Making Waves

by Catherine Todd

  Most of what you found in La Jolla was the visual equivalent of Barry Manilow: easy looking. There were undemanding scenes of French provincial life painted in a vaguely Impressionistic style. There were Southwestern landscapes featuring cute Indians and charming buffalo. There were Art Nouveau statues favored by those with newly acquired upper-middle-class incomes and large Cadillacs.

  Somehow, I didn’t think Barclay would appreciate any of them, though it was hardly my place to say so. In fact, I wondered if he didn’t deserve to have me steer her toward something truly hideous. I looked hopefully through her handouts, but what she had collected was too innocuous to afford an appropriate revenge.

  “Ummm,” I procrastinated. “It’s really hard to choose art for somebody else. It’s really all a matter of individual taste.” God, that was such a cop-out. So much art was pretentious nonsense, like the sculptures that moaned at you and did everything but clutch your arm (an artistic genre much favored by the Whitney in New York, if I remembered correctly) or the man-sized hippopotamus on roller skates I had once seen in a gallery in the desert. “Are you an art lover?” the salesperson asked everyone who came in the door. As if anyone would dare to say no. As if only that discriminating quality would enable you to appreciate the company of life-sized jungle animals in the living room.

  “I know what you mean,” she said, folding the papers and putting them away. “I think I’ll get the decorator to show me some things before I make any decisions.”

  I wondered if Van Gogh would have done better if he had lived in a world inhabited by decorators. Probably not—a neurasthenic one-eared genius would be a hard sell even now.

  “That’s probably best,” I agreed, reluctantly abandoning the fantasy of some updated Odalisque hanging above the volumes of tax codes in Barclay’s office. “Then you could coordinate the colors with the carpet.”

  She looked at me to see if I was serious. Apparently satisfied, she peered at the menu. “I always have the scallops,” she told me.

  I sighed and handed mine to the waiter. “I’ll have the spinach salad with the dressing on the side.” I looked at her. “Would you like a bottle of wine?”

  She hesitated. “I guess so.”

  “What would you like?”

  The waiter stubbed his toe on the chair leg in his rush to get her the wine list, but she wouldn’t choose. She shrugged delicately.

  I might have disgusted Steve with my wine philistinism, but I knew enough to pick a California Chardonnay. I wanted to impress her and relax her enough to confide in me, so I picked Grgich Hills, which everyone in the entire oenophilic world had heard of. I trusted the hotel to pick the good years, but I doubted whether either of us could have told the difference anyway.

  While I was busy with the wine rituals, she took out a little compact and darted a quick look at her face, as if to reassure herself, “That’s me.” Whenever I looked in the mirror, even before the makeover, I always thought, “That can’t be me.” That’s probably the difference between beautiful (young) women and the rest of us.

  I raised my glass and saluted her. “I’m so glad you could come,” I told her, oozing solicitude. “I know this must have been a hard few weeks for you.”

  She bent her head in acknowledgment.

  “How are the children adjusting?” I asked her.

  “Pretty well, I guess.” She still didn’t look up. “Actually, they’re sort of unhappy.”

  “Naturally, losing their mother so recently.”

  Her head snapped up. She looked as if she were about to say something, but she broke off a piece of bread and chewed it daintily. “I’m sure they miss her,” she said when she had swallowed. “But it’s more than that. She gave them anything they wanted. Really. You can’t believe it. Now they complain about everything. What we eat. What we buy them to wear. What I let them see at the movies. Everything. It’s never as good as what she got for them or let them do. It’s never enough.” She shook her lovely head sadly. “Sometimes I think they hate me as much as she did.”

  I murmured something sympathetic, but there was no point in protesting too much. Any thought I might have had about Tricia doing Eleanor in was rejected on the grounds that she had clearly had a powerful motive for keeping her alive. If she didn’t, she had stood to inherit the children, and it was worth putting up with the occasional thrown ashtray to avoid that. I wondered if she’d inquired into a good boarding school.

  “Of course she would have been jealous of you,” I told her.

  Her shrug of indifference would have seemed perfectly natural to another stunning twenty-five-year-old. “Well, she was old and—”

  “Not that old,” I couldn’t help interrupting.

  She looked at me again. “Okay, but she was so fat, and Barclay didn’t love her anymore. At first I felt sorry for her, but she just wouldn’t accept that he had moved on beyond her. I think she went sort of crazy. She called him all the time and wrote him letters. She just wouldn’t let go.”

  “Did the letters and calls upset him?”

  “Not at first. We used to laugh when the phone rang, because you could always tell when it would be Eleanor. She always called at eight o’clock, just when she knew we’d be having dinner. Finally we’d just let the machine pick up, and then she’d get really mad. She said, ‘What if one of the kids had an emergency and you missed it because you wanted to be alone with your—’ Well, you get the idea.”

  “But later on, he got more upset?” I prompted her.

  She nodded. “That’s when he started getting real angry, you know? But he wouldn’t say anything. It was like he was holding it all inside. Then he started having trouble sleeping and…and all the other stuff I told you about. I made him go to the doctor. He got some pills, but they didn’t help.”

  Just then the waiter emerged from the kitchen with our lunches, so I was prevented from pressing her on it. I wondered if by chance Barclay’s prescription had found its way into Eleanor’s digestive system, but I couldn’t think of a way to ask that wouldn’t seem too obvious. We toyed in silence with our food while I racked my brain for a way to get back to Eleanor and Barclay. I wondered if journalists and detectives had better covers than that of nosy voyeur.

  “I thought I’d be glad when she was dead,” she said frankly, spearing a scallop on the end of her fork.

  She must have seen my expression alter. “Sorry,” she said. “I know she was a friend of yours, but—”

  “She was not a friend of mine,” I said quickly and truthfully. “Where did you get that idea?”

  She looked down at her plate. “Barclay told me so the other night, after the play. He said you took her side of things because—” She stopped, and a look of horror crossed her face.

  “Because my husband left me, too. It’s okay.” The spinach tasted suddenly dry in my mouth. I wondered if her agreeing to have lunch with me was in some way a small rebellion against Barclay’s recent neglect of her. “You know, I don’t think Eleanor really had any friends,” I told her. “She was so obsessed with the divorce that she drove them all away. Nobody could stand to be around her. You had to feel sorry for her, though,” I added incautiously.

  She twisted her wedding ring round on her finger. It held a stone worthy of a Gabor sister. “I didn’t feel sorry for her,” she said angrily. “She wouldn’t leave us alone. She wanted to make Barclay pay for leaving her, and she was never satisfied with what he gave her. I don’t think she ever would have been satisfied. She’d always have wanted more.”

  “Wasn’t Barclay”—I chose the word carefully—“relieved when he learned she was dead?”

  She looked at me oddly. She might have had an IQ only slightly higher than room temperature, but she knew something was up. “Why do you ask?” she asked coolly.

  It was my turn to squirm. “Well, you mentioned that he was angry with her and taking some kind of medication. I was just hoping things might have gotten better after she died.”

  She narrow
ed her eyes. “My husband is a very compassionate, caring man,” she said emphatically. “He had some feelings for her; she was the mother of his children. Of course he was upset when she died.”

  “People have always admired him for that,” I reassured her hastily and hypocritically. “It must have been hard for him when he got the news.”

  “Well, the police came to our home right after Juanita—our housekeeper—found the body when she took the twins over there. Fortunately, the boys were inside the house and didn’t have to see their mother…like that. Anyway, by the time Barclay got home, they had already heard the news at the firm, so I wasn’t with him. But he was very upset.”

  “He was working the night she died, too, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.” She pushed her plate away abruptly. “Do you mind if we don’t talk about this anymore? It’s really been hard for all of us, and I’d just like to forget about it for a while.”

  “Right. Of course. I understand how you feel.”

  “I mean, it’s not like a normal death, or anything.”

  “Oh. Why not?”

  “I really don’t want to get into this, Caroline. I think enough’s been said on the subject.”

  “Fine,” I told her. “We can just drop the whole thing.”

  “I mean, she committed suicide. It’s like she wanted to pin the blame on Barclay one last time for what he did to her. It’s like she was saying, ‘Look how miserable my ex-husband and his new wife made me. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I had to kill myself.’”

  “I’m sure no one thinks—” I began.

  “Sure they do. They look at us and they feel sorry for her, just like you do. Eleanor turned herself from something spiteful and pathetic into some kind of martyr just by taking her own life. Saint Eleanor,” she said, her lips curling bitterly to form the words. “The bitch tried to ruin everything for him—for us—and now it’s like she’s reaching out from the grave. Why couldn’t she just get run over by a car or something easy like that? She made a big enough target. Why does she have to make our lives so terrible?” Tears trembled at the edges of her magnificent dark lashes. She would never look ugly when she cried.

  “Do you think that’s why Barclay’s been depressed?” I asked her.

  “I’m sorry, Caroline, but I have to say it really isn’t any of your business,” she said and dabbed at her lips with her napkin.

  “I’ll get the check,” I said.

  12

  I wasn’t sure what I had gleaned from my lunch with Tricia other than flecks of spinach on my teeth and the conviction that Barclay probably wouldn’t allow her within ten feet of me again once she reported the gist of our conversation. I was sure he was hiding something, but there was no way to prove what it was. You could hardly hang a murder rap on somebody for being glad his ex-wife, a harridan of almost mythical stature, was finally out of the way, and that was really all she’d confessed to. If he’d been openly jubilant, I would have been much less suspicious. What I didn’t buy was Tricia’s explanation of his misery, although hers was clearly unfeigned.

  What was I doing trying to wring information out of a harassed second wife who was doing the best she could to deal with a rough situation? I should have been offering to babysit, not faking sympathy for her plight so she would spill the family secrets. What did I expect her to do, confess that she had wondered how Barclay’s suit pants had gotten wet up to the knees on the night Eleanor died? That he had rubbed his hands together with glee, chortling that their problems were over at last? I hadn’t really learned much of use, and I had probably tipped my hand.

  Still, even if Barclay had renounced any further interest in the contents of Eleanor’s box and had left the state with his devoted wife in tow, I wasn’t going to relinquish this investigation. Maybe it was the thrill of defying Steve that appealed to me. Maybe I wanted to humiliate Barclay and, by extension, my own husband. Maybe my motives would have given a psychologist a field day. Everything I had told Rob was true. I still wanted to know, and I was kidding myself if I thought I was going to give up on it now.

  The office of Rachel Fenton, my would-be attorney, was perfect. The chairs were severe but not uncomfortable, the table and desk no-nonsense and functional. There was nothing to give potential clients the fear that expensive interior appointments would be coming out of their bills, no burnished wood paneling or oversized floral bouquets. The parking lot had been full of middle-sized Japanese cars, nothing a car-jacker would give a second glance.

  Rachel Fenton, like her furnishings, was direct and unpretentious. Her business suit was Wall Street blue, her hair stylishly short, her makeup light. She shook my hand firmly but not in that overly hardy way some women use to prove they are “one of the guys.” She explained her fee schedule, the retainer, et al., in a manner that did not make me wince. Then she seated herself calmly, prepared to listen.

  I told her I was somewhat embarrassed at initiating the process when I had not yet heard officially from Steve. “But I know he’s been in contact with Jay Thompson, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just to set up a tennis date,” I added.

  She smiled. “Jay Thompson doesn’t play tennis. He does these iron-man triathlon events almost every weekend.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “We’ve met in court a lot. If Jay’s representing him, your husband’s got himself a top-notch lawyer.” I liked the way she said it—confident but not cocky.

  “What do you need to know from me?” I asked her.

  She pulled out a pad of paper. “I need as complete an inventory of your assets as you can give me: stocks, bank accounts, the house, and any separate property you might have—that’s property that came to you before the marriage or might have been given to you specifically, say by your parents.”

  “I know what those things are. You can’t be married to a lawyer for eighteen years without some of it rubbing off.”

  She sighed. “Well, that’s the easy part. The hard part will be putting a value on your husband’s share of the practice, among other things. Did you work to put him through law school?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “But it wasn’t much. Stanford gave law school wives—there weren’t as many husbands then—sort of time-filler jobs around the campus as a kind of courtesy.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “It helps to have a big endowment, I suppose.” Nevertheless, she scribbled something down on the pad. “Now, what was your income last year from your writing?”

  I told her, blushing as I did so because the grand total was scarcely enough to keep my family in hot dogs for a month even if you compromised and bought something other than Hebrew National. “It isn’t much,” I said apologetically.

  “You’d have a hard time living on it, even in Bangladesh,” she admitted. “But I’m still impressed. I always wanted to write something, but I never found the time.”

  Another closet author. “Well, don’t give up your day job,” I told her.

  She smiled. “Okay. Now, do you know what your husband’s partnership draw was last year?”

  I gave her a ballpark figure. “But I’m not sure,” I said sheepishly.

  “Don’t you sign your tax returns?”

  “Yes, but I never really look at them. Steve always takes—took—care of that.” I almost hung my head. I felt I had let her down. “I was foolish, I know.”

  “Too trusting, maybe, but you’re not alone; I can tell you that. Anyway, it’s no problem getting hold of your returns, even if you don’t have copies. Do you know if Mr. James regularly gets a bonus?”

  “He got one last year. It varies from year to year. But this year should be another big one, because the firm took an important client public not long ago and”—I had a brief vision of the library in Jeff Grayson’s house—“everybody’s talking about how much money they’re making.”

  She laid her pen down on the pad. “Has your husband mentioned that he expects a big bonus?”

  I considered. “No, I don’t
think so.”

  She sighed. “Well, I have to warn you that sometimes it can be pretty hard to pin it down. I’m not saying it will be true in your husband’s case, but most partners in a firm have a certain amount of flexibility about moving money around and hiding it from their about-to-be-ex-wives. It’s sort of ‘catch me if you can,’ and if you don’t happen to ask the right questions, you won’t get the right answers.”

  I was so relieved I could have hugged her. At least she wouldn’t dismiss my concerns, gleaned from the knowledge of what Barclay had done to Eleanor, as paranoid ravings. “I’ve heard they can lie about their bonuses,” I agreed.

  She shook her head sadly over human frailty. “It’s been known to happen. I just need to warn you, but let’s not borrow trouble before it starts.” Her expression said she nevertheless expected it would.

  I cleared my throat. “I want to talk about…”

  “Yes?”

  My heart started to thud in my chest. My voice was so tight I could hardly get out the words. “The children are living in the house with me, but Steve is talking about…”

  “Suing for custody?” she asked briskly, to help me along.

  “He hasn’t said so in so many words. But I feel he’s threatened it. I feel very pressured to go along with whatever he suggests because if I don’t, he’ll demand custody.”

  She gave me a level gaze. “Does he have any reason to remove them from your custody?”

  “Not at all,” I said firmly. “Right now, he sees them on occasional weekends, but that’s it. The kids would like to see more of him, but I think they’re happy living with me.”

  “Then it’s probably fair to say that it’s just a negotiating tactic, like a move on a chess board. He probably can’t get sole custody, so you don’t have to cave in on his other demands. However,” she added gravely, “I can only say that some form of joint custody is usual in these cases. I have to tell you that if you can work out something you are both happy with, without getting your lawyers involved, it will save you a lot—and I do mean a lot—of money and grief. Some kind of specious custody battle could run through your assets in no time flat.”