The Murder of Miranda

by Margaret Millar

  To the District Attorney of Santa Felicia County:

  Are the police deaf to the voice of a woman crying out from her grave for Justice?

  The fire which killed Iris Young was no ordinary fire, her husband no ordinary man, his employee, Miranda Shaw, no ordinary servant. One of these 3 people is dead.

  3-1 = 2

  2 = a pair

  Is this what the anguished voice from the grave is trying to tell you?

  Listen! Heed!

  This alert comes from:

  A Seeker of Truth

  As a precaution Seeker inked out the club name and ad­dress at the top of the page and the left-hand corner of the envelope. Truth didn’t necessarily mean the Whole Truth.

  Switching identities, Fair Play wrote a short note to the Admiral advising him to reject further pension payments now that he was a wealthy man, and to consider reimburs­ing the taxpayers for previous payments.

  He lay back in the chair and closed his eyes. Righteous­ness flowed through his system like a spring tonic. The pain in his hip had disappeared, the broken-legged mare had been old anyway, and he would go to Waikiki for Christ­mas and eat poi and drink mai tais.

  When Aragon phoned the Admiral’s house a woman with an English accent told him Mrs. Shaw had taken the girls to the Penguin Club for lunch and a swim and would probably be gone all day. He called the club and talked to Ellen.

  “She’s here,” Ellen said. “She’s been showing up with the girls every day lately. The Ingersolls are letting her use their cabana while they’re in South America and she just sits in it by herself.”

  “Why?”

  “She wants to avoid people. Most people.”

  “Who’s the exception?”

  “Grady. He came back to work about a month ago.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about it. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Not like this.” There was a short silence. “She’s still crazy about him, sick-crazy. She sits up in that cabana posing and preening and staring down at him. He can’t stand to look at her and she never takes her eyes off him.”

  “I heard it different. The rumors going the rounds of the country club are about her and the Admiral. What do you think of that?”

  “Nothing. He’s an old man.”

  “A rich old man.”

  “Forget it. I see her every day and I’m telling you the way she watches Grady is—How rich?”

  “A whole bunch rich, you should know that.”

  “I knew his wife was rich, which isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

  “There’s no reason to believe he won’t inherit a large part of her estate.”

  “But suppose—Oh, never mind. It was just a thought. I have to hang up now anyway. Henderson has an errand for me in town.”

  “I’d like to come down and talk to Miranda. Is that okay?”

  “With me it is. With her maybe not.”

  “I can try.”

  “Try ahead,” Ellen said. “If I’m not here, go right on up to cabana number twenty-one.”

  He left his car in the club parking lot. As he was walking across the street to the front door he saw Grady about fifty yards away heading for the employees’ entrance at the back. Aragon waved at him but got no response. Either Grady didn’t recognize him or didn’t want to.

  A wide thickly carpeted staircase led to the row of ca­banas on the second floor. The impression of opulence ended abruptly at the top. The corridor was a kind of long dark tunnel dimly lit at each end by a sixty-watt bulb sus­pended from the ceiling. The brown wooden floor was strewn with swimmers’ towels like mounds of dirty snow on a mud road.

  He knocked on the door of 21 and Miranda’s voice re­sponded immediately.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Tom Aragon.”

  “Aragon?” She opened the door. “My goodness, this is a surprise.”

  She sounded as though it was a pleasant one. Too pleas­ant. It made him vaguely uncomfortable.

  She wore a pink and yellow silk caftan and her long hair hung loose over her shoulders. It was a couple of shades lighter than when he’d last seen her on the street with the two girls in April. Her hair wasn’t the only change. In April she’d been a little depressed, resigned to her fate and not expecting any change for the better. Now she seemed in high spirits. Her eyes sparkled and she had an almost feverish color in her cheeks.

  “Come in, Mr. Aragon, come in.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How did you find me? Oh—Ellen, of course. Dear little Ellen, she knows everybody’s secrets, doesn’t she?”

  He considered the reference to Ellen inaccurate on all counts but he didn’t challenge it.

  The cabana was a small three-sided room furnished with webbed plastic chairs and chaise and a glass-topped table. The fourth side had a half-railing which showed the pool below, and beyond it the sea, and twenty miles to the southwest the hazy blue offshore island, a piece of moun­tain caught and held. Between the island and the shore were the oil platforms like isolated steel prisons built for incorrigibles.

  After a few amenities—she was fine, he was fine, the weather was fine—she changed the subject abruptly.

  “Grady’s back,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  “I had a glimpse of him outside.”

  “Doesn’t he look beautiful?”

  “I—well, he was pretty far away. I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You’re probably laughing at me because men aren’t supposed to be described as beautiful. Only what if they are! You might as well admit the truth.”

  “All right, I admit the truth,” Aragon said. “Grady is a beautiful man.”

  She smiled. “That’s better. He really is, believe me. You didn’t see him at his best when you came down to Paso­loma with those papers for me to sign. He was in shock.”

  “I can understand why. Has he gotten over it?”

  “Of course. He needed a little time to think, that’s all. The instant we met again when he came back here to work I knew nothing had changed between us, that we were as much in love as ever. Naturally, he can’t be obvious about it, but I catch him watching me out of the corner of his eye. It’s so cute . . . Glance over the railing and see if he’s down there now on the lifeguard tower.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he staring up here?”

  “No.”

  “He’s very good at pretending to ignore me.”

  “Is that how you want it?”

  “Of course it is. We can’t afford to be seen together just yet. The police are everywhere. Fortunately Grady under­stands, he’s being extremely tactful about the situation. He disappears the minute I enter the club and stays out of sight until I’m settled up here in the cabana. But it will be nice when we can act natural again.”

  “You claim the police are everywhere,” Aragon said. “What are they doing?”

  “Asking questions about Iris Young, every conceivable sort of question. And I’m sure they’re getting every con­ceivable sort of answer, especially from the girls. Juliet and Cordelia are like children, they’ll say anything to draw at­tention to themselves. I expect some of their statements will be critical of me. They’ve never liked me, they’re not used to anyone giving them orders or even advice, but that’s what I’m paid to do and I do it.”

  “According to the newspaper report, Iris Young was alone in the house the night she died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She wanted to be.”

  “I understand she was crippled.”

  “She wasn’t helpless. She could walk with the aid of a cane, and God knows she could talk, or rather scream. When she got mad you could hear her for miles. Believe me, whatever happened in the house happened because she wanted it to
, whether it was being left alone or being waited on hand and foot.”

  “What was her state of mind that night?”

  “The same as it always was—selfish, mean, arrogant.”

  He hoped, for her sake, that this wasn’t an example of her conversations with the police. “Did she seem de­pressed?”

  “Why should she be depressed, with all that money and power? I’m the one who should be depressed.”

  “And are you?”

  She gazed at him somberly for a minute, then one corner of her mouth twitched in a demure smile. “What do you think? How do I look?”

  “You look very pretty.” And a little wacky.

  “I’m deliriously happy, if you want the truth. Every­thing’s working out the way I planned. May I tell you something in confidence?”

  “Yes, but I’d prefer—”

  “Absolute confidence, like between lawyer and client, I forget the legal term for it.”

  “Privileged information.”

  “Let’s call this privileged information.”

  She was smiling fully now, as if something was turning out to be a great joke. He hoped he wasn’t it.

  “I’d ask you to cross your heart,” she said, “except I’ve always been told lawyers don’t have one.”

  “I hear beating inside my chest. Maybe I’m an excep­tion.”

  “Then cross your heart.”

  He did. Miranda liked games and he didn’t mind as long as they were as innocent as this one.

  It didn’t remain innocent very long. She said, “I’m going to be married within two or three months. Surprised?”

  “Yes. I didn’t peg Grady as the marrying type.”

  “I’m not marrying Grady, I’m marrying Cooper.”

  “Cooper?”

  “The Admiral. I expect him to set the date when this business about his wife is all settled. Oh, it will be nice having money again, being able to afford things. “Things like what?”

  “Like Grady.”

  He knew then why she looked a little wacky. She was.

  He said, “You can’t buy people, Mrs. Shaw.”

  “Most people you can’t, some you can. Grady’s one of the some. Of course, it will take a lot of money and I could never manage it on my own. Cooper is going to help me.”

  “Is he aware of this?”

  “No.”

  “Is Grady?”

  “No. Just you and I. And you can’t tell because it’s privi­leged information and you crossed your heart.”

  Behind the boiler room, which contained the heating and filtering tanks for the pool, there was a small tool shed with a padlock on the door. The lock had been broken so often that no one bothered replacing it anymore and em­ployees had access to the shed for whatever purpose they had in mind. Grady’s purpose was lunch. He’d purchased it at a taco stand a couple of blocks up the street, and he sat now on a wooden chest among the rakes and shovels and hedge clippers, the ants and pill bugs, the lengths of piping and coils of rope.

  The shed smelled of paint thinner and fertilizer and the cooking fumes from the snack-bar grill, but it was peaceful and quiet except for the sound of the waves. Grady liked to listen to them, trying to estimate their size and shape and whether the tide was coming in or going out. Usually he checked his tide book as soon as he reported to work and then chalked the numbers up on the blackboard beside the pool. High 10:25 p.m. 5.7 Low 5:41 p.m. -0.5. He hadn’t done this yet today because he’d seen Miranda arriving with the girls and he wanted to stay out of sight until she went up to the cabana. Avoiding Miranda was easy. Avoiding certain other people wasn’t.

  “So there you are,” little Frederic said. He carried a skateboard and was wearing protective equipment—knee and elbow pads and a red plastic helmet. In spite of these precautions he was plastered with an assortment of grimy bandages on his hands, nose and legs. “I’ve been looking all over the place for you.”

  “Now you found me,” Grady said. “Bug off.”

  “What are you hiding in here for?”

  “Who says I’m hiding?”

  Frederic fitted his skinny little rump snugly into the cen­ter of a coil of rope. Then he removed his lunch, a package of bologna, from underneath his helmet. “What’s it worth to you if I don’t tell?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Take your time. Think it over.”

  “There’s no one to tell.”

  “Sure there is. You don’t happen to have a dill pickle on you, do you? There’s this kid at school who wraps a piece of bologna around a dill pickle and he calls it—”

  “I don’t give a goddamn if he calls it mother. Who is there to tell?”

  “The chick you went to Mexico with.” Since no dill pickle was available, Frederic didn’t bother separating the slices of bologna. He took a bite out of all eight at once. “She’s always asking people where you are—the porters, Henderson, Ellen, even me. How come you don’t want her to find you?”

  “Listen, Frederic. Let’s talk this over man to man.”

  “Hell no. That palsy-walsy stuff just means you’re not going to pay me.”

  “I can’t, I don’t have the money. Anyway, you’re my friend. Aren’t you?”

  “What gives you a dumb idea like that? I don’t have friends. I get shut up in some crazy school that teaches Greek—and who rescues me? Nobody. And where am I going to spend the rest of the summer? A prison camp in the boonies, only they call it an outdoor learning experi­ence in the Sierra wilderness.”

  “Stop it, kid. I cry easy.”

  “You might.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Frederic ate the last chunk of bologna, then he tucked the empty container under one of his knee pads beside a gum wrapper and a soggy piece of Kleenex. He disap­proved of littering. “You want to know what she’s doing up in the cabana right this minute? Wow, you’ll throw a fit when I tell you.”

  “Try me.”

  “She’s talking to her lawyer. His name’s Aragon. The reason I’m sure is he’s my lawyer, too. Him and me, we’re going to sue people together when I grow up, maybe sooner. I’m keeping a list.”

  Grady didn’t throw a fit but he drew in a quick breath and held it as though he’d been knocked over by a wave he didn’t see coming. “What are they talking about?”

  “Search me.”

  “I’m searching you.”

  “I don’t know what they’re talking about, man. I stood in the hall and listened but I couldn’t hear a thing.”

  “Suppose you got in the cabana next door,” Grady said. “You might be able to hear something from there.”

  “Might. How do I get in?”

  “Ellen has a set of master keys.”

  “She wouldn’t give them to me for a million dollars.”

  “She might give them to me.”

  Frederic’s eyes widened. “Oh, now you’re going to turn on the old macho, right? Can I come along and watch?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t seen you in action since—”

  “No. Stay here and I’ll be back soon.”

  “If you change your mind, send me some kind of signal, like whistling three times.”

  “Sure, kid. Sure.”

  After Grady’s departure Frederic amused himself by catching a spider that had spun a web between two of the crooked rust-stained teeth of a rake. For a while he had hopes that it was a black widow and he could train it to bite people to death, a reasonable alternative to suing them, but the creature didn’t have the black widow’s dis­tinguishing red hourglass on its abdomen. Nor did it seem to want to bite anything, not the ant Frederic offered it, or the scab from his thumb, or a shred of the bandage dan­gling from his left wrist. He replaced the spider in the teeth of the rake.

  During these maneuver
s he kept listening hard, but no­body whistled three times or even once and Grady was still missing. Frederic waited another five minutes, then he picked up his skateboard and went back into the boiler room. He kicked a couple of pipes and tried to turn a wheel marked Do Not Touch and to remove a High Voltage sign from the fuse box. But everything was sealed, padlocked, clamped, welded.

  Through the kitchen (Private, Keep Out) he left the club by the rear door (Employees Only), where he had a view of the parking lot. Grady and Aragon were standing beside Aragon’s old Chevy, right in the very center of the lot with­out any trees or shrubbery around to provide coverage. There was no possible way of approaching them without being seen. They were out of reach, twenty years and a thousand miles away, and he could never catch up with them.

  He had made a secret pact with his best friend, Henry, not to cry under any circumstances. But Henry was in Philadelphia visiting his parents and Frederic was here and now, hurting inside and outside.

  Tears rolled down his cheeks like leaden bubbles.

  “You got it all wrong,” Grady said. He had pulled a pair of jeans on over his trunks because it was against the rules for any employee to enter or leave the club wearing only swimming attire. Aragon noticed that the jeans were too tight around the waist—Grady was eating regularly again.

  “I swear to God, Aragon, I haven’t even spoken to her since I came back.”

  “Why not?”

  “I tried to, I wanted to be friendly, but she avoided me. I thought she was sore at me and I didn’t blame her. I just felt grateful she hadn’t put the cops on me about the Porsche. So while she was avoiding me I was avoiding her and it was working out fine. Then suddenly zap, I get this letter.”

  He handed Aragon a piece of pale blue paper that had obviously been unfolded and refolded a number of times. It was soiled at the crease lines and damp from moisture seeping from his swim trunks into the pockets of his jeans but the ink hadn’t smudged. The writing, neat boarding- school backhand, was embellished with a few touches of Miranda’s own, extra-large capitals and circles over the i’s instead of dots.