Consigned to Death

by Jane K. Cleland

  “Yeah, that’s the joint.”

  “Well, I’ve told you that I won’t talk to you,” I repeated, wanting to be on the record, in case the call was, in fact, being taped, and Max ever needed to defend me against a charge of interfering with an official investigation.

  “I understand,” he answered. “Just in case, write down my cell number.”

  I did, told him good night, and hung up.

  Wes sounded confident, even excited, and it was contagious. That must mean that he had answers he knew I’d be glad to hear. I couldn’t imagine what they were, but I allowed myself to feel optimistic.

  I smiled as I climbed the stairs, and I was still smiling as I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wes was leaning against an old dark blue Toyota in the parking lot of the Portsmouth Diner when I pulled in just before seven. It was thickly overcast and cold, and he wore a red-and-black checked woolen jacket buttoned to his chin.

  I pulled up near the front in response to Wes’s signal. I lowered my window and he said, “Go ahead and park. I’ll drive.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Wait a sec!” I called as he walked away. From the back, he appeared rounder than he had from the front. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be fat before he was thirty. “What about breakfast?”

  “Later.”

  I pulled into a space and hurried to his car. Looking in, I spotted crumpled-up coffee cups, candy wrappers, and fast-food bags covering the floor in back, stacks of papers haphazardly placed on the backseat, and a portable CD player wedged between a scuffed, old briefcase and a battered CD storage case. It was a pit.

  Reaching across from the driver’s side, Wes swept crumbs from the front seat onto the floor. Gingerly, I sat down and latched my seat belt, wrinkling my nose with distaste. The metal was sticky.

  Wes revved his motor and accelerated as if he were on a race track, then, when he came up on a slower moving vehicle or red light, pounded the brakes to stop. And he did it over and over again. It was nauseating. Reaching Portsmouth Circle, a rotary that served as the unofficial entrance to the city from the interstate, felt like a major accomplishment. Wes swung south on 1-95, and at the next exit, reeled east toward the ocean.

  “If we’re going far,” I said, turning to look at him, “let me drive.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You drive like a maniac.”

  Amazement showed on his face. “What are you talking about? I’m a good driver.”

  “Oh, God. Slow down, will you? You’re not a good driver-you’re a jerky driver. If you don’t stop it, I’m going to get sick.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  He slowed to a reasonable speed, but his driving stayed staccato. I readjusted my grip on the overhead handle, and hung on.

  Fifteen minutes later he slammed to a stop at the edge of the dunes in Hampton Beach. The sky was overcast and thick. It looked like rain. I held on to the dashboard for a moment, relieved that we were uninjured and no longer moving.

  “Wow. Whatever’s going on, I sure as shooting hope it’s worth what I just went through on that ride.”

  “So,” Wes said with faux concern, “are you always cranky before breakfast or only when you’re with a new man?”

  “Oh, God, save me from fourteen-year-old race-car drivers.”

  “I’m twenty-four,” he protested.

  “Well, you look and drive like you’re fourteen.”

  “You’re getting old. The older you are, the younger other people look to you.”

  “Did you bring me to the beach so you could insult me?”

  “No,” he said, opening his door and stepping out. “That’s just an added benefit. Come on, don’t get me started. Follow me.” He handed me the portable CD player he’d extracted from the backseat. “Take this.”

  “What in the world?…” I began, but he disappeared behind the car and opened the trunk. He pulled out a scraggly woolen blanket and a scuffed red-and-white Playmate cooler and locked the car.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “For what?”

  “Come on.” He scrambled up a dune, pushing through tall grass, and with a sigh and a shrug, I followed.

  Wes headed toward the ocean, and looked around. He selected a fairly level spot about ten feet from the surf. Snapping the blanket to lay it flat, he smoothed it out and sat down, gesturing that I should join him. The wind off the blue-black ocean was bitter, and I shivered as I sat down, lifting the collar of my pea coat and rubbing my hands together.

  As I got settled, I looked around. Wind-whipped whitecaps rippled across the ocean surface. The beach was mostly deserted. I saw someone sitting about a hundred yards to the north, huddled in a lawn chair staring at the ocean, and far to the south, a man was throwing driftwood to a golden retriever. Each time the man tossed the branch, the dog dashed away and retrieved it, trotting with a jaunty swagger, to drop it at his master’s feet.

  Wes turned on the CD player, and Frank Sinatra began to sing “Fly Me to the Moon.” “I have no reason to think you’re wired, and I damn well know I’m not,” he whispered, leaning toward me. “But I’m going to be quoting a police source, so I can’t take any chances. With the ocean sounds and the CD, if we whisper, we should be fine.”

  “Are you serious? You think I might be wearing a wire? You’ve been watching too many movies.” I noted that even as I expressed incredulity, I whispered.

  Wes leaned back, resting his weight on the palms of his hands. “You might be right. So what? Indulge me, okay?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  He pulled a thermos of coffee, two plastic mugs, and a box of doughnuts out of the Playmate. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a doughnut. I took a honey-glazed and nibbled. It didn’t taste like food. It tasted like dessert. Wes took an oversized bite of a chocolate-glazed doughnut. He used the back of his hand to wipe away smudged chocolate from his cheek.

  “What do you want to hear about first?” he asked. “Phone, prints, or background?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Phone, I guess. Were you able to learn who called Mr. Grant?”

  Wes nodded. “Basically, no one.”

  “What do you mean, ‘basically’?”

  “His daughter, a widow named Dana Cabot who lives in Boston, called several times. So did his next-door neighbor and his lawyer, Epps. Also, there were two business calls.” He shrugged. “Other than that, no one but you and another dealer, Barney Troudeaux, called him during the last month.”

  “What kind of business calls?”

  Wes reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a single sheet of lined paper, folded into a small square. Consulting it, he said, “His doctor’s office. And Taffy Pull, a candy store on the beach.” He refolded the paper and placed it on his lap.

  “Nothing there seems to stand out, does it?”

  He shrugged. “Not to me. The police are checking them out.”

  “Do you know what they’ve learned?”

  Wes pursed his lips. “No.”

  “Your source won’t tell you?”

  “My source says he-or she-doesn’t know.”

  “Do you believe him-or her?”

  He turned both hands up and gave me a “my guess is as good as yours” look, then smiled, and said, “I’ll keep pushing.”

  I nodded. It was hard to imagine that calls from a candy store or his doctor were relevant. The former was probably a sales call, and the latter was most likely routine.

  “Did Mr. Grant make any calls?” I asked, thinking that perhaps he’d initiated one or more of those calls.

  “No one but you, Troudeaux, and his lawyer.”

  “Not even his daughter?”

  “Nope. No other calls.”

  “Was he in frequent touch with his lawyer? Mr. Epps?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. There were a couple of calls, but earlier in the month. Nothing from, or to, Epps in th
e last week.”

  “How about Barney? When did Barney last call him, or vice versa?”

  He smiled. “Are you ready? Troudeaux called Mr. Grant at seven-thirty-two the night before he died.”

  “The night before,” I repeated. I turned toward the ocean, and watched as water rushed in, then slowly seeped away. “What does he say they talked about?”

  “Changing an appointment.”

  “What appointment?”

  “Did you know Mr. Grant kept a diary?”

  “Yes. My appointment to see him the morning he was killed was in it.”

  “Right. Well, apparently, so was Barney Troudeaux’s. Troudeaux had an appointment to see Mr. Grant the morning he died, too.”

  “That morning? You’re kidding!”

  “Yeah, at nine. Except that Barney said he called Mr. Grant and changed it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My source tells me that Barney said that Mr. Grant agreed to change the appointment to three that afternoon.”

  “Why the last-minute change?”

  “A board meeting for the association Barney heads up.”

  “But he would have known about a board meeting sooner than the night before,” I objected.

  Wes shrugged. “Looks like he screwed up and double-booked himself.”

  “Were there any calls on the day Mr. Grant was killed?”

  “Yeah. From you, his daughter, and his neighbor. That’s it.”

  “But then how did Barney learn that Mr. Grant was killed?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  I shrugged. “I’m just wondering… did he show up at the Grant house for his appointment that afternoon?”

  Wes looked intrigued, wiped his chocolate-sticky fingers on his jeans, and wrote a note on the folded square of paper. “Good question,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”

  “What about fingerprints?” I asked.

  “Apparently yours were everywhere. Barney’s were around, too, but not as many as yours.”

  I smiled. “I’m more thorough.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind when I’m ready to sell my family’s treasures.”

  “Does your family have treasures?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. I was joking.”

  “Too bad. I would have made you a good deal.”

  Wes shook his head, grinning a little. “There were other prints, too. Miscellaneous and explainable. Grant’s wife, for instance, obviously from before she died, a house cleaner who came in periodically, and a delivery boy from a grocery store in town. There was one set of prints in the living room that is still unidentified.”

  “Can they tell anything about who left them?”

  “No, not to quote them on. They’re adult prints, but smallish, so based on the size, they may be from a woman.” He shrugged. “But there are small men, too. And large men with small hands.”

  “Doesn’t it seem incredible that no other prints were found? I mean, what about his daughter and granddaughter? Or other delivery people? Or friends?”

  “I guess he lived a pretty quiet life.”

  I shook my head, wondering what prints they’d find in my house if they looked. I wasn’t a bad housekeeper, but I wasn’t a nut about it either. It made me wonder whether maybe one of my dad’s prints was still somewhere, maybe on the side of a dining room chair, a remnant from one of the scores of times when he’d sat, idly tapping a beat, waiting for me to serve the meal.

  “Anything else scheduled for that morning?” I asked, focusing on Wes, chasing away the memory. “Besides me?”

  “Just Barney Troudeaux’s nine o’clock appointment.”

  “I thought he changed it when he called the night before.”

  “That’s what he says, but it was still in the diary.”

  “Maybe Mr. Grant hadn’t gotten around to changing it before he died,” I said, saddened at the thought.

  I recalled the day that I’d made a mistake in my schedule, realizing it only after I’d left the Grant house. I hurried back and knocked on the door. When he answered, I apologized for my error, he assured me it wasn’t a problem, and escorted me back to the kitchen. I could picture him sitting at his kitchen table, erasing the mistaken entry, turning pages to find the correct date, his callused index finger running down the center of the page until he located the time slot he wanted. He smiled then, and using a freshly sharpened pencil, he wrote my name.

  “We’ll never know, I guess,” Wes said.

  “Yeah. And probably, it doesn’t matter. Because Barney was at the board meeting, right?”

  “Right.”

  Bright sunshine unexpectedly illuminated the beach from a sudden break in the clouds. I heard the dog bark, and squinted into the sun in time to see him run a circle around his owner as they made their way up the dunes. I took another bite of doughnut. My coffee had cooled enough so it was comfortable to sip.

  “How about Mr. Grant’s background? Were you able to learn anything about him or his family?”

  Wes nodded. “Yeah. Quite a story, actually. He was born in Kansas, the only son of successful ranchers. He came east to go to prep school, and never lived in the Midwest again.”

  “Was he in the war?”

  “Yeah. He joined the army in 1942, and for a lot of the time, he was stationed in France. That’s when he met his wife. According to all reports she was a piece of work. A tough old bird with a temper. She was maybe French, maybe Belgian, maybe who knows what.”

  “What do you mean, ‘who knows what’?”

  He shook his head, and gestured that he had no idea. “I know that her name was Yvette. Or at least that’s what she called herself. I couldn’t even find a record of her maiden name.”

  “How can that be? What does that mean?”

  “Probably nothing. Maybe she was a Jew on the run. Maybe she was a Nazi sympathizer. Who knows? Back then, there were lots of good reasons to change your name and reinvent yourself.”

  I thought about that for a long minute, watching as shards of sunlight dappled the sand and water. Gretchen had wanted to reinvent herself, a fresh start, she’d called it. I wondered if Gretchen was her real name, or if, like Yvette, she too had changed it. No matter. She was Gretchen to me, and I felt grateful that her desire for a fresh start had led her to my door.

  After a sip of coffee, I asked, “What did Mr. Grant do after the war?”

  “He settled in Rocky Point and started a painting contracting business.”

  “And?” I prompted.

  “And he made a fortune. Everyone I checked with said he was a ruthless SOB, but likable. The kind of guy who could sell tulips to a Dutchman.” He shrugged. “Apparently he was a good talker and a terrific negotiator. But you’d better be careful every step of the way because if there was anything he could exploit, he would.”

  “Why? What does that mean?”

  “You know… it means that he was a smooth operator, a guy who knew the angles and never missed an opportunity to make a profit. He built his business by winning federal contracts until it became the biggest company of its kind in New England, then sold out to a national firm. That was about fifteen years ago.”

  That sounded like both the Mr. Grant I’d met and the one I’d gotten to know after his death: charming and shrewd. “How big a fortune are we talking about?” I asked.

  Wes glanced at the folded square of paper. “Somewhere around thirty million dollars, depending on who you ask.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Wow it is.”

  I remembered that Max had planned to ask Epps who would inherit Mr. Grant’s estate, and wondered if he had done so. From my conversation with Mrs. Cabot yesterday, I assumed she inherited everything. It occurred to me that Wes might know.

  “Does his daughter inherit everything?” I asked.

  “Nope. Fifty-fifty split with the granddaughter. Nothing to anyone else.”

  “No siblings, uncles, cousins? No other family
?”

  “No. Mr. Grant had a sister who died in her teens back in Kansas. Mrs. Grant-who knows what family she might have had. According to my source, no one else has surfaced yet.”

  I nodded. That would account for Andi’s impatience. Fifteen million dollars would buy a lot of independence. I wondered whether she cared that she had such a small family. As the only children of only children, apparently Andi and I shared a common legacy-small families that grow smaller with each generation.

  “Anything else of note?” I asked.

  “Something about the daughter’s leaving after high school. Mrs. Cabot. She left to get married in… let me see here… 1964. It seems she and her father had an argument sometime during the summer after her high school graduation that was heard for miles around.”

  “What about?” I asked.

  “No one remembers. But they sure remember the shouting. The fight started on the beach, and continued through the village. Dana marched into the house, packed two bags, and, with her mother pulling at her and begging her to stay, left.”

  I stared at Wes. Was it possible that a forty-year-old argument had anything to do with Mr. Grant’s death? It was hard to believe that a long-ago altercation could be relevant today. Turning my attention to the sea, I looked at the whitecaps shimmering in the now-bright sun. I remembered Max asking Alverez why he was interrogating me about the jewelry in my safe. Alverez had said that until he knew what was going on, it was impossible to know what was a tangent and what was a clue. Dana’s departure had been so remarkable, it was etched in the community’s memory even after forty years. An event that memorable might, in fact, have repercussions that rippled through the generations.

  “That kind of breach between parents and a child, it’s sad, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Wes answered with a shrug, seeming not to care much one way or the other. “I guess. But I bet that her half of thirty million dollars will help heal a lot of wounds.”

  “Don’t be cynical,” I said. “It’s sad, and that’s that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I gotta tell you, Wes, that my head is spinning a little from all this information. But I’m not sure whether any of it is relevant.”

  “Me either. I just provide the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”