Trouble in Rooster Paradise (34 page)

“
If there’s anything I can do for
you, please don’t hesitate to call.”

He needed to say it. I knew it just as sure as
I knew I’d never call him.

The back of my head still hurt when I put my
hat on in the hallway. I noticed the bouquet of roses was gone as I
walked away from my office. I slipped a clove in my mouth and
opened Dag Erickson’s door to take a friendly reconnoitering
peek.

The flowers sat on Cissy’s desk. A good
sign.

She was at her typewriter. I studied her
pondering profile, noted the brow knotted into a scowl, the lower
lip pinned down by front teeth. She turned to me as I
entered.

It was probably my imagination, but I thought I
saw a fleeting tenderness in her eyes before they turned stormy.
She fixed me with a venomous stare and said in almost a whisper,
“May I help you?”

“
Peace offering okay?” I asked,
nodding to the roses.

“
Let me make something perfectly
clear. It’s not like I own you or anything. You’re over twenty-one.
It’s just that I expect a wee bit of consideration if you’re not
going to show up when you say you are. I mean, what was I to think?
Especially after what had happened the last time I saw you? For all
I knew you’d been killed and were lying in some gutter. How do you
think I felt?”

She bit her lip petulantly. I said I was
sorry.

Knowing Cissy, she probably hadn’t seen the
newspapers—generally too much lunacy and heartache for her taste.
But, even if she had, thanks to Rikard Lundeen and Addison Darcy,
certain details never saw ink. I apologized again and told her
those details.

She listened respectfully and I watched her
thin-lipped pout give way to shock and sorrow.

“
Does it help at all to say again
that I’m sorry?” I said.

The first sign of absolution was a small and
rather formal smile.

I checked my watch and started for the
door.

“
Listen, Sweet Knees, I really want
to make amends. Let me buy you dinner tomorrow night.”

“
I don’t know—”

“
I’d take you out tonight, but I’ve
got a feeling I’ll be grim company later. But how about a prime rib
feast in the Georgian Room over at the Olympic? Cocktails and all
the trimmings. What do you say?”

That won her over.

“
Great. We’ll talk more then. Right
now, I’ve got to go meet a man with a checkered past.”

Even though my story was winding down to a
close, I insisted on taking a short break. After chewing and
swallowing the last of the hardtack with herring, I said to Kirsti,
“It still dumbfounds me, Blue Eyes, how many irrational people make
up the world. I’m convinced that most humans are lunatics to some
degree.”

Kirsti’s look was more sympathy than
understanding. Like my grandmother used to say, you can’t put an
old head on a young body.

Still, I felt a need to explain.

“
I don’t mean it like it sounds,
Kirsti. Most people aren’t crazy enough so as to spot it, or to
where they’d get themselves locked away in a mental hospital.
They’re just crazy when it comes to some important or critical
issues.”

She gave me a charitable smile.

“
I’m serious. How else do you
account for the way people live their lives? How else can you
explain the huge gap between the beliefs and opinions people mouth
and their personal choices and behavior?”

She stayed silent.

“
I rest my case.”

The drive to Rikard Lundeen’s was disquieting.
It meant a return to The Highlands and to thoughts of Blanche Arnot
and Britt Anderson. Britt would be haunting me for quite a while.
That I knew.

Charlie was at the gatehouse again. He
dutifully found me on his clipboard and sent me on
through.

I parked my Chevy in front of Rikard Lundeen’s
stately New England-style manor house. It was way too big for a
widower to rattle around in.

Lundeen’s old manservant gave me a
suit-off-the-rack look before he let me in. His quick appraisal
told me that if I were a dinner guest I’d be seated way down table
and out of reach of the salt. He left me waiting in a living room
with floor-to-ceiling draperies and furniture with sapphire-colored
upholstery and blond woodwork. The décor was but one of many
bothersome details Lundeen had turned over to hired
help.

I spent ten minutes studying the original works
of art that adorned the white walls around me. Abstract
expressionism. All I saw was a jumble of colored blotches, slashes,
and twirls that some visionary had splashed on canvas, put into
frames, and then taken money for his perversity. Had these somehow
spoken to Rikard Lundeen? Or were they just high-priced
window-dressing?

I sat on a hybrid daveno that lengthwise could
easily have slept two. Rikard Lundeen entered the room, followed by
his manservant carrying a metal tray that held cups and a porcelain
decanter.

I stood to meet him. He clasped my hand in both
of his and wagged it in the air a full ten seconds.

“
Masterfully done, son. Masterfully
done,” he said.

When he let go of me I handed him my bill with
itemized expenses and made the obligatory
by-all-means-check-it-over comment.

“
That won’t be necessary, son. Not
at all.” He glanced at the total, shoved the paper into his pocket
and took his checkbook from his coat and made me out a
check.

I thanked him and put the check in my wallet. I
resumed my spot on the daveno and he sat in a chair across from me.
The manservant left after pouring us coffee.

We talked about some of the events of the past
several days and how they’d unfolded. I was tempted to let it go at
that. After all, I reasoned, what difference did it make? But then
Lundeen went and gave me an opening I couldn’t ignore.

“
Addison Darcy, that randy old son
of a bitch. It looks like his wicked ways almost caught up with
him.”

“
Funny thing that,” I said,
positioning a fresh clove with teeth and tongue to the left side of
my mouth. “Just as Blanche Arnot was about to shoot your friend
Addison, she said something about ridding the earth of him, and
afterward it would be his old buddy’s turn. Any idea whom she meant
by that?”

Lundeen didn’t say anything.

“
It got the police curious. They
asked me if I knew who this old buddy Blanche referred to might
be,” I said.

“
And what did you tell
them?”

“
That they might find the answer in
the blackmail photos or in Christine Johanson’s diary.”

“
And will they?” His voice had
dropped an octave.

“
No. Guy de Carter had yet to take
photos of you and Christine, and she didn’t name you in her
diary.”

“
How long have you
known?”

“
About your budding affair with
Christine?”

He gave a nod.

“
I had a few inklings along the way.
Her diary refers to you as Slick, as in slicked-back hair,” I said,
pointing to his head. “You’re not listed as a repeat customer at
Fasciné Expressions, but then I remembered you telling me that you
stopped by the place from time to time to take its pulse. But it
really wasn’t until Blanche Arnot made her ‘old buddy’ comment that
I made a solid connection. You live just down the road from Darcy.
You were going to be her next stop.”

“
I see.”

“
It made me rethink a few
conversations. You told me that you and Darcy made trips together
and raised hell when you were younger. Darcy told me that he
practically lived in New York City due to business, and that he
liked to take in the shows. As you must know by now, Blanche Arnot
had been a Ziegfeld Girl.”

That news didn’t surprise him.

“
At the Moonglow Eats the other day,
you told me that the golddigger I’d helped you with previously had
gotten off easy because you’d mellowed with age. I understand
better now what you meant by that comment. You
have
mellowed.

“
Blanche Arnot told me a pitiful
tale about her good friend Sally Miller, a fellow chorine who’d
been betrayed, framed, and sent to prison by her lover and his
friend. Both were businessmen. Out-of-towners with local pull. The
Miller girl died in prison. Addison Darcy had been her lover. And
you,
Mr. Lundeen, were his old buddy. You helped him to get
rid of the girl once she’d become a liability.”

He closed his eyes for a second, opened them
and looked at me speculatively.

I continued, “Blanche Arnot never forgot you
two. When she married and came to Seattle, she recognized both of
you. She was an unstable woman, kept reasonably stable by a man who
loved her—her physician husband. But then he died. If that didn’t
push her over the edge, I think it at least allowed her to jump.
She hatched an elaborate revenge for you and your old pal. She
chose a trap that fit your crime and that she was sure would snare
you both. And whaddaya know? She almost pulled it off.”

Lundeen’s breathing was shallow and his rugged
cheeks had reddened. He regained possession of himself with no
little effort, deliberately taking slow deep breaths. I stood up to
leave. He stayed seated, watching me.

“
Blackmail was to be only stage one.
But the murder of Christine Johanson set everything and everyone
connected to her reeling. Including you. I believed your spiel
about concern for family. But you weren’t really too interested in
clearing Dirk. Mind you, I don’t think you have anything against
the boy, but it probably would have suited your purposes just as
well had Dirk quickly been found guilty. You hired me for
insurance. What you really wanted was a plausible explanation to
spoon-feed the police and any of the press you don’t already have
in your pocket. How was it you put it again? You wanted me to
‘contain anything disturbing.’ Wasn’t that it?”

He stood and gave me a level stare with his
slate blue eyes. I kept thinking about all his sanctimonious talk
of family, when but a day or two before he’d been making moves on
his godson’s girlfriend, getting set to jump her bones.

“
So, what do you propose to do now?”
he asked flatly.

“
Not a thing,” I said. “That chorus
girl’s been dead for over thirty years. Anything resembling a case
against you died with a madwoman. And the last time I checked
there’s no law on the books against being a jerk or a conniving old
roué. Not on
man’s
books anyway.”

Then I gave him a glassy-eyed smile and got the
hell out of there. I found my hat in the anteroom before the smarmy
manservant made his showing.

Outside, heavy drizzle doused the grounds and
shrubbery. Everything had a dismal, disenchanting look, like a
fairy kingdom gone sour. I got in my Chevy and edged down the
driveway until the windshield wipers started to make a difference.
I stopped at the border of Lundeen’s property and let the engine
noise compete with the sound of rain battering the car
body.

“
Like a tiger getting beat out of
the brush.” Lundeen had said that right after de Carter had tried
to kill Darcy and me. But Lundeen knew better. It wasn’t just
scandal he worried about. His instincts for self-preservation were
strong. He sensed a personal danger from the very start. I was the
baby goat. The bleating kid. I was hired to be the tiger
bait.

Lundeen hadn’t mellowed with age at all. I was
wrong about that. He’d merely slowed.

I rolled down the window. As my sleeve and
shoulder got wet I took from my wallet the card with Rikard
Lundeen’s private number scrawled on it. I tore it into little
pieces and tossed them in a nearby Thuja hedge. Or was it Viburnum?
They all look the same in the rain.

“
Good for you, Gunnar,” Kirsti said
sweetly, her eyes shiny. She suddenly looked extraordinarily lovely
and alive to a guy who’d already reached for more than his share of
brass rings. “That was awesome. I’m proud of you for tearing up his
phone number like that. That Lundeen was pond scum. Lower than the
low.”

Kirsti was beaming at me. I liked being beamed
at. So, I fudged a little. She probably would have too, if she were
in my shoes. I much preferred Gunnar the Noble to Gunnar the
Abject. Besides, she was recording things for posterity.

“
Tell me again, Blue Eyes, what kind
of paper did you say you might parlay these memories of mine into?”
I asked.

Kirsti switched her recorder off and pulled in
her lower lip with her teeth and then slowly let it go. “Well,
actually, Gunnar, I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said in
a sweet melodic purr.

It was a classic female purr with which I was
long familiar. It was harbinger to a request.

Kirsti went on, “At first, I thought of simply
writing a human interest paper. That sort of thing.”

“
But
now
?” I said
warily.

She was beaming again. “Well, you have to
admit, that was quite a week you’ve told me about. So now I’m
thinking that I might like to type up what I’ve recorded
as
is
. You know, a transcript. With your permission, of course. In
fact, I’d love to record and transcribe any other cases of yours
that you’d care to tell me about. For instance, last week you
mentioned some guy who had been killed ‘out of character.’ Maybe
you could tell me all about that one, and what exactly you meant. I
think making written records of your private eye days would be
cool, and that others would like to read them. What do you think,
Gunnar?”