Accustomed to the Dark Page 8

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “It was as though she’d been pressed beneath the weight of that house, like a flower.” She paused. “I would’ve liked to help her. I did try to help her, over the years. But it’s terribly difficult to help someone who doesn’t really want your help, isn’t it? And eventually, out of a kind of moral laziness, I suppose, you stop trying.” She shrugged, embarrassed again, at the sadness in her voice, perhaps, or at her failure.

  “I have a feeling,” I said, “that there wasn’t much you could’ve done to help Sylvia.”

  She shook her head. “But it’s all so dreadful. Drugs, guns. Helping prisoners escape.” She looked at me. “Convicted killers. That’s what the radio said.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s so dreadful.” She shook her head again. “What on earth is she doing?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have any photographs of Sylvia, Mrs. Rudoph?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  I nodded.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked me. “Will you be calling the police?”

  “I don’t have any real evidence against Sylvia. Just the word of a man whose word isn’t very good.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You broke into Sylvia’s house, didn’t you? To look around. To investigate. You were inside while I was watering the roses. That’s why I didn’t see you come up.”

  I smiled. “If I admitted to that, Mrs. Rudolph, I’d be admitting to a felony.”

  Her face was serious. “But if you had gone through the house, hypothetically speaking, and if you’d found anything helpful, then you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

  I smiled again. “I’m not so sure that’s true. But you’ve been very helpful yourself.”

  She waved that away. “But what are you going to do?”

  “Sylvia left a bag of garbage in her backyard. I’m going to go through it.”

  “Garbage?” She blinked.

  “People sometimes get careless about what they throw away. Maybe Sylvia did.”

  “But is that legal? Going through someone’s garbage?”

  “Once something’s been put in the garbage, it essentially becomes public property.” Essentially, this wasn’t true. According to the Supreme Court, the garbage had to be on a public thoroughfare. Technically, by lifting the garbage from Sylvia’s lawn, I was guilty of trespass.

  She thought about that for a moment. “Well,” she said finally, “if you say so.” She didn’t seem entirely convinced. “But I think I should be with you when you do it.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve really only this man’s word, you said. About Sylvia. And his word isn’t necessarily good, you said. Suppose you’re wrong, suppose Sylvia had nothing to do with the jailbreak. Or the drugs. Or any of it. Maybe there’s some other explanation for all this. The RV, the vacation. Everything. I’m sure your heart’s in the right place, Mr. Croft, and I don’t mean to be obstructive. But it seems to me that someone should be there with you, someone who can … protect Sylvia’s interests.” She frowned once more. “Does that sound silly?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I told her. “Do you have a plastic tarp?”

  She didn’t, but she had some large garbage bags of her own. She also had a pair of rubber gloves, and she lent them to me. She walked along beside me as I carried everything across the street and behind Sylvia’s house. I unfolded the bags, four of them, and spread them out along the lawn near the garbage can. I put on the gloves, lifted the lid, set it on the grass, hauled the garbage from the can, set it down on the outspread bags. I used my pocket knife to cut the string. Carefully, I began to shake the trash loose from the bag.

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Rudolph.

  I had seen it, too. A small yellow bird, a parakeet, had been lying at the top of the garbage. It tumbled out across the black plastic and onto the grass and it lay there, stiff and still, like a child’s discarded toy.

  12

  I LET GO of the bag, squatted down beside the bird, picked it up. Its soft yellow feathers were smooth and unruffled but its opened eyes were filmed with dust.

  Mrs. Rudolph said, “Sylvia had a parakeet?”

  I lay the bird down on the ground and I stood. “Not anymore.”

  “But why … how did it die?”

  “Its neck’s been broken.”

  She sucked in a sharp breath. “She killed it?”

  “Someone did.”

  “But that’s so … so heartless. So cold. How could anyone do something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I thought I did. The parakeet had been put into the bag last, and it seemed likely to me that it had been put in there by Sylvia. Maybe this had been the last act she’d performed before she drove away in her dandy new RV. Maybe she had hesitated before she killed it. Maybe she had told herself that she was doing the best thing, the only thing. But in the end she had broken its neck, swiftly and firmly, as though she were breaking the link between herself and her past.

  Mrs. Rudolph was thinking the same, perhaps. “Poor Sylvia,” she said sadly.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She took in a long deep breath. “It’s such a waste. Such a terrible waste. She was such a sweet little girl. Years ago. She really was. I felt so sorry for her, living in that house. And I just stood by and watched her grow older and more and more … enclosed.” She lifted her chin. “I still feel sorry for her.”

  “So do I,” I said. I bent down, lifted the bag, began to shake the garbage loose again.

  It was clear from what she’d left behind that Sylvia had made a break with her past. I found the kind of things I had expected to find in the medicine cabinet: a can of hairspray, a bottle of Midol, some old lipsticks, a tube of toothpaste squeezed flat. Amid the limp fruits and vegetables I found her credit cards, American Express, Visa, and Master, all three neatly scissored into quarters. Next to these I found her driver’s license, some folded grocery coupons, and a receipt, dated two weeks ago, for the purchase of a Colt Python and a .22 caliber Beretta semiautomatic. Probably she had emptied her wallet, cut the cards, and then tossed everything into the trash. I set the receipt aside, on the grass.

  I looked at the small picture on the driver’s license. A thin woman, a sharp nose, a narrow mouth, brown hair swept back over her ears, hiding them. I put the license beside the receipt.

  Stuck to an empty milk carton I found a slip of paper with a phone number scribbled across it. I recognized the area code—Denver. Above the number, someone had scrawled, “Call Lyle Saturday!!!!” The phrase had been underlined twice, and the handwriting resembled the signature on the driver’s license. I put the slip on the grass.

  Lucero and Martinez had escaped from the penitentiary on Saturday night.

  Toward the bottom of the bag, beneath some coffee grounds, I found a sodden mass of what had once been photographs. They had been set alight, left to burn for a while, then doused with water. A few charred corners of prints remained, some black-and-white, some color. There wasn’t enough left of the photographs for me to identify anything. But I assumed that they were more family photos, more moments snipped from a long and probably complicated lifetime, and that Sylvia had burned them deliberately.

  I stripped off the gloves, picked up the license, the receipt, the slip of paper, and I stood up.

  Mrs. Rudolph came over to me, looked down at the number on the paper. “Do you think that’s important?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s find out.” I took out Leroy’s tiny phone, flipped it open, tapped in the numbers. The phone rang. Once, twice, three times.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice.

  Mrs. Rudolph was watching me. I signaled for her to come forward and I held the phone away from my ear, so both of us could hear. She leaned carefully toward me, craning her neck.

  “Hello?” said the woman again.

  I said, “Sylvia?”

  “I—who is thi—” And the
n suddenly a dial tone. The woman, or someone else, had hung up the phone.

  I looked at Mrs. Rudolph. “Was that Sylvia?”

  She made a face. “I don’t know. It could’ve been.” She cocked her head, listened to her memory. She winced with frustration. “It could’ve been.” She raised her hands. “I’m sorry. Really I am. I just didn’t hear enough.”

  “That’s okay. Excuse me.” I raised the phone again, tapped in Hector’s number.

  He answered it himself. “Ramirez.”

  “Hector, Joshua. I’m in Las Vegas and I may have something.”

  A brief pause—probably while he found something to write with. “Okay. Go ahead.”

  “I think that a woman named Sylvia Miller was the one who brought the gun into the pen for Lucero. Before that, she was bringing in dope for him, and delivering it to her brother, Ronny.”

  Watching me, Mrs. Rudolph frowned. She looked down at the garbage spread out along the black plastic, at the small yellow bird lying on the grass.

  Hector asked me, “Where are you getting all this?”

  “You want me to go on?” I said.

  He sighed. “Right,” he said. “Go on.”

  “She’s gone now, and I think she’s gone for good. But a couple of weeks ago she bought herself a Colt Python and a twenty-two Beretta.”

  A pause. “Yeah?”

  “She also bought a used RV.”

  “An RV,” he repeated.

  “If she had it modified, she could’ve hidden both of them in there. Lucero and Martinez. Under the seats, under the floor.”

  “And with a woman,” he said, “maybe some of the uniforms wouldn’t search as carefully at the roadblocks.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You got the make and model?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. I’ll get it from Motor Vehicles.”

  “You may have a problem.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She’s tossed her driver’s license. And her credit cards. I think that maybe she picked up new papers and a new name. The RV may be registered to that one.”

  “This woman would know how to get new papers?”

  “Lucero might.”

  “Shit. Right. What else you got?”

  I looked down at the phone number in my hand and for a brief moment I considered not giving it to him. But I was hours away from Denver. If that had been Sylvia who answered the phone, I had alerted her.

  “A Denver phone number.” I read it to him. “I just called it and a woman answered. Could’ve been Sylvia, could’ve been someone else. Whoever it was, she hung up.”

  “You already called?” His voice had tightened. “You check to see who owned it first?”

  “No. Could be someone named Lyle.”

  “Lyle. Terrific. What else?”

  “A possibility.”

  “These are all possibilities, sounds like.”

  “Another one, then. Sylvia worked at the First National here. She was the head teller. She had access to the bank’s money.”

  A few feet away, Mrs. Rudolph started. She looked at me with her eyebrows lowered, her mouth set in disapproval.

  “You’re telling me,” Hector said, “that she dipped into the till?”

  “It looks like she’s burned all her bridges, Hector. She might have burned that one, too. She told them at the bank that she was going on vacation last Friday. Today’s Monday. Maybe it’s a slow day. Maybe they haven’t checked the vaults. Maybe they should.”

  “Okay, yeah, I’ll make a call. That it?”

  “I don’t think she kept her personal records here at the house. She may have a safe deposit box somewhere. At her own bank, maybe at another one.”

  “Okay. You’re at the house now?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m gone, Hector.”

  “Hold on. I’m gonna call the Las Vegas cops, bring them in.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes. The house’ll still be here.”

  “Shit.”

  “Hector, I’m the one who found her. And I didn’t have to call this in.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  I heard him take a deep breath. “Fifteen minutes. Don’t screw around with the evidence.”

  “Thanks, Hector.”

  “They must’ve given you a special plaque when you graduated from the Asshole Academy.”

  “I keep it with the bowling trophies.”

  “I know a better place for you to keep it.” He hung up.

  I flipped the phone shut, slipped it back in my pocket.

  “You had no reason to say that,” Mrs. Rudolph told me sternly. “About Sylvia and the money at the bank.”

  “I may be wrong,” I admitted. “But like I told my friend, I think that Sylvia’s left for good. Maybe all that money was a temptation.”

  “But you don’t know Sylvia. You could be wrong about everything you’ve said. It’s all … conjecture, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is. Mrs. Rudolph, I’m sorry, but I have to leave. The police’ll be here any minute, and there are things I need to do. If you want to stay out of this, you should probably—”

  “I’ll wait for them.” She lifted her chin again. “Here. Someone has to look out for Sylvia.”

  I nodded. “Why don’t you give them these?” I handed over the receipt, the slip of paper, the license. I could get a copy of the license from Motor Vehicles.

  She took them, looked down at them unhappily.

  “Thank you for your help,” I said. “I apologize for getting you involved in all this.”

  She took a breath. “I suppose,” she said sadly, and looked around her, at the house, the yard, the hedge of juniper, “that I’ve always been involved in all this.”

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Rudolph.”

  “Yes,” she said, and then once again she looked down at the garbage scattered across the black plastic bags.

  I turned to leave.

  “Mr. Croft?”

  I turned back.

  “Would you let me know what happens? If you find her. Would you call me?”

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  I drove back onto the Interstate, heading north again, toward Denver. I phoned the hospital and learned, once again, that there had been no change.

  For a while, I kept my eye cocked toward the rearview mirror. After half an hour, when no one had stopped me, I let myself relax a bit. There had been a possibility that the state police would want to talk to me. Hector had evidently headed them off.

  I passed the turnoffs for Watrous and Valmora. Horse and cattle country on either side of me now, bright green and empty.

  I thought about Sylvia Miller.

  “She brings the gun into the penitentiary somehow,” I said. “She hands it over to Ronny. Ronny gives it to Lucero. On Saturday night, Lucero and Martinez organize the breakout. Outside, they dump the other four men—decoys, like Hernandez said—and they head for the R V, where Sylvia is waiting. They hide inside it. Sylvia drives them into town.”

  “To Airport Road?” Rita asked me. The sunlight sparkled off the small cross at her throat. “To the house of Robert and Rosa Theissen? Or do you think they dropped her off first, at some motel, on some neutral ground?”

  “They needed Sylvia,” I said. “She was their passport. Driving the van themselves would be too dangerous.”

  “So. What did Sylvia do while Martinez and Lucero walked into Four-thirty-three Acequia Court? While they were in there, shooting Robert Theissen, then abusing and shooting Rosa?”

  “Maybe she came inside and joined the fun.”

  Rita frowned.

  Sylvia Miller. A quiet, reserved woman who had taken care of her father until he died. Who worked at the same place for nearly twenty years. Who was responsible. Polite, well spoken.

  Who looked like a librarian, Jimmy McBride had said.

  But I had seen the inside of Sylvia Miller’s house. I had seen that razor and brush ca
refully positioned on the bathroom counter, in memory of a dead, and probably brutal, father. I had seen her own room and its filth. If the condition of our surroundings reflects the condition of our souls, then Sylvia Miller had possessed a very troubled soul.

  13

  I WAS APPROACHING Raton, green mountains crowding the sky ahead, when the telephone began to chirp from the passenger seat. There had been three more calls since I left Las Vegas. Two of them were from other friends, with more condolences, more offers of help. The third was another hang-up.

  I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Well, Sherlock, you really opened up a can of worms.” Hector.

  “How so?”

  “First off, that phone number you gave me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Belongs to a guy named Lyle Monroe. Well, belonged is probably a better way to put it, because Lyle’s dead. He was shot. The Denver cops found him in the basement of the house.”

  “When was he shot?”

  “Sometime today. Not more than an hour or two before they found him.”

  “They were there. Lucero and Martinez. And Sylvia Miller. That was her on the phone.”

  “Yeah. Prints all over the place, Lucero’s and Martinez’s. The Denver cops say it looks like they took off in a hurry. Probably right after your call. The cops were there fifteen minutes after I called them.”

  He waited a few seconds for me to figure it out. I didn’t need a few seconds. “I screwed up,” I said.

  “Looks that way.”

  I made him an offering: “If the cops up there can locate that RV, they can bring all three of them in.”

  “That’s the second thing. You were right about the bank.”

  “Yeah? How much right was I?”

  The prairie had fallen away behind me and now the Jeep and I were climbing up toward Raton Pass, into the pine trees. Big pine trees, ponderosas, looking primeval and indestructible, like they’d been here forever and would be here forever. They hadn’t, of course, and they wouldn’t.