Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (7 page)

Okay, so this wasn’t heaven, either, maybe, but I was jealous as hell of everyone who lived in these houses, people who drove Cords and Bentleys, I guessed. And Rolls Royces. I was jealous of Joe Richmond for being one of these people, until I remembered he was dead, and that what must have been a beautiful life— or was it?— had ended in an ugly death a couple of thousand miles away from Lake of the Isles.

The house was built of big stone slabs. It had an iron entry gate set into a stone archway. Set into the stone was a brass plaque that said Anderson. There was a button beside the gate. I hopped out of my cheap transportation and pushed the button. Half a minute later, the gate swung open. I drove in, about seventy-five feet to the turnaround near the front door, and parked behind a BMW.
Big deal
, I thought, disappointed. I could see a BMW anytime in my own neighborhood.

As I walked up the steps, the big dark wood front door opened smoothly and a pleasant-looking woman of sixty or so greeted me by name. I had called from the airport and been told to “come along anytime this afternoon” by this same slightly high-pitched voice. When I inquired, on the phone, I was told she was not Mrs. Anderson. The Andersons were out. She was the housekeeper.

So the housekeeper let me in. She did have the caution to put a question mark after “Mr. Samson?” but she seemed to assume I was not there to sell her magazines. I was grateful.

Emily Richmond was sitting in a lounge chair beside the pool, a book with a flowered cover in her hand. A swimming pool is no big deal in California, where lots of middle-class people have them and get to use them most of the year. But in a place like Minneapolis, I guessed, with three warm months a year, a pool represented real luxury.

So did Emily Richmond. She was wearing a loosely belted ankle-length robe, a pearl-gray confection I was pretty sure was silk. I caught a glimpse of swimsuit under it. The day was not warm enough for sunbathing. Either the pool was heated or she was pretending she was home in Southern California. For my benefit, or rather for my non-benefit, still holding the book, she wrapped the robe more securely around herself. Then she stood and walked over to me. She was tall and slender, five-nine or ten. She transferred the book to her left hand and held out her right.

I took it for just a second, a long and graceful hand. Even her hair was long and graceful, fine and ash blond, falling down beside one eye, along the curve and angle of cheek. Her eyes were gray, like the robe, and like the eyes of a woman I once loved. Her lips were finely made, not full and not thin, and her nose was long and perfect. She smiled at me, just the tiniest bit, and invited me to sit at a poolside table. The housekeeper was still hovering. Mrs. Richmond asked if I would like some iced tea and I said I would be grateful. The housekeeper was dispatched.

“I’m sorry about your husband,” I said. She nodded, a slight tilt of the head, a slight dropping of the eyelids.

“Thank you. You’ve come a long way to tell me that.”

She was serious.

“I don’t understand. Didn’t you get my phone message? That I’m investigating his death?”

She looked at me, perplexed in a dreamy way. “Yes, but there’s nothing to investigate, is there? I mean why would you do that? He killed himself.”

“Well, there are some people involved with his campaign who don’t think he would do that. So they hired me. Just to check things out.”

She nodded. “That explains it.”

I looked for some sign of anger that she’d been left out of the decision, left out of the conviction that someone had done her husband in. I saw none, I did see some slight amusement. Our tea arrived. Emily Richmond thanked the servant and dismissed her. I took a long drink.

“Why doesn’t it bother you that someone hired me without consulting you?”

“Because I really have no involvement with them. With the campaign.”

“Do you mean,” I persisted, “that you planned to stay altogether separate from your husband’s gubernatorial campaign? Not be with him?”

“It was silly. He couldn’t win. Why spend all that time and money and energy for nothing? He knew from the beginning I wouldn’t participate.”

“Let me see if I understand,” I said gently. “The two of you talked it over at the very beginning and you told him you wouldn’t work with him on this? How did he react to that?”

“No, Mr. Samson. You don’t understand. We never talked it over. There was no need to talk it over. He knew. I don’t do public things. I’m a poet. A private person. A solitary person. I find social intercourse painful and exhausting.”

She looked at my glass of tea, still half full. I did not take the hint, swallow the rest of it and get the hell out of there. Instead, I played sympathetic.

“I understand. And even so, despite your feelings, he went ahead and began running?”

She smiled that slight smile again. “Not despite my feelings, Mr. Samson. Despite my lack of feelings.”

She was stroking the flowered cover of her book, almost tenderly. It looked like one of those jobs the craftsies sell on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley— a handmade book of blank pages, to be used as a journal. “Your lack of feelings,” I echoed. “For your husband?”

“Joe was a wonderful man,” she said noncommittally. “He loved me desperately. Actually, people used to say he adored me.” Her expression was soft, reminiscent, pleasant. As though the man had been dead a dozen years.

“But how did you feel about him?”

She frowned at me, a change in expression as small as her smile. “I was grateful. When I wanted companionship, he gave it to me. When I didn’t, he left me alone. And he didn’t have a wife hanging all over him, keeping him from traveling, from his political activities.”

“Why did you marry him?” I asked her, taking care to speak very softly. “For his money?”

She laughed, a quick, breathy sound. “The money is mostly mine. He had some. I had more.” She was stroking the book again, glancing at my quarter-full glass. This time, I thought she might simply ask me to leave, but the housekeeper appeared at the door.

“Telephone, Mrs. Richmond.” With a tiny moue of annoyance, and not a word to me, she glided off into the dimness of the house.

She left the book on the table. I slid it over. Sure enough, it was one of those journal books, bound in board and covered with blue cotton scattered with yellow and purple flowers. I turned to the first page.

This morning When the fence posts steamed like dung, You cried.

I didn’t have time to think about that right then. I wanted to read more. The poem on the next page was longer.

This is a weed

growing like

a flower,

and I can never tell

until

the seeds

all blow away.

On the page after that, something slightly more personal:

You know,

I’ve never been a summer woman

dancing on the beach,

or autumn’s silent dignity,

or winter storms

that shriek

and turn to mud,

or spring,

the easy birth of yellow-green.

I was just turning the page when I heard, “Mr. Samson!” and looked up to see Emily Richmond staring at me. She walked easily across the stones of the terrace and whipped the book out of my hand. Her eyes were not hot with anger but very, very cold.

“I did not mind having you ask me questions about my marriage, Mr. Samson,” she said through white lips. “But this”— she shook the book at me— “is a ruthless invasion of privacy.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I lied. “I had no idea what it was. I thought it was an ordinary book. I was just going to pass the time with it.”

“How much did you read?” she demanded.

“Hardly anything. Then I realized—”

She didn’t believe me. “Is there anything else you want to know about my husband?”

“Actually, yes. You said he had money. Where did he get it?”

Still standing, she said, “He inherited it. From his family’s mill. Richmond Mills. He’s a cousin.”

Pretty big company
, I thought;
plenty to go around for all the kin
. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Why is it that his friends think he was murdered and you seem to think he killed himself?”

“Maybe I knew him better than they did. Or possibly they never saw his depressed side. I certainly did.”

Yes
, I thought,
I’ll bet you did
. As though she had picked up on that thought, she glared at me. It was the closest thing to a full, human expression I had yet seen.

“One more thing,” I said pleasantly. “Where were you the day he died?”

Her face had become nearly blank again. “In my house in Bel Air. By myself.”

“Did you spend any time with anyone that day?”

“Only the servants. I hope that’s all, Mr. Samson, because you really have exhausted me. I’m going to my room, and I’ll ask the housekeeper to see you out.”

“Thank you. See you at the funeral?” She was already gone.

The housekeeper saw me out, but not before I ripped a piece of paper out of my notebook, wrote down both my local and Oakland numbers, and stuffed the paper into her plump, firm hand. Just in case Emily decided she wanted to talk to me again about her husband. In a moment of caper fantasy, I wondered if I could manage to break into this house late that night, steal Emily’s book, read the whole thing, really try to get a fix on her. But I didn’t know which room was hers. Also, I figured the house was probably well wired, and the local police would be very good about calls from Lake of the Isles. Finally, reading that whole book would probably send me into a depression so heavy my plane wouldn’t take off on Wednesday.

I have a problem with poetry. I like some of it, sometimes. But it’s hard to judge. Once I read a poem I thought was really terrific, and it turned out to be the ravings of a hospitalized schizophrenic. Of course, that doesn’t mean the poem wasn’t great. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what the hell it does mean.

JOE Richmond’s mother lived outside the city in a close-in, rich old suburb, in a monstrous late Victorian with one of those iron fences that look like they’re made of spears. The gate was open. I drove in.

The house sat placidly in a nest of shrubs in the middle of an acre or two of perfect lawn. A few big trees covered its rear, just in case the spear fence wasn’t enough to protect it from the twentieth century. There was an entry porch, a second-floor balcony above that, and, at roof level, a widow’s walk that you could get to only, as far as I could tell, by climbing out the windows of two tall round towers, one at each of the front corners. The left-hand tower had a rooster weather vane at its peak. A hodgepodge of gables stuck out of the roof at various spots, overhung with elaborately carved eaves. In San Francisco, someone would have completed the fantasy with a three-color paint job, but this house was painted white— trim and all.

I left my car in the well-raked gravel drive and crunched up to the walk leading to the front steps. The people in the house pretended they hadn’t noticed my arrival until I rang the bell.

An old man wearing a navy blue suit and a navy blue tie with a white shirt answered the door. He had cold blue eyes and a face ironed smooth except for the thousands of wrinkles and micropouches around his eyes.

“Samson,” I said. “Mrs. Richmond is expecting me.”

He nodded. “Please come this way, Mr. Samson.”

He led me down a long, empty hallway— no hall trees or little fancy tables with mirrors over them. No elephant leg umbrella stands, nothing— and through one of those double sliding doors the Victorians used to hide their parlors behind.

“I’ll tell Mrs. Richmond you’re here,” he said. I nodded, looking around the room, which didn’t go with the house very well. It was done in French Provincial, with lots of white wood and gilt and pictures of people who looked like George and Martha Washington. A museum exhibit from the wrong century entirely. Even the mantle looked like it had been ripped out of an older house, somewhere outside of Paris, and stuck against the Victorian firebox.

I sat down on a chair that looked pretty sturdy, resisting the temptation to check the seat of my pants for dust, first. On the table next to the chair was a music box with the figures of two little eighteenth-century people perched on top. When you cranked the box, they did a minuet. I was playing with that when Mrs. Richmond senior came in the door.

I had been expecting a dowager type. Gray hair, big bosom with a brooch pinned at her chest, rings, maybe even a cane. I got the rings, but nothing else.

She wore a big square-cut emerald on her right index finger and an even bigger ruby on her left ring finger. She was wearing those sunglasses you can’t see through, so I couldn’t see her eyes at all, and her eyes, I guessed, would show her age. She had to be at least sixty-five, I reasoned, since Joe had been in his early forties and had, according to Pam, an older brother. Unless she wasn’t the mother of the older brother. Maybe she wasn’t Joe’s mother either? Maybe there was a mistake and she was their sister? My face must have shown my confusion. I stood up.

She smiled. “Mr. Samson? I’m Marietta Richmond. Why don’t you explain to me exactly what it is you want to know, and who is paying you to conduct an investigation into my son’s death?”

I smiled back. Her teeth were definitely her own, I could see the slightest sag under her chin, but the hair was carefully and expensively dyed a soft brown. Her shapely, firm-looking body was encased in a long, sleeveless form-fitting royal blue dress of some soft cottony fabric. I couldn’t see her legs, but the arms were smooth and slender. I wished passionately to see her eyes.

“I’m sorry if I seem to be looking at you too much, Mrs. Richmond,” I said. “But I’m finding it hard to believe you were Joe’s mother. Not to mention having an even older son.”

“You’re very sweet, Jake.”

“Thank you. And in answer to your questions, my client is a friend of his, a political connection. And I want to know about his life, what kinds of relationships he had with what kinds of people. My client believes someone killed him. People usually have reasons for killing other people.”