Desert Winter (34 page)

Larry turned a page of his notes, telling Pea, “You seem more than a little eager to cast suspicion on Stewart's nurse.”

“Damn right. And I make no apologies. I've already told you outright—I always suspected Bonnie's motives in this house. Did you look into those newspaper letters I told you about?”

“We did. The information was useful, but hardly conclusive. In fact, we visited Miss Bahr again this morning.”

“And what did that murderous sow have to say for herself?”

Larry closed his notes. “Mr. Fertig, I find your words highly offensive.”

“Tough.” Pea gave the detective an unflinching stare. “That pig invites mockery. She deserves it.”

“It may interest you to know that she gave us a highly reasoned explanation for the letters she wrote to the paper. She became emotional and distraught, though, when the topic turned to you.”

Pea leaned toward Larry, bracing his arms on the back of the sofa. “Good.”

“Truth is, she sympathized with the dilemma you've felt here in the household all these years—having once been so close to Stewart, reduced to hired help. She had
no
sympathy, however, for some of the more recent duties you'd taken on.”

Pea paused. A touch of wariness colored his bravado as he asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Ever so slightly, Larry leaned forward in his chair. “I'm talking about pimping, Mr. Fertig.”

Pea glared. His mouth pinched. A vein pounded along the side of his neck.

Larry clarified, “Perhaps ‘pimping' isn't the precise term, but it's close. I don't mean to suggest that you solicited clients for a prostitute, but you did, it seems, solicit prostitutes for a client—your boss, Stewart Chaffee.”

“That …
bitch,
” Pea spat at us.

“Bonnie told us that you frequently arranged for young call boys to visit Stewart and perform sexual services here at the estate. I think you may have shocked her puritan sensibilities, Pea. These goings-on did
not
sit well with her. I'm sure she'd swear to this activity, perhaps sign a complaint. She could be very helpful in providing the chronology. Then my department would have no trouble tracing any financial records of your payments.”

“Look,” said Pea, starting to pace behind the sofa, “you've got the wrong spin on this. I don't know what Bonnie told you, but it sounds like crap. Stewart's special visitors—that's how he preferred to think of them—were
not
prostitutes, and they were
not
underage. They were male escorts, every one of them certified over eighteen. You can find them in any bar rag. Christ, they're even in the Yellow Pages. Point is, they were paid for their
time
here, nothing else.”

I suggested, “But if, while they were here, one thing led to another, that was a private matter between consenting adults.”

“Absolutely correct. That's how the escort business works. I didn't make the rules.”

“You merely took advantage of them,” said Larry.

Pea stopped pacing. “
No,
Detective.
Stewart
took advantage of them. I merely set up the appointments and wrote the checks when they had finished.”

Mustering an air of sympathy, I shook my head, telling Pea, “That must've been terribly painful for you.”

He paused, recalling everything. With a bitter laugh, he asked, “Painful? You don't know the half of it. It was bad enough that I lost Stewart's affections and became his servant. It was bad enough that I wasted—really, truly
wasted
—twenty years of the prime of my life. But when I started arranging for an old man's young tricks, that was
way
beyond the call of duty.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because he enjoyed it so. You see, down deep, I still loved the man. It even got to the point where I had no problem with the one-nighters—they were just cattle, an expendable commodity. But now and then, one of them would catch his fancy, and I'd hear all about their exploits, in numbing detail, at breakfast the next morning. It was enough to make me gag. So these were the guys he wanted back, and I had to set up the return visits. Now,
that
galled me.” The memory colored Pea's face with anger.

Larry reminded him, “Those visits made Bonnie angry as well. It sounds as if you both would have liked to put a stop to the call boys.”

He shouted, “Who
gives
a shit what Bonnie did or didn't like? She
worked
here, damn it!”

“So did you.”

That parallel slid past Pea. He ranted, “I can't believe it—I just really can't
believe
that Bonnie would divulge such a private matter. She's trash, obviously. Who but trash would use such sordid knowledge to besmirch the memory of her former employer? Stewart was so
good
to her. Then she turns around and pulls
this.
”

Larry said, “She took no pleasure in telling us this background. She must have thought it was relevant to the murder investigation.”

“Oh, yeah, I'll
bet
she did. The call boys were ‘relevant,' all right. She saw this naughty little wrinkle as a convenient means of casting both Stewart and me in a bad light—while diverting suspicion from herself. How's
that
for relevant? I've said it before, Detective: if you want Stewart's killer, look no further than Bonnie.”

Pea had wound himself into such a state, there was little point in protracting the discussion. His emotional reaction to Bonnie's revelation of the call boys made him look far guiltier than she did, though it was easily arguable, in light of the entire investigation, that either the houseman
or
the nurse had had a motive, the means, and the opportunity to kill. I was unable, then and there, to sort through all that we'd learned. Like Larry, I had come to believe that our best chance of clarifying the bigger, blurry picture would be that evening, when all of the interested parties—suspects and bereaved alike—would gather at the museum.

Not wanting to jeopardize either Pea's attendance that night or his cooperation in releasing the paintings that afternoon, Larry told him, simply, “I appreciate your time.” Then Larry put away his pen. He rose from his chair. I rose from the sofa.

But Pea wasn't finished. “Stewart's interest in hot young men wasn't limited to call boys, you know.” He grinned at us during a meaningful pause.

“I'm sure we've heard enough on that topic,” I told him primly while stepping toward the kitchen door, though in truth, I was itching for more details.

Pea supplied them. Sauntering toward Larry and me, he continued, “Yes, Stewart immensely enjoyed the sexual services of the barely legal. He had a habit of getting what—and whom—he wanted. He had recently set his sights on your brother's lover, Detective. What's his name—Kane? Stewart was interested from the moment they met last Sunday. And when the kid offered to bring the desk key back to him the next morning, Stewart was convinced that the attraction was mutual. I mean, I
knew
Stewart was dreaming—a kid like that doesn't drop his pants for an old cripple unless there's cash involved. But Stewart was convinced he had a tryst in the making, and he took great offense when I suggested that he might want to keep a few crisp hundreds in his saddlebag, just in case. ‘A kid like that,' I told him, ‘would expect nothing less than five.'”

Pea concluded, “That's why I made myself scarce on Monday morning. I smelled trouble, and I didn't want to be around for it.”

22

Larry drove me back to
campus, where I'd left my car that morning. Talking along the way, we both agreed that Pea's emotional outburst over the issue of call boys had not served him well. “Aside from the thin ice with the law,” said Larry, “sex for pay is fraught with dangers. Its practitioners can be disreputable, to say the least. There's no telling what sort of seedy connections Stewart forged as a result of this habit, opening up untold potential for his own demise. Pea should have informed us of this immediately.”

“But he was basically in denial,” I reasoned. “When the issue surfaced, he blew. Certainly, one of Stewart's tricks could have turned murderous. If not, Pea harbored resentments strong enough that he himself may have done it—exactly as proposed by Bonnie.”

We discussed the merits of this scenario, pro and con, agreeing that suspicious details were mounting against both Pea and Bonnie, but there was not yet sufficient evidence to accuse either of the crime.

A detail we were reluctant to discuss was Pea's final revelation that Stewart had not only voiced his carnal interest in Kane, but that the victim-to-be had felt convinced that the attraction was mutual. On the surface, it didn't make sense, easily dismissed as the delusion of a mind turned feeble. What's more, neither Larry nor I cared to entertain a theory that seemed to draw an additional link from Kane—and by implication, from Grant—to Chaffee's murder.

Still, I knew some background regarding Kane and Grant that Larry was unaware of. He knew that his brother and the much younger man were now living together, but I doubted that he knew they were planning a contractual marriage, a legal union promoted largely by Kane. Grant had already been shaken by the discovery of the forged clipping on Kane's computer, sufficiently shaken to question the kid's motive in rushing toward a partnership that would, at a purely material level, enrich Kane far more than Grant.

Kane had met the renowned Stewart Chaffee on Sunday, getting a good look at the wealthy old man's surroundings and witnessing his obvious flirtations. Was it conceivable that Kane had seen in the retired decorator a bigger fish than the one he'd already landed? Was Stewart's wishful contention—that Kane had volunteered to return the desk key as a means for the two of them to meet alone—not so feebleminded after all?

I shared none of these thoughts with Larry as we drove from Rancho Mirage toward the campus of Desert Arts College, but my silence must have clued him that I was pondering Pea's insinuations about Stewart and Kane.

Larry was pondering them as well. Glancing over at me, he said, “After Chaffee was killed and the medical examiner's team arrived on the scene, we made a complete inventory of the effects found on the victim's person. Most conspicuously, there was the nurse's note and the tasseled key, but there were other miscellaneous items found in that pony-skin bag. At the time, I saw no significance in any of those additional items, but now I'm not so sure.”

I could have guessed what he was about to say, but remained silent.

“Stewart Chaffee had five new hundred-dollar bills in his purse.”

Just as Pea had suggested.

The remaining distance to campus was short, and we traversed it in silence, unwilling to speculate on the meaning of Chaffee's willingness to buy, if necessary, Kane's affections. I couldn't help recalling that when Kane had forged the clipping for the mysterious man in black, he'd been paid a hundred dollars in cash for an evening's work. What, I wondered, would he be willing to do for five hundred—for a task that would take minutes, not hours? Granted, the cash had been found in Stewart's saddlebag, so perhaps the proposition had never been discussed. Or had there been more cash, with five hundred remaining after a deal had been struck?

When Larry dropped me off, he simply asked, “Seven o'clock?”

Before closing the car door, I confirmed, “The press reception begins at seven.” Gesturing across College Circle toward the museum, I added, “I'll see you there tonight.”

*   *   *

I coasted through my dramatic-literature seminar that afternoon, perplexed by this new wrinkle in an investigation that was edging perilously close to home. I tried to keep our discussion focused on the topic delineated by my syllabus—social alienation as a recurring theme of twentieth-century playwrights—but my half dozen students kept steering our discourse back to the murder. Even those not directly involved in the
Laura
production were now well aware that the victim's clock was a centerpiece of the stage setting. One young lady assured me, “
Everyone's
talking about it.”

I briefly considered a simple remedy, removing the clock from the stage. Something else
—anything
else—would have to take its place. But then I realized that the clock would become all the more conspicuous by its absence, providing an even greater distraction to audience and cast alike. No, I didn't need a new clock; I needed to solve the larger riddle, naming Stewart's killer and quashing the buzz.

At home, after class, I was fretful and distraught, not caring to eat. When I explained to Tanner what Larry and I hoped to accomplish that night, he offered, “At least let me fix you some soup.”

I thanked him with a kiss, managed to down a bowl without tasting it, then primped for that evening's main event, wondering if Larry's gambit to lure the killer to the press conference would pay off. If it didn't and Glenn Yeats announced to the world that the museum was sole heir to Chaffee's estate, which was not true, and if he later found out, as he surely would, that I had kept this information from him and allowed him to make a fool of himself … well, I didn't care to contemplate the fallout.

Dressing, I considered several outfits, wintry and sedate, but I ultimately decided, what the hell, wear red. I already knew that I would choose the same hue on Friday evening, just twenty-four hours away, when I would reign at the premiere of my play. Tonight's event, decidedly less festive—even grim—also needed, to my way of thinking, that extra bit of flash and dazzle. Not that I was out to impress anyone at the museum with my vibrant tastes. I simply needed any help I could get in energizing my mind and concentrating my creative energies on the decryption tasks at hand.