Savages: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels)

by Bill Pronzini

“Lucky me.”

  Tamara’s phone rang and she retreated into her office to answer it. I opened the file folder again, thinking: So now I’m the mop-up guy. Weirdos and recalcitrants, my speciality. Yeah, lucky me.

  All right. Background investigation requested by Mrs. Celeste Ogden on one Brandon Mathias, who at the time, nearly four years ago, was engaged to marry her widowed older sister, Nancy Ring. Mrs. Ogden neither liked nor trusted Mathias; she considered him cold, ruthless, self-involved, pathologically ambitious, and several other unflattering things and was convinced he was marrying her sister for her money and the business Nancy Ring had inherited from her first husband. The business, RingTech, was a small but very profitable manufacturer of computer software for businesses, located in Palo Alto.

  I’d done what I considered to be a thorough check on Mathias, all the way back to his youth in northern Ohio, and I hadn’t found anything to support Celeste Ogden’s suspicions. He came from a well-to-do family; he’d graduated with honors from both high school and Ohio University, the latter with a degree in computer science; he’d landed a position with a Silicon Valley firm during the boom years, made all the right contacts and all the right professional decisions, worked his way up to an executive position at an annual salary in excess of $200,000. No question that he was ambitious, maybe even to the point of ruthlessness, but so are a lot of men and women in this country. As far as his personal life went, there wasn’t so much as a smudge: no previous marriages, no questionable relationships, no brushes with the law, not even a hint of unethical business practices.

  I was satisfied, but Celeste Ogden wasn’t. If anyone was pathological, it was her. She was convinced that Mathias was some sort of Hyde in Jekyll guise. She insisted I dig deeper, keep digging until I found something. I don’t much like that kind of excavation; everybody has some unflattering secret buried in his past, and if it’s small enough and irrelevant enough, it should be allowed to remain buried. But in my business you don’t just blow off a client who has plenty of money—her husband was a well-regarded vascular surgeon—and no set time limit for results, even if you don’t particularly like her.

  So I dug and kept on digging, and I still didn’t find anything. Brandon Mathias wasn’t a saint, but neither was he much of a sinner. If he had any buried secrets, they were down so deep a team of detectives working round the clock couldn’t locate them. Obsessive-compulsive in his drive for success was about the harshest criticism you could apply to him. Maybe that was why he was marrying Nancy Ring, but even if so, it wasn’t a hanging offense. And he wouldn’t be fooling her, either. She was forty-three years old and had been married to a Silicon Valley mover and shaker for nearly twenty years; she had to be going into the marriage with her eyes wide open.

  I’d said all of this to Ogden, verbally and in my report, and in return I’d got a heaping of abuse. She was one of these moneyed types used to giving orders, having things her own way. She didn’t like it when her opinions went unvalidated, and when that happened she blamed the other party, not herself. She claimed I hadn’t done my job properly, hinted that I was incompetent—like that. I wouldn’t take it from her. I don’t take that kind of crap from anybody. As politely as I could under the circumstances, I defended my work ethic and the results of my investigation, suggested she take her suspicions to another agency, and terminated the relationship. I half-expected to have to take her to small-claims court to collect the balance of our fee, but she surprised me by paying the final invoice by return mail.

  That was the last I’d heard from or about her. Whether or not she’d hired another investigator, she hadn’t succeeded in stopping the wedding: the “brother-in-law” reference to Tamara proved that. Now after four years Ogden was back knocking on my door again, and not so imperiously this time. Why? I didn’t want to work for her again, but I was curious enough to listen to what she had to say.

  I dialed the number on the message slip. A woman with a Spanish accent answered, asked for my name, and went away to deliver it. Ten seconds later Celeste Ogden was on the line, thanking me for returning her call. The voice was familiar, low pitched and aggressive, but the inflection was different. Subdued, tinged with something I couldn’t quite identify.

  “I imagine you were surprised to hear from me again,” she said, “after such a long time.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “I didn’t know who else to call. The police . . . they won’t listen to me. I need someone to listen to me.”

  “Police, Mrs. Ogden?”

  “They say it was an accident, that it couldn’t be anything else. But they’re wrong. I don’t care what anyone says. He did it. He’s responsible.”

  “Did what?”

  “Nancy’s dead,” she said in a cold, flat voice. “My sister is dead and that bastard killed her.”

  2

  Celeste Ogden lived on the upper westward slope of Nob Hill, in the penthouse of an ornate apartment house built in the twenties. I’d been there before, four years ago, so I knew what to expect. The liveried doorman gave me the kind of fish-eyed look his breed reserves for the lower variety of salesman until I dropped the Ogden name and said I was expected; then he shifted into mock deferential and allowed me to enter. A room-sized elevator whisked me up six floors about as fast as a race car accelerating from zero to sixty. The penthouse had a double-door entrance and chimes that rang with a cathedral-like resonance. A Latina maid, probably the same one who’d answered the phone, opened the door and silently conducted me into a massive sunroom, where she left me to wait.

  The room, which opened onto a broad terrace strewn with stone statuary, reeked of old money and old-fashioned elegance. Heavy teak and mahogany furniture, Oriental carpets, Tiffany lamps, gilt-framed paintings of what looked to be old Dutch burghers and their families in various stages of a picnic. It should have been bright and cheerful, with golden afternoon sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but it wasn’t. It had an aloof, museum-like aspect enhanced by a hushed silence.

  I wandered over to an unused fireplace. On the mantel was a gilt-framed photograph of Celeste Ogden and a white-maned, white-mustached man some twenty years her senior. I’d never met her husband, but the gent in the photo had the distinguished, self-confident look of a successful vascular surgeon. He also had a possessive hand placed firmly on her shoulder. I moved from there to the windows. Hundred-and-eighty-degree view: cityscape, the Bay, Alcatraz and Angel Islands, the Golden Gate Bridge. Add a few thousand a month, minimum, to whatever exorbitant rent the Ogdens were paying. If they were renting; for all I knew, they owned this penthouse.

  I’d been there about a minute and a half when Celeste Ogden came in. In one hand she carried a white, shirt-sized gift box. She apologized for keeping me waiting, thanked me again for agreeing to see her. Subdued, all right, but that didn’t affect the imperious, iron-willed air she projected. Or the simmering anger that was evident in her gray eyes. She was past forty now, but she didn’t look it. Slim, trim, her sharp-chinned face unlined and glowing in a way that indicated a recent face-lift; dark hair perfectly coiffed, beige pantsuit that appeared to be silk and was as unwrinkled as her skin, a gold locket at her throat, and rings galore. The diamond wedding rock on her left hand threw off daggers of reflected sunlight as sharp as laser beams.

  She invited me to sit down, sat herself on a round-backed couch with tufted velvet upholstery, and laid the box down beside her. I perched on the edge of a matching chair with my hands flat on my knees. I could feel sweat under the collar of my shirt. Surroundings like this, women like her, always made me feel poorly dressed, poorly socialized, and vaguely inadequate. Kerry says it’s low self-esteem and there’s no good reason for it. She’s right about the low self-esteem, anyway.

  I said, “As I said on the phone, Mrs. Ogden, I doubt there’s anything I can do for you.”

  “Reserve judgment, please, until you’ve heard what I have to say.”

  Whatever that was, she’d insist
ed on saying it in person rather than over the phone. And offered to pay me for my time if I’d come see her, whether I agreed to help her or not. That was as much the reason I was here as curiosity about the circumstances of her sister’s sudden death.

  “And try to keep an open mind,” she added. “You may think me an unduly fixated and suspicious woman, based on our past association, but I assure you I’m not. I have good reason for my feelings about my brother-in-law.”

  “Suppose you start by telling me how your sister died.”

  “It was prominent in the media. You didn’t see any of the news stories?”

  “I’m sorry, no, I didn’t.” That was because I make it a policy not to read newspapers or watch TV reportage. There are news junkies and then there’s me, the anti–news junkie.

  Celeste Ogden drew a deep breath, composing herself, before she said, “The official verdict was an accidental fall. Down a long staircase at her home in Palo Alto . . . severe head trauma. It happened sometime between ten and eleven at night and the light in the upstairs hall was burned out. The police believe she was on her way downstairs for some reason and tripped in the darkness.”

  “But you don’t think it was an accident.”

  “No, I don’t. She was pushed or thrown down those stairs.”

  “By her husband?”

  “By his order. He’s much too calculating to have done it himself. He was in Chicago when it happened, at a business conference.” Ridges of anger puckered her mouth, bent it down tight at the corners. “The perfect arranged alibi, while somebody else did his dirty work.”

  Hired killing? Well, maybe. It isn’t as easy to hire a hit man as Hollywood and fiction writers would have you believe, particularly for corporate businessmen like Brandon Mathias who move in the upper echelons of society. On the other hand, if you’re cunning and ballsy enough and you’ve got enough money to spread around, anything is possible.

  I asked, “Your sister was alone in the house at the time?”

  “Except for whoever killed her, yes.”

  “No evidence of an intruder?”

  “None. Nothing was disturbed and all the doors and windows were locked. The only way anyone could have gotten in was with a key, and he is the only person who could have provided one.”

  Not quite true. Keys can be lost and found, or obtained in other ways. Nancy Mathias could also have let another person into the house, someone she knew or a fast-talking stranger with the right kind of story. But there was no benefit in pursuing any of that now.

  “Who found the body?” I asked.

  “Her cleaning woman, early the following morning. Philomena worked for Nancy for several years and had a key to the house.”

  So much for providing that angle. “You said you had good reason to suspect your brother-in-law, Mrs. Ogden. What would that be, exactly?”

  She arranged her hands in her lap, palms up, one on top of the other, and sat staring at them for a few seconds before she said, “Have you ever lost someone close to you, someone you loved very much?”

  Uh-uh, I thought, I’m not going there. Not with her, not with anybody at this point in my life. “No,” I said. And I’m not going to.

  “It’s devastating. Totally devastating. Nancy and I were very close, or at least we were until the past couple of years. She was my only sibling, the only person I cared deeply about other than my husband. When you have that sort of connection, your life becomes intertwined with the other person’s. You develop a sixth sense where they’re concerned that allows you to intuit things about them and the people close to them. By observation and . . . osmosis, if you will. You understand?”

  “Very well, yes.”

  “There was a great deal wrong in my sister’s life since her marriage, especially during the past few months, and all of it was directly related to him.” Slight inflection on the pronoun. “He” and “him” every time she referred to Mathias, as if she couldn’t bear to speak his name.

  “How do you mean ‘wrong’?”

  “She wasn’t the same person after she married him. I sensed it would be that way—the reason I hired you to investigate him—and that was the way it was. Before she met him, she was high-spirited, vivacious . . . a word you don’t hear much anymore, but it describes Nancy perfectly. Afterward she grew distant, withdrawn, secretive, almost reclusive—a shadow of her former self, living in his shadow. His doing. I told you before he was a controlling personality.”

  “Did he abuse her?”

  “Not physically, so far as I know. Verbally, yes, oh yes. But never in public, of course. Cold, manipulative . . . a psychological abuser.”

  “His wife as a possession, molded to his will?”

  “Exactly. Everyone, including Nancy, is just an object to him. He has no compassion or other human feelings. All he understands is his own ambition.”

  “And she tolerated this?”

  “Nancy was . . . malleable. And needy, very needy.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about her relationship with her husband?”

  “Not to me, nor to anyone else. She was devoted to him; he could do no wrong in her eyes until recently. She defended him so fiercely whenever I brought up an issue that it was impossible to get through to her.”

  “Until recently, you said. She showed signs of rebellion toward the end?”

  “Not rebellion, exactly, no. The last time I saw her was four months ago, and then only for a few minutes. She wouldn’t return my phone calls or answer my e-mails.”

  “If his control over her was that complete,” I said carefully, “why would he want her dead?”

  “That is what I want you to find out.”

  “Another woman?”

  “I suppose that’s possible, although so far as I know he has never shown any interest in other women.”

  “Bad investments? Illegal transactions of some kind?”

  “Either one is possible,” she said. “I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  “I take it there was no prenuptial agreement?”

  “I begged Nancy to have one drawn, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She believed that marriage is based on trust. If you couldn’t trust a man, you had no business marrying him in the first place.”

  “So he inherits everything.”

  “Yes. The company, her bank accounts, everything.”

  “Approximately how much does the estate amount to?”

  “In liquid assests, more than three million dollars.”

  Plenty of motive for murder. But again, why would Mathias take the risk if he had her bent to his will? There’d have to be some other compelling reason besides financial gain. I asked, “Do you have any evidence, anything other than intuition, that Mathias was responsible for your sister’s death?”

  “If I did, I would have taken it to the police and he’d be in jail now where he belongs.” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Are you one of these men who scoff at women’s intuition?”

  “Not at all. I don’t doubt that you believe she was murdered and your brother-in-law arranged it.”

  “But that’s not enough for you.”

  “I didn’t say that. You know the people involved; I don’t. Does your husband feel as you do?”

  “My husband?” She looked at me as if I’d made an offensive remark. “Why would you ask that?”

  “No particular reason. It was just a question.”

  “Dr. Ogden is a very busy man,” she said stiffly, as if that were an appropriate answer. Maybe it was. “I have his complete trust and support.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I don’t expect the same from you,” she said, “but I’d like you . . . no, I need you to give me the benefit of the doubt. As much as I wish I were capable of proving his guilt myself, I simply don’t have the knowledge or the skills. You do.”

  “There are other detective agencies—”

  “But you already have a dossier on him and an understanding of my position. I trust you and I
have faith in the thoroughness of your methods.”

  “You weren’t so sure about that four years ago.”

  “Four years ago,” she said, “I was a different person than I am now. Four years ago my sister was still alive.”

  Awkward moment. I managed not to squirm. She was practiced at getting her way, and this whole conversation had been carefully manipulated with alternating prods of pathos, praise, and subtle demand. Even so, I couldn’t blame her. Her hatred of her brother-in-law may have been misguided, but both her grief and her conviction were genuine.

  Saying no to someone in distress has never been easy for me. I tried to say it now, and what came out instead was a hedge: “I can’t conduct the sort of investigation you’re asking for on the basis of intuition alone. I’ve already done a deep background check on the man without turning up anything. If he’s as cunning as you say, there won’t be anything to find in the past four years, either. And if he is guilty of murder, he’ll have covered himself twice as thoroughly. Without some concrete facts as a starting point, I just don’t think I could—”

  “What sort of facts?”

  “Unusual recent occurrences in his life or hers. Anything out of the norm that might support the assumption of violence. Letters, messages, unexplained bills, that sort of thing.”

  “A diary?”

  “Or a diary, yes.”

  She smiled faintly, a constrictive upward movement at the corners of her mouth, and picked up the white gift box and held it out to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “Open it.”

  I took it from her. Inside were a dozen or so computer discs, each of which bore a set of dates, and several business-size envelopes and small manila envelopes stuffed with papers. I looked into a few of them: insurance policies, itemized credit card bills, utility and property tax bills, check registers and canceled checks, miscellaneous items that couldn’t be identified at a glance.

  “Nancy’s,” she said. “All of it.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From her study at her home. The day after she died, before he came back from Chicago.”