Neuman said quickly as he guided Paula around a coffee table strewn with magazines and newspapers to a sofa against the wall facing the kitchen. “I really, really do.” They sat down.

Valerie Heath reached down and snatched a pack of cigarettes off the coffee table and lighted the cigarette with a little sports car. When you mashed the trunk, the hood flew up to reveal the wick and flame.

She turned and got a chair from a chrome-and-glass table near the bar. The shorts of her jumpsuit were slightly soiled on the seat, old stains that would no longer wash out, and the limp legs of the misshapen shorts revealed too much of how she was put together in that region, more than she would have wanted anyone to see. But that was the furthest thing from her mind at the moment. As she sat down in the chair facing them across the coffee table, she was not only pissed and curious, she was nervous. She dragged on the cigarette and then held it aloft in her right hand, her elbow resting on her other forearm which lay across her stomach. Neuman noticed her fingernails were short, the dull red polish flaking off. She periodically puckered the side of her mouth that had the fever blister. The lady was tense.

“How long did Ms. Synar live with you?” Neuman asked quickly, getting right to it, making every effort to accommodate her obvious wish for him to get the hell out as soon as possible.

“Two years.”

“Even?”

“What?” She glared at him.

“Two years even?”

“Yeah,” she said acidly, daring him to challenge the fact “Even.”

“Ms. Aldridge checked Los Angeles and New York,” Neuman said. “There aren’t any Synars there.”

Valerie Heath glanced at Paula and shrugged. Not her problem.

“Where did she work when she was living with you?” Neuman had his notebook out and was pretending to take notes, his arms on his knees as he sat forward and read from the notebook on the coffee table.

“You don’t know where she was working?”

“On our policy forms,” Neuman said, sighing hugely and pretending an impatient weariness at having to back up and bring her up to speed, “our policy holders are asked to list their beneficiaries’ name, address, place of employment, date of birth, and Social Security number. Now, since this policy was taken out nearly eight years ago, and had not been updated-people never update them, they should, but they never do-everything on it was stale except her date of birth and Social Security number. Okay? So we had to start from scratch. In the past couple of weeks we’ve come this far, right here to you. And you say you haven’t seen her in almost two years. If I knew where she was working at the time maybe there would be someone there who was close to her and would know more about where she might be or maybe they’re even still in touch with her.”

Valerie Heath studied him. She had crossed one leg over the other and was swinging it gingerly, the cellulite dimpling the lower sides of her weathered thighs. If Neuman had guessed right, she was one hell of a confused woman right now, and he didn’t think she was having any luck puzzling through it.

“And you traced her to here,” she said stiffly, slapping the cigarette in her mouth and sucking on it.

Neuman nodded his head slowly.

She glared at him, her eyes flat with anger.

“You told Ms. Aldridge that you had another woman living with the two of you at that time,” Neuman said. “Is she still with you?”

“No.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s moved.”

“Oh. Well, do you know where she moved to? Maybe she knew where Ms. Synar went after she left here.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

Neuman nodded. “What was her name?”

This last question seemed to bring Valerie Heath to the boiling point.

“Look, goddamn it, I don’t know you from Adam,” she said. “You just walk in here…” She was shaking her head in frustration. “Let me see that ID again.”

“Oh, sure,” Neuman said, and he took it out of his pocket once more, stood, and leaned across the coffee table to hand it to her. This time she actually read the card which, of course, she hadn’t done when Neuman first showed it to her. Moving it away from her until it came into focus at about arm’s length, she concentrated on the words though her hand was shaking so badly Neuman couldn’t imagine how she could read it As she squinted at the ID, Neuman nudged Paula with his knee and tapped the mailing label on one of the magazines lying upside down on the coffee table.

After studying the card a moment, Valerie Heath gestured at Neuman with it though she didn’t get up. Neuman stood again and took it back.

“I’m going to check you out, mister,” Valerie Heath threatened, her lips quivering with emotion. “Tomorrow I’m calling… I’m checking you out, mister. I’m not going to answer any more questions.”

“Ms. Heath,” Neuman said slowly. “Please, I can assure you…”

Valerie Heath jumped to her feet, almost losing her romper top which she quickly retrieved, yanking up on the sides.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said. She was trembling, her eyes blinking furiously, her anger tinged with something besides antagonism.

Neuman and Paula stood, and Neuman started to say something else, but Valerie Heath beat him to it.

“Get out of here!” She stretched a leathery arm toward the front door, a trail of cigarette ashes following the arc of her gesture.

“Look, I apologize if I offended you”-Neuman was keeping up the patter all the way to the door-”but I had to ask these questions. I mean, this is just part of the job. It’s what we have to do if we’re going to help…”

They were outside, and Valerie Heath slammed the door behind them.

“Jesus,” Paula gasped as they walked out through the courtyard. “I thought she was going to start hitting you. I really thought she was going to.”

“You were a lot of help in there, Paula,” Neuman said, grinning at her.

“Next time, hotshot, why don’t you let me in on the game plan and you might get some help. What did you expect me to do?”

They walked back along the drive through the drifting mist of the sprinkler system which was still hissing.

“What was your impression?” Neuman asked as they got into the car.

“Well, for starters, it was a total washout She didn’t give us one ounce of information we didn’t already know.”

“Yeah, but what was your impression about how she reacted to the whole thing about Colleen Synar?”

Paula thought a second. “Frightened. Yeah, she seemed scared, actually. And confused.”

“Yeah, I thought so too,” Neuman said, starting up the car. “And I noticed she didn’t threaten to call the cops if we didn’t get out.” He turned on the headlights and drove past the house. When he got to the intersection where the street entered the mainland, he made a U-turn and started back.

“What’s the deal?” Paula said. “You’re not going to go back there…”

“Just wait a second,” he said. He cut his headlights just before reaching the house again and glided past, doubling back at the end of the street. He pulled to the curb and parked behind one of several cars between him and Valerie Heath’s. He cut the motor.

“I think we really rattled her cage,” Neuman said. “You saw the name on the magazine subscription label?”

“Irene Whaley.”

Neuman picked up the radio and called in the license plate on the Corvette. Paula rolled down her window and flapped the top of her dress for air. The night had grown sultry and with the dead air came an occasional waft of strong harbor odors. When the call came back on the car they both listened. It belonged to Frances Rupp, same address.

Paula looked at Neuman. “What the hell’s going on?”

Neuman shook his head, watching the house. “I do not know.” And then: “Okay, here we go.”

Valerie Heath came out of the front courtyard gates in a hurry. She was still wearing her less than wonderful romper, still smoking furiously, and she was carrying a purse with a shoulder strap. They heard the chirrup of the security system on the car as she hit the disarm button on her key chain, and in a matter of moments she was in the car and was pulling out of the driveway.

“We’re going to follow her?” Paula asked.

They watched her taillights grow smaller and smaller.

“You’d better move it, Casey. She’s-”

“I’m not going to follow her,” Neuman said, taking off his tie and jacket and tossing them in the back seat He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt “I’m going to go around to the back of her place and get her trash. Watch for me at the left front corner of the house. When you see me, pull up into the driveway.’