The Secret Keeper

by Dorien Grey

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “Talk to you soon.”

  *

  I stopped at the diner in the lobby of my building to order a B.L.T. and cottage cheese with two cartons of milk to go, which I carried up to my office. I didn’t want to waste a minute getting started reading the materials Mel had given me.

  I spent the rest of the day going over everything in the envelope. The will was straightforward and pretty much exactly as he had said. There were a few individual specific bequests—paintings and artwork, a few family heirlooms. I made note of them, curious to see if they showed up on the inventory. If they didn’t, that meant someone had taken them between the time the new will was made out and the reading. And felony theft could mean prison time.

  The financial report was at least ten pages long, including detailed assets and liabilities, all stocks and bonds, brokerage houses dealt with, various investment funds, etc. For someone who has trouble figuring out the answer to the classic question of how many apples Johnny has left if he started out with four apples and gave Billy three, I wasn’t able to make too much sense out of it.

  There was a sizable list of Bement’s charities, with addresses and annual amounts given. A couple of them I recognized, most of them I didn’t. Most were, not surprisingly, based in third-world countries. They added up to one hell of a lot of money, and I had no doubt the fact that Gregory Fowler had encouraged Clarence to increase his charitable donations was reason enough for Richard and the boys to hate him.

  I wondered how much the original will had set aside for charity. Since it had been written in—1946?—it would have undoubtedly been a much smaller piece of the estate’s pie. And even though the fifteen percent the new will set aside to be divided among all the charities might reduce the amount any individual charity would receive, fifteen percent of the entire estate was a pretty big chunk of money. It could well have provided the motive for murder to keep the new will from going into effect.

  Noticing that it was coming up on three forty-five, I put in a call to Mel and was a little surprised to find him in.

  “I just walked in the door. What can I do for you, Dick?”

  “Do you by any chance have a copy of the original will?”

  “Yeah, I do. Right here somewhere. What do you want with it?”

  “Actually, I just want to know what provisions it had for charities.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t recall offhand. Let me check. Hold on for a second?”

  There was about a minute of silence, and then, “Got it here. Let me see…uh…a flat bequest of twenty-five thousand each to…uh…six charities. What do the charities have to do with it?”

  While I didn’t know the total worth of the estate, I was pretty sure fifteen percent of Clarence Bement’s fortune was still quite a bit more than the total of one hundred fifty thousand earmarked in the original will.

  “It occurred to me the boys could have guessed that a new will, even if they hadn’t seen a copy of it, would leave a lot more to charity if only because your grandfather had been contributing to a lot more of them—which would mean a lot less for them.

  “And if they’d stolen the new will and knew it was cutting them off at the knees, I’d imagine they’d do everything they could to keep it from being recorded. I’m still not quite sure how they found out about the new will, but I’d put my money on Esmirelda.

  “The only way to keep a new will from going into effect—or to keep anyone from knowing it had been signed—was to get rid of both Mr. Prescott and your grandfather.

  “As for the witnesses to the will, if nobody knew it had been signed, there wouldn’t be any reason to look for them. The chances the two guys who did witness it even thinking to say anything about it were extremely remote—all it meant to them was a quick twenty bucks.

  “Until recently, I’d thought whoever it was who took a shot at Jonathan did it because he thought Jonathan had witnessed the signing. Then I’d realized that, if it was the same person who stole the will, he knew it wasn’t Jonathan. He probably assumed your grandfather had told Jonathan something that might implicate him in some way but then came to the conclusion that he hadn’t and—wrongly, as it turned out—that he didn’t know anything.”

  “So, what now? I wish I didn’t have to leave town first thing in the morning!”

  “I think the next thing to do is for me to call the detectives looking into the case and tell them everything we know. Maybe they can take it from there.”

  “Good luck. I’ll try to call you at some point while I’m gone. I’m dying to find out what happens next.”

  We hung up shortly after, and before even returning the receiver to the cradle, I called City Annex. As I’d expected, neither Garland nor Angell was in, so I left a message for them to call me.

  *

  Tuesday being Jonathan’s chorus night, Joshua and I spent the evening “reading.” He brought out a stack of his favorite large-print, mostly pictures storybooks and sat beside me on the couch reading to me.

  For someone not yet in first grade, his reading skills were really impressive, and I was sure that was in part due to the fact that his parents and Jonathan and I had done our best to instill in him a love of reading and of words. Of course, that he practically had them memorized might have helped.

  *

  Wednesday was one of those “forever” days. With nothing I could really do on the case, I hoped at least to get a call from Angell and Garland. I’d dragged out all my morning rituals, had started on a second pot of coffee, and was getting mildly bored, a very rare occasion for me.

  At around eleven, the phone rang.

  “Hardesty? This is Detective Garland. I got your call.”

  “Thanks, Detective,” I replied. “Is there any chance we could get together today to talk about the Bement and Prescott murders?”

  “Well, we’ve got a pretty busy day, so unless it’s really important…”

  I was tempted to say, “Oh, no, not really. I was just lonesome,” but opted for, “Yes. It’s important.”

  There was a pause, then a sigh. “I suppose we can come by your office sometime today, though I don’t know when.”

  “I’ll look forward to seeing you whenever.”

  “We’ll be there when we get there.” And he hung up.

  *

  The day crept by. I did some straightening up of my desk, went through a couple old files for no particular reason, and fielded two calls from prospective clients, one of whom seemed like he might actually be serious. He said he would be out of town for a few days, but would call me as soon as he got back to set up an appointment. Somehow, I had the feeling he would. That helped.

  Around two thirty, debating whether to fix another pot of coffee or drink the crankcase sludge at the bottom of the pot, I was standing at the window looking down at the street when I saw an unmarked police car pull into a just-vacated parking space across from my building.

  The passenger’s side door opened and Detective Angell—he was hot even from six stories up—got out. He walked around the front of the car to put money in the meter as Garland got out from the driver’s side.

  I quickly went to rinse out the coffee pot and start a fresh one before they arrived. I had just turned the pot on when I heard footsteps in the hall. I opened the door to a somber-looking Detective Garland and a far more pleasant-looking Detective Angell.

  “You read minds?” Angell asked, apparently because I’d opened the door before they got to it.

  “One of my many talents,” I said.

  After a quick exchange of cursory greetings with Garland, I pointed them to chairs and asked if they wanted coffee, which, like the first time they’d come to my office, they declined.

  “So this news…?” Garland asked, obviously anxious to get on to more important cases.

  I told them about the new will’s having reduced Richard’s sons’ share of the estate, and emphasized again their greed as a definite motive for murder. I repeated for the
m everything I knew about the case, hoping that, since they had linked Prescott’s death to Clarence Bement’s car, they were now as convinced as I that this was a double murder.

  They listened to everything I had to say, and when I’d finished, Garland said, “Look, the only thing new here is the extra motive provided by the new will, and granted it’s a strong one, the fact remains it’s still all almost totally conjecture.

  “We haven’t been sitting on our hands, and we’re working on it, but we still don’t know who drove the car that forced Prescott off the bluff, or who burglarized his house, or who killed Bement, and until we come up with some solid evidence, we can’t arrest anybody.”

  What in the hell kind of “solid evidence” were they looking for? A confession? Good luck with that one!

  But in fairness, I knew they, as Garland said, were not just sitting on their hands, and that they didn’t have any obligation to let me know everything they were doing.

  “We’re on it,” Angell volunteered, “and we’re doing everything we can. We’ll get to the bottom of it, I promise. And we do appreciate your keeping us posted on what you find out.”

  They left about five minutes later, having told me nothing of exactly what it was they were doing, but I couldn’t very well insist. At least they now seemed to be treating the two deaths as related murders. I guess that was something.

  *

  Thursday morning, as I pulled into the drive at Clarence’s home, I noticed an old four-door Chevy parked in front of the garage with its trunk and back door open and two large cardboard boxes on the ground beside it.

  After parking, I took the folder Mel had given me containing all the will information, which I’d brought along to go over one more time if I started getting bored, and walked to the edge of the building, looking toward the garage.

  A beefy, leathery-complected man with close-cropped hair in his middle fifties came around from the patio with another large box in his arms, which he deposited in the trunk, apparently unaware of me. Esmirelda’s brother Bernard, I assumed, though I remembered Detective Angell having mentioned his having fallen off a garage roof while at work. He must have made a pretty speedy recovery.

  At any rate, Esmirelda had apparently found new quarters. I was mildly curious about what all she was taking with her but didn’t want to have a confrontation with either her or her brother.

  I returned to the front door and, unlocking it, went in, feeling just a bit awkward being alone in someone else’s house. The appraisers weren’t due for another twenty minutes, so while I waited, I wandered around the ground floor. I’d wondered, when making the tour of the house two days before, how Clarence made it upstairs to the bedrooms, until Mel pointed out the small elevator next to the kitchen pantry.

  Going in to the den, I put the folder on the desk, reflecting as I did so on how many of the paintings, sculptures, and other decorator items just in that one room I’d have loved to have, and how few of them I could ever afford. Money may not bring happiness, but if you have it you can be comfortably miserable.

  Wandering about the room, I stopped to admire the burled oak desk. I opened the drawers, noting that the one with a lock on it had obviously been forced open, probably in search of Clarence’s signed copy of the will.

  Though I had never met Clarence Bement, I had to give him a great deal of credit for his cleverness. Again, I was sure Jonathan’s finding the safe, and his subsequently being given a book with the combination hidden in it, were deliberate. He had entrusted Jonathan with secrets not even Jonathan recognized as being secrets.

  Glancing at my watch, I saw I still had a few minutes before the appraisers were scheduled to arrive. I wished I had thought to bring a thermos of coffee with me. The huge house was utterly silent, and dust motes danced in a slant of light coming from the window.

  A knock pulled me out of my reverie. As I approached the door, I could see a late-model van in the drive, parked behind my own car. I opened the door to find a well-dressed thirty-something businesswoman standing in front of two business-type men, both in their mid-to-late twenties. The woman and one of the men carried briefcases; the other had an expensive-looking camera around his neck and was carrying a large case, which I assumed contained more camera equipment. They all but exuded professionalism.

  “Mr. Hardesty,” the woman said, smiling and handing me a business card. “I’m Elisa Lennox with Quality Appraisals.”

  I showed them in, and Ms. Lennox introduced her team as Patrick and Ethan.

  “Let me give you a quick tour,” I said, “and then I’ll leave you to it.”

  *

  As soon as the tour was over, they set to work, starting in the living room. I wondered if Esmirelda would be totally moved by evening or if she were going to spread it out over a couple of days. I couldn’t imagine she’d have all that much to move. While I did not look forward to another meeting with her, I had to find out so the appraisers could include her quarters in their inventory.

  I really wanted a cup of coffee. This being Briarwood, I couldn’t just walk down to the corner convenience store for a cup. I probably could have scrounged around in the kitchen and made a pot but didn’t feel quite right about it.

  I went to the back of the house and into what I assumed to have been a family room with sliding glass doors leading to the patio. As I entered, I saw Esmirelda and her brother, arms laden with clothes, cross the patio toward the old Chevy. Going to the windows and hoping not to be seen, I heard two car doors slam, followed by the sound of a car engine starting.

  I waited a few minutes, then went out through the sliding door and crossed the patio to what Mel had said was the exterior door to her quarters. Even though I knew she’d just driven off, I knocked with some trepidation, not really wanting to have any sort of confrontation. Luckily, there was no answer. I knocked again, and after another minute, walked around to the side of the building to a large window.

  The blinds were open, and I looked in, rather expecting to see her standing there glaring at me, but there was no sign of anyone. No boxes on either the floor or the furniture. I could see off to my left an open door to what appeared to be a small bedroom. The bed was neatly made but again the room held no sign of human habitation. Whether this meant she was gone permanently or was just out, I didn’t know.

  I went back across the patio to the garage. Looking in a side window, I saw a black Mercedes on the far side but no other car.

  Returning to the house, I went to the living room, where Ms. Lennox and her team were hard at work. I was rather curious as to exactly how they went about cataloging everything, and watched as she went from item to item, inspecting it closely, turning it over, apparently looking for signatures or other identifying marks, speaking softly to Ethan, who wrote everything down on a notepad and indicating to Patrick what items she wanted photographed. I didn’t envy them their job.

  “Excuse my interruption, Ms. Lennox,” I said, hoping I wasn’t breaking her concentration. “I don’t know if you’ll be getting to the maid’s quarters today, but I know she’s in the process of moving, and I’m not sure if she’s entirely gone yet or not. So perhaps if you could wait until tomorrow…?”

  “Of course,” she said, and went back to work.

  Effectively dismissed, I returned to the den. Mel had asked me to go through the mail, and I figured now was as good a time as any.

  On one corner of the desk was a stack of standard-size envelopes atop a smaller stack of larger envelopes of varying sizes, and several magazines. I sat at the desk, located a letter opener in the top drawer and began going through the envelopes.

  I found it interesting, and rather sad, that there was no personal mail, only various business newsletters, notifications and solicitations, and the standard bills—electric, water, the lawn service, and phone. After opening and glancing at each one, I returned it to its envelope and set it aside.

  However, when I came to the phone bill, I was a little surprised to note some tw
o dozen long-distance calls prefaced by a 011, which I knew indicated they were international calls, all made within the space of the three days before Clarence Bement died. Somewhere in my mind a switch was flipped, and that tiny glimmer that had been lurking in the dark recesses of my thoughts rapidly flared into a 10,000-watt Kleig light.

  Why I have never gotten used to this reaction, considering how often it happens, I don’t know. I do know I’ve always resented my mind knowing things it refuses to tell me until it suddenly sneaks up behind me and smacks me on the back of the head with a coal shovel. This was one of those moments.

  Okay, now what? an unidentified mind-voice asked.

  Two of the international numbers were one-time calls lasting four and six minutes, respectively. The six other numbers were called at least three times each and had a minimum charge, indicating they’d lasted one minute or less, which in turn told me they had not gone through. I thought I knew why, and it did not make me happy.

  I reached for the envelope containing the will information, checked the financials page with Clarence’s charities.

  My old Midwestern morality kicked in momentarily as I hesitated to use someone else’s phone to make long-distance—let alone international—calls, but figured I’d have put the charges on my expense account bill anyway, and if Mel objected, I’d pay for them myself. The thought of Mel gave me a small gut-punch, but I’d deal with it later.

  Picking up the phone, I called the first of the duplicate-calls numbers. It rang four times before an obvious answering machine kicked in.

  “You have reached Child Rescue International. Our offices are closed at the moment. Please call back another time or leave a message at the tone.”

  The second call got another machine: “Thank you for calling Endangered Africa. We’re sorry, but no one is in to take your call at the moment. You may leave a message at the tone.”

  If I wasn’t mistaken, the voice on the second recording sounded an awful lot like the voice on the first.