Chapter 49
I HAD RETURNED my Camry. Pearl was off to the woods with the woman Susan insisted on calling Pearl's personal trainer. I sat in my office with coffee, going through the scrapbook of press clippings that Lily Ellsworth had given me when I first met her. I thought I remembered something, and I was right. There was a picture of Royce Garner with Mrs. Garner beside him, talking to a group of parents during the crisis. She looked like an answer to the question Why does Mr. Garner fool around? Of course, she might be a wonderful human being. But unless the camera lied flagrantly, no one would mistake her for pretty.
So it was surreptitious. Garner was cheating on his wife with Beth Ann. Why Beth Ann would wish to cheat on anyone with Royce Garner was imponderable. So I didn't ponder it. Instead, I pondered what I could do with what I had learned. After a while, I decided on B&E, with blackmail a fallback position, and took my coffee, got my gym bag of tools, went to my car, and headed out to Beth Ann's condo to implement my plan.
It was mid-morning when I got there. The sun was bright. The weather was cool. The condo parking lot was half empty. A guy in a white sleeveless undershirt was rolling a big blue trash barrel across the lot. He set it down at the far edge of the lot, beside another one, and turned and went back around the building. After he disappeared, I drove around behind the building and down a slight grade. At the basement level, a big door stood open. The guy in the undershirt came out with another big blue barrel. He had a wreath tattooed around the biceps of his left arm. I parked in a guest overflow slot near the basement door. The guy in the undershirt ignored me, and when he was out of sight, I left my car, took my small gym bag with me, and walked into the basement. I was in an open area where there were at least ten more of the big blue barrels. Ahead of me was a corridor. I went down it. There was a boiler room to the left, and at the far end, two elevators. I got in one. I punched the button for the lobby and went up.
In the lobby, I opened the front door of the building. I used my tool bag to keep it from closing, went out, found Beth Ann's name on the directory. 417. I went back in, picked up my gym bag, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.
Number 417 was at the far end of the corridor, on the left, which probably meant Beth Ann paid less for it and didn't get to look at the lake. I put my gym bag down and knocked. No answer. Breaking into a place isn't very hard if you don't mind people knowing you were there. Tossing a place and having no one know it was a little trickier. I didn't care if Beth Ann knew someone had burgled her. So with a lender pry bar and a little force, I was in quite quietly in about two minutes. The jamb was splintered a bit and the door wouldn't latch closed anymore. But no one dashed into the corridor and yelled "Stop, thief!" I closed it and put my gym bag down to keep it from swinging open, and turned my attention to the apartment.
Beth Ann was not an obsessive housekeeper. The breakfast dishes were still on the coffee table. There was lingerie on the floor of the bathroom and a bathrobe tossed across the sofa in the living room. Two empty wine bottles stood on the sideboard, and a cutting board with vestiges of cheese and stale bread sat beside them. In an alcove off the living room, behind the kitchen, was home-office space with a desk and a laptop computer and a file cabinet. The computer was a Mac, which meant I had a feeble grasp of how it worked. I turned it on, and when it lit up, I clicked on the mail icon and read her e-mail. Most of it was innocuous. There were several embarrassing e-mails from someone named roygar, whom I assumed to be Garner. But nothing that added to my sum of useful knowledge. Nothing in the computer referred to Jared.
I moved to the file cabinet and spent more than two hours going through professional mail outgoing, professional mail incoming, bills tendered, bills paid, credit-card statements, a file of clippings about the school shooting in Dowling, a file of love letters from Garner that would have made a buzzard feel queasy, and about five years' worth of at-a-glance appointment calendars, none of which told me anything more than she had a busy life. I took the love letters and put them in my gym bag.
I moved to the desk. It had a checkbook and bank statements in the center drawer. They indicated that she spent a lot of money, but nothing else. I spent an hour on the desk. If I had known what I was looking for, it would have gone faster. I could eliminate places where what I wanted wouldn't go. But since I didn't know what I was looking for, I had to look everywhere. I checked under the throw rug in the bedroom, and under the bed, and between the mattress and box spring, and in the towels folded in the closet, and the pockets of coats. I sifted through sweaters and underwear and socks. I looked in the toes of her shoes. I checked behind paintings and mirrors, under couch cushions, behind chairs. In the bathroom, I checked the toilet tank. In the kitchen, I looked into cereal boxes and sugar canisters. I checked in the oven and under the sink. I looked in the refrigerator, in the vegetable keeper, behind bottles of Perrier. I opened the freezer and found something. Under a package of frozen chicken thighs, in a plastic freezer-storage bag with a tightly sealed top, was a six-by-nine brown envelope. In the envelope were pictures of Jared Clark and Beth Ann Blair. Both were naked.
I said, "Bingo."
My voice was loud in the empty apartment.
There were five pictures; none showed them having sex, and all showed them in affectionate full-frontal nudity. Probably taken with a timer, which would be more difficult in mid-sexual congress.
She couldn't get rid of them. There was absolutely nothing else in the apartment that even hinted of any connection to Jared Clark. But whatever made a grown woman take up with an early-adolescent boy made her, in the face of all wisdom, keep these unforgiving mementos in deep concealment.
I closed the freezer, put the pictures in my gym bag along with my burglar tools, and went out of the apartment. When she came home and found she'd been broken into, she'd go straight to the freezer. In five minutes, she'd know the pictures were gone. She would be sick with worry and fear and maybe shame. Good! I took the elevator down to the lobby. There was no one in the lobby. I went out the front door and walked around the building to where I'd parked my car. The basement door was closed now. I started the car and drove out through the parking lot. All the blue barrels were lined up in an orderly row, waiting for the trash truck. The sun was in the western sky. I looked at my watch; it was after four. I -pulled out onto the highway and drove toward Cambridge to retrieve Pearl.