Natural Causes

by Jonathan Valin

  Too damn many, I thought. And too goddamn much secrecy.

  “He said nothing about it on the phone when he called you from the Belle Vista?”

  “It wasn’t a long talk. Good Lord, it was past two in the morning. He just said what I told you—that he’d had a bumpy flight and that he would be out of touch for several days.”

  But Quentin Dover was already out of touch, although it took me a second to realize it. “He called you at two A.M. Cincinnati time?”

  “Somewhere around then—yes,” the woman said. “He often called me late at night from L.A. He knew I’d worry if he didn’t. You know, there’s a three-hour time difference on the coast.”

  “I know,” I said. “Two in Cincinnati would have been eleven P.M. in L.A.”

  “Yes. He’d just gotten back to his hotel room after dinner.”

  “He said that?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “Yes. What of it?”

  “That wasn’t the strict truth,” I said.

  She laughed peremptorily. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Quentin wasn’t in his hotel room at eleven P.M. He checked into the Belle Vista early that afternoon, had supper in his room, made several phone calls—one of which I thought was to you—then drove off in a rented car at eight P.M. and didn’t return to the Belle Vista until after midnight.”

  I left out what he’d done after that. The woman was already upset and there was no sense in making her feel any worse.

  “Are you telling me that he lied to me?” she said weakly.

  “I’m telling you that he wasn’t in the hotel when he called.”

  “Maybe he didn’t say he was in the hotel. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe it was just a manner of speaking—another way of saying that he was in L.A.”

  “Or of saying that he was working on a new TV project?”

  “Take that back,” she said angrily. “My son didn’t lie to me. He had no reason to lie to me.”

  “Does it make a difference?” I said.

  For a second I thought she was going to hit me. “Of course, it makes a difference,” she said through her teeth.

  I got up from the table. “I’m sorry, Connie. He just told so many different stories to so many different people.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll let you know when I find out what was really going on.”

  She nodded slightly. “Let me know.”

  23

  I STOPPED at a phone booth on the way downtown and called Seymour Wattle in L.A. It was about nine in the morning on the coast, and Seymour sounded as if he’d had a rough night.

  “No, I haven’t got nothing yet,” he said before I could say anything more than my name. “Chrissake, it’s only been one day.”

  “That’s not what I called about.”

  “Well, what did you want?”

  “The phone call that Dover made to Cincinnati on Friday night—do you have a record of the number?”

  “Yeah, it’s right at my fingertips.”

  “Take it easy, Sy. Find it, and I’ll call you back later in the day.”

  “Make it a lot later, man,” Seymour said. “I don’t need to use you for no wake-up service. Shit, do you have any idea how many television production companies there are in L.A.?”

  “Keep at it,” I said.

  But after I hung up, I wondered if that was such a good idea. I was pretty sure that no matter how long he looked, Wattle wasn’t going to come up with anything about Dover’s mysterious TV project. I had the feeling that there wasn’t anything to come up with. Connie Dover had had the same feeling—that Quentin had allowed her to believe something that wasn’t true. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d done that, either.

  He’d certainly lied to her about the document he’d said he was working on. He’d told Helen Rose the same lie at just about the same time. But then lie was a strong word for it. He’d told them what they wanted to hear. I had the feeling that he’d been doing that with his mother for a long time. Most children paint a brighter picture for their parents. And Quentin had played son to a lot of people. Son and father, like Connie had said.

  ******

  I got to the Maisonette at twelve thirty-five and found that Frank Glendora had reserved one of the private rooms on the second floor. He was a careful man, no question about it. The maitre d’ directed me upstairs to a small, paneled dining room, furnished with French provincial sideboards and chairs. A linen-covered table was set in the center of the room, sparkling with crystal and silver. Frank Glendora was sitting at it, his elbows on the table top.

  “Hello, Harry,” he said.

  “Frank.”

  He pointed to the other chair at the table and I sat down.

  “Charles,” he said to the maitre d’, “bring us some drinks and a menu.”

  Charles took our bar orders and left. Glendora didn’t have to tell him to close the door. He did it on his own.

  “You had a pleasant trip back?” Glendora asked.

  “What I remember of it.”

  He gave me a perplexed look.

  “I was drunk, Frank. I don’t like airplanes.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I used to hate them myself, before I went to work for United. Then it became a contest of wills—mine and the company’s.” He laughed. “The company won out.”

  So Jack Moon had said.

  “You have something to tell me?” Glendora asked.

  I said, “Quentin went to L.A. on Friday night—three days before his usual meeting with the ‘Phoenix’ team.”

  “Yes,” Glendora said. “I’ve been at some of their Monday meetings.”

  “At this point, I’m not really sure why he made the trip. He checked into the Belle Vista Hotel, then left again late on Friday night.”

  “He left the hotel?” Glendora said with surprise. “I thought he’d been there the whole weekend. That was the impression I got from the police.”

  “That was the impression he wanted to create. However, he wasn’t in his room between sometime after one on Friday and sometime before he died early Sunday morning.”

  There was a knock at the door. Glendora’s hand shot to his lips. It was an involuntary gesture—a reflex. It surprised me. And it rather surprised him, too. He dropped his hand from his mouth and rubbed his chin in perplexity.

  “Now why the hell did I do that?” he said.

  The door opened and Charles came in with our drinks. He served them and handed each of us a menu. After we’d ordered and Charles had departed, Glendora picked up his glass and the conversation. “You said he was out of his room between Friday and Sunday. Do you know where he was?”

  I shook my head. “I was working on the theory that he was meeting with someone about a television project. That’s what he implied to his mother. But it might not have been the truth.”

  “It was always a hard thing to know with Quentin,” he said with a touch of sadness.

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “Oh, I did,” Glendora said. “I liked him enormously. But he was a complicated man—a troubled man. And not entirely an honest one.”

  “Are you basing that on the rumors you heard?”

  Frank Glendora looked offended. “I’m not a fool, Harry. Contrary to general opinion, I do occasionally see things for myself.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He smiled. “Oh, it’s all right. I’m quite used to being considered an ogre or an automaton. It’s part of the job. I can’t say that it’s a part I enjoy. But every businessman has to make hard decisions. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any business to run. I wouldn’t have acted on the rumors I’d heard if I hadn’t thought they were grounded in fact. Facts that I’d personally observed.”

  “What exactly did you hear?” I asked him. It was one of two questions that I’d wanted to ask for days.

  “That Quentin wasn’t doing the job he was hired to do,” Glendora said. “That he was taking a lot of pills an
d drinking a great deal. That he was depressed, possibly suicidal. That he’d lost his way and grown desperate.”

  I asked the second question. “And who did you hear this from?”

  Glendora took another sip of his drink. He put the glass back down on the table and folded his fingers beneath his chin. “I heard it from Quentin,” he said.

  I stared at him. “I beg your pardon? You heard it from Quentin?”

  “Yes. Oh, I heard other things from other people, too.” He tossed one hand out, as if the other things didn’t matter. “From Walt and Helen and Jack. But then you always hear these sorts of things in this business. You get used to it after a time. The constant placing of blame. The scuttling after dollars. You get used to it.” But he sounded as if he hadn’t quite gotten used to it yet. “Walt called me three weeks ago. Helen sometime before that. And Jack...well, I talk to Jack almost every day. Each of them had his own reasons for complaint—some better, some worse. Quentin had a reason, too, I suppose. In a way, I was hoping that you’d find out what it was. It’s been bothering me since last Thursday.”

  “Quentin’s mother said you had a meeting with him on Thursday.”

  “Yes. I saw him that afternoon. Here, as a matter of fact. In this room. We had lunch together.”

  “What was the purpose of the meeting?”

  “Quentin wanted to talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “I thought he was going to talk about ‘Phoenix,’ about the problems he’d been having completing a document. That’s what he’d said on the phone, when he arranged the meeting on Thursday morning. You know he’d promised Helen three weeks before that he and Walt would deliver a document by this Monday. Helen, Jack, and I discussed it in New York, and we’d agreed to give him one more week if he asked for it. But no longer than that. The show simply couldn’t have survived any longer without a workable story line. To be frank, I don’t know if it will survive anyway—a lot of damage has already been done. That was what I was going to tell him on Thursday—that he had one more week to deliver or his job was in serious jeopardy.”

  Glendora unlocked his hands and dropped them heavily on the table, as if he were done using them for the day. “As it worked out, I didn’t have to say that to him. I didn’t really do much talking at all. Neither did Quentin. It was a very odd meeting.

  “When he arrived I could see that he was in a bad way. He’d been in a bad way for months; but that morning he looked like he was going to die. He kept taking pills. Pacing nervously around the room. Once he phoned his doctor. I was seriously afraid he was going to have an attack. I’d never seen him like that before. He’d always seemed so much in control. So unflappable. It was very upsetting. Jack, Walt, and Helen had said that he was in a decline, but this was worse than I’d thought. The first thing he said to me was that if he couldn’t produce the document by Monday, he was going to resign. Under the circumstances, I was grateful that he’d said it.”

  “Better than leaving him in the room with a loaded gun,” I said.

  Glendora frowned. “I don’t like kicking someone when he’s down, Harry. You’re quite wrong if you think I do.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “We had a few drinks. Quentin had more than a few. Then he told me a peculiar story—one that has stayed with me. He said that he’d spent most of that week visiting places from his past, just as if he knew he was going to die that weekend. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But when he did die on Monday, I called one of the people he’d mentioned—a school teacher. And she told me that he had, in fact, come to see her on Wednesday. I asked her what they’d talked about, and she’d said that he’d wanted to know what he’d been like as a boy—what she’d thought of him.”

  Charles knocked on the door and rolled in a cart with our food on it. He served the meals and left, but neither of us touched our plates.

  “He said other things,” Glendora said. “About drugs and liquor. And then he told me if things kept going the way they were, he was going to take his own life. That’s why, on Monday, when I heard he was dead, I thought...”

  “That he’d killed himself,” I said.

  Glendora nodded. “I didn’t know what to say to him at the time. You know, we liked each other but he’d never been intimate. He wasn’t a warm man. I suppose I’m not either. I said something feeble—the sort of thing you always say in the face of an unexpected collapse. That it would be all right. That we would work with him. I think I even said that he could have more time to finish the document. But I don’t think he was disappointed at my loss for words. In fact, before he left, he regained his composure and told me not to worry about him—that he’d be all right. Later on, after he died, I had the terrible feeling that I had been part of that tour he’d been making. Perhaps the last stop. That I was just one more person whom he had visited—to find out what we’d thought of him.”

  Glendora shook his head sadly. “Can you imagine that? A man like him, with that much experience and personal charm, coming to me—a virtual stranger—to find out who he was?”

  I didn’t say it out loud. But I wondered where else a man like Quentin Dover could have gone.

  24

  TALKING ABOUT Quentin’s last days didn’t do much for our appetites. Glendora picked through his salad and I stared at mine without interest. What I really wanted was another drink. But since Charles seemed to come at discreet intervals, I had to make do with a glass of ice water.

  When he’d finished toying with his food, Glendora put the silverware down gently beside the plate, as if he were setting the table again, and gave me one of his grave, sad-eyed looks. It was hard for me to tell what he was thinking since he always wore the same long-suffering expression. But what he’d said earlier, and the way that he’d said it, made me wonder if I’d misjudged him. Perhaps he really had hired me to find the truth about Quentin’s death. There was no telling what might devil a man’s conscience, even an executive of United American. And Quentin had clearly troubled Glendora. And moved him. It was strange, I thought, how many people had cared for Dover, in spite of himself.

  “Do you think he did kill himself?” Glendora said as he pushed gently at his fork and knife.

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “Do you think you could find out for sure?”

  “For United?”

  “For me,” he said.

  “I can try, Frank.”

  He nodded. “That’s all I want—for someone to try.”

  “There’s no need to feel guilty about him,” I said. “He created most of the trouble he was in by himself.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Glendora cleared his throat, as if to warn me off the subject of his possible guilts. “Did you want to talk to Seth?” he said.

  “Quentin’s lawyer?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes. This afternoon if possible.”

  There was a phone on one of the sideboards. Glendora picked it up and made the call.

  ******

  Seth Murdock had an office in the Central Trust Building, a few blocks west of the Maisonette. I walked over to it, through the hot, sultry afternoon. I found Murdock’s name in the lobby display case. He was high up—2015. A black bellman in a red cap showed me to the express elevator and a few seconds later I got out on the twentieth floor.

  The hallway, like the lobby, was old-fashioned, all marble pilasters and plastered walls. But Murdock’s office was surprisingly up to date. It had been rehabbed in a contemporary style—dry-wall and chrome fixtures, plush carpeting on the floors and Danish modern furniture in the waiting area. I gave the secretary my name and sat down beside a woman with a fat, padded brace on her neck.

  After a moment, the secretary told me I could go in.

  The inner office was as plush as the waiting area. Heavily carpeted, dry-walled, and furnished in a variety of dark glossy woods. The only things that hadn’t been redone were the windows. They were tall, old-fashioned fans with round
tops segmented like slices of orange.

  Murdock was standing in front of one of the windows when I came in—his hands clasped behind his back. He had silvery white hair, slick with pomade. He turned around as I walked up to his desk.

  “You Stoner?” he said in a raspy voice.

  I nodded.

  “Have a seat.”

  I sat down in front of a huge cherrywood desk, tiered and ornamented like a three-decked battleship. Murdock sat down behind it in a tall leather chair. In front his hair had been combed and chopped in a crew cut. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles, cleaned so immaculately that they flashed in the sunlight coming through the windows. His face was haggard, hollow at the cheeks, pallid, and spotted with age. He could have been in his late fifties, but his pallor made him seem much older.

  Murdock coughed hoarsely and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re here to talk about Quentin?”

  “Yes.”

  He tented his hands at his lips. “I really shouldn’t be talking about him at all, you know. His estate is still in probate.” He swiveled slightly in his chair and his glasses caught the sunlight again. “However, since you’re a friend of Frank’s, I’m willing to make an exception. With the understanding that I will not talk about the provisions of Quentin’s will. Is that agreeable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you may proceed.”

  I smiled at his locution. “I’m mainly interested in Quentin’s financial situation.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Whether he was having any serious financial problems prior to his death.”

  “I guess that depends on your definition of serious.” Murdock pulled a silver case out of his pocket, flipped it open, and took out a cigarette. He tapped it several times on the case, then stuck it in his mouth. “He was having problems,” he said as he lit the cigarette. “However with an income the size of his, such problems were only temporary, cash-flow things. Within a matter of months he would have straightened them out.”

  “Within a matter of days he might have lost his job,” I said.

  Murdock plucked the cigarette from his mouth and held it between his thumb and forefinger, letting the blue smoke crawl over his hand. “I was not aware of that,” he said after a moment. “The last time I spoke to Quentin he was sanguine about his prospects.”