Somebody Else's Music(55)

PART TWO

“Iris”

—GOO GOO DOLLS





“Mercedes Benz”

—JANIS JOPLIN





“Porcelain”

—RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS





ONE





1


Her name was Christine Allison Inglerod Barr. Liz Toliver recognized her on sight, in that short moment before Gregor realized she’d come up behind him. He’d just had time to push her away and into the arms of Jimmy Card when she vomited, a thick bulk of tan and pink spraying over the front of the man’s $2,000 sports jacket. For a moment, everything was totally insane—there was Liz, and Jimmy Card, and Mark, all of whom he knew, but there was also another woman, not the nurse, not the mother, a woman with good jewelry smelling just faintly of alcohol. Gregor’s primary thought was of the integrity of the crime scene. He kept trying to herd the whole group back toward the house and as far away from the body as possible. Jimmy Card didn’t look as if he’d noticed that he’d been thrown up on. The woman with the jewelry was smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were a disaster at crime scenes. Around them, dark was falling very fast. It had to be seven o’clock. Only Mark DeAvecca and the woman with the jewelry seemed to be keeping their heads, and Gregor thought the woman with the jewelry might have other reasons for staying calm.

“It’s Chris,” Liz Toliver kept saying. “I can’t believe it. It’s Chris.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jimmy Card said. “How could this possibly have happened? I thought you were the great detective.”

“Want me to call the police?” Mark said.

“As fast as you can,” Gregor said. “Where’s your brother?”

“With the bitch nurse and Grandma. Who’s a bitch, too. Did I tell you that?”

“Call the police now. Swear like a college student later. Don’t let your brother out here to see this.”

“Right.” Mark turned on his heel and headed back to the house, with the faintly contemptuous air adolescents have when they know they’re behaving more like an adult than any of the adults.

Gregor turned his attention back to the group, now in the middle of the lawn, Liz and Jimmy huddled together, the woman with the jewelry just about to light another cigarette.

“Did you drop your cigarette butt on the lawn?” Gregor asked her.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jimmy said. “Who cares if she smokes at a time like this? I’d smoke if I still did it.”

Gregor tried to explain, patiently: the nature of forensics; the importance at crime scenes of even small things like cigarette butts and stray hairs. Liz and Jimmy looked at him as if he had to be insane. The woman with the jewelry went on smoking.

“Go back to the house,” Gregor said finally. “Just go back to the house and sit still until the police get here. You’re not doing any good where you are.”

“You have to wonder why she didn’t come to the door and ring the bell,” the woman with the jewelry said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jimmy Card said again.

Liz backed away from him. The vomit on his sports coat had rubbed off onto her sweater. They had been holding themselves against each other without thinking. She blinked at the mess and shook her head. For the first time since Gregor met her, she looked as old as she was supposed to be.

“It wasn’t a stupid question,” she said carefully. “Maris is right. You do have to wonder why she didn’t come to the door and ring the bell.”

“She didn’t do it because she was out here getting … getting …” Jimmy gave up.

“It doesn’t make any sense that she was out here,” Liz insisted. “Why would she be off by the side of the drive? And how did she get here? There’s not—”

“There is,” the woman with the jewelry said. Maris, Gregor told himself. “Her car’s down by the third bay. It’s hard to see because it’s dark. But it’s her car. I recognize it.”

They all looked toward the other end of the driveway. There were, Gregor realized, several cars now in the parking area—his own, Liz Toliver’s Mercedes, a red Jaguar he assumed must belong to Jimmy Card, and the dark car Maris had pointed to, a Volvo station wagon, the sort of car that in most places belonged to doctors’ wives. Maris took a long drag on her cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the air.

“You’ve got to assume she came here to talk to Betsy,” Maris said. “So why didn’t she just come up and ring the bell? It’s just across there. She wasn’t very far.”