Liar (11 page)

Murder of Reclusive Heiress Stuns Quiet Community

Spanning Alibi Is Bigamy: Husband of Slain Heiress Admits He Led Double Life

Bigamist Not Charged with Wife’s Slaying

DeMont Family Brings Suit: Seek to Prevent Bigamist from Inheriting

I thought of shy Briana, suddenly the object of this type of scrutiny. Of Travis, at eleven, certainly old enough to read these headlines. I rewound the reel of microfilm and shut the machine off.

Later that night, I sat on the living room floor, surrounded by the boxes from Briana’s house. Cody, my cat, was eyeing the piles of paper with twitching tail; I tensed as he tensed, and saw him ready to pounce. As on all his previous forays, I was able to shoo him off before he did much damage, but the scuffle woke the dogs. Worn out from a long run on the beach, Deke, a big black Lab, quickly went back to sleep, but Dunk, the shepherd, decided to gently sniff at all of the boxes again. Apparently satisfied, he lay down with a paw across my ankle and went back to sleep. This show of possessiveness was oddly comforting. Technically, he’s Frank’s dog, and like his master, he was soon snoring.

I stretched a little, then went back to work. The phone calls to Briana’s former neighbors hadn’t been of much use; only two of the neighbors remembered her, and neither knew what had become of “Mrs.” Maguire or her son. They told me that she and her son had kept to themselves, had been polite but very private. After reading the headlines, it was easy to understand why Briana and Travis had sought privacy.

I made notes based on the articles I had copied, recapping what I had learned, putting the information in chronological order.

As Mary had remembered, Gwendolyn DeMont was raised by her grandfather after her mother’s death. Gwendolyn’s father, who died a hero’s death in World War I, was one of two sons, but apparently her grandfather had quarreled bitterly with his surviving boy, Horace DeMont. When the old patriarch died, this son was left only a small monetary bequest; the bulk of the estate, including all the DeMont lands, was left to Gwendolyn.

At the time of her grandfather’s death, Gwendolyn was forty-five years old. Within a month of his death, and to her uncle Horace De-Mont’s shock, she married one of the few men who had ever made her acquaintance: the estate’s sixteen-year-old gardener, Arthur Spanning.

In the articles, her uncle made much of the fact that throughout her life, Gwendolyn seldom ventured outside the family home. She was shy of strangers, especially male strangers. It was Horace DeMont’s contention that Arthur Spanning had connived his way into the household and then taken advantage of her grief. That Arthur bore no real affection for her was now proven by his illegal second marriage. Greed and impatience, DeMont said, had led Arthur to murder his rich wife.

This was vigorously denied by Arthur’s older brother, a man named Gerald Spanning. Gerald Spanning had once been Arthur’s legal guardian-like Gwendolyn, Arthur had lost his parents at an early age. He speculated that this might have been one reason Gwendolyn felt drawn to Arthur, who had worked on the estate from the age of twelve. Perhaps she took advantage of a young man’s first crush, but Gerald Spanning had consented to the marriage of his underage brother because Arthur’s heart was set on it.

However set Arthur’s heart had been at sixteen, it roved by the time he was twenty-two. Briana, who was then working in a nursery and landscaping supply company, was courted by and married the charming young man she knew as Arthur Sperry. His landscaping business required frequent absences.

The articles in the
Express
supplied few details about this business, but apparently Gwendolyn had indulged her young husband’s whim to have his own business, to earn his own money. If this business required him to travel, she did not seem upset by her days alone.

The cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Coughlin, was interviewed. She had worked for the Spannings for twelve years. She worked there every weekday, with weekends off, and did not live on the premises. She declared that the Spannings had always seemed to be a happy couple, that Arthur was an attentive husband. True, she admitted, they slept separately, but she had never heard them argue or complain of one another. Mrs. Spanning seldom ventured away from the house, and was rarely seen outdoors except in her own very private garden-a garden Mr. Spanning tended for her. No, Mrs. Coughlin was sure Mrs. Spanning had never had the least idea of Mr. Spanning’s other life.

Police said that Mr. Spanning’s claims concerning his whereabouts on the evening of the murder were borne out both by emergency room personnel at Las Piernas General Hospital and the Las Piernas Police Department. At the hospital, Travis received treatment for a severely lacerated hand. The boy said he had been sleepwalking and thrust his hand through a back-door window. To add to the upheaval in Mr. Spanning’s life, his car had been stolen from the hospital parking lot. Ironically, police had taken the report of a stolen vehicle for “Mr. Sperry” and later, when Gwendolyn Spanning’s body was discovered, this report was used to further back Mr. Spanning’s claims regarding his whereabouts on the night of the murder.

Not much was revealed about Arthur Spanning’s double life, possibly because Arthur was able to engage excellent legal help, but also because Arthur, Briana and Travis refused interviews. The “double life” article was largely conjecture, but not wild conjecture. The reporter noted that although Las Piernas and Los Alamitos border one another, they are separated by a county line. It was theorized that this division helped Arthur to keep his two identities separate-many tax, business, birth, marriage and other records were maintained separately in each county.

Arthur Spanning was a man unknown to his neighbors, not active in the community in any way, a person who lived behind high fences and strong gates, and who dealt with most others through his lawyers. Mrs. Coughlin and the lawyers were the only persons who saw much of either of the Spannings. With the exception of rare and rather strained contact with the families of Horace DeMont and Gerald Spanning, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Spanning shunned the world around them.

If the Spannings had been more active socially, Sperry’s friends might have noticed that he resembled the heiress’s husband. As Arthur Sperry, head of a middle-class family, he had many friends and admirers. All admitted that they knew little of his history or work, but all described him as charming and helpful, an excellent listener who was loyal to his friends. He was active in his local parish.

To the great frustration of the DeMonts, no criminal charges were filed against Spanning; their lawsuit to prevent him from inheriting Gwendolyn’s estate was also unsuccessful.

What happened with the bigamous marriage to my aunt was typical of cases where there is no clear attempt to defraud the second spouse. Although the marriage to Briana was invalid, it was apparent that Arthur didn’t marry Briana for financial gain, so no criminal charges were filed against him. She was given custody of their son, and refused Spanning’s offer of child support.

I made a quick search of the remaining boxes from the apartment; there were some photos of Travis that might come in handy, but not much else.

The dogs suddenly scrambled to their feet; I heard Frank’s car pulling into the driveway. I began to put the papers away. I was putting the stack of bills into one of the desk boxes when something caught my eye. It was a puce-colored flyer, announcing that Cosmo the Storyteller would be appearing in a free program for children at the Crescent City Public Library on the second of January at one o’clock.

Crescent City. The first library on the phone bill. And one so far north of San Pedro, Briana would have no reason to check a book out of it, let alone attend a children’s program. Cosmo the Storyteller.

Frank called a greeting from the front door. I set the boxes and papers aside and hurried to give him a proper welcome home. I was patient, which is not the first attribute anyone will mention in my eulogy. I listened to him talk about his day, let him vent some steam about cases that would suffer while he was away, even waited until he had changed clothes and was starting to pack for Idaho before I told him that I thought I had figured out how to find Travis.

We rode to LAX with Pete and Rachel early the next morning; the flight to Boise from Los Angeles International had been cheaper than any out of Las Piernas, but involved ten times the headaches. The department doesn’t have to justify headaches, only dollars.

While we watched brake lights on the San Diego Freeway, I repeated to Rachel what I had told Frank the night before.

“I don’t get it,” Pete said, listening in on our conversation. “How can you be sure Travis is this storyteller?”

“I can’t,” I said.

He snorted. “So this is just a hunch? Woman’s intuition?”

Don’t be such a pain in the ass!
I wanted to shout, watching Rachel scowl at him. “Just leave Pete up there in Idaho-okay, Frank?” she said.

Oh, God.

Frank, who was driving, glanced into the rearview mirror to look at Pete, then shook his head. “Even the governor couldn’t pardon me for doing something like that.”

“It was more than a hunch,” I said. “And I’m not saying he’s the storyteller-just that this storyteller probably knows where to find him. Briana made calls after Travis’s father died. Probably trying to find Travis.”

“An assumption,” Pete pointed out.

“Yes, I’ll admit that.”

“A logical one, Pete,” Frank said. “This woman was such a loner, she didn’t even have an address book. She was dead for some time before anyone noticed she was missing. She didn’t have much money-seemed to be barely getting by. But when the father of her son died, she spent over sixty dollars calling public libraries. I doubt she was trying to hunt down a book.”

Pete shrugged. “Okay. Go on.”

“The calls were to libraries up and down the state,” I said, “but they started with Crescent City-which is not far from the Oregon border. Crescent City is the same place the flyer comes from. Briana didn’t have a car, but even if she did, I doubt she would have driven seven or eight hundred miles to see a storyteller. So why would she have a flyer from a distant library for a children’s event?”

“You call this library yet?” Pete asked.

“Pete,” Rachel said with exasperation, “we left the house at six o’clock in the morning. You think the average public library was open for business by then?”

He shrugged, and took out a stick of cinnamon gum. The only time I ever see Pete chewing gum is before he gets on a plane.

“Ha qualcosa contro il mal d’aria?”
Rachel asked in a low voice.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve got the pills. But it isn’t really air sickness that bothers me, you know?”

From that point on, there was a concerted effort to distract him from his fear of flying.

It was probably a good strategy where Frank and I were concerned as well. Distracting Pete kept our thoughts away from the last time Frank had gone to interview a witness. That time, he ended up a hostage. This trip was coming too soon after that ordeal. Neither of us had been able to sleep well-his nightmare had awakened both of us at about three in the morning. Knowing the alarm would be going off in a couple of hours, we lay there in a too-tired-and-too-wired state, worried minds continually snatching our weary bodies back from the brink of sleep.

At the airport we behaved in a perfectly respectable fashion, focusing our efforts on having a pleasant conversation until the flight was called. Frank gave me a brief hug, a kiss and a smile, then said, “I’ll call you tonight,” in the same way anybody else might have said it to a spouse. Said it as if he were going to Idaho to talk someone into buying a copier rather than to convince some weasel-faced, scared-ass, hiding-out known associate of a criminal to admit under oath that he had seen said associate kill a man in cold blood.

I understood, took my cues and ignored the knot in my stomach. It would be an ordinary day with an ordinary good-bye, and no one would question anyone’s ability to face it, no one would say aloud that there were damned good reasons for nightmares that woke everybody up, that there was no shame in it, that it was too soon, too soon-because that would be akin to saying the aftermath of his captivity still had legs to run on. Which it did. Trauma runs the marathon, not the fifty-yard dash.

I thought he might go all the way down the jetway bantering with Pete, might get on the plane without glancing back, so I relaxed my guard and failed to have the correct devil-may-care expression on my face when he looked over his shoulder. But he wasn’t wearing a smile either, not until I tried to come up with one. I hoped mine didn’t look as forced as his did, and raised my hand to wave-or beckon him back, I’m not certain-but he didn’t see the gesture, because Pete said something to him just then. They took another step and were past the point where Rachel and I could watch them.

Rachel didn’t object when, instead of leaving the nearly empty waiting area, I moved to the wall of tall windows, squinting in the bright morning sun, watching until the plane was pushed back from the gate. There was nothing to be done now, I told myself. Once again, being on my best behavior had proved damned unsatisfying.

I turned in my story on campaign contributions and left the office. I had a council meeting to cover that night, so I took a few hours off in the early afternoon. I went home and spent some time with Cody and the dogs, then stretched the phone out onto the back patio. It was a warm day, bright and breezy. Frank’s garden lay before me, the dogs plopped down at my feet, and Cody settled on my lap and purred his approval of the arrangements.

I opened my notebook and resumed my search for my cousin.

I decided to make my first calls to the El Cajon, Mission Viejo and Lake Arrowhead libraries, the ones Briana has spoken to on her longer calls. I tried Mission Viejo first, since it was the closest to Las Piernas. I thumbed through my notes while waiting for the call to go through, and found the name of the children’s librarian.