Chapter Nineteen
Present
William Bass was eighty-seven now and living in Buena Villa, an old, graying hacienda just outside of Santa Barbara that had been converted into a nursing home.
By the looks of it from the outside—the shingles curling on the roof and covered with moss, the shutters in need of painting—Bass’s fortune was all but gone.
Bass’s nurse, Wanda, met Church at the front desk when he signed in. She was middle-aged, African American, with close-cropped coarse hair. She had on white tennis shoes and purple scrubs with pink hearts. She smiled at Church warmly.
“This way, honey,” Wanda said. “I’ll take you to him.”
The carpeted halls were narrow and dimly lit; they smelled faintly of Pine-Sol and incontinence. Most of the doors they passed were closed, but through one open doorway Church caught a glimpse of an elderly woman sitting up in bed, eating her lunch from a tray.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Wanda said. “Mr. Bass doesn’t get many visitors.
He’s a bachelor, you know. No family.” She paused outside of a closed door at the end of the hall.
“It’s this one here,” Wanda said. “Now, I will warn you that Mr. Bass can be a bit . . . prickly. I wouldn’t take it personally.
It’s just the loneliness talking. I find the best approach in these sorts of cases is to just smile and kill them with kindness. ”
She knocked twice and then opened the door with the fortitude of a soldier going to war, and Church followed behind her.
Inside was a single-size bed and an en suite handicap bathroom.
The bed was made; a quilt was folded neatly at the end.
Bass sat in front of it in a wheelchair, facing a small television.
He was portly now and balding but clean shaven.
He wore a velvet robe and silk pajamas—once nice but now mottled with age and wear.
“I’m back, honey,” Wanda said. She went over and gave Bass’s arm a comforting squeeze. “I brought that guest we talked about.”
“Out of the way, will you?” Bass said, shooing her out of his view. His eyes were trained on the TV behind her. “Olivier is giving his speech.”
“Why don’t we pause this, just for now, sugar?” Wanda said. She picked up the remote and clicked, and the screen froze. “Laurence Olivier will take right back up where he left off when you’re done. Now, this is Detective Church. I told you he was coming today, remember?”
Bass’s eyes flickered reluctantly from the television to Church. “Have you seen this program?” Bass inquired.
Church glanced at the screen but couldn’t place the image on it.
“It’s Brideshead Revisited,” Wanda said, “Mr. Bass’s favorite. He watches it nearly every day.”
“It’s magnificent,” Bass said. “Laurence Olivier plays Lord Marchmain. He’s really very good. I saw him once, you know, in The Merchant of Venice on Broadway. Spectacular. Are you a theater man, Detective?”
“No,” Church said. “I’m sorry to say I never really cared for it.”
“Hmm,” Bass responded, as if Church’s lack of enthusiasm for the theater revealed something inauspicious about his character.
“I’ll leave you boys to it, then,” Wanda said. She leaned down and pressed what looked like a remote buzzer into Bass’s hand. “Just press the call button if you need anything, honey. I’ll be just down the hall.”
Wanda gave Detective Church an encouraging smile as she walked past him and out the door. For a moment, Bass and Church just looked at one another. Then, Church cleared his throat.
“Well, as Wanda said, my name is Detective Church,” he said. “I’m here to talk to you about Saoirse Towers and what happened the night she disappeared.”
He pulled up the only other chair in the room that he could find, which was next to the TV, and moved it in front of Bass, directly facing him.
“I’m talking to everyone who was there that night,” Church went on as he sat down. “What they saw, what they heard, what they can remember.”
“Everyone should go to the theater,” Bass said animatedly. “Even philistines.”
Church blinked at him, caught off guard by the sudden about-turn in the conversation.
He wasn’t sure what to say in response, so he just said, “Yes, well, I’ll have to give it another go.
” He shifted in his chair and tried again.
“Mr. Bass, on the night that Saoirse Towers disappeared, several eyewitnesses claimed you had an altercation with Saoirse in the ballroom,” Church said.
“An altercation?” Bass huffed. “My, that’s dramatic. No, no. It was more of a—a conversation.”
“A conversation?” Church repeated.
“Yes,” Bass said. “You know, one person says something, and then the other person responds, and so on and so forth.”
“Witnesses reported raised voices,” Church said.
“My voice carries,” Bass said. “And the acoustics in that room—well, sound travels well.”
“According to onlookers, you grabbed Saoirse roughly by the arm,” Church went on. “Then she pushed you away and told you not to touch her.”
“Well, I don’t recall any of that,” Bass said, shaking his head.
“All right,” Church said. “Do you happen to recall, in this . . . conversation that you and Saoirse were having, what it was about?”
Bass was silent for a moment. “Laurence Olivier came from nothing, you know,” he said. “His father was a clergyman. But Olivier, they made him a lord.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Laurence Olivier,” Bass said, louder, as if Church were stupid. “He was born Laurence Olivier, but he died Sir Laurence Olivier. Isn’t that something?”
“I suppose,” Church said. He wondered at Bass’s lucidity.
Maybe, in his old age, he had grown senile.
“Now,” Church went on, trying to keep Bass focused on the conversation at hand, “perhaps this will jog your memory. That night, the conversation with Saoirse Towers, was it about Saoirse’s plans to divest her shares in Bass Corp. ?”
Bass blinked at him and then laughed a deep, rumbling laugh that turned into a violent hacking cough. His shoulders shook violently, and Church wondered for a moment if he should get the nurse, but Bass held out a hand to stay him.
“Rumors!” Bass said, when he finally caught his breath.
He swatted at the air like the word was a pesky fly.
“People like to talk, don’t they? But that’s all it is—a bunch of hot air.
Saoirse always had the acumen to separate business from her personal beliefs. Period. She was never going anywhere.”
Church couldn’t help but feel there was something threatening in that proclamation: She was never going anywhere. And in the end, she hadn’t, had she? She’d stayed right there at Cliffhaven, and her money had stayed invested in Bass Corp.
“What about the necklace?” Church asked.
Bass cleared his throat. “What necklace?”
“The one she always wore,” Church said. “It was given to her by her mother when she was just a girl. It had a locket with an inscription on it and a very distinctive chain—twenty-four karat gold, with little gold stars woven into it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t recall that,” Bass said.
“Here,” Church said, reaching into his pocket.
He pulled out a plastic baggie that he had signed out of the evidence room that morning.
He leaned forward and placed the bag with the necklace in Bass’s lap, and Bass flinched, either from surprise at the gesture or from seeing the necklace again after all these years—Church wasn’t sure which.
“Care to explain how this necklace found its way into your room the day after the party?” Church asked.
In the case file, Church had read how Bass had seemed agitated and flustered when the police had first questioned him, and he couldn’t account for Saoirse’s necklace being there among his things.
Later, when they brought him into the station for further questioning, Bass claimed he’d found the gold chain on the floor of the ballroom the night of the party.
He’d recognized it as Saoirse’s, picked it up, and put it in his pocket to give back to her the next time he saw her, but then he’d forgotten that he’d had it.
Church was curious if Bass would give a different answer now.
“I don’t know,” Bass said. “A faulty clasp? Perhaps you should consult a jeweler instead of harassing me, Detective, with your inane questions.”
“A faulty clasp?” Church said. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Mr. Bass.”
Bass balked at the bald statement. “How dare you speak to me in such a manner,” Bass said.
But Church kept going. He thought that if he applied pressure, he might get somewhere with Bass.
He had read, in the case files, about Bass’s volatile temper.
“Saoirse was hell bent on divesting her shares in Bass Corp.,” Church said.
“You went to her that night, tried to talk her out of it. A last-ditch effort. But Saoirse was stubborn; she wouldn’t listen.
You grabbed her, and she screamed at you to let her go.
There were witnesses, then, in the ballroom.
But later, when you sought her out, there weren’t witnesses then, were there? You made sure of that.”
A vein pulsed on Bass’s neck. “Well, I’ve never been so egregiously treated in my entire life,” he said.
“It was the only thing you could do to save your company, to save yourself, wasn’t it?” Church went on. “You had to take Saoirse out of the equation forever.”
Bass looked around Detective Church toward the doorway. “Wanda?” Bass called, and when she didn’t immediately appear, he clicked the call button in his lap repeatedly. “Wanda, I need you!”
Wanda appeared in the doorway a few moments later, partly out of breath. “Yes, sugar?” she huffed.
“I want to watch my program,” Bass said, gesturing toward the TV.
“Are you two done talking already?” Wanda asked as she shuffled into the room.
“Yes,” Bass answered firmly. “The detective was just leaving.”
“All right,” Wanda said as she retrieved the remote from the tray on his side table and pointed it toward the television. “Let me get you all set up here . . .”
She bit her lip in concentration as she fiddled with the buttons, and when Laurence Olivier’s face unfroze and his voice filtered into the room, she said brightly, “There you go, sugar,” and set the remote back down.
“And show the detective out,” Bass said, not even looking in Church’s direction. “He seems confused, and I wouldn’t want him to get any more lost than he already is.”
“That’s all right, Wanda. I can find my own way out,” Church said, standing. “But, Mr. Bass, I will need the necklace back.”
“What?” Bass said absently and then glanced down at his lap. “Oh, yes, this. You can have it.” He picked it up with his trembling, liver-spotted hand and dropped it unceremoniously on the floor next to his wheelchair.
“Very dignified of you,” Church said. He leaned down to retrieve it and then headed toward the door.
“Oh, and, Detective?” Bass called.
Church didn’t want to, but he paused, turned around. “Yes?”
“If you wish to talk with me again, I want my lawyer present,” Bass said.
“That’s probably a good idea,” Church said. “Maybe he can help you come up with a better story.” Church held up the plastic baggie with the necklace in it. “From the looks of it, this thing was torn from Saoirse’s neck. It wasn’t a matter of a faulty clasp. The chain was broken.”