Crime Scene

Chapter 34

Lydia Delavigne — Rennert’s ex-wife; Tatiana’s mother — lived on the thirty-first floor of a newly built high-rise in San Francisco, a torqued platinum phallus blocks from the Embarcadero.

I left my car with the valet, made myself known to the concierge. While he called up to her “suite” I answered another email from Amy, confirming our plans for that evening.

The concierge said, “You can go up.”

I headed for the elevator bank.

A high-speed car shot into the sky, spat me out into a silent corridor carpeted in near-black blue and painted barely-above-white gray.

A woman was waiting in the doorway to 3109. She was thin, her spine arrow-straight, making the most of her small stature. Black hair tied in a tight bun; ivory skin, with smoky nuances, same as Tatiana. She wore black leggings, navy shoes with kitten heels, a billowing gray silk tunic patterned with deep-blue butterflies.

Color-coordinated with the hallway.

“Behold,” she said, “the man fucking my daughter.”

What can you say to that other than nothing?

She didn’t seem bothered. It was more like she was assigning me a classification.

She went inside, leaving me to follow.

She kicked off her shoes in the entry hall and padded ahead.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said.

Her apartment evoked The Future, circa 1975: a single room, open, vaulted, and finished in white from top to bottom — surfaces, fixtures, and furnishings. It made for disorienting effect, washing away depth and compressing space. Steps led down to a sunken sitting area with two white sofas, a lustrous white coffee table, piles of white pillows on a stitched cowhide rug.

In its immensity, its blankness, the place felt like a photographic and philosophical negative to Walter Rennert’s attic. Their marriage must’ve been interesting.

“Tea?” she said, moving toward the kitchen area, a speed kettle already piping.

“Yes, please.” I faced the eastern wall, a solid sheet of glass overlooking the Financial District, skyscrapers reduced to ash by a scouring midwinter sun. “Nice view.”

“On a clear day you can see forever.”

“How many clear days do you get a year?”

“Not a one,” she said gaily. “But who wants to see forever? That sounds hideous.”

She brought a tray down to the sitting area and placed it on the table, curling up against the sofa arm, her legs folded beneath her. She had tiny hands; tiny, delicate fingers. They barely reached around her mug. The veins in her neck and wrists were Delft blue. The resemblance to Tatiana was so striking that her comment about sex began to bother me.

She sidled closer, allowing the tunic to ride up. My chest got tight.

She said, “Beauty is editing.”

I took a gulp, scalding the roof of my mouth. “Tatiana said the same thing.”

Lydia halted her advance. “Did she.”

“She said she’s a minimalist at heart.”

“I’m sure she would never admit that to me.”

“She doesn’t seem to have a problem admitting things to you.”

“Who else should she tell, if not her mother?”

“Is she required to tell anyone?”

“Oh but yes,” she said. “Otherwise it might never have happened. We talk, we share our experiences, so that we exist.”

She lolled back, inspecting me. “You know, she said you were a big boy, but hearing and seeing are not the same. Don’t worry, she didn’t go into excessive detail. Look, you’re blushing, how perfectly charming.”

“How’s it going for her in Portland?”

“If you’re fishing to find out whether she returned, she did. A few days ago.”

I set the mug aside. “Does she know I’m here?”

“Not yet. Should we make it our little secret?”

“No need,” I said. “If you speak to her, send my best.”

“If I speak to her before you do, I will,” Lydia said. She mirrored me, putting down her own mug. “I birthed a free spirit, I honored that as I raised her, allowing her to be who she wanted to be. Watching her evolve was lovely. She’s always been so much like me. Though by her age, I’d accomplished what I’d set out to accomplish.”

Her arms had begun to twine toward the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or simply a reflex — the world her stage.

“Yet despite that” — she wilted — “a critical piece of my psyche remained unfinished: I wasn’t free. It had of course to do with my own mother. She was such a terrible scold. Art to her was a competition. I wasn’t going to make that mistake with my child.”

She smiled. “I know you must miss Tatiana, how could you not? But it’s for the best. You’re an authority figure by nature. You can boss her around but it will never work.”

“I wouldn’t dream of trying.”

“Oh, don’t say that, don’t ever say that. What else have we, but our dreams?”

Said the woman in the eight-million-dollar apartment.

“So,” she said, “young, strapping Mr. Edison, what can I do for you? I know you didn’t come here to talk about her. Or did you?” She leaned in. “I do hope you aren’t going to ask me to carry a message to her.”

“I’m not.”

“Good, because I’m enjoined against that. By the rules of rational parenting: we all must make our own choices. Although if you give up that easily, then you don’t deserve her.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

Having won her point, she smiled again, though I detected a certain disappointment that I hadn’t fought back. “Tell me, then, what are we going to talk about?”

“Dr. Rennert,” I said.

“Ah,” she said.

“I understand you two kept in touch after the divorce.”

“Naturally. We’re connected on a cellular level. Our living styles became incompatible but that doesn’t mean he ceased to adore me and I, him. The same applies to everyone I’ve loved. The web of intimacy, sticky and ever-expanding.”

She pursed her lips, kissed air, looking as satisfied as though she’d made contact with flesh. “I don’t believe we’re meant as a species to be monogamous.”

“Right.”

“Nobody is perfect,” she said. “And thank goodness, perfect is boring. Walter wasn’t perfect, though he would’ve liked people to think he was. Do you believe — do you expect me to believe — that he didn’t take his fair share of comfort in the arms of others? I don’t begrudge anyone the pursuit of happiness.”

“It’s his connection to Julian Triplett that interests me.”

Another disappointed nod. “If we must.”

“You’ve been expecting this conversation,” I said.

“At some point, perhaps. I didn’t expect to be having it with you.”

“Who, then?”

“Tatiana, if she took the time to find out. Has she?”

“Not in detail.”

“You’ve tried to discuss it with her,” she said. “She got angry. Yes?”

I stared.

Lydia Delavigne said, “A mother knows. She idolized Walter. And idealized him. And he encouraged it.”

“Aside from you, did he tell anyone else about his relationship with Triplett?”

“Oh no. He was afraid of more scandal. For himself and for the boy.” She smiled. “I’m extraordinarily discreet. It’s one of my best qualities.”

“Clearly.”

“That’s very sweet of you to say,” she said. “May I ask what led you to investigate?”

“The rocking chair.”

She shuddered. “That thing. It put a nobler face on what was essentially charity. You know, teach a man to fish, versus give him a hunk of halibut. Walter tried to convince me to buy one, as well. I said let’s not get carried away.”

I said, “How did it start between them?”

She sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s much harm in telling you, now that he’s gone... He wrote the boy a letter.”

“While Triplett was in prison?”

“I warned him not to. I thought it was unhealthy. But he got into one of his righteous funks.”

“When did this happen?”

“Oh, don’t quiz me, it’s boring. Three or four years after the fact? We were still married. I remember Walter’s excitement when he got the reply. What do you know, but it was quite articulate, too, once you got past the atrocious spelling and grammar. They corresponded for a while. Eventually Walter went to visit him, where they kept him.”

“How many times?”

“More than once. I wasn’t keeping count. The boy had no one.”

“He had a sister.”

“Well, all I know is that Walter felt he had a moral obligation.”

“To do what.”

Her answer surprised me. “I suppose you could say he viewed it as a personal research project,” she said. “An attempt to grapple with the same question he always grappled with. How does it happen that a person can come to commit such a horrible act?”

I said, “Triplett was a case study?”

“You make it sound so sterile... No. It was never Walter’s intention to exploit. And he never could have published it, that would have been impossible.”

“Then what was he trying to accomplish?”

“He was curious,” she said. “One of his best qualities.”

She took a sip of tea. “Walter was very badly beaten as a child. Did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“His own father was a wicked man. Creative, but horrible. That’s not accidental. True cruelty is its own form of genius. He owned property all over San Francisco.”

“That’s where the money comes from.”

“You didn’t think Walter got rich in a lab, did you? The house he grew up in — it’s still there, in Pacific Heights. Landmarked. Some twenty-five-year-old computer person lives there now... Walter showed me pictures once. There’s a grand marble foyer, and a pair of staircases, shaped like this.”

She traced a female form.

“When Randolph — that was his father — when he wanted to punish Walter, he would make him run up one side and down the other, for hours on end. If he slowed down, or tripped, Randolph would whip him.”

I said, “Does Tatiana know about this?”

“Certainly not. And you’re not to tell her. I’m only telling you so that you’ll understand why Walter was so drawn to darkness. It mesmerized him. It wasn’t simple voyeurism. He genuinely wanted to understand. That’s how it started, at any rate. With time, I think he came to view the boy as a kind of ward.”

“When did Walter start supplying him meds?”

“After his release. Practically from day one. It was the right thing to do. They just punted him out and locked the gate behind. Shameful, but predictable.”

“Did he give him anything else? Money?”

“It’s certainly possible. By then I had moved out. I didn’t keep close tabs.”

“I’m trying to figure out how Walter felt comfortable hanging out with a convicted murderer. Having him over to the house.”

“I suppose he was confident in his own ability to manage the situation.”

“Ms. Delavigne, did your ex-husband ever express the belief that Julian Triplett was innocent?”

“Not in so many words.”

“But?”

“Well, actions speak louder, don’t they.”

“Which actions do you mean?”

For the first time her bravado seemed to falter. She pursed her lips. “More tea?”

We’d hardly touched the mugs, but before I could answer she had snatched them up and carried them to the kitchen, dumping them out in the sink. She poured refills. To her own mug she added a slug of caramel-colored liquid from a bottle kept in a drawer. She did not offer to do the same for me.

I waited for her to return to the couch. “I spoke to Nicholas Linstad’s ex-wife, Olivia,” I said. “She told me Walter regarded Linstad as a surrogate son.”

Lydia said, “Well, he would have. You’ve never met his sons from his first marriage.”

I shook my head.

“They have more in common with their mother than with Walter.”

“How’s that.”

“Materialistic.”

I bit my tongue.

“Not to mention that they moved away,” she said. “Far, far away, making it clear that they had no intention to return. Walter took their life choices as personal insults.”

“And Nicholas?”

“He didn’t need to be grasping,” she said. “He’d married up. With Walter he could afford to play the intellectual.”

“Meaning, he wasn’t, really.”

“I don’t know if Nicholas was really anything, at his core,” Lydia said. “He was magnetic. Let’s give him that. Handsome, intelligent, capable of making conversation with anyone — for a short while. He had the most intense gaze. It made you feel as if you were the only person in the world that mattered. That Scandinavian sangfroid. You could interpret it as interest, if you wanted to see it as such. Personally, I was impervious. But Walter was rather swept off his feet.”

“When did they fall out?”

“I couldn’t give you a date and time,” she said. “As I said, I was no longer around.”

“It seems like Walter tried to stand up for him during the internal hearing,” I said. “Deflect some of the blame.”

“Yes.”

“So at that point, at least, they were still close.”

“Yes, noble Walter, falling on his sword. You see, my dear, what you fail to grasp is how much it pleased him to martyr himself.”

The notion of Rennert as masochist rang true. And it pointed to a line of succession for Walter Rennert’s self-destructive affection: from his sons to Linstad. From Linstad to Triplett.

Not much room left for Tatiana. With her, the pattern was reversed: she was the one sacrificing herself for him.

I said, “What caused the rift between him and Linstad?”

“Everyone disappoints in the end.”

A logical conclusion for a woman married five times. “How did Walter react to the news of Nicholas’s death?”

No answer.

“He talked to you about everything else,” I said. “He didn’t talk to you about that?”

For a moment she sat motionless.

She said, “Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: I don’t know where the boy is now.”

She looked at me. “All right? You can put me in the rack, it won’t do any good.”

I nodded.

She cleared her throat, took a sip of her tea. “The night Nicholas died, Walter phoned me up.” She paused, corrected: “Not that night, the next day, early. He said he needed to see me, right away. He was adamant. He said, ‘I can’t drive, you have to come here.’ I refused, of course, and next thing I know he’s pounding at my door. I was living in the Sunset then. He showed up looking like a wet dog, with his hair stuck down to the top of his scalp. He was drunk, which I suppose is why he didn’t want to drive. I almost slammed the door in his face but he looked so pitiful. He said, ‘There’s been an accident.’ ”

“What kind of accident?”

“He wouldn’t elaborate,” she said. “He had the boy with him in the car. He asked, would I put him up for a few days while he thought things through. The place I was in had a little garage. I said he could sleep there temporarily.” Wistful smile. “That tells you what you need to know about the depth of our love. For all I knew, I was sheltering a killer. But Walter assured me I’d be safe, and I trusted him.”

“How long did Triplett stay with you?”

“Walter picked him up the next day.”

“Where did they go?”

She shook her head. “I told you. I don’t know.”

I assumed she was lying. But I could detect her patience thinning, and I didn’t think that going at her any harder would yield the truth.

“You never reported any of this,” I said.

“Report what? I had no idea Nicholas had died until weeks later. Then I drew my own conclusions.”

“That?”

“The boy had killed Nicholas, Walter was protecting him.”

“Is that what you still believe?”

She said, “I believe people get what they deserve.”