Natural Causes

by Jonathan Valin

  “I need some help,” I said to him. “Who do you know at the phone company?”

  “I know the vice-president,” Glendora said. “We play racquet ball together.”

  “Do you feel up to pulling a few more strings? I think I’ve got a lead on where Quentin was last weekend, but I need someone with access to phone company records in order to confirm it.”

  “It is Sunday,” Glendora said.

  “It’s up to you, Frank,” I said. “You can call him now or you can call him in the morning.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “What exactly do you need to know?”

  “I need a record of any long-distance calls made on Dover’s private phone this past weekend.”

  “On his private phone here in town?”

  “Yeah.” I gave him the number.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Where will you be?”

  I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was half-past five. “I’ll be here for another couple of hours. After that you can get me at the Dover home.”

  “Marsha’s or Connie’s?”

  “Marsha’s,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll talk to you later, Frank,” I said and hung up.

  Glendora wasn’t a fool. I figured he’d guessed why I was going out to the Dover house. It wasn’t a tough thing to guess at. All you had to do was know Marsha. Or know me. Either way, it wasn’t a flattering deduction.

  ******

  At half-past six, Glendora called back.

  “I’ve got what you wanted,” he said. “Do you have a pencil handy?”

  I took one out of the nightstand drawer and tore off a piece of the phone book to write on.

  “Quentin made five long-distance calls last weekend on his private line—all to the same number. One on Friday night. Three on Saturday. And one that I don’t understand on Monday afternoon.”

  “Quentin didn’t make the last few calls—his doctor did.”

  “I see,” Glendora said. “Well, I don’t really see. But I’ll take your word for it. The number called was 505-889-9206.”

  “That’s not L.A.’s area code—505,” I said with surprise.

  “No. It’s New Mexico,” Glendora said. “I had it checked. It was Quentin’s ranch in New Mexico.”

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” I said. “Then he wasn’t in L.A. on Friday night and on Saturday after all.”

  “Why do you say that?” Glendora said with alarm.

  “Because his cardiologist talked to him at the 505 number on Saturday morning.”

  There were other reasons—the timing of the phone call to his mother on Friday night, the man with the Mexican accent whom Feldman had talked to on Monday, above all the phone call Quentin himself had made to his private phone in Cincinnati. It hadn’t made much sense for him to call-forward if he were trying to reach someone in L.A., which is what I’d assumed. He could have dialed directly from the Belle Vista and no one would have known whom he’d talked to. But if he’d been calling someone at his ranch in New Mexico—the man with the Mexican accent—then he would have had to have made a long-distance call from the Belle Vista and he must have known that the hotel kept a record of long-distance calls. So he’d put call-forwarding on his own phone to disguise the destination of the call. All of Quentin’s behavior pointed to the fact that he hadn’t wanted anyone to know about, much less have a record of, his New Mexican sidetrip. I didn’t go into it with Glendora. He sounded too confused already.

  “How did he manage it?” he said with a touch of awe. “Getting out of the hotel? Flying to Las Cruces? Coming back again without anybody knowing that he’d gone?”

  The answer was that he’d had some help—there was no other way to explain how the rental car had gotten back to the Belle Vista lot while Quentin was on his way to Las Cruces. Or how Quentin had gotten back to the hotel on Sunday. “I’m more interested in knowing what he was doing at that ranch,” I said. “And I won’t be able to figure that out from here. Is Jack still on the coast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call him and tell him to meet me at LAX tonight. I’ll come in on the red-eye, about twelve-thirty A.M. his time. Tell him to get in touch with Sy Goldblum, too. I’d like to have him at the airport when I come in.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Glendora said. “This is very confusing to me.”

  “To me, too.”

  He sighed. “It appears to have been a deliberate confusion, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so, Frank. Whatever Quentin was up to, it looks as if it was unethical at best and illegal at worst. There’s no other way to explain the coverup. The whole thing was clearly planned in advance—the call-forwarding tells us that.”

  “But why?” Glendora said.

  “He apparently thought that he needed an alibi to cover his trip to Las Cruces. Draw your own conclusions.”

  “Lord, Quentin,” Glendora said unhappily and rang off.

  ******

  I packed my overnighter and my Dopp kit again and called Cincinnati International to make a reservation on the red-eye to the coast. While I had the ticket agent on the line, I decided to do a little digging. I had a fairly good idea of when Dover had left L.A.—sometime after he’d picked up the rental car at eight P.M. Pacific time. He’d called his mother at two A.M. Eastern time, which was eleven Pacific time. Unless he’d stopped some place in L.A. for the night and then gone on to Las Cruces in the morning, he was probably at his ranch when he made that call to Connie. Assuming my timetable was correct, he’d had three hours to get from L.A. to Las Cruces—between eight and eleven P.M. What I needed to know from the ticket agent was whether that could be done on a commercial flight or whether, as I suspected on the basis of all the other diversions, Quentin had found some other, less public way of getting to New Mexico.

  “I may need to catch a flight to Las Cruces, New Mexico, next Friday,” I said to her.

  “From L.A.?”

  “Yes. I want to leave between, say, eight-thirty and nine-thirty in the evening, if possible. Can you set that up for me?”

  I could hear her punching buttons on her computer terminal. “There are no direct commercial flights to Las Cruces,” she said. “The nearest I can get you is El Paso, leaving at six-thirty, arriving at nine-thirty Mountain time. There’s nothing flying later than that on Friday night.”

  “So I’ll have to charter something?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I thanked her and made a mental note to have Wattle check the L.A. charter flights. Then I dialed the New Mexican number. I let the phone ring ten or twelve times, but no one picked it up. It would have been too easy, anyway. The only things I could recall being told about the ranch were that Quentin had sunk a bundle of money into it and that it was run by an overseer named Ramirez, who had visited Dover the week before he went on his trip. Connie Dover had been the one who’d mentioned Ramirez. If anyone would know his number, it was probably her. I called her up.

  “This is Stoner,” I said.

  “Yes?” Her voice sounded more bitter than usual. For a second I thought she’d found out about me and Marsha. Then I remembered the way our last conversation had gone and decided I was merely feeling guilty.

  “I have some news for you,” I told her.

  “About Quentin?” she said anxiously.

  “Yes. He left L.A. on Friday night and went to his ranch in Las Cruces.”

  “On Friday night?”

  “That’s where he was calling you from—not from the Belle Vista.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. “He wouldn’t have lied to me like that. You must be mistaken. He was in Los Angeles, preparing for a meeting.”

  Whatever he’d been preparing for, it wasn’t in Los Angeles. But I saw no point in trying to convince Connie of that. After what Murdock and Marsha had told me, I didn’t see much point in talking to her about her son at all. She’d hardly known him.

  “
You mentioned Quentin’s overseer on Saturday.”

  “Jorge Ramirez?”

  “Yes. He visited Quentin a week ago last Wednesday?”

  “So what?” Her voice sounded downright hostile. She’d written me off. I could hear it. We had nothing more to talk about.

  I went ahead anyway, even though I knew she wasn’t going to cooperate. “Do you know what that meeting was about?”

  “The ranch. I already told you that. There had been flood damage.”

  “What was Quentin’s plan?”

  “To repair it.”

  “That’s right. Quentin’s lawyer told me that he’d spent a fortune on it in the last two months. Over a hundred thousand dollars.”

  I could hear her suck in her breath. “If you knew that, why did you ask?”

  “You wouldn’t know Ramirez’s phone number?”

  “Find it somewhere else,” she snapped. “I don’t think we have anything more to discuss. And let me assure you, Stoner, that I know what you’re up to. You may be able to dishonor my son’s memory with his tramp of a wife, but don’t try it publicly.”

  I’d been wrong. She did know about me and Marsha. But then she had a lot of practice prying into her son’s life.

  “If you proceed in smearing Quentin’s name and memory,” she went on, “I will sue you. That is a promise. You and United American and Frank Glendora. I wonder how happy they would be about having the Russ Leonard story come out in open court? I have enough materials at my disposal to create quite a stink. About that and about any number of little incidents. And I won’t hesitate to use them, if it takes every penny I can raise. Leave this thing alone, I’m warning you. And leave that whore alone, too.”

  “You’d like to see her dead, wouldn’t you, Connie?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Suddenly I was as sick of her as she was of me.

  “How about Quentin?” I said. “Aren’t you a little glad that he’s dead, too?”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say to me!” she screamed. “An unforgivable thing!”

  “No more pretending everything’s swell when it’s not. No more lies to cover up. Nice and safe in the ground, like his father.”

  “Shut up!” she shouted. “You son-of-a-bitch!”

  She slammed the receiver down in my ear.

  31

  AT EIGHT-THIRTY I drove out to the Dover house to say goodbye to Marsha. But she wasn’t there. I guess I hadn’t really expected her to be. The house was dark. After trying the front door, I walked around to the garden and up to the terrace. I sat there for a while on the chaise, listening to the wind in the oaks and staring at the Dixie cup in the pool. Maybe it was better that she was gone, I thought. At least she wouldn’t be alone that night. The reflector was lying on the tiles by the chaise. I picked it up and put it on the liquor cart. Then I walked back to the car and drove to the airport.

  I thought about her on the flight out. Most of the people on the plane were asleep. All the lights were dimmed, except for a few reading lamps overhead. There wasn’t any sound but the engines and the rush of the wind. It was more like a Pullman than an airplane—that late at night. I had my usual complement of Scotches, smoked a pack of cigarettes, and thought about Marsha.

  I thought about Quentin, too. About him and the girl, when I should have been thinking about how he’d gotten to New Mexico and how that rented car had gotten back to the Belle Vista lot and why he’d gone so far away to die. I should have been thinking about his project—the one he’d been so happy and sad and noncommittal about, the one he’d told his lawyer he might need his help on. Instead, I thought about what Maria Sanchez had told me, about how Quentin had said that he’d loved Marsha. Maria hadn’t believed him. But I wasn’t so sure. At first Marsha had told me that he’d made her sleep with other men. But later on, she’d said it had been her idea. I wasn’t so sure that it made a difference—whose idea it had been. Like Quentin had told Feldman, they’d suited each other in some sad, indelible way. That’s what had made the difference.

  The plane touched down at LAX at one A.M. L.A. time. It was four by my watch and I was fagged out—rotten with booze and cigarettes and fatigue. Jack met me at the arrival gate. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and khaki pants. He looked as if I should have been meeting him. Sy Goldblum wasn’t there.

  Moon smiled at me affectionately and I smiled weakly back at him.

  “Tired, huh?” he said.

  I nodded.

  He picked up my bag and carried it down the long, empty corridor to the taxi stands in front of the terminal. We caught a cab and Jack told the cabbie to take us to the Marquis.

  “You can bunk with me,” he said. “Goldblum’s going to meet us tomorrow morning for coffee. He couldn’t get away tonight. He said to tell you it was something about the Sanchez killings. Christ, that made a splash out here. They love their psychopaths.”

  “More homegrown fruit,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “How’s ‘Phoenix’?” I asked him.

  “Well, we made it through the weekend without any major losses. That’s something.”

  “You haven’t been home in a while, have you?”

  “Five days,” he said. “I would have left tomorrow, if you hadn’t needed me.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “They won’t forget me. I won’t let ‘em.”

  ******

  I fell asleep, fully clothed, on the daybed in Jack’s suite at the Marquis and woke up eight hours later. It was ten A.M. by the digital clock built into the huge television set. I stood up and wandered into the john to shower and shave. As I was stepping out of the tub, the phone rang. I picked up the one by the toilet.

  “Hi.” It was Jack. “I’m downstairs at the bar with Sy.”

  “I’m up here in the john with the telephone.”

  “You think you can make it down here in the next half hour?”

  “Give me ten minutes,” I said.

  I dug a sports shirt out of my overnighter and slipped it on with a pair of jeans. When in Rome, as Jack had said. This time, I’d come prepared. After stepping into a pair of socks and shoes, I took the elevator down to the lobby and walked into the Marquis bar. It was virtually empty at a quarter of eleven in the morning—just a few tourists, sipping Tequila Sunrises out of brandy snifters, and Jack and Sy.

  I went over to their table and sat down.

  “Sy,” I said.

  “Harry.” He gave me a Boy Scout salute. I still had trouble picturing him in blue serge. That Monday he was wearing a muscle T-shirt and white boat pants. Big tufts of brown hair stuck out of the T-shirt from his chest, his armpits, his shoulders, and his back. He looked like Bel-Air’s version of a lycanthrope.

  Jack looked very uncomfortable. He didn’t like Wattle; he didn’t have any reason to, after their last encounter. Seymour stared at him with amusement—one arm draped over the back of his chair. Jack stared at the table or at his Bloody Mary or at me.

  “So what do we got?” Wattle said.

  I laid it out for him and Jack. “Quentin wasn’t in L.A. on Friday or Saturday. Actually I’m not sure about Friday night—there’s just a likely guess. But I am sure that on Saturday he was in Las Cruces, New Mexico.”

  Jack looked surprised. “He had a ranch there, didn’t he?”

  “That’s where he was—at the ranch. Possibly with his overseer, a man named Ramirez.” I looked at Wattle. “That name doesn’t ring any bells, does it? Jorge Ramirez?”

  He shook his head.

  “I figured. But it was worth a shot.”

  “How in the world did he manage it?” Jack said with wonder.

  “I don’t know the details. All I can do is make guesses at this point. Guesses that fit the facts as we know them.”

  “Let’s hear ‘em,” Wattle said.

  “First of all, it looks as if Quentin checked into the Belle Vista on Friday not to prepare for a secret meeting a
bout a TV project like we originally thought, but to establish an alibi. He wanted the world to think that he was at the Belle Vista the whole weekend.”

  “Then he wasn’t looking for another job?” Jack said.

  “Not in TV. Not at all, as far as I can see.”

  “Then what was his new project?”

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. He was badly in debt and he needed a good deal of money to make everything right again. The project was probably something that would make him money. Exactly what, I don’t know. I do know that he wasn’t counting on ‘Phoenix’ anymore because he told Glendora that he was going to quit the show if he didn’t finish the document by this past Monday.”

  “He said that?” Jack said. “Quentin said he was going to quit?”

  “He said more than that. He told Glendora he was thinking of killing himself.”

  “Christ,” Moon said. “What shit! He was just trying to buy more time on the show with a new lie.”

  “Possibly. But the part about killing himself was no joke. Dover’s father killed himself. And Marsha, his wife, told me that he’d always been afraid that he’d end up a suicide, too. Phil Feldman, Dover’s cardiologist, confirmed that.”

  “Are you saying that he killed himself?” Wattle asked.

  I shrugged. “Dover had painted himself into a corner by last Friday. He was worried, depressed, talking about suicide, on the one hand. And on the other, he was promising people like his mother and his lawyer that everything was going to be O.K.—that he had a new project in the works that was going to get him off the hook on ‘Phoenix’ and put him in the black again financially. If he couldn’t come up with a document or something just as good as a document, then, yes, I think he might have committed suicide.”

  “He hadn’t been able to write a word in six months,” Jack said. “What makes you think he could do it in two days?”

  “I don’t think he could. I think he was counting on something else.”

  “Like what?” Wattle said.

  “Like I said, my guess is money. Money from some source other than his job. Money that he didn’t want anyone to ask questions about. Money that he had to go secretly to New Mexico to get. I think that’s why he concocted the project story and the L.A. trip—to cover his tracks while he was getting the money. As far as his mother, his lawyer, and his doctor knew, it would have been money from some kind of special project. Money from a TV deal, money from a business deal. If it was enough money, he could have quit ‘Phoenix,’ like he’d told Glendora he was going to do, and still have saved face with Mom, paid off his creditors, and kept his wife and his house and what was left of his way of life.”