“Yes. Once. I slapped his face.”
“When was that?”
“A long time ago. Three years.”
“How did you get along with him after that?”
“I had as little to do with him as possible. My husband handled all our business dealings.”
“How did he and Kenneth get along?”
“They had no trouble. They are two of a kind, after all.” Another pause. “If you’re thinking Eldon might have murdered Kenneth, you’re mistaken. He had no reason. He doesn’t want Alicia; he only wants her body.”
“There’s Kenneth’s money,” I said mildly.
“Yes. But I have more than Alicia inherited, you see—much more. My father was a very rich man in Oslo.”
Again I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Eldon told you the truth that we were together when Kenneth died,” she said. “Not alone together; with some of the other guests. If someone pushed him, it wasn’t Eldon. Nor I. I had contempt for Kenneth but I didn’t hate him. I couldn’t have killed him if I had. I couldn’t kill anyone.” She seemed to think about something for a time. “Not even Alicia,” she said.
I had nothing to say to that, either. Silence rebuilt between us; she still wasn’t looking at me—hadn’t looked at me the entire time we’d been talking. It was an eerie sort of conversation, as if there were a great distance between us and we were each talking to ourselves. It matched the surroundings, made me even more aware of them.
She had more to say; I sensed it, and I sensed, too, that prodding was not the way to get it out of her. When she was ready to talk she would, not before.
A good three minutes passed, with her looking out to sea and me looking here and there, everywhere but at her. Birds made a racket in the cypress nearby. A dog came bounding up onto the terrace, took a look at us, sniffed around, peed on one of the empty benches, and went away again.
“I examined the gallery records last night, after you left,” she said. The words came so abruptly that her voice startled me a little, even though I had been waiting for her to speak. “My husband paid Alicia fifty thousand dollars four months ago, from his private checking account.”
“A down payment on Kenneth’s collection?”
“I don’t know. It was for an unspecified reason. But on the same day he also deposited seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Where did he get it?”
“From one of our better customers.”
“For something he’d sold, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Who was the customer?”
“Margaret Prine.”
“Uh-huh, I see. Do you have any idea what it was he sold her?”
“It was nothing from our inventory at the time,” she said. “I made a careful examination of those records, too.”
“Would Mrs. Prine pay that much money for something in Kenneth’s collection?”
“She was not impressed with his collection. His best pieces are ones she already owns or was not interested in. All except one.”
“The Hainelin snuff box?”
“Yes.”
“Would Mrs. Prine have paid seventy-five thousand for that?”
“I think so. Yes, she would have.”
The implications were obvious. If the Hainelin box was what Mrs. Prine had bought from Summerhayes, then it followed that the fifty thousand he’d paid Alicia Purcell on the same day was for purchase of the box. But why would she lie about having had it all along? Why the deception? It was legally hers anyway, as part of her husband’s collection.
There was only one reason I could think of: Everyone knew Kenneth had been carrying the box on his person that night. If she admitted having it after his death, suspicion might fall on her—suspicion that she’d got it from him out on the cliffs, before she pushed him off—
No, hell, that didn’t wash. She was alibied for the time of Kenneth’s fall; she couldn’t have pushed him. So why worry about being suspected, when everybody including the authorities was perfectly willing to call her husband’s death an accident? All she’d have to do in any case was to say he’d given her the Hainelin before he stalked out of the house.
And that brought me right back to the original question: Why hadn’t she admitted she had the box?
I put the question to Mrs. Summerhayes. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t understand women like Alicia, why they do things.”
“Your husband might know.”
“Yes, but he won’t tell you if he does. He won’t tell me.”
“Why do you suppose he kept the two transactions secret? Because of his affair with Mrs. Purcell?”
“Yes. And because of the money. He likes to gamble in the stock market and he knows I won’t give him money for that any more. He has lost too much in the past.”
I wanted to ask her why she put up with a bastard like him, why she stayed married to him. But I already knew the answer. She loved him, and it didn’t really matter to her what he was or what he did: she loved him.
She was still sitting in rigid profile, and this time I sensed that she had said all she’d come to say. It had not been easy for her to talk to me as she had; it had been an act of small vengeance, born of bitterness and pain, and I thought that she might regret it later on. But it wouldn’t be because of anything I did.
I said, “What you’ve told me here is in confidence, Mrs. Summerhayes. I won’t repeat it to anyone under any circumstances, especially not your husband. You have my word on that.”
She nodded as if she didn’t care one way or the other; but when I stood up she looked at me full-face for the first time, as if she had not expected a kindness from someone like me. Then she averted her gaze again, without speaking. And I left her there, a big woman sitting small and huddled and alone among the ruins.
I drove back downtown to O’Farrell, parked on the street—the downstreet garage was closed on Saturdays—and went up to the office. The books on snuff bottles and boxes that I’d checked out of the library were still there, on a corner of my desk; I opened the one I’d skimmed through previously, refamiliarized myself with some terms and types, and then got Margaret Prine’s telephone number out of the Chronicle file and dialed it.
An elderly female voice answered and admitted to being Mrs. Prine. I said I was Charles Eberhardt, from New York; that I was a dealer in antique miniatures; that I understood she was a prominent local collector of rare snuff boxes; and that I had for sale an exceptionally fine and unusual eighteenth-century ivory box bearing a portrait by the famed English miniaturist, Richard Cosway. Was she interested? She was interested, all right. But she was a wily old vixen: she wasn’t about to show enthusiasm to a voice on the telephone, to react to such a proposition with anything but coolness and caution.
She said, “May I ask how you obtained my name and telephone number, Mr. Eberhardt?”
“Certainly. They were given to me by Alejandro Ozimas,”
Pause. “I see. And why did you choose to call me about the Cosway piece?”
“Mr. Ozimas said you were a collector of discerning taste. He also said you were both discreet and quite able to pay my price.”
“And that price is?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
“I see,” she said again. “Describe the box, please.”
“It is made of ivory, as I said; oval-shaped, with delicate gold ornamentation. The Cosway portrait is of the Prince of Wales—an associate of Cosway’s, as I’m sure you know. Or at least he was before the scandal that linked him romantically with Cosway’s wife.”
“You’re certain it’s authentic?”
“Absolutely certain.”
“How did it come into your possession?”
“I purchased it from a collector in Hawaii.”
“His name?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge it.”
Another pause. Then she said flatly, “I do not buy stolen or tainted property, Mr. Eberhardt.”
I’ll just bet you don’t, I thought. But I said, feigning indignance, “Nor do I sell stolen or tainted property, Mrs. Prine. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in calling you. I’m sure Mr. Ozimas can recommend another local collector …”
“Just a moment. If you’re from New York, why don’t you take the Cosway there and sell it to one of your customers? You do have customers in New York?”
“Of course. But I hope to make another purchase while I’m in San Francisco, a very lucrative purchase, and it happens I’m short of cash at the moment. That’s why I’m willing to let the Cosway box go for twenty thousand.” It sounded phony even to me, but if I was reading her correctly it wouldn’t make any difference. “May I show it to you? I could bring it to your home within the hour—”
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. I am expecting guests shortly.”
“This evening, then?”
“Also out of the question.”
“Tomorrow? It’s important that I complete a sale on the Cosway as soon as possible—no later than Monday. I’m sure you understand.”
“I’m sure I do,” she said. “Very well, Mr. Eberhardt. Shall we say tomorrow afternoon at three?”
“Good. At your home?”
“I’d prefer not. Do you have objections to meeting publicly?”
I didn’t, although I would have preferred the chance to look at her collection—at the Hainelin box, if she did have it. I hadn’t expected an invitation anyway. She didn’t know me from a hole in the wall; she would have had to be a damned fool—and she was hardly that—to let a stranger who knew she had a valuable art collection set foot inside her door.
I said, “None at all. Where do you suggest?”
“The main lobby of the Fairmont Hotel.”
“How will I know you?”
“I carry a gold-headed cane,” she said. “You’ll know me by that. I .look forward to seeing the Cosway, Mr. Eberhardt.”
“You won’t be disappointed when you do.”
“I sincerely hope not,” she said, and the line clicked, and that was that.
I thought as I cradled the receiver: Even money she’s trying Ozimas’s number right now, to check up on Charles Eberhardt. But Ozimas had indicated that he and his houseboy were going to Big Sur this weekend; otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the calculated risk of using his name. The odds were pretty good that Mrs. Prine would show up at the Fairmont tomorrow afternoon, on schedule.
I hung around the office for a while, making inroads on a written report to Tom Washburn. Nobody telephoned, and I was fresh out of productive ideas. Hunger made me call it quits around two-thirty. I drove home, treated myself to a beer and the last of the leftover chicken, and spent the rest of the afternoon puttering around the flat, making a few minor repairs—damn toilet kept running, even when you jiggled the handle—and listening to the rest of the Cal game. The Bears were down twenty points late in the fourth quarter when I finally shut off the radio. Some game. It was a good thing I hadn’t gone with Eberhardt, I thought; I’d have been bored sitting there in the sun guzzling beer. Bored to tears.
I almost believed it, too.
At five I called Kerry. She was in a good mood; she said, “Come on over. I rented us a movie.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“You’ll see when you get here.”
“Not another of those X-rated jobs?”
“No, but it’ll do things for your body temperature.”
“I’m too old for that kind of stuff. Think about my heart.”
“I’ve got a different organ in mind,” she said.
I said, “That’s me you hear knocking on the door.”
I took a quick shower, changed clothes, got the car, and drove up to Diamond Heights. Parking on Kerry’s street is sometimes as bad as it is on mine; somebody must have been having a party this afternoon because there wasn’t a space anywhere closer to her building than a block and a half. I hoofed it uphill, taking it slow so I wouldn’t use up all my energy just getting to her.
Even so, I was puffing when I reached the building vestibule. Which is why I had my head down, which is why I didn’t see the guy coming out of the door. He didn’t see me either; we collided, caromed off each other—and I found myself standing there eye to lunatic eye with the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston.
I said, “What the hell are you doing here?”
He said, and I’ll swear to it, “God sent me.”
“Dunston, if you don’t leave Kerry alone—”
“She is my wife.”
“She is not your wife!”
“ ‘Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother—’ ”
“You quoted that one before. Try a new one.”
“Heathen,” he said.
“Crackpot,” I said.
We glared at each other for about five seconds. Then he turned on his heel and stalked off, and I turned on mine and went inside and upstairs and whacked on Kerry’s door so hard I jammed my wrist doing it.
She opened up, took one look at me, and said, “Oh God, you ran into him.”
“Literally.” I pushed past her, massaging my wrist.
“You didn’t do anything to him?”
“No, I didn’t do anything to him. But I might have if I’d had a straitjacket handy.”
“I didn’t let him in,” she said.
“Good for you. Did he tell you God sent him?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
“Me too. He’s driving me as crazy as he is, you know that?”
“You think he’s not driving me crazy?”
“This is the last straw,” I said darkly. “Tomorrow we quit pussyfooting around. Tomorrow we put an end to this one way or another.”
“How?”
“By paying a visit to the Church of the Holy Mission,” I said. “By having a talk with the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak, with or without God’s permission.”
Chapter Eighteen
I don’t much like San Jose.
This is no reflection on the people who live there—not on most of them, anyway. Everybody’s got to live somewhere, and in California these days, with the economic situation being what it is, your options are pretty much limited to areas with a reasonably high employment rate. There are some nice little communities near San Jose—Los Gatos, for instance; I have nothing against those. Just San Jose itself. It’s like a big overgrown kid who sprouted up too fast, seems bewildered by his sudden wild growth, and doesn’t quite know what to make of himself. It can’t make up its collective mind if it wants to be a big metropolis or a small city, or if it’s really just a little country town at heart. It has no real identity because there are too many opposing components in its makeup: part agricultural, part industrial, part Silicon Valley hype, part Mexican barrio, part Vietnamese refugee resettlement center, and part mindless, tasteless urban and suburban sprawl. It has some cultural attractions downtown, and the local Yuppies have begun renovating and restoring some of the old mid-city Victorians; but the downtown area is just a pocket surrounded by slums, industrial areas, cheap apartment buildings, and seemingly endless strings of tract houses and shopping centers. The city also has a high crime rate and harbors more than a few bizarre institutions, not the least of which are the Winchester Mystery House, a model of lunatic construction built by the widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, who believed she would die if the house was ever completed and therefore kept adding on things like doors that open on blank walls and stairways that lead nowhere; the Rosicrucians, a leading candidate for the Weirdest California Cult award; and now the Church of the Holy Mission, not to mention the Moral Crusade, the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston, and the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak.
When Kerry and I got to San Jose a little past noon on Sunday, it was the first time I’d been there in more than a year. It seemed much more sprawling and congested than I remembered it, even on a Sunday—not that that surprised me any. I
took the downtown exit off Highway 17, and we drove around for twenty minutes looking for Langford Street; if Kerry were a better map-reader we’d have found it in ten because it was not far from either City Hall or the San Jose State University campus. The neighborhood was neither well-to-do nor shabby: Langford was that vanishing breed, a lower-middle-class inner-city residential street shaded by leafy trees and featuring a dozen different architectural styles, from wood-shingled cottage to big gabled Victorian.
The biggest lot and the biggest Victorian on the fourteen-hundred block belonged to the Church of the Holy Mission, which announced its presence by means of a six-foot, billboard-type sign on its front lawn. It was three lots, actually, on a corner; in addition to the Victorian, freshly painted a sedate white with blue trim, it contained a low modern wing, a separate box-shaped outbuilding, and parking facilities for maybe thirty cars. The parking area was full at the moment, although it wouldn’t be for long: services must have just ended because people were streaming out of the modern wing, most of them young, some with small children in tow.
“They look normal enough, don’t they,” Kerry said as I drove by hunting a place to park.
“You can’t tell a fanatic by his appearance.”
“They’re not all fanatics,” she said, and sneezed. She was getting a cold and she’d been snuffling and sneezing all morning. “A lot of them are disillusioned or have emotional problems.”
“Yeah,” I said. And a lot of them, I thought, will drop out later on even more disillusioned and with even greater emotional problems. There had been an article in the Sunday Examiner-Chronicle not too long ago—the Sunday paper is usually the only one I read —that dealt with dropouts from fundamentalist and ultrafundamentalist religious groups. Things were so bad with these people after experiencing a cultist dependency on leaders like Daybreak, authoritarian types who practice a kind of religious mind-control, that an outfit called Fundamentalists Anonymous had been formed to help them deal with the real world again. Maybe the Church of the Holy Mission wasn’t quite one of the wild-eyed ultrafundamentalist sects, but like the Southern Baptist Convention and other mainline fundamentalist churches, which Daybreak seemed to be patterning it after, it would bring more harm than good to some of its followers.
Deadfall (Nameless Detective) Page 16
