Natural Causes

by Jonathan Valin

  “Connie?” she said in a boozy, downhome voice.

  She tried to prop herself up on one arm, slipped, and caught her elbow in the webbing of the chaise. The sunglasses fell down, too, landing sideways on her nose. “You’re not Connie,” she said and wrenched her arm loose.

  “No. I’m not Connie.”

  The girl picked a towel up off the tiles and draped it around her body. I’d never seen a body like that outside of a magazine, and the experience made me a little dizzy.

  Seeing me hadn’t done a thing for the girl. She reached for the bottle of bourbon, took a swig, and said, “Well, who the hell are you, then?”

  “Harry Stoner. I’m here to talk to you about your husband. Jack Moon told you about me this afternoon.”

  “Jack?” the woman said, passing a hand through her golden hair. “Jack’s in California.”

  “No. Jack’s in town. He called you this afternoon. Remember?”

  The girl gave me a puzzled look. If that was a stumper, I figured I was in for a long night.

  “It’s kind of gloomy to be sunbathing,” I said—just to say something.

  “What the fuck do you know about it?” Marsha Dover said sullenly. “Quentin bought me a book that said there were always good tanning rays in the afternoons. Even when it’s overcast. Besides, it didn’t seem to bother you any when you were standing over there with a hard-on.”

  She had a point. She also had one of the saltiest tongues I’d heard this side of the Marine Corps. The combination of that face and body with that tongue was bizarre and a little disconcerting, like finding out that the Mona Lisa was a WAC.

  “Do you mind talking to me about your husband?” I said, trying to start something up.

  “What if I do?” the girl said with sodden petulance. “Nobody gives a shit about my feelings, anyway. Just because I’m not a genius doesn’t mean I haven’t got feelings. Quentin didn’t marry me because I was a fucking genius. And somebody sure as hell better let his momma know. That woman has been on my back since I married Quentin—about how Quentin’s got a reputation to keep up and about how I gotta dress right and I gotta talk right and I gotta do the sort of things she wants me to do. Well, I’m fucking sick of it!

  “Quentin’s reputation.” The girl laughed bitterly. “He never gave a shit. Why the hell should I? And if Connie’s so goddamn strong, how come I was the one who had to go to L.A.? How come I was the one who had to stare at his rotting body? I’d have plain loved to have seen Connie do that. Momma’s little precious.” She began to laugh again. “She’d have wet her pants.”

  I let her laugh herself out, then tried to start things up again. I knew it was hopeless—the girl was just too drunk—but, judging from what Moon had said and what I’d already heard, talking to Marsha Dover was always going to be relatively hopeless. Like the girl had said, she was no genius.

  “You were in L.A. yesterday?”

  She took another swig of bourbon and belched. “Yeah, so what?”

  “Do you know what Quentin was doing out there?”

  “Getting his kicks,” she said.

  “I thought he went out there on business.”

  “Maybe he did,” she said. “That’s what they tell me, anyhow.”

  “The police?” I said. But she wasn’t listening to me. She was miles away, adrift on a sea of bourbon.

  “I just wanted ta’ call my Momma,” the girl mused. “That’s all. But, no. Connie says I can’t. She says she doesn’t want any of them showing up at the funeral and spoiling it for everybody. I haven’t seen my Momma or Poppa in three years. I got a right. What’s she expect me to do? Read some goddamn book on the stages of grief, like she did? I said to her, ‘Connie, I’ll tell you something. You best lay off of me or you’re going to be mighty sorry.’ I’m not blind. I know a thing or two. And the bitch knows it, too.” The girl glared at me savagely.

  “She damn well knows it!” she said again. She turned her head and looked at the bottle of whiskey. “Maybe I’m not perfect. Maybe I’m not the perfect wife. Quentin wasn’t anybody’s fool. I told her, ‘He knew he was getting damaged goods. And he was damn happy to have them. And you know it, too!’ Quentin knew what I was. And I knew what he was. We both had our faults. But we loved each other. Shit, yes, we loved each other.” She picked up the bottle and hugged it to her breasts. “He loved me. And she can’t change that fact or take that away from me—no matter what she says about doctors or probate. My Momma ain’t gonna let anybody probate my ass. Quentin wouldn’t have let her do it, either.” She began to cry. “He loved me.”

  I felt like holding her—to calm her down and give her back a sense of companionship. But she wasn’t the kind of girl I could touch like that. It wouldn’t have meant the same thing. At least, it wouldn’t have to me.

  “I’m sorry he’s dead,” I said. “It must have been a terrible shock for you.”

  “It was,” she said through her tears. “You shoulda seen him. Connie wouldn’t look. She wouldn’t even look at the damn photographs. But I looked. They made me look. Only thing I recognized was his mouth. The rest of it...” She covered her mouth with her hand and gagged.

  “Don’t talk about it,” I said.

  “Gotta talk about it,” she whispered. “If I don’t, I fucking will go nuts. Keep dreaming about it. The way he looked. It made me wanna die, too, seeing him like that. Going to die, anyway, like Quentin said. She wouldn’t give a shit. Nobody would.”

  Marsha Dover looked forlornly across the terrace. “Look at this place.” I looked down at the beautiful little garden. “I never wanted it. Not any part of it. Quentin wanted it. No.” She shook her head. “That’s not true. I wanted it. I just don’t want it anymore. And that’s the truth. It doesn’t matter anymore. None of it.”

  She sat up on the chair and the towel fell below her breasts. I almost had to catch my breath—she was that beautiful. “I shouldn’ta left,” she said softly. “Shoulda stayed at home like Momma said. I was just a dumbass kid, balling bikers and living my own stupid little life. Shoulda stayed in Indianapolis. It’s where I belonged. I got no place to go now. Lost my only friend in the world.”

  “Maybe you could go home for awhile,” I said. “Stay with your family.”

  She shook her head. “They wouldn’t have me back. Treat me like I’m dead, ‘cause of what I did. ‘Cause of Quentin.

  “Can’t go back,” she said with sudden anger. “I changed too much. Quentin changed it all. Too hard, now. I’d break...break whatever I touched.”

  She held the whiskey bottle out and stared at it for a second. Then she threw it toward the edge of the pool, where it cracked against the concrete apron.

  “Oh, Christ,” the girl said in a heartbroken voice.

  She got to her feet and the towel fell away completely. Marsha Dover stumbled crazily across the terrace and walked straight through the broken glass. She winced when she stepped on it but kept going, trailing blood behind her.

  “Hold on,” I shouted at her.

  She just kept walking—right into the pool. She bobbed in the water, her blonde hair floating about her head, then began to sink in a vortex of bubbles and hair and lazy swirls of blood.

  “Jesus!” I said under my breath.

  I hopped over the lounge chair, ran across the terrace, and dove into the pool. The girl kicked viciously at me when I tried to pull her out. But I managed to get a choke hold on her and drag her to the shallows.

  She cursed and screamed at me. “Get off me, you fucking ape! Let go of me, goddamn it!”

  Then she got sick, doubling over and coughing up pool water and bourbon. Then she passed out in my arms, leaving me knee-deep in puke and blood and chlorine, with the smell of bourbon rising around me like a mist.

  5

  I FOUND a sliding glass door at the back of the house and managed to get Marsha Dover through it and onto a couch inside. After bandaging the cuts on her feet with strips I’d torn off the towel, I phoned Jack Moon and
told him what had happened.

  “Jesus,” he said. “She really went bonkers, huh?”

  “Yeah. Thanks a lot, buddy, for helping to arrange things.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “But I did warn you she was drunk.”

  “Well, you didn’t warn me strongly enough. Now what the hell are we going to do?”

  “I could call Quentin’s mother, I guess.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a hot idea,” I said. “Marsha doesn’t seem to be crazy about the woman.”

  “You got any other suggestions?”

  I thought it over. “O.K. Call Mom. I’ll wait here until she arrives.”

  “You’re going to miss the plane.”

  “Then we’ll catch one in the morning, Jack,” I said and hung up on him.

  I sat down on a recliner across from the couch and closed my eyes. I was probably ruining an expensive chair with my wet clothes, but I didn’t care. What the girl had done had shaken all that kind of caring out of me. I sat there for a few minutes, while Marsha Dover snoozed her drunk away. Then I turned on a table lamp, took a decanter of whiskey off a mahogany sideboard, and drank from the bottle.

  It was first-rate Scotch. Everything that Quentin Dover had owned had been first-rate, including the little number on the couch. Getting sick had taken about three months off her tan, but she was still beautiful to look at. Beautiful and not a brain in her head—an exquisite little fucking machine.

  “Jesus,” I said aloud.

  I walked out to the terrace and found a robe, crumpled up by the liquor cart. I brought it back inside and covered her with it. Asleep she looked about sixteen. She was probably no more than twenty-four or -five, anyway. Just a dumb cracker from Indianapolis. I’d had a Hoosier friend who used to call it ‘India-no-place.’ That’s probably what she’d called it, too. India-no-place. I brushed the wet hair off her face, and she moved her head slightly and sank deeper into the pillows. I sat down again on Quentin Dover’s tuxedo chair and watched her sleep.

  ******

  I’d drunk a good bit of the Scotch by the time Connie Dover arrived. I heard a car drive up to the garages and crunch to a stop in the gravel turnaround. Then I heard someone fumbling at a latch. Lights began to go on all over the dark house, refracted by the cut-glass panes of French doors and the crystal baubles of chandeliers. The woman came marching toward us on a wave of refulgent light. When she got to the back room, she stood in the archway for a moment, fists on her hips, and stared sternly at her daughter-in-law.

  She was a smart-looking woman in her fifties—thin, thin-breasted, with fine, frosted blonde hair parted in the middle and knotted in back, at the nape of her neck. A wing of hair had fallen across her cheek and she brushed it savagely with her hand.

  “I should have known this was going to happen,” she said angrily and switched her gaze from Marsha to me. She had cold blue eyes and her skin was as pale and powdered as Marsha’s was tan. “Are you Stoneman?”

  “Stoner,” I said.

  “You do good work, Stoner,” she said sarcastically.

  “I wasn’t hired to look after your daughter-in-law.”

  The woman tossed her head at me, as if that were beside the point. “Come on. Let’s lug the sack of guts upstairs.”

  I carried Marsha Dover up to a bedroom. Her mother-in-law turned down the covers on the bed and I put her on the sheets.

  Connie Dover stared at the girl for a moment. “She’s a beautiful thing, isn’t she? Beautiful but, oh, so dumb.” She flipped a blanket over her body.

  “Maybe you should call a doctor.”

  “Why? Have they discovered a cure for stupidity now?”

  “Her feet,” I said. “She cut them pretty badly.”

  “She’ll be all right,” the woman said. “Her problem isn’t with her feet anyway. It’s up here.” She tapped her head. “And in her groin.”

  She flipped off the light and we walked back down the staircase.

  “I suppose she flashed her rear end at you?” Mrs. Dover said. “That’s her usual routine.”

  “She was pretty drunk and pretty shaken up.”

  “And tomorrow she’ll be sober and contrite, and tomorrow night she’ll be drunk again. It never stops. I don’t know how Quentin could stand it. That girl’s got a personality like house current. On again, off again. When she’s on, she’s little Miss Polymorphous Perversity. When she’s off, she’s what’s left over when you take her toys away. Which isn’t much, believe me. In either case, she’s a child and has to be treated like one.” The woman gave me a pointed look. “She’s not to be trusted, you know. She’s an inveterate liar. Quentin rescued her from a life of dismal poverty, and she repaid him with public drunkenness and countless adulteries. God knows how many men she must have had. She probably qualifies under state law as a public utility.”

  “You really like her, don’t you?” I said. “I mean deep down inside.”

  The woman eyed me coldly. “That’s not funny. I’m trying to do you a favor, Stoner. Jack tells me that you’ve been hired to investigate my son’s tragic death. I don’t know what there is to investigate. The police have already ruled it an accident. But if you’re going to go traipsing through Quentin’s life, I can at least put you on the right track. To listen to Marsha, you’d think I was a monster and my son forced her to live a life of sinful luxury, away from the bosom of her family. Her family! Well, if you ever want to make a case for heredity affecting I.Q., take a good close look at that brood.”

  “And what was your son really like, Mrs. Dover?”

  She stood very still, at the foot of the stairs. “He was a bright, witty, generous man,” she said and her eyes teared up. “He was good to everyone. And it’s a sin for anyone to say otherwise.”

  Connie Dover began to wobble unsteadily on her feet. I reached for her arm.

  “I’m all right,” she said quickly. “I’m quite all right.” She wiped the tears from her eyes with her fingertips. “Really. You can release me. I won’t fall.”

  I let go of her arm, and she braced herself against the stairpost.

  “It’s just been such a terrible week,” she said. “And I’m worn out.”

  “Do you feel up to talking to me? I have a few questions I’d like to ask. But I could come back some other time, if you want.”

  She dropped her hand from the post and drew herself up quickly. “I’d be happy to talk to you. In fact, there is nothing I would rather do, especially after what you must have heard from Marsha. We’ll go to the kitchen. I need a cup of coffee, and you look like you could use one too.”

  I also looked like something that would leave a stain on Quentin’s brocade loveseats, and the kitchen stools were wood. I sat down on one of them, while Mrs. Dover brewed a pot of coffee on a free-standing Jenn-Air range. A huge, beaten copper chimney was suspended above the stove, with copper and silver pots dangling like tassels from its skirts.

  The woman talked as she worked. “It’s going to be lonely in this house without Quentin. It’s really far too big for just two people. But then I had hopes that he would have children.”

  “There are none?”

  The woman laughed mordantly. “No, there are no children—just Marsha. She was all the child that Quentin and I could handle. But then you saw for yourself.”

  “Yes,” I said. I could see that Marsha Dover must have been a handful.

  “You know, she’s tried that kind of thing before,” Connie Dover said. “That’s why I didn’t get upset about her feet. I wasn’t being heartless—just sane. There were weeks when we had a different doctor out here every other day. I’ve just run out of names at this point. Names and patience. She wore my son down, Stoner, with pranks like that. She ruined his health and his well-being. It would have been different if she were deeply troubled, but Marsha’s never felt anything deeply in her life. She’s all shallows. It’s one to her—attempting suicide, making love, getting drunk, whatever strikes her fancy.”

&nb
sp; “Why didn’t Quentin divorce her?”

  “He was afraid to divorce her,” she said. “Afraid she’d really kill herself, instead of indulging in one of her melodramatic charades. For some reason he held himself responsible for Marsha’s drunkenness and her tantrums, as if it were their marriage that had unhinged her. He wasn’t...rational when it came to Marsha. But then people in love seldom are. He loved her, you know. Quentin married her when she was very young—scarcely nineteen—and I don’t think he ever stopped thinking of her as if she were the same beautiful little girl that he’d picked up in a bar. She was his version of nostalgie de boue. Also, she’s got quite a build.”

  I smiled.

  The woman poured the coffee into two cups. “She changed once she began to live here. Money changed her. License changed her. I warned Quentin it would happen. I told him she wasn’t ready for this kind of life. I begged him not to marry her—just to keep her if he must. But...” She waved her free hand gently in the air. “He was very headstrong, my son. A very emotional, very impetuous man. He wanted the little hick and she was Baptist enough to get him to marry her first. Of course, after the ceremony, she turned as Episcopalian as the rest of us. She took one look inside the country club and decided that good manners meant getting drunk and sleeping around. It would have been funny, if she hadn’t been part of the family. I never saw anyone change so fast. From a shy child who couldn’t say two words without tripping over her own tongue to...well, to what you saw by the pool.”

  The woman brought the coffee over to the table and sat down across from me. “The last time I saw Quentin was right here at this table,” she said softly. “On Friday afternoon. He and I had lunch at the house. It was a lovely meal. But then lunch with my son was always a joy. He was very excited that day. He was about to embark on a new project and that made him happy. That was why he was going to L.A.—to discuss the project.”

  “A project for United?”

  “Probably. He didn’t say. Personally, I was hoping it was the novel he had been working on for so long. But it was undoubtedly some TV thing. They’re always so secretive about their little ideas.”