Minutes later, the volley from the honor guard brought me out of it. As the lonely chord of taps echoed in the distance, the flag was folded and presented to the widow, who passed it to the mother without a word or glance, who clasped it to her heart. The honor guard returned to order arms, the preacher said a prayer, the casket was lowered toward its tomb. A young woman, presumably in hire to the mortuary, presented Clarissa Crandall with a snow-white rose. I’m not up on my interment protocol, but I think she was supposed to drop it in the grave. Instead, she looked at it as though it were a weed, then dropped it to the ground.
Moments later, the minister sent us on our way. Mine was down the hill toward Sands Limo Number Two, and I made sure I got there before the widow did.
“Mrs. Crandall,” I said after she broke free of the knot of sympathizers who were plaguing her.
A brow arched. Her lips were as red as the stripes on her husband’s flag. “Yes?”
“My name’s Tanner. I was a friend of Tom’s.”
She looked at me the way my clients do on occasion, clients who regard private detectives as unsavory, even the ones who work for them. “Haven’t we met?”
I nodded. “Guido’s. About a year ago.”
She twirled the golden lavaliere that frolicked between her breasts. “Ah, yes. My one and only descent into the abyss. Another shattered soul, Mr. Tanner?”
“I wouldn’t call Tom’s soul shattered, Mrs. Crandall. I’d call it overtaxed.”
Her lips wrinkled like foil. “By me, I suppose.”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Neither would his mother, and neither would the owners of the stares that were crawling all over me back there at that wretched chapel.”
I let my gaze drop. “Maybe it’s the outfit.”
Her shrug made the outfit even more scandalous. “Sackcloth and ashes would be preferable, I know, but I’ve got some stills to shoot this afternoon, and there isn’t time to change.” She duplicated my earlier glance. “You weren’t exactly outfitted by Wilkes Bashford for the occasion.”
I gripped my lapels and bowed. “Touché, Mrs. Crandall.”
“It’s Duncan now. I’ll be using my maiden name for all occasions.”
“Including wakes and second marriages.”
She didn’t know what that meant, and I wasn’t sure myself. After she decided it didn’t matter, she looked over my shoulder at the limo, to be sure it was ready to whisk her away from all this. “What can I do for you, Mr. Tanner? I have an appointment in the city in twenty minutes. Which means I can give you ten seconds.”
“I was wondering what the authorities have told you about your husband’s death.”
“They’ve told me they’re not sure what happened.”
“Do they say when they’ll know?”
She shook her head. “They don’t seem very … agitated about it, however.”
“They’re hardly ever agitated about anything that happens in the Tenderloin. Did they do an autopsy?”
“I don’t know. Why would they?”
I didn’t have an answer I was ready to share with her. “Did Tom have a history of medical problems?”
“No.”
“Had he had a physical lately?”
“I think they make them get one every year at the ambulance service.”
“His was normal?”
“As far as I know. What are you suggesting, Mr. Tanner?”
“I’m suggesting the odds that he dropped dead in an abandoned bus terminal seem pretty long.”
“But it happens.”
“Yes, it does. So do muggings. So does suicide. I’m just finding it hard to believe that any of those things happened in this case.”
Her eyes flared like an animal’s near fire, and her lungs issued a hot burst of breath. “Well, you can scratch one item off your list—my husband was not suicidal.”
I met her look. “I agree, as a matter of fact.”
“Good. Is there anything else?”
“Did Tom have any reason to be wandering around the Tenderloin that night?”
She seemed irritated by the question. “Not that I know of.”
I decided to irritate her some more. “Where were you the night he died, Mrs. Crandall?”
“At work. Not that it’s any of your—”
“And where was your friend?”
She raised a brow. “Am I supposed to know who you’re talking about?”
I gestured at the limo. “Mr. Sands.”
“What difference does that … oh. I get it. You’re implying Richard had something to do with Tom’s death.” Her look was scathing. “The short answer is, why would he bother? Mr. Sands has managed to get whatever he’s wanted in this world without worrying his handsome head about my husband.” She left it to me to decide whether Sands’ trophies included her. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to be beautiful for my photographer. And I suggest you find something to do besides drumming up business trying to make something sinister out of a tragic accident.”
Clarissa Crandall twirled so rapidly her dress rose halfway up her thighs, then swooped into the limousine and disappeared behind a screen of black sheet metal and smoked window glass. I expected the limo to roar off toward the big, bad city, but a moment later a motor whined and the rear window rolled down.
Her expression was a stranger to the one she’d taken into the car. “There’s something you should know, I think,” she said quietly.
“What’s that?”
“I loved my husband. I suppose you don’t believe that, given what Tom has obviously told you about me. But I wanted you to know there’s another side to his story.”
“I’d like to hear it some time.”
“Why?”
“It might help.”
She looked beyond me, at the gravestones marching up the hill, including the ones decorated with Mylar balloons and plastic windmills, as though eternity were a frat party. “Help who? Help what?”
“Help me figure out what happened to Tom.”
“What difference does it make?” She sighed and closed her eyes, weary in the lap of luxury. “Why are you bothering?”
“Because finding things out is the only thing I’m good at.”
“That hardly seems enough.”
“It is for me.”
We regarded each other for a while, with a mix of sorrow and expectation. Then the window rolled up, and the limo was gone, and I was left behind in a quandary and a cloud of dust.
I looked around. Everyone else had gone except Tom’s mother, who lingered near the grave as though she had it on good authority there would be a reprise of the Resurrection. In the hostile stare of a grave-digger who was slumped over the long handle of his shovel, impatient to get dust back to dust in a hurry, I strolled to her side. “Mrs. Crandall?”
The stout and tidy woman looked up at me, eyes buffed by sadness and memory. Her hands were clutching the flag to her breast; her mind was clutching at a miracle. “Yes?”
“My name is Tanner. I was a friend of your son’s.”
She blinked at the interruption and then at the intrusive sun. “I don’t recognize you. Were you in Tom’s class at San Ramon?”
I shook my head. “We were members of the same club, sort of.”
“From the war, you mean?”
“No, just friends from the neighborhood. Over in the city. I saw Tom once or twice a week over the last few years.”
She sighed. “Tom was a good boy.”
“Yes, he was.”
“The good die young, they say.”
“I’m afraid this proves the rule.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Was he happy at the end, do you think?”
“I’m not sure,” I evaded.
When I didn’t continue, she answered her own question. “I don’t think he was,” she declared firmly.
“Do you know what was wrong?”
She sighed. “The war, partly. Tom always worri
ed about the war.”
“Worried about what part of it, specifically?”
She looked toward a passing cloud. “Who can say? About whether he’d done right in going, I think; Tom always tried to do the right thing.” She grimaced as though she’d felt a pain. “In my day, no one ever doubted wars were right. No one ever doubted anything. I suppose it’s better Tom’s way.”
“Better—not easier.”
She blinked away a tear.
“Was there anything else bothering him? Besides the war?”
Her lips stiffened as she looked around the cemetery, then softened when she saw we were alone. “That woman.”
“Clarissa?”
She nodded curtly. “She was not right for Tom. She was too … modern. Too pushy. I tried to tell him so, but …” Her shrug suggested the effort had been both incessant and ineffective.
“Did you see Tom often in the past few years, Mrs. Crandall?”
She shook her head. “He was too busy. And she would never come out to the valley with him, so …” Her hands rose and fell at her sides like fractured wings. “She made him choose, and he chose her.”
“Did Tom have any friends still living out here? People he was still in touch with?”
She shook her head. “Only Ellen.”
“Who’s Ellen?”
She set her jaw. “Ellen Simmons. The one he truly loved. The one he should have married. The one that monster dragged away before the service even started. As if Tom had anything to do with that old business.”
“What old business?”
She looked at me for the first time, finally conscious that I was essentially a stranger. “Nothing that concerns you. Or Tom, either one.”
SEVEN
Under the not-altogether-bogus guise of wanting to know more about my dead friend’s origins, I lingered at the gravesite to try to pry more information out of his mother, lowering my voice so not even the trees and monuments would overhear. Her eyes fixed on the still-uncovered vault, her voice a leaden yet maternal drone, Mrs. Crandall uttered a simple eulogy: Tom had been an attentive son.
A happy childhood, a triumphant adolescence, a patriotic enlistment, were preludes to an increasingly distressing sequel. Troubled by the war, by his work, most recently by his marriage, after a bright beginning Tom had begun to founder. But not so much so that he couldn’t find time to drive out to see his mother at least one Sunday each month, to take her to church, then to supper at the Lyons in Walnut Creek, then to the cemetery to put fresh flowers on his father’s grave, which was not ten yards from the one her son had just been placed in.
“Was Tom’s brother here, by the way?” I asked as her litany died away.
She clutched the handbag even tighter, as though there were secrets deep within it. “Tom doesn’t have a brother.”
“You mean something happened to him?”
“I mean Tom doesn’t have a brother.”
I tried to recall the phone message precisely. “I thought Tom mentioned him recently. I must have misheard.”
Mrs. Crandall had had enough of me. “I have to get back to the house; people will be coming by. I have to make snickerdoodles.”
I started to take my leave, then turned back. “The woman you mentioned, the one Tom should have married. Does she still live out this way?”
Mrs. Crandall nodded, if possible even more distressed than before. “Ellen’s still at home, more’s the pity. She works at a bank in Oakland, but she lives with her folks on the old highway. How she stands it, I don’t know—Orson Simmons is off his rocker; always has been. Poor Gertrude looks like death would be a blessing.” Mrs. Crandall shook her head, her expression still suitable for extreme unction even though the people she had spoken of weren’t eligible. “Tom broke Ellen’s heart when he didn’t come back to her after the war. It’s the only mean thing he ever did.”
“Absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder.” The surroundings and the sentiments had made me a greeting card.
Her lips stiffened. “The heart Tom had when he came back wasn’t the one he took over there. That was bad enough. Then that woman got hold of him.” She made Clarissa Crandall sound as corrupting as a cult.
After giving me directions to Ellen’s parents’ house, Mrs. Crandall started walking toward the Chrysler for the ride back to the mortuary. The trip to the car was a trudge; she took my arm to steady herself while I tried to believe I was performing a service instead of prying; along the way I almost tripped over a gravestone with a golf bag etched onto it. After helping Mrs. Crandall into the rear seat of the Chrysler, I thanked her for her time and returned to my Buick, glad to be going in another direction.
The San Ramon Valley has been a magnet for the fortunes churned out by the economic fission of the eighties, from the Rodeo Drive redux of downtown Walnut Creek to the inexplicably expensive homes clustered belly-to-belly in the Blackhawk subdivision to the festive jockocracy that flourishes around the watering holes in Danville. But it wasn’t always so, and Mrs. and Mrs. Simmons and their daughter Ellen lived in a board-and-batten bungalow tucked away in the corner of a walnut orchard in the flatlands not far from the freeway, a house that had doubtlessly been built back when Danville was as rural as Delano.
What the Simmons house lacked in style and sophistication it tried to make up for with precision. The grounds were simple but immaculate—hedges trimmed, lawn edged and mowed, flowers planted in perfect patterns. Each piece of gravel in the drive seemed to have been put in place by hand; the furniture on the porch was nailed to the floor to ensure perpetual symmetry; the window blinds were pulled to the same dimension: I hadn’t seen that kind of regimental mania since I was in the army. Despite the effort at cut-rate respectability, I had a feeling this was a place the newer residents of the valley thought something should be done about.
When I knocked, the door opened immediately, as though someone had been standing guard out at the highway and had warned of my approach. Beyond the screen, Ellen Simmons looked at me with such frank curiosity I decided she must have seen me watching when her father pulled her out of the chapel and had been intrigued by the attention. Or maybe she was just interested in anything that might take her out of that house even for a moment, even something as scruffy and unpromising as a private eye.
She still wore her funeral attire—black dress and red-rimmed eyes—and still clutched a handkerchief in her fist. From the stretch of the dress across her bust and hips, I bet that after she took it off she would have it cleaned and pressed and return it to the person she’d borrowed it from. The crimson in her eyes was going to take longer to be rid of.
I introduced myself and said that I’d seen her at the chapel and asked why she’d left so quickly.
She answered my question with one of her own. “You knew Tom?” Her eyes bulged with hope and her hair got a quick pat: she wouldn’t want to disappoint a friend of Tom’s.
I nodded. “We lived near each other in the city.”
She twisted her handkerchief and smiled, briefly and bravely. “I bet you’re the detective.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“He thought a lot of you.”
“I felt the same about Tom. So did you, I understand.”
Her eyes rinsed themselves a bit more, but she was so used to it by now she ignored it. “You must have been talking to Mrs. Crandall.”
I admitted it.
“She’s a dear.”
“She thinks you were the love of Tom’s life.”
“I know.”
“What do you think?”
She hesitated. “I think he had a wife.”
“Love’s not always law-abiding.”
Her look was intended to discipline me. “It was for Tom.” Signs of resistance replaced the signs of mourning. “Besides, I don’t know that it’s any of your business what Tom and I were to each other.”
“I think you’re right.” As right as Tom’s wife and mother had been.
I
let my apology sink in. When it had, her expression eased back to the original edition, which was drawn and melancholy yet somehow as plucky as a puppy’s. “Mrs. Crandall told me Tom would often come by to see you after he’d been to see her.”
She shrugged and bit a lip. “The last year or so, sometimes. Not often enough.”
In those stark and bloodless surroundings, the nakedness of her desire was carnal. “What would have been often enough?”
She met my eye. “I imagine you can guess, if you’re a very good detective.”
We let it sit where it was for a while. Ellen Simmons worked on her eyes with her handkerchief while I worked less visibly on my tact. Neither of us made much progress.
Because she was well-brought-up, Ellen eventually remembered her manners and invited me inside, but was relieved when I declined. From the way she fidgeted when she issued the invitation, I guessed the housekeeping had slacked off since she’d heard the news about Tom. Nevertheless I was charmed. I hadn’t met a woman who worried about housekeeping in years.
“I have a few questions, if you don’t mind,” I said as I moved to the shady side of the porch and she shoved open the screen door and joined me.
“Why? What’s the point now that he’s … gone.”
“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth.”
“Then what are you trying to do?”
“Preserve my options, I guess.”
She hesitated, as though to measure my capacity to respond to her next question. “Do you think he was murdered?” she said suddenly.
I tried not to show my surprise. “I don’t know. Do you?”
“Yes.” The word was bold and heartfelt.
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. That man Sands, maybe.”
“So you know about that.”
She nodded and borrowed Tom’s words: “It was destroying him, what that man was doing.”
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