Crazybone (3 page)

Pretty soon she said, “Why would they do a thing like that?”

“A gesture of goodwill, as I—”

“Oh, bullshit. Insurance companies don’t give a damn about people. They don’t do anything unless there’s something in it for them.”

“All right, Mrs. Hunter, I’ll be candid. In return Intercoastal would ask the right to publicize their gesture, use your name in a promotional campaign.”

“So that’s it. My photograph, too, I suppose. And my daughter’s name and photograph.”

“With your permission, of course.”

“I won’t consent to anything like that. Never. What’s the matter with them? I just lost my husband, Emily lost her father, our lives are in a shambles. We’re not about to become shills for a fucking insurance company.”

“That’s not what—”

“That’s
exactly
what it is.” She was angry now. The anger was genuine, but I had the impression she was working it up, using it to hold the fear at bay. “They hired you to poke around in my life, my husband’s life, make sure we’re not ax murderers or sexual deviants or something else that would make them look bad if it got out. Isn’t that right?”

“There’s nothing in your background you’re ashamed of, is there?”

“Of course not!” She spat the words at me; the gray-green eyes flashed and sparked. “How dare you!”

“I didn’t mean that to be insulting.”

“I don’t care what you meant. It is insulting, this whole ploy is insulting. You get out of here right now. You leave my daughter and me alone, stay out of our lives. And you tell your bosses if they bother me again in any way I’ll sue them for harassment. You understand?”

“Yes, ma’am, I understand.”

“Now get off my property. And don’t come back.”

I didn’t argue with her; it would have been an indefensible argument even if I’d had the inclination. All I did was nod and walk out into the sunlight and tree shadows. She followed me as far as the studio entrance. When I glanced back after a time she was still standing there, still hugging herself as if there was no more warmth in the day and little enough in her body.

As I came around the nearest of the big oaks into the parking circle, I saw that my car had a visitor. A slender little girl of nine or ten stood on its near side, peering at it the way you would at a giant and unfamiliar bug.

She turned her head when she heard me approaching, and her posture changed into a kind of poised wariness like a cat’s when it sees a stranger — not startled, not afraid, but ready to run if the situation called for it. I smiled and slowed my pace, but if that reassured her any, she didn’t show it. Even though she was motionless, facing me as I came up, she still gave the impression of being on the verge of flight. No, not flight exactly. Up close, it seemed more like a readiness to retreat, to take refuge within herself. A defense mechanism of the shy, the vulnerable, the lonely.

“Hello,” she said. She made eye contact all right and her voice was cordial, but she seemed uncomfortable, as if she wished one of us wasn’t there. “Who are you?”

“Nobody special. Insurance man, I guess you could say.”

“Oh.”

“You’re Emily?”

She nodded. “Is my mom in her studio?”

“Yes. I tried to talk to her, but she told me to go away.”

A little silence. Then, “She doesn’t like it that Daddy took out a policy.”

“Why is that, Emily?”

“I don’t know. Did you know my father?”

“No, I never met him.”

“I miss him,” she said.

It might have been an awkward moment. What do you say to a ten-year-old who has suddenly and tragically lost her father? But her words were a simple, solemn declaration that required nothing of me, least of all pity. Emily Hunter had to be hurting inside, but her pain was a private thing to be shared with no one except her mother. She resembled Sheila Hunter physically — the same fine, dark hair and luminous eyes and willowy body — but I sensed an emotional stability in her that was lacking in her mother. Self-contained, better equipped to handle a crisis, mature beyond her years.

“What will you and your mom do now?” I asked. “Will you stay here, do you think?”

“It’s our home. We don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“No relatives back in Pennsylvania?”

“Where?”

“Pennsylvania. Harrisburg. Your folks are from there, aren’t they?”

“There’s just us,” Emily said, and I couldn’t tell if it was an evasion or not. “Except for Aunt Karen, but she—”

She broke off abruptly, as if she’d been about to say something she wasn’t supposed to. It prompted me to ask. “Where does your aunt Karen live?”

Emily shook her head: closed subject. “We have enough money so we’ll never have to worry. We don’t need the money from Dad’s insurance policy.”

Parroting words of her mother’s, I thought. “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “But people can always use a little extra, in case of emergency.”

“No. Mom said—”

“Emily!”

We both turned. Sheila Hunter was striding toward us, almost running. Even at a distance I could see the tenseness in her body, the anger that put splotches of dark blood in her face.

She came up fast, her breath rattling a little, and said, “Emily, go into the house,” without looking at her daughter. The glaring hostility was all for me.

“Mom, I—”

“Right now. You heard me, go.”

Emily aimed an unreadable glance at me, then went straight to the front door and inside. No hesitation, no backward look. As if she were escaping rather than obeying.

“You,” the woman said to me, the way you’d say it to a dog you’d just caught relieving itself in your front yard. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Your daughter was here when I came out. We were just talking.”

“You were trying to pump her for information. What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. What’re you afraid she might have told me?”

“Damn you! I told you to leave us alone! If you’re not gone in one minute I’ll call the police and report you. I mean it, one minute.”

I was in the car and rolling in less than thirty seconds. And bidding a none too fond good-bye to Greenwood ten minutes after that. End of a brief and unsatisfactory visit to the Peninsula’s lap of luxury. End of job, too, right? Sheila Hunter wouldn’t take Intercoastal’s fifty K if they brought it to her in small, unmarked, tax-free bills; Intercoastal could not capitalize on her and her daughter’s tragedy no matter how squeaky clean the Hunters might be; so there was no point in continuing my investigation. Go back to the office, write up a report for Tamara to feed into her computer and send to Ken Fujita, and then move on to the next case on the docket.

Except that I did not want to let go of this one just yet.

I kept thinking about the little inconsistencies and ambiguities that had cropped up during my conversations with Sheila and Emily Hunter. I kept getting mental glimpses of the woman’s fear and wondering what could generate such abnormal terror in a recent widow. And I kept hearing the word that had popped out of her when she’d first seen me, the nightmare word “crazybone.”

A reasonable amount of curiosity is a good thing for a private investigator to have; too much, though, becomes a drawback. I had way too damn much. Always had, always would. And along with it, an overactive imagination and a need to find answers. The combination had gotten me in trouble more than once, so you’d think I would have learned from past experience. You’d be wrong. In spite of myself I kept right on giving in to my weaknesses, making the same mistakes — doing it my way, just like Old Blue Eyes.

So I wouldn’t write a report to Ken Fujita yet. A little more digging first, maybe some answers that would satisfy me even if they were irrelevant to Intercoastal Insurance. And at my expense, since I couldn’t justify putting it on their tab.

Crazybone. Hell, it was a word you could use to describe my head.

On my way out of Greenwood I passed Anita Purcell Fine Arts. I would have gone in there to talk to the Purcell woman except that the place was dark and there was a Closed sign in the window. I swung into the lot long enough to read a smaller sign that said their hours were eleven to five, Thursday through Sunday.

In Redwood City I stopped at a service station and looked up the address for the Lukash Dental Clinic. It turned out to be an operation large enough to warrant its own building, a refurbished pile that took up a third of a block on a downtown side street. Busy place. The parking lot was packed, and inside, the reception area contained four uncomfortable-looking individuals waiting on chairs and two women working phones and appointment calendars behind a horseshoe desk. Other people wandered in and out while I was there, hygienists and dentists in white smocks and patients who were all done being drilled and scraped and polished and X-rayed. Nobody seemed particularly happy except the staff: they all smiled a lot, maybe to demonstrate that they practiced what they preached, since every one of them had very white teeth. Or maybe they were cheerful because they were integral cogs in what was obviously a successful assembly line production.

The older of the horseshoe women said yes. Dr. Lukash was in, but at the moment he was tending to an emergency patient. She imparted this information with a kind of hushed gravity, as if whatever his ministrations might be, they were a matter of life and death. Would he be available within the next half hour to discuss a personal matter? She thought he might be, so I wrote the words “Regarding Sheila Hunter” on the back of one of my cards and passed it over. She looked at the printed front, lost her smile and peered at me with sudden suspicion, then went away stiffly with her lips compressed. Some people view private detectives with the same jaundiced eye as they do process servers, bill collectors, and IRS auditors — as harbingers of calamity, trouble on the hoof.

I sat on a thin-cushioned chair to wait. The woman came back and busied herself again without looking at me; as far as she was concerned, I wasn’t there and never had been, like Yehudi. I thumbed through a copy of
Sports Illustrated
and watched the ebb and flow and listened to the sinister whine of drills from hidden cubicles.

After eighteen minutes by the clock behind the horseshoe, a tall, white-coated party put in an appearance. He consulted with the receptionist, then came over to me. He was in his early forties, going gray around the edges in a distinguished fashion; his thick mane had the kind of wave in it that said he frequented a men’s styling salon instead of a barbershop. He didn’t have a smile for me, since I was not a paying customer, so I couldn’t tell much about his teeth until we started talking. I made a bet with myself that they would be even whiter and more perfect than his staff’s — an easy winner.

He introduced himself as Dr. Arthur A. Lukash and then said, “We’ll talk in my office. I can give you about five minutes.” Crisp and civil, nothing more or less. Without waiting for a response, he turned and walked back across the reception area. It was not much of a slight, but just enough for me to work up a mild dislike for him as I trailed along behind.

His office was small and cramped and smelled as if it had been swabbed down with antiseptic. “Now then,” he said as he lowered his backside into a desk chair, “what’s this about Sheila Hunter? I can’t imagine a detective has any reason to bother the poor woman. Or me, for that matter.”

I explained who had hired me and why. I didn’t say anything about my confrontation with Mrs. Hunter.

Lukash said, “It was my understanding she had no interest in Jack’s insurance.”

“Intercoastal hopes to change her mind.”

“Not to the point of harassing her, I trust.”

“Of course not.”

“The fact is, Sheila... Mrs. Hunter is a strong-willed woman. Once she has made up her mind, no one is likely to change it.”

“She and her daughter are entitled to the insurance money. Why do you suppose she’s so set against it?”

“I have no idea.” He put his hands together and the points of his fingers under his chin, a prayerlike gesture that struck me as habitual. Pretty soon he said, “Just why are you here? I don’t see what I can possibly tell you.”

“I spoke with Richard Twining earlier; he said you and Jack Hunter were friends. I thought you might—”

“He told you wrong. Jack and I were not friends.”

“But you did know him fairly well?”

“Wrong again. I played golf with the man, I occasionally socialized with him and his wife at the club, but I neither knew him well nor exchanged confidences with him. I doubt anyone other than Sheila knew Jack well.”

“Meaning he was private, hard to know.”

“Closed off, yes. He shut everyone out except his family.”

“That sounds as though you didn’t much like him.”

“I didn’t dislike him,” Lukash said. “He was a casual acquaintance, that’s all. I was sorry to hear about the accident, but more sorry, frankly, for Sheila and Emily.”

“How well do you know Mrs. Hunter?”

He stiffened. “What do you mean by that?”

The sudden wary defensiveness in his voice prompted me to ask, “What do you think I mean, Doctor?”

“I don’t know her any better than I knew Jack.”

“Another casual acquaintance.”

“That’s right.” His mouth worked as if he were trying not to scowl. “Did Rich Twining say something to you about Sheila and me?”

“Such as what?”

“He did, didn’t he. Dammit, he’s the one with a lech for her. Did he tell you that?”

“He didn’t make any bones about it,” I said.

“He’s a liar if he told you he slept with her. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him and it offends his ego.”

I let that pass without comment.

Lukash said, “I’ll bet he didn’t mention Trevor Smith’s name.”

“Who would Trevor Smith be?”

“I thought not. He can’t stand the idea that Smith could succeed where he couldn’t.”