Death by Surprise (Carolyn Hart Classics) (5 page)

But today the Saturday morning charm was absent. Greg’s call and the continuing prick of worry over Francine Boutelle obtruded into my workaday schedule.

Greg. He was not an altogether comfortable person. Intense, energetic, quick-tempered, he was consumed with ambition. I sometimes had the feeling that his interest in me was the first time he had ever taken his eyes from his main goal: the aggrandizement of Gregory Garrison.

But was it an aberration?

That is one of the difficulties in being rich. And the primary reason, though not the only one, why the rich marry the rich. A man can’t be after your money if he has potsful himself.

Greg. I could see him so clearly, his thick black hair and vividly blue eyes. He had the kind of looks political candidates need these days, a handsome face, a trim athletic build. This wasn’t what attracted me. His appeal was a sense of leashed power, of intense energy, and vitality. He radiated excitement, like a superb horse waiting for the starting gun.

He was, in essence, a very attractive animal.

Our minds are interesting creatures with their incredible ability to sort and store infinite amounts of information, to catalogue experience and retrieve it.

That was what my mother said, some years earlier, about Toby.

“Quite an attractive animal, isn’t he?” she asked sarcastically.

Toby, with his marvelous capacity for avoiding the unpleasant, had just left our tiny apartment. I stood stiffly in the center of the little living room, but I think I can fairly say that I wasn’t defensive or even angry. I went straight to the point.

“Why are you here, Grace?”

“Margaret Fitzgerald called me yesterday. She said she couldn’t believe it, she really couldn’t—”

I almost smiled.

“—but the daughter of a friend of hers had told her mother that you were . . . sharing an apartment with a man!”

And I was. I was a first-year law student as was Toby. We had met that summer at Lake Tahoe and it seemed a fun idea. I hadn’t, of course, broadcast it. Whose damned business was it, anyway?

“As I wrote you and Dad, I am sharing an apartment with another law student.”

“That wasn’t quite honest, was it?”

“It was quite honest. His name is Toby Weston. He’s from Spokane, Wash.”

“For heaven’s sake, K.C., if you want . . . why don’t you marry him?”

“I have absolutely no interest in marrying Toby.”

At her look of total dismay, I took a little pity.

“Look, Grace,” I said gently,
“Autre temps, autre moeurs.
Life is different.” I looked around the boxy room with its array of ferns and plants (Toby liked growing things) and the worn Persian rug and stacks of books. “This is just a temporary thing. We’ll go to school and we’ll be friends and have a lot of fun and one day it will all be over.”

I had seen how it would go. And it had. Toby, ebullient, entertaining and macho, split the pots and pans with me, upon graduation, and loaded up the rental hitch for the drive back to Spokane.

“Look me up, K.C., if you ever come up my way.”

“I will, Toby. Take care of yourself.”

“Right. You, too.”

But this camaraderie, and, admit it, friendly sex, was absolutely foreign to Grace.

She had stood in that dingy little apartment that day and summed me up as a trollop.

“But if you aren’t even in love with him . . .” she began heatedly.

“Grace, let’s drop it,” and my voice began to have an edge.

She had stared at me for a long moment. It must have been hard for her. She couldn’t threaten to disinherit me. The chips jumped generations according to old K.C. III’s will. I had the income from the trust upon reaching the age of 21 and I could, if I wished, live with a dozen guys and no one could cut off my cash.

Grace drew her breath in sharply. “I don’t know what your father will think.”

I knew. I had told Dad, in a gentle way, before I had left for school. He had tamped his pipe and looked out the window of his chambers and said quietly, “Sometimes, K.C., a casual involvement can be quite . . . affecting.”

I had patted his arm. “It will be all right.”

He had nodded. “Just be careful of yourself, K.C.”

I wasn’t going to tell Grace about that talk. That would be a gratuitous insult. Instead, I just shrugged.

Her face flushed. “Perhaps we can buy you a stud farm,” and she whirled on her spike heels and flung open the door.

I had never forgotten that moment. Angry? Some. But, mostly, that taunt hung in the back of my mind until an odd moment like this when the memory popped up so clearly and vividly I could once again smell the moist greenery of that tiny room and hear the sharp click of Grace’s heels.

A stud farm. It must have hurt more than I had ever admitted.

I took another sip of coffee and made a face. It was cold. Irritably, I flung back the covers. My lovely Saturday morning wasn’t fun anymore. I didn’t even try to follow my usual routine. Instead, I dressed quickly, grabbed up my briefcase, and slammed out of the apartment.

I parked in my usual lot, a weed-pocked asphalt patch behind a bail-bond company. I paid a princely $15 a month for my slot. John Solomon’s office was only a block from mine. His office didn’t even have a storefront. It was tucked behind the Acme Cleaning Plant. A rickety outside stairway led up to a garage apartment that John had converted into offices.

I rang the bell and heard the sharp buzz. Nothing happened. I rattled the screen door, tried the knob. The door was locked. On a weekday, you could go right in and Mitzi, fat and fiftyish, would wave you to a seat in a ratty rattan chair while she yelled over her shoulder, “Hey, Solly, you got a lady.”

I jabbed the bell again.

“Coming. Coming.” The door swung slowly in and John looked sleepily out. For the first time, it occurred to me that the apartment might be both office and home.

“I’m sorry if I woke you, John.”

He shook his big head slowly. “No matter.” He cleared his throat. “It
is
Saturday.”

“I need help.”

He sighed, opened the door wider for me then led the way into his office. He squeezed behind his desk and flicked on a gooseneck lamp.

“What’s happened, a murder?”

“Nothing that easy.”

His watery brown eyes looked at me curiously. I took a deep breath and told him about Francine Boutelle’s approach, her accusations about my Dad and her claims that she had something on all of us, including Grace.

“So,” I concluded, “I want everything you can scrape out from under a rock about Francine Boutelle, everything, where she came from, where she’s worked, her boyfriends, what she likes to drink, every damn thing you can come up with.”

“It will cost a lot of money,” he warned.

“Money I’ve got.”

He nodded. “Okay, K.C. I’ll put Pamela on it.”

Pamela Reeves is John’s high-class operative. She has a B.A. in elementary education which, she discovered, pays on a level with clerking at the five and dime. She discovered, too, that she has a talent for getting people talking and finds everybody fascinating. She is superb at joining an office staff and finding out who’s filching the company blind.

“I need as much as you can get to me by Monday noon.”

“Jesus,” he sighed.

“I’m a good customer.”

John sighed again. “I was going to go to the lake with my daughter.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“She doesn’t know she has a father, I work so hard.”

I grinned. “Sad.”

Slowly, he smiled, too. “I would only do this for a beautiful blonde with velvety brown eyes.”

“And money,” I added drily.

“Well, that too.”

We left it that I would pick up whatever he had managed to discover at noon on Monday. As I left, he was dialing the phone. John might look sleepy but I would get a bulging folder full of facts.

My office was packed with waiting clients. I didn’t give the Carlisles another thought until the phone rang at three. I excused myself from the worried couple whose tax return had been plucked for an audit and answered it.

“K.C.?”

“Yes,” and I just managed not to sound impatient. After all, Priscilla couldn’t know how busy I was.

“I have to talk to you.”

Priscilla’s voice is as soft and breathy as the sex symbol in a Swedish film. I find it exceedingly irritating.

“I’m busy,” I said sharply. “I have clients in my office.”

She ignored that. After all, what did my clients matter to her? “Can you come over now?” she demanded.

“No.”

“K.C., this is important!”

I glanced at my watch. Three-fifteen. I had one more client in the waiting room. “I’ll drop by around five.”

It was a quarter to five when I found a parking slot a few doors down from Priscilla’s condominium in Gloucester Square. The row of narrow-fronted, Jamestown-style attached houses were beautifully designed, expensively executed, and ludicrously out of place in La Luz.

Priscilla opened the door herself. She led the way to a sunken living room with a fluffy white shag carpet and chocolate-colored wingback chairs on either side of a Delft tile fireplace.

I sank gratefully into one of the huge chairs. Priscilla walked on to the bar. “What will you have?”

“Does the house run to Margaritas?”

“Sure.”

It was excellent, the glass chilled and the rim salted. I took a slow satisfying taste. I do love Margaritas. I felt the tension of the day drain away—until I looked at Priscilla in the chair opposite.

Priscilla and I are both blondes, but that, I hope, is where the resemblance ends. Her eyes are the empty china blue of a 1910 doll and her complexion the peaches and cream of a 1925 Gibson girl. Usually. Today, she stared at me, her face greyish, her eyes strained. She huddled in her chair, clutching a tumbler with three inches of neat Scotch.

“For Pete’s sake, Prissy, what’s wrong?”

She took a hefty swallow of her drink. “Nothing’s really wrong,” she said unconvincingly, “I just wanted to talk to you.”

Priscilla paints china plates. I play racquetball. Her idea of fun is Las Vegas. Dick and Jane and Spot were likely the leading characters in the last book she ever read. She and I have more in common than I and an
ayatollah
—but not a lot.

I just looked at her.

She fidgeted, took another big swallow—there was nothing weak about Priscilla’s liquor consumption, apparently—and blurted out, “How are you going to vote on the trust?”

I continued to look at her. If she had asked for the latest quote on the stock market, I could not have been more surprised.

She mistook my shock for obstruction.

“K.C.,” and her husky voice was almost inaudible, “please, you can’t do it to me, you can’t. You always said, a long time ago, if I ever needed anything, you would help. Please, you have to vote for it.”

“Wait a minute, Prissy,” I said soothingly. “Slow down. I haven’t said I wasn’t going to vote for it. But let me be sure I understand. You want me to vote to dissolve the trust?”

She beamed. “Yes, oh yes, K.C.”

“Why?”

The happy smile at my understanding dissolved like a cube of sugar in boiling coffee.

“Why?” she parried.

“Why do you want the trust dissolved?”

“For the money.”

“Yes, Priscilla,” I said patiently, “I understand that. There will be a lot of money if the trust is dissolved. Why do you need that kind of money?”

“Well, it . . . I mean, after all, K.C., think what we can do with that kind of money. Furs and jewels and . . . I think I’ll go to Paris, that’s what I think I will do.”

Paris is a damn long way from Las Vegas, but there would always be Monaco.

I stared speculatively at Prissy, at her glistening white blond hair and soft body and strained face.

“I might vote to dissolve,” I said slowly, spacing it out, “if . . .”

“If what?”

“If you’ll tell me the truth. About why you want the money.”

She finished her drink and avoided my eyes. “Oh, it’s just that I’d like to be free, and the money, that much money, well, everything would be all right. If I can just get the money.”

I didn’t say a word. I waited until, reluctantly, warily, she looked in my eyes.

“How much does Francine want, Prissy?” I asked quietly.

Her hands flew to her throat, an interesting example of primeval instinct. She stared at me, her eyes wide and frightened. She tried to speak and couldn’t.

“Fifty thousand?” I asked.

She huddled deeper in her chair, a bird waiting for the cat to pounce.

“Come on, Prissy,” I said tiredly. “Tell me.”

She shook her head, back and forth, back and forth.

“It can’t be that awful,” I encouraged gently. After all, Priscilla had just turned 25 and she had not, despite her fondness for Las Vegas, been exposed to much vice. Whatever secret she hid must be magnified in her own mind. In the 1980s, it would take a truly horrendous deed to excite much public interest. Prissy was just a kid, a voluptuous and stupid kid.

“Don’t be frightened, Priscilla.” I spoke as if to a small child. “The Boutelle woman is out after all of us. She tried to get fifty thousand from me, saying she could prove Dad took a bribe on the Levy case and you know that’s ridiculous.”

I could tell from Priscilla’s lack of response that she had no idea what the Levy case was and, further, could not care less. It was that quality in Priscilla which made sustained sympathy a little difficult. Still, she looked so much like a terrified and cornered animal that I continued.

“Look, Priscilla, I’ll help you. But you are going to have to tell me what’s wrong.”

She licked her lips. “The trust. If you will vote to dissolve the trust . . .”

I interrupted sharply. “Not until you tell me what you are afraid of.”

She pushed up from her chair and crossed to the bar. She poured her glass full of Scotch and took another drink.

Even for a drinker, she was having a bit too much. I had never thought of Priscilla as a drinker. But really, I had seen little of Priscilla these last years. What did I know about her? For all I knew, she might souse her way through every day.