Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

He was watching to see if I’d react, but the name didn’t mean anything.

  “I’m supposed to know her?”

  “You sold a photograph of her to a tabloid this morning. It’s all over the internet.”

  It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. I was still keyed up on Lorca and Agent White. Then I remembered my morning walk. My photo credit would have run alongside the picture. For good or ill, the whole world was going to know I took that shot.

  “The suicide—what’s she have to do with anything?”

  “My client is Olivia Gravesend. Claire Gravesend’s mother.”

  “You’re talking about the Olivia Gravesend.”

  “Yes.”

  “The girl I saw this morning—she’s the daughter?”

  “I just said that.”

  “Your client’s hiring me to do what?”

  “Her girl’s dead. She wants to know why and how.”

  “Aren’t the police going to tell her that?”

  Jim brushed a piece of cigar ash from his lapel.

  “She doesn’t trust anybody. They ID’d the girl with fingerprints, then sent a man out to her house with photos to make the formal identification. While he was there, he told her it looked like suicide.”

  “She’s worried they’re jumping to conclusions.”

  Jim nodded.

  “It’s pretty fast,” he said. “If they start in that mind-set, they’ll have blinders on.”

  “Did anyone see her jump?” I asked. “If there’s a witness, if someone came forward—”

  Jim cut me off with a wave of the hand.

  “I don’t know if there’s a witness or not. And if they found someone to make a statement, how much do you trust that? You know how it works. You can buy a city councilman for ten thousand dollars. How much do you think a witness on Turk Street costs?”

  I thought about how I’d spent the last several weeks, and what I’d watched this morning. Witnesses were as malleable as any other kind of person. Money wasn’t the only thing that shaped testimony. Coercion was just as good, and cheaper.

  “You said we’re meeting her this evening,” I said. “Is she coming here?”

  “Her house—if you’ve got time.”

  “I was going to leave town for a while,” I said.

  “Because of today?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Look, Lee—they were threatening him to get the testimony they wanted. We pushed back and he changed his story. We didn’t have the same leverage as them, so we used different leverage. He could have been lying until we set him straight.”

  “Are you drinking the Kool-Aid, or just selling it?” I asked. “DeCanza shit his pants when you brought up Eagle Pass. So we both know what’s true. He was terrified of your client, and that says it all.”

  Jim’s silence was as close as he’d come to admitting I was right. Since that was all I’d get, I let it stretch as long as it would go. Jim found a paperclip at the edge of my desk, straightened it out, then bent the wire around his fingertip.

  “Can you help Mrs. Gravesend?” he asked. “Or should I find someone else?”

  Jim knew how to lure me in. As much as I hated to lose a shot at a client like Olivia Gravesend, I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else getting the job. And maybe leaving town wasn’t a great plan anyway. The government didn’t need me around to make a case against me. If Nammar got a true bill out of a grand jury, someone would be at the airport when I came back. So I might as well just stay here and try to keep on top of it.

  “When do we go?” I asked Jim.

  “Right now,” Jim said. “Go splash some water on your face. Try to look like the kid I used to know. I’ll call Titus and tell him to pull around.”

  We were in the back seat of the Range Rover. Jim rolled up the black privacy screen, which closed us off from his driver, and then he leaned to the humidor built into the console between us. He selected a fat Cohiba. He began to roll the cigar back and forth between his fingers, but made no move to light it.

  “What do you know about Olivia Gravesend?” he asked me.

  “Public stuff. Whatever’s in the papers. You fired me before I ever got to work for her.”

  Jim let that slide. He used a double-bladed cutter to clip the end off his cigar, then passed the tip a few times beneath his nose.

  “She’s not like other people in her position,” Jim said. “She had family money, sure. And she might have married in to more. But if she’d been born in a shack and married a sharecropper, she’d still be where she is.”

  “You’re saying she’s smart.”

  “Smart doesn’t cover it. You’re smart. I’m smart. Olivia Gravesend is ruthless.”

  “But you trust her.”

  “She’s been my client for thirty years. You know the first rule of managing a client like her?”

  “No.”

  “Cover your ass,” Jim said. “If Olivia wants something done, she tends to do it herself. If she brings in outside help, it’s because she wants a cutout to take the blame. So see to yourself first. Then give her what she wants. But never, ever trust her.”

  We rode in silence down the length of Market Street. The driver pulled to the curb before we had to turn onto Embarcadero, and Jim opened his door.

  “This is it?” I asked. “She lives in your building?”

  “This is where I get out,” Jim said. “I’ve got trial in the morning. I don’t have time to go all the way out to Carmel and back.”

  So, as it happened, I left town that night after all, in the back of Jim Gardner’s Range Rover, the privacy screen still up and the driver invisible as we raced south on 101. San Mateo, Palo Alto. San Jose just lights and highway signs, and then we were pushing into darker areas. I rested my head against the window and let the pavement glide past. When I smelled garlic I knew we were passing through the fields in Gilroy. After that, I must have fallen asleep for almost an hour.

  When I opened my eyes, we were moving south on Highway 1. The curves kept our speed down, but not much. To the right, I caught fast glimpses of the Pacific between the trees. The water was smooth and silver-black in the moonlight. Ten miles like that, and then the road moved inland a little and the driver slowed. He turned onto an unmarked road and headed down toward the sea cliffs. We came to an iron gate, and paused. The gate began to swing open, and we rolled the rest of the way to Olivia Gravesend’s house.

  I got out of the car and stood looking up at it. It was made of rough-edged sandstone. Its many-tiered roof was covered in Spanish tiles. I counted six chimneys. The air smelled of lavender and eucalyptus and ocean spray. The house was built directly on the cliffs, and the waves were booming just a hundred feet below. Olivia Gravesend could have gone fishing out her bedroom window if she’d wanted to.

  Jim’s driver, Titus, stayed in the car but shut the engine off. I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked to the front door and knocked. A butler met me. White hair, a white shirt beneath a black jacket. His hair was disheveled, and both his shirt and his jacket could have used a pressing. I doubted he always looked this way.

  “She’s waiting for you in the gun room, sir.”

  “Okay.”

  I had no way of knowing if she always met her visitors in the gun room. Maybe she saved it for the special occasions when she had violence on her mind. The walls were English walnut, lined with bespoke French shotguns. A table by the fireplace held an open wooden case with matched dueling pistols lying on green velvet. Olivia Gravesend sat by the cold fireplace in a pose so upright that her straight-backed wooden chair might have felt bad about its posture. She wore a black dress that went to her ankles. Her only jewelry was a small golden medallion. A saint I didn’t recognize. She looked at me with eyes matched to the gunmetal all around her.

  “You’re Lee Crowe. Jim told me about you.”

  The butler took that as his cue to leave. After he shut the door, I could hear his footsteps moving off.

  “Ye
s, ma’am,” I said. “You can call me Lee.”

  “Don’t ma’am me, Crowe—it sounds simple.”

  “All right.”

  “You photographed my daughter this morning. Why?”

  “I saw her, and I shot the scene. I figured I could sell it to the paper.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “It was just luck,” I said, and regretted the word. “I was walking past, on my way to the office.”

  The woman stared at me in silence. Her nose was thin and sharp, like a hawk’s beak. Her dark hair was up in a bun, and held in place with wooden pins the way her daughter’s had been. Beyond that similarity, they looked nothing like each other.

  “You live in that neighborhood—the Tenderloin?”

  “No,” I said. “I was doing something for Jim. For a different case.”

  “So you’ve been lucky today, Crowe,” she said. “You got your picture, and you sold it. Now I’m hiring you.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t worry about your rates,” she said. “Just send the bills.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Jim told you what I want?”

  “You don’t trust the investigation. You want to find out what really happened.”

  “Jim considers himself an ethical man,” Olivia said to me. “Does that surprise you?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  “He looks in the mirror and what does he see? A pillar of the community. A lion of the law. I tell him I’d like to break the rules, so he finds the right man for the job, and stays home. His conscience is clear. We wouldn’t want him to feel conflicted, would we?”

  “You don’t want me to talk about this with him.”

  “Correct, Crowe,” she said. She pointed to another straight-backed chair on the opposite side of the fireplace. I sat down and smoothed my pant legs. “He mentioned you’re quick. He also said you’d do whatever it took.”

  “I’ve been known to.”

  “But only if you have to. And you’ll keep my name out of it, whatever it is you do.”

  “Tell me about your daughter.”

  “She was a good girl. Never mind how she grew up—she was kind.”

  “This morning, how old was she?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Was she seeing anyone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was she doing—college?”

  “She’d left school. I don’t know what she was doing.”

  “When was the last time you talked?”

  “December, after Christmas. Her birthday.”

  “You fought?”

  “Not at all. We had a glass of brandy. I was in this chair and she was in yours. It was cold; there was a fire. We spoke about her upcoming term. She was excited about a class, a professor she admired. She went back that night.”

  I looked out the window. Rain was streaming against the old glass. There were a few clear patches of sky, though, giving way to a view of the moon over the ocean.

  “What school?”

  “Harvard.”

  “She flew back to Boston?”

  “Of course.”

  “Your plane, or a commercial flight?”

  “Neither. My plane was in Vancouver getting a new engine. I hired a charter.”

  “And she made it there—you know that?”

  “Yes,” Olivia said. “I spoke to the driver, later. The man who brought her from the airport to our house.”

  “Your house?”

  “My great-grandfather believed in many things. Most of all the utility of a pied-à-terre. You’ll find a Gravesend foothold anywhere of consequence.”

  I tried to imagine how the Gravesends determined the cutoff for that. If I had my facts straight, Olivia Gravesend’s great-grandfather had done with copper and gold what Carnegie had done with steel. But Gravesend hadn’t pissed his fortune away on libraries for the common man. There could be a lot of houses.

  “And after she arrived at her pied-à-terre?”

  “She went to one class. And then she disappeared.”

  “How do you know she went to the class?”

  “I talked to the professor, the one she was excited about. It was a journalism class.”

  “You went to Boston?”

  “Twice. And no one’s been in the house since January, except for me.”

  “You know that? There’s an alarm system you can monitor from here?”

  “I suppose I don’t know that,” she admitted. “I assume no one has been in but me.”

  “Is there a cleaning service?”

  “She wouldn’t allow one.”

  “Because she liked to take care of it herself, or because she wanted privacy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you take anything from the house?”

  “Nothing—and I didn’t search it. Both times, I went in and saw she wasn’t there, and left.”

  “You reported her missing?”

  “No.”

  She wanted me to ask why, but I waited her out. She needed to develop a habit of telling me things without a prompt. Her back was even more rigid now than it had been two minutes ago.

  “She wrote to me,” she finally said. “I hadn’t heard from her for two weeks. I’d just started making calls. And then I got her first letter.”

  “Postmarked from where?”

  “San Rafael. She’d come back to California.”

  “What did the letter say?”

  “That I shouldn’t worry. There was something she needed to do, and then everything would be fine again.”

  “Had she ever done anything like that?”

  “Never.”

  “The letter was handwritten, and signed?”

  “If it hadn’t been, I can assure you I’d have done something more. Before you leave, I’ll give them to you. There were six. The last one arrived a week ago.”

  “Postmarked from San Rafael?”

  She shook her head.

  “They were all different, but all within two hundred miles of San Francisco. The last was from Mendocino.”

  “Were the two of you close?”

  “I want to think so.”

  “But you didn’t know if she was seeing anyone. Was she guarded, or were you too busy to ask?”

  Her eyes narrowed on mine, her sharp raptor’s nose pointed down.

  “It’s easier than tiptoeing around,” I said. “And I didn’t think you were the kind to get offended.”

  She smiled with some bitter understanding.

  “Did Jim call me the Iron Bitch? I know he likes that one. I’ve met at least three people he’s said it to.”

  “I’m not the fourth.”

  “I’d fire him, but he’s seen too much,” she said. If she expected me to follow up on that, she didn’t give any sign. “And your question? Claire was guarded. I know I have a reputation. Jim must have told you something. And maybe he’s right about me, at least in some parts of my life. In business. In certain personal circles. But with Claire, I was her mother. First, and last.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Overwhelming love, Crowe. That’s what it means, and it’s what I felt for her. What I still feel.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “When she was under this roof, she wasn’t so guarded. It started when she was eighteen. When she went to Boston.”

  “She was keeping things from you?”

  “I think so,” Olivia said. “She’s my only child. I have no nieces or nephews. I keep few friends—fewer still with children of their own. So the only point of comparison is my own youth. And I think whatever she was going through was more than the usual. She wasn’t just a girl who’d turned eighteen, who’d gone off to college and decided to shut out her mother. There was something else. It got a little worse each year, and then it exploded.”

  The young woman I’d seen this morning had taken a long dive from a tenement window into the roof of a car, but when I’d found her,
she’d looked like she might sit up, brush the blood from her ankle, and walk back to a cocktail party. I could only imagine what she must have looked like before she’d stepped off firm ground and into the air. Which is to say, she didn’t look like she’d been on the lam from her mother since Christmas.

  “Did she have money of her own?” I asked. “A fund she could tap in to, something to finance these last six months?”

  “She had her own money. After she came of age, she got the first ten percent.”

  “Could you track how she spent it?”

  “It was hers. So in a word—no.”

  “But you have the account information?”

  “I had it. What it was when I handed it over to her. What she did with it after that, I don’t know.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  “Enough to take care of herself, but not so much that she’d regret it if she made a big mistake.”

  I was sitting here because I’d photographed Olivia Gravesend’s dead daughter, then sold the shot for a thousand dollars. That was money I’d use, regardless of my recent windfall from Jim. I’ve never had any real money. Being married to Juliette, I’d lived close enough to it that I know I’ll never understand it. Take this room, with its rows of shotguns on the wood-paneled walls. Each gun was probably a year’s worth of lease payments on my office.

  “Mrs. Gravesend,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that means. I’d regret it if I lost the cash in my wallet right now—fifteen dollars. I know you’re on a different level. Are we talking about a hundred thousand? Two hundred fifty?”

  Her eyes tracked slowly from my shoes to my shirt collar. She was probably pricing everything I had on, which couldn’t have added up to whatever she’d paid for her nail polish. I was glad I’d had dry clothes at the office.

  “Twenty million,” she said. Doing the math, she glanced at the oak-beamed ceiling. “Rounded down.”

  “That was a tenth of what she stood to get?”

  “Yes.”

  “The rest came when?”

  “Her thirtieth birthday. And that money was just a start. She was to receive the entire estate when I pass.”

  “That was irrevocable, or could you amend it?”

  “I could do anything. And she knew it.”

  “Meaning she had every reason to stick around. To stay in your good graces.”