Sympathy for the Devil (20 page)

“
I
've got to talk to you.”

I was speaking to Lily's back as she sat motionless on the cushioned window seat, pressing her cheek against the cold glass. The large family room was wallpapered in an intricate green ivy pattern and filled with leather sofas and dark wood. It took Lily a while to speak.

“Can it wait, do you think?” she asked, without moving.

I turned to leave, but just then, Lily looked up at me, her head in profile against the black window. The dim light from a shaded lamp picked up the wetness of her face.

“Madeline, I know something.”

“What do you know?” I asked gently.

“About the poison. About the strychnine.” Her long blonde hair was in a thick and intricate braid down her back. She turned again to the window, talking more to the blank darkness outside than to me.

“I know where the poison must have come from.”

It was hard to hear her, what with the clatter of the rain hitting the windows and Lily's naturally soft voice. I moved in closer and sat down next to her on the deep window seat. Her legs were drawn up under her long wool skirt, her cheek was still flush against the window. I sat the opposite way, my feet on the floor, but with my ear now close enough to pick up every word.

“Where did the strychnine come from?”

“Bruno bought it himself,” she said. I was close enough
to watch each tear as it clung to her light lashes. “We have this miserable problem with mice and rats. We have four acres of landscaped property and another forty acres that are pretty much wild. So the rats can be horrid. We kept finding them in the house and I told Bruno I couldn't have that.”

I didn't interrupt, hoping she'd continue talking.

“Bruno was planning to soak loaves of bread in a solution of strychnine and spread them over the property when we were away next week. The gardeners would have had plenty of time to sweep up the bodies.”

A nasty image, but I said nothing.

“When he'd been a boy, they'd had rats at their vacation cottage in Colorado and his dad had done the same thing.”

She had come to a halt, not wanting to go further. I nudged her along.

“So did Bruno buy the poison?”

“Well, yes. But of course he never got to use it. He kept it locked up,” she said, virtuously.

“Locked up where?”

“In the liquor cabinet.”

Oh boy. Whoever had access to the brandy also had access to the strychnine.

“Lily, the police came to the house and got the decanter of Armagnac on Sunday. They should have found the strychnine then. Why didn't they?”

“I moved it,” Lily mumbled. “When the police said they were going to search the liquor cabinet, suddenly everything looked so bad. Why hadn't I told the detective about the poison right after the party? I was sure they'd arrest me!”

Fresh tears made twin streaks down her face.

“Besides, I wasn't sure who…” She stopped.

“Who else knew Bruno had strychnine locked up in the liquor cabinet?”

She still wouldn't look at me. Her voice was now only a whisper. “I thought to myself, how would Bruno handle
this? And then I decided to move the strychnine someplace where no one would find it.”

“Where'd you put it?”

“In our bedroom safe. But when the police found a half-pound of strychnine in your friend's house, it seemed like too much of a coincidence. And when I checked my safe this morning, the bag was gone.”

Why will no one ever listen to me? Didn't I tell them Wesley was framed! And now, finally, some proof.

In as calm a voice as I could muster, I asked, “Who has the combination to your private safe, Lily?”

“Just me.” She thought. “And the family.” She paused. “Oh, and a few people at Bruno's company, and the housekeeper.” She stopped. “And some former employees.”

Goodbye simple proof.

“Anyone else?”

“Actually, I don't think we had the combination changed when we married. Maybe his ex-wives?”

I stared at her.

“See we don't keep anything of real value in it.”

I rethought the situation and got hopeful again. No matter how many zillions of people had that combination, I was almost certain that Wesley was not one of them.

I reached out and touched her shoulder. Finally, she looked at me. “Lily, you've got to talk to the police. Just tell them the truth. It'll be okay, and it could help Wes.”

She nodded and then she actually smiled at me. “I'm glad I told you. You know, you're just like Bruno. I was feeling horrible and you told me what to do.”

Just like Bruno. Well. I'm sure she meant it as a compliment.

Donnie arrived with a tray, a teapot, and two cups.

“I'd like to check something out in the garden,” I said.

“Not tonight! Surely it can wait for the storm to pass.”

“It's ugly,” Donnie agreed. “When I was in the kitchen, I heard trees coming down, the wind is so strong.”

“I better not put this off.”

As I headed for the upstairs bedroom where I'd ditched
my jacket, I saw Lily begin to pour the tea. Donnie was turning the key that started the gas jets in the fireplace.

Back downstairs, the house seemed quiet now, large and warm and snug against the howling of the wind outside. Moving through the halls, I caught a glimpse of Graydon, still here, still moping, in front of a T.V. set in a small office just off the kitchen.

Outside, the rain lashed down at a forty-five-degree angle, with gusts often whipping it sideways. I abandoned my attempts to hold the hood up over my hair and just moved as quickly as I could. I passed the same familiar cars parked in the drive: Graydon's BMW, Bru's Jaguar, and Hirsh's scratched Bentley, although any trace of the soothsayer was long gone.

Fumbling under my clothing, I retrieved the envelope that still contained sixty five-hundred-dollar bills. It was warm from being held snug in the waistband of my tan tights. With a pencil from my parka pocket, I wrote “Sorry about the scratches. Hope this covers the repair of your car. M. Bean.” The door was unlocked. I left the package for Perry on the driver's seat. Ah, well. Never trust a soothsayer when she predicts you're about to come into a lot of money.

I trudged around the huge house, and soon found the large marble bust of an elderly man near the bench where Carmen and Bruno had met, she to plead for family unity and he to sip his Armagnac. So what had happened to that glass?

The path was paved with large, rough-cut stone blocks, perhaps three feet square. They would have provided a suitable surface for a nice smash, but surely the police would have noticed any shattered glass on the night of the party.

Once I stopped fighting the idea of being cold and wet, I began to feel giddy, like a child playing in puddles. My parka was holding up well, but my legs were getting soaked through their tights and the bottom hem of my cashmere tunic was soggy. Wes gave me the dress last Christmas to celebrate our first profitable year. Now the dress, as well
as the business, was probably ruined. Ah, well.

Water was rolling off my head, springing my curly hair into long wet ringlets, pouring down my face like a vigorous cold shower. Giant puddles had formed where there were depressions in the uneven rock path, and I got down on my knees and put my hands into the muddy water just to make a thorough search. Twigs, rocks, nothing else.

My ears were becoming accustomed to the language of the storm; the ever-present rush of water, the drumming of rain on the bench, and the harsh clanking of metal against metal as the wind beat the nearby tennis court fencing.

What was that? I stopped splashing in the muck, startled by an unexpected sound that couldn't be explained by rain, rushing water, or wind. It sounded like gravel, like when it's kicked on a path when someone is approaching. In the dark of the storm, I twisted to see who was coming up behind me. I stared into the gloom. No one was there.

Then, again, another shuffle! Again I reeled around fast, staring into the dark. And, again, no one.

My senses were hyperalert, straining to see or hear or feel a stranger upon me. And then, once again, I heard the sound of movement. But this time, I was surprised to realize it was coming from the ivy! I stared hard at the hillside. Millions of black-green five-point leaves were dancing and jittering in the deluge of mud and rain.

In an instant, I became sickeningly certain of what had made those footsteps. Rats. Hundreds of yet-to-be-poisoned, agitated rats. Rats scurrying, excited and frightened by the storm. Rats burrowing under their blanket of wet ivy, not four feet away from where I, deeply disturbed, stood.

I
t was after some time had passed, with me staring numbly at the infested hillside, that I got the terrible idea. The idea was this: Bruno threw his brandy snifter up against the hill. The idea wouldn't go away. I hated the idea. The more I hated it, the more I believed it was true.

I stared at the ivy some more. Perhaps I could go find a rake and just poke around. Sure. And break the evidence. Who was going to get fingerprints off a shard?

I stared at the ivy some more, and just to make sure I was fully aware of all the horrible possibilities lurking just beneath the leaves, I could swear I saw a long wet tail disappear back into the greenery.

“Hell.”

That being said, I walked back to where I presumed Carmen had stood with Bruno when she first brought him his drink. I sat on the soggy wooden bench where they had their chat. I stood up. I picked up a tiny stone from the path, tossed it gently at the hillside just a few feet away, and watched where it landed. I walked up to the very place and stuck my arm, elbow-deep, into the leaves and vines and, for all I knew, a hidden rat's nest.

I screamed quite a bit, too. My apprehension was almost unbearable. Would I touch a glass or a rat? Although clearly an octave higher than the prevailing winds, my screams were swallowed in its deep howl as I, now com
mitted to this dreadful task, forced myself to feel around in the roots and vines and mud of the hill.

When I was eight, I had a friend named Imogene who lived next door to a vacant lot. We used to play in that lot, unconcerned by the tiny field mice and lizards that lived and played there as well. One day we found a baby blue jay, abandoned we thought, since it was far from any tree that might hold its nest. We scooped up the baby bird, aware that its mother would now surely reject it because of our very touch. We warmed it in a blanket made from a red cotton kerchief and built it a little pen out of chicken wire where we vowed to bring it worms and bugs on which to grow. It was the budding of our nascent maternal core.

When we returned the next morning, bugs in jar, we discovered a sickening little scene. The pen had been overturned. The baby blue jay had been attacked in the night. Its sweet head was missing and its tiny feathered body lay there half-eaten. I remember the two of us girls crying in shock and grief, losing our first child to some horrible, heartless marauder.

Rats, my father said.

I moved my hand around a few feet to the left, then a few feet to the right, then higher, then lower, my fingers cold and hurting as they scraped the tough roots and stones under the ivy. By the time my hand actually brushed against something rounded and hard, I was so traumatized with disgust and horror, that I almost passed it by. Then, fast, my fingers grabbed hold and pulled out my prize.

It was a startlingly simple moment. I had Bruno's brandy snifter. These things shouldn't work out like this. But sometimes they just do.

And then, I looked up on the hillside. Dear Lord, something was moving up there. Upset and angry, a line of rats was attempting to escape across a sprinkler pipe from the monster who was rustling and plunging into their homes.

I backed away from the hillside. Freaked but triumphant, I remembered to hold the glass at the edges, and to shield it beneath my jacket. I was actually laughing from the re
lease of tension. And then a curious thing occurred. My ears, which had moments earlier been so sharp as to detect the rooting around of rats in the ivy, had failed to warn me that someone had walked up on the path from the house.

Nosing around other people's secrets, I can't honestly say why I hadn't been more concerned about my safety. I figured that a poisoner had to be about the least confrontational type of murderer going. In theory, as long as I didn't drink anything foolish, I'd be okay. That, of course, was in theory.

Graydon pulled his collar close. He looked at me with indecision.

“Lily told me you were looking around out here,” he said, in a normal tone of voice. “Can you give me that?” he asked, gesturing to the small bundle under my jacket.

“I'd rather not.”

He seemed to be thinking that over.

“Are you going to shoot me, Graydon?”

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 said. “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.”