Thought I Knew You(33)
Call Karen at Omni S.D. The note was jotted sideways, as if the book had been held at an angle, perhaps while he was on the phone, holding it between his ear and his chin, searching for something to write on. S.D. San Diego? Two of the four times, we believe he was in San Diego. I hit the power button on the computer. Having not been booted up in two months, the machine took a few minutes to come to life. Once the familiar desktop appeared, I opened the web browser and Googled “Omni San Diego.” Omni San Diego Hotel appeared at the top of the searches.
I ran downstairs and found the piece of paper I had used to document the dates. Back upstairs, I picked up the phone and dialed the number on the screen before I could think myself out of it.
“Omni San Diego Hotel. This is John. How may I help you?”
“Hi, my name is Claire Barnes. I have a credit card statement saying that my husband Greg Barnes stayed at the Omni on May twenty-second, but he swore he stayed at the…” I referred to the screen and picked the next hotel down the list “… the Chariot.” I forced a laugh. “I’m sorry. He travels practically weekly for work. It’s impossible for us to keep all this straight, so we just now realized the discrepancy. Can you look to see if a Greg Barnes checked in on May twenty-second?”
“Let me check that for you, Mrs. Barnes.” The man’s tone was crisply official. After a moment, he came back on the line. “Mrs. Barnes, would you be okay with verifying your home address?” I rattled off our home address. “Yes, we have a Greg Barnes listed here on that date.”
I thanked him, hung up, and called Detective Reynolds. When he picked up, I ran through my discovery. “Do you think it means anything?” I asked.
“We’ve checked a lot of this already, but nothing’s popped.” The loud crinkling of shuffling papers came through the phone. “Hold on, okay?” When he came back on the line three minutes later, he seemed interested. “Yep, we show a corporate credit card charge on May twenty-second for the Omni. In February, he stayed at… hmm… the Grand Del Mar, it looks like.” He let out a low whistle. “That’s a five-star hotel. Surely his company wouldn’t pay for that.”
“No. But they have a special ‘cheating on your spouse’ policy that allows you to use your corporate credit card for personal expenses, and they take it out of your paycheck.”
“Wouldn’t the spouse realize the paycheck was about four hundred dollars short?”
“I wouldn’t. I don’t manage the money. I used to like it that way. I’m rethinking that.”
Detective Reynolds cleared his throat. “Okay, so we know where he stayed in San Diego. We knew that before, from his credit card statements. But what does that get us?”
“Nothing, I guess.” I slumped in the chair. “Who is Karen? Maybe she’s our mystery woman?”
“We’re considering it. We’ve pulled the guest lists for all the times Greg stayed at the Omni, and there were a few Karens, but none that would fit our mystery woman. They all were there with families or other people, and none of them knew Greg.” He was quiet for a moment. “But that doesn’t really mean anything. I’d be skeptical that she was even registered, much less had her own room.”
True. If Greg were cheating on me, he wouldn’t have paid for two rooms. We chatted for a few more minutes about the holiday and hung up.
I opened the bottom drawer of the desk. I desperately needed to understand our finances. I pulled a handful of the files and fanned them on the desk. Each file had a label: ING, First Bank, and then one labeled “Inheritance.” The last one commanded my attention. The first page, dated the previous January, looked like a standard bank statement. The sequential pages dated all the way back to May 2001. The statements had Greg’s and my name in the top left-hand corners. In the description column, several transactions were recorded, with interest added and at what percent. When my gaze traveled to the bottom right-hand column, I blinked to see if I had misread the number. The figure next to “Total” was $657,997.23.
I couldn’t comprehend that number. Did that mean six hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars? How was that possible? Was that ours? I grabbed the file for ING and scanned the contents. The Total column there was less impressive, only about eight thousand dollars and change. I did the same for First Bank and was relieved to discover that, as of September, we had enough in our checking account to cover the checks I’d been haphazardly writing, although I desperately needed to go lighter on my credit card. I doubted what we had in checking would cover what I’d charged over the last two months. We. We didn’t have anything in checking. We did have a moderate savings account, both of our names typed officially at the top of the statement.