by Lia Matera
Three months. It had been less than three months since Sandy had asked me about my divorce, and (it now seemed) manipulated me into talking about Lennart. It had been less than three months since Sandy had volunteered to find out what had become of Lennart. It had been less than three months since Sandy had brought me the news of Lennart’s suicide and Kirsten Strindberg’s inheritance. It had been less than three months since Sandy had encouraged me to open an office in my hometown and blackmail an admission of guilt from Gary Gleason.
In fact, though I’d known him casually for more than a year, it had been less than three months since Sander Arkelett had made a point of befriending me. And bedding me.
“Why didn’t Sandy tell me about you?”
The young man’s cheeks flamed with color. “There are reasons that—” He glanced at the door of Sandy’s room. “I would not wish to tell you, if he felt it was not wise that I should do so.”
“Sandy told you not to tell me?”
The boy nodded. “Yes, yes. There are reasons.”
“Somebody tried to kill him last night. Your secret might have something—”
“If I could speak to him.” Dieter Strindberg placed a trembling hand on the wall.
“They’re not going to let you do that. Not tonight. It’s the cops you should—”
“No!” He backed away from me, shaking his head. “He would not wish it!”
Would not wish it. “This secret—is there a criminal penalty attached?”
The boy moistened his lips, swallowing.
“Sandy would want me to know,” I insisted. “Maybe he didn’t before, but he would now.”
Dieter Strindberg just stood there.
“All right, listen. I’ve got to go home and get out of these clothes. Come with me. It’s private there. Tell me only what you feel comfortable telling—”
“No, truly! I would prefer— I believe it is best—”
“To tell me nothing?”
“Please pardon me. No more than what I have already told you. Until I am certain …”
“That Sandy wants you to?”
“Yes, yes.” He nodded emphatically.
I wondered whether the boy was afraid for Sandy, or of him.
A nurse wheeled a coughing old man down the corridor toward us, blitzing him with cheery small talk. He wheezed appreciatively, patting her hand.
I looked up at Dieter Strindberg. It wasn’t like looking at Lennart. I was aware of the differences now. In me, too. “Come home with me anyway. We’ll talk about the damn weather.”
31
We took a cab to the Mayor’s Residence, where I’d left my car some twenty hours earlier. I drove us over the squandered bricks of Old Town and across Highway 101, which dissected Hillsdale in the middle of its unartistically old-fashioned downtown. I noticed several news vans in front of the courthouse and wondered if Captain Loftus had called a press conference. By the time we climbed a short hill to Clarke Street, Dieter Strindberg and I had already talked about the weather. It was raining again. Dieter said it reminded him of northern Germany, where he and Lennart had grown up. That was about all he said.
There weren’t any news vans outside my house when I pulled up. I’d expected to see some. Sandy had been filmed leaving the house with me. Two hours later, he was lying on a stretcher. The press was bound to wonder why my friend—like my client and my neighbor before him—had been shot. The absence of a welcoming committee seemed to confirm my suspicion of a media event at the courthouse.
I left Dieter downstairs while I showered and changed out of my crumpled, muddied dress.
I had a great deal to think about, but mostly I thought about Hal. He hadn’t come to the hospital to ask about Sandy. I’d expected a call, at least.
I remembered Captain Loftus saying Sandy should keep an eye on my cousin. I hoped the captain hadn’t misinterpreted Hal’s resentment of Sandy. I hoped he hadn’t arrested Hal. I told myself I’d have heard from the family, if he had.
I was more afraid Hal had packed up and left town. His mother had sneered that he was allowed to camp in his hovel only because he was the mayor’s son. Hal had spent years shedding his cloak of privilege; he wouldn’t continue living there once he knew that.
If Hal left town, I’d never find him. And it might be years before he drifted through San Francisco again. The thought made the blood throb in my temples, made my stomach feel like I’d swallowed a boulder.
I went back downstairs, wondering whether it was worth half an hour of slick road to confirm my fears.
Dieter Strindberg stood at the front window, holding open the old damask curtain. “There are large vehicles outside.” He defined a box shape with his long hands. “With satellite dishes on the top.”
“News vans. The police held some kind of press conference, I think. Now the reporters want my reaction.” There was a loud rapping at my door. “You’d better stand away from the window.”
He looked alarmed when I stepped into the hall. But I had no intention of answering the door.
I phoned my papa, and learned that no one in the family had seen Hal since he’d left the party.
“I’m trying to find my cousin,” I explained to Dieter. “I’m going to drive out to where he’s been living. You’re welcome to come, if you want. Or I can drop you off wherever you’re staying.”
He eyed me suspiciously. Didn’t want me to know where he was staying, I supposed.
I opened the door and spread my arms to keep Judy Britt from entering. “I’m on my way out,” I told her. She didn’t budge.
A couple of reporters climbed out of their vans and dashed through the rain to my porch. One of them, a huge man with a clipped beard, said, “Do you think we could set up in your living room for five minutes? Get your reaction to the police captain’s statement?”
I continued to bar the door. “What was the gist of his statement?”
The man pulled off a rain poncho, revealing a clip microphone with a logo I couldn’t quite place. An Oregon station, I thought; southern Oregon, not too far away. The San Francisco stations would have recalled their troops by now. They had fires in Oakland to cover, child kidnappings in Fremont. They’d wait for an arrest before they came back. Until then, they’d rely on the likes of Judy Britt to keep them abreast.
“Can we come in?” repeated the man.
“What did Loftus say?”
Behind him, an older man sneezed. I recognized him. Anchorman of the local news for the last thirty years.
Judy Britt spoke. She looked like an Inuit in her fake-fur fringed hood. “He identified Sander Arkelett as a San Francisco detective who was apparently working for you. He said Arkelett was shot twice from about twenty feet with a thirty-eight caliber gun. He wouldn’t say whether he had any suspects.” It was clear from her tone whom she suspected.
“Let us in,” the big man coaxed. “We have to say something … and you don’t want us speculating. A brief statement, that’s all.”
Dieter stood in the living room doorway, just out of the reporters’ sight. I grabbed his hand and pulled him outside, firmly slamming the door behind us.
I tried to tug him down the porch stairs before anyone could block our path, but Dieter let go of my hand. He stood forehead to chin with the big reporter, looking aghast, like a deer in the glare of headlights. I had to go back and push him from behind, bulldozing the reporter aside. In the meantime, a huge light was trained on us from inside the Oregon news vans.
We were both soaked by the time I shoved Dieter into the Mercedes. A man sat cross-legged inside the news van, filming the scene. He would probably report that I’d fled guiltily.
As I went around to the driver’s side, I noticed Gary Gleason standing at his front window looking out at me, gesturing and shaking his head.
I looked at my ex-husband, then looked
behind me at the reporters. I didn’t know what Gary was driving at, and I didn’t feel like crossing the street in the rain to find out.
I broke a few speed limits racing toward the jetty.
I tried to get Dieter to talk—talk about anything—as a prelude to asking him a few questions. But the boy was determinedly monosyllabic. I shot through the cannery district, past the Victorians of Hillsdale’s founding despoilers. I slowed down as we negotiated the long, slick curve of road beside the murky bay. My wipers weren’t fast enough to keep the windshield clear.
It took about twenty minutes to reach what had once been hundreds of acres of waterfowl refuge, and was now a sinking housing development.
As I’d feared, Hal’s house was dark. My headlights reflected off the waterlogged plywood that covered the windows, and I noticed that two or three boards had been nailed across the front door. One of them bore an ancient, weatherbeaten condemnation notice.
“Damn! Damn it!” I cried, pounding the car horn in frustration. Its cheerful peeping was barely audible; the convertible top magnified the pounding of the rain like a drum skin.
I reached into the small baggage space behind the bucket seats, groping for my flashlight. I wasn’t willing to admit to myself that Hal was really gone. I had a vague thought of breaking into the house to see if he’d left anything behind to show he meant to come back.
I grabbed a cold metal object and pulled it out of the compartment. I didn’t notice it wasn’t a flashlight until Dieter Strindberg drew in his breath and fumbled for the door handle. Then I looked at the thing in my hand and saw it was the goddam disappearing gun.
I let out a stream of expletives that would have shocked a longshoreman. They certainly set my passenger to trembling.
I immediately regretted my display of temper. Dieter was already skittish, already leery of me. And here I was flashing a gun and screeching like a fishwife.
I was about to put the gun down and explain, when Dieter cried, “You have known who I am! You have lied!”
“Who you are? You’re—” I realized he was telling me that he wasn’t.
The dashboard lights glinted green on his colorless hair and pale skin, making him look almost otherworldly.
And it occurred to me that I was out in the middle of nowhere with a man I knew nothing about, except that he closely resembled someone I’d once known.
I held the gun in both hands, carefully, as if it were a smoldering powder keg. I’d never checked to see if it was loaded; I didn’t know how. I made sure my fingers didn’t touch the trigger.
“You’re not Lennart’s brother,” I said, trying to sound as if I knew who he was, as well as who he wasn’t.
The boy bent his head, staring at the gun. He murmured something. I strained to hear him over the drumbeat of rain.
“Lennart had no brother. We invented one, Sander Arkelett and myself.”
I was about to protest that I’d seen Lennart’s will, but I realized that it hadn’t mentioned anyone but Kirsten. It was Sandy who’d told me the will disinherited a brother.
The boy’s voice became plaintive. “You will not take me to the police?”
“Why did Sandy lie to me? Why did he want me to think Lennart had a brother?”
The gun seemed to weigh ten pounds. It was cold and slippery and repulsive to the touch. I thought of Wallace Bean; he’d loved his forty-five. He’d confided in a pretrial interview that he found “his piece” sexy—and that he’d felt sexy firing it.
My passenger seemed to misinterpret my fidgeting preoccupation with the revolver. He was out of the car before I could attempt to stop him (though I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop him). He disappeared behind a curtain of rain, sprinting toward the jetty.
I slammed the passenger door shut, mechanically wiping rainwater from the leather seat. The boy looked so damned much like Lennart. Who the hell could he be? Lennart would have been thirty-three if he’d lived; too young to have so old a son.
Perhaps the boy was an actor, hired because of his resemblance to Lennart Strindberg. And yet, the resemblance was more than superficial. It was in his voice, in his gait.
I looked for the boy as I drove out to the main road, but I saw no sign of him. The storm was particularly ferocious on that outcropping of rock and sand, miles from town. But I supposed “Dieter” had enough sense to take shelter in one of the decaying monuments to my Uncle Henry’s bad judgment.
Sooner or later, the storm would abate and he would walk back to town. I wondered what, if anything, I should do about it.
32
As I drove toward Hillsdale, I puzzled over the boy’s panicky flight into the rain. True, I’d pulled a gun out of the baggage well and done some serious swearing, but even so his reaction seemed unduly paranoid. He’d assumed I’d pulled a gun on him because I knew who he was. And he’d run out into a rainstorm, fearing my reaction.
But he couldn’t have been afraid of me, or he wouldn’t have risked a bullet in the back by diving out of the car that way.
He’d been afraid I’d turn him over to the police. He’d said as much.
I didn’t think he’d shot Sandy. At the hospital, he’d seemed genuinely distraught. And, assuming his accent was authentic, I didn’t see what possible connection a young German could have to Wallace Bean.
So who were the police seeking in connection with Kirsten’s murder?
I’d handled enough murder trials to know that the police always look for the person who stands to benefit financially from a murder.
But surely Gary Gleason would inherit Kirsten’s property. That building of hers in San Francisco’s financial district was not community property (inheritances are always separate property), but Kirsten must have bequeathed it to Gary. People with valuable assets usually make wills—especially if they’re married to beneficiary lawyers.
I remembered Captain Loftus asking me about Kirsten’s “papers.” I’d assumed—feared—he referred to Kirsten’s letters. But maybe he’d been trying to track down a missing will. Gary would have told the police Kirsten made one, and the captain would have become suspicious if a police search failed to locate it. Maybe that’s why the warrant to search my house authorized the police to look for anything written by or to or about Kirsten Strindberg. Maybe the cops wondered if I hated my ex-husband enough to do him out of his inheritance.
The thought fascinated me, stayed with me for miles of dark, wet road.
What if the boy I’d known as Dieter Strindberg were Kirsten’s heir under the laws of intestate succession? What if he were Kirsten’s, and not Lennart’s, next of kin?
I let a stoplight go green, then red, then green again, thinking about it.
I’d assumed Kirsten and Lennart had been married because they’d had the same last name. But Kirsten hadn’t taken Gary’s name when she’d married him.
Maybe Kirsten hadn’t taken Lennart’s name either, maybe she hadn’t had to. Maybe the two of them had been cousins, like me and Hal. That would explain why Dieter Strindberg (if that was his name) resembled Lennart.
And the boy might have been entitled to some share of the estate, had Lennart died intestate. That would explain why the boy had hired Sandy. Kirsten’s financial district property had become a hundred times more valuable since the old leases had expired—ample incentive for the boy to check the circumstances of Lennart’s death.
A car horn behind me urged me to do less thinking and more driving. I sped through the intersection and pulled off the road. The rain had slackened to a drizzle, shrouding the decommissioned power plant across the bay in twinkling mist. Thousands of tiny lights reflected on a mirror of black mud, creating the illusion of a romantic, if potentially lethal, fairy castle.
My bit of guesswork seemed all right as far as it went. It explained why Dieter had panicked, thinking I’d discovered his identity. I might have taken him to th
e police at gunpoint, telling them he was Kirsten’s next of kin. If the young German had been in town the night of Kirsten’s murder, Loftus would probably have arrested him first and asked questions later.
But my theory didn’t explain why Sandy had lied to me about the boy being Lennart’s younger brother. Sandy could have told me the truth; the boy’s relationship to Kirsten would have made little difference to my plan.
I could only suppose that telling me the truth would have altered Sandy’s plan.
I felt my forehead, hoping to find signs of feverishness. I wanted to believe that my suspicions were irrational, that Sander Arkelett had not been hired by Kirsten Strindberg’s next of kin to steal her will and murder her.
33
I didn’t think there was much likelihood Hal had shown up at his parents’ house, but I drove there anyway.
By the time I pulled up to the mock chalet, the rain had stopped, though the wind continued to rock my convertible. I locked the passenger door and climbed out. A dripping plastic police cordon stretched around my aunt’s rhododendron bushes, but I didn’t see any cops. I supposed they were waiting for daylight to complete their search—they’d wait forever if they were waiting for good weather.
I was getting ready to ring the doorbell when my Uncle Henry opened the door. He was startled to see me, nearly dropping the overnight bag he carried.
Recovering, he took my elbow and steered me down the porch steps. “You have your car, don’t you, Laura? Give me a lift.”
“Is Hal here?”
My uncle shook his head, glancing nervously at the upstairs windows.
I unlocked the passenger door for him, automatically tossing his small bag into the baggage well—right on top of the revolver. I silently cursed my stupidity. I’d have to remember to get the bag out before my uncle did. “Has Hal been here today? Or anytime since the party?”
“Huh! If you could hear what she says to him! No, no, he never comes here.”