Mr. X (67 page)

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“This enormous lie is right in front of us. This stupid habit! I thought no one could accept me if they knew my real story. I could hardly accept myself. It was so
shameful
.” Tears rose to the surface of her eyes. “We were so
poor
. My father was killed holding up a
liquor store
. Is this the kind of person you want to have dinner with?”

“It’s no disgrace to have a tough start,” I said.

Laurie fixed me with a burning glance. “I grew up with the idea that the world … Okay. There was no safety
anywhere
. You didn’t know if there was going to be food for dinner, and we were always getting evicted because my mother couldn’t pay the rent. Every time we moved, I went to a different school, so I never had any friends. Not that I would have had friends anyhow. My
clothes were from secondhand stores, not the cool ones, the ratty places. I was a laughingstock. Every day, I thought a big hole was going to open up in front of me, and I’d fall in and just keep on falling. I thought we were going to wind up on the street. Or that I’d be taken away to some kind of
prison
, and my mother would
die
.”

She wiped her eyes. “Anyhow, when she got married to this cameraman at Warner Brothers, Morry Burger, it was like being rescued from drowning. He had a job and a house in Studio City. For a while, everything was okay. But good old Morry drank a bottle of gin a day, and he started beating up my mother when he came home from work. I hid in my room, and I listened to him hitting her, and her crying, and him yelling at her to stop crying, and it was like … the hole opened up, and I fell in. I stopped feeling anything at all, I was like a zombie. Which was just as well, as it turned out. Here we get to the first of the good parts.”

Laurie sank back again, holding her glass in front of her face. “When I was eleven, Morry started climbing into my bed at night. My mother was passed out. She would have killed me if she knew. Well, maybe she did know, but she never admitted it.

“Then Morry got fired from Warners. He managed to find some work, but the jobs never lasted more than a couple of weeks. I ran away from home about a dozen times, but the cops always brought me back. We lost the house in Studio City, which Morry found really depressing, I might add. For about six months, we moved from one dump to another, mainly on the edges of Hancock Park. And then, one night my mother went out and someone killed her in back of a drugstore. They never found the guy.

“I was already smoking a lot of grass. After my mother got killed, I met this girl named Esther Gold. Esther Gold was a rich screwup who gave me amphetamines and ’ludes, and we got tight. One night, Morry grabbed my bag and found some pills, which gave him the brilliant idea that I was so depraved he might as well make money and influence people by selling me to his friends. Which he did, once or twice a month. But even though having to get into bed with Morry’s friends as well as Morry was vile, disgusting, hideous, Esther Gold started scoring Percodans and Dilaudids, and whenever one of Morry’s pals came over, I zoned out.”

She wiped tears off her cheeks and smiled at the other side of
the room. “We have gone through childhood, such as it was, which means we come to the next really good part, adolescence. Esther went to Fairfax, and I went to L.A. High, so I never saw her again, but L.A. High was full of dopers, you could get anything you wanted. One day in English class, I said to the teacher, ‘I’m the Queen of Heaven, and you’re a pimple on the ass of God.’ My exact words. She threw me out of class. I started walking home. But home wasn’t
home
, it was just the dump where I lived with Morry. I stood right where I was for about four hours. When a cop drove up and asked me my name, I told him I was the Queen of Heaven.”

Laurie started giggling, and more tears spilled from her eyes. I brushed them off with the tips of my fingers. “Thank you. I wound up in the hospital. At least I told the cops about Morry, and Morry went to the slammer, three cheers for the L.A. child-welfare system.

“There isn’t much to say about the hospital except I started getting a little more clarity. A wonderful man named Dr. Deering, a psychiatrist who was about sixty years old, told me I had a placement in a halfway house, but he and his wife would take me in, if I liked the idea. Dr. Deering was the only man in the world I trusted, and I only trusted him a little bit, but I said I’d give it a try. And after that, everything was different. No matter how paranoid and suspicious I got, they were always patient. I understood the deal, you know? I said to myself,
These are nice people, and they’re probably your last chance to have a decent life. Don’t mess up
.”

Laurie drank some wine, and her face filled with resentment. “To Stewart Hatch, of course, this means I was some kind of parasite. But I loved the Deerings. I was this person I can hardly remember anymore, and they took care of me. They hired tutors. They suffered through dinners when I screamed at them. They
talked
to me. When I learned how to act like a normal person, they put me in a private school and helped with my homework. College seemed completely remote, so when I graduated, they found me a job as a receptionist at a medical center in San Francisco. David and Patsy Deering. God bless them.”

We clinked glasses.

“Did Stewart tell you I ran away? He did, didn’t he?”

I said I didn’t remember.

“Dr. Deering drove me to San Francisco. We found an apartment.
I called them at least once a week for the next year, when I guess God decided to drop me into the hole again. David and Patsy were killed in an automobile accident, driving home from a party. It was terrible. When I came back from their funeral, I was so depressed I hardly got out of bed for a month. No more job, of course. So there I was, feeling like something the cat threw up, but I stumbled into a job in an art gallery, and one night at an opening I happened to meet Teddy Wainwright.

“Stewart undoubtedly implied that I took advantage of Teddy. There’s no point in going over the whole thing, but I realized later,
of course
I fell in love with an older man, I couldn’t have fallen in love with anything
but
an older man. Teddy was a father figure, so what? He loved me. Oh, God, Teddy did, he did love me. I think … Teddy helped me put myself together just by being such a great guy. I wish he was still alive, so I could introduce you to him. You would have liked each other.”

“Back when you first met Stewart, did he remind you of Teddy Wainwright?”

Laurie slid closer and collapsed against my shoulder. “Wasn’t that dumb? Hmm. On second thought, I don’t like this. You’re too perceptive.”

“You don’t dislike it that much.”

She put her hand on my thigh. “The guy was from this town in the middle of nowhere. He seemed sort of square, but I thought that was almost charming, in a way. Little did I know how sick he was. He is sick, he likes hurting people.” Laurie swung her arm across my chest and pressed her face against mine. Her body felt as hot as a feverish child’s.

95

After midnight, I rolled over and noticed a shape beside the bed.
Stewart
, I thought, and shot upright. Stewart Hatch moved toward me and bent down to reveal Robert’s grinning face.

“Want to change places?” he whispered.

“Get out. No, don’t. I have to talk to you.”

Laurie mumbled, “Whuzz?”

“I’m going downstairs for a glass of milk,” I said, and she lapsed back into sleep.

I slipped into my shirt and pants. The gun, which I had hidden beneath my trousers, went into one of the blazer’s pockets. Robert kept grinning at me. My limitations amused him.

We padded past Posy’s and Cobbie’s bedrooms and down the stairs. I switched on the light over the butcher-block counter and took a glass to the liquor cabinet, where I found a half-empty liter of Johnnie Walker Black.

Robert eased into one of the chairs in the alcove. “Does our Laurie have a tendency to hit the bottle? You’re putting away more than usual, too.”

“Maybe a little. It’s been a hell of a week.” I lifted the glass. “Anyhow, to Toby Kraft. I guess he was a crook, but he sure did his best for Star. And me, come to think of it.”

“Certainly looks that way,” Robert said.

A little belligerently, I took the chair opposite his. “That’s interesting. I want to explore what you mean by that remark, but first you have to keep your mouth shut and listen to me. Last night, you were waiting for me in my room, looking at Rinehart’s book. You said something like, ‘Old Dad was a lousy writer, wasn’t he?’ How did you know Rinehart was our father? I didn’t tell you.”

“Am I allowed to talk now? How did I learn about Rinehart? The same way you did, I suppose. From Star. You’re not her only son, after all.”

“You’re lying.”

“Don’t forget, you had dinner up in the lounge with Nettie and May.”

“And you came to the hospital?”

“How do you think the poker money wound up in your pocket? Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but I couldn’t resist. Then I went in and said goodbye to Star, and she told me about Rinehart. Obviously, she was going to tell you the same thing. I was sure I could count on you to take it from there. For all your flaws, you’re a dependable lad.”

I could only stare at him. “You knew you could count on me.”

“To take the next step. I’ll shut up again, and you can fill me in.”

“Oh, I’ll fill you in,” I said. “Edward Rinehart was Howard
Dunstan’s son. I’m pretty sure he was illegitimate. He’s been looking for us most of our lives.” I described what Howard Dunstan had said to me by pretending that I had heard it from Joy. I told him about meeting Max Edison at the V.A. Hospital with Laurie. “Edison was still afraid of Rinehart, and so was Toby. Toby didn’t want me to mention his name. I’ll never say this to Laurie, but I think we got him killed. She said his name.”

Robert absorbed it all. “You don’t know that Rinehart killed Toby Kraft, and you shouldn’t blame yourself. You thought Rinehart was dead. Besides, Toby was in a dangerous profession, and I don’t mean pawnbroking. Concentrate on being grateful for the money he left you.”

“How do you know about that, I wonder?”

“I went into his safe, remember? When I took out Hatch’s papers, I came across Toby’s will and his insurance policies. With the real estate, it must come to about two million. Think of it as your dowry.”

“Too bad I gave most of it away,” I said.

Robert looked at me in genuine dismay. Then his eyes narrowed and his mouth lifted in a smile. “You’re joking.”

I told him about asking Creech to divide the money.

“What possessed you to do a ridiculous thing like that?”

I explained and said, “After all, Star should have inherited the money, not me.”

“I wish I didn’t believe it. Did the lawyer suggest that the money revert to you when the old girls kick the bucket?”

“C. Clayton Creech doesn’t miss a trick.”

“Could be another twenty years.”

“The aunts don’t spend money,” I said. “They use a one-way barter system.”

“Once they get their hands on a few hundred thousand, they might turn into model citizens. I can see Clark buying the biggest car in sight. Joy will put Clarence in a nursing home. Eventually, all three are going to wind up in nursing homes.”

“Good,” I said. “If they need nursing homes, they’ll be able to afford decent ones. That’s what the money is for.”

“It was supposed to be yours. Ours.”

“I hope you’re not thinking of killing them for it,” I said. What I thought was a joke earned me a sizzling glance of disgust. Robert shook his head and looked away.

“Robert, you didn’t kill Toby, did you?”

He sighed and shook his head again. “I should give up on you.”

“Tell me you didn’t murder him because you knew I would inherit his money.”

“It would get you off the hook, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have any reason to wallow in guilt, or to blame Laurie.”

I thought about the timing of Toby’s death, and the world seemed to stop moving.

“But to answer your question, no. I did not murder Toby Kraft. Sorry, you’ll have to live with your guilt.”