Baptism in Blood(103)
“I know,” Gregor said. “Let’s go look in the dresser.”
“For you don’t know what.”
“Right.”
It was, Gregor thought then, very good for him that he was now a famous man. This was the kind of behavior the police did not put up with from people who were nobody in particular. Gregor went over to the dresser and opened the top drawer. It felt clumsy in his hands. His fingers didn’t seem to work right in the cotton gloves. He pulled the drawer out as far as it would go without falling on his feet and then felt along the bottom of it, but there was nothing. Then he drew the drawer all the way out and put it on the floor. It was filled with good silk underwear, trimmed in lace, in five muted but distinctive colors. Gregor knew nothing at all about women’s underwear, but he knew expensive when he saw it, and this stuff was definitely expensive. It was outrageously expensive. It was so expensive, even Bennis didn’t own anything like it, and Bennis truly loved to spend money.
”Underwear,” Clayton Hall said. “Really great underwear. But that’s all there is.”
Gregor ignored him and slid out the second drawer. He checked its underside, as he had with the first, and then he pulled it all the way out, too. This one was filled with sweaters, all cashmere, all impossibly thick. Gregor checked each and every one of them, carefully running his hands up the sleeves and down under the necks. There was nothing.
“I wonder what something like this costs.” Clayton Hall picked up a long black turtleneck tunic.
Gregor might know nothing about women’s underwear, but he knew a great deal about women’s sweaters. Bennis practically lived for sweaters. “About six or seven hundred dollars,” he told Clayton Hall as he went back to the dresser for the third drawer.
Clayton let the sweater fall back onto the pile from which it had come. “Six or seven hundred dollars? For one sweater?”
Gregor checked under the third drawer and then pulled it out. This one had more sweaters, but cotton ones, and what seemed like hundreds of silk scarves. Gregor stepped back and looked around the room. This was ridiculous. He was going about it entirely the wrong way. If he was Zhondra Meyer, where would he have hidden it? He had no doubt that she would have hidden it. She wouldn’t have kept it in her desk. It would have been too easily found there. She wouldn’t have put it in her safe. She wouldn’t have had easy access to it there and besides, someone might suspect. Where would she have put it? Or, Gregor amended in his head, more likely, them.
Zhondra Meyer’s bedroom had enough furniture in it to stock a warehouse. Besides the dresser and the wardrobe and the bed, and the chair that had been used to make it look like Zhondra had killed herself, there were two more dressers and another wardrobe. In front of the fireplace there were two green velvet-covered wing chairs and a long oval coffee table. The coffee table was covered with photographs in silver frames. Both the photographs and the frames were old. Gregor saw a picture of a man and woman in twenties hairstyles and full riding habits, leaning against each other and laughing.
“That’s it,” he said.
“What’s it?” Clayton asked.
Gregor picked up one of the frames. “That’s where she hid them,” he said. “Or some of them. There could be dozens and dozens around this house. But maybe not. Maybe they’re all here.”
“What are here?”
“Zhondra Meyer’s personal insurance policy against untoward publicity.” Gregor opened the back of the frame and peeled away the stiff cardboard backing. He took out the three small snapshots that had been stuffed back there and looked at them. They were not photographs of anyone he knew, just pictures of women, naked, making love to other women.
“Jesus,” Clayton Hall said. “What was she doing? Peddling pornography on the side?”
“Zhondra Meyer didn’t have to peddle pornography,” Gregor told him. “She just wanted to keep her name out of the papers. I should have realized there would be something like these around. She’s been remarkably lucky about her publicity for this place. Not a single disgruntled recanter. Not a single confused, lonely, psychologically disturbed woman going to the press with—well, God knows what.”
“Goddess worship,” Clayton Hall said.
Gregor was opening photograph frame after photograph frame, but coming up with nothing but more women and more women. He came upon a picture of Alice in a very embarrassing position and passed it by immediately. He had no wish to shame or embarrass anyone. Maybe there were other places in the house where pictures were hidden. Maybe he would look and look, and never find what he was looking for.