Hush Money (4 page)

For a short minute back there when he was talking about the kids, he'd had me almost liking him. But then sympathy's not my strong suit when it comes to the rich and powerful, only a certain unhealthy respect.

“So you want me to find out what happened?” I asked, not liking it even as I said it. It sounded weird, like being hired to fill a hole and then dig it up again.

“I'm gonna find out,” he said again. “If I was more sentimental, I'd think it was to try to make it up to her somehow, but that won't bring her back, will it? More than likely it's to find out about myself, what makes a man like me tick. A taking stock after the damage is done.”

Unh-unh, I said to myself. I gave him an I for Introspection, but this was where Cage checked out.

“That's out of my league, Mr. …” I began.

“I know what your league is,” he said sharply. “George Curie hired you for a particular job, right? He did it because that's what I told him to do. Well, I've changed my mind. Period. That's another thing you'll find out about me: I can change my mind. You can still go ahead with that—there are others besides me involved and if keeping my daughter out of the headlines protects their interests, I'm willing to pay to protect their interests. But as far as I'm concerned, I want to know. Anything you turn up, any new fact, I want to be the one to hear it first, not the police, not anyone else. That's what I'm buying. I'm willing to pay for it too, and if the whole thing blows sky high into a scandal, I'll take the consequences.”

I got up from the chair … in my mind. I guess it showed though, because he gave me the look that went with the worm-curling tone.

“I said I'll pay for it,” he said. “Your guarantee is double what you have already, and there's more if you need it. You'll get it from me, not George. In fact I'd as soon he didn't know about it, not that I give a good goddam. I've already given my staff their instructions.”

Well, it was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that somebody'd had me pegged in advance. It sort of piqued my
amour propre
, if you know what I mean. And there were other things I didn't like about it, such as his overnight change of heart and all that soul-searching in front of a perfect stranger, plus how a stiff who got caught in the middle with people like Beydon and the Diehls could get squashed like a bug and nobody to sing at his wake. Also I had that feeling in my stomach, the kind you get when you've swallowed something whole and live. Call it adrenalin, call it fear, I'm not particular, but I know it and I don't like it.

But then my
amour propre
flipped over on the other side, and I found myself thinking redblooded male thoughts, like annuities and Cage's Personal Retirement Plan and what it would be like some day to own a piece of a Bay Isle Club myself and hang around the squash court swapping war stories with the help.

And you can call that greed, if it's easy on your ears.

In any case he wasn't the type to be kept waiting. I decided that I didn't like him any better than he did me. Or trust him, it goes without saying.

But I sat down again … in my mind.

He didn't have any theories for me, at least any he wanted to share. All he could do was open a few more sesames for me, like with the bigwigs at the University, and with the Diehls too. It didn't figure to him that they'd have anything for me and he said it was their interests he was trying to protect, but not so's you'd believe it. Another contradiction, it seemed, and I got the message that if I stepped on a few Diehl toes here and there, he'd be the last to suffer.

And then a funny thing happened, which surprised even me.

He'd been on his feet, giving orders like a general in his tent and the cords stiff on his neck. But then he stopped, over by the window, his back to me so I could see only the corner of his face where his jaw was working. And then his tone went all souly again, like Laurence Olivier warming up for a soliloquy on the eve of Agincourt. It was like he could look a long way backwards and forwards at the same time, or so he thought, and it didn't make much difference whether he liked the vista or not.

“There's something else you ought to know,” he said. “Not that it'll make any difference, but if you're worth a damn you'll find it out anyway, and maybe it'd save you time.”

He took in a long deep breath.

“I'm not her father,” he said, staring out the window. “I am legally, I saw to that, but … Well, Nancy and I had our troubles back then. It wasn't what you'd think. She wanted a kid, we both did, but somehow or other it didn't happen. We had it checked out physically, but there was nothing wrong with either of us. It was one of those things, it happens to people. It got to her more than me. It drove her damn near wild.

“She didn't give two hoots about who it was,” he said. “It could have been anyone …”

He broke it off then.

“Don't get any funny ideas about me,” he said tightly. He turned on me. “Damn few people know about it and if I find out you've been spreading the word, that'll be something between us.”

“What about the father?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“He's a long way away from here, and anybody'd have a hell of a time tracing him. I saw to that.”

I bet he had.

“And Karen? Did she know?”

“Not from me, she didn't. I … Well, there's no undoing what never got done, is there?”

“Who else?”

“No one. No one who counts now.”

“Wouldn't Curie have …?”

“No. He didn't represent me then.”

I put that together with something George S. III had told me and filed it away.

“What about your wife? Wouldn't she …?”

He shook his head and the blond brows pulled down over his eyes.

Suddenly the air had gotten very thick. He was staring me down, waiting. Maybe waiting for me to laugh at him, or call him impotent.

I didn't.

Instead I thought of asking him why he was telling me if it was such a well-kept secret which wouldn't do me any good if I stumbled across it. Was that too father's guilt? But I thought better of that too. Discretion, you could say, had changed sides.

In any case, we got interrupted. This blonde frost came in, with oval specs and long hair tied at the nape of her neck and a tight-skirted walk which made you think of ice cubes rattling around in a glass.

The stalactite type, if you go for it.

She had a phone call for him. That's what she said. It could have been her way of telling him it was 11:30 and time for his swim to Catalina, because there was a wall phone by the bar which hadn't rung. But when I stood up to go, he told me to stick around a little while.

I did, about ten minutes' worth, with the view and the two defunct Beydon women for company. The funny ideas started then, about Korean heroes and Twink Beydon's virility and whether the father who was a long way away really was just a stud to Nancy, and how much of Nancy's itchy pants might have rubbed off on her “mother's daughter” of a daughter. In which case the artist, whoever it was, really had blown it. I thought too that there was a whole lot more behind the glimpses he'd given me of Philip “Twink” Beydon, and how if it ever all came pouring out at once I wouldn't much like to be standing in the way, not even if it meant stopping the winning touchdown.

“Do you think they're beautiful?” a voice said suddenly behind me.

It was the stalactite, at my shoulder, looking at the portrait and then at me.

“I'm Ellen Plager,” she said with a smile. “What do you think of them?”

“I never met either one,” I answered, “but if they were, I'd guess the artist blew it.”

“Yes, she did,” she said. “I think you're right.”

“She?”

“The late Mrs. Beydon. It's a self-portrait, at least her half of it.”

“Oh,” I said.

She laughed, a tinkling sound to register her little victory. She said Mr. Beydon was tied up unexpectedly and asked to be excused, but he'd expect my first progress report the next morning. I asked her what kind of woman Mrs. Beydon had been. She said she'd never met her. I asked her if she played squash, and the tinkle turned into a bell, and then she stared at me in a cool smug open-eyed way which seemed to say yes she did, but that her schedule was filled up right then, only she'd keep me in mind in case something opened up.

I went out the way I'd come in, alone, back through the belly of the whale where Twink Beydon used to bang his fist on the marble table, shouting for heirs, and the skeletons rolled around on the balcony clutching their sides. I didn't hear a sound except my own heels clicking on the tiles. Out by the entrance hall was a big smoked-glass mirror where I straightened my tie, cocked my hat, and tried on my best gumshoe leer.

Welcome to the team of Twink Beydon.

Except that I never wear a hat, and my soles are made of leather.

Gomez was looking busy in the garden when I came out.

“Hasta la vista,” I called to him, but he didn't even glance up as I went out the gate.

4

The next time I actually saw him was at the funeral, but in between he was never more than two steps in back of me. Or in front. It was Big Daddy, my old platoon sergeant and Mrs. Hotchkiss in the third grade all rolled into one. It got so I could hardly go to the john. Everywhere there'd be a message for me to call him, either at Bay Isle or the big house in town up off Rossmore or the Wilshire office or a couple of phone numbers I didn't recognize. Mostly I got the stalactite first. I'd ask her how the squash was coming and she'd tinkle at me and Twink would come on, wanting to know what was happening, how I was doing, what I was doing, what so-and-so had said—with the i's dotted and the commas included.

I gave it to him too. It was no skin off my nards. In the beginning I used to wonder what was happening to Diehl, California, and a few other little projects I knew he had going if he was spending all his time on yours truly, but probably at any given moment he had a couple of dozen Cages mucking around for him out in the boondocks, and he took the one or two really hot ones and worried them like a dog in the gristle, leaving the rest for later.

I suppose I should have felt honored.

I tackled the Curie part of the job first because it was easier. In fact, don't tell George S. III but he could've saved his client my fee simply by letting time run its course. All I did was hurry it along a little and smooth out a couple of rough spots.

I started at the local constabulary. The sheriff turned out to be a worried little rooster, who kept one eye cocked on me and the other on the next election, and before I left I had him showing me pictures of his family. In between we got into his Karen Beydon file. It was fat all right, but the more I looked the less I got out of it. The event had taken place circa 3:05 on a Friday afternoon. Classes were in session, there were people all over the campus and students mixing in the mixed dorm. Nobody'd heard a thing. Nobody saw her fall. A couple of students had found her lying there just a minute later, but by the time the law came along—the campus law first—there was nothing left to do but scrape her off the pavement and mop up the splatter. They'd been through her room wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and found nothing interesting. I skimmed through a stack of photos and diagrams and depositions thick enough to paper the Administration Building and about as useful. Some people said she'd been depressed, but to hear others tell it she'd been the life of the campus. As far as her sex life went, you could take your choice all the way from nun to nympho. Here she was a radical; there she'd had nothing to do with campus politics. Her professors had no complaints about her work, her grade point average was closer to four than three, but on the other hand she'd gone tripping most of the previous spring quarter with a swain called Andrew Ford, and you couldn't help but wonder how she did it, genius or no. According to her roommate, one Robin Fletcher, she'd spent more time in the Bay Isle hideaway than in the dorm, and there was a footnote to another police dossier about a party they'd had to break up over there a few months back.

“What about the local drug scene?” I asked my friendly sheriff.

He didn't like that very much. He even managed to look hurt.

“There isn't any,” he said. “All we get is stuff brought in from the outside and none of that's hard.”

And even what there was, he said with a straight face, he could have controlled with a little cooperation from the University. And furthermore, though he didn't say it in so many words, with just a little cooperation from the coroner's office he'd have been as happy as anybody to stamp Accident all over the Karen Beydon case and clear his desk and go back to running hippies off his beaches.

Expenses? Zero.

Information? About the same.

The medical examiner was one of those long lean types with a practice of his own on the side and an Adam's apple the size of a Number 2 potato. Short on bedside manner but methodical as they come, and given to third-guessing his second guesses. He said they'd found some traces in her blood, not a lot, difficult to quantify from their data. He wouldn't commit himself to what it was, but I got the feeling she might have been smoking some grass with maybe an upper to sweeten her breath, not enough in any case to make her practice her Immelmanns. We swapped a few “contusions” and “intercranials” and he described exactly what happens when an object, a body for instance, falls seven stories onto asphalt, and still he couldn't make up his mind as to the probable cause of death.

I helped him out.

Expenses? Less than you'd think.

Information? Ditto.

Which left the so-called working press, and there I had an unexpected break. What happened was that the East L.A. barrio blew up again, which it does whenever there's one of those Mexican Independence Days and the aztecs break out the firewater and start playing with matches. Before you know it half of Whittier Boulevard's up in smoke, the law joins in the celebration, push comes to shove, some cannons go off, the call goes out for stretcher-bearers and the taco stands rake it in like McDonald's on Saturday night. All this in living color too, Southern California's semi-annual war, and it sure beats the Rose Parade.