Savages: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (3 page)

I said, “As I said on the phone, Mrs. Ogden, I doubt there’s anything I can do for you.”

“Reserve judgment, please, until you’ve heard what I have to say.”

Whatever that was, she’d insisted on saying it in person rather than over the phone. And offered to pay me for my time if I’d come see her, whether I agreed to help her or not. That was as much the reason I was here as curiosity about the circumstances of her sister’s sudden death.

“And try to keep an open mind,” she added. “You may think me an unduly fixated and suspicious woman, based on our past association, but I assure you I’m not. I have good reason for my feelings about my brother-in-law.”

“Suppose you start by telling me how your sister died.”

“It was prominent in the media. You didn’t see any of the news stories?”

“I’m sorry, no, I didn’t.” That was because I make it a policy not to read newspapers or watch TV reportage.
There are news junkies and then there’s me, the anti–news junkie.

Celeste Ogden drew a deep breath, composing herself, before she said, “The official verdict was an accidental fall. Down a long staircase at her home in Palo Alto . . . severe head trauma. It happened sometime between ten and eleven at night and the light in the upstairs hall was burned out. The police believe she was on her way downstairs for some reason and tripped in the darkness.”

“But you don’t think it was an accident.”

“No, I don’t. She was pushed or thrown down those stairs.”

“By her husband?”

“By his order. He’s much too calculating to have done it himself. He was in Chicago when it happened, at a business conference.” Ridges of anger puckered her mouth, bent it down tight at the corners. “The perfect arranged alibi, while somebody else did his dirty work.”

Hired killing? Well, maybe. It isn’t as easy to hire a hit man as Hollywood and fiction writers would have you believe, particularly for corporate businessmen like Brandon Mathias who move in the upper echelons of society. On the other hand, if you’re cunning and ballsy enough and you’ve got enough money to spread around, anything is possible.

I asked, “Your sister was alone in the house at the time?”

“Except for whoever killed her, yes.”

“No evidence of an intruder?”

“None. Nothing was disturbed and all the doors and
windows were locked. The only way anyone could have gotten in was with a key, and he is the only person who could have provided one.”

Not quite true. Keys can be lost and found, or obtained in other ways. Nancy Mathias could also have let another person into the house, someone she knew or a fast-talking stranger with the right kind of story. But there was no benefit in pursuing any of that now.

“Who found the body?” I asked.

“Her cleaning woman, early the following morning. Philomena worked for Nancy for several years and had a key to the house.”

So much for providing that angle. “You said you had good reason to suspect your brother-in-law, Mrs. Ogden. What would that be, exactly?”

She arranged her hands in her lap, palms up, one on top of the other, and sat staring at them for a few seconds before she said, “Have you ever lost someone close to you, someone you loved very much?”

Uh-uh, I thought, I’m not going there. Not with her, not with anybody at this point in my life. “No,” I said. And I’m not going to.

“It’s devastating. Totally devastating. Nancy and I were very close, or at least we were until the past couple of years. She was my only sibling, the only person I cared deeply about other than my husband. When you have that sort of connection, your life becomes intertwined with the other person’s. You develop a sixth sense where they’re concerned that allows you to intuit things about them and
the people close to them. By observation and . . . osmosis, if you will. You understand?”

“Very well, yes.”

“There was a great deal wrong in my sister’s life since her marriage, especially during the past few months, and all of it was directly related to
him
.” Slight inflection on the pronoun. “He” and “him” every time she referred to Mathias, as if she couldn’t bear to speak his name.

“How do you mean ‘wrong’?”

“She wasn’t the same person after she married him. I sensed it would be that way—the reason I hired you to investigate him—and that was the way it was. Before she met him, she was high-spirited, vivacious . . . a word you don’t hear much anymore, but it describes Nancy perfectly. Afterward she grew distant, withdrawn, secretive, almost reclusive—a shadow of her former self, living in his shadow. His doing. I told you before he was a controlling personality.”

“Did he abuse her?”

“Not physically, so far as I know. Verbally, yes, oh yes. But never in public, of course. Cold, manipulative . . . a psychological abuser.”

“His wife as a possession, molded to his will?”

“Exactly. Everyone, including Nancy, is just an object to him. He has no compassion or other human feelings. All he understands is his own ambition.”

“And she tolerated this?”

“Nancy was . . . malleable. And needy, very needy.”

“Did she ever talk to you about her relationship with her husband?”

“Not to me, nor to anyone else. She was devoted to him; he could do no wrong in her eyes until recently. She defended him so fiercely whenever I brought up an issue that it was impossible to get through to her.”

“Until recently, you said. She showed signs of rebellion toward the end?”

“Not rebellion, exactly, no. The last time I saw her was four months ago, and then only for a few minutes. She wouldn’t return my phone calls or answer my e-mails.”

“If his control over her was that complete,” I said carefully, “why would he want her dead?”

“That is what I want you to find out.”

“Another woman?”

“I suppose that’s possible, although so far as I know he has never shown any interest in other women.”

“Bad investments? Illegal transactions of some kind?”

“Either one is possible,” she said. “I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

“I take it there was no prenuptial agreement?”

“I begged Nancy to have one drawn, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She believed that marriage is based on trust. If you couldn’t trust a man, you had no business marrying him in the first place.”

“So he inherits everything.”

“Yes. The company, her bank accounts, everything.”

“Approximately how much does the estate amount to?”

“In liquid assests, more than three million dollars.”

Plenty of motive for murder. But again, why would Mathias take the risk if he had her bent to his will? There’d have to be some other compelling reason besides financial gain. I asked, “Do you have any evidence, anything other than intuition, that Mathias was responsible for your sister’s death?”

“If I did, I would have taken it to the police and he’d be in jail now where he belongs.” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Are you one of these men who scoff at women’s intuition?”

“Not at all. I don’t doubt that you believe she was murdered and your brother-in-law arranged it.”

“But that’s not enough for you.”

“I didn’t say that. You know the people involved; I don’t. Does your husband feel as you do?”

“My husband?” She looked at me as if I’d made an offensive remark. “Why would you ask that?”

“No particular reason. It was just a question.”

“Dr. Ogden is a very busy man,” she said stiffly, as if that were an appropriate answer. Maybe it was. “I have his complete trust and support.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“I don’t expect the same from you,” she said, “but I’d like you . . . no, I
need
you to give me the benefit of the doubt. As much as I wish I were capable of proving his guilt myself, I simply don’t have the knowledge or the skills. You do.”

“There are other detective agencies—”

“But you already have a dossier on him and an understanding of my position. I trust you and I have faith in the thoroughness of your methods.”

“You weren’t so sure about that four years ago.”

“Four years ago,” she said, “I was a different person than I am now. Four years ago my sister was still alive.”

Awkward moment. I managed not to squirm. She was practiced at getting her way, and this whole conversation had been carefully manipulated with alternating prods of pathos, praise, and subtle demand. Even so, I couldn’t blame her. Her hatred of her brother-in-law may have been misguided, but both her grief and her conviction were genuine.

Saying no to someone in distress has never been easy for me. I tried to say it now, and what came out instead was a hedge: “I can’t conduct the sort of investigation you’re asking for on the basis of intuition alone. I’ve already done a deep background check on the man without turning up anything. If he’s as cunning as you say, there won’t be anything to find in the past four years, either. And if he is guilty of murder, he’ll have covered himself twice as thoroughly. Without some concrete facts as a starting point, I just don’t think I could—”

“What sort of facts?”

“Unusual recent occurrences in his life or hers. Anything out of the norm that might support the assumption of violence. Letters, messages, unexplained bills, that sort of thing.”

“A diary?”

“Or a diary, yes.”

She smiled faintly, a constrictive upward movement at the corners of her mouth, and picked up the white gift box and held it out to me.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

I took it from her. Inside were a dozen or so computer discs, each of which bore a set of dates, and several business-size envelopes and small manila envelopes stuffed with papers. I looked into a few of them: insurance policies, itemized credit card bills, utility and property tax bills, check registers and canceled checks, miscellaneous items that couldn’t be identified at a glance.

“Nancy’s,” she said. “All of it.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From her study at her home. The day after she died, before he came back from Chicago.”

“You have a key to the house?”

“No. He wouldn’t allow it. I went to see Philomena and convinced her to let me have hers.”

“Does Mathias know you took all this?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about it at the funeral. Hardly spoke a word to me.”

“What’s on the computer discs?”

“Nancy kept a daybook. Faithfully, every day, since she was a child. Usually just a few lines about her day, impressions, and so on.”

“Up to the time of her death?”

“To the very night, in fact.”

“So you’ve read everything on the discs?”

“More than once. The rest, too, of course.”

“And?”

“Hints, little things that I’m at a loss to explain—out of the norm, as you put it. You’ll be able to tell what they are, I think.”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“I’d rather you discover them for yourself.” The faint nonsmile again. “Without my biased input.”

I said, “I didn’t know your sister or anything about her private life.”

“You’ll know enough by the time you’ve examined everything in that box.”

Probably more than I’d ever want to know, I thought.

“Just study it all with an open mind,” Celeste Ogden said, “that’s all I ask. When you’re done, I think you’ll understand why I don’t believe Nancy’s death was an accident.”

“Maybe so. But I still may not want to undertake this sort of investigation—”

“Of course you will,” she said in her imperious way. She got to her feet. “Excuse me a moment,” and away she went, leaving me alone with my doubts and the box full of a dead woman’s private leavings.

I pushed the contents around again with the tips of two fingers. But my mind wasn’t on Nancy Mathias. It was Kerry I was thinking about when Celeste Ogden came back into the room. This time what she had in her hand was a check.

“One thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s sufficient for the time being, I trust.”

I had the feeling, holding the check, that she hadn’t just made it out; that it had been written long before I got there. A woman used to getting her own way, all right. A woman you couldn’t say no to in a situation like this, no matter how hard you tried.

JAKE RUNYON

It started out as just another routine assignment.

Some operatives would consider it dull routine—deliver a subpoena to a reluctant witness in a robbery-assault case—but it was the kind he liked because it entailed a road trip. He felt better when he was on the move. Didn’t matter where he went or why. Driving, moving, energized him, gave him a measure of peace that he seldom found when he was caught between four walls.

The road trip in this case would be manageable in one long day if the timing were right, but he had other agency business to take care of that Friday and he couldn’t get out of the city until early afternoon. The subpoena could have waited until Monday for delivery, but he never felt right about putting off a job when he had the opportunity to do it immediately—the more so when there was a static
weekend to be gotten through. As it was, he’d stay over in a motel somewhere around Gray’s Landing. The four-hour run back to San Francisco would use up most of Saturday morning and he could stretch the day out with a detour or two.

This Saturday was the first in weeks he hadn’t been able to fill up with work. Busy summer, lots of overtime—also just the way he liked it. What he didn’t like was the reason behind the heavy workload. He didn’t know Bill or his wife very well, Kerry hardly at all, but the news of her breast cancer had slammed him a little because of Colleen. Ugly damn coincidence. He knew what they were going through, both of them. Breast tumor, surgery, radiation—that was bad, but at least it was the curable kind of cancer with a high survival rate. Ovarian cancer, the kind Colleen had had, was a death sentence. Six months of pain and fading hopes and not-so-quiet desperation before she was finally, mercifully gone. But it would never be over for him. He would continue to live with the suffering, hers and his both, every day and every night until he drew his last breath. He hoped to God, if there was a God, that Bill wouldn’t have to do the same.