Schemers nd-34

by Bill Pronzini

  “I don’t know and I could care less. Why don’t you ask him?” Then, “Jeremy really didn’t steal those books, you know. Any more than I did. I told you who’s responsible.”

  “Let’s assume you’re wrong. Why couldn’t Jeremy be guilty?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Greg has the only key to the library and he guards it like the Crown jewels. Nobody but him is allowed in there. Nobody but him knows which books are the most valuable. Nobody but him could have taken them. QED. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  I let that pass. “What about you, Mr. DiSantis? That your take on the situation?”

  “It does seem obvious,” he said.

  “On the surface. Somebody could’ve figured a way to get in when nobody was around. It only takes a few seconds to make a wax impression of a key, for instance.”

  “That’s true, I suppose.”

  “If I didn’t, and Jeremy didn’t,” she said, “who else is left?”

  “Your husband’s secretary.”

  “Brenda? My God, Brenda’s so loyal to Greg it’s a wonder she doesn’t prostrate herself at his feet. Or offer to blow him under his desk while he’s dictating, not that she’d be able to, poor thing. Did I tell you he’s impotent?”

  “Christ, Angelina!”

  She wrinkled her nose at him.

  I said, “I’d say she was more interested in your brother than your husband.”

  “Jeremy? And Brenda? He doesn’t have much taste in women, but what he does have is better than that. ”

  Like DiSantis, I’d had enough of her. Maybe she was easier to deal with when she was sober, but I wouldn’t have put money on it. I shifted a little so I had a better angle on the lawyer and tried pumping him a little.

  “What’s your opinion of Gregory Pollexfen, Mr. DiSantis?”

  “He’s a client. What I think of him is irrelevant.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Nine years. Since I joined Wainright and Simmons.”

  “And you handle his legal affairs?”

  “The firm does.”

  “But not you personally.”

  “… For the past three years, yes.”

  “Any trouble with him?”

  “What do you mean, trouble?”

  “Just that. Personal problems, professional difficulties.”

  “No.”

  “Visit him in his home?”

  DiSantis didn’t like this line of questioning. He said, “Are you trying to make me out as a suspect now?”

  Angelina Pollexfen laughed.

  I said, “Not at all. Asking questions, trying to get at the truth. Doing my job.”

  “Well, I’m not going to answer anymore. And I advise Mrs. Pollexfen to follow the same course. Do I make myself clear, Angelina?”

  “Oh, perfectly. Clear as crystal.”

  “All right. Now suppose we finish our lunch like civilized people.”

  She laughed again, guzzled the rest of her drink, and winked at me-a broad, exaggerated wink.

  “Isn’t this fun?” she said.

  W hen I made my escape from L’Aubergine, stomach grumbling, faculties more or less intact and credit card unsullied-DiSantis had picked up the tab-I sat in the car to decompress and check my messages. Only there weren’t any. No callback from Jeremy Cullrane on any of the four I’d left for him.

  I checked in with Tamara, to tell her about the lunch from hell and ask if Cullrane had called the office by any chance. No, but she’d picked up some interesting information about him.

  “That deal I told you about yesterday?” she said. “It was for a music show at the San Jose Auditorium that fell through, cost everybody involved a bundle. Word is Cullrane was the biggest backer and biggest loser. One hundred large.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars? Hell of a loss.”

  “That’s not all. He was a player in two other promotional deals since that went sour and cost him plenty both times. Man’s a three-time loser.”

  “Where’s he been getting the money?”

  “Well, like I said yesterday, ain’t no high rollers lining up outside his door.”

  “Any chance Nicole Coyne could be bankrolling him?”

  “No way. The girlfriend’s a lounge and club singer. Makes enough to afford a North Beach apartment, but she’s not well off. Neither is her family.”

  “The money has to come from Pollexfen, then.”

  “Why would a man like him keep throwing good money after bad? He’s got a rep as a tight-fisted businessman.”

  “And throwing it to somebody he admits he doesn’t like or trust. Has to be leverage-the strong kind.”

  “Like blackmail?”

  “Like that. It would also explain why Pollexfen puts up with him under the same roof. Question is, what kind?”

  “Might have a business connection,” Tamara said. “Pollexfen’s not only tight-fisted, he’s ruthless. Word is he plays fast and loose to get what he wants.”

  “Shady stuff?”

  “Could be. Rumors to that effect.”

  “You find out anything more about his wife?”

  “Some. She’s a player, too, only a different kind.”

  “Men?”

  “Yup. Doesn’t seem to be too discreet about it, either.”

  “Names?”

  “Linked to three or four guys. Paul DiSantis is one.”

  “Playing pretty close to home,” I said. “Pollexfen has to either know or suspect, and yet he stays married to her even with the prenup and even though they seem to hate each other. She says the main reason is the community property laws.”

  “Good reason.”

  “And that he’s a control freak, enjoys manipulating her, keeping her on a leash. Both good reasons. But I get the feeling there’s more to it.”

  “Same kind of leverage Cullrane has?”

  “The two of them blackmailing him together? That’s possible. But then why don’t brother and sister get along? She doesn’t seem to like Cullrane any more than she does her husband.”

  “Maybe just a sibling thing,” Tamara said. “Like with sister Claudia and me. Besides, you don’t have to like a person to work a scam with him.”

  “True enough.”

  “Everybody hates everybody else. How’d you like to go to a dinner party at that house?”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “The first big deal that went sour for Cullrane was five years ago, right? If he is blackmailing Pollexfen, that figures to be about when it started. See if you can find out if Pollexfen was mixed up in anything big and possibly shady around that time.”

  “I’m on it. Anything else?”

  “Just the phone number and address for Pollexfen’s collector friend, Julian Iverson. Maybe he can tell me something we don’t already know.”

  11

  JAKE RUNYON

  The town of Sonoma was Old California, established in the days of the Spanish land grants, built around a central square with one of the original missions on one corner and nearby, the remains of a fort where troops were garrisoned when Sonoma was the capital of the Bear Flag Republic. Nowadays the historical aspects played a distant second to tourism and the wine industry. Expensive shops, tasting rooms, designer restaurants. And up-valley, dozens of wineries that catered to organized tours, charged ten-and-fifteen-dollar tasting fees, and sold promotional items by the bushel.

  Runyon didn’t much care for upscale tourist traps. Too many people, too much traffic, too much undisguised greed. And too little regard for the residents. Prosperity bred high rents, overblown home prices, and jacked-up costs for goods and services. He’d heard it said that Sonoma was a nice place to visit but unless you had plenty of money and didn’t mind crowds of out-of-towners, you wouldn’t want to live there.

  The Sunset Acres assisted living facility was on the southeast end, close enough to downtown shopping but far enough off the main road into town so that tourists wouldn’t be reminded of one of their own potential ol
dage options. It took up most of a city block-small units strung together in wings radiating out from a central building that housed staff offices, kitchen facilities, and a recreation-dining hall. The units all looked alike, wood and stucco with tiny porches, and the landscaping was the low-maintenance variety crisscrossed by flagstone paths. Nothing special, nothing distinctive. Just a place for old people who had nowhere else to go and no family members who were willing to shoulder the burden of caring for them; a place to live out the rest of their lives in relative comfort.

  Visitors had to sign in at the main building. Runyon had called ahead to make sure Mona Crandall was available and would see him, so he was expected. The woman at the lobby desk drew an X through one of the squares on a grounds map, doing it with a smile and a flourish as if it were the location of buried treasure. “That’s Mrs. Crandall’s unit,” she said. “Number forty-one West. She doesn’t have many visitors, you know. She’ll be delighted to see you.”

  Not exactly true at first. Mona Crandall wasn’t smiling when she opened the door to Number 41 West, and at first she didn’t seem particularly welcoming. But he won her over without making any effort other than to be polite. Reserved until she’d had time to take his measure, and then almost eager for his company. But not because she cared very much why a private investigator from San Francisco was visiting her, even though he’d made it plain in his call that his business concerned her two sons. Like a lot of the elderly in circumstances such as hers, she was starved for human contact and some friendly attention.

  She was in her midseventies, on the frail side. Needed a walker to get around. Blue-rinsed hair that had had a recent styling and alert brown eyes. She’d been watching a talk show on television; as soon as she let him in, she moved over and switched the thing off.

  “I keep it on for noise,” she said. “Mostly what they have on these days is garbage.”

  “Except for old movies.”

  That earned him her first smile. “Except for old movies,” she agreed.

  She asked him if he drank tea. He said he did. No trouble at all to make him a cup, she said, and he let her do it, sensing it would hurt her feelings if he declined. While she was in the kitchenette, he took in the surroundings. The unit wasn’t much larger than a studio apartment-small sitting room, smaller bedroom, bathroom, kitchenette. Furniture crowded the sitting room, leftovers probably from the home she’d shared with her late second husband. Television wasn’t her only interest or recreation; a bookshelf was filled with well-read paperbacks and there was a stack of library books on the table beside her chair. Her body may have been wasted, but her mind wasn’t.

  When the tea was ready he went out and got his cup to save her making two trips with the walker. Another smile. And they were ready for business.

  She didn’t know what had been happening to her sons. They hadn’t told her and the only newspaper she read was the San Francisco Chronicle. “A terrible thing like that and I have to hear it from a stranger,” she said. Concern in the words, tempered by bitterness. “Cliff and Damon don’t call or visit very often,” she said. “Keep to themselves. I haven’t seen my grandchildren in over a year. They’re all right? The stalker hasn’t done anything to them?”

  “No. Only to your sons. And their father’s grave.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake? What possible reason?”

  “No idea yet. It doesn’t seem to stem from anything they did, their business or personal relationships.”

  “Well, they were always good boys. Honest, hardworking. They seem to be good parents, too.”

  “But not such good sons.”

  She sighed. “They blame me for the divorce. Breaking up our family, leaving their father to raise them alone. They worshiped him, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried to explain to them, when they were grown up, tried to tell them the truth. But they wouldn’t listen.” The lines tightened around her mouth. “Lloyd told them over and over that it was my fault, all my fault. That I was the cheater, not him. He poisoned them against me with lies.”

  The way Andrea had poisoned Joshua. Love your mother, hate your father. Love your father, hate your mother. Toxic damage that becomes so deeply ingrained over the years, it can never be undone.

  “Cliff called me a spiteful liar to my face,” she said. “I suppose I should be grateful they visit me as often as they do.”

  Grateful, no. But she’d been left with that much, at least. Andrea’s poison had been lethal; Joshua was dead to him, no possibility of resurrection.

  He said, keeping his face blank, his voice neutral, because this wasn’t about him or his pain, “It must be very difficult for you.”

  “At first it was. Not so much after I met Wally, my second husband. He was such a good, faithful man. But now that he’s gone and I’m alone… Yes, it’s difficult. But I won’t beg, not even for my grandkids. I didn’t beg Lloyd Henderson and I won’t beg his sons.”

  “How do you mean, you didn’t beg Lloyd?”

  “To stop cheating on me. I asked him, I threatened him, but I wouldn’t beg.”

  “That’s the real reason you left him?”

  “Yes. I stood it as long as I could, for the sake of the boys, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “A lot of women?”

  “Almost from the beginning. One after another after another. He couldn’t leave them alone. I gave him as much of myself as any man could want, and it wasn’t enough. He had to have more, he had to have different.”

  Lloyd Henderson, pillar of the community.

  “When that woman from up north came to the house,” Mona Crandall said, “that was the last straw. A person can take only so much humiliation. Only so much.”

  “What woman, Mrs. Crandall?”

  “One of his bitches. No, that’s not right, I shouldn’t call them that. They weren’t bad women, most of them. He could be so attentive, so charming. I let him seduce me before we were married, why shouldn’t they let him seduce them?”

  “When was it this woman showed up at your house?”

  “Twenty years ago. She was the reason I left Lloyd.”

  “You said she was from up north? Where, exactly?”

  “Mendocino County. Some town I’d never heard of.”

  “Near your husband’s hunting camp?”

  “I don’t know. I never went there with him and the boys. Hunting, fishing… I never liked killing things. Lloyd did. He made the boys like it, too.”

  “What did she want, this woman?”

  Mona Crandall didn’t seem to hear the question. Her eyes were distant, fixed on the teacup, as if the past were visible to her in the dark liquid. “He never wanted me to go with him. Took his women there, I knew that. All those weekends… it wasn’t always his men friends he went with, it was his women, too.”

  Runyon waited until she blinked and focused on him again, then repeated his question. “What did the woman want, Mrs. Crandall?”

  “Lloyd. She wanted him. She said she was in love with him, pregnant by him. He’d made promises to her, she… oh, I don’t remember everything she said. It was a shock, you know. Being confronted with his cheating like that, so suddenly and right in my face.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? Sent her away, sent her to him at his office. He was furious when he came home-furious with me, as if I was at fault. We had a terrible fight. That was the end for me. I left him the next day.”

  “Do you remember the woman’s name?”

  “No. It was such a long time ago.”

  “If she was pregnant, do you know if she had the child?”

  “No. What does it matter now?”

  “It may have a bearing on what’s been happening to your sons.”

  “After more than twenty years?” The bitterness returned to her voice. “Lloyd has been dead… what is it, five or six years now? Cliff and Damon didn’t tell me when he died, I had to find out from a friend here. I would
n’t have gone to his funeral anyway, but they should have told me. Don’t you think they should have told me?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Past sins catching up. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Runyon nodded. “Past sins,” he said, and let it go at that.

  He finished his tea, refused a second cup. The refusal put a brief sadness in her eyes; she’d hoped he would stay longer. But she didn’t make an issue of it. She’d been left alone so often in her life, by loved ones and strangers alike, that she’d come to accept it and the pain that went with it as her lot.

  He was at the door when she said abruptly, “Mr. Runyon.”

  “Yes?”

  “I remember now. Her name, the woman who came looking for Lloyd. Jenny. I’m sure that’s what it was.”

  “Last name?”

  “I don’t believe she gave it. Jenny, that was all.”

  T amara was skeptical at first. “Lloyd Henderson’s bastard son? I dunno, Jake. Why would he just show up all of a sudden, after twenty years, and start throwing acid at his half brothers?”

  “Say he only recently learned Henderson was his father and went to Los Alegres to confront him-money, payback. Say he’s mentally unstable. Finding out Henderson’s been dead for five years throws him into a rage. He takes it out on the old man’s grave, but that doesn’t satisfy him. So he goes after the two legitimate sons.”

  “Stalking them with acid just because Pop’s been underground for five years? Sounds far-fetched.”

  “Depends on the details. What happened with Henderson and his mother, what his life was like, how he found out the truth. Kids can build up a lot of hate for a parent they think abandoned them.” He thought but didn’t say: I ought to know.

  “So what do you want to do? Go up to Mendocino?”

  “Worth the trip,” Runyon said. “It’s the only lead I’ve got.”

  “When?”

  “Right away. I can make the drive in a couple of hours. Spend the night, start checking first thing in the morning.”

  “All right, go for it. You tell the clients about any of this yet?”

  “No. Not until I see if the lead goes anywhere. The hunting camp is near a village called Harmony. Can you get me the exact location?”