“Earlier this morning and before I came home at noon, anybody. Mona says they should install a revolving door. Everybody’s in and out constantly. As the election approaches, they come and go at all hours.”
“How do you know someone didn’t follow you here?”
“I kept one eye on the rearview mirror and doubled back several times. Besides, no one was home when I left.”
“No clues from the folder you found in the old lady’s desk?”
Avery answered Van’s irreverent question with a dismal shake of her head.
“She’s a strange one,” he observed.
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve got lots of her on tape. She’s always smiling, waving at the crowds, but damned if I believe she’s all that happy.”
“I know what you mean. She’s a very private person and says little. At least until today.”
“Tell us about Carole Navarro,” Irish said. “She’s more to the point than Zee Rutledge.”
“Carole, or whatever her original name was, was a tramp. She danced in the seediest nightclubs—”
“Tittie bars,” Van supplied.
“… Under a number of spicy and suggestive names. She was arrested once for public lewdness and once for prostitution, but both charges were dropped.”
“You’re sure of all this?”
“The private investigator might have been slime, but he was thorough. With the information he supplied Zee, it was easy for me to track down some of the places Carole had worked.”
“When was this?” Irish wanted to know.
“Before I came here. I even talked to some people who knew her—other dancers, former employers, and such.”
“Did any mistake you for her?” Van asked.
“All of them. I passed myself off as a long-lost cousin to explain the similarity.”
“What did they have to say about her?”
“She had severed all ties. Nobody knew what had happened to her. One drag queen that I spoke to, in exchange for a twenty-dollar bill, said she told him she was going to give up the night life, go to business school and improve herself. That’s all he remembered. He never saw her after she quit
working at the club where they shared a stage.
“This is pure conjecture, but I think Carole underwent a complete transformation, finessed her way into the Rutledge law firm, then once on the inside, saw a way to take her self-improvement campaign one step further by marrying Tate. Remember the piece I did several years ago on prostitutes, Irish?” she asked suddenly.
“While you were working at that station in Detroit? Sure, I remember it. You sent me a tape. What’s it got to do with this?”
“The personality profile of those women fits Carole. Most of them claim to hate men. She was probably no different.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No? Look how she treated Jack. She flirted with him to the extent of damaging his marriage, but I get the impression she never came across. If that isn’t malicious, I don’t know what is. For the sake of argument, let’s say she didn’t view men too kindly and set out to ruin one whose future looked the very brightest, while at the same time elevating herself.”
“Wasn’t she scared that someone would recognize her, that her shady past would eventually catch up with her?”
Avery had thought of that herself. “Don’t you see, that would have iced the cake. Tate would really be humiliated if it was revealed what his wife had been before he married her.”
“He must be a real dunce,” Van muttered, “to have fallen for it.”