The Woman Who Fell From Grace Page 11

  “And yet you’re willing to give it all up.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me over his glass. “Am I?”

  “Charlotte seems to think so.”

  He smoothed his mustache, turned ultracasual on me. “What did Charlotte say? I mean, strictly out of curiosity … ”

  “That she’s tried to discourage your advances.”

  “And?”

  “And that you don’t discourage easy.”

  He winked at me. I think. It might just have been his tic. “Man to man, she’s nothing more to me than a bit of bed fluff.”

  “Not exactly the description of her that leaps to my mind.”

  “That’s where you’d be wrong, lad. Take an older man’s advice — it’s the quiet ones are the best. They appreciate your attention. Do anything for you. Unfortunately, they also happen to be the toughest to catch. So I’ve been feeding her a bit of line about running off with her. But I’ve no intention of actually doing so. I’d never leave Mave. Never.”

  “Charlotte told me you were coming into money.”

  “That little bitch,” he said tightly. He hesitated, then said, “I am. That’s the truth. And perhaps I have thought about running off. Being my own man again. Being … needed. A man has to be needed by someone. Makes him feel alive. Mavis, she needs no one. Always has everything her way. Never gives an inch. Don’t get me wrong, lad. I’m happy being with a woman who fights back. I’m just not happy being with one who wins all the time. … I’ve thought of running. Taking someone with me. Sure I have. But it’s only idle fantasy. I know I’ll never do it. That’s what makes me different from other men.”

  “No, that’s what makes you just like other men. Tell me, how much are they paying you?”

  “Who?”

  “Whichever sleazy tabloid you tipped off about me picking up Alma’s diary yesterday.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” He sounded genuinely baffled.

  “Fifty thousand? A hundred?”

  He shook his head. “You’re wrong, lad. Couldn’t be more wrong. My brother, Ken, he’s on his deathbed with cancer. Ken never married. When he dies, I inherit the title and all that comes with it.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s the truth. I’m not in contact with the press. I’d never sell Mave out like that. Never.” He drained his glass and reached for his Browning. Slowly, he got to his feet. “I’ve kept you up long enough.”

  “A word of advice?”

  “By all means.”

  “I wouldn’t keep stringing Charlotte along. Because if she decides to take you up on your offer, and then discovers you weren’t serious, you’ll need more than that Browning. You’ll need a bazooka.”

  Lulu woke me in the night again.

  She was crouched on the pillow next to my head, whimpering. When I asked her what she wanted, she jumped down off the bed and skittered over to the spiral staircase. Down she went … hop-thump-thump … hop-thump-thump …

  She wanted me to let her out.

  I started to, until I remembered Roy’s warning. “Are you sure about this?” I asked her.

  She was sure about this.

  I got into my trench coat and aged pair of Timberlands. Then I dug her leash out of my Il Bisonte bag. She hates the leash. Considers it an affront to her dignity. But she’ll usually submit to it if I insist. Not this time. She changed course on me the second she spotted it. Went back upstairs. Jumped up onto the bed with a grunt. She didn’t want to go out now. At least not with me.

  I went to the bottom of the stairs. “Lulu, I am getting a little tired of this moody, high-handed tyranny. You’re starting to make me feel like a goddamned cat person. There happens to be a man with a gun out there. A man who has been ordered to shoot anything with four legs. If you want to go out, you go with me and go on a leash. Take it or leave it.”

  She took it. Most sourly.

  The sky had cleared. The stars were brighter than I’d seen them since I was out on the Aegean. I stopped to get the flashlight from the Jag’s glove box. Then I flicked it on and we set out. We walked alongside the historic service yard until we picked up the path that rimmed the great north lawn along where Raymond and De Cheverier fought their climactic duel. There was only a sliver of moon. It was black out there beyond the flashlight’s beam, and silent except for the occasional rustling of night animals in the brush. I found myself thinking about the Glaze family as we walked. I thought about Mavis and how afraid she was underneath her armor. Afraid she wasn’t as perfect as she expected everyone else to be. I thought about Mercy and how she was chaffing at the narrowness of the life Mavis had laid out for her. I thought about Frederick and Edward — their bitterness toward Mavis, their highhandedness toward Richard. I thought about all of them. And as I did, I began to feel that same sense of melancholy I always feel when I’m getting pulled into my celebrity’s family troubles. Not that I ever want to. I don’t. But I can’t seem to help it. Hazard of the profession, at least it is for me. I’m not the answer man. I’ve never solved my own problems, let alone somebody else’s. I’m no healer. But it’s hard to tell somebody that when they’re begging you to heal them. Especially when it has gone as far as murder.

  I wondered if there was more to the rift between Mavis and her brothers than their mother’s will. I wondered if something else had happened a long time ago — fifty years ago — to turn them against each other. I wondered.

  A narrow path plunged into the woods just beyond the cemetery. We took it. We hadn’t gone far when I started to hear a scuffling sound of some kind, steady and rhythmic. Then I saw the flicker of a lantern through the trees. We started through the brush toward it.

  “That you, Roy?” I called out, so he wouldn’t blow our heads off.

  It wasn’t. It was Gordie, hard at work in a small clearing digging a hole in the damp earth with a shovel. He still had his pj’s on, with a pair of sneakers. He was covered with dirt. He worked so intently that he didn’t even hear us coming.

  “Hey, Gordie,” I said. “What are you up to?”

  He looked up in total panic at the sound of my voice and started to run. I grabbed him by the arm. “It’s okay,” I assured him as he squirmed in my grasp. “I’m not going to tell anybody. Just wondered.”

  He swallowed and took a deep breath, relaxing. “Nothing. Not doing nothing.”

  I released him and went over and checked out his hole. It was narrow, about three feet deep. “I’d say you’re digging a tunnel.” No response. “Where to?” Still no response. “Come on, you can trust me.”

  “Out,” he confessed solemnly.

  “Out where?”

  “The other thide of the wall.” He cocked his head toward the six-foot brick wall that was beyond the trees where we stood.

  I nodded. I understood perfectly. I dug holes myself when I was his age. Straight down through the earth toward Europe — my sense of geography wasn’t much. Only, I dug in daylight.

  “Kind of late, isn’t it?” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “Betht time. You can be detected during daylight.”

  “Hard to argue with that,” I admitted. “Well, I guess I’d better let you get back to it. Onward and downward.”

  He nodded and grimly resumed digging. Strange little guy. If he wasn’t careful, he might grow up to be a writer.

  “Hey, Hoagy,” he called after me.

  “Yeah, Gordie?”

  He grinned. “Tooth fairy came.”

  “Yeah, I had a funny feeling he might.”

  “Only left me a quarter though. Got me a dollar before.”

  “I’m afraid they don’t make anything like they used to, Gordie,” I informed him. “Including fairies.”

  Lulu led me back through the woods, straining at her leash. She now seemed to have a firm idea of where she wanted to go and was anxious to get there. She led me across a muddy pasture in the direction of the souvenir building, then steered me past that to the exact spot in the outer wall where I’
d seen Mavis and Roy conferring. The spot where the peacock predator was getting in.

  About twenty feet short of the wall she pulled up abruptly, black nose quivering in the flashlight beam.

  Roy was sitting there on a folding chair behind a tree, a shotgun in his lap, motionless. The consummate hunter.

  “That you, Roy?” I called out, so he wouldn’t blow our heads off.

  He didn’t respond. Not that he’s a particularly verbal kind of guy, but he didn’t so much as move. I started toward him. I was leading Lulu now. She wanted nothing to do with this.

  There was a good reason why Roy wasn’t moving. He was fast asleep on the job, breathing slowly and deeply like an old draft horse. There was a thermos at his feet. I opened it and smelled its contents. Equal parts coffee and bourbon.

  Lulu moseyed over to the burrow under the wall and sniffed at it delicately. Then she snuffled at me, pronouncing herself ready to move on. We started back. We hadn’t gone far when I heard an animal crashing through the brush alongside us. Lulu froze and let out a soft, low growl. It was met with an answering growl. Then she relaxed and whooped softly, tail thumping on the ground. And out of the brush it came, eyes glowing in the flashlight beam. It was a mutt, part terrier, part collie, male, with a dirty-gray muzzle and a busy stub of a tail. They greeted each other in the way dogs will do. Then Lulu yapped in a manner I can only describe as girlish and tumbled over onto her back, dabbing at him playfully with her paws while he sniffed at her in an extremely personal manner. I stood there holding the flashlight and watching them. My chest felt heavy, my knees weak. The signs had all been there, but I’d been too dumb to read them. They do say a father is always the last to know. Lulu was in love.

  “Your daughter has a boyfriend.”

  “How cute.” She yawned. It was five in the morning.

  “It is not cute, Merilee. He is a mongrel, a cur. He looks like a Butch or a Bowser. Definitely a Bowser. And who knows where the hell he comes from?”

  “I’m sure he comes from a very fine —”

  “He had his nose in her bum.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “Chased him back under the wall, the no-good mutt. I knew something was up. She’s been acting weird ever since we got here. I think this calls for prompt, decisive action, Merilee. I’m putting her on the first plane to New York tomorrow morning.”

  “Hoagy, she’s a big girl now and there’s not a thing you can do about it,” she said lightly. “Face it, darling. Your little one hears the call of the wild.”

  “Then I’m getting her a pair of earmuffs — shearling.”

  “Hoagy?”

  “Yes, Merilee?”

  “Hello.”

  “Hello yourself. How’s Elliot?”

  “Mr. Hewlett, the cranky old farmer down the road, came and looked him over. Said he was all stopped up.”

  “Elliot or Mr. Hewlett?”

  “Elliot, you ninny. So we rolled him over onto his back and —”

  “Elliot or Mr. Hewlett?”

  “And dumped two ounces of caster oil down his throat. He squealed in protest but —”

  “Elliot or —”

  “If you don’t stop that, I’m going to hang up. … Anyway things seem to be moving along smartly once again. I was going to call you in the morning, actually. It seems your housekeeper there is on to something.”

  “Make that was.”

  “Oh, dear. Hoagy … are you okay?”

  “Just dandy. What did your aged chums say?”

  “There were some very hush-hush whispers around the lot about Sterling Sloan.”

  “What about him?”

  “Apparently he was a rather serious morphine addict.”

  “Oh?”

  “Hollywood drug of choice in those days, I’m told,” she said. “Goldwyn made sure it stayed a deep, dark secret because of all the major drug scandals in the twenties. And it has pretty much stayed that way, actually. None of Sloan’s biographers have gotten on to it.”

  “That’s not too surprising. Most show-biz biographers would rather make up the dirt than dig for it.”

  “They also said Rex Ransom has been going around town for years bragging he knows something nasty. It seems he had the hotel room next door to Sloan’s. And he was there when Sloan died.”

  “Excellent. I’ll talk to him when he gets here. I’m dying to meet him anyway.”

  “Rex Ransom?” she said, surprised. “Whatever for?”

  “It so happens, Miss Nash, that Rex Ransom was my very first hero.”

  “Your hero? Why on earth was he … Oh, wait, didn’t he do one of those fifties kiddie serials on TV?”

  “Not just any serial, Merilee. He was the Masked Avenger, he and his faithful steed, Neptune. When I was five, I had a Masked Avenger mask, a lunch box, time-traveler ring. I walked like him. I hitched up my trousers like him … ”

  “And I’ll bet you were cute as a bug’s ear.”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “I hope he doesn’t let you down,” she said vaguely.

  “Why would he let me down?”

  “Some things a little boy has to find out for himself.”

  “You’ve been a big help, Merilee. How can I repay you?”

  “Well, I do have something in mind. … ” She hesitated. “I-I had a nice chat on the phone with your parents last night.”

  “Why, what did they want?” I demanded.

  “Don’t shout at me. They didn’t want anything. I called to wish your father a happy birthday. It was his seventieth yesterday, you know.”

  I left that one alone.

  “They’ve been in Hobe Sound,” she said.

  “Naturally. It was winter.”

  “He sounded so sad, Hoagy.”

  “Price of brass must be down.”

  “That’s not it at all. He misses you. You’re his only child. He knows he made mistakes, tried to turn you into someone you’re not. He understands that now. He doesn’t know what else to say to you, except that he’s sorry.”

  “This all sounds a lot more like your dialogue than his.”

  “You can repay me by calling him. It’s been so many years since you have.”

  “What’s your second choice?”

  “He’s an old man, Hoagy. He won’t be around much longer.”

  “He’ll never die,” I assured her. “He’ll simply stare death in the face and say, ‘I am very, very disappointed in you.’ ”

  “You have to settle this, Hoagy, or you’ll be sorry for the rest of your life.”

  “I’ve prepared myself for that. Look, Merilee, I’m —”

  “You’re a grown man, and I can’t make you call him if you don’t want to, nor should I try to. Does that cover it?”

  “Thank you for being so understanding. I knew there was a reason we were friends.”

  “Oh, is that what we are?” she asked sweetly.

  “Good night, Merilee.”

  “Be kind to Lulu, darling. She needs you now more than ever. This is a grand adventure she’s embarking on.”

  “So to speak.”

  “Hoagy?”

  “Yes, Merilee?”

  “She’s a Virgo, Hoagy.”

  “Oh, God. I hate this.”

  The morning was bright. So was my left side. The bruises there had blossomed numerous eye-catching shades of yellow and purple. My head felt fine. Well, not, fine but okay. I got up slowly, groaning, and made my way downstairs naked. I started my coffeemaker. I put down Lulu’s breakfast. I threw open the sitting room curtains, the better to breathe in that fresh country air, only to find myself face-to-face with a pair of elderly ladies in pastel leisure ensembles. Stray tourists. One of them gaped at me, wide-eyed — the sight of me unclothed does have that effect on some women. The other one started fumbling for her camera.

  A uniformed security guard came loping across the courtyard after them. “Area’s off-limits, girls!” he called out. “Staff only.
Follow me, please. Peacocks are this way.”

  Off they went, chattering excitedly. They’re probably still talking about it. I know I am.

  I showered. I dressed in the gray cheviot-wool suit while I sipped my coffee. Fern was being buried that morning. I hadn’t known her for long, but I felt like going. I met up with Mavis, Mercy, and Charlotte in the courtyard. Mavis had on a severe navy-blue pin-striped pantsuit and was tense and quiet. Richard was backing the Mercedes out of the garage. He hopped out and opened the front passenger door for Mavis and closed it after her while Mercy and Charlotte got in back. There was room for me back there, too, but I didn’t want to intrude. I was also anxious to get behind the wheel of the Jag again.

  I was putting the top down when Charlotte got out and offered to take her own car so I could ride with the Glazes.

  I thanked her but declined. “Why don’t you ride with me?” I suggested. I did want to talk to her.

  She turned me down. Mercy didn’t.

  “Do you mind?” she asked me shyly. She wore a jacket and skirt of matching black gabardine. She looked good in black. I have yet to meet a good-looking woman who doesn’t. “I’ve always wanted to ride in an antique car.”

  “I prefer to think of it as a classic.” I started it up. It kicked right over, began purring. “I don’t mind a bit. Hop in.”

  “Okay with you, Father?” she asked Richard.

  Richard wore shades against the bright morning. Sunshine can be somewhat rough on bloodshot eyes. “Fine, child,” he replied unsteadily.

  “Great.” She climbed in next to me.

  “Follow me, Hoagy,” Richard said, with a lazy fly-boy salute that was straight out of Dawn Patrol.

  “I shall.”

  He got in the Mercedes and was about to pull away when I heard the eruption. Mount St. Mavis. She immediately flung her door open and marched toward us, heels smacking sharply on the bricks.

  “What do you think you are doing, Mercy?” she demanded.

  “Riding to the funeral, Mother,” Mercy replied mildly.

  “Get in the family car at once!” Mavis ordered. “You will not ride to Fern’s funeral in some flashy open sports car. This is the most preposterous, disrespectful thing I have ever —”