Natural Causes (4 page)

"You were in L.A. yesterday?"

She took another swig of bourbon and belched. "Yeah,
so what?"

"Do you know what Quentin was doing out there?"

"Getting his kicks," she said.

"I thought he went out there on business."

"Maybe he did," she said. "That's what
they tell me, anyhow."

"The police?" I said.

But she wasn't listening to me. She was miles away,
adrift on a sea of bourbon.

"I just wanted ta' call my Momma," the girl
mused. "That's all. But, no. Connie says I can't. She says she
doesn't want any of them showing up at the funeral and spoiling it
for everybody. I haven't seen my Momma or Poppa in three years. I got
a right. What's she expect me to do? Read some goddamn book on the
stages of grief, like she did? I said to her, 'Connie, I'll tell you
something. You best lay off of me or you're going to be mighty
sorry.' I'm not blind. I know a thing or two. And the bitch knows it,
too." The girl glared at me savagely.

"She damn well knows it!" she said again.
She turned her head and looked at the bottle of whiskey. "Maybe
I'm not perfect. Maybe I'm not the perfect wife. Quentin wasn't
anybody's fool. I told her, 'He knew he was getting damaged goods.
And he was damn happy to have them. And you know it, too!' Quentin
knew what I was. And I knew what he was. We both had our faults. But
we loved each other. Shit, yes, we loved each other." She picked
up the bottle and hugged it to her breasts. "He loved me. And
she can't change that fact or take that away from me--no matter what
she says about doctors or probate. My Momma ain't gonna let anybody
probate my ass. Quentin wouldn't have let her do it, either."
She began to cry. "He loved me."

I felt like holding her--to calm her down and give
her back a sense of companionship. But she wasn't the kind of girl I
could touch like that. It wouldn't have meant the same thing. At
least, it wouldn't have to me.

"I'm sorry he's dead," I said. "It
must have been a terrible shock for you."

"It was," she said through her tears. "You
shoulda seen him. Connie wouldn't look. She wouldn't even look at the
damn photographs. But I looked. They made me look. Only thing I
recognized was his mouth. The rest of it. .." She covered her
mouth with her hand and gagged.

"Don't talk about it," I said.

"Gotta talk about it," she whispered. "If
I don't, I fucking will go nuts. Keep dreaming about it. The way he
looked. It made me wanna die, too, seeing him like that. Going to
die, anyway, like Quentin said. She wouldn't give a shit. Nobody
would."

Marsha Dover looked forlornly across the terrace.
"Look at this place." I looked down at the beautiful little
garden. "I never wanted it. Not any part of it. Quentin wanted
it. No." She shook her head. "That's not true. I wanted it.
I just don't want it anymore. And that's the truth. It doesn't matter
anymore. None of it."

She sat up on the chair and the towel fell below her
breasts. I almost had to catch my breath--she was that beautiful. "I
shouldn'ta left," she said softly. "Shoulda stayed at home
like Momma said. I was just a dumbass kid, balling bikers and living
my own stupid little life. Shoulda stayed in Indianapolis. It's where
I belonged. I got no place to go now. Lost my only friend in the
world."

"Maybe you could go home for awhile," I
said. "Stay with your family."

She shook her head. "They wouldn't have me back.
Treat me like I'm dead, 'cause of what I did. 'Cause of Quentin.

"Can't go back," she said with sudden
anger. "I changed too much. Quentin changed it all. Too hard,
now. I'd break ... break whatever I touched."

She held the whiskey bottle out and stared at it for
a second. Then she threw it toward the edge of the pool, where it
cracked against the concrete apron.

"Oh, Christ," the girl said in a
heartbroken voice.

She got to her feet and the towel fell away
completely. Marsha Dover stumbled crazily across the terrace and
walked straight through the broken glass. She winced when she stepped
on it but kept going, trailing blood behind her.

"Hold on," I shouted at her.

She just kept walking--right into the pool. She
bobbed in the water, her blonde hair floating about her head, then
began to sink in a vortex of bubbles and hair and lazy swirls of
blood.

"Jesus!" I said under my breath.

I hopped over the lounge chair, ran across the
terrace, and dove into the pool. The girl kicked viciously at me when
I tried to pull her out. But I managed to get a choke hold on her and
drag her to the shallows.

She cursed and screamed at me. "Get off me, you
fucking ape! Let go of me, goddamn it!"

Then she got sick, doubling over and coughing up pool
water and bourbon. Then she passed out in my arms, leaving me
knee-deep in puke and blood and chlorine, with the smell of bourbon
rising around me like a mist.
 

5

I found a sliding glass door at the back of the house
and managed to get Marsha Dover through it and onto a couch inside.
After bandaging the cuts on her feet with strips I'd torn off the
towel, I phoned Jack Moon and told him what had happened.

"Jesus," he said. "She really went
bonkers, huh?"

"Yeah. Thanks a lot, buddy, for helping to
arrange things."

"Sorry," he said. "But I did warn you
she was drunk."

"Well, you didn't warn me strongly enough. Now
what the hell are we going to do?"

"I could call Quentin's mother, I guess."

"I don't know if that's such a hot idea," I
said. "Marsha doesn't seem to be crazy about the woman."

"You got any other suggestions?"

I thought it over. "O.K. Call Mom. I'll wait
here until she arrives."

"You're going to miss the plane."

"Then we'll catch one in the morning, Jack,"
I said and hung up on him.

I sat down on a recliner across from the couch and
closed my eyes. I was probably ruining an expensive chair with my wet
clothes, but I didn't care. What the girl had done had shaken all
that kind of caring out of me. I sat there for a few minutes, while
Marsha Dover snoozed her drunk away. Then I turned on a table lamp,
took a decanter of whiskey off a mahogany sideboard, and drank from
the bottle.

It was first-rate Scotch. Everything that Quentin
Dover had owned had been first-rate, including the little number on
the couch. Getting sick had taken about three months off her tan, but
she was still beautiful to look at. Beautiful and not a brain in her
head-an exquisite little fucking machine.

"Jesus," I said aloud.

I walked out to the
terrace and found a robe, crumpled up by the liquor cart. I brought
it back inside and covered her with it. Asleep she looked about
sixteen. She was probably no more than twenty-four or five, anyway.
Just a dumb cracker from Indianapolis. I'd had a Hoosier friend who
used to call it 'India-no-place'. That's probably what she'd called
it, too. India-no-place. I brushed the wet hair off her face, and she
moved her head slightly and sank deeper into the pillows. I sat down
again on Quentin Dover's tuxedo chair and watched her sleep.

***

I'd drunk a good bit of the Scotch by the time Connie
Dover arrived. I heard a car drive up to the garages and crunch to a
stop in the gravel turnaround. Then I heard someone fumbling at a
latch. Lights began to go on all over the dark house, refracted by
the cut-glass panes of French doors and the crystal baubles of
chandeliers. The woman came marching toward us on a wave of refulgent
light. When she got to the back room, she stood in the archway for a
moment, fists on her hips, and stared sternly at her daughter-in-law.

She was a smart-looking woman in her fifties--thin,
thin-breasted, with fine, frosted blonde hair parted in the middle
and knotted in back, at the nape of her neck. A wing of hair had
fallen across her cheek and she brushed it savagely with her hand.

"I should have known this was going to happen,"
she said angrily and switched her gaze from Marsha to me. She had
cold blue eyes and her skin was as pale and powdered as Marsha's was
tan. "Are you Stoneman?"

"Stoner," I said.

"You do good work, Stoner," she said
sarcastically.

"I wasn't hired to look after your
daughter-in-law." The woman tossed her head at me, as if that
were beside the point. "Come on. Let's lug the sack of guts
upstairs."

I carried Marsha Dover up to a bedroom. Her
mother-in-law turned down the covers on the bed and I put her on the
sheets.

Connie Dover stared at the girl for a moment. "She's
a beautiful thing, isn't she? Beautiful but, oh, so dumb." She
flipped a blanket over her body.

"Maybe you should call a doctor."

"Why? Have they discovered a cure for stupidity
now?"

"Her feet," I said. "She cut them
pretty badly."

"She'll be all right," the woman said. "Her
problem isn't with her feet anyway. It's up here." She tapped
her head. "And in her groin."

She flipped off the light and we walked back down the
staircase.

"I suppose she flashed her rear end at you?"
Mrs. Dover said. "That's her usual routine."

"She was pretty drunk and pretty shaken up."

"And tomorrow she'll be sober and contrite, and
tomorrow night she'll be drunk again. It never stops. I don't know
how Quentin could stand it. That girl's got a personality like house
current. On again, off again. When she's on, she's little Miss
Polymorphous Perversity. When she's off, she's what's left over when
you take her toys away. Which isn't much, believe me. In either case,
she's a child and has to be treated like one." The woman gave me
a pointed look. "She's not to be trusted, you know. She's an
inveterate liar. Quentin rescued her from a life of dismal poverty,
and she repaid him with public drunkenness and countless adulteries.
God knows how many men she must have had. She probably qualifies
under state law as a public utility."

"You really like her, don't you?" I said.
"I mean deep down inside."

The woman eyed me coldly. "That's not funny. I'm
trying to do you a favor, Stoner. Jack tells me that you've been
hired to investigate my son's tragic death. I don't know what there
is to investigate. The police have already ruled it an accident. But
if you're going to go traipsing through Quentin's life, I can at
least put you on the right track. To listen to Marsha, you'd think I
was a monster and my son forced her to live a life of sinful luxury,
away from the bosom of her family. Her family! Well, if you ever want
to make a case for heredity affecting I.Q., take a good close look at
that brood."

"And what was your son really like, Mrs. Dover?"

She stood very still, at the foot of the stairs. "He
was a bright, witty, generous man," she said and her eyes teared
up. "He was good to everyone. And it's a sin for anyone to say
otherwise."

Connie Dover began to wobble unsteadily on her feet.
I reached for her arm.

"I'm all right," she said quickly. "I'm
quite all right." She wiped the tears from her eyes with her
fingertips. "Really. You can release me. I won't fall."

I let go of her arm, and she braced herself against
the stairpost.

"It's just been such a terrible week," she
said. "And I'm worn out."

"Do you feel up to talking to me? I have a few
questions I'd like to ask. But I could come back some other time, if
you want."

She dropped her hand from the post and drew herself
up quickly. "I'd be happy to talk to you. In fact, there is
nothing I would rather do, especially after what you must have heard
from Marsha. We'll go to the kitchen. I need a cup of coffee, and you
look like you could use one too.

I also looked like something that would leave a stain
on Quentin's brocade loveseats, and the kitchen stools were wood. I
sat down on one of them, while Mrs. Dover brewed a pot of coffee on a
free-standing Jenn-Air range. A huge, beaten copper chimney was
suspended above the stove, with copper and silver pots dangling like
tassels from its skirts.

The woman talked as she worked. "It's going to
be lonely in this house without Quentin. It's really far too big for
just two people. But then I had hopes that he would have children."

"There are none?"

The woman laughed mordantly. "No, there are no
children--just Marsha. She was all the child that Quentin and I could
handle. But then you saw for yourself."

"Yes," I said. I could see that Marsha
Dover must have been a handful.

"You know, she's tried that kind of thing
before," Connie Dover said. "That's why I didn't get upset
about her feet. I wasn't being heartless just sane. There were weeks
when we had a different doctor out here every other day. I've just
run out of names at this point. Names and patience. She wore my son
down, Stoner, with pranks like that. She ruined his health and his
wellbeing. It would have been different if she were deeply
troubled, but Marsha's never felt anything deeply in her life. She's
all shallows. It's one to her-attempting suicide, making love,
getting drunk, whatever strikes her fancy."