The Eighth Day (5 page)

“I’m sorry,” Danny told her.

“We weren’t friends or anything. It’s just . . . well, it was just so
awful
. Every time I think of him in there . . .” She shuddered and squeezed her eyes closed again.

After a moment, Danny asked, “How long was he on sabbatical?”

The secretary shook her head. “The usual. A year. He was doing research. Someone said he was in the Near East, in Ankara or some such place. And then I think he was in Rome.”

“Well . . . do you know when he came back?”

“Oh, it was a couple of months ago,” the secretary said. “He was supposed to resume teaching in the fall. So we’ve had to cancel both his classes. Luckily, they weren’t requirements.”

“What do you think made him do it?” Danny asked.

She shook her head. “No idea. I’d have thought he’d be the last person to commit . . . to do what he did. He was very religious. Though I suppose, from a religious standpoint, he didn’t actually kill himself. He just . . . created the conditions to . . .” Another shudder.

“You think he was religious?” Danny asked. “I thought he renounced the priesthood.”

“Oh, he lost his vocation, all right, but not his faith.” She sighed and cocked her head to the side. “Who did you say you were?”

“Danny Cray.”

“And you’re . . . a friend?”

Danny shook his head. “I’m with the law firm handling Dr. Terio’s estate,” he told her, wondering even as he spoke,
Where did that come from?
“We want to make sure that the will we have is the most recent one.”

The explanation seemed to satisfy her. The wrinkles in her brow flattened out, and her smile reappeared.

“I was wondering,” Danny went on. “Do you think any of his colleagues are around?”

The secretary gave him a wry look. “Now? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s intersession! There’s no one here but us slaves. If you come back in a couple of weeks . . .”

He said that he would and left carrying a course catalog listing the faculty and classes that were scheduled for the fall. Leafing through the catalog as he walked back to the Student Union, he saw that Terio had been set to teach a class in Islamic mysticism and a graduate seminar in something called the
Black Writing
.

Hungry now (it was almost three), he went to the cafeteria and called Red Top Cab from his cell phone. Then he wolfed down a Gardenburger and strolled outside. It was another five minutes (which Danny calculated was worth about $8.33) before the cab came. He told the driver to take him to the Fairfax County Courthouse.

There he hoped to find the professor’s last will and testament. At a minimum, it would identify the executor of the estate, someone who would know what had happened to Terio’s papers. Since there were no survivors, the executor would presumably be in control of the professor’s effects.

The courthouse was a reasonably well organized and efficient place that Danny had visited a number of times before. Even so it took him nearly an hour to get his hands on the will, and when he did it proved to be a disappointment. Dated five years earlier, the document bequeathed Terio’s estate to “the priests and nuns of the orphanage that nurtured me”—the Catholic Home Bureau in Brooklyn, New York. The law firm that had drawn up the will was listed as its executor.

Informed that it was five o’clock and that the courthouse was closing, Danny wrote down what little information there was and joined the rush-hour tide flowing toward the nearest Metro stop. Half an hour later, as the train rocked past Arlington Cemetery, his thoughts of Terio were interrupted by the sudden recollection that it was his birthday—and the happy realization that he’d just made seven hundred bucks.

Thank you, Jeezus!

FIVE

A
nd thank you, too, for this grand armful of girl,
Danny thought as he and Caleigh made their way down Columbia Road. She was a South Dakota girl, right out of Pierre—which, as she liked to remind people, was not pronounced in the French way but in the clipped, no-nonsense accent of the Dakotas:
It’s “Peer,”
she’d insist,
just “Peer.”

Danny had gone home with her for Christmas the year before, and it struck him as a stripped-down kind of place, plain, bare, and hard. The land was like a hardwood floor, flat and beige, stretching toward the horizon, its temperatures sinking into the imaginary numbers.
Ten below. Twenty below. How low can it go? How low can you stand?
And her family . . . She was the baby and the only female of eight kids, each of her seven brothers huge, hearty, rawboned. It was difficult to figure how generations of sodbusters and tractor salesmen could have produced a child as delicate, luminous, and beautiful as the woman on his arm. Not that Caleigh would agree with his assessment. “I’m okay, I guess” was about as far as she’d ever admit to being a beauty.

But the Latino men on the corner of Eighteenth and Columbia Road knew better. As the couple walked past, one of the Latinos turned his eyes to heaven and muttered a kind of prayer while his friend made a show of looking thunderstruck. Staggering slightly, he clapped a third guy on the back and exclaimed,
“Chica sabrosa, chavo!”
And then the three of them burst into laughter.

They stopped in front of the pet store window for Caleigh’s “critter fix.” She was crazy about animals—their apartment building’s strict no-pet policy was the bane of her existence. Every Sunday, she pored over the real-estate listings, looking for a “pet-friendly” place. She dragged Danny to them, but the rental market was so tight that the apartments on offer were, without exception, “the real dogs”—as he put it.

By now Caleigh and the pet store owner, Magda, were good friends. Tonight, as usual, he and Caleigh had to go inside the store so a puppy (this time an “otter hound”) could be picked up and cooed over.

Five minutes later, they arrived at their favorite Italian restaurant, I Matti, where the maître d’ greeted them with a theatrical “
Buona sera!”
Clasping Caleigh’s hands in his own, Marco asked, as he always did, if Danny was treating her right. And when she admitted that he was, the maître d’s stern look dissolved into a smile and he ushered the two of them to a primo table overlooking the street.

When he’d gone, Danny murmured that “the guy’s in love with you—you know that, don’t you?”

Caleigh rolled her eyes and waved it off. “That’s just Marco. He’s like that with everybody.”

“Right! And that’s why we get this table—you and me and, if he’s lucky, the mayor. I don’t think so.”

“Well . . .” She shrugged.

When they’d ordered, she said, “Tell me about the case.”

“ ‘The case’?”

She blushed. “Yeah! That’s what it is, isn’t it? You’re on a ‘case.’ Just like Nero Wolfe.”

Danny frowned. “Nero Wolfe was a fat guy. And old! And he never left his apartment.”

“Well,” she said, “except for that.”

He shrugged. “It’s going okay, I guess. Lucrative, anyway.”

Soon a plate of bruschetta pomodoro arrived with glasses of Greco di Tufo, and he told her about his disappointing visit to George Mason University. “So, after that, I went to the courthouse.”

“What for?”

“The guy’s will.”

“But what’s the point? I mean, I’m sure a will might be interesting, but—” A bite of bruschetta fractured into little cubes of oily tomato. “Yikes,” she muttered, and pushed them into a mound on her plate. “I might not be up to the challenge of pasta,” she confided.

It had been a decade since she’d come east from Pierre, and Danny could still hear the Plains in the flat vowels of her voice, just as he could see the Sioux blood in the high cheekbones of her face. She was as polished as a pearl and as hip as anybody, but even Swarthmore, Harvard, and Washington hadn’t been able to obliterate the farm girl in her. She knew not just how to drive a tractor but how to repair its engine.

His own bruschetta exploded when he took a bite, and Caleigh giggled. “We may not be ready for dining in public,” she decided. “So anyway, what about this will?”

“I think the guy was an orphan,” he told her.

“Really? Why?”

“Because he left everything to this charity in New York. Otherwise, the courthouse was kind of a bust. The will was five years old, and there wasn’t anything in it about his papers. No ‘directed disposition of personal items’—nothing.”

“What about his executor?” she asked.

Danny shook his head. “It’s just a law firm—the one that drew up the will.”

“So . . .” Caleigh winced. “He didn’t have any friends? Relatives?”

“Not that I can see.”

“That’s terrible!”

Which was just like her,
Danny mused—feeling sorry for somebody she’d never even heard of. And a
dead
somebody at that.

“Then what happens to his papers?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But they might let you have them, right?”

Danny frowned. “Mmnnn . . . maybe not.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are lawyers involved and lawyers are funny about ‘papers’ and . . . technically, they belong to the beneficiary.”

“You mean, this charity—”

“The Catholic Home Bureau in Brooklyn. It’s an orphanage. I checked.”

“But they might let you look at them, right?”

Danny nodded slowly. “Yeah . . . they might. Or maybe not.”

Caleigh risked another bite of bruschetta. Finally, she said, “So, actually . . . you’re not really getting anywhere.”

Danny made a helpless gesture. “I’m getting a hundred bucks an hour—which is
some
kind of somewhere. I mean, when you think of it, the worst thing that could happen is—I solve the case. Right away. Then where would I be?”

An hour later, they were back in the apartment, high on each other’s company.

“And now, for a truly slammin’ dessert,” Caleigh promised, her blue eyes lighting up as she headed for the bedroom. Danny watched her go, her hips shifting in a liquid saunter.
It’s the wine,
he thought.
Two glasses and her inhibitions disappear.
The truth was, for someone as straitlaced as Caleigh, she had a libido that just wouldn’t quit. “In another century,” she’d once kidded him, “I would have been ‘tormented by the yearnings of my body.’ But that was then.”
And this,
Danny thought,
this is now
—as she leaned out through the doorway to the bedroom and threw him a look. “Don’t go ‘way.”

He wouldn’t. But while he was waiting, he jotted down a note on a Post-it and clapped it to the refrigerator door:
Call lawyer re estate.
Then he snuck in a quick call to an information broker in Daytona Beach, requesting an expedited list of Terio’s phone calls in the month before he died. “Not just the numbers,” Danny said. “Names, too.” He was reciting his Visa number and expiration date when Caleigh sashayed into the living room wearing a pair of see-through black harem pajamas.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed, sparking a laugh from Caleigh as he made a show of fumbling the phone as he tried to hang it up. “Can I get you something?”

“Like what?” Caleigh asked.

“I dunno. Me?”

In the morning, she was long gone by the time he came out of the shower.

Wrapping a towel around his waist, he made a cup of coffee, then telephoned Alfred Dunkirk, the lawyer handling Terio’s estate. Although Belzer hadn’t said anything about suing Terio’s estate, it seemed prudent to take a low profile with the late professor’s lawyer.

“I saw the story about Mr. Terio’s death,” Danny told him, “and the obituary in the
Post
.”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering about the house. . . .”

“Excuse me?” The lawyer seemed genuinely baffled.

“I was wondering when it might come up for sale.”

Dunkirk made no attempt to disguise his repugnance at Danny’s opportunism, but neither did he blow him off—not entirely. “Call Spencer Realty,” he suggested. “They’re handling it.”

And so he did. “Al Dunkirk said I should give you a call,” he told the Realtor. “He said you were handling the Terio property.”

“That’s right,” the woman replied. “We are.”

“Well, I’d be very interested in seeing it.”

“Oh, well . . . that’s
great
—although I should tell you, it’s a little premature. I won’t really have the listing until next week.”

“Oh.” Danny made his disappointment obvious.

And the real-estate agent rushed to reassure him. “Oh, I can show you the house!” she promised. “I just can’t sell it to you. Not yet! But if you’re really interested—we could look at it this morning.”

It didn’t seem like a good idea to arrive at Adele Slivinski’s office in the Bomber—it was a car that tended to make people skeptical of the driver. So he took a taxi. A forty-year-old with a helmet of stiff blond hair and a button nose that didn’t seem to go with the rest of her face, Adele was an ebullient woman with a white Mercedes and a vanity plate that read:
HOMEY
.

“I like your plates,” Danny remarked as they pulled away from the curb, heading toward Route 50 West.

“I wanted
HOMES
or even
HOMZ
, but they were taken. So I had to settle for
HOMEY
, but . . .”

“What?”

“Well, it’s sometimes misunderstood.”

Danny chuckled.

The real-estate agent kept up a steady patter about mortgage rates and lenders, new homes versus older ones, as the Mercedes forged westward, passing huge tracts of expensive town houses, until, quite suddenly, they were in the country.

“Isn’t it fab?” she asked as they turned onto a washboarded road. “It’s one of the last corners of Fairfax that isn’t developed to within an inch of its life.”

From the outside, the house had a slightly down-at-the-heels look, but from a buyer’s point of view there was nothing obviously wrong with it. On the contrary, it was a comfortable-looking house in good repair, with copper gutters and a towering oak that shaded its roof from the afternoon sun. The inside was neat asa pin, with bloodred Oriental carpets sprawling across the living-room floor. Hand-colored nineteenth-century engravings hung from the walls in simple wooden frames: desert landscapes, crowded caravansaries, and scenes from the souks.

Nice stuff,
Danny thought,
and the real thing, too—not something you’d pick up at K-Mart.

The furniture was worn but comfortable, with simple wooden pieces and overstuffed couches and chairs. Following Adele as she opened and closed doors to empty closets and a tired-looking bathroom, they came into the kitchen—which Adele declared “serviceable. But if it were me,” she said, “I’d retire these harvest-gold appliances. I mean, really!” Then she led him past “the laundry room” and “a nice big pantry—that’s a good feature,” hesitating, finally, before a scuffed white door. “And this is the study,” she sighed. “I really do apologize for the state it’s in—you’re getting a preview here, so I hope you’ll understand: I haven’t had a chance to tidy it up yet.” Opening the door, she stepped aside and let Danny enter ahead of her.

He expected to find a mess, but it was actually quite tidy—just a little small and full of stuff. Some black filing cabinets and crowded bookshelves. A wooden desk with a flat-screen monitor amid piles of paper and stacks of books, some quite old—and everything covered with dust. Beneath the desk: a Dell Dimension computer. A map of eastern Turkey on one wall, a map of the Vatican on another.

For the first time, Danny felt that he was getting somewhere.

“It’s a little musty,” Adele said.

“No, it’s a nice room,” Danny assured her, pausing to study the contents of one of the bookshelves.

Not unexpectedly, most of the books were academic titles that concerned various aspects of religion. Slim volumes described the lives and works of medieval saints and mystics, while other and thicker tomes cogitated on an array of esoteric subjects, with works ranging from
Elizabethan Jews
to books in Arabic and Italian whose subject matter Danny was unable to fathom from the titles.

Adele wrinkled her nose. “Of course it’s a lot more spacious than it
looks
because of the clutter,” she said. “And the built-in shelves are a nice feature.”

Danny nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “they’re good to have.”

“One of the things I love about this place is the traffic flow, the way everything sort of
swooshes
from one room to another. That’s because of the floor plan—it’s so open!”

Danny was nodding, but he wasn’t listening. His attention had strayed to a single shelf, directly behind the professor’s desk. What struck him about it was the look of the books that it held—for the most part, they were bright and new, unlike those on the other shelves. His eyes flickered over the titles:

Lipid Tubules and the Paradigm of Molecular Engineering
The Hermetic Apocalypse
Protein-Based Computers
The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughn
Nanotechnology and the Quantum Corral

“It’s a terrific room if you have a book collection,” Adele confided. “All that
shelf space
.”

Danny continued to nod. “You read a lot, Adele?”

“Actually,” she said, “I do. I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s new book . . .”

Danny made interested sounds as he removed a volume from the shelf and let it fall open in his hand. He read the first sentence he saw: “Nanotechnology is the art and science of building complex, practical devices with atomic precision.”
Hunh,
he thought, considering the words.
Thinka that
.

But he didn’t, really. What he thought about, instead, was that this was a very strange shelf of books and that few of them had much to do with Terio’s own expertise. Nor, in fact, did they seem to have much to do with one other. Terio was a religious scholar, and this stuff was all about . . . what? Magic and technology? Alchemy and molecular biology? It was as if Terio had been a schizophrenic, with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the year 3000.