I spent that night going over facts and suppositions, by myself and with Tamara and Kerry. Tamara had dug up two more pieces of connected, corroborating, circumstantial evidence-all there was left to find. On Wednesday morning I went to see Irv Blaustein at Pacific Rim Insurance and had a long talk with him.
Same conclusion, down the line.
There was nothing to do then but make an appointment with Celeste Ogden and deliver the news to her.
I f anyone killed your sister, Mrs. Ogden, it was Anthony Drax.”
No visible reaction. She sat on the tufted velvet couch in her living room, her back straight, her hands palms up in the lap of her black slacks-the same posture as on my previous visit and in Dr. Prince’s office yesterday. Same expressionless demeanor, too.
“If?” she said.
“He was there the night she died and his actions indicate a certain amount of guilt, but whether he was directly responsible is open to question. If he was, it probably wasn’t a premeditated act.”
“Of course it was premeditated. On his orders.”
“If a crime was committed, it’s not likely Mathias was complicit except as a catalyst.”
“You’re not making sense. Why do you keep saying ‘if ‘?”
On the table in front of her was the file printout Tamara and I had put together, but Mrs. Ogden hadn’t opened the envelope. She wanted a verbal report first, which made this even more difficult for me.
I said, “It’s also possible your sister’s death was just what it was ruled to be, an accident.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“I’m sorry, but the facts support more than one theory.”
“Will you please get to the point? Tell me why you believe Drax is guilty.”
She wasn’t going to let me ease into explanations. All right then. Facts. I told her about the Mathiases’ neighbor Mary Conti and what she’d seen at approximately ten o’clock on the night Nancy Mathias died. I gave her the information Tamara had turned up: the three-year-old BMW Z3 owned by Drax’s girlfriend, Donna Lane, was silver colored; she’d been working a flight to Dallas on the night of the murder; the car registered to Drax had been in the shop for repairs on that same date.
“There’s one more thing that points to him,” I said then. The main thing, thanks to Kerry’s sharp eye. “The last entry in your sister’s diary.”
“… You mean the question ‘why adhere’?”
“Yes. Only it’s not the question we all took it to be. She wasn’t asking herself why she should stay in the marriage.”
“What, then?”
“Let me give you the reasoning first. Your sister often worked in her study at night, paying bills, writing in her diary. We know that from the date-and-time lines on the diary entries. And from the fact that Mrs. Conti often saw lights on in the upstairs front room. That is where Nancy’s study was?”
“Yes.”
“Directly above the front entrance.”
“Yes.”
“Was her desk close to the windows?”
“Close to them, yes.”
“Her last diary entry was made at ten-oh-five P.M. That’s approximately the same time Mrs. Conti saw the stranger park his car, walk toward Nancy’s house, and vanish. Suppose your sister had just opened up the diary file to make a new entry when the doorbell interrupted her. Suppose she swung around to the windows, looked out and down. Mrs. Conti said the night-light over the front door was on. Would Nancy have been able to see who was ringing the bell at that late hour?”
“Yes, if he was standing back slightly from the door. It’s set flush in the wall; there’s no vestibule.”
“Then suppose she was surprised and puzzled enough at the visitor’s identity to turn back to the computer and type that last sentence before she went downstairs to answer the bell. If it was on and open to the diary file, it’s not unlikely she’d have done something like that under the circumstances.”
“No. It’s not.”
“But it was an impulsive act and she was in a hurry, distracted. The question she was asking was the one in her mind at the moment, and when she typed it out she used her usual brand of shorthand-but she also made a pair of typing errors that she either didn’t notice or didn’t bother to correct, and that changed the entire meaning of the sentence. She touched the Caps Lock key when she shifted to type the first letter, so that the rest of the question was in capital letters. Three words, not two. Or rather, two words and one set of initials. Her second mistake was not hitting the space bar to separate the initials from the last word. The question wasn’t ‘Why adhere?’; it was ‘Why AD here?’ AD-Anthony Drax.”
Celeste Ogden nodded stiffly. “But you don’t think he went there with the intention of killing her.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “Drax is a smart man, and smart men don’t plan crimes where there’s a strong risk of being seen in the neighborhood, as he was seen. It’s more likely he went there to talk to her. If he did kill her, it was probably the result of tempers flaring out of control-a shove, an unintentional blow, a fall that resulted in a fatal head trauma. That kind of thing happens all too often.”
“Nancy wouldn’t have invited him upstairs. Or are you saying he didn’t push her down the stairs?”
“Not the way you mean. In that scenario he panicked when he saw she was dead and tried to cover up by making it look like an accident. Carried her upstairs and threw the body down. Found her key and locked the door after him when he left. The other possible scenario is that he did nothing except argue with her and then leave. She was upset; she went upstairs; she tripped or lost her balance and fell.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“There’s just no way of knowing. Two things argue for the first scenario-the length of time Drax was in the house, more than half an hour, if Mrs. Conti’s memory is accurate, and the fact that he was hurrying, staying in the shadows, coat collar pulled up, when she saw him the second time, as if he was anxious to get away from there. But both could also have innocent explanations.”
Celeste Ogden got up and paced over to the windows, stood looking out at the city. It was quiet in the big sunroom, quiet in the penthouse flat. Somewhere I could hear a clock ticking, the only discernible sound. We were alone in the penthouse; Mrs. Ogden had let me in herself this time.
With her back to me she said, “Why would Drax want to talk to Nancy at that time of night?”
“It’s the kind of thing a man like him would do if he knew she was dying, knew she was angry at her husband and threatening divorce. Try to convince her to change her mind, stay with Mathias and keep quiet about her condition for his sake.”
That brought her around. “Now what are you saying? That Nancy was killed because she had a brain tumor?”
“Directly or indirectly, yes.”
“That’s insane!”
“I agree. But it’s the only reasonable explanation.”
“Why? Why? She would have been dead in six months.”
God, I hated this. I tried not to squirm as Celeste Ogden came back and sat down again. “Or she might have lived a year or more,” I said. “A long, difficult year for her and her husband-doctor and hospital visits, time demands, gradual physical deterioration, all the rest of it. The kind of situation you can’t ignore, can’t control, can’t keep under wraps.”
“Him,” she said as if she were uttering an obscenity.
“What I think happened,” I said slowly and carefully, “is that Mathias confided the situation to Drax. Needed to vent to somebody with the same mind-set who would understand his point of view. That’s what I meant about him being a catalyst. Nancy was forcing him to stand by her with the threat of divorce, of going public with her illness and what a coldhearted bastard he is-creating a scandal that might potentially damage his image, the IPO, his long-range plans. Yet if he played the dutiful husband it would mean putting his business interests on partial hold, delegating responsibility to und
erlings like Drax, and that could also be damaging. He was between a rock and a hard place.”
“Sufficient motive for paying Drax to commit murder.”
“Yes, but I don’t think he did. Even if the idea occurred to him, he’s too cautious, too self-protective, to take such a huge risk. I think it was Drax’s own idea to see Nancy that night. Mathias may or may not know about it; if he does, it’s in his best interest to keep quiet about it, and about Nancy’s terminal diagnosis, and let her death stand as an accident. Same for Drax, guilty or innocent. Nobody else besides Dr. Prince, as far as they’re aware, knows about the brain tumor; it didn’t turn up in the routine autopsy because the medical examiner wasn’t looking for it.”
“Savages, both of them,” Celeste Ogden said. “Monsters.”
I didn’t dispute it.
Almost immediately she was on her feet again. Yesterday she’d been calm and stationary throughout the explanation of her sister’s malignancy; today she couldn’t seem to sit still, as if the latest shock had unleashed something inside her. I watched her walk around the room picking up decorative knickknacks and putting them down again, straightening and rearranging paintings and wall hangings that didn’t need straightening or rearranging. That went on for three or four minutes. Then, abruptly, she sat down again in the same rigid, palms-up posture as before. Nothing had changed on the blank screen of her face, not even when she referred to Drax and Mathias as monsters.
“All right,” she said. “Do you call the police or shall I?”
“Neither of us.”
“What?”
“We can’t go to the police. It wouldn’t do any good.”
“What are you talking about?”
This was the worst part, the part I’d been dreading most. Bite the bullet; get it said.
“There’s no case against Drax, not even a circumstantial one. It’s all ifs and maybes, supposition and guesswork. No witnesses except for Mrs. Conti, and it was too dark for her to identify the man she saw. No crime-scene evidence. No evidence that Drax was in the neighborhood or inside the house that night. No probable cause for the police to arrest and charge him, much less for the district attorney to prosecute him.”
She stared at me. “Confront him, make him confess.”
“He’d only deny it and keep denying it. So would Mathias. Men like them never willingly incriminate themselves.”
“Beat it out of him then.”
“I don’t operate that way, Mrs. Ogden. And it wouldn’t do any good if I did. Confessions made under duress won’t stand up in a court of law. He’d recant it, have me thrown in jail, hire a lawyer, and sue me out of business.”
On her feet. Down again. “His fingerprints… they must still be in the house.”
“Probably, unless Mathias has had the place cleaned since. But they don’t prove anything. Fingerprints can’t be dated and Drax was a visitor there before.”
“Then for God’s sake find some other kind of proof. That’s what I hired you for.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“Why can’t you? I’ll pay you whatever you ask-”
“It isn’t a question of money. Or time. Or effort. The damn lousy fact is, there’s no proof to find. It doesn’t exist any longer, if it ever did. It stopped existing when Drax drove away that night and the Palo Alto police ruled Nancy’s death accidental and closed the case.”
The emotionless facade broke down all at once. It was like watching a wall collapse. Rage, disbelief, frustration, all ran dark and hot in her eyes and in her voice when she said, “Damn you, what are you telling me? Are you telling me nothing can be done, nothing? They’re going to get away with it, both of them?”
What could I say? That things always work out neatly in the end and life always delivers easy answers to difficult problems? That there’s no such thing as a perfect crime? That one way or another the guilty are always punished, justice is always done? No, I couldn’t lie to her. Some loose ends don’t get tied off, some problems don’t get solved, perfect crimes happen more often than you can imagine, the guilty all too often go free, there’s more than one reason the statue of Justice is blind. That’s the way things are. You have to accept it and deal with it.
But all I could manage was, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ogden.”
“No. No! I won’t stand for it.”
“I’m afraid you don’t have any choice.”
“There’s always a choice. Another detective… a criminal attorney…”
“That’s your prerogative. But give them the facts as I’ve given them to you, and they’ll tell you the same thing. There’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing anybody can do.”
Up again. “Get out of here,” she said. “I don’t want anything more to do with you. Get out of my sight.”
I didn’t blame her for that. She had nobody else to take it out on; might as well be me.
I beat it out of there without another word.
26
JAKE RUNYON
It was late Wednesday afternoon before he finally got on the highway back to San Francisco. Tamara understood about the delay when he called her to explain, but he still didn’t like leaving her and Bill hanging an extra day, unavoidable or not. He’d been away too long already.
One reason was the long night; he didn’t get to bed until almost 3:00 A.M. Another was that he had to go back to the sheriff’s department in Red Bluff to sign a written statement of what he’d told Rinniak and Sheriff Macon the day before.
Rinniak was there, bleak and haggard, when Runyon arrived late in the morning, and they had a few minutes together. The two women had made separate signed confessions by then, Sandra Parnell tearfully, Ashley Kelso gloatingly. Turned out they were lovers, bisexuals-one angle he hadn’t figured on. No real surprises in the rest of it. Rinniak made no mention of Kelso, and Runyon didn’t ask.
Ashley was the leader, of course. Paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex-you didn’t need to be Freud to see that. She hated her father because of his strict authoritarian ways and she hated Jerry Belsize because she’d given him her virginity and he wouldn’t stand up to Kelso or have anything more to do with her after the ass-kicking incident. She itched to pay back both of them for the imagined hurt they’d done to her and, in her words, “have fun doing it.” Some of the “fun” had been spur-of-the-moment, but most had been planned over a period of months.
She and Sandra were still friends even though she had taken Ashley’s place with Belsize; the Parnell girl looked up to her. Ashley took their relationship to a different level by seducing her, “making her fall in love with me.” That gave her a hold on the weaker woman that became controlling, hypnotic. Sandra would do anything Ashley said-the torching of empty and abandoned places, for starters, using tins of kerosene Ashley swiped from Battle Hardware. Since she was a kid, Ashley had been “getting off on watching things burn,” the sexual thrill common to most firebugs. She also saw to it that Jerry found out about the homosexual affair-the reason he’d broken up with Sandra, told his parents that she wasn’t the girl he’d thought she was, and didn’t want anything more to do with her. Their relationship was stagnant anyway because of her deepening involvement with Ashley.
The breakup allowed Ashley to turn Sandra against Jerry, convince her that he deserved payback, manipulate her into the kidnap scheme. They lured him out to RipeOlive with the promise of three-way sex, and he was just dumb enough to go along with it. Ashley clobbered him with her favorite weapon; they dragged him into the warehouse and used a pair of her father’s handcuffs to leave him shackled to the beam. She didn’t care if he was alive or dead when they went back last night to torch the buildings. All she wanted, she said, was to watch him burn.
The murder of Manuel Silvera had been premeditated. He’d seen Ashley and Sandra leaving the scene of the barn fire, made the mistake of going to Ashley about it instead of her father. Like a lot of people in Gray’s Landing, Silvera was afraid of Kelso, but he was a mo
ral man and his conscience wouldn’t let him keep quiet about what he’d seen. Ashley saw killing him as the perfect way to shut his mouth and blame Jerry at the same time. There was another reason, too: she was curious to know what it felt like to kill somebody. She arranged to meet Silvera in the barn Friday night, made the anonymous call to the Belsizes to lure them away, hit him with the two-by-two when he wasn’t looking. Stringing him up was what she called “an inspiration”; she’d never seen anybody hanged before, and the idea excited her. After she and Sandra finished planting the false evidence in the hayloft and in Jerry’s room, they went back to the barn for one more look at their handiwork-and that was when Runyon arrived. They hid behind the stack of lumber, and he got the same two-by-two treatment as Silvera. He might’ve gotten the hanging treatment, too, if the Belsizes hadn’t come back when they did.
The game playing was partly kicks, partly a means of tightening the frame around Jerry, partly payback against Runyon; Ashley was pissed at him for showing up at the farm and almost spoiling her plans. Jerry had never been in the trailer at the migrant workers’ camp. The whole thing-roach butts, sleeping bag, fast-food remains, Sandra coming to Runyon with her plea for help, the anonymous phone call to Kelso-was an elaborate setup. Sandra hadn’t wanted to do it-she was afraid of Runyon as well as Kelso-but Ashley forced her into it. She hadn’t been told in advance about the anonymous call; her reaction to Kelso’s arrival on Sunday had been genuine. Ashley’s little surprise joke.
Runyon had figured out the sham even before he found Belsize, been pretty sure then that Ashley and Sandra were the real perps. Too many inconsistencies, too many lies. Jerry didn’t drive like a maniac or run down dogs in the road or beat up on his women-that was game playing and character assassination. He didn’t do drugs, had never bought weed from Gus Mayerhof. But Ashley did and had. Nobody knew Jerry or had seen him in Lost Bar because he’d never been there. Sandra hadn’t seen him on Friday night because he was already shackled at RipeOlive by then, and Jerry’s father hadn’t told her that Runyon was a detective because she hadn’t talked to his parents in weeks. The little scene between Ashley and Sandra in the restaurant parking lot on Saturday night had been staged, too. Ashley made a slip then that Runyon hadn’t caught until later. “I’ll bet if Jerry hit you any harder with that two-by-two, he’d’ve taken your head right off.” Unlikely that either her father or Rinniak would have told her the exact nature of the weapon. There was only one other way she could’ve known.
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