Death by Surprise

by Carolyn Hart

  I had never forgotten that moment. Angry? Some. But, mostly, that taunt hung in the back of my mind until an odd moment like this when the memory popped up so clearly and vividly I could once again smell the moist greenery of that tiny room and hear the sharp click of Grace’s heels.

  A stud farm. It must have hurt more than I had ever admitted.

  I took another sip of coffee and made a face. It was cold. Irritably, I flung back the covers. My lovely Saturday morning wasn’t fun anymore. I didn’t even try to follow my usual routine. Instead, I dressed quickly, grabbed up my briefcase, and slammed out of the apartment.

  I parked in my usual lot, a weed-pocked asphalt patch behind a bail-bond company. I paid a princely $15 a month for my slot. John Solomon’s office was only a block from mine. His office didn’t even have a storefront. It was tucked behind the Acme Cleaning Plant. A rickety outside stairway led up to a garage apartment that John had converted into offices.

  I rang the bell and heard the sharp buzz. Nothing happened. I rattled the screen door, tried the knob. The door was locked. On a weekday, you could go right in and Mitzi, fat and fiftyish, would wave you to a seat in a ratty rattan chair while she yelled over her shoulder, “Hey, Solly, you got a lady.”

  I jabbed the bell again.

  “Coming. Coming.” The door swung slowly in and John looked sleepily out. For the first time, it occurred to me that the apartment might be both office and home.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you, John.”

  He shook his big head slowly. “No matter.” He cleared his throat. “It is Saturday.”

  “I need help.”

  He sighed, opened the door wider for me then led the way into his office. He squeezed behind his desk and flicked on a gooseneck lamp.

  “What’s happened, a murder?”

  “Nothing that easy.”

  His watery brown eyes looked at me curiously. I took a deep breath and told him about Francine Boutelle’s approach, her accusations about my Dad and her claims that she had something on all of us, including Grace.

  “So,” I concluded, “I want everything you can scrape out from under a rock about Francine Boutelle, everything, where she came from, where she’s worked, her boyfriends, what she likes to drink, every damn thing you can come up with.”

  “It will cost a lot of money,” he warned.

  “Money I’ve got.”

  He nodded. “Okay, K.C. I’ll put Pamela on it.”

  Pamela Reeves is John’s high-class operative. She has a B.A. in elementary education which, she discovered, pays on a level with clerking at the five and dime. She discovered, too, that she has a talent for getting people talking and finds everybody fascinating. She is superb at joining an office staff and finding out who’s filching the company blind.

  “I need as much as you can get to me by Monday noon.”

  “Jesus,” he sighed.

  “I’m a good customer.”

  John sighed again. “I was going to go to the lake with my daughter.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “She doesn’t know she has a father, I work so hard.”

  I grinned. “Sad.”

  Slowly, he smiled, too. “I would only do this for a beautiful blonde with velvety brown eyes.”

  “And money,” I added drily.

  “Well, that too.”

  We left it that I would pick up whatever he had managed to discover at noon on Monday. As I left, he was dialing the phone. John might look sleepy but I would get a bulging folder full of facts.

  My office was packed with waiting clients. I didn’t give the Carlisles another thought until the phone rang at three. I excused myself from the worried couple whose tax return had been plucked for an audit and answered it.

  “K.C.?”

  “Yes,” and I just managed not to sound impatient. After all, Priscilla couldn’t know how busy I was.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  Priscilla’s voice is as soft and breathy as the sex symbol in a Swedish film. I find it exceedingly irritating.

  “I’m busy,” I said sharply. “I have clients in my office.”

  She ignored that. After all, what did my clients matter to her? “Can you come over now?” she demanded.

  “No.”

  “K.C., this is important!”

  I glanced at my watch. Three-fifteen. I had one more client in the waiting room. “I’ll drop by around five.”

  It was a quarter to five when I found a parking slot a few doors down from Priscilla’s condominium in Gloucester Square. The row of narrow-fronted, Jamestown-style attached houses were beautifully designed, expensively executed, and ludicrously out of place in La Luz.

  Priscilla opened the door herself. She led the way to a sunken living room with a fluffy white shag carpet and chocolate-colored wingback chairs on either side of a Delft tile fireplace.

  I sank gratefully into one of the huge chairs. Priscilla walked on to the bar. “What will you have?”

  “Does the house run to Margaritas?”

  “Sure.”

  It was excellent, the glass chilled and the rim salted. I took a slow satisfying taste. I do love Margaritas. I felt the tension of the day drain away—until I looked at Priscilla in the chair opposite.

  Priscilla and I are both blondes, but that, I hope, is where the resemblance ends. Her eyes are the empty china blue of a 1910 doll and her complexion the peaches and cream of a 1925 Gibson girl. Usually. Today, she stared at me, her face greyish, her eyes strained. She huddled in her chair, clutching a tumbler with three inches of neat Scotch.

  “For Pete’s sake, Prissy, what’s wrong?”

  She took a hefty swallow of her drink. “Nothing’s really wrong,” she said unconvincingly, “I just wanted to talk to you.”

  Priscilla paints china plates. I play racquetball. Her idea of fun is Las Vegas. Dick and Jane and Spot were likely the leading characters in the last book she ever read. She and I have more in common than I and an ayatollah—but not a lot.

  I just looked at her.

  She fidgeted, took another big swallow—there was nothing weak about Priscilla’s liquor consumption, apparently—and blurted out, “How are you going to vote on the trust?”

  I continued to look at her. If she had asked for the latest quote on the stock market, I could not have been more surprised.

  She mistook my shock for obstruction.

  “K.C.,” and her husky voice was almost inaudible, “please, you can’t do it to me, you can’t. You always said, a long time ago, if I ever needed anything, you would help. Please, you have to vote for it.”

  “Wait a minute, Prissy,” I said soothingly. “Slow down. I haven’t said I wasn’t going to vote for it. But let me be sure I understand. You want me to vote to dissolve the trust?”

  She beamed. “Yes, oh yes, K.C.”

  “Why?”

  The happy smile at my understanding dissolved like a cube of sugar in boiling coffee.

  “Why?” she parried.

  “Why do you want the trust dissolved?”

  “For the money.”

  “Yes, Priscilla,” I said patiently, “I understand that. There will be a lot of money if the trust is dissolved. Why do you need that kind of money?”

  “Well, it . . . I mean, after all, K.C., think what we can do with that kind of money. Furs and jewels and . . . I think I’ll go to Paris, that’s what I think I will do.”

  Paris is a damn long way from Las Vegas, but there would always be Monaco.

  I stared speculatively at Prissy, at her glistening white blond hair and soft body and strained face.

  “I might vote to dissolve,” I said slowly, spacing it out, “if . . .”

  “If what?”

  “If you’ll tell me the truth. About why you want the money.”

  She finished her drink and avoided my eyes. “Oh, it’s just that I’d like to be free, and the money, that much money, well, everything would be all right. If I can
just get the money.”

  I didn’t say a word. I waited until, reluctantly, warily, she looked in my eyes.

  “How much does Francine want, Prissy?” I asked quietly.

  Her hands flew to her throat, an interesting example of primeval instinct. She stared at me, her eyes wide and frightened. She tried to speak and couldn’t.

  “Fifty thousand?” I asked.

  She huddled deeper in her chair, a bird waiting for the cat to pounce.

  “Come on, Prissy,” I said tiredly. “Tell me.”

  She shook her head, back and forth, back and forth.

  “It can’t be that awful,” I encouraged gently. After all, Priscilla had just turned 25 and she had not, despite her fondness for Las Vegas, been exposed to much vice. Whatever secret she hid must be magnified in her own mind. In the 1980s, it would take a truly horrendous deed to excite much public interest. Prissy was just a kid, a voluptuous and stupid kid.

  “Don’t be frightened, Priscilla.” I spoke as if to a small child. “The Boutelle woman is out after all of us. She tried to get fifty thousand from me, saying she could prove Dad took a bribe on the Levy case and you know that’s ridiculous.”

  I could tell from Priscilla’s lack of response that she had no idea what the Levy case was and, further, could not care less. It was that quality in Priscilla which made sustained sympathy a little difficult. Still, she looked so much like a terrified and cornered animal that I continued.

  “Look, Priscilla, I’ll help you. But you are going to have to tell me what’s wrong.”

  She licked her lips. “The trust. If you will vote to dissolve the trust . . .”

  I interrupted sharply. “Not until you tell me what you are afraid of.”

  She pushed up from her chair and crossed to the bar. She poured her glass full of Scotch and took another drink.

  Even for a drinker, she was having a bit too much. I had never thought of Priscilla as a drinker. But really, I had seen little of Priscilla these last years. What did I know about her? For all I knew, she might souse her way through every day.

  She turned around but stayed at the bar, leaning against it.

  “If I tell you, then will you promise to vote to dissolve the trust?”

  Priscilla was right on one count. It didn’t matter a damn to me whether the trust ended or continued. But I had enough experience to know that great sums of money change life. Whether you wish it or not. The Mercedes salesmen would come. Brokers would call. Slick, hungry-eyed predators would always be near, waiting their chance.

  But I was a big girl.

  It would be a challenge, too, to make something useful and satisfying of life even though you knew that whatever you wanted, if it were for sale, could be bought.

  “K.C.,” and the appeal in her voice was unmasked, “please help me. I have to have the money. I have to.”

  It was the most direct real emotion I had ever heard from Priscilla.

  I almost said yes without another word because it was so painful to see, like a fluffy plastic doll suddenly come to life. But I knew I would never again come so close to discovering what lay behind her distress.

  I tried a different tack.

  “Is it a man, Priscilla?”

  I hated to think of unleashing Priscilla with several million dollars. I could imagine how she would be ripped off, monetarily and emotionally.

  She stared at me for a long moment. Behind her china blue eyes, she was thinking furiously. Abruptly, she nodded.

  “That’s it, K.C. Oh, I didn’t want anyone ever to know and that awful Miss Boutelle, she threatened to put it all in that magazine and then I would lose him.”

  “Threatened to put what?”

  “All about me and him.”

  I gave a little shrug. “I can’t see breaking the trust on that account, Priscilla. I mean, for God’s sake, nobody cares who you are sleeping with. Certainly it’s not worth fifty thousand to hide.”

  Panic flared in her face again. “You don’t understand. He’s married. His wife is an invalid. And besides,” she said triumphantly, “he’s Catholic.”

  I suppose I must have underestimated Priscilla. She had obviously been reading Ann Landers all these years.

  “Hmm, that’s a problem,” I agreed. Of course, it was possible, with Priscilla’s mind and body, that she might fall for the oldest line of all, but, somehow, circa 1980, I didn’t think so.

  “Who is he?”

  She stared down at the fluffy white carpet, then said abruptly, “Hamilton Fisher,” then looked up to see how I reacted.

  I’ve been in enough trials where the witnesses shock and surprise you, to learn not to change expression. So Priscilla didn’t get any reaction from me.

  I knew Ham Fisher, of course. Big, rawboned, and cheerful, he had the Cadillac franchise. He also had an invalid wife. But Priscilla couldn’t know that I knew even more about Ham Fisher. I knew that for years he had quietly taken out to dinner, when he was in Los Angeles, a sorority sister of mine who was a film editor at Columbia.

  It was a brilliant piece of improvisation on Priscilla’s part. And it showed how far she was willing to go to hide whatever dreadful specter Francine Boutelle threatened to expose. Of course, it didn’t show too much concern for Ham Fisher.

  Priscilla crossed the room and leaned down to clutch my arm. “Please, K.C.” Her soft whisky-laden breath engulfed me. “Please vote yes. If you don’t—oh, it could ruin my life.”

  She was lying about Ham Fisher. Lying, too, I thought, that her secret concerned a man. But there was something there, something that terrified Priscilla. The hand on my hand was damp with sweat.

  I hesitated for another moment. After all, if I could wring the truth out of her, maybe there would be some way for me to quell Boutelle. But maybe not.

  Maybe Priscilla’s secret was truly appalling.

  “All right,” I said abruptly. I couldn’t bear to hear her beg. It wouldn’t hurt me to vote to dissolve although I might be doing Prissy a disservice in the long run, opening her up to more grief by making her vulnerable to the greedy and unprincipled people who cluster near great wealth. But I had decided. “All right, Prissy, I’ll vote yes. But look at me.”

  She stared down at me with wide and fuzzy blue eyes.

  “Why don’t you let me handle this thing with Boutelle? If you’ll tell me all the details, exactly what she plans to publish, maybe I can head her off.”

  She was tempted. For a moment, she wavered, then, wearily, hopelessly, she shook her head. “No. There’s nothing anyone can do. Nothing.”

  There was stark despair in her voice.

  Travis’s call came Sunday afternoon.

  It was typical that it was person-to-person, not direct dialed. Travis had never been careful about pennies. Not about dollars, either.

  “K.C., it’s swell to hear your voice.”

  “It’s nice to hear yours, Travis.”

  After that insincere exchange, he got down to business.

  “I wanted to have a word with you. Have you talked to Edmond?”

  “Not since last Christmas,” I said drily. “Have you?”

  “No, I haven’t, as a matter of fact. Thing about it is, I have a little note here from Kenneth about a meeting to dissolve the trust.”

  “I received one, too.”

  “Good-oh.” Travis had spent a year in Australia during his college days. He had come home with several Aussie expressions and a full red beard which was just now becoming fashionable. “Well, no point in talking to Edmond. You know how he is, the long view instead of the short. But I’ve got my heart set on a rather special artifact, K.C. It’s a private sale, a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” He paused, said dramatically. “A Ming vase, absolutely beautiful. I didn’t think there was any way I could manage it. I don’t want to be specific but prices in the art world have gone ‘round the bend, right ‘round the bend. If we dissolve the trust, I can do it. Hell, if we dissolve the trust . . .” I suppose his mind was
so flooded with the glories of what he could buy that he was rendered speechless for a moment. Then, in a rush, “So the thing is, old top, I wondered if you could see your way clear to voting to dissolve. I mean, there must be some things you’d like to do if you had some extra money, a condo in Aspen, maybe, or a little cottage in Carmel?”

  Travis might not be a soulmate of a brother but he had remembered, obviously, how much I liked to ski and my fondness for that little jewel of a seaside city. To have put that much effort into thinking of the other guy indicated an overwhelming need on his part to be persuasive.

  I decided not to prolong the suspense. “I’m voting to dissolve, Travis.”

  I heard his sigh of relief, all the way from Chicago. That was as revealing in its way as the entire conversation.

  “Excellent,” he boomed. “Absolutely excellent. Hold to it, K.C. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I had intended to tell him we would all be dining at Mother’s, but, his objective secured, he was off the phone.

  I almost laughed, but, somehow, none of it was funny.

  I half expected Edmond to call. He was an astute businessman. One secret of astuteness is never to go into a meeting until you have your ducks lined up. So, it wasn’t a surprise when Pat told me Edmond was on the line Monday morning. I had to file a brief by noon and I was still working on the last few pages, but I took the call.

  “K.C.?”

  “Yes, Edmond.”

  “I wondered if you might be free for lunch. At the Atheneum Club.”

  “I’m sorry, Edmond, I can’t make it today. I have another engagement. But would another day do?”

  He paused. “Actually, K.C., I had hoped to talk to you before we attend the meeting scheduled at Kenneth’s office this afternoon.”

  “Oh?” I replied noncommittally. I saw no reason to make it easy for Edmond.

  “Yes.” He paused again and I could picture him, mouth pursed, eyebrows drawn in a dark frown. “It is difficult to explain financial matters adequately over the telephone, but I am hoping to gain your agreement, K.C. Normally, I would oppose dissolution of the trust. After all, the taxes . . .” he took a deep breath, “. . . the taxes on my portion of the undistributed income will, as you appreciate, be devastating. For this reason, I would be much more prudent to vote against dissolution but, the fact of the matter is, I have an opportunity of a kind that could result in tremendous profitability. You will understand if I am somewhat vague about the matter. I do, after all, have to protect my fellow investors, but it is an opportunity to join in a drilling venture in the Gulf that has high prospects of success.”