Chapter Thirty-One

Alone in Cece's house, Joe moved silently through the empty rooms. At the kitchen door he paused and listened. Hearing nothing, he stepped inside, adopting the brisk attitude of a man merely looking for a snack or glass of water. Seeing that there was no one to impress with his study in casualness, he stopped and listened again. Down a short hallway to the right came a faint noise. Quietly, he followed it, moving down the hall as the sound clarified into singing-- an off-key Spanish song in the high, thin voice of one of Cece's maids. Joe peeked around the corner and found Lupe sorting and folding laundry as she took it from the dryer. An ironing board nearby suggested she would be in the utility room for awhile.

With a satisfied smile, Joe returned to the kitchen as silently as he had come. After making a quick tour of all the downstairs rooms, he headed up the stairs, then did checked each guest room as he moved down the hall. Finally he found himself outside Cece's room. He placed a hand on the knob and turned, breathing a sigh of relief to find it unlocked.

It was a large room with high ceilings and heavy, red-upholstered furniture. A small claw-footed lamp on the bedside table had been left on, casting black shadows off Cece's high-backed easy chair, ornately carved vanity and hulking four-poster bed with its tapestry curtains. A light from another room drew Joe into the bathroom, but after a quick look around at the marble, mirrors and deep jacuzzi tub, he lost interest.

The next door to catch his eye was the closet-- an enormous walk-in, full to the ceiling with clothes, shoes and handbags. This wasn't what Joe was looking for either, and he returned to the main room. Almost as an afterthought, he opened the nightstand drawers and rifled through their contents, but found nothing more interesting than an inspirational book, some aspirin and a box of throat lozenges. He was on the point of leaving when he noticed yet another door. This one locked.

He hurried back to his room, returning a few moments later with a thin metal wire on a wooden handle-- a lock picker's tool. After jiggling it patiently in the lock and fiddling with the knob, the door finally swung open. He put the tool in his back pocket and after checking that the blinds and curtains were drawn, he turned on the light.

The room was small and intimate, made smaller by the presence of a heavy roll-top desk along one wall and two wing-back chairs with ottomans on the other. One wall held a painting of a much younger Cece, dolled up for an evening on the town. The fourth wall was a solid mass of bookshelves. Joe's main interest though, was the desk. It opened easily with his lock pick, revealing a desk calendar, ledgers, pens and notepads in front of an array of pigeonholes stuffed with papers and envelopes. Most of it was the ordinary bills and records of running a large home, along with dues and meeting reminders for a few clubs and charities that Cece was involved with. Nothing here implicated Cece in anything worse than a bad spending habit. With a sigh, Joe closed the desk and locked it, then started on the side drawers. He had just unlocked the first one when he heard a sound in the bedroom and jumped to turn off the light.

In the darkness, he inched his way to the door and silently turned the lock, keeping his ear pressed against the door and listening to the footsteps as they moved across the room. They disappeared in the direction of the bathroom and closet, and Joe wrestled with the urge to bolt. But before he could make a decision, the steps came back, this time accompanied by a voice humming a little tune-- the tune he had heard downstairs in the utility room. It was just the maid, putting clothes away. Relieved, Joe waited in the darkness for minutes that felt like hours, stretching the limits of his patience until he finally felt certain she wasn't coming back. Then he turned the light back on and returned to the desk.

The first two drawers revealed nothing more interesting than what had been in the desk, but the deeper bottom drawer was more intriguing. With growing interest, Joe flipped through a few albums of newspaper clippings about Cece's life. A few of them were reviews of plays she had been in with Elise. What interested him more though, were a series of later articles, all dealing with the death of Cece's husband, the fight over his inheritance, and the lingering mystery of just what had caused his death in the first place.