Hush Money (6 page)

“You're working for him, aren't you?” she said.

It came out halfway between a guess and a fact.

“For who?” I said.

“For who. For Twink.”

I didn't say anything.

“Don't lose your cool,” she said. “I won't fink on you. And I'll tell you something else I didn't tell the fuzz. He's not her old man.”

The surprise came jumping out of me like a horse when the bell rings. Not the fact of it, which I already knew, but that Robin Fletcher did too.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Just what I said. Twink's not her real father.”

“Where'd you hear that? Did Karen tell you that?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say she did.”

I tried another tack, but there was no prying it out of her right there and then, with the hamburger grease wafting on the air. Then she said softly:

“I could tell you some other things too, Brother, but it'd cost you.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Not money, dumbie,” she said, smiling, and for just a minute it wasn't as absurd as it sounds. But then she stood up, heisting the sloppy bulk that went with her, and those bare feet came out from under the table big as a bear's and no cleaner, and the idea drifted out of my head.

Maybe she saw it go.

“Never mind, Brother,” she said. “I'll see you around. If you want to find me, just ask people. Got to go now.”

Behind me the kaffeklatsch had long since broken up. The terrace was deserted.

“Hey wait a minute!” I called after her. “Robin!”

She was already through a gap in the hedges.

“You forgot this!”

I waved the Wolfe at her, but all she gave me in exchange was the peace sign, and she shouted something that sounded like: “Jesus saves!” and was gone around the corner of the building.

At that she mightn't have been bad for a change, if there hadn't been so much of her.

5

I gave it all to Twink but the part about him. My self-protective instinct at work, I guess. You could chalk it up to boss psychology. I told him I thought he was on to something with his Society of the Fairest Lord but I didn't know what yet. He wanted me to see the Diehls, and I said I didn't see why. He said it wasn't for me to ask why, and I said I had some leads to check out on the campus first, and we compromised on the Diehls for the next day. I guess you could call that employee psychology, because I felt like I had him panting and holding in the clinches.

But I couldn't find Andy Ford, Karen's non-poet scene. Everybody knew him and nobody knew where he was. I found instead a passel of normal kids, normal in that they were still in a state of shock from the TV cameras, and the best I could get out of them was a run of awfuls and heavies, with a sprinkling of mind-blowings. And I found the poet laureate of the campus, this William Gainsterne in the suede vest, who wasn't shocked by anything.

I'd run a check on him through my Vice Chancellor. He'd been in some half a dozen colleges, it turned out, teaching poetry to the coeds, and the Vice Chancellor said he'd been a real catch for the campus because of his literary reputation. The Vice Chancellor said they were trying to persuade him to stay on permanently. I guess he looked the part, enough, and he talked low, batting his lashes when he laughed at his own wit, and in such a reasonable tone about his sex life with Karen it was all you could do to keep from reaching for the horsewhip.

He had nothing to hide, he said. Of course they'd been together, in the winter. It had been one of those inevitable attractions. An occupational hazard of sorts, from his point of view, but wasn't that what poetry was all about when it came down to it: a sudden flaming of sexuality? Still, he supposed he felt in some measure responsible. Maybe he'd broken it off too suddenly, even callously? Not that he'd been her first of course, there was Andy Ford for instance—did I know Andy Ford?—and others too, she'd told him all about them, and in his opinion she'd done some of her best work after their little affair, but …?

Even so, he didn't believe in the suicide theory. Of course, he said, all poets toyed with the idea, but at least while their best work lay ahead, the creative urge usually won out. Eros over Thanatos, he said. And with Karen—not to belittle her of course, but between the two of us her talent was (had been) more potential than actual.

“Her talent for poetry?” I asked.

“That, yes. Also her talent for life, so to speak,” he said, the lashes keeping time with his grin.

Himself, he chose murder as the cause of death, though in that, he said, he was purely a victim of his own aesthetic. He had nothing to go on. He didn't suppose it would ever come out, those things never did, but now that it had happened of course, he didn't see how he could go on with the local group. In fact he was thinking of leaving, he said, which grieved him, because he thought he was only beginning to appreciate California.

All in all, he said, it was a terrible blow.

I saw him again the next morning, at the funeral. He still had the vest on, but a tweed jacket over it and a tie held his cowboy shirt together. He looked right through me as though I marred his vista.

As California funerals go it was a pretty modest affair. There was the usual caravan of limousines on the freeway with CHPs on motorcycles opening the lanes, and the cemetery was theoretically open to the public, and there were enough flowers around the grave to build a good-sized float, but the guards outside the Diehl Ranch sign looked as if they meant business and I didn't spot a camera the last five miles. The Diehls, you see, don't belong to the Forest Lawn set. They've got their own graveyard back in the hills on a winding two-lane road, and to judge from the headstones every Diehl who'd died in over a hundred years had been planted there, including Nancy Diehl Beydon. It was a pretty place to be dead if that kind of thing's important to you: a view of the jagged mountains in the east and those low humpy hills off to the west, and not a hint of Diehl, California, from where we stood. The sunsets must've been spectacular.

I guess, though, that a funeral's the worst place in the world to judge other people's grief. Oh there were tears all right, glistening under the veil, and some handkerchiefs came out, and the stony expressions of the men, and the preacher adding heavy words of his own to those of the Lord, but I couldn't help but think there was something stagy about it, put on, like in church. Maybe it needed some keeners, a little wailing and tearing of hair, a dirge. Or a bottle or, God knows, a rock band. Instead I saw people starting to peek when the preacher's prayer went on too long, like they too wanted to check out who else was looking and who else praying.

Hell, give me a tearjerker movie any day.

The University contingent was there, my Vice Chancellor among them and a batch of kids looking young and uncomfortable. From their newspaper pictures I recognized the Diehl brothers, two of them anyway, who'd agreed to talk to me later that day, and their women and children. I saw the George S. Curies, III and IV, and maybe the partners who fitted in between, and a whole host of faceless faces who probably served the Diehl-Beydon enterprises in one capacity or another. My friend Miss Plager wore black, with gloves and a broad-brimmed hat, and Gomez and Garcia were in black suits which fitted them like sandwich boards. I tried to figure out what was going on inside their impassive heads and came up with a blank.

And there was my employer of the moment, closest to the grave and towering over the assembly, looking more stern than bereaved, his hair white where the sun hit it and yellowing in the shade. God knows what he was thinking.

And yours truly, a little to the side and behind, watching without seeing because there was no color, no sound, no movement, and nothing inside but that heavy cloudy space between the ears where I was supposed to be solving a crime. If there'd been a crime. Opinions were divided. But when they lowered Karen Beydon into the ground, I realized that I knew her less than I had reading my morning newspaper the day after she hit the pavement. Whereas if there was a murderer in that crowd, he didn't raise his hand and say, “I did it.”

People began to stir. All of a sudden there was a crush toward Twink Beydon, as though everybody decided at once to get their condolence calls out of the way. If you'd only just dropped in and didn't notice the gravestones, you'd've thought he'd just won something, like an election. A lot of voices were mouthing a lot of platitudes in a lot of decibels, and I decided it was no time for me to salute and report in. Instead I turned toward the younger generation walking slowly away toward where the cars were parked, and a little apart from them, glancing my way, Sister Robin Fletcher.

She'd had a bath, at least one, and if it would have taken a scrub brush and lye soap to put her next to godliness, you could almost call her presentable. She had on one of those long figured Indian skirts, sandals underneath, and a cream-colored Mexican blouse fastened at the neck with a cameo pin. Her hair had been washed too, not that the color was any different but it glinted in the sun, and a bow at the neck held back the frizz. But there were things about her no soap and water could help. That pasty look for one. Her skin was pale, puffed, doughy—unnatural in a girl that age. Her eyes were puffy too, and bloodshot, though she hadn't seemed the type for tears, and she was staring at me with that dreamy see-through expression I'd noticed before.

“Hey!” I said to her. “Remember me? The man from
Time
? Now what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, I'd like to know?”

Not particularly funny, and it seemed to make no dent at all.

“You were going to read me some poems, remember?” I went on. “What's wrong with like right now?”

By way of reply she started to walk away from me. I touched her arm, but she jerked loose.

“Hey,” I said, “now that's a hell of a way to treat a friend in distress.”

“I didn't know you were either,” she answered dully.

“All right,” I said, “so I don't work for
True Confessions
or the
Ladies' Home Journal,
but you can't blame a guy for trying. We've all got to eat. Hell, what would you do in my place?”

She stopped again.

“You really want to know?” she said.

She turned to me, and now there was some glisten in her eyes which didn't come from makeup or the sun.

“Sure, why not? I'm always open to suggestions.”

“O.K., she said harshly. “Then get out, Brother. Hang it up, cash it in. It's none of your business, it's got nothing to do with you.”

“What's got nothing to do with me? Karen?”

“Karen, everything. The whole bit.”

“Well, maybe you're right,” I said, “but twenty-four hours ago you were acting like you had a whole hell of a lot more to tell, given the right circumstances. Who got to you in between? Gainsterne?”

It was a shot in the dark, and a pretty wild one to judge.

She burst out laughing.

“You're not much of a Dick Tracy, are you, Brother.”

“Well,” I said, “they signed me up for the part, but somewhere along the way the picture got shelved.”

Which drew another laugh. At least her face worked better that way.

I touched her again, and this time she didn't jump.

“Look,” I said, “couldn't we go somewhere and talk things over? Read some poems, for instance?”

She shook her head.

“I've already told you more than I'm …”

She hesitated.

“… more than I should have,” she finished.

“You mean, more than you're supposed to?”

Another shot in the dark.

“I mean what I said,” she answered. “And about you too, Mr. Cage. Haven't enough people gotten hurt without another one getting his?”

Which was another of her opaque remarks I couldn't get her to explain.

“Who else has gotten hurt besides Karen?” I tried.

No response.

“What was it you weren't supposed to tell me? Was it what you said about Twink? Well if it was, you can forget about it, I already knew that.”

Nothing again.

By this time most of the cars had already gone off to wherever it is people go after funerals. It felt pretty awkward, our just standing there, with no one for company but dead Diehls.

“All right,” I said. “I guess you've got your reasons and that's good enough for me. If you change your mind though, here's where you get hold of me.” I gave her a card and wrote the phone number on it. “Chances are you'll get an answering service, but the biddy there'll know where I am. Meanwhile, maybe you could save me a little trouble if you'd tell me where I can locate Andy Ford.”

Only this time it struck closer to home, either that or graveyards made her cheeks shiver.

“Who, Andy?” she said in that other innocent tone.

“That's right, Andy Ford, Karie's longlost non-poet lover, you were telling me about him yesterday, remember? I wasted one whole afternoon trying to track him down and it's too nice a day to do it again.”

“Where'd you look?” she said.

I gave her the rundown, which included his pad and just about the whole damn campus.

She laughed again.

“You just didn't look under the right rock,” she said.

“Where's that?”

And she told me.

Anyone who's been around the California surfing scene will know where I mean. It's the best beach left for the board-and-wet-suit set that isn't government or private property, unless you're masochist enough to go for the Wedge at Newport. Not the most famous because it's small and in a hard-to-get-to cove and technically you're trespassing whenever you touch the sand, but when you can make bigger waves in your bathtub than what you'll find anywhere between Oxnard and San Diego, there the rollers will still be coming in, a long way in, as big as you want and smooth like blue silk.