A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(59)

Jane wrote down the name of the girlfriend and then looked up the address. She wrote down the name of the supposed gun seller, Walter Slawicky. The Livingston County paper, which was published in Geneseo, had seen fit to include a few details that the big-city papers had left out, including Nick Bauermeister’s employer, a storage company called Box Farm Personal Storage on Telephone Road near Avon. On the computer Jane ranged further in space and time, searching for the names of Bauermeister, his girlfriend, his employer, and the gun seller in any context, asking the engine to search the past five years up to the present day. Whenever she found anything she printed the page.

When Jane had exhausted her search, she tried to assess what she had. The most interesting person to look at first would be the man she knew was lying to connect Jimmy with the crime. She found Walter Slawicky’s address online. He lived on Iroquois Road in Caledonia. She looked at views of the house from street level and from above, then signed out.

Jane went back upstairs to her room, plugged her cell phone in to charge, set the alarm on it, and lay on the bed. She was asleep in a few minutes, still tired from the late night with Carey. At ten the alarm went off. She got up, dressed in a pair of black jeans, black running shoes, and a black pullover sweater. She took out a black baseball cap, but didn’t put it on yet. She wore a light gray hooded sweatshirt to counteract the unrelieved black, then took the stairs to the garage and got into her Passat.

The drive from Rochester down Interstate 390 to Caledonia was easy and fast at night. Her car was small, dark, and nondescript, so she felt confident leaving it parked along the street in Caledonia where there were a few restaurants still open. The line of other cars at the curb would camouflage hers, and she expected to be gone before the bars closed. She took off her hoodie, put on her baseball cap, and got out to walk.

Slawicky’s house was on the opposite side of the street, but Jane approached it by staying along the side where the shadows were deepest and hurrying past any building that cast light on the sidewalks. When she found the address she could see that the house had lights on. Someone must be at home. She crossed the street.

As she approached the house she looked carefully in all directions to be sure there wasn’t anyone on the street and nobody standing at windows to notice her. She slipped into the yard, then moved along the tall, untrimmed hedge at the border of the property, letting it hide her silhouette.

The house was an old one, probably from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with a sagging covered porch and tall, narrow windows that looked cloudy as though they hadn’t been washed recently, and wispy whitish curtains behind them.

When Jane was as far back in the side yard as the first window, she glided silently to the side of the house and looked in. The window showed her a small dining room with an old table that had a number of rings in its finish from years of wet glasses, and a vase in the center with dusty silk roses in it—a faded red and a white that was now yellowish. A still-folded newspaper and pieces of junk mail were strewn around on the surface. She saw no signs of a recent female presence, and no female belongings. She was fairly sure no man would buy fake roses for his house. This looked like a house Slawicky had inherited from elderly rela-tives and never cleaned.

Through a wide opening beyond the dining room table she could see a darkened living room where the changing glow of a television set was visible on the ceiling. She moved into the deeper darkness away from the dining room window and toward the living room. She picked a window on the television’s side where she would not have its glare in her eyes. What she had to minimize now was motion. If Slawicky’s eye caught movement he would be unable to keep from turning to look. She slowly moved her face close to the side of the house and brought only her left eye near the corner of the window.

There he was in a chair in front of the television set. He was about forty-five to fifty years old, and his hair on top was retreating to the back of his skull. He was broad, and wore a light blue T-shirt that rose above his pants to reveal a round, hairy belly. There was a bottle of beer in his right hand and occasionally he lifted it to drink, but his eyes remained aimed at the television set, the pupils barely moving. When he drank, the pressure of the bottle to his mouth made his small round nose bob up and down.

The furnishings in the living room were consistent with everything Jane had seen so far. The couch was swaybacked and the arms had ladders of frayed fabric where people had leaned on them. The chair where Slawicky sat matched the couch, and both looked as though they had been bought by an earlier generation, and inherited with the house. The chair was aimed precisely at the television screen. Jane caught a reflection in the dark window across from the television set, and decided get a better look from another angle.

She moved around to the opposite window where she could see the television set. It was well over five feet wide, a plasma high-definition screen of the sort that she’d seen in stores for around four thousand dollars. In the two corners at that end of the room were pairs of detached speakers, two tall and two short. She had no idea of what those had cost, only that it was more than most people would have paid to hear every whisper of the inane commentary on televised games.

Jane moved along the driveway to the garage. The big door was closed, but she could see there was a man-size door on the side, so she tried the knob. It was locked, so she took out her pocketknife, inserted the blade into the space between door and jamb by the strike plate, pushed to depress the plunger, then pulled the door open. Inside she could see the sleek, rounded, gleaming shape of a Porsche. She stepped in and read the letters across the back: Carrera. She moved along the car, and noticed that there was a slight cloudy residue on the rear side window where the dealer’s sticker had been poorly scraped off. The car was new. It had to cost around eighty-five thousand.