Killer Smile

“A few blocks from here, in Bella Vista.”

“Nice.” Bella Vista, in addition to being the immigrants’ name for Fort Missoula, was also a neighborhood near Olde City, but she couldn’t tell Paul about this coincidence because she wasn’t allowed to talk about work. Or suicide.

“It’s a rental with an option to buy, and if I get tenure, I’ll go for it. Real estate is a helluva lot cheaper here than the Bay Area.”

“Jeez, your own house. That’s great.” Mary felt happy for him. She was working toward a house, too. But when you bought a house, people always said the same thing: “Owning a house is a lot of responsibility.”

“That’s okay. I like responsibility.”

Mary smiled. So did she. Then she realized that, so far, she hadn’t thought at all about Mike.

Paul looked at her.

Mary looked back at him. She sipped some water, impossibly cold. The candlelight flickered. An animated man at a nearby table burst into laughter. She felt suddenly fresh out of conversation.

“Okay, I give up, tell me about your case,” Paul said, with a smile.

“It’s just a case, sort of historical, but it seems a little sketchy, the way it’s unfolding.”

“Judy said you’re way too involved with it. She says you’re showing an unusual interest in laundry and worshipping dead hair.”

“It’s just the file!”

“Tell me about it. I’ll keep an open mind.” Paul cocked his head, and Mary felt a tug in her chest. He was a nice man. He even had a nice voice, soft and deep. He was a good listener, better than the reporter, who just wanted his story. Paul didn’t seem to want anything from her, nor could he. It would take 38,270 more dates before she slept with him, and even then she wouldn’t enjoy it. Enjoying it belonged to Mike.

“Well, I don’t know where to start.” Mary didn’t want to say the wrong thing. It was fast becoming her new forte, and since she wasn’t allowed to apologize, she felt disarmed. She needed a replacement forte.

“Tell me about the hair.”

“It’s hair I found in an old wallet, that’s all. My client’s wallet. He passed away in 1942.”

“So your client is dead?”

“Well, technically, his estate is my client, but I guess I think of him as my client.”

“I see,” Paul said, without apparent judgment. “Whose hair is it? Is it his?”

“I doubt it, but I don’t know. The hair thing isn’t as wacky as it sounds. Lots of people, traditional people like immigrants, carry hair with them or keep it somewhere. It’s a family thing, an old-time thing. It’s not that weird.”

“Like when you save some hair from a kid’s first haircut?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“My mother did that for me. She showed it to me last time I visited, at Christmas. She even saved my baby teeth in an old envelope. They were disgusting, hollow with brown edges on the top.” Paul laughed, and so did Mary. Still, she felt uneasy. Old teeth and dead hair didn’t seem like good di

“And there were drawings in his wallet, too. Judy thinks he just liked to draw or doodle, but I think they mean something.”

“Why?”

“Because people don’t save doodles, and he saved these. He carried them around in his wallet, with the hair, a saint’s picture, and some photos that meant a lot to him. He didn’t have a lot of possessions and he was a simple man. He kept the drawings in the billfold section, where money would be. So I think they were important.”

“Okay, I’m with you there.” Paul nodded. “I put important papers in my billfold all the time. Bank deposit slips, ATM slips, store receipts.”

“Me, too,” Mary said, encouraged. “And also they’re not just doodles. When I showed them to the lawyer who hired me, he got a little agitated. Nervous.”

“So what are the drawings of?”

“I don’t know. A reporter I know had no idea, either.”

“What do they look like?” Paul leaned slightly forward on his seat. It was too dark to see clearly, but behind his glasses, his eyes seemed to sharpen. Mary couldn’t discern his eye color, but she thought it might be blue. Smart blue.

“I don’t know. They look like a circle, with things on it. Different views of the same circle, over and over.”

“Do you have the drawings with you?”

“No.”

“Just the hair?”

“I don’t have the hair with me!” Mary yelped, but Paul’s sly smile told her he was Joking Around. Okay, she officially liked him. “I could draw the circles from memory, though.”

“Be my guest, and I’ll order for us.” Paul extracted a ball-point from inside his jacket, passed it to Mary over the table, and flagged the waitress. She took the pen, opened her napkin, and began to draw a lame version of Amadeo’s circles. When the waitress arrived, Paul ordered them both avocado salads and grilled bluefish.

“This is what one looks like.” Mary finished her drawing and handed him the floppy napkin. Paul held it up by both sides, squinting in the votive candle, then lowered it to reveal an unhappy professor.

“I have no idea what this is.”

Mary took the napkin and assessed her handiwork with a frown. Her drawing looked like a pepperoni pizza. “I didn’t draw it well enough.”

“Where did you say the drawings are?”

“At my office.”

“So why don’t we have di

Mary blinked. “Really?”

“Why not?”

Mary’s hopes soared. “I have a better idea. How hungry are you?”

“Not very.”

“Me, neither. So let’s go see the drawings and then have di

Paul laughed. “Now I see what Judy meant,” he said, shaking his head, but Mary was already signaling to the waitress.

It took them only fifteen minutes in a cab to get uptown, and Mary held on to the hand strap as the cab lurched and swerved. No one seemed to be following them, but the Escalade driver couldn’t have kept up anyway. Her knee, thigh, and arm touched Paul’s about 9,274 times, and when they pulled up in front of her office building, she could have sworn the cabbie was trying to marry them off. They entered the building, signed in with the guard, and took the elevator upstairs.

The gleaming doors slid open, and Mary stepped off the elevator.

And stood stu

Thirteen

“My God,” Mary said, uncomprehending as she surveyed the scene.

The reception area of Rosato amp; Associates had been completely destroyed. The new leather couch had been slashed and its white stuffing yanked out, and the matching side chairs had been upended, their cushions sliced open. The glass top of the coffee table was broken in the center, and magazines had been thrown on the floor. Marshall ’s desk had been overturned, and her correspondence, pencils, pens, and other stuff strewn on the rug. The desk drawers hung open, their contents spilled. Her chair lay on its side, and someone had even crushed her baby’s picture, shattering its glass. Amid the debris lay the green metal box they used for petty cash, open and empty. What else had been stolen?

“Let’s get out of here,” Paul whispered. “They could still be inside.” He took Mary’s arm and turned to the elevators, but she wasn’t leaving.

“No, call 911. Call security, too. The number’s taped to the reception desk. I’ll be right back.” Mary hurried from the reception area, stricken. She and Judy had told Be

“No, wait!” Paul shouted, but Mary hurried to the conference room, where her heart sank.

Her WORLD WAR II ROOM sign had been torn down, and the umpteen cardboard boxes had been torn open and dumped. Documents from the National Archives lay all over the carpet, many of them ripped in two. Her notes, pens, legal pads, and old coffee cups from the conference room table had been whisked onto the rug, and the phone had been yanked from the socket, taking with it a chunk of new drywall. Somebody had evidently hurled a chair at one of the large framed Eakins prints behind the table, cracking it in a jagged network. The chair lay on its side in a shower of glass shards, next to a new thirteen-inch Sony TV that had been smashed, its gray casing split. Mary was appalled and confounded by the sight. It made sense that they stole petty cash, but why take the time to trash the place? It looked like they’d been enraged.