Desperate Measures (27 page)

“They have the best tamales,” Barbara said, taking wine to the table. Shelley brought the glasses. “Okay. Here's the toxicology report. See what you think.”

She poured wine and drank part of hers while Shelley read the report, and then read it again slower.

“She didn't have that much,” Shelley said then.

“Right. She should not have had that much on hand.” Briefly she recapped what Dr. Minick had said. “So the problem is how did he get that much into her without signs of a struggle or the puncture of a needle?”

“Not who did it, or why?” Shelley asked after a moment.

“Wrigley,” Barbara said. “I don't know why. Right now the
how
is uppermost in my mind.”

Shelley sipped her wine, put it down. She seldom drank much of anything. At a restaurant her drink came in an oversize glass filled with fruit and a pretty little parasol on top.

Barbara drank her own wine and refilled her glass. “What made her decide to take a sleeping pill that night?” she said. “There had been upsets for weeks, but that night she hit the pills. Why?”

“And how did he know she would?” Shelley added. “He must have gone back to replace the right ones at some point.”

Barbara, slumped in her chair, suddenly sat up straight, and hit the palm of her hand against her forehead. “Dummy! Of course! He had to have been there early, to substitute the doctored capsules. He went with the plan in mind, the capsules ready, and then returned later to take them away again.” She drank more wine, and nodded. “Wrigley could have done it without anyone being the wiser. Slipped out the back door of the clinic, walked four blocks to her house; later he could have returned just as easily.”

Shelley was frowning hard, and now she shook her head. “I just don't see how he could be sure she'd take the pills, how many she would take, what the effect would be…. I guess he'd have access to that drug,” she said doubtfully.

“Want to bet that his group did a study of the effects of sleeping pills, relaxants, et cetera, in the past year or so?” Barbara said. “We'll find out.” She made a note.

“You know, that group of his, they needed start-up money; even for bare-bones business, you need some capital,” Shelley said after a moment. “And from what you said, it's hardly bare bones. I wonder where that money came from?”

Barbara made another note. “Good thinking. His wife is from a wealthy family, according to Bailey; they could be the source. But we'll find out.”

“What's their name?” Shelley asked. “You said she's in Monterey with her mother? Maybe I know them.”

The rich know the rich, Barbara thought, and thumbed through her notes. “Dumont,” she said. “In timber, tall trees, like that. Know them?”

Shelley shook her head. “I know who they are, and I bet I know people who know them. I'll ask the Valley girls association.”

Barbara gave her a hard look, and she shrugged.

“It's a gossip network, not a real association. I don't want to be too obvious, but I'll see what I can find out.”

Shelley put the food in the oven soon after that; they ate, talked some more, and a little after ten Shelley left. Barbara made sure the security system was activated, checked the doors and windows, closed all the drapes and blinds, and started to turn off lights, but then left most of them on. The house was too big and too quiet, and without lights it would be even quieter somehow.

It was lonesome in such a big house by herself, she thought, and marveled that Frank never had mentioned that. He called at eleven, too tired to say more than that he had landed and was in his hotel and going to bed. And airplanes weren't what they used to be.

Then she went up to the room she used as an office in this house and made her detailed notes about the day and the various conversations that had occurred. The cats wandered in, wandered out. She had left Frank's bedroom door open so they could settle down on his bed, the way they did every night, but they prowled. And she found herself thinking of all the mismatched couples she had been encountering. Hilde and Isaac Wrigley; Rachel and her high school boyfriend; Leona and Gus Marchand. Shelley and Alex, she added regretfully. Shelley had been right about how she and Bill Spassero looked together. Frank always said he couldn't wait to see their children: little golden-haired apes, that's what they would be like. The one perfect match blown out, she thought. But maybe the flame would rekindle, after Shelley got tired of being a little sister.

When she finally went to bed, both cats joined her, and she remembered the year she had bought them for Frank's Christmas present. They had been tiny golden puffballs, cloud soft, and had snuggled against her throat, purring all night every night until she presented them to her father. Again she felt the loneliness of the house pressing in on her, a silence unlike the silence of her own apartment; an absence, she thought. That made the difference.

24

Frank was disgruntled.
His flight had been so bad he didn't want to think about it. If they thought a dab of caviar and a glass or two of champagne could make up for two hours on a tarmac, they were dead wrong. He did not like caviar, and he didn't drink champagne. The night before he had not set a clock or put in a wake-up call because no matter what was happening, every morning he woke up by seven-thirty. This morning the clock had seemed to believe it was ten-thirty when he got out of bed. During the night he had huddled and shivered for a long time, then called housekeeping for a blanket, and instructions about how to turn down the air conditioner. It couldn't be done the voice on the phone said, bored. But they'd send another blanket. He tried opening the door to his balcony to admit a rush of warm humid air, then he closed it again, imagining the headlines: elderly man slain in hotel room.

When he walked outside that morning, he quickly stepped back under an awning. Already the sun was blistering hot and bright enough to scald his eyeballs. The day went downhill from then on. His room had a marvelous view of the Gulf of Mexico, which to his eyes was a piss-poor excuse for an ocean, as still as a painting, and as uniformly blue as a paint chip. By afternoon the view was of drapes; the sun would have turned the room into an oven without them.

He sat on a shaded veranda of the hotel and drank a tall glass of fruit juice and watched the western sky grow mountains. Virtual mountains, cumulus clouds, anvils, black and silver, rising, swelling, growing. The turbulent sky made up a little for the flatness of the land. At least it would cool off, he thought; his clothes were plastered to his skin wherever they touched. The humidity was so high, sweat had no place to go except down his legs, down his face and arms.

The air got cooler when the storm came ashore, but the wind blew the clouds inland swiftly, and then he felt hotter and stickier than ever.

He walked on the beach at sunset and had to admit that it was pleasant then, but with too many people. The gaudy sunset was magnificent; a golden sheen spread across the smooth water; limeade wavelets whispered in the sand as they came ashore; gulls and sandpipers scurried out of the way, returned. And Frank was hoping things would work out for him to pay his visit to Fensterman the next day, return to the hotel, call the airline to change his reservation, and be home Sunday night.

The next afternoon at two he arrived at Fensterman's house. It was eight feet above ground level, with broad pillars supporting the building, a rambling affair that went off in several directions. Half a dozen cars were parked in the space below.

A black woman in a white dress admitted him to a spacious, airy foyer, arches on both sides to other rooms, white terrazzo floor, potted palm trees and orange trees.

“He said for me to bring you back straightaway to the Florida room,” the woman said. “This way, sir.” Her speech was nicely cadenced, slurred and slow; she said
suh
.

The room she led him to had windows on three sides, one facing the gulf, and opposite it the morning sun would come in. A low table before the eastern windows was filled with African violets, the biggest Frank had ever seen, bushlike, covered with blooms.

A scrawny brown man dressed in shorts and a tank top came to meet him. “Holloway? Ed Fensterman. Come on in and park it. Bring us something to drink,” he said to the woman, who left silently. “It'll be fruit juice,” Fensterman said. “All I drink, all I offer anyone. No alcohol, no caffeine, none of that goddamn herbal tea crap. Pure fruit juice.”

He motioned toward a group of chairs near the west windows. “Best view in the house. Overhang keeps the sun out until a hell of a lot later than this. Sit here and watch the boats come and go. Watch the goddamn storms blow in.”

He had to be in his eighties, as brown and crinkled as a gingersnap; he reminded Frank of a mandrake root he had seen once. With pipestem arms and legs, sinewy, withered looking, he looked like a man who should be returned to the earth from which he had been dug.

As soon as they were seated with a low table between them, Fensterman said, “Why do you want that book? How the hell did you ever hear of it?”

“A recently deceased client of mine had her house broken into before the family could dispose of her property. That book was the only thing taken. I'm curious about why.”

“Bullshit! There's more to it than that. You don't fly across the country to scratch an itch. Never mind. You ever live in New York City?”

“Never.”

“I haven't given a thought to that part of my life in a long time. You brought it back, talking about that book. We were dirt-poor, Harriet and me. Didn't have a dime in those days, but you could live in the city without money then. Walk everywhere, get cheap Chinese food when you found a spare dime, and it was a great thing then, to live in New York. Couldn't pay your rent, hell, you just stuck until they tossed you out on the street, and you moved somewhere else where you couldn't pay the rent. Harriet worked while I wrote novels. Funny thing, she hung in there all those years with fucking nothing, but as soon as we started getting ahead, she took off. Funny.”

The black woman returned with a tray; he ignored her as she poured juice into tall glasses, put down coasters and napkins on the table, added the glasses, then withdrew again without making a sound.

“I was a combination of Hemingway, Hammett, and Conan Doyle. The style of Hemingway, the toughness of Hammett, and the weird murders of Doyle. You know, the goddamn speckled band snake, the fucking dog with the phosphor on its muzzle, crazy stuff like that. You read Sherlock Holmes?”

“Yep. Loved him when I was a boy.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I thought up the murders. One of them, this woman drops dead, just keels over, a goner. Not a mark on her, no poison in her, healthy one minute, a stiff the next. A voodoo curse got her. Like that. I thought them up, wrote the goddamn books, and never made it out of paperback. Most advance I ever got was the last one, and I never wrote the book.” He laughed; it sounded like the bark of coyote. “We took the money, a thousand dollars, big money to us, and we came to Florida, and a slick son of a bitch sold me a piece of swamp. Still don't know how the bastard did it, but I saw the light. I'd never make it writing some of the best goddamn mysteries ever written—the world wasn't ready—but I sure as hell could and did make it in real estate. Land developer. I turned that piece of swamp into a shopping mall.” He laughed again. The sound made the hairs on Frank's arm rise. “Never even started that book.”

The fruit drink was delicious; Frank could not identify what all was in it, but it was exactly right. Fensterman was talking about another perfect murder; the old icicle trick. Frank did not yawn, or even sigh. He drank his juice and listened.

The next time Fensterman paused, Frank said, “What about the murder in the book I'm interested in,
Over My Dead Body
?”

That cackling laugh came again. “You'll have to read it and find out for yourself. It's ingenious. You'll see. My secretary will Xerox a copy. Monday. It'll be ready Monday. Can't get any fucking help on weekends. I used to work seven goddamn days a week, eighteen-hour days, every goddamn day. They think anything more than thirty hours a week is back to slavery. Cost you fifty bucks.”

“Fair enough,” Frank said. He drained his glass. “That was very good. Thanks.”

“Stay for supper,” Fensterman said. “I don't eat anything but seafood and fruit. I expect to live forever. Eat right, live forever.”

“Thanks again, but I'm afraid I can't. Another appointment. What time would be good on Monday?”

“Three, four. How the hell do I know? I'll light a fire under her. Say four. We'll have to call you a cab.” He let out a piercing yell, “Ruma, get in here!”

The black woman came in, as silent as ever; he told her to call a taxi, then he said to Frank, “Come on, I'll show you how I have to keep my books.”

He led Frank through the sprawling house. Not another person was in sight anywhere, and it was as still as a tomb. They entered a room he said was storage. Frank stared. Cages? He kept books and papers in wire cages? Bookcases were enclosed in screening material with metal frames. There were hundreds of books, folders, paper stacks….

“Can't put them in closed cabinets,” Fensterman said. “Goddamn mold eats them up. Can't put them on open shelves, the fucking roaches eat them. Spray every month, so what? They love the stuff. Spray every day, they just get bigger. They call them palmetto bugs down here, but they're roaches on steroids. They eat the glue on the spines first, then come back for the rest. Five, six inches long, you can hear the fuckers galloping around, hear them munching all night. So I had screened cases built. Does the trick, too. Should get it patented, make a fortune.” He laughed again.

Ruma came to say that the taxi had arrived, and Frank escaped.