Hush Money (2 page)

The works, in short.

Well, it was a good story. While it lasted, it must have sold plenty of papers, and you could imagine the sponsors of the Six O'Clock News doing handstands.

Only now the family wanted the muzzle on.

“We represent them, of course,” said George S. Curie III. “We always have, on both sides, Beydons and Diehls. Whatever you undertake to do, they're to be kept out of it insofar as possible.

“Now,” he said, “it's already clear to us from the facts that Karen's death was accidental. The rest,” with a wave of his hand, “is yellow journalism. The police, of course, have their duties, and obviously we can't be involved in obstructing the pursuit of justice. If there's to be a coroner's inquest, so be it, but as a practical matter we … Mr. Beydon … would prefer not. We leave it to your discretion.

“Meanwhile, we want the press called off. They've had their fun, now let them wrap up the story.

“And of course, the sooner the police close their files the better.

“How you do it, that's up to you. You'll be amply recompensed, for yourself and incurred expenses. Money's no object, within reason. I'll only repeat: We want it done fast, and we want it done … discreetly.”

He handed me two pieces of paper, the gesture so smooth I didn't so much as spot them coming out of his jacket pocket. I glanced at them on their way into mine. One was a retainer check with yours truly as payee, the other one of those to-whom-it-may-concern open-sesame letters making (discreet) use of the Beydon name. Both were signed by George S. Curie III.

Translated, it all meant that Philip “Twink” Beydon may have loved his only daughter while she was living and grieved her dead, but maybe not enough to give a damn how she died, not enough at least to get in the way of things like free enterprise and family reputation. Which was no skin off my ass. The reporters I could handle, even their bosses if push came to shove, and as far as the law was concerned, well, maybe there is such a thing as an honest cop in California, but any time you like I'll give you my ten-minute lecture on Law Enforcement with a capital $.

According to George S. Curie III, the University would be no obstacle either. He ran through some other details—no problems, and probably you've started wondering why, if it was so easy, George S. Curie III didn't take care of it himself? I wonder too sometimes, on my way back from the bank. But then, you don't know the George S. Curie IIIs of this world. On the one hand you've got the clean-handkerchief theory to go on, and maybe at that there's more profit in wills.

Anyway, I was halfway up to my feet when it stopped being quite so easy.

“There's just one minor … complication,” said George S. Curie III, and it was the only time he seemed to slip a little. “That is to say, before you do anything Mr. Beydon wants to talk to you first.”

“Why?” I said, standing up the rest of the way.

He shrugged up at me.

“I don't know,” he said. “It's his money after all, perhaps he just wants to see what he's buying? In any case I have my instructions.”

He must have read my reaction because he went on drily:

“By the way, in case you didn't notice it, those two documents I gave you are both dated tomorrow. Needless to say …”

“You're a crafty son of a bitch,” I said.

He looked up at me with that same kind of you-can't-touch-me expression he must have had on when the kids in kindergarten tried to rub his nose in it. You could call it a smile, more or less.

“He'll be expecting you at ten tomorrow morning. My secretary will give you the address.”

He got up too then. The smile was gone, the gray back in his face, and old Sensible Shoes appeared from out of nowhere to show me out. She had my orders all typed in a memorandum, sergeant-major style, and she didn't even give me time to exchange names with the receptionist much less pleasantries (but I'll lay you three-to-two it was Karen) before I was standing outside again on the flagstones near the gold plaque, the heavy front door shut behind me.

I glanced at my watch—I hadn't been inside more than half an hour—and I headed for my mostly-Mustang, which all of a sudden looked a little shabby there in Rollsland, though it was only a year old, less than 25,000 miles and enough extra mustard under the hood to damn near double the speedometer.

Come to think of it, they never did ask me to stay for tea.

2

I did a little homework that night, consisting mostly of swapping Chivas Regals with Freddy Schwartz of the
Times
in a juice joint over on Santa Monica Boulevard. We're not exactly what you'd call friends, Freddy and me, for one thing he's old enough to be my grandfather, but what we've got going is better than friendship, meaning enlightened self-interest.

Except that he's a jew, Freddy's the example that proves the cliché. He's got the red nose (with mole), the rheumy eyes, the ruined liver, the soured soul, of the classic cityroom hack. Also the computerful of garbage upstairs and the unwritten Great American Novel. With Freddy Schwartz, it's all in his head. For instance, he can tell you more than you want to know about the membership of the California Club, from sex life to hemorrhoids, and this all the way back to 1940 and before. One time just for nothing he laid on me the private lives of their Excellencies, the past three governors of our sovereign state, and I told him he ought to make a Great American Novel out of it, and he looked at me crooked like I was a spy for Jacqueline Susann or somebody, then said he already had the first chapter done—in his head, of course, and then a couple of shots later would you believe the tears started rolling down his cheeks?

Anyway, for a newspaperman who pulls down maybe a thou a month and pisses his life away within walking distance of a barstool, he's a useful little guy.

But then you could say he's got a pretty fair bunch of legmen doing his job for him, such as yours truly.

Between us we filled out a working biography of one Philip “Twink” Beydon and family, or what was left of it. Leaving out some of the more picturesque details, I came away with this:

Chapter 1:
Philip Beydon
. Born 1919 up near Sacramento. Father, a smalltown banker, had some trouble with the law but got through one bankruptcy in time for another circa 1931 and died a pretty wealthy cardiac in 1950. The first anyone ever heard of young Philip was at Berkeley in the late '30s. That's where the “Twink” came in too. If you go back that far, maybe you'll remember the Katzenjammer Kids who were supposed to do for Cal what Ernie Nevers had done for Stanford? Only it never came off? One of the reasons it never came off being that midway through his junior year Twink Beydon ran into the goal post scoring a touchdown and broke his hip. Even so he made honorable mention All-American that year, and the next year was supposed to be the Rose Bowl, with a pro contract waiting at the end. Except that Twink stumped the experts again and all the broken hearts at Sigma Chi had to go back to rooting for a bunch of stiffs whose names ended in
icz
. Meaning simply that the hero upped and got married.

End of Chapter 1.

Chapter 2:
Nancy Diehl Beydon
. According to Freddy Schwartz, it was the scandal of the season. You didn't become a Diehl by marriage, then or now, with nothing going for you but a mended hip and a fistful of press clippings, and Bryce Diehl wasn't about to make an exception for the second of his four children and only daughter. The tycoon with a heart of honey? Not this time anyway, and when the week after her twenty-first birthday Nancy came home with her name changed by act of the sovereign state of Nevada, he damned and disowned her publicly, irrevocably and eternally, or at least until the Diehl Ranch toppled into the ocean. According to Freddy Schwartz she'd been nothing if not the dutiful daughter before. She'd won her blue ribbons in the jodhpur set, she'd done the coming-out bit, had gone to the right schools and worked for the right charities. But not even Daddy and excommunication could keep her from her beloved Twink. “It was a love match if ever there was one,” said Freddy, waving sentimentally to the bartender. I had some reservations of my own, but if it was peculiar that it had taken over a decade of love to spring little Karen out of the connubial nest, the thought didn't occur to me then. In any case Nancy's exile stayed in force until Bryce Diehl rejoined his Maker and her brothers came into their own, some several millions' worth give or take a hundred in such tangibles as land, oil, rolling and four-legged stock, dollars, and Oh yes, land.

End of Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 you could call:
Twink Beydon Strikes It Rich
. First he had the war to win, and a chestful of medals (sometimes I wonder if World War II medals isn't another
Mayflower
story, but no matter), and then his fortune to make, and to hear Freddy tell it it was was Saturday's hero all over again, one hundred yards of green, the stripes painted gold and nobody in his way this time but a blonde number with L-O-V-E printed in diamonds across her megaphone. How did he do it? He did it with nothing, i.e., in the time-honored Western way. Maybe people in the rest of the world do it by making things, but the big California loot has come from what was already here when there was nobody but a few Indians scratching around in the dirt and fishing the rivers. Meaning the land, and what's under it—gold, oil and gas—and what grows on top—food and lumber. Meaning the surface itself, there to be carved up and flattened and subdivided and pulverized and carved up again, and also the water that runs down out of the few mountains left over after the flattening. California wealth is grabbers' wealth, where the guy with the longest reach gets the T-bone and there's still enough hamburger to feed another twenty million.

Well, Twink Beydon had a longer reach than most. According to Freddy he also had brains, guts, ambition, and I suppose it never hurt him either to let it be known whose son-in-law he was, even though he never got as close to old Bryce Diehl as the morning milkman. Anyway, at one time or another Twink's entrepreneured a few bucks out of most of the things I've mentioned and sometimes in combinations, and of course in the long run he even entrepreneured the Diehls.

That's where the story got complicated. Not even Freddy Schwartz knew all the ins and outs of it. It started and ended with the Diehl Ranch, but to tell it right you'd have to go all the way back to the original land grants when the first Diehls slickered half of Southern California away from the Spaniards, which I'm not about to do lest it stir up the Indians who owned it before. So imagine about 100,000 acres of virgin land stretching from the Pacific almost to the desert, rolling hills mostly, arid land but good for grazing, with enough orange groves where there's water to keep the whole country in Minute Maid and here and there a few small forests of oil pumps to break up the décor—and you've got the basis of what was, still is, one of the biggest California fortunes going. Bryce Diehl ran it, and two generations of Diehls before him, and after he kicked off it was his sons' turn to feed the chickens and bring in the hay.

But something came along that made all that had been look as penny ante as the original Woolworth's candy store.

The old boy must have had an inkling at that. At least he set up the organization for it: the Diehl Corporation, the Bryce Diehl Foundation, Diehl Exploitation Inc., and God-knows-what-other tax dodges. Over it all: the InterDiehl Holding Company. He did it partly, Freddy said, to beat Internal Revenue, partly to keep his son-in-law's hand out of the till. To judge, the first worked out a lot better than the second, because if today the checks of InterDiehl Holding are signed by Bryce Diehl Jr., President and Chairman of the Board, you know who's laying out the book and handing him the pen.

According to Freddy it was Nancy who brought Twink back into the fold, but you could also put it up to fate, necessity, call it greed. Which isn't to say the Diehl brothers are mental retards necessarily or that left to themselves they couldn't have developed and peddled the housing tracts, marinas, industrial parks and all the rest of the eyesores with phony Spanish names that'll keep their great-grandchildren in Sugar Frosted Flakes. But it took a five-star grabber to put it all together and come up with Diehl. That's right: Diehl. Diehl, California. The smart money says that by the turn of the century, if we ever get there, there'll be as many as 500,000 happy Americans living and working in the city of Diehl, California, and those half million are going to have to eat, sleep, shit, screw, pray, play golf, and watch TV, and die, and their children are going to have to go to school, and so on, and every night before they go to bed (it says in the Master Plan) they'll get down on their knees and thank Philip “Twink” Beydon for making their dreams come true. Oh there are still some wrinkles to be ironed out, like whether to start the little hideaways down in Diehl Cove at $75,000 or $100,000, and some politicians to be paid off, and the eco freaks and the civil rights nuts beating their breasts, but once something like that gets started out here, it takes a lot more than the Sierra Club and Huey P. Newton to plug up the dike.

Diehl, California. At that I guess it sounds better than Beydonville.

Freddy gave me the angle on some other things too. Like the Diehl Stables. If you've hung around the local horse parlors you're sure to have seen one or another of the Diehls in the winner's circle smiling at the silverware, but it took Twink Beydon to turn a profit on it. The Diehl Charities too, and Diehl Culture. Giving it away was Nancy's department, but you can bet that wherever the money went the name went with it. Discretion, my ass. And when the new football stadium goes up at the University, the same one Karen went to, what do you suppose they're going to call it?

Then Nancy Beydon up and died, of cancer, and there was just one chapter left. Call it:
The Short and Happy Life of Karen Bryce Beydon
. Freddy couldn't write it any more than I could, but he had the same theory: that the young lady thought she could fly, and it made perfect sense to him that Twink would try to get what was left of her underground and no questions asked.