The Murder of Miranda

by Margaret Millar

  “She used to be quite beautiful.”

  “I doubt that he’d take that into consideration.”

  “If you’re just going to be negative about the whole thing, forget it.”

  “I’m not being negative, Iris. I want you to enjoy your­self.”

  “Enjoy myself?” The little dog jumped off her lap and darted across the room to hide under the desk. “Enjoy my­self? Are you insane? Look at me, stuck here day after day, hardly able to move, worrying myself sick over the girls, wondering what will become of them, of me, of—”

  “A small dinner party would be very nice,” Cooper said. “Very nice. As for a partner for Charles, what about Nev­ille’s widow?”

  “Who?”

  “Miranda Shaw. I had a glimpse of her today at the club, so she’s obviously over her period of mourning. She might be pleased to get back in circulation even if it means sitting next to Charles.”

  “I’ve never really liked Miranda Shaw,” Iris said, “but I can’t think of anyone else offhand.

  Part II

  It was only the second time since he’d worked for Smedler’s law firm that Tom Aragon had been summoned by Smedler himself up to the penthouse office.

  The penthouse wasn’t far in terms of distance. The city of Santa Felicia had a building code limiting the height of buildings, so Smedler’s office was in fact only three stories from the sidewalk. But in terms of accessibility it might as well have been a mile. It was serviced by an elevator whose movements could be controlled by Smedler through a cir­cuit breaker beside his desk. There were, of course, little buttons in the elevator for clients to press, giving them the comfortable feeling of being in command of the situation, but a few minutes trapped between floors, or behind a door that wouldn’t open, left them with reasonable doubts.

  Smedler’s secretary, Charity Nelson, wearing her orange wig slightly askew, was gluing on her fingernails for the day. She said, without looking up, “Aragon, you’re late.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We expect our junior employees to be like the Boy Scouts, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, punctual—”

  “Punctual is not part of the Boy Scout creed.”

  “Let’s add it right now. Punctual.”

  “I couldn’t get the elevator moving,” Aragon said. “It happens all the time. The air conditioners and electric ma­chines still function and the lights are on, but the elevator won’t work.”

  “Electricity is a very mysterious thing.”

  “Not all that mysterious. I was the assistant manager of an apartment house when I went to law school. If I could take a look at the transformer—”

  “Well, you’re not the assistant manager here, so mind your own business. Sit down. Smedler’s on the phone.” Charity filed the glue and the rest of the fingernails under B for bite. “Did he tell you what he wanted?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he asked for you specifically because you did such a bang-up job on the Lockwood case. By the way, we’re still waiting for Mrs. Lockwood to pay up. But that’s a mere trifle, forget it. We can’t have you worrying your pretty little head about anything as crass as money, can we? No indeedy.”

  Aragon sat down in a leather swivel chair facing Char­ity’s desk. Though it was late October and only ten thirty in the morning, the room was uncomfortably warm and humid. Charity had turned off the air conditioner to pro­tect her house plants, massed like a bonsai jungle in the east corner of the room. The plants didn’t like air condi­tioning, and she felt the same maternal obligation to them that she would have to a child or pet, rejoicing in their growth and good health and fighting off their enemies like aphids and mealybugs and red spider mites.

  Aragon looked at one of the plants, wondering if Charity talked to it, and if she did, why it hadn’t shriveled up and blown away.

  “You want to know why I believe you’ll make it as a lawyer, Aragon?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You look dumb. Not dumb dumb, more innocent-like dumb. Any judge or jury would feel sorry for you seeing those calf eyes peering from behind those horn-rimmed glasses. Juries hate a smart-looking lawyer who dresses well.”

  “Do you talk to your plants, Miss Nelson?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not.”

  “I’m not a loony. What in hell would I say to a plant?”

  “Oh, something soothing, pleasant, complimentary—you know, the way you talk to the new employees.”

  “I don’t talk like that to any employees. You trying to come on funny, junior? Better think twice.”

  Aragon thought twice and changed the subject. “What does Smedler want?”

  “What he always wants, everything.”

  “I meant from me.”

  “The file sent up was from Probate, so don’t expect any fun and games like last time. Probates are ho hum.” A light flashed on the intercom. “Okay, he’s off the phone. You can go in.”

  Even on Monday morning Smedler looked fit and vigor­ous. Though office rumors had him spending every week­end fighting with his third wife at the country club, he showed no signs of injury, physical or mental. He wore a vested pin-striped suit, a Dartmouth tie and a small perma­nent smile unrelated to anything he happened to be saying. His admirers, mostly female, thought this smile made him look inscrutable and they were always disappointed to find out how scrutable he actually was.

  “This matter is more of a nuisance than a problem,” Smedler said. “So far, anyway. The reason I called you in is because I hear you get along well with women. Is this correct?”

  “It depends on the circ—”

  “Yes. Well, anyway, to get down to business, I have some probate papers that must be signed. An elderly man, Neville Shaw, died last spring, leaving his wife, Miranda, as the administrator and sole beneficiary of his estate. I made it clear to Mrs. Shaw that probate was often long and involved and that she’d better keep in touch with me, since there’d be matters coming up from time to time which would require her notarized signature.

  Well, matters have come up, a lot of them, but the past week I haven’t been able to contact her. There’s no answer when I call her house, she doesn’t respond to messages left at her club, and two registered letters have been returned to the office unde­livered. Even with her full cooperation, probate may drag on for months. So find her.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You shouldn’t have much trouble. I’m sure this isn’t a deliberate evasion on her part—she’s a nice little woman, a good deal younger than her husband, well-bred, pretty, not too bright, always acts somewhat scared. In this case she has damned good reason to be scared.”

  There was a long pause, which Aragon recognized as a standard courtroom tactic: dangling question, delayed an­swer. He said nothing.

  Smedler looked annoyed. “Don’t you want to know why?”

  “I figured you’d tell me.”

  “Of course I’ll tell you. The problem is how much. It’s important not to start any more rumors about Neville Shaw’s will. There are enough already. He was nearly eighty when he died, and the fact is the estate should have had a conservator for the last few years of his life. He was getting senile, making a lot of crazy purchases and invest­ments, highly speculative stocks, foreign currency, real es­tate syndicates. He even put up his house as down payment on a stud farm in Kentucky. I didn’t know any of this was happening—and merely acted as his attorney when he made his will a dozen years ago—but I found out in a hurry. When the routine notice to creditors was published, they began coming

  out of the woodwork: brokers, bankers, developers, even the real estate hustler who’d handled the Kentucky transaction. To put it briefly, the creditors out­number the credits. Shaw died broke.”

  “And Mrs. Shaw doesn’t know this?”

  “No.”

/>   “That seems peculiar for this day and age.”

  “The Shaws didn’t live in this day and age.”

  “When are you going to bring her up to date?”

  “The first step is yours, Aragon. Now, here’s the address and phone number of her residence and her club. When you contact her, inform her firmly that she must come to my office to sign some papers. After that, I’ll—well, I’ll simply tell her that she’s not quite as rich as she was at one time and that she’ll have to make substantial reductions in her standard of living.”

  “Maybe you’d better tell her the truth; that she’s broke.”

  “You don’t tell women the truth,” Smedler said. “Not all at once anyway, and certainly not a woman like Mrs. Shaw who’s been protected and insulated from the world. My God, she might scream or cry or faint. She might even shoot me.”

  “If Mrs. Shaw is as insulated from the world as you claim she is, why would she be carrying a gun?”

  “I only meant there’s no way of predicting how a woman will act when she’s in extremis. And believe me, that’s what she is going to be. If nothing else does it, the stud farm in Kentucky will.”

  “It’s a nice Freudian touch.”

  Smedler went over to the water cooler and poured him­self a drink in a clear plastic cup. The water looked slightly murky and when he drank it he winced. “Ever taste this stuff, Aragon? It’s lethal. I often suspect my secretary of trying to poison me. The only reason I survive is because I’ve gradually built up an immunity. Have some?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Better start working on your immunity. The water situ­ation is not likely to improve. In fact, I predict that some day the world will dry up and blow away. There’ll be no nonsense about floods and arks, just a whole lot of dust. Think about it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Aragon thought about it and concluded that Smedler’s weekend bash with his wife must have been worse than usual.

  Smedler returned to his desk. “I was your age, Aragon, when I passed my bar exams and assumed I was about to enter the practice of law. What I actually entered was the practice of people. To put it another way, anyone can memorize the criminal code, but what’s important is the code of criminals.”

  “That’s very good, sir.”

  “I know. I’ve used it in a dozen speeches. Well, you have work to do, I won’t keep you.”

  The Penguin Club was a long blue one-and-a-half-story building built on a narrow strip of land between the road and the sea. To passersby, it presented a windowless front except for a series of shuttered air ducts that peeked out from beneath the roof like half-closed eyes. In spite of the club’s reputation as a gathering place for the very rich, the cars in the parking lot were the same size and brand as the ones found outside a supermarket or a laundromat. The only difference was that there were fewer of them—less than a quarter of the slots were occupied. In a time and place of abundance, space was the only real luxury left.

  Tom Aragon hadn’t been inside the Penguin Club since the night he and some of his high school friends had come up from the beach to scale the back fence and swim in the pool. Before they even hit the water the lights went on, every light in the place—at the entrance and inside the office, along the corridors and the terrace, under the water and from the depths of shrubbery, the tops of palm trees, the interiors of cabanas. A uniformed security guard ap­peared, his gun drawn. “Back to the barrio, you bobos!”

  This time he was ten years older and went to the front entrance. For the first few seconds he felt nervous, as if the same security guard was going to be on duty and might recognize him.

  The fancy gold lettering on the door didn’t soften its message: Members and Guests Only. No Trespassing. Dress Code Enforced. He went inside. No one recognized him or even noticed him. In the office, on the other side of the waist-high counter, only one person was visible, a young woman sitting at a desk with a pencil behind her ear. She didn’t seem to be doing anything except possibly thinking.

  Aragon was the first to speak. “Miss?”

  She removed the pencil and came over to the counter. She was tall and on the verge of being pretty, with dark hair and serious green eyes. The lids were pink, as if, not too long ago, she’d been crying. He wondered why, esti­mating his chance of finding out as very slight.

  “May I help you?” The hoarseness of her voice tied in with the pink eyelids. “I’m Miss Brewster, the club secre­tary.”

  He gave her one of his business cards: Tomás Aragon, Attorney, Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, McFee, Powell. “I’m trying to locate one of our clients, Mrs. Miranda Shaw. I understand she’s a member of this club.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are some important papers for her to sign and Mr. Smedler hasn’t been able to contact her at her house. He thought she might be here.”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “Does that mean she’s not here?”

  “Not necessarily. She might have come in while I was on my coffee break or before I arrived. I was late this morn­ing. My car wouldn’t start and I had to ride my bicycle.”

  “What kind of bicycle?”

  “What difference does it make what kind of bicycle?”

  “No difference. I was merely putting in time until you decide to tell me about Mrs. Shaw.”

  She took a deep breath. It seemed to hurt her. She began coughing, holding on hard to her throat.

  He waited, looking toward the pool. A couple of swim­mers were doing laps and half a dozen women were taking part in an exercise class at the shallow end. On the terrace an elderly man wearing a tennis visor sat at a table, writ­ing. Most of the deck chairs on the opposite side of the pool were empty.

  The lifeguard tower interested Aragon most. It was oc­cupied by a red-haired boy about eight or nine looking through a pair of outsized binoculars. Aragon had the im­pression that they were focused on him. To test this he smiled and waved, and immediately the binoculars were lowered and the boy climbed down from the tower and disappeared.

  The young woman had finished coughing. “We’re not allowed to give out information about our members. It’s in the rule book. Practically everything is, including fraterni­zation.” She gave the word a certain bitter emphasis which he didn’t understand. “I— Look, I’m having a bad morn­ing. You’d better talk to the manager, Mr. Henderson. Wait here and I’ll see if he’s busy.”

  “Sure. Sorry about the bad morning. By noon things may be better.”

  “Or worse.”

  “Or worse,” Aragon said. There was no point in wasting happy talk on Miss Brewster. She wasn’t in a receptive mood.

  Neither was Mr. Henderson.

  Henderson had been going over the delinquent-dues list, trying to decide whether to take the drastic step of posting it on the main bulletin board or merely to keep a copy in strategic areas like the card and game room. There was the added decision of which names should be removed.

  Each case had to be judged on its individual merits, or lack of them. The Whipples, for example, were traveling in the Orient and probably hadn’t received the notice that the rent on their cabana was overdue. Billy Parr Davis had run up a two-thousand-dollar bill at his sixtieth birthday party, but it was only a matter of time before his mother sent a check to cover it as usual. The Redferns were in the throes of a divorce and custody of the club membership hadn’t yet been determined, so it was unreasonable to expect payment from either of them. Mr. and Mrs. Quinn were protesting the charges for damages little Frederic had done to the first-aid station and the plumbing in the men’s locker room. Mrs. Guinevere had gone to a fat farm to lose fifty pounds and her bill would be paid when the remaining two hundred returned.

  There were, of course, the usual deadbeats, some, like Charles Van Eyck, very wealthy and intent on staying that way, others obviously having a hard time keeping up with inf
lation and the Joneses. Henderson was checking the list a final time when Ellen opened the door of his office.

  He looked up, frowning. “You didn’t knock. I’ve told you—”

  “Sorry. Knock, knock.”

  “Come in and be brief.”

  “Yes, sir. There’s a Tomás Aragon here. He’s a lawyer. I think you’d better talk to him.”

  “Is he applying for membership?”

  “No. He wants some information about Mrs. Shaw.”

  “That’s a funny coincidence.” Henderson sounded un­easy. He didn’t like coincidences. Through some obscure mechanism they usually ended up working against him. “I was just going to ask you about her myself. Her name’s been crossed off the delinquent list.”

  “She paid up,” Ellen said. “In cash.”

  “Her bill’s been outstanding for some time. I haven’t pressed the matter because I wanted to give her a chance to get over the loss of her husband.”

  “Well, I guess she got over it.”

  “Why cash, I wonder. Nobody around here pays cash. It’s a dirty word . . . This lawyer, Aragon, what sort of information is he after?”

  “He’s trying to find Mrs. Shaw so she can sign some legal papers.”

  “That sounds plausible to me,” Henderson said. “What’s he like?”

  “Young, dark-haired, horn-rimmed glasses, rather ap­pealing.”

  “I meant inside.”

  “I can’t see his inside. Outside he looks honest enough.”

  “Then there’s no reason to be secretive about it. Tell him Mrs. Shaw is not here. Unless, of course, she is?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “Neither have I. Odd, she was coming every day for a while. Mr. Van Eyck used to stare at her across the pool. I sensed a possible romance between two lonely people. That would have been good for the club—we could have held a lovely wedding reception in the ballroom, with white cymbidiums and silver ribbon and podocarpus instead of ferns. Ferns are

  common . . . When’s the last time you saw Mrs. Shaw at the club?”