The Murder of Miranda

by Margaret Millar

  “He wasn’t acting rationally, whatever his motives. Smedler believes you should have demanded a conservator for the estate.”

  “I’m not the kind of woman who demands. I guess I’m not sure enough of myself to tell other people what to do.”

  “You seem to me to be quite sure of yourself, Mrs. Shaw. You’ve made some bold decisions in the past three weeks.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps too bold.”

  She shrugged and turned away. Her movements were graceful but a little contrived, as though they’d been prac­ticed for years in front of mirrors. “If I broke the law and a few conventions, I suppose I’ll be sorry eventually. Right now I’m not, I’d do the same thing again. It’s going to sound very silly coming from a grown woman, but I couldn’t help myself. I fell in love. It never happened to me before, even when I was young. The other girls at school were continually in love, they took it for granted as an everyday thing. For me it was a miracle and still is . . . You look impatient. Am I boring you?”

  “No.”

  “But you would prefer not to hear it.”

  “Happy beginnings are a dime a dozen. I like happy endings.”

  “There’ll be a happy ending, I intend it that way.”

  He almost believed her. She seemed to be putting it all together, the strength and power she’d never used, the will she’d never exerted, the determination she’d been afraid to show.

  “Fine,” he said. “Great. Now let’s get the business over with and I can leave.” He opened the briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers. “I’ll need your initials at the bottom of each page—after you’ve read it, of course—and your signature at the conclusion.”

  “I’m not signing.”

  “You’d better think this through, Mrs. Shaw.”

  “I already have. If Neville could play his little game, I can play mine.”

  Aragon sat with the briefcase across his lap. The blind­ing sun had given him a headache, the heat was unbear­able, the broken spring of the chair was sticking into his flesh like a spur. “I told you I liked happy endings, Mrs. Shaw. Especially my own. I am, as Smedler’s secretary keeps reminding me, a junior junior employee of the firm. It’s not a secure position. Neither is yours. Whatever you got from Mr. Tannenbaum isn’t going to last, so you have to consider the possibility that Grady and the money might run out simultaneously.”

  “I’m buying time, Mr. Aragon.”

  “Time can’t be bought, it can only be spent.”

  “You don’t understand. Grady is starting to love me, really love me. I’m becoming indispensable to him. When you’re indispensable to someone he has to love you.”

  “My wife is indispensable to me, but so is my auto me­chanic and him I’m not too crazy about.”

  “You’re not even trying to understand.”

  “Look, Mrs. Shaw, sign the papers and I’ll get out of here and you can tell Grady only whatever you think he’ll believe.”

  “He’ll believe anything I say. He’s a beautiful person.”

  “Glad to hear it. In my line of work I don’t meet too many beautiful persons.”

  She got up suddenly, and forgetting all the lessons she’d learned in mirrors, flung herself down on the bed and be­gan to weep. She wept silently, barely moving a muscle of her face. It was a half-comic, half-sinister sight, like a wax-museum figure rigged to spout tears at the press of a but­ton.

  Aragon looked away from her, toward the sea. The pur­ple van was gone and the wide stretch of beach was empty. In the water a solitary swimmer who had to be Grady was heading free-style straight out to sea as if his life depended on it. The next land in that direction was Hawaii, but maybe Grady figured it was worth a try.

  “I mustn’t cry,” she said in a whisper. “Dr. Ortiz won’t allow it.”

  “He’s not here, so go right ahead.”

  “No. It’s not good for me. Dr. Ortiz says I have to avoid bad emotions. I must think only of pleasant things.”

  “I hope he remembers that when he’s making out his bill.”

  “You’re a cruel, cynical man.”

  “I’m an errand boy for Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, McFee, Powell. This isn’t a personal matter between you and me, so let’s not get nasty.”

  As he spoke he saw the swimmer turn suddenly, as if he’d heard his name called, and head back for shore. You should have kept going, Grady.

  Miranda was dabbing away tears with the sleeve of her robe, but new ones kept coming and her eyes were starting to turn red. “I need something to calm me.”

  Aragon wasn’t sure what she meant but he hoped it was pharmaceutical. “I have some aspirin in my car. If you like, I can—”

  “Aspirin. Aspirin, for God’s sake. I’m dying and you offer me aspirin.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  “Call Grady. He can tell Dr. Ortiz to come and give me a shot.”

  “Grady went for a swim.”

  “Swim, that’s the only thing he ever does, the only thing he ever thinks about.”

  “Beautiful persons need a lot of exercise,” Aragon said.

  When Grady returned to the cottage he stopped for a minute at the carport to admire the Porsche that was parked inside. It was a yellow Carrera with gold mag wheels and beige glove-leather seats. Every time he looked at it he felt a little light-headed, he had to convince himself that it was really his and Miranda was going to give him the pink ownership slip as soon as it arrived from the De­partment of Motor Vehicles. He called it Goldfinger, not out loud in front of anybody, but very softly and secretly as part of a pact between him and the car.

  It was the only perfect thing he had ever owned and he felt personally insulted when Miranda criticized it: “Why can’t we simply get in it and go? Why do we have to sit here for half an hour with the engine running?” “Not half an hour,” he told her. “Just five minutes.” For her it was ugly time, full of noise and smell and vibration. He loved every minute of it, it was like waiting for an orgasm.

  He entered the cottage without knocking and went into the alcove behind the wooden screen to dress. A white T-shirt, a pair of shorts, the wristwatch Miranda had given him before they left Santa Felicia, the huaraches he’d picked up in Tijuana.

  Nobody said anything. The loudest sounds in the room were insects humming and Grady slapping the sand off his legs with a towel. He began to whistle the song “Goldfinger” but stopped almost immediately because he was afraid someone might recognize it and guess it was the name he’d given the Porsche. He felt that in some crazy way this could ruin things. He didn’t know how, he only knew things ruined easy.

  He came out from behind the screen, still holding the sandy towel. “It’s four o’clock, the café should be open by now. I’m going over for a can of beer. Anyone care to join me?”

  No one did.

  Miranda was sitting at the desk and there were a lot of papers spread out in front of her. She wore a pair of half-glasses he’d never seen before, and when she peered at him over the top of them she looked like an old woman.

  “Hey, what is this, Halloween? Take those things off.”

  “I can’t read the fine print without them.”

  “Fine print. Okay, I get it. This is private business and you want me to split.”

  “No, I think you should stay.” She began gathering up the papers and putting them in numerical order. She moved slowly, as she always did, but Grady saw that this was a different kind of slowness, clumsy and reluctant. “Mr. Aragon has brought us some bad news, Grady. Noth­ing we can’t handle, the two of us together, but—”

  “It’s about the will,” Grady said.

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t leave you everything, after all.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Then why is the news bad?”

 
; “‘Everything’ includes his mistakes. Neville made some reckless financial deals during the last year or two of his life.”

  “How reckless?”

  “I’d rather not go into it now, Grady. I don’t feel very well. My head—”

  “How reckless?”

  “Very,” she said. “Very reckless.”

  “So he didn’t leave you any money?”

  “No.”

  “But there’s the house.”

  “It has three mortgages on it. Among other things, Nev­ille bought a stud farm in Kentucky.”

  Aragon, putting the papers back in his briefcase, won­dered how she’d found out about the stud farm in Ken­tucky. If Shaw had told her that, he’d probably told her a lot of other things she’d been pretending not to know. Whatever her reason for the pretense, she had gained noth­ing from it but a small delay. “I’m buying time, Mr. Aragon . . . Grady is starting to love me, really love me. I’m becoming indispensable to him.”

  “What about the car?” Grady said, “My Porsche.”

  “It’s paid for, if that’s what you mean. I traded in the Continental and the Mercury.” She took off her glasses and hid them away in a needlepoint case. The fine print had been read, all of it bad. “It’s really our car, isn’t it, Grady?”

  “Sure. Naturally. I call it mine because you promised to give me the pink slip on it—”

  “Whatever is left of the estate we’ll share, the two of us. We don’t need a fortune to be happy together.”

  “—and because I do all the driving. You can’t even shift gears.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Shut up about that stupid car.”

  “Stupid car? Now wait a minute, you can’t talk like that about a turbo Carrera.”

  “I can if I paid for it.”

  “That’s a bitchy remark.”

  “I have more of the same if you care to hear them.”

  “Say, what’s the matter with you, anyway? I never saw you like this before.”

  “I have had bad news, terrible news, and all you can do is stand there blabbering about a car while I . . . while my whole world falls apart.”

  “Since we’re supposed to be sharing everything, let’s call it our world,” Grady said. “So our world is falling apart. You’re right, that’s terrible news. But what I want to know is how new is this news?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Just now, from Mr. Aragon. He told me about the—the stud farm in Kentucky. And other things.”

  Aragon didn’t deny it, but he glanced toward the door as though he wished he were on the other side of it.

  “I had no idea Neville liked horses,” she said. “He never let me keep any pets, not even goldfish.” She thought of the aquarium in their bedroom at home, the dead fish floating in the murky water that smelled of Scotch. “I would have liked a dog, someone to talk to. Everything was always so quiet. I used to look forward to the gardener cutting the grass or clipping the hedges. He was a funny little man. I forget his name, or perhaps I never knew it. His lawn mow­er sounded very loud, worse than the Porsche. I have this—this awful headache, Grady. Could you get something for me from Dr. Ortiz?”

  “No.”

  “But I hurt, I hurt all over.”

  “Sure you hurt. A needle in the butt every morning and a bunch of goats surging around in your bloodstream, what the hell do you expect?”

  “I’m only doing it for you, Grady.”

  “Crap. You’ve been here two or three times before. Who were you doing it for then?”

  “You’re cruel, you’re so cruel to me.”

  “I’ve never lied.” He threw the towel into a corner as if he were trying to discard a piece of the past. It lay in a dirty heap. “You must have known Neville had blown away every bill he owned. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know. Ask Mr. Aragon.”

  In spite of the mention of his name, neither of them turned to look at Aragon. He picked up his briefcase and took a step toward the door. When this didn’t attract atten­tion he took several more steps until he was close enough to put his hand on the doorknob. Goodbye, Miranda. Nice meeting you. Once.

  Miranda had started crying again. Her tears dropped on the burn-scarred desk, little crystal bombs iridescing in the sun for a moment before they exploded into words: people were cruel to her, they accused her of things, they picked on her. She hated Grady, Smedler, Aragon, all lawyers, lifeguards, nurses, doctors and the California judiciary. She was innocent, her butt hurt and she was going to throw up. She also had a terrible headache but nobody cared, nobody cared about anything except their damned Porsches and everyone should get the hell out of there.

  “I was just leaving,” Aragon said.

  “Take Grady with you. He can show you his turbo Carrera.”

  Grady stood with his arms crossed on his chest, motion­less, expressionless, like a cut-rate Midas turned to bronze instead of gold.

  “Do you hear me, Grady? I want you to leave.”

  “Everybody hears you,” Grady said. “You’re scream­ing.”

  “Not yet. I’m working up to it, though.”

  “You’re making an ass of yourself, Miranda.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “All right, all right. Like the man said, I was just leaving.”

  The café had been opened only a few minutes before and none of the tables was occupied. Two waiters were more or less on duty, an elderly man sitting on a stool picking his teeth and a teenager who bore a strong resemblance to the woman who’d greeted Aragon at the reception desk in the office, thin straight lips and nose, eyes cool as coins. When he saw Grady his face seemed to splinter with excitement.

  “Mr. Shaw, Mr. Shaw, sir . . .”

  “Bring us a couple of beers, Pedro.”

  “What kind?”

  “You’ve only got one kind.”

  “My uncle says to ask. It sounds good.”

  “I’m buying,” Grady told Aragon. “Or rather, Miran­da’s buying. All I do is write the magic name Shaw on the bill and everything is taken care of.”

  “Was taken care of.”

  “That’s definite, is it? I mean you weren’t trying to scare her to force her to economize, or something along those lines?”

  “No.”

  Grady rubbed his eyes. The pupils were red from the salt water and sand and sun. “She conned me.”

  “Maybe you con easy.”

  “It’s not just the money I’m talking about. It’s the whole deal. I didn’t go after her, man. She was there, I couldn’t get past her. So I thought, why not? I was figuring on a little fling, a couple of months, three at the most, and I thought that’s what she wanted, too. But then she began using words like commitment and marriage and forever. Forever. Can you beat that? I’m not a forever guy.”

  Pedro returned, swinging a bottle of beer in each hand.

  “Mr. Shaw, sir, I’m ready.”

  “So am I,” Grady said. “What are we ready for?”

  “The ride. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Very early before the traffic. How about seven o’clock?”

  “You like seven o’clock, Pedro?”

  “You bet.”

  “I don’t like seven o’clock. But then, I don’t like six or eight o’clock either, so let’s make it seven. We’ll race the wind, you and me.”

  “You and me will win. You bet?”

  “I bet,” Grady said. After the boy left he poured the beer himself. It gushed out over the tops of the bottles like used soapsuds and he sat staring at the foam as though he saw his fortune in it, brief as bubbles and a little dirty. “Here’s to Miranda.”

  “To Miranda.”

  “Long may she live. Al
one.”

  The beer was too warm and too sweet.

  “Christ, I need something stronger than this,” Grady said. “You don’t have grass on you, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Those kids in the van had some, I could smell it, but they weren’t sharing . . . Listen, about Miranda and me, it wasn’t working. It wouldn’t have worked even if you hadn’t shown up with the news about the money.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t ruin anything good.”

  “Maybe she thinks so. I don’t. Like I said, I’m not a forever guy. I feel trapped half the time and guilty the rest. She’s so dependent. When I do some perfectly innocent little thing like taking the kid for a ride in my Porsche, she makes out like I abandoned her. It’s kind of crazy anyone being dependent on me. Nobody ever was before. It gives me the creeps.”

  “About the Porsche,” Aragon said. “I gather you don’t have the pink slip for it.”

  “The car’s mine. She gave it to me. I’m not conceited enough to claim I earned it, but it’s mine. Hell, she can’t even drive it, she doesn’t know how to shift gears.”

  “All that has no bearing on the ownership of the car. As of now it may be the only thing she has left.”

  “Then how could she afford to come to an expensive place like this?”

  “She sold some of her jewelry and other things to a dealer in Santa Felicia.”

  “Then she’s honest-to-God broke.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s a whole new ball game, with me stuck out here in left field.”

  “She’s out there with you. She didn’t plan it that way, it’s not her fault.”

  “She shouldn’t have lied to me.”

  “There are people who lie,” Aragon said, “and people who want to be lied to. They’re often the same people.”

  Grady drained his glass and put it down on the multicol­ored tile table. The tiles looked handmade. None of them matched and none of them came out even at the corners. Aragon wondered which of Dr. Ortiz’s relatives had worked on it, perhaps a third-cousin-by-marriage who was considered too artistic for one of the menial jobs like Pe­dro’s.