Fugitive Nights (2 page)

“I'm not trying to catch him in a tryst. I don't care
what
he does.”

“Any lawyer would tell you that in a divorce situation in California you don't have to—”

“I don't
want
a divorce. I just have to understand why.”

“Why he's fooling around?”

“No … yes, that's part of it, but only a small part.”

“What's the big part?”

“I think he's preparing to have a child. And I can't understand why.”

“You said you don't care if he—”

“I don't care if he has one mistress or ten! But he's having a
child.
I have to understand that.”

“Okay, how do you know?”

“I found something quite by accident. Our business manager writes the important checks and handles our portfolio, but we have separate personal checking accounts. It caught my eye, the monthly statement in the pocket of his blazer. It fell out when I hung the jacket in the armoire. I just got a glimpse before he came into the room, but when I returned to the armoire later it was gone. It was a monthly billing from a place called the Beverly Hills Fertility Institute.”

“Did you call them?”

“I had my doctor make a few calls. The sperm banks in Los Angeles are administered by a medical director who insists on absolute confidentiality. All they'd say is that the name Clive Devon is unknown to them.”

“How old is your husband?”

“Sixty-three.”

“And how old're you, if I may ask?”

“Forty-four. I've never had children, and as of last December I won't be having any. I went through the change rather early just like my mother and both my sisters. Clive's obviously planning to have a child by a surrogate! Perhaps he's planning to leave me!”

“Do you care?”

“Yes, very much.”

“Maybe he's one of these movers and shakers that can't depart this earth without leaving his genetic code behind. Maybe he's donated his sperm to some study or experiment.”

“He's a terribly shy man, an introvert really, with low self-esteem and very few friends. He's never
done
any moving and shaking. He's always lived on trusts. I can't imagine him having a need to leave part of himself behind. Clive being part of an experiment? That's preposterous.”

“Did he make you sign a prenuptial?”

“No.”

“Then you stand to inherit when he dies?”

“Oh, yes. We've been married for thirteen years. He can't legally leave all his money to a new wife and child.”

“Well, did you ever want children?”

“No, nor did he. Neither of us had happy childhoods so we thought we'd keep our neuroses to ourselves and not pass them on.”

“Mrs. Devon, why don't you just
ask
him why he made this little bank deposit that's driving you nutty?”

“Oh, I'd never pry. Nor would he if the roles were reversed. We're each very independent. We live apart a good deal of the time. I prefer our main house in Beverly Hills and only come here two weekends a month. He stays here all the time, even in summer. I seldom can get him to spend forty-eight hours at our other home.”

“Do you and your husband still …”

“He had a cardiac bypass. Arterial insufficiency allows him to ejaculate, but he can't get an erection. We haven't had sex for about five years.” Then she added, “At least together.”

“Have you discussed this with anyone else? I mean, why he maybe wants a kid?”

“We have the same attorney in Los Angeles, a good friend. He hasn't a clue.”

“Of course
he
wouldn't dream of just asking Mister Devon, either?”

“I would never permit it. We do have our private separate lives and we …”

“Respect one another.”

“Completely.”

“Where's your husband today?”

“I have no idea. When I come here we're only together long enough to have dinner or a game of golf. He likes to spend most of his time hiking in the desert. Or so he says.”

The P.I. put the cocktail glass on an onyx coffee table that was bigger than a squash court—the only piece with the right scale—and said, “So you want me to conduct a surveillance and find out who, what, where, when and why?”

“Just who and why. I particularly have to know why. If once, in all these years, he'd ever expressed the slightest wish for a child we could have … at least talked it over.”

“Surveillance is very expensive. It can go on for days and weeks with no satisfaction whatsoever. And by the way, I don't do illegal phone taps.”

“All right, just find out who the surrogate is to start with. Who may lead to why.”

“Sixty dollars an hour charged against a one-thousand-dollar retainer is what I get for surveillance work,” the P.I. lied, half hoping Rhonda Devon would change her mind. This could turn into
real
garbage work. “And when he goes to bed I go to bed. I don't sit outside a client's house running up the meter. If he gets up in the middle of the night for a run to his hired bake-oven I'll never know about it.”

“You're very flippant,” Rhonda Devon said.

“I don't think I really want the job.” The P.I. hesitated for a moment, then said, “I have to ask you, Mrs. Devon, after the cardiac surgery did he
try
with you? Are you sure he has vascular insufficiency?”

“There were a few pathetic attempts. No, I do not believe he's capable of erection.”

She looked thinner than ever in the lemony light and shadow. The P.I. was unaccountably sorry for her, and felt odd pitying someone this rich.

“Mrs. Devon”—the P.I. touched an urn on the coffee table—“are you afraid he's found someone he cares about? Someone he wants to raise a child with? No matter
how
the conception gets accomplished?”

“That's an Etruscan vase,” Rhonda Devon said, as though she hadn't heard the question. “Please be careful. I've prepared a file for you with everything you'll need to know about Clive, including a photo. The file's on the table by the door.”

Rhonda Devon arose languidly, but staggered a step from too much predinner booze, and swayed across the marble foyer, leading the way to the door.

Before leaving, the P.I. looked at the client, and said, “What'll you do with the information if I'm able to get it? I mean, the name of the surrogate and the reason for your husband doing this? What would you do with the information?”

“You don't have to worry about that,” Rhonda Devon said.

“Oh, but I do. In fact, I'm not taking this case if you refuse to tell me.”

Rhonda Devon studied the private investigator for a moment, showed perfect orthodontal teeth, and said, “Absolutely nothing. But I have to know.” Then she added, “I'd be happy to pay a bonus for results. Say, five thousand dollars? I won't pretend that my husband and I have a close relationship or even a normal one. But I have to know. Surely, as a woman,
you
can understand?”

O
n the fourth ring, he picked up the phone, or tried to. He made a swipe at it, but the phone fell off the nightstand. Somebody had squeezed him like a grapefruit. He was all acid and pulp, juiceless. Dry as tumbleweed.

On the seventh ring he found it, a phone in the shape of a boxing glove. The guy whose mansion he was sitting probably had had one intramural match at prep school when he was ten years old, and had gone goofy over prize fighters. The study was full of Leroy Neiman's nervous sports prints, as well as
lots
of boxing photos. Undoubtedly, he was the kind of guy who wouldn't travel without his Water Pik.

“Hello,” he croaked into the boxing glove. He heard a muffled reply and turned the phone right side up. “Yeah?”

A woman's voice said, “Detective Cutter?”

“Yeah, who's this?” He felt like somebody had inflated his skull with mustard gas.

“Is it a bad time to call?”

“No, it's a bad
day
to call. What day
is
this?”

“It's Monday, February fourth.”

“What
year
?”

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No, I had to get up and puke anyway. Who the hell
is
this?”

“My name's Breda Burrows,” she said. “I'm a P.I. here in Palm Springs, retired from LAPD.”

“Yeah, so whadda … oh, shit!”

Lynn Cutter slouched from bed in his gray silk pajama bottoms (property of the guy who was nutted out over boxers) and scuttled toward the bathroom like somebody trying to run underwater. Because the bathroom was bigger than the Palm Springs police station he didn't quite get to the toilet, but did manage to upchuck in a Jacuzzi tub with gold-plated faucets.

Lynn went down on the cool tile for a minute, examining a crumbled line of grout from a roach's-eye view. He raised up, wiped his mouth on a monogrammed towel, and picked up the extension: a
Sports Illustrated
phone shaped like a sneaker.

Speaking from the supine position, he said, “I'm dying.”

“I can call back in thirty minutes.”

“They'll be pulling a sheet over me,” he moaned. “Look, lady, it ain't easy talking into a tennis shoe. Whaddaya want?”

“Well, Detective Cutter,” she began, then thought it sounded stiff and formal. So she said, “Whadda your friends call you?”

“I don't have any.” He was feeling more bile bubbling and rising. “But mother calls me Lynn. Kiss her for me. I'm all through.”

“Lynn?”

“Yeah, Lynn! I know! Marion Morrison didn't like a girl's name and changed it to John Wayne! I know! Lynn's not a common name but life wasn't easy for a boy named Sue, was it? Now, lady, will you tell me what the hell you want this time a morning?”

“It's one o'clock in the afternoon, Lynn.”

“Morning, afternoon! Kee-rist, have a heart!”

“Can I drive over and talk to you? I have something to discuss that might be to our mutual advantage.”

He paused, then said, “Save your gas. I ain't about to jeopardize a disability pension by doing favors for private eyes, okay?”

“Hey, I wouldn't jeopardize your pension,” she said. “We're in the same society. Society of the badge.”

“Used to be. You ain't carrying a badge no more. Far as I'm concerned, you're just fuzz that
was
. Like just about every other P.I. I ever met. Fuzz that
was
.”

“But I'll always be a cop at heart,” she said. “How about a brief meeting?”

“I gotta go,” he said. Then it occurred to him. “How'd you get my number?” He wobbled to his feet, weaved a bit, and considered peeing in the bathtub.

“I'll tell you,” she said, “if you'll meet me for lunch.”

“Lunch?” He'd only raised his voice to twelve decibels, slightly louder than the sound of human breathing, but it sounded like a concussion grenade. When he turned on the faucet he heard Chinese New Year.

“How about a drink?” she asked. “Let's meet in one hour and have a drink. Whadda you got to lose?”

“The Furnace Room,” he said, spotting an empty cognac bottle on the counter beside one of the bathroom sinks. The only thing he remembered clearly was that what's-her-name drank every drop of booze in the house. “You'll love the joint. It's about as bright and cheerful as Gotham City. Can we hang up now? This conversation's going on longer than the Lebanese civil war.”

When it was time to shave, Lynn Cutter gave up on trimming his mustache, but held the mansion-owner's electric shaver in both shaking hands and mashed his face up against it. The quiet hum of the shaver sounded like underground nuclear testing. After a hundred mashes or so, he was shaved. Sort of.

Breda Burrows was one of those people who grinned when she was irked. When she was
really
mad the grin widened. Once, when she was working patrol on Hollywood Boulevard she had occasion to grin especially wide after a pimp named Too-Slick Rick, sitting in his Cadillac Eldorado, said to her, “Honest, I don't make these street ladies work for me. I wouldn't lie to you, cross my heart, Officer. On my momma's grave.”

And then Too-Slick Rick thought it would be real slick and real cute to cross a heart. Hers. He reached out the window of his pimpmobile, and with a manicured right index finger—longer than a broomstick and fitted with two diamond rings set in a bed of sapphires—he crossed her heart. Right under her LAPD shield. Right on the nipple of her left tit.

She spread out that grin till it stretched from Hollywood and Vine to the Chinese Theater, and said, “On your momma's grave? And does your momma have room down there for one more, chump?”

Suddenly she leapfrogged. She vaulted up and sat down on his extended arm, the way a stuntperson vaults into the saddle over the rump of a horse.

Too-Slick Rick played teeter-totter, with his elbow acting as fulcrum. His head shot up, smashing his mauve fedora flat against the ragtop Cad. Breda's partner said that the elbow made a sound like a steel hull powering through polar ice, only
louder.
Too-Slick Rick didn't beat up any of his girls for a couple of months, not with his left arm anyway.