The Murder of Miranda

by Margaret Millar

  “It’s a speech habit I picked up from all the teenagers around this summer. You know, like you know.”

  “I went to Mrs. Shaw’s house,” Aragon said. “It seems she took off in a hurry, didn’t even bother to lock the doors. What concerns my boss is that she was aware of the important papers she had to sign but she made no attempt to do it. Naturally there’s some question of whether she left voluntarily.”

  “That’s a joke.”

  “Is it private or do I get to laugh, too?”

  “The question is not whether she left voluntarily but whether he did.”

  The afternoon wind had begun blowing in from the sea, carrying the smell of tar from the underwater oil wells. It was a faint pervasive smell like a hint of doomsday.

  “Forget I said that,” she added. “I’m not supposed to gossip about the members.”

  “This ranks as a little more than gossip, Miss Brewster. I learned the man’s name this morning. Grady. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  “Did you learn that this morning, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were misinformed. He’s no friend of mine.”

  She turned and walked away. He followed her. She was almost as tall as he was and their steps exactly matched, so they looked as though they were marching in single file.

  “Miss Brewster.”

  “If you already know so much, why did you come back here?”

  “What’s his full name?”

  “Grady Keaton.”

  “Has he worked at the club long?”

  “About six months.”

  “Can you tell me something of his background?”

  “He didn’t talk much about himself. Not to me anyway. Maybe to fifty other women.”

  “Why fifty?”

  “Why not? One thing I can tell you about Grady is his philosophy—why not?”

  They had reached the front door of the club but neither of them made any move to open it.They stood facing each other, almost eye to eye. Hers were green and very solemn. His were obscured by horn-rimmed glasses which needed cleaning.

  Aragon said, “A minute ago you made it sound as though Mrs. Shaw had kidnapped an innocent lad. Now he’s not such a lad and not so innocent, and Mrs. Shaw had to take a number and wait in line. Which version are you sticking with?”

  “Are you going to make trouble for him?”

  “I might. It’s not my main objective, though. All I really want is Mrs. Shaw’s signature on some legal documents.”

  “Why keep coming back here?”

  “This is where she’s known, where her friends are.”

  “I’m not sure she has friends at the club. She and her husband sort of dropped out of things when he began showing signs of senility, and after his death she didn’t come around for ages. When she finally did she talked to me more than anyone else, mostly chitchat about the weather, food, clothes. Nothing heavy or even interesting.”

  “What makes you dislike her?”

  “That’s pretty strong. Let’s just say I disapprove.”

  “Of what?”

  “Her vanity,” Ellen said. “She probably had reason to be vain some time ago. But at her age she should be able to pass a mirror without stopping to adore herself.”

  “Or criticize herself?”

  “Whatever she’s doing, the key word is herself. No mat­ter how big the universe is it has to have a center, and Miranda decided long ago that she’s it.”

  “Do you call her by her first name?”

  “She asked me to. I don’t, though. Mr. Henderson wouldn’t like it.”

  “She must consider you a friend.”

  “I—well, I’m not. It’s part of my job to act friendly toward the members and I do it. But when some of them expect or demand too much, that’s their problem. I couldn’t help them even if I wanted to. Mr. Henderson has rules about the staff becoming involved with any of the members.”

  “Evidently Mrs. Shaw wasn’t aware of the rules.”

  “Grady was. But then, rules aren’t exactly his strong suit.”

  A small plane passed very low along the edge of the sea as though it was searching for something washed up by the tide. She shielded her eyes to watch it until it disappeared behind a row of eucalyptus trees.

  “You’d better come into the office,” she said. “If people see us talking outside like this, some of them might think I’m carrying on an illicit affair. That wouldn’t bother me but I don’t suppose your wife would approve. You are married, of course.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Intuition. Extrasensory perception.”

  “I don’t buy those.”

  “Okay. How about research? The City Directory lists a Tomás Aragon, 203 Ramitas Road. Occupation, attorney. Wife, Laurie MacGregor, M.D.”

  “No age, weight, political party?”

  “I’ll have to guess about those. Twenty-seven, a hundred and eighty pounds, and a Democrat.”

  “You’re very good, Miss Brewster. I wish you were on my side.”

  “I might be when I figure out what game we’re playing.”

  The door opened and a tall elderly woman came out, leaning heavily on a cane. In her free hand she carried a small red leather case with a snap fastener. She had short thick grey hair and colorless lips so thin they looked glued together. They came apart only slightly when she spoke. “There you are, Ellen. I’ve been asking for you.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Young. I had to—”

  “My daughter Juliet has been complaining of burning eyes after swimming, so I brought over my own testing kit. It turns out Juliet is not imagining things, as she often does. Your chlorine registers too high and your pH too low.”

  “I’ll tell the engineer.”

  “He’ll deny it, of course, but I have the evidence.” She shook the red leather case vigorously. “Considering the dues we pay, I should think the club would be able to afford a competent engineer.”

  “We try.”

  For the first time, Iris Young acknowledged Aragon’s presence with a brief glance. Then she turned back to El­len. “Who’s he?”

  “Mr. Aragon is a lawyer.”

  “I hope he’s not applying for membership.”

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Young.”

  “Good. The club has too many lawyers as it is, sitting around encouraging people to sue each other. By the way, I expected to find the girls here. The Admiral brought them down this morning before his golf game.”

  “They left some time ago,” Ellen said. “The Ingersolls gave them a lift into town.”

  “I’ve instructed them not to accept rides from strang­ers.”

  “The Ingersolls aren’t exactly stra—”

  “Too late to fuss now. The whole problem will be re­solved as soon as Cordelia gets her driver’s license back and I can buy her a new car, something more conventional. That Jaguar she had was a bad influence. It practically demanded to be driven at excessive speeds. It was too stimulating.”

  “A Jaguar would certainly stimulate me.”

  “I’m glad you agree.”

  Ellen wasn’t entirely sure what she’d agreed about, but Mrs. Young seemed satisfied.

  She crossed the road to her own car, a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, walking as if every step was painful. The chauf­feur helped her into the back seat and put a blanket over her legs.

  In Ellen’s absence Mr. Henderson had taken charge of the office, a job he despised, since it nearly always involved complaints ranging from errors in billing to the fat content of the hamburgers in the snack bar. Neither of these ex­tremes, and very little in between, interested him. He thought of himself as creative, a man of ideas. His latest idea, closing the club one day a week in order to conduct a bus tour to Santa Anita, Hollywood Park or Agua Calient
e, had been poorly received by the membership. It was noted in the club newsletter that plans for a weekly Racing Revel had been indefinitely postponed. So were plans for a Blackjack Bash, which violated a local ordinance, and a Saturday Cinema for Stags, sabotaged by does, who out­numbered stags four to one.

  Henderson kept right on trying. When Ellen entered he was, in fact, sketching out in his mind a Garden of Eden Ball.

  People were tired of costume parties and the main at­traction of the ball was certain to be its lack of costumes—except a figleaf or three. There would be some opposition, of course, from the elderly and fat, but in the long run the ball seemed destined to be a rousing success, the stuff of memories.

  Ellen said, “Mr. Henderson.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling and the future. The waitresses and busboys would be dressed as serpents, and from the chandeliers, just out of reach, would hang huge red paper apples. When the more athletic merrymakers succeeded in breaking the apples, confetti would come flying out with sinful abandon. Beautiful, beautiful.

  “Mr. Henderson.”

  Henderson dragged himself rather irritably out of the Garden of Eden. “Welcome back, Miss Brewster. Did you have a nice vacation?”

  “I was only gone for two hours.”

  “Two hours can be an eternity in this madhouse. The Admiral’s wife was just in here complaining that we have too much chlorine in the pool and not enough pH. What the hell is pH? When you find out, buy some and pour it in.”

  “Mr. Henderson, this is Mr. Aragon.”

  “I can’t help that. My God, people expect me to solve all their problems.”

  “I don’t expect you to do anything about mine,” Aragon said.

  “You don’t. Good. Stout fella. Now if you’ll pardon me, I have important work to do, pH and all that.”

  “I understand.”

  “Of course, of course you do. Very understanding face you have there. Not many of them around these days.”

  Henderson departed, wondering why he was always meeting such odd people. Perhaps it was a family curse.

  “We keep two files on each member,” Ellen told Aragon. “One is for regular office use: address, phone number, oc­cupation, names of family members, and so on. The other is private, to be used only by Mr. Henderson and the ex­ecutive committee. It contains each member’s original ap­plication for membership and the names and comments of their sponsors, letters of resignation and reinstatement, per­tinent financial records, lists of other clubs they belong to. Some of this is useful, but mainly the file is a hodgepodge that should be cleaned out or updated.”

  “What’s your definition of hodgepodge?”

  “Oh, complaints from one person about another person, perhaps one or both of them long since dead, old newspa­per clippings covering social events, divorces, scandals and the like; cards from members traveling abroad; photo­graphs, many of them unidentified and unidentifiable.”

  “Apparently you have access to the file.”

  “Only when Mr. Henderson wants me to look something up,” Ellen said. “He keeps the key.”

  “But you can ask him for it any time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you?”

  “I’m supposed to have a good reason.”

  “Mrs. Shaw skipped town under unusual circumstances. That good enough?”

  “We’ll see if Mr. Henderson thinks so.”

  While she went to get the key Aragon stood at the door and watched the people. There were about twice as many of them as there had been during the morning. Several small groups were having late lunch on the terrace and most of the chaises on the opposite side of the pool were occupied. The water of the pool itself was being churned up by half a dozen earnest swimmers doing laps to a pace clock. On the lifeguard tower an ivory-haired young man was picking absently at his chest, peeling away the dead skin of his latest sunburn.

  The elderly man in shorts and tennis visor was still busy writing but he had changed his position from the terrace to a chair under a cypress tree at the corner of the fence. The tree was bent and twisted by the wind and salt air. It seemed a good place for him.

  Ellen came back carrying the key and looking a little embarrassed, as though Henderson might have given her a reprimand or a warning.

  Her voice was subdued. “Listen, I’m sorry I said some of those things about Mrs. Shaw and Grady.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know for sure whether they’re together or not. They both left at approximately the same time but that may be only a coincidence. She takes trips every now and then, cruises and stuff like that. As for Grady, life­guards come and go around here like the tides. It’s a boring job and the salary’s lousy, that’s why we mostly have to hire college kids who are subsidized by their families. Grady isn’t a kid and he has no family. We all knew he wouldn’t last.”

  “It’s funny he didn’t last long enough to pick up his paycheck.”

  “Where—how did you find that out?”

  “Frederic told me.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “He had the idea,” Aragon said carefully, “that Mrs. Shaw was, in his words, Grady’s new chick.”

  She looked down at the key in her hands, turning it over and over as if she was trying to remember what lock it fitted. “So even the kids were talking about it.”

  “Or kid. And he’s not exactly typical.”

  “They probably all knew before I did, everyone in the club. What a prize cluck that makes me. I never even sus­pected her because she’s so much older, and that day in the office they both pretended to be meeting for the first time.”

  “Some first meetings can be quite electric,” Aragon said. The word reminded him of Hippollomia and his truck trapped behind Mrs. Shaw’s locked gate. “There is no elec­tric . . . Missus forgot to pay.”

  She said, “Afterward I watched them walk down the corridor together. There was something about them, some­thing inevitable, fated. I couldn’t describe it but I knew Grady was walking out of my life before he was even in it.” She turned away with a shrug. “So scratch one lifeguard. He won’t be back.”

  “Not even for his paycheck?”

  “He won’t need it. Miranda Shaw is a very wealthy woman.”

  He didn’t correct her.

  The files took up half the width of one wall of the office. They were painted pastel blues and pinks and mauves to help conceal their purpose. They still looked like files. Ellen unlocked the blue one.

  The material on the Shaws was sparse. Attached to an application form dated twenty years previously were enthusiastic comments from the Shaws’ sponsors, Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Godwit, and their seconders, Dr. Franklin Spitz and Mrs. Ada Cottam, and a card with a single word printed on it and underlined: OIL. Whether it was the OIL or the enthusiastic support, the Shaws were admitted to membership in the Penguin Club the following month, paid the initiation fee and a year’s dues in advance and rented cabana number 22. Neville Shaw’s other affiliations included the University Forum, the Greenhills Country Club, Turf and Tanbark, Rancheros Felicianos and the Yale Club.

  An old letter from Shaw addressed to the manager and the Executive Committee deplored the kind of music played at the New Year’s Eve Ball. A later one canceled the rental of cabana number 22, citing excessive noise from 21 and 23. To the bottom of this someone had added a brief comment in ink: Party Pooper!

  There were only two recent items in the file, a copy of a delinquent-dues notice signed by Walter Henderson, and a greeting card bearing an indecipherable postmark and ad­dressed to Miss Ellen Brewster, in care of Penguin Club, Santa Felicia, California.

  “Go ahead, read it,” Ellen said. “It’s not personal. She wrote cards like that to a lot of people. I think she was homesick, she didn’t enjoy traveling, especially in Mexico.”
<
br />   “Where was she in Mexico when she wrote this?”

  “Pasoloma.”

  He had never heard of it.

  Dear Ellen: Heavenly weather, blue sea, blue sky. Only fly in ointment is more like a mosquito or flea, what the tourists call no-see-ums. My husband is off on a 3-week fishing trip but I get seasick so I’m here on the beach, scratching. By the way, a mistake must have been in our last billing. I’m sure my husband paid it promptly as usual. Regards, Miranda Shaw

  “She didn’t like Pasoloma,” Ellen said. “There’s nothing to do except surf and fish, she told me. Yet she kept going back.”

  “Did her husband always go with her?”

  “As far as Pasoloma. Then he’d charter a fishing boat for two or three weeks and do his thing while she did hers.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the sort of vacation a rich beau­tiful woman would plan for herself.”

  “Not unless she liked surfing. Or surfers. Anyway, she went.”

  “When she came back,” Aragon said, “did she look like a woman who’d just spent a couple of weeks lying on a beach?”

  “No. She avoids the sun and salt water because they dry the skin. Even when she sits on the terrace here she hides under an umbrella and a wide-brimmed hat and a robe big enough for three Arabs and a camel.”

  “You’re sure about the camel?”

  She smiled faintly. “All right, scratch the camel and one Arab. The general picture remains the same.”

  “Where is Pasoloma?”

  “I looked for it on the map once and couldn’t find it. But I think it’s fairly close to the border because they always took their car and Mr. Shaw refused to drive long dis­tances.”

  He figured that would put it somewhere in the northern part of Baja California. During the Lockwood case, he’d covered the area by car and he couldn’t recall even a small village by that name. Either Ellen Brewster had made a mistake—which seemed unlikely—or else Pasoloma wasn’t a geographical location at all but merely the name of a resort where people went to swim in the surf or lie on the beach or charter a boat for deep-sea fishing. If so, it was a peculiar choice for a woman who didn’t like any of those things. Maybe Pasoloma offered other enticements Mrs. Shaw hadn’t mentioned to anyone at the Penguin Club.