Hush Money (3 page)

“You oughta make a novel out of it,” I told him. “It's a hell of a story, Freddy, and who else could tell it?”

“Do you really think …?” he started. He looked up at me like a little dog trying to figure out if his master was going to give him his Yummy or take it away.

I didn't grin or anything, but then he said, “Fuck off, Cage,” morosely, and he stuck his nose back in his sauce.

I patted him on the shoulder, told him to put in a good word for me in
shul
and laid enough salad on the bartender to keep him going till closing, which sum I entered in the little spiral I use for a gyp sheet. Then I got the Mustang from the flunkey and headed west on the freeway, feeling pretty chipper on the whole. I worked off some of the Chivas Regal in the gym, which I sometimes do when the moon is up and the stiffs asleep, and the rest of it on a number from Air France who keeps the home fires burning for me now and then, and later on I dreamt I was flying out of L.A. on a Ferris wheel big enough to hold half a dozen 747s but only me aboard, spreadeagled on my belly and looking down at the world through a big bottom bubble. But then the bottom bubble was gone, there was just me making like a Sabre jet over what looked like a bunch of green waves, whoooosh, and when I woke up, it was another morning in sunny Santa Monica, Air France had taken off, and I'd just come all over my lilypink sheets.

You could say life is made up of just such simple pleasures.

3

“I'm the man from Sears,” I said. “I've come for the helicopter.”

The sign said Bay Isle Club—Members and Guests Only, and in case you doubted it there was a (discreet) red-and-white barrier before the entrance to the drawbridge and a sixty-year-old stormtrooper sitting next to it in a glass kiosk reading the
Playboy
centerfold with both lips.

“Honh?” he said, glancing out at me without seeing.

“The eggbeater,” I said, handing him my card. “Sorry, but one of your inmates defaulted on his payments.”

The happy glaze drifted south from his eyes.

“What's your business, buddy.”

“Twink,” I said.

“All right, let's cut out the funny stuff, if you're another of them newspaper …”

“Beydon,” I said, gesturing at my card. “Philip Beydon. I'm expected.”

He turned back into the kiosk, held the card up to his eyes, dialed a number. A minute later the barrier lifted, and he was already too busy with his playmate to see my goodby wave.

The Bay Isle Club, Members and Guests Only, was on a narrow finger of filled-in land sticking out into a manmade marina some forty miles south of L.A. The hideaways were long and narrow jobs, and the perspective fooled me at first. I mean, from the bridge you wouldn't have said super-rich, just middling garden-variety. But each house fronted on the water, each with its own lawn and dock, and backed onto a paved alley which was deserted as I drove through.

I parked in front of the Number 11 garage, a three-holer big enough for a small fire department, and walked down a path under an arched bougainvillea trellis to a high heavy wood gate with a silver B on it. Before I could even knock, the silver B swung back and a silent moon-faced aztec let me in. He was about my height but twice my width, with straight black hair scowling over his eyes and as somber as a priest getting ready for the sacrifices. He led me through a small tropical garden, where goldfish the size of footballs lounged under the lilypads of a pond, and up a path of polished redwood stumps to the entrance.

The house split in two. Behind me over the garage were the slave quarters, but up on top of them was a glass-walled glass-roofed studio which, I guessed later, was where Nancy Beydon used to darn her socks between masterpieces. The aztec led me to the main branch, also three stories, through French doors, up three marble steps and into a gallery two stories high and shadowy, which ran most of the way to Honolulu. Down the middle went one of those endless tables like in the old-fashioned novels where the host sits at one end, the hostess at the other and the hero somewhere in between, with nobody in shouting distance but a handful of ghosts. Except this one had a top of inlaid marble of the kind they don't grow this side of the Atlantic. The chairs were throne-sized with bigger ones at the ends, and there were sideboards behind them and tapestries on the walls which maybe weren't Bayeux but close enough to fool most of us peons. Here and there in the open spaces was statuary on pedestals, and cherubs grinned down at you from the gloom, and you got the feeling that whatever Hearst had left behind in the Old World, the Beydons had snapped up.

Not your taste maybe, but it's always a little impressive to see what they do with it.

Up above on the second story a balcony ran all the way around and doors led off to parts unknown, but we went through a ground-level door and down a curving flight of steps, heading for the dungeons. Then through another door and onto another balcony, where there was a hardwood floor down below, bright lights in the ceiling and two men in shorts and sneakers chasing after a hard black rubber ball with racquets in their hands.

I leave the economics to you. Take a finger of land surrounded on all sides by water and figure out what it would cost to build a regulation squash court in your basement. All I can say is that InterDiehl Holding must have been one hell of an investment if you could have bought the stock, which you couldn't at the time.

One of the players was my aztec's double, and it took me quite a while to separate them into Gomez and Garcia. Whereas Garcia's opponent, naturally, was Twink Beydon.

He looked like what you'd expect. Six foot three about, and big and chesty, but no paunch in sight. Maybe there was some gray in his hair, but it's hard to tell with us blonds. His eyes were that clear California blue, and the only thing, maybe, that gave away his age was that his face was beef red and dripping sweat. The kind of perennial jock, in sum, who's always cleaning up the trophies in the fifty-and-over meets, and everybody says it's not fair except those of us who compete in the thirties and forties.

They'd just finished a point when we came in, the ball slamming into the tin below the line, and Beydon waved up at me.

“Hi there! Are you Cage?”

“That's right.”

Motioning with his racquet: “Do you play?”

I shook my head. As it happens I do, but I'm not much for customer games.

“O.K. Be with you in a minute.”

From the look of it, Garcia was playing a little customer squash himself. Or boss squash, particularly when you think of jai-alai, where any aztec can look good losing if the price is right. Beydon served, and he backed Garcia to the wall and kept him there through a couple of volleys. You could see the slice coming, so could Garcia, and there it came neatly, just above the line in the corner. Garcia just made the return by the skin of his teeth, and Beydon put the point away with a slam we could all admire. I thought it was a hell of a way for a man to work off his grief, but to each his own.

A couple of more points and the set was over.

“I'll meet you in the bar,” Beydon called up with a grin, and the silent Gomez led me back the way we'd come. We went through The Gallery, up some more steps and into what looked like a ship's lounge, with comfortable chairs and a broad picture-window view of the lawn and the dock and the channel behind it. The bar was a real one too, with stools in front and Michelob on tap. Gomez disappeared, and I walked around behind and drew myself a glass, and watched about a thirty-footer making its way slowly up the channel. A few minutes later Beydon showed up again, in a gray sweatsuit, a towel wrapped around his neck, his hair wet and slicked down.

We sat in two of the chairs by the window, and after a few pleasantries about keeping in shape he got down to what I was doing there.

I'll say this for the Twink Beydons of this world, they like to lay it all out for you. Don't get me wrong. Behind those larger-than-life meat faces, those broad big-jawed grins, those clear innocent eyes and bushy blond brows and all the gladhanded I'm-just-a-country-boy-at-heart man-to-man palaver that goes along with it, they're as crooked as the next guy and maybe a little tougher—hell, they didn't get there washing blackboards for the teacher—but at least when they let you have it you know it's going to be between the eyes and not slipped up between your cheeks like a suppository. Or so I used to think, when I was an innocent young blackboardwasher myself. But in any case my way of dealing with them has always been to let them say their piece, and with an ego like Twink's, listening was no problem.

“Whatever George told you,” he said, pointing his index finger at me, “forget it. He's a great lawyer, George is, the greatest, but he's as conservative as they come, a regular Milquetoast. That's why I need him. To him, a man's reputation is number one. To me, it's about number twenty. As far as I'm concerned, a man who makes no mistakes has got to be sitting on his hands. I've made a few in my time, more than a few, but I'll take the responsibility for them and no one else. And I'll tell you this much. All this, all I've built,” and he made a circling gesture with his paw as though he meant to include not just the house but half of California, “is so much dirt. That's all it is, dirt. That's what it's worth to me now. The man who could give me back my wife and daughter could have it all on a platter.”

He looked over his shoulder at a big formal oil portrait of what I took to be Nancy and Karen. I looked with him. The earnest way he studied it would have made you think it was the Mona Lisa at least, which it wasn't. Oh it was them all right, you could see the resemblance, the mother sitting, Karen, age circa ten, standing alongside her, but like most of those high society art jobs it had about as much life as a couple of slabs of plastic meat in a butcher's counter.

“But I guess the only one who could do that,” he said softly, laughing a little, “is the Good Lord, and my connections in that direction aren't any too good.”

It was corny and it got a lot cornier. Like all the rich and powerful his talk was full of “philosophy,” and to hear him you'd have thought all he'd really wanted out of life was to live with his wife and daughter in a little thatched cottage by some stream where the fishing was good and electricity non-essential. He gave me his own version of Nancy and Karen, how the one was the model of womanhood and the other was going to be, how the last time he'd talked to her, which was only a week before she'd … but all of it flat too, like the portrait.

But then the meat-and-potatoes came back into his voice.

“I'm gonna find out what happened to her,” he said.

Not “I want to” or “I want you to” but “I'm
gonna
.”

“I don't believe in accidents,” he went on. “You just don't fall out a window. And whatever anyone tells me, she didn't jump. I know that.”

I wanted to ask him how, but he didn't need any help from me.

“I know it in my heart,” he said. “She was her mother's daughter … and mine. There's no suicide in the family. Hell, Nancy lived her whole life like she was going to last till ninety, and that was as true the day she died as the day I met her.

“And my brother Alan,” he said. “You've heard of my brother Alan?”

No, I hadn't.

“Killed in Korea,” he said, and I felt my stomach going tight. “But he died a hero's death. They gave him the Silver Star.

“Anyway,” he went on, “Karie is … was … the same way. Sure she had her bad times, crises, when the world was coming to an end, but she was a battler. She was never one to lie down and say that's it.

“Sure,” he said, combing his hand through his hair, “I didn't see as much of her as I should have, wanted to. She was down here at the University, and since Nancy died … well, I guess I've spent most of my time in town. You know how it is. But we always could talk to each other, there was none of that father-daughter Freudian crap between us. I was proud as hell of her. She had a million friends. They were always over here, she had the run of the house, no questions asked. I …”

He paused and stared out the window.

The thirty-footer had disappeared.

“You mean you think she was
pushed
?” I asked, like they do on TV.

He seemed hardly to have heard me. He looked down at his hands.

“I don't know,” he said finally. “Maybe she got into a bad crowd over there. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the kids as a whole. Radicals, hippies, if they can show us how to do a better job I'll be the first to join 'em, I'm …”

He stopped again.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit and horseshit. Bunch of pillpoppers, living off other people's sweat and the best they can do is puke all over …”

His jaw had set. He looked at me hard, straight on.

“A father's guilt, Cage. But what do you know about that? You're a bachelor, aren't you?”

“That's right.”

“A father's guilt. The years go by, you don't want them to but they do, and you forget what counts. It's an old story. One day you wake up and realize your daughter's twenty and dead.

“Hard to believe,” he said.

He sat there with it, and then he went on:

“The truth is: I didn't know her hardly at all these last years. I don't know who her friends were or what she did. I paid the bills, that's all. I had other things on my mind, business for one. She was down here, she was doing great in school, but … Well, beyond that all I did was pay the bills.”

He ran his hand through his hair again, then wiped it across his sweatshirt.

“For all I know she was one of them. Maybe she
was
doped up, maybe …”

“But I don't think so,” he said. “No sir. Karie was too smart for that. Any more than I think she fell or jumped. I think …”