Bloodlines ik-9

by Jan Burke

  He said, “Not at all, miss, but—” just as Max tried to protest that this was his treat.

  “It can’t be, Max. I’m supposed to be working, remember?”

  He glanced nervously at the waiter, who was feigning just the right amount of indifference, and said, “All right. But another time, then.”

  “Another time.”

  I had decided that I would do my best not to appear shocked at the prices on the menu, but the real shock turned out to be that my menu didn’t have any prices on it at all.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the waiter, holding the menu out for him to see. “I think I have a misprinted one.”

  Max said, “The Cliffside is a bit old-fashioned, I’m afraid. Why don’t we switch menus?”

  At that point, I finally figured out what was going on. “I can’t believe it,” I said. “Only men get menus with prices on them?”

  He smiled. “Neanderthal, I agree. I promise not to drag you by the hair into a cave after dessert.”

  The indignation I felt over the “ladies” menu allowed me not to faint when I finally did get a look at the prices. The waiter was placing bread on the table and filling our water glasses while reciting the specials with a level of enthusiasm that suggested the chef had chosen these items in our honor. I thought about ordering nothing but a side salad, then told myself that it would be worth it to pack a lunch every day next week in order to not look like a pauper just now. I thought Max — a recent college student — would understand a low-budget order perfectly, but I didn’t want to appear to be a nobody to the waiter.

  So I ordered duck in blackberry sauce, which came with grilled vegetables and little pancakes stuffed with wild rice. Max ordered a porterhouse steak. We considered and rejected the idea of having some wine, both of us having a lot of work before us that afternoon.

  Max asked me how long I had worked for the Express. I told him that I was new there, but had worked at the Californian. He tried asking about that, but seemed to quickly pick up on the fact that I didn’t want to reminisce about Bakersfield.

  When the waiter brought the salads, he nearly tripped on my shoulder bag, which I had set on the floor. He acted as if people tried to trip him all the time, that keeping his balance while treading a path of hidden obstacles was part of the service a member of the staff of the Cliffside was happy to render to its customers. I apologized as Max picked up the bag and set it on an empty seat. “What the hell do you have in this thing,” Max asked, “a brick?”

  “A library book. Mind if we stop by the downtown library on the way back to my office?”

  When I told him I was reading Interview with the Vampire, he said he had already read it, and talked about it enthusiastically, but he was good about not spoiling the ending for me.

  “You okay these days?” I asked, thinking that by now he had relaxed enough to tell me what was on his mind.

  “Sure. Well — no. Actually, I don’t know how to answer that.” He sighed and set down his silverware. “I don’t know what to do.” He smiled a little crookedly. “Can we talk off the record for a while?”

  I agreed that would be all right. He had tensed up again, and I knew that as it was, he was feeling so uptight, I wouldn’t get much out of him otherwise.

  He took a minute to figure out how to begin, then said, “When the story came out — about them finding the real Max Ducane — I felt horrible. I mean, I already feel like a fake, you know?”

  “Why? Because of a name? Lots of us have names that others have had before us. Think of all those John Smiths.”

  “But they weren’t believed to be someone else. Each John Smith is who he is, and his grandmother and his uncle know which one he is. Few people got their names the way I did.”

  “Right. You could have been in my situation, named after an old song, and have everyone sing the damn thing to you whenever you leave a party.”

  He laughed.

  I liked his laugh; it was one that made you want to laugh with him.

  The strangest thing happened, though. Maybe because I had been looking at pictures of Katy and Todd Ducane all morning, I could see why Warren Ducane had mistaken him for his brother’s child. I decided to keep that to myself.

  “Max, if you think about it, all of us have made-up names. So you got this one in a courtroom. You’re hardly the first person to legally change his name. Unless you don’t like the name?”

  “No, it’s fine. In fact … do you know who I was named after? When I was Kyle, I mean?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “It was my uncle’s middle name. Adam Kyle Yeager. A man who died in prison. Now, there’s a hero. It wasn’t even anything glorious like civil rights or civil disobedience. He was a felon. A thief, among other things. From all I’ve heard, he was a local gangster.”

  “He must have meant something to somebody, for you to be named after him.”

  “Oh, my father thought the world of him.” He caught himself and said, “Mitch, I mean.” He looked away for a moment, then said, “For the most part, not knowing who my birth parents were hasn’t bothered me. After Mom — Estelle — died, I really wanted to know who they were, and every now and then I wondered about them. But on the upside, by the time I was ten or so, if I saw Mitch Yeager acting like a jerk, I knew he wasn’t my father. I was always free of him — I hadn’t inherited anything from him.”

  “I can see both sides of it, I suppose. I think curiosity would have gotten the best of me by now.”

  “That’s really all it is for me at this point — curiosity. I’ve met people who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, or farther back than that, but whose own lives haven’t been worth much of anything at all. So I told myself that what mattered was what I did with my life. Who I am, what I made of myself.”

  “I agree.”

  “And I’ve had incredible advantages. I don’t deny that. Estelle Yeager loved me. I didn’t grow up in poverty, or being discriminated against for the color of my skin. I’ve never had health problems. Hell, just being born in this country is something to be thankful for. There are plenty of horror stories about what can happen to orphans, so for a bastard, I’d say I’ve done really well. Mitch Yeager might not love me, and maybe he’s always planned to use me for his own purposes, but he has spent a lot of money on me.”

  “I know what you mean about the advantages,” I said, “and maybe you were better off than some other orphans, but didn’t you feel kind of bad about being shipped off to boarding school?”

  “If I hadn’t gone to boarding school, I would have been raised by Mitch, and I don’t think that would have been so great. As it is, the headmaster of my school sort of took me under his wing, became a better adoptive father than Mitch was. So I was lucky there, too.”

  “Back up a second. You said Mitch wanted to use you. How?”

  He toyed with his steak, then said, “Sonya, his new wife? She’s nice. But not too bright. The kids he’s had with her take after their mother, according to Mitch. I hardly know them, so I couldn’t say. Anyway, he wanted me to be a kind of caretaker of his businesses, along with my cousins — Eric and Ian. We’d see to it that his kids died wealthier than he did.”

  “And would you have been compensated for that? Or were you supposed to just be grateful to have a chance to repay him for adopting you?”

  “No, I would have been compensated. And generously.”

  I studied him for a moment. “But you turned him down by accepting Warren’s offer.”

  “Oh yes. Mitch is furious with me. I don’t blame him. I even offered to pay back what he spent on my upbringing and education. I’d be embarrassed to repeat what he said to me, but he ended by telling me he didn’t want the money because I was his responsibility, and he had never backed down on one yet.”

  “Ouch. I grew up Catholic, so I recognize that weapon. Guilt.”

  “Yes. But to be honest, I don’t feel guilty about Mitch. Maybe I should, but I don’t. I hated the way he
treated Mom. I’ve even wondered if … well, never mind that. I haven’t ever been close to him, but that’s not the problem. It’s just that he … how can I describe it? He ensnares people.”

  “So Warren Ducane and Auburn Sheffield gave you a way out of his trap.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You know, I can’t help but think there was more to it than that. Auburn said you had turned them down.”

  “Believe it or not, Lillian convinced me.”

  “How?”

  He was silent. I waited. I concentrated on my lunch for a while. He hadn’t been eating much, and still didn’t. That made me feel a little self-conscious, so I stopped and looked up at him.

  “That night,” he said, “at the dinner party? After you left?”

  I turned crimson, but said, “Don’t tell me… you threw something, too?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “No. I meant, after everyone else left, Lillian and I talked. I can’t explain it, really, but I feel comfortable around her.”

  “I know what you mean, or at least — I went over there with a chip on my shoulder, totally expecting her to look down her nose at me, but ended up liking her in spite of myself.”

  “Same here. I thought she might want me to be some kind of replacement grandson or something.”

  “That would have been pretty creepy.”

  “Creepy. Yes. This whole thing has lots of creepy aspects to it.”

  “But she didn’t pressure you?”

  “Not openly,” he said, amused, “but subtly? Maybe she did. She got me to talk about school and my plans to work for Mitch. Like I said, it was easy to talk to her. She also said that whether I called myself Kyle or Max, she’d like to get to know me, because she had known my mom, and liked her.”

  “She meant Estelle?”

  “Yes. Then she asked Hastings — her butler — to bring out some photos. They were of Mom when she was young, maybe nineteen or so. I guess Mom had been dating a friend of Lillian’s then, because the man she was with in the photos wasn’t Mitch. She looked… so beautiful, so happy. I don’t remember her that way. I guess she was sadder, more fearful, when I was a kid. She drank a lot, and it made her look older than she was. Even her posture had changed from that of the girl in the photos. Maybe because she was always cowering around Mitch.”

  “With reason?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Yes. Anyway, Lillian said that she didn’t think she could ever forgive Mitch for what he did to my mother. She said that if I wouldn’t take Auburn’s offer, she’d like to know how she could help me to become free of Mitch, because she would never believe that Estelle would have wanted me to live my life always doing just what he wanted me to do.”

  “So you decided to take Warren’s offer?”

  “Yes. As for Mitch and all his schemes — I haven’t ever seen them do anyone any good. Not even Mitch, really.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Invent things,” he said, then blushed. “I mean, I have some ideas, and know some people I’d like to work with, guys from school.”

  “Like the GPS thing you were talking about the other night?”

  “Yes. I want to be part of what’s happening with that.” He paused, then said, “At least, that was my plan until yesterday.”

  “Do you lose the money now that they know the real — well, I mean, the original Max Ducane is dead?”

  “No, it’s mine,” he said, without much enthusiasm.

  “Okay, you have an idea, some people to work with, and the funds to try it. So what’s the problem?”

  “Max Ducane,” he said quietly.

  “But you just said—”

  “I’m using his money. I’m using his inheritance. He’s a murder victim.”

  I thought about that for a moment, then said, “He was a murder victim twenty years ago, Max. You didn’t cause that to happen by agreeing to Warren’s plan.”

  “No, but it wouldn’t be right to just — let me put it this way. Maybe someone else could say, ‘Too bad, that’s just the past.’ But I can’t. For one thing, well — not many people know this, but I’m living at Lillian’s house.”

  I must have raised a brow or something, because he quickly added, “Just for a few weeks. Then — well, never mind.”

  “What?”

  “There was a plan that I would move into the house where her daughter lived. I was going to rent it, maybe buy it from her if I liked it. But I don’t know — it seems morbid.”

  “She still owns that house?”

  “Yes. I think — I think she still had some hope that Kathleen or Max would come home again.”

  “Twenty years of that. Wow. Did she rent it out to someone else in the meantime?”

  “No.”

  “Weird.”

  “People hold on to hope,” he said. “They have to, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so. So … living with her, though. Why did she want you to live with her?”

  “She wanted to get to know me. I’ve been spending a lot of time around her and Helen Swan and Auburn Sheffield, and I even spent time around Warren Ducane just before he left. I like all of them, but I especially like Helen and Lillian.” He paused, then said, “I was there yesterday, when the police told Lillian what you’d found.”

  “Oh no…”

  “It was so hard on her, even after all this time. Thank God your friend Helen came over to be with her, because I felt strange as hell, to say the least. And that’s my point — I can’t have this name and be befriended by these people and then pretend I don’t know who that other Max Ducane was. When you looked in that trunk — that was her daughter, her grandson. Warren loved his brother — he set me up to get all of that money because I reminded him of Todd. Don’t you see? I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do something to… to bring about justice, if at all possible. I have to use the money to try to find out who killed them.”

  “All of it?” I asked, startled.

  “No, I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to. Auburn and Mr. Brennan will still manage the trust until I’m thirty. Let’s just say that I have been given enough right now to offer a big reward without becoming a beggar myself.”

  At this point, I started giving him the pitch. I asked to write his story, including the part about the reward, and started working through a list of things he had told me that could be published without hurting anyone. Some of it — mostly negative personal comments about Mitch and Estelle — he still wanted to withhold. He said I could tell O’Connor or Lefebvre anything that would be of help with investigating the murders, provided it was off the record, too. He didn’t want to see anything he had said about Mitch and Estelle’s marriage in the paper. I suppose I let what was beginning to be a friendship get in the way and didn’t push him about that.

  I told him about Mitch showing up at the coroner’s office.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “Mitch thinks he has special privileges. I guess he does.”

  “Your cousin was the one who did the actual talking, I think.”

  “My cousin? Eric or Ian?”

  “Ian — at least, Lefebvre said it was Ian.”

  “Silver streak in his hair?”

  “Yes.”

  He made a face and gave an exaggerated shudder.

  “That bad?”

  “Ian and Eric are evil.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m not joking,” he said.

  I was startled by his tone, his seriousness.

  The awkwardness that produced was relieved a moment later, when the waiter came back and asked if we wanted dessert or coffee. We both declined, and soon he was back again, presenting the checks, taking our credit cards with thanks and an appearance of sincerity in his pleasure in serving us.

  I could see Max fretting as the waiter walked off. “Don’t worry,” I said, “my card won’t be declined.”

  He smiled. “I hope someday I’ll be able to make this up to you. You know, th
at we’ll be able to do something together and it won’t be work for you.” He turned red after he said it.

  “Do you have a girlfriend at Dartmouth?” I asked.

  “No. Not many girls go to Dartmouth — they just started admitting women six years ago. So there weren’t many in my graduating class. Not many at all in computer science.”

  “Oh.”

  I was scared to death that he was going to say, “Why do you ask?” But he asked a worse question.

  “Did you have a boyfriend in Bakersfield?”

  “No,” I said, breaking eye contact. “No … just friends. That’s all.”

  “I must have missed that news story,” he said.

  I looked back at him. “What?”

  “The one about all the guys in Bakersfield suffering from blindness.”

  “It’s my charm that allowed them to resist, I’m afraid.”

  He shook his head.

  “I didn’t go to Bakersfield in what you’d call a receptive mood,” I said.

  “Somehow, I sense there’s more to this.”

  “There is, but I need to get back to the paper.”

  He laughed. “You didn’t come back to Las Piernas in a receptive mood, either, I see. Okay, I won’t pressure you to talk about it.”

  The restaurant had become more crowded by the time we left, and the parking lot was full when we stepped outside. Most of the cars were Jags, Mercedes, or BMWs. There was a gaggle of black BMWs parked near the place where we had left Max’s. “Are you going to be able to figure out which one is yours?”

  “I’ll have to look at the plates,” he admitted. “Mine will be the one without any yet. But before we do that, let’s go over to the fence — have you ever seen the view from this parking lot? It’s one of the best in Las Piernas.”

  He was right. The fence was about waist-high. We could see Catalina Island in the distance, and nearer, sailboats passing the oil islands — man-made islands with oil well drilling rigs on them, the rigs covered and disguised as condos. And beyond, dappled with bright sunlight, a vast expanse of blue-gray sea. The wind brought sea spray and the scent of the ocean up the cliff, and below us breakers roared and hissed.