Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

I expected to see Lauren, the way she’d look if she were an actress playing her older self, after the make-up guy glued on latex wrinkles and rubber jowls and added a few age spots and a stringy, gray wig to obscure her youthful, sculpted beauty. But underneath all that applied age, I knew her intense eyes would shine through, revealing the woman underneath it all, the one that time, real or imagined, couldn’t hide.

So, I was startled by the matronly old woman who faced me, her gray hair tied up in a bun, wringing her hands under her grandmotherly bosom. I looked for Lauren’s intensity in her eyes, but if it had been there, I wouldn’t have had to look for it.

She had the flat gaze of a trout.

If there was an actress underneath that aged skin, she had long ego become the woman she was playing. It was hard to imagine that Lauren had sprung from her loins, or that she’d ever had loins at all.

“I tried calling Cyril while you were on your way up,” Mrs. Harper said, “but there was no answer.”

“I wish you’d been able to reach him,” I lied. “He could probably explain himself better than I can. But I’ll try. May I come in?”

She stepped aside and let me walk in past her. Oprah was muted on the TV, the kind that was designed to look like a piece of carved-wood furniture, with built-in drawers and molding. There were framed, family photos on top of the TV and on most of the walls.

“Did you leave him a message?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Harper took a seat on the couch.

“Good,” I sat down in a chair facing her. Now Cyril Parkus would know I was in Seattle and what I was doing. The best I could hope for was to get as much information as possible from her before he called back. I wouldn’t get a second chance. “I’m assuming you’re familiar with the circumstances regarding your daughter’s death.”

“It wasn’t a death,” she replied. “It was a suicide. I don’t see what there is to investigate.”

“For starters, why did she do it?”

“Only she knows.”

“Can you live with that? Mr. Parkus can’t. He needs to understand. She didn’t leave a note and, as far as he knew, your daughter was very happy.”

“Lauren wasn’t my daughter,” she said, looking away from me, “though I certainly loved her as if she was. Even so, I think Cyril has engaged you in a hopeless pursuit that will only prolong his pain. And mine.”

Mrs. Harper wasn’t her mother. That explained why I couldn’t see a trace of Lauren in her face. I marveled at my rapidly-developing detective instincts. I would have to learn to pay more attention to my first impressions.

“What was your relationship with her?” I asked.

Mrs. Harper looked at me suspiciously. “Didn’t Cyril tell you?”

“I’d rather hear it from you,” I stalled, scrambling to come up with a bullshit explanation. “When I get the story secondhand, all I’m told are the broad strokes and none of the important details.”

“It’s irrelevant,” Mrs. Harper said. “Whatever tormented her was part of her life in Los Angeles.”

I could see that she still needed more convincing and time was ticking away. I took a deep breath and leaned towards her, resting my elbows on my knees. I had to show her how serious and competent I was.

“Suicide investigation is my specialty, Mrs. Harper. It’s been my experience that it isn’t any one thing that makes someone take her own life, but rather an accumulation of events over a long period of time. They eventually build into one, overwhelming presence that permeates every moment of their lives until there seems to be only one escape. Death.”

That last word hit her like a slap, which is what I intended. I gave it my best James Earl Jones delivery, as heavy and throaty as I could, then I let the word hang in the air between us, to reinforce the gravity of the situation.

“My job is to track down those scattered events and try to determine how they became something the person could no longer live with.”

It sounded like the intro to a TV series: “The Suicide Sleuth.” It might be hard to squeeze in enough sex and action to distract people from the morbid subject matter, but the exciting main titles were already playing in my head.

I looked her in the eye.

“I think we both know that whatever haunted Lauren didn’t start in Los Angeles,” I added. “It started a long time ago.”

Mrs. Harper nodded, tears rolling down her cheeks. I’d gotten to her.

“I thought we’d saved her, that she’d put those horrible years behind her,” she said. “But I see now that I was fooling myself. I see that no matter how much joy or love comes into your life, you can never erase the past.”

I tried to hide my excitement. I tried to look caring, concerned, and patient. I tried to look like a guy who wasn’t afraid that Cyril Parkus might call at any moment and ruin everything.

“Tell me all about it,” I said.

And so she did.

Chapter Sixteen

It took her about twenty minutes to lay out the whole story, fighting tears as she remembered it all again, the hope and the happiness and then the pain.

And while she spoke, I wanted to pull out one of the pictures I had of Lauren, to see if the expression on her face, the look in her eye, would slowly reveal their meanings to me as I learned more about her.

The story began about twenty years ago.

Mona and Brock Harper lived in a big house in Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle. He was a lawyer in the shipping industry and frequently entertained clients in his home, from private dinners with a few individuals to large banquets and garden parties.

The Harpers were always looking for dependable domestic help, but they went through maids almost as fast as they went through cocktail napkins. One day, a young woman answered their advertisement for a cleaning lady. She was conscientious, worked fast and efficiently, and clearly had experience. Her name was Lauren, and although she said she was eighteen, Mrs. Harper wasn’t fooled.

Still, good cleaning women were hard to find, and not only that, but Lauren was polite, well-mannered, and a perfect hostess when called upon to serve guests at the Harpers’ many social gatherings.

Lauren was also bright and inquisitive. More than once Mr. Harper found her in the library, after her work was done, reading from his leather-bound collection of classic literature, something he’d never done. The books were bought by their decorator, strictly for show. But it pleased Mrs. Harper that Lauren was finding the decor useful. It revealed the maid had intelligence and a desire to better herself.

Mrs. Harper decided to save her.

One night, on his wife’s orders, Mr. Harper followed Lauren after she finished work and discovered that Lauren was an orphan, living in a squalid Seattle tenement with a bunch of “runaways, junkies, whores, and radicals.” As far as I know, he didn’t become a private eye after that. I guess he didn’t get the same thrill out of surveillance that I did.

They immediately brought Lauren back to their home, offering her a job as a live-in housekeeper. Lauren settled into the maid’s quarters off the laundry room and continued her exemplary work. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper tried to try and find out something about their secretive, but dependable, housekeeper, but to no avail. After a month or two, the Harpers sat Lauren down and told her if she was going to live in their home, she would have to trust them as they had trusted her. She had to tell them the truth about herself.

So, she did.

Lauren admitted that she was only fifteen, and that she was a runaway, but that no one was, or ever would be, looking for her. She said her mother was a junkie who “sold her body,” as Mrs. Harper put it, for drugs and money. Lauren didn’t know who her father was. The man her mother lived with for years was a drug dealer who sexually molested Lauren whenever her mother wasn’t available for him, and sometimes even when she was. Her mother knew about it and didn’t care.