The Smart Money

by Lia Matera

  “Well, he’s the boss.” She didn’t even glance at the paper. Instead she leaned across the file-strewn counter and confided, “It’s just a police thing, anyway. He could have gone home this morning.”

  Behind her, another nurse stopped filing. “Janet! Didn’t you hear about his wife?”

  I left them to their gossip, and went to find Gary’s room. I passed a door marked administrative nurse, and recognized the name on the plate: someone I’d known in high school, someone who’d dreamed of moving to Paris. I felt a claustrophobic chill. I wanted to shout from the rooftops that I wasn’t really back to stay; that I wasn’t like my lumpen classmates; that I’d never be content to gather small-town moss.

  Gary’s room heightened my desire to flee. The linoleum was so old it was no longer capable of looking clean. The walls were painted an age-darkened tan, and the windows showed signs of crumbling at the sills.

  Gary lay in bed looking utterly blank—a startling departure from his usual thoughtful frown and appraising eyes.

  He noticed me. His mouth twisted.

  I said, “I heard about Kirsten.”

  “Why’d you come back?” His whisper was bitter.

  I pulled a chair up to his bed. “A friend of mine is a private detective. He came up here on a case a couple of months ago, and I asked him to find out if Lennart still lived here.” Actually, Sandy had volunteered to find out what had become of Lennart. I’d told him about the thwarted affair one night when he’d inquired why my marriage had broken up. “He came back and let me know Lennart had … had died. That he’d run a hose from the exhaust pipe—” I closed my eyes.

  I opened them to find Gary watching me, his mouth tight and brows pinched.

  I continued. “My friend brought me a photocopy of Lennart’s obituary. That’s how I found out he’d died in our … in the old VW. That he’d supposedly driven it out to the jetty and—” I looked at Gary’s hand, where it rested on the hospital sheet. He wore a broad white-gold wedding band. The bastard. “You know damned well Lennart couldn’t drive that car. You tried yourself to teach him to work the stick shift and clutch, and you—” I swallowed. “You came home laughing about what a klutz he was. You said he’d never learn.”

  “What do you want me to say? I was wrong. He learned. He made it out to the jetty.”

  “I was waiting for Lennart that night. I was at the Trade Winds Motel. We were going to go to San Francisco together. The obituary said Lennart had a suitcase with him.”

  Gary’s scowl deepened. “Did you look for Lennart when he didn’t show up? Try to find out why he didn’t meet you?”

  “No. Because Lennart phoned me at the motel.”

  Gary started to say something.

  I cut him off. “At midnight.”

  “At midnight,” he repeated. “The police said—”

  “Right. I got a call from Lennart fifteen minutes after he died.”

  Lennart Strindberg had already been dead at 11:45, when a police cruiser noticed the Volkswagen sitting at the foot of the jetty with its lights out and its motor running. It was in the police report.

  “He told me that he and Kirsten were reconciling, and that he wouldn’t be coming with me, after all.”

  “You didn’t— The voice didn’t sound odd?”

  “I don’t remember thinking so. But I was pretty emotional.”

  Gary closed his eyes. I became aware of a quiet tap- tap-tap on the window behind me. Rain.

  “You knew Lennart’s voice well enough to imitate it,” I pointed out. It had been an unusual voice, not quite free of a German accent. “And you knew the situation. You knew what to say.”

  Gary’s eyes opened. “What are you—?”

  “When I found out how Lennart died, I knew he’d been murdered.”

  Gary’s lips formed the word “no,” but no sound came out.

  “And I came here to do you—you and Kirsten—as much harm as I possibly could.”

  “You thought me and Kirsten—? Me and Kirsten?’ Gary’s face bore traces of the righteous, martyred outrage he’d worn to protest marches in the early days of our marriage. “She’d been with him two years. I considered him a good friend.”

  It was all I could do not to spit in his face, despite his present troubles. He’d slept with his “good friend’s” wife for five months before Lennart and I found out about it.

  “The money Kirsten inherited from Lennart put you through college and law school,” I reminded him. Sandy had done some research. Lennart had been the eldest son of a deceased German industrialist. The industrialist had left a trust fund for Lennart’s nine-year-old brother Dieter, and he’d left Lennart money and an office building in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. A few weeks before his supposed suicide by carbon monoxide inhalation, Lennart had willed everything to Kirsten.

  Gary’s eyes narrowed; his nostrils flared. But he couldn’t deny that Lennart’s death had been a financial blessing.

  And up until that afternoon, when I’d learned Kirsten had been murdered, I’d have bet my soul that she and Gary had killed Lennart for his money.

  Now, with Gary in the hospital and Kirsten dead, I wasn’t so sure.

  18

  The wind whipped freezing rain in several directions at once. An umbrella would have been no match for it; I’d already passed one tumbling down the street, inside out and broken like a giant wounded bat. A raincoat would have been better, but it wouldn’t have kept me dry below the knee. I knew: I’d spent years of my life peeling wet tights off the clammy gooseflesh of my legs.

  I walked past boxy Victorians with fat, solitary palms in front, past block-long stretches of sidewalk-ringed ravine, past ranch-style houses landscaped with skinny redwoods, past shabby bungalows with pickups in their muddy yards. My glove-leather flats were waterlogged; my pants drank in mud from hem to thigh; my sweater was sodden; my hair was beaten into limply corkscrewed cascades. All around me, snails slid like slow boats over the eddying rainwater.

  The last time I’d walked the streets of my hometown, I’d been crying so hard the rain hadn’t mattered.

  That day, Gary had arranged an excursion to Fern Canyon—he and I, Lennart and Kirsten. At the last minute, he’d begged off to study for a junior college Bio 101 exam. When Kirsten begged off too, I was pleased. A day alone with Lennart. I sneaked glances at his sensitive profile every time I shifted the VW’s gears.

  But the car had broken down halfway to the canyon, beside a lagoon where elk liked to congregate. Lennart and I hiked to a phone and called for a tow truck. On a whim, I took his hand. He didn’t pull it away, but he didn’t squeeze back, either. We went back to wait with the elk. Their antlers spanned ten feet, but they were dumb, unaggressive animals. We fed them brambles.

  It was raining by the time John Loftus pulled up in his tow truck. He dropped us off at my house, taking the VW on to the repair shop.

  The apartment door was locked, for once. I let us in with my key. And we found them on the living-room floor, on the sheepskin rug my mother had bought me when I was a baby. The rug I’d always kept clean and brushed, draped over a chair.

  Kirsten had been on top.

  “Damn you!” I whispered to the rain, fourteen years too late. “Damn you!”

  Then, I’d said nothing. I’d turned tail and run.

  “I should have said something.” I should have forced her to leap off him and cover herself up. I should have made him cringe and grovel in apology. I should have made them cry.

  Instead, I’d left them on my sheepskin (and in my memory) in medias res.

  I’d stumbled outside, right behind Lennart. In time to witness his awkward, arm-flailing dash into the rain.

  I pushed soaked hair out of my eyes. I had walked a long time that day with no awareness of the cold. Not so today.

  I found a phone
booth and shivered in it, dialing with numb fingers. I begged the taxi company to hurry.

  The day of the sheepskin, I’d phoned Jay Bartoli for a ride. In my fury, I’d insisted he take me home and make love to me. Lying on my sheepskin in a fever of mortification, I learned the whole truth. “We all figured you knew. They’ve been hot and heavy five, six months already,” Jay had announced casually. And I’d shrieked that I didn’t care, that I was in love with someone else anyway.

  That evening, I’d thrown Gary’s clothes—and my mother’s sheepskin—outside to molder in the freezing mud. No one showed up to stop me. A note on the kitchen table read: “I think it would be best if I split for a while.”

  In the wee hours of the morning, Lennart had come to see me. Lennart, with his necessary manners. He was too gallant—maybe too unhappy—to refuse my love.

  Two days later, Gary had finally taken his sodden things out of the yard. I was standing behind a barely-parted curtain, paralyzed by my own venom. I watched him pile wet clothes into the newly overhauled VW that my papa had paid for, and that I never saw again.

  A week later, Lennart Strindberg died in that car.

  Fourteen years later, I found out he was dead.

  I hadn’t planned to accuse Gary and Kirsten of Lennart’s murder, not publicly; the evidence was too cold, too flimsy. But I’d looked forward to threatening to do it, just as I’d looked forward to threatening to put Gary out of business. I didn’t run from confrontation, not anymore.

  Gary Gleason was smart enough to know that an accusation of murder, coming from me, would blossom into a media event. He wouldn’t want to subject himself and Kirsten to the publicity—and risk—of an investigation.

  So I’d been prepared to offer the bastard a choice: his reputation and his livelihood, or Kirsten. If he agreed to walk out on Kirsten without telling her why, I’d keep quiet about Lennart’s inability to drive the Volkswagen. I’d also tear up the public defender contract, and move back to San Francisco.

  And if he hesitated to leave his true love? I had one last threat—one I was prepared to carry out. I would track down Lennart’s brother, Dieter, and offer him the gift of my legal services.

  Dieter had been only a boy, living with his legal guardian in Germany, when Lennart died. Lennart’s will, leaving everything to Kirsten, had cheated Dieter of his father’s American holdings—including the fast-appreciating San Francisco building where White, Sayres & Speck had their offices.

  By my calculation, Dieter had recently attained his majority. If I asserted that his guardian had been derelict in his fiduciary duty, Dieter could avoid the statute of limitations and challenge Lennart’s will.

  A murderess can’t inherit from her victim, and in probate court, the standard for proving murder is not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as it is in criminal court. If six out of nine jurors believed Kirsten had “more likely than not” conspired to murder Lennart, then Lennart’s property would revert to his brother Dieter under the laws of intestate succession.

  Even if Gary did not mind risking his career and his reputation, I thought he would balk at putting Kirsten’s fortune on the line.

  Gary and Kirsten’s forced separation was to have been my meager memorial to Lennart Strindberg.

  But that end had been achieved by someone else—achieved in such a way that I could take no satisfaction in it. I was no longer certain my ex-husband deserved it, no longer certain Gary Gleason had killed Lennart Strindberg.

  19

  The taxi dropped me at Hal’s house, where I expected to find him and Sandy.

  I didn’t notice until after the cab pulled away (“You sure this is the right place, lady?”) that my Mercedes wasn’t parked in the driveway.

  I wandered through the leaky house, feeling marooned. It was a hell of a walk back to the nearest phone. I could hear waves smashing over the jetty, could feel the foundation shudder beneath the floorboards.

  The house was as cold as a refrigerator, and much damper. I couldn’t open the door for light because the wind and water whipped in. I searched the kitchen for matches to light the lanterns, but I didn’t find any.

  I groped my way back to Hal’s bedroom and shucked my icy sweater. I’d just put on one of Hal’s fuzz-balled pullovers when I heard a scraping sound and felt a blast of cold air. The front door had opened. I was about to call out my cousin’s name, when I saw a gleam of artificial light on the damp floor.

  A flashlight. That morning I’d searched through Hal’s possessions. A flashlight had not been among them.

  Maybe it was the sound of the storm beating against the boarded-up window, maybe it was the darkness of the deteriorating house. Something frightened me into unwonted caution. I snatched up my wet sweater and hid behind the open door of Hal’s room, shielded from view.

  A moment later, light swept the room. It picked out Hal’s cot, his piles of clothes, the cracks in the exterior walls, the spreading puddle beneath the window where the wet boards dripped.

  It was a long moment before the flashlight turned away and the room was dark again. I peered through the crack between the open door and the door frame, and saw the light bob down the hallway, silhouetting a form in a big hooded jacket.

  Then I heard footsteps at the other end of the house, in the living room. The flashlight swung around, blinding me for a moment. Then it was clicked off.

  There was little natural light in the hallway, just a bit that filtered through the boarded-up windows in adjoining bedrooms. But as the footsteps grew louder, I could see the hooded figure shift the flashlight from his right hand to his left, slip his hand under his jacket, and pull out another flashlight-sized object.

  I glanced toward the living room and saw the outline of a tall man with wild hair—my cousin Hal. As I watched him approach the hallway, my brain made sense of what I’d just seen the man with the flashlight do.

  “Hal!” I shouted. “He’s got a gun!”

  My cousin jarred to a stop, then lunged forward into the hall.

  The shots sounded like cannon blasts. I watched Hal dive to the ground.

  I rushed from my hiding place, throwing myself on top of Hal. There was a sound like a donkey braying—me, screaming.

  Hal tried to wriggle out from under me, cursing.

  “Are you shot? Are you hurt?” I quavered.

  Apparently he was not: he scrambled to his feet, knocking me over. Then he dashed toward the back of the house, toward the kitchen door.

  I rose shakily and followed. I found Hal staring out at a wall of rain. He slammed the door with a resounding, “Damn!”

  He turned to me, glowering, strands of gray and black hair plastered to his forehead, his clothes dripping.

  He grabbed a lantern from a hook near the door, catching me by the wrist and pulling me back down the hall. When we reached the bedroom, he dug some matches out of his pocket and lit the lantern. He held it up to the door.

  “That’s what I thought,” he muttered.

  I stood behind him, trembling with cold and shock, peering at the door from behind his back. “What is it?”

  “Bullet holes, Mowgli.” He turned to face me. “It was you—your voice—he shot at, not me.”

  20

  Hal chopped up some driftwood and a three-legged chair, and built a fire. I huddled in front of it while he went to change into dry clothes.

  I’d barely begun to get warm when I heard the spinning tires of a car in the rain. I stood up, staring at the front door. I almost swooned, I was so damned scared. Nobody had ever taken a shot at me before.

  I ran to Hal’s bedroom. If I was going to face the man in the hooded jacket again, I wanted Hal with me. I didn’t think twice about flinging the door open.

  Hal stood near his cot, toweling his hair dry, not a stitch of clothing on his body.

  And what a body. Years of physical labor
had made his chest, shoulders, and arms bulge with muscle. His belly was tight, his hips lean, his thighs tough. When I first opened the door he looked surprised. When I glanced back up at his face, he’d dropped the towel.

  I was embarrassed. “I heard a car.”

  He stepped closer, putting his hands on my waist. He smiled down at me. It was a beautiful smile, unclouded by animosity or cynicism, for once. I put my palms against his damp chest, feeling his muscles ripple as his arms circled me.

  “Thanks for playing human shield,” Hal murmured in my ear.

  He kissed me in a very uncousinly way.

  And I kissed him back, sliding my fingers through his hair.

  It didn’t register until later that my fingers encountered scar tissue on my cousin’s scalp. Enough to make his hair stick out at odd angles no matter how well-cut it might be.

  Hal said, “You’re right about the car, Mowgli.”

  I blinked up at him. “The car?”

  He nodded. “I heard a car door slam. You want to know who I think it is?” Someone began pounding on the front door. “I think it’s probably Sandy.”

  My cousin slid his hand under my borrowed sweater.

  We heard the front door open, and my cousin’s eyes narrowed with mischief.

  I backed away, shaking from an excess of hormones. Then I turned and left the room, adjusting the sweater.

  I almost collided with Sandy where the hallway met the living room. His slacks were dark with rain from the thigh down, and he carried a dripping anorak. He was wiping his cheeks with his sleeve when he saw me.

  He was beginning to grin, when he glanced behind me and frowned. I looked over my shoulder and saw Hal’s bedroom door close.

  “Where have you been, Sandy?” I resolutely took his arm and led him to the living room. “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  I told him about the man who’d shot at me.

  Sandy watched me solemnly, his damp, tousled hair gleaming with auburn highlights in the firelight.