One Got Away

by S. A. Lelchuk

  “When will she be available? I don’t mind waiting.”

  “You’re not on our calendar.”

  “Just dropping in.”

  “People don’t ‘drop in’ here. Our residents value their privacy.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Try impossible.” He was already moving to the door, ushering me out.

  I didn’t budge. “Tell her it’s about Coombs.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Dr. Coombs. Two words. That’s all.”

  He thrust the door open. “You need to leave now.”

  I still didn’t move. “Fine. Don’t. But then you better spend the rest of the day blowing dust off your résumé. You’re going to need it. Probably by tomorrow in the a.m., if I had to guess.”

  “You can’t threaten me,” he said.

  “I can’t do anything to you,” I said pointedly. “Don’t worry about me.”

  His voice was almost apologetic. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “One call,” I said. “Two words. That’s all I’m asking.”

  He considered, then nodded.

  Thirty seconds later, I was in the elevator.

  * * *

  The duplex was incomparable to any apartment I’d ever seen, much less set foot in. A tall, slender man in a pinstriped suit who could not have been anything except a butler ushered me into a spacious foyer floored with pink-veined marble, all gilt-edged mirrors and crimson wallpaper.

  “Boots off?” I asked.

  He spread his hands politely. “Whatever you prefer.”

  “Then the boots stay on.”

  I followed him down a long hallway into a living room furnished with the same splendor. Ornate, handwoven carpets, grand marble fireplace, immense crystal chandelier, high walls of books bound in rich, dull leather. I took in some of the titles. This particular selection could have been drawn from Bloom’s The Western Canon. Everything from the early Greeks to the Russian and European greats, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Goethe and Mann and Maupassant and Stendhal and Flaubert, Samuel Johnson and Dryden and Pope onward.

  To my right, a row of arched, leaded glass windows displayed the Bay, a swirl of fog curling over the Golden Gate. Framed oil paintings hung from the walls, intimidating men and women in Old World finery, dark clothes, dark backgrounds, expressionless set faces. I saw a signed painting, brightly colored nude figures dancing across a landscape. A Matisse. It didn’t look like a copy. A brace of antique dueling pistols hung above the marble fireplace. I wondered if they’d ever been used. Some real or imagined slight, leading to words, and tempers, and inevitably blood.

  “Nikki, yes?” said a sharp voice.

  The speaker was a white-haired woman seated on a plush burgundy sofa. With the exquisite background, muted light, and her regal bearing, she looked like she could be sitting for a portrait herself. She stood, and I saw she was strikingly tall. Even bent with age she must have been five foot ten.

  I crossed the room to her. “Mrs. Johannessen? Thanks for making the time.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.” She wore a flowing, formal dress, a light silk shawl around her shoulders. A weighty pair of sapphire earrings dangled from her ears, mirroring her ice blue eyes, and around her long neck was a matching silver and sapphire choker. Her hair, pure white and very fine, fell past her shoulders and her face, although wrinkled with age, was intelligent and astute. I couldn’t see any resemblance to Martin. They had been cast from different molds. “A question,” she continued. Her voice was cotton and steel, soft with something harder underneath.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Can you mix a martini?”

  I looked at her, startled. “I think I like you already.” Realizing that the foggy old lady I’d imagined was nonexistent. This woman was about as weak and foggy as Catherine the Great.

  “You’ll find the requisite materials on that bar cart across the room,” she commented as she sat and picked up the book she had been reading. Chekhov. “As for liking you,” she continued without looking up, “I’ll reserve judgment until I see if I like my drink. Call me superficial if you wish. I’ve been called worse.”

  She turned a page.

  The conversation seemed temporarily over.

  I walked to the bar cart, an ornate walnut-and-brass model with large multispoked wheels the size of bicycle tires. There was ice in a silver bucket, a pair of silver tongs, a tray of garnishes, clusters of bottles, and several crystal decanters filled with amber liquid. I located a bottle of Beefeater gin and smiled, finding something refreshingly unpretentious in the twenty-dollar bottle. A choice that said the buyer knew what she liked and didn’t give a damn about trendy. A pleasant change from the San Francisco bars boasting thirty kinds of local, botanical-infused this-and-that, and snooty bartenders who rolled their eyes if someone wasn’t smart enough to order something utterly obscure.

  My own taste in gin was a little like my taste in books. Contemporary could be great, but it was hard to beat the classics.

  I eschewed the silver cocktail shaker and instead used a crystal beaker and long bartender’s spoon. “Chekhov?” I asked while I stirred.

  She looked up. “ ‘Ward No. Six.’ Are you familiar?”

  I took two martini glasses, poured a big splash of vermouth into each, swirled, then dumped the vermouth. Maybe it was a hunch, but this woman seemed like she’d drink her martinis bone dry.

  I said, “Suffering leads man to perfection—something like that, right?”

  “And what do you think about that, Nikki? Must we suffer?”

  “I don’t think we must do anything.” I continued stirring the gin, the cubes tinkling like wind chimes against the glass beaker. “But the man who thinks that—Dr. Ragin—becomes very good at seeing only what he wants. So good that he convinces himself the suffering and pain and injustice all around him aren’t very real—and therefore aren’t worth doing much about. Justification can be dangerous. Look where he ends up. Blinders don’t always work out. So, I take the doctor’s opinion with a grain of salt.”

  “I take mine with olives,” she put in.

  Instead of toothpicks there was a little stand, like a tiny umbrella stand, full of miniature silver rapiers. I took two of the little swords and skewered three olives with each.

  She accepted the glass I handed her. “Made one for yourself?”

  “Seemed rude to let you drink alone.”

  She didn’t answer, but her blue eyes warmed with approval. She nodded at the armchair facing her. “Sit.”

  It wasn’t a question. I sat.

  She sipped her martini and nodded with satisfaction. “I’ve found, sadly, that mixing a good martini has become something of a lost art.”

  “Maybe you don’t associate with the right people.”

  She laughed for the first time. “Maybe I don’t.” She ate an olive off the sword. “Now, what’s this about Geoffrey—how are you mixed up with him?”

  “I was hired by Martin,” I said. “To follow him.”

  “You’re a private detective?”

  I nodded.

  “Martin hired you to follow Geoffrey,” she repeated. She would have made a fine poker player. Her eyes showed nothing. “How do I fit into this? And why show up at my doorstep unannounced?”

  “Because announcing wasn’t working too well,” I answered. “I started to get the feeling that Martin was determined for us not to meet. Which made me curious.”

  “Well, what have you done to get my poor son in such a tizzy?”

  Half against my will, I was liking the woman in front of me more and more. No tiptoeing around, no wasted words. Not doing that fake thing rich people did where they tried to make you feel that really, deep down, you were just like them.

  And she liked gin.

  “Your son got in a tizzy all by himself,” I answered. “I’ve been trying to get him out of it. And best as I can tell, there’s nothing poor about him. Must run in the family.”

 
; Her blue eyes were intent on mine. She didn’t seem to take offense. “I expect he told you a word or two about our family? Our position in this city?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. And he told you about Geoffrey?”

  I nodded again. “Sorry about how things worked out.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Why would you be? I ask for things I want. I recall asking you for a drink, not for your pity or condolences.”

  I was taken aback. “But he took so much from you.”

  “Took?”

  I wasn’t used to feeling off guard. “The money, the cars, the watches…”

  “Let me correct the record,” Mrs. Johannessen said. “Since my son seems to have neglected to do so. The relationship I had with Geoffrey was consensual in the most fundamental sense of the word. I went into it with open eyes, and my gifts to him were just that—gifts. If you’re sitting there thinking the poor, old dotard was coerced or tricked, I strongly advise you to reconsider.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  She wasn’t done. “And as you observed a moment ago about my son—unasked—there is nothing poor about me.” She must have seen the doubt in my eyes because she went on. “You’re a young and beautiful woman, Nikki.”

  I was having trouble keeping up. Not a feeling I was used to. “Thanks?”

  “Don’t thank me. It’s not a compliment. It’s a statement of fact. There’s a difference. I have little interest in issuing compliments, especially these days. There isn’t time. Facts, to me, are of much greater interest.” She leaned forward, holding her drink in one hand. “Here’s a fact. I used to look a lot closer to you than I do to myself, now. Which is natural, given that probably a half-century separates us in age. Stand up for a moment, will you?”

  I put my drink down and stood.

  She nodded toward several framed photographs on a mantel under the pair of dueling pistols. “Take a look over there. The second one from the right.”

  I walked over to the gelatin silver print, seeing a man and a woman, dressed formally and posing for the camera. The woman was taller than the man by at least several inches, and rather than trying to minimize this, she stood, shoulders straightened with an almost military posture, staring straight into the lens. She was beautiful, a full figure, skin creamy white, a classically proportioned face that a Renaissance painter would have begged to model. But the eyes, even in the faded black and white of the photograph, were the same, bright and bold and full of life.

  I looked back toward the woman on the couch. “You were gorgeous.”

  “Come sit again.”

  I returned to the armchair as she continued speaking. “You reach a time in life when certain pleasures, once enjoyed easily, even thoughtlessly, become elusive. I’m a widow, but don’t think for one moment that I buried any part of myself with my husband. You read, clearly. Are you familiar with The Arabian Nights?”

  “Reasonably.”

  “With Sinbad?

  I nodded.

  “Now, he was a real character, a murderous, plundering adventurer of the first order—at least before those dreadful American cartoonists turned him into a castrated Mickey Mouse. Anyhow, on his fourth voyage Sinbad finds himself on the island of pepper-gatherers, where in short order he marries a noblewoman. She dies soon after, leaving him a widower. Are you familiar with what happens next?”

  “Yes.” As a girl I had loved The Arabian Nights, marveling at the casual brutality of the exotic world, the simultaneous cheapness and richness of life, and most of all Scheherazade, powerless and yet so much cleverer than the men around her, holding off her pending execution day by day through the power of her stories and imagination, nothing more.

  I said, “They put him into the ground with her, according to their custom. Bury the living with the dead. He escaped, naturally, though I’m pretty sure he had to kill off a few innocents to manage it.”

  Mrs. Johannessen said, “You follow me, I assume?”

  I did, and said so.

  “I have every intention of enjoying life as long as I am able.” She ate another olive off the little silver sword, then let it slide back into the glass. “And if you think that after my husband died I simply dried up and went into cold storage while waiting for the end, then you don’t know me very well at all.”

  “I don’t know you very well at all,” I put in. “But I feel like I’m starting to.”

  “Have you had a chance to meet Geoffrey?”

  “I have.”

  “And what did you think?”

  I answered honestly. “I found him extremely impressive.”

  “It must have occurred to you that a charming, articulate, and handsome man in the prime of his life could probably have his choice of many beautiful women without turning his charms on the octogenarian crowd. I’m speaking factually, again.”

  I thought of Coombs’s gaze, the magnetism of his eyes, his easy wit and confidence. That unmistakable feeling that life was a little warmer, a little more exciting, in his presence.

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “I pride myself on being a realist,” she said, sipping her drink. “It’s an attitude that has taken me quite well through life. I find that if one is able to look clearly at who they are—willing to strip away the cheap, meaningless varnish of what others say to your face to gain favor—happiness becomes easier to grasp. So, what did you walk in here thinking? That you were going to talk to a senile old woman who thought that she’d ended up in this so-called mess thanks to the tenderness of her personality? Or perhaps her cooking skills? All, by the way, are nonexistent. I’m too old and too rich for charm, I’m acerbic to a fault, and I couldn’t fry a lamb chop to save my life. But I know a few things. I’m eighty-one years old, Nikki, and I know who I am.”

  Her eyes caught and held mine. “Do you really think I believed he was in it for the pillow talk?”

  “You make a good point,” I acknowledged.

  “I like to imagine that Geoffrey didn’t despise the time we spent together, but that’s my business, after all. I’m free to think what I wish. As is he, and as are you. What I do know is that he gave me a great deal of pleasure. And in return, I was happy to give him what I gave him.” She set her drink down on a jade coaster. “Do you know what I’m worth?”

  “I have a decent idea.” I named a number that I’d come across in a Time profile of the family.

  She nodded. “I don’t mean to tromp into the boorish gardens of financial vulgarity. I bring up my wealth as a way of explaining that I could easily spend ten times what I gave Geoffrey, every year, should I live to be one hundred, which, by the way, I very much plan on doing. I do nothing for my money. It existed before me and it will exist after me. We have an office full of clever people who work industriously to ensure that our family’s money grows each year. Some years less, some more, and other years it shoots up like a teenage boy. So why should I begrudge Geoffrey some baubles and pretty things?”

  “But he left you. Didn’t that sting?”

  She finished her drink. “I knew he would leave eventually. Sticking around is not in that man’s nature. If it was, I suspect he might be far less interesting. I enjoyed the time I spent with him. I enjoyed the conversation, his intelligence, his good taste, his spirit.” She ate her last olive and tapped the edge of the miniature sword against the rim of the crystal glass with a sharp metallic sound. “And I consider myself richer, not poorer, for what I gave to get those things.”

  I finished off my martini, too. “May I say something honestly?”

  “By all means.”

  “Martin gave me the impression that you were… showing your age a bit more.” No wonder Martin had wanted to avoid this meeting. The mother was a hundred times stronger than the son.

  “Parents, children, their relationships.” She sighed. “So complicated. Tell me, Nikki, about your family.”

  I looked down at my glass. “I don’t talk about my family. It’s a thing of mine.”

&nbs
p; If she heard the change in my voice, she ignored it. “You’re sitting in my living room, asking me probing, personal questions about my family, and you don’t like to talk about your own?” she challenged. “You wanted to see me. Now I’m asking you.”

  She had a point.

  “My parents are dead,” I said. “They were murdered in our home when I was ten.”

  She didn’t offer any of the horrified, sympathetic looks or, worse, hugs, that I was used to getting when I revealed this. A high school teacher of mine, once, had teared up and stroked my hair as though I was an Affenpinscher. All she asked was, “Who did it?”

  “Two men. The younger one did some prison time and was eventually released.”

  “And the other one?”

  “He lives quite close to here. His address is San Quentin. Specifically, the Adjustment Center. Located in Death Row.”

  “Adjustment Center? What is that?”

  “For the worst of the worst. The ones so bad that the prison worries they’ll hurt the serial killers out of plain boredom.”

  “They’ll never release him, then?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  Her eyes didn’t leave mine. “If they released him, what would you do?”

  She had been honest with me. “I’d find him and kill him. I’d kill him exactly the way he killed them and I’d make absolutely sure he knew who was doing it.”

  Thanks to the autopsy photographs, I knew exactly which of the knife wounds were where. Like a ghoulish blueprint that I’d never forget, no matter how much I wanted to.

  But I didn’t want to. Just in case they ever freed Carson Peters.

  “I don’t know you very well at all,” Mrs. Johannessen returned. “But I feel like I’m starting to.”

  We looked at each other. One of those long, understanding, uniquely female glances that convey more than most language. I was thinking that in a different world, the woman in front of me could have been one of my closest friends. I pushed the thought away. I was working. And I needed something that I couldn’t ask her for.

  Again, I thought of a poker game. “Your turn,” I said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about your children.”