He looked startled. “I don’t have a gun, Maddie.”
“Then I think I better get back to the house.” I tried walking past him, but he blocked me.
“Why are you out here, Maddie? It’s a terrible night to be outside.”
His tone was so conversational. Was he the killer? Or was he just trying to keep me from finding evidence that pointed to someone else? Someone he felt he had to protect.
“I need that glass. Then everything can go back to the way it was, okay?”
“Are you trying to protect Carmen?”
“Carmen? Why? Is someone trying to hurt her?”
He didn’t get it, so that at least cleared up that question. I tried a more direct approach.
“Why did you kill your father?”
He draped his arm around me and leaned a little too heavily. With the slippery rocks underfoot, I collapsed, sitting down hard on the bench. Graydon sat down right beside me, holding me with a tight grip around my shoulders. I was still trying to protect my treasure, hidden from the rain under my jacket.
“Everything I ever wanted, Maddie, Dad took away from me. You know? And all the stuff he ever gave me were things that meant nothing to me. I mean, he ended up paying a guy just so I could graduate from high school. So why did he make me go to college? To humiliate me, do you think?”
“No, Gray. He just didn’t understand you.”
“I guess. But it went too far. I told him not to sell the company. It was mine. That’s what Dad said from the time I was a kid and I’d hang around the studio just to watch him work. He just shouldn’t have gone back on his promise. Not this time.”
“So all this was about the company?”
He spoke to me with his mouth close to my wet hair, the rain falling from his head onto mine.
“It was lots of things, I guess. Things really got bad when he got married again. He was starting a whole new life with Lily. I’d never seen him like that before. All the time, he used to tell people what to do, but it seemed the older he got, the more he was letting Lily tell him what to do. I didn’t get it. He still wouldn’t listen to a word Bru or I said. He still didn’t take my advice at the office. But when Lily wanted something, she just had to snap her fingers.”
“It must have been difficult when Lewis came along.”
“Dad changed. Here was this important man, my father, on his hands and knees playing with his new toy. His baby. You know all the things he’d been too busy to do with my brother and me, when we were growing up? He would brag about all the great stuff he was doing with this new kid. It wasn’t that I was jealous. It just didn’t seem fair, you know?
“But I figured, with all the time he was out with the wife and kid, the more I could do with the business. Like I could really run things, for a change.”
The rain was falling steadily. And here was old Graydon Huntley acting as if our sitting in the middle of a storm chatting about murder was not particularly bizarre. What I really needed was a rescue. But what was holding up the cavalry? Wasn’t Carmen getting ticked off, waiting so long in my car? Wasn’t Lily starting to worry about my whereabouts? And what the hell had happened to Rudy?
I kept Gray talking. “Did you plan this…thing?” I asked, not daring to use the word “murder.”
“I guess I’d been pretty upset about a lot of things. I guess my dad dying seemed like a great way to solve a lot of problems. But I don’t think I ever gave it any more thought than that. See, there’s all sorts of problems with my wife’s family. If I had this house, see, it could have made a tremendous difference to my in-laws. I think Carmen would have stayed with me, then. I really believe she would have stayed with me.”
“I know about the Feliz land,” I said, looking out into the darkness at the vast property that was the source of so much longing and frustration.
“Dad should have given it to Carmen! See, he just wouldn’t listen about that. After he died, I was planning to do the right thing for Carmen’s family. But then, with that lousy will and the lawyers and the land…I don’t know what happened, exactly, but Dad screwed me again, didn’t he? Even when he’s dead, he still does a number on me. He took away the one thing I ever really wanted.”
“The Feliz land?” I felt I was missing something.
“My wife. My Carmen.” Graydon squeezed my arm painfully tight and spoke into my hair. “He took her away from me, Madeline. He shouldn’t have done that.”
Did he know about his father and Carmen?
He whispered, “Dad made her fall in love with him.”
He knew. It’s a lesson that Bruno never lived to acknowledge: Even the dullest blade can nick you. Graydon Huntley went after his father for seducing his wife, and that was a motive even an L.A. District Attorney would have to find compelling. But would I ever have a chance to relate this enlightening conversation to the proper authorities? I kept Graydon talking. It works on television.
“Your father was a complicated person,” I offered.
“Hell. He could get any girl he wanted! Any one! You should see the actresses that came into the office, willing to do anything to get close to Bruno Huntley. So why did he have to take her?”
“I don’t know.”
“To show me! That’s why! To show me that no matter what I did in my life or what I managed to get on my own, he could do it better and he could take it away. What makes a man get like that?”
“It’s that ruthless competitive thing,” I said. “It’s probably the same quality that made him so successful.”
“I figured one day Dad would get tired of Carmen, or tired of torturing me. I figured I could wait. I always had. But then, he started talking about selling the company in a few years. I mean, I was steamed.
“And then, at the Halloween party, the fortune teller told me that Dad had already negotiated the deal!”
“Graydon. Let me get this straight. You believed this gypsy fortune teller was telling you the truth?”
“Well, sure. It’s the way Dad would do a big deal, keep me in the dark until it was over. And just like that, I was out of my rightful spot, in line to the throne. Oh sure, the soothsayer woman told me Dad would get me another job somewhere. But what about my legacy? What about my company?”
The irony was brutal. Bruno’s great big joke, his soothsayer telling nasty, shocking, personal predictions, had actually pushed this man, his son, to kill him.
“Did you know your father had strychnine in the house?”
“He told everyone about it. It wasn’t any secret.”
Thinking back, I remembered something Wes had told me days ago.
“You were hanging around the kitchen after dinner. So you must have seen Carmen coming in to get your father a drink.”
“Yeah! Right! She was going to Dad, again. Imagine that. She knew I was steamed about the fortune teller, and she thought she could patch things up between Dad and me. Is that perfect? What was she going to do? Have sex with my father in the bushes so he’d reconsider selling out my future?”
Gray clutched at me harder, shoving me down against the bench until I yelped out in pain. This time he loosened his grip and I got a bit of relief. He didn’t seem to enjoy hurting me, which I took to be a good sign.
“I was with Carmen when she was pouring Dad his Armagnac. She was fussing about meeting him and she wanted to, I don’t know, do her makeup again, so she left for a minute. The door to the liquor cabinet was still wide open. I saw that bag of rat poison. I don’t know. I think I half-figured he’d taste something wrong and pour it out. Maybe get a stomachache. I didn’t really think it through, you know?”
I guess.
He stopped talking. There was really very little else to say. Lily had not come out looking for me. Carmen had not gotten bugged enough to track me down. Rudy, for all I knew, was sitting in the family room with Donnie drinking tea. Hell, I’d have settled for Perry Hirsh looking for me just to get another glance at my butt.
“We’re soaking,” I sai
d. “Let’s go inside and get dried off.”
“I need to see what you found. Is that the glass Dad was drinking from?”
“I think so.”
“You know, Maddie, you’re really smart. I never thought about where Dad’s glass could be. Lucky thing you figured it out instead of the police. But I gotta have it, now. Let me have it.”
What else could I do?
I brought it out from under my coat. Graydon grabbed it. If it didn’t have his fingerprints before, it certainly did now.
“So would this have proved that I did it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it could have shown that you’d handled the glass. I’m sorry Gray. I was just trying to get Wesley out from under. You must have put that strychnine in Wesley’s apartment, huh?”
“That wasn’t planned. Bru told me to go into Dad’s safe and take anything that was valuable. He said it was really ours, anyway. So I checked it out on Sunday. That’s when I saw the sack of poison. God, I was blown away seeing it again! I mean, who the hell moved it up there?
“And then I got it. It hit me. Lily must have figured out everything that happened. She was keeping the poison locked up in the safe so she could blackmail me. If I didn’t do something fast, she’d get everything: Dad’s money, Carmen’s property, and my company. The bag was her ace, you know? So I took it. Then, later, I guess I just went a little crazy. I’m sorry about getting your friend in trouble, but, well, it’s not like he was family.”
A nice warm sentiment from a man who had recently sent his father to paradise or points south.
“It’s the cops’ fault, really. They told us they thought Westcott killed Dad. So I just gave them a little help in catching him.”
“I see.”
No one was coming. I was going to have to make a move. The good news was that Gray had sort of mesmerized himself, deep in the justification of an irrational act, sitting still all this time in the soggy cold, telling his story. The bad news was my butt had sort of fallen asleep.
I jerked myself to my feet, pulling away fast down the path. Gray didn’t give chase. He didn’t even stand up right away.
“Hey. I still have the glass, Maddie. See?” He stood and held it up. Then with a strong, swift jerk, he smashed it on the paving stone near his feet. It was a million shards in seconds.
I took off past the tennis courts as fast as was safe on the slippery stones. Of course, he came after me.
When it comes to the winding paths through the property, I had a pretty good idea of which way they led, but soon I was at the border that separated the landscaped yards from the outer lands that were wild. I ran through a large iron gate, up an irregular dirt path seeking shelter in the tall wet weeds. Heart pounding, I ran as far as I dared on the cleared path and then darted into a tangle of tall grass and got down on my knees. I prayed I wasn’t sitting in a patch of poison oak as I waited for my heartbeat to quiet down so I could listen for Graydon’s footsteps.
“Maddie? Where are you? Hey, you shouldn’t be out here on this kind of night. It’s dangerous, you know? You could have a terrible accident.”
Would he really hurt me? Kill me? After all, he’d had a lifetime of pain and abuse before he’d halfheartedly sent a poisoned drink off in his father’s direction. Not exactly the methods of a determined fiend.
But he had killed once; what now? Perhaps he’d decided that he could add murder to that extremely short list of things he could do pretty well. And why hadn’t I taken the time to think all this psychological bullshit through before I ventured out in this muck?
“Maddie! Come out here!” He passed quite close to where I was sitting, missing me in the dark downpour. I waited until he was a distance away, and then bolted further into the hilly country.
The overgrown chaparral abruptly ended. Last year’s brushfires must have burned right to this spot, four hundred yards above the border of Bruno’s backyard. Where no plants grew, there was no longer a root structure to hold the hillside up when the rains came. In a downpour like this one, it was the wrong place to be. And, then, I saw something truly awful. The earth above me was moving. Inch by inch. The hill was coming down.
I veered left, going downhill in a deep crouch, while trying to make my way clear of the mud. Around me, everything was moving: rivulets of water, debris on the ground, and the mushy soil itself. I tripped and fell hard on my hip. Black waves of mud were building on themselves and gravity was tugging it all down my way.
I pulled myself painfully up and knew I was in trouble. Moving in a crouched position was now impossible. Graydon would soon spot me. It was black night, and the rain was coming down hard again, but in my light colors, I was not exactly camouflaged.
I stood and made a run for it, trying to ignore the sharp fire in my hip. In moments, Graydon called out to me and I froze. He had been running up a section of hillside that hadn’t burnt down so close to the estate. He spotted me and changed directions, crossing to the left as he charged back downhill.
I stumbled frantically, moving further left, trying to evade the horrible onslaught. The mud seemed to be shearing off, picking up momentum.
Graydon was closing in on me, cutting right to left and on an angle downward. He was moving with less caution and, therefore, much more speed. I was injured and winded and weakened from my hour in the freezing rain. I was sure I had already caught my death of cold. The rest of this nightmare was simply offering a multitude of quicker ways to cash in.
I had to get away. Gray was getting so close! And then, he went down. One moment Gray was crashing across the hillside, and the next moment I saw him fall. I tried to force myself to keep moving. Then I heard his screams. I looked back up the hill. He had stepped, unaware, directly into the path of the oncoming mudslide. The entire hillside seemed to be coming down and he was rolling down with it.
“Graydon!” I screamed into the stormy din. “Can you hear me?”
Graydon’s voice floated on the wind. I couldn’t be sure I heard him correctly. “Heal us!” Was that it? No. He said, “Feliz.”
I started moving upwards again, checking that my feet were planted on firm ground. I hoped to pull level with where he’d fallen, the better to evaluate my options for helping him.
“Graydon?”
A flash of lightning and a clap of thunder obscured any answer he may have offered. In that brief light I could see he was tangled in some thick low bushes. He had slipped and rolled downhill in the mud until the twisting bale of branches grabbed at his clothes and pinned him down. And now, just a few yards above his head was a wall of mud, sliding closer with every drop of rain that fell.
I couldn’t get in there.
“I’ll go back and get help!” I yelled. I doubt that he heard me.
Staying clear to the left of the mudslide, I tried to scurry down the hill. The rain seemed to come to a stop and the wind died down. Suddenly, I could hear his voice calling me clearly.
“He’s coming to get me!” he cried. “He wants me!”
I looked back. Graydon, still pinned, stopped struggling against his tight prison of black branches. He pointed up above him on the hill.
“Don’t you see him?” he shouted, hysterical. “The old man on the waves? The old man with the face like a skeleton!” he yelled, gulping water, mud now up to his neck and pushing forward.
“Run, Maddie! Don’t let the old devil catch you!” He turned to look up at the moving mountain of black mud that was overtaking him.
“Graydon,” I shrieked. “Move! Move!”
“It’s okay, Maddie. Everything’s okay. I’m going to be his guest in…”
And that was it. Graydon vanished under tons of wet hillside.
As I scrambled down towards the estate, rescue workers appeared. They were making a human chain, passing large sandbags and warning me to stand clear. It took me a minute to realize what was going on. My cavalry hadn’t finally arrived. They were there to protect the house from the slide.
Somehow, I managed to get to the house. Inside, I couldn’t seem to feel its warmth. Regretting the puddles I was leaving on the beautiful old wood, I numbly walked through the entry, down the back hallway, and through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. The little liquor cabinet, sitting beneath the counter, looked so innocent.
In the kitchen I turned on the tea kettle. I only knew that if I didn’t put hot liquid into my system, I might be spending the night at Cedars Emergency Room, learning everything I’d ever wanted to know about the effects of exposure.
Honnett walked into the kitchen, followed closely by Lily.
“There she is!” Lily beamed, and then got a good look at me.
“Get towels! My god, get blankets!” Honnett ordered, and Lily ran out of the room. “Get a doctor to come out here at once!”
“And you might want to get the coroner, Chuck,” I suggested, my voice hoarse with fatigue. “Graydon killed his father and then, out there somewhere, he died.”
One moment I was trying to remember in which cupboard I’d find a teacup and the next I was suddenly sitting sprawled on the kitchen floor. So, in an attempt to cover my graceless fall, I opened the lower cabinet that was now at eye level. As Honnett rushed over, bending down to help me stand, we both looked into the cabinet at the same time.
Little Lewis Huntley was curled up, asleep, unaware that the world around him was moving, with parts of it moving just a little too fast.
Chapter 35
The police were busy on Wednesday and Thursday. Carmen Huntley confirmed that she’d left her husband alone with the open liquor cabinet on the night of the party. She also admitted to her affair with Bruno.
They identified Graydon Huntley’s fingerprints on Lily’s safe and on the glass beaker taken from Wesley’s apartment, the one that had contained the half-pound of powdered strychnine. That poison had been their strongest evidence linking Wes to the murder.
After that, it was just a lot of details. Like digging up a hillside to find the remains of the final suspect in the murder of Bruno Huntley.
Thursday, Lily made a public statement forgiving her stepson’s act. Gray’s secretary turned up on “Inside Edition,” confirming Gray’s murderous motives. Charges against Wesley were quietly dropped.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 22
