by M. K. Wren
Conan raised an eyebrow. “What did it look like?”
“Let’s see…here it is. Brown with some sort of pattern. Connie said she couldn’t see much of the woman’s face. She had on sunglasses.”
“At nearly three in the morning?”
“Right. But we have another witness to that, a lineman name of J. C. Lawson. He saw her when she went out to the pad where Arno was waiting by his chopper. He was passing the time talking to Lawson. He says Mrs. Talbot got into the chopper with Arno, then she started crying and carrying on, and after a minute or so she got out and ran back to the office. Connie says she called a cab and waited for it outside. Arno told Lawson the woman had been planning on leaving her husband to meet her lover in Holliday Beach, but she got cold feet. We figure she let Arno keep the three hundred she promised to pay him.”
Conan asked, “Did she give him the carafe?”
“Well, Lawson said after she left, he saw what he called a thermos—we haven’t shown him this one yet—on the seat next to Arno, and he was drinking from a cup he keeps in the chopper. Arno took off then. That was about three o’clock. And that’s all we know so far.”
Conan only nodded, staring at the plastic-shrouded carafe, and Kleber said, “Okay, Conan, why were you so interested in Arno’s murder? You think it has something to do with Gould’s?”
Conan hesitated, but finally answered, “I don’t know.”
Wills had been listening with steadily decreasing patience, and now he rose. “Earl, by God, you’re really reaching. How the hell could this have anything to do with Gould’s killing?”
Steve Travers’s sage gray eyes slid toward Wills, and his cool, assessing gaze was enough to silence the sheriff. Then Steve drawled, “Speaking of the Gould killing, Giff, remember I told you there was a fragment of material caught in Cady’s chain saw?”
Wills glanced at Conan, then nodded. “What about it, Chief?”
“Well, the lab identified it. Latex. Like they use in surgical gloves.”
Conan leaned forward. “Surgical gloves? That might explain why the only prints on the saw were Cady’s and mine.”
“There’s another way to explain MacGill’s prints, Flagg,” Wills said truculently. “Saturday morning he threatened to kill Gould with that same saw.”
Conan didn’t remind Wills that Cady hadn’t actually threatened to kill Gould, but to cut off a particular portion of his anatomy, nor did he remind Wills that Gould had died of a bullet wound, nor point out how unlikely it was that Cady would use surgical gloves to avoid leaving his prints on the saw without wiping off the prints he’d already left there. Conan was not at the moment thinking about the prints on the saw. He said, “Steve, those three unidentified prints on that carafe…maybe you should check them against the elimination prints from the people involved in Gould’s murder.”
Steve studied Conan curiously. “Worth a try.”
“Flagg, you’re reaching farther’n Earl here,” Wills said with a snort of disgust. “You ask me, there’s no mystery about Arno’s murder. You dig deeper, and you’re going to turn up his wife.”
“Giff, for God’s sake, that’s crazy!” Kleber burst out.
“Maybe. Maybe not. I always say, when a husband gets murdered, you better take a good look at the wife.”
Kleber’s eyes were down to crackling slits. “Is that where you’re looking in the Gould murder?”
Wills glared at him, then for a moment turned thoughtful. That didn’t last, however. He started for the door. “The Gould murder is an altogether different case, Earl. Now I gotta get to work. Can’t stand around here reaching for straws.”
Conan waited until Wills had reached the door before he asked, “By the way, Sheriff, have you found out yet if Gould left a will?”
Wills seemed to freeze, then he retorted, “If he did, his lawyer didn’t draw it up for him. Ain’t that right, Chief Travers?” And with that he made his exit, slamming the door behind him.
Kleber winced. “Ol’ Giff’s going to shake that glass out before this case is over.”
Steve only laughed as he reached into his breast pocket. “Funny you should ask Giff about the will, Conan.”
“What’s funny about it? Giff’s damn sure not going to let me see Gould’s will if he finds it.”
“Yes, but you’ve got a friend in high places.” With a Cheshire cat grin, Steve handed Conan a folded sheet of paper, and another to Kleber. “Giff’ll get a copy, too. I’ll fax it to him when I get back to Salem. But Giff’s been such a pain in the backside, I figured I’d let you guys have first go at it.”
Conan looked at the sheet of paper, and it jolted him to his feet. “For God’s sake, Steve, this is Gould’s will!”
Steve smiled benignly. “Sure looks like it. And Giff’s right: Gould’s lawyer didn’t draw it up or know anything about it. The SFPD found the original in a safety deposit box in a San Francisco bank. Holographic, but legal. And the handwriting checked out.”
Conan hungrily read the words scrawled with such seeming carelessness, despite the serious purpose of the document. The notary public’s stamp was as incongruous as a diamond brooch on a faded sweatshirt. The will was dated nearly three years ago, and its provisions were simple. All Gould’s assets, including future income from his books, he bequeathed to his present wife, Savanna Barany, with the exception of $500,000 to his first wife, Julie Sanzio, identified as a professor of biology at the University of Oregon.
“Maybe someone should be questioning Julie Sanzio,” Conan said.
“We checked her out,” Steve said. “Right now Dr. Sanzio is in Costa Rica on a field trip, and she’s been in the university’s field headquarters in San José since she broke her ankle a week ago. Fell out of a tree. You got to that last paragraph yet?”
Kleber had, apparently. He muttered, “Well, I’ll be damned…”
Conan had also reached the final paragraph, and he read it with a sensation of rising hackles. James Ravin Gould, in sound mind, had written: “Full control of my literary estate shall remain in the hands of Byron Lasky of the Lasky Literary Agency. I want Byron Lasky to continue in his present capacity, at his present ten percent commission, as long as any book of mine remains in print anywhere in the world.”
Kleber recovered enough to say: “Maybe this explains why Lasky’s in such a stew for somebody to find those lost manuscripts.”
“If he knew about this will,” Conan noted as he folded his copy and put it in his shirt pocket. “Gould didn’t tell his lawyer about it, nor Savanna, apparently. Would he tell Lasky?”
Both Kleber and Steve were spared speculation on that point by the jangle of the phone. Kleber reached for it, asked, “What is it, Dave?” Then after a nod, he handed the receiver to Conan. “For you. Miss Dobie.”
Miss Dobie’s first words were “If that strange young man ever brings that dog into this shop again, I can’t be responsible for my actions! He terrified Meg!”
Conan asked cautiously, “Was this a large, black dog who looks like a wolf?”
“Yes! And he said he was a friend of yours!”
“Skookum?”
Miss Dobie sighed audibly. “That strange young man! Anyway, he left a package here for you. He said you wanted it, whatever it is.”
“A package? Yes, I want it. I’ll be there in five minutes!” He hung up, started for the door. “I’ll talk to both of you later.”
“What the hell lit a fire under you?” Kleber asked.
But Conan was already gone, the glass rattling as he slammed the door.
*
Miss Dobie was concluding a sale when Conan flung the bookshop’s door open and demanded, “Where is it?”
She cocked her thumb toward his office without looking up from counting change for a young woman with a baby strapped to her back. The baby began wailing the moment Conan entered the shop.
He made no apologies but went straight to his office, and there on the floor by his desk was a carton about a cubic foo
t in dimension. Since Conan was expecting something closer to the size of a couple of reams of typing paper, this carton gave him pause. He was given further pause when he picked it up to put it on the desk.
“Damn!”
Behind him, Miss Dobie laughed, not charitably. “Heavy, isn’t it?”
Conan decided she deserved any satisfaction that barb might provide after encountering Manny Chavez and Skookum without prior warning. “Where’s Meg?”
“Upstairs sulking on the top shelf of the Philosophy section. What in the world is in that box?”
“Ravin Gould’s last book,” Conan replied, “if Manny the wunderkind and his magic computers had any luck.” He opened the carton and tried to lift out the first sheet, but the second and third followed. It was fanfold paper, the edges punctured with regularly spaced holes, and judging from the height of this boxed pile, there were at least four reams altogether. He tore off the first sheet and groaned, “Oh, my God.”
The print was pale dot matrix, and on the left half of the sheet were nine columns of numbers, seven digits in the first, four in the others. Down the center of the page was another column a little over an inch wide, each line beginning and ending with a colon to form a tenuous border, but at least there were words in this column. They were broken randomly at the end of each short line, but Conan deciphered with some satisfaction the words:
:My father was a f:
:ucking bastard.:
“This is it, Miss Dobie. Manny came through.”
She peered at the sheet. “But with what?”
“That,” Conan replied as he lifted the carton, “is what I have to find out.”
Chapter 22
It was two-thirty in the afternoon when Conan hauled the printout to his library. He left it on the floor behind his desk and opened the sliding glass door on the south wall; the small patio was shaded with pines that cooled the air, and on this relentlessly sunny day, the library’s west windows had collected more heat than he found comfortable. Then he went to the living room to put a tape on the stereo—he decided to listen to all nine Beethoven symphonies as accompaniment for this reading marathon—then to the kitchen for a mug of coffee, then back to the library, where he settled in the chair behind the desk.
But he wasn’t yet ready to begin reading. He took two sheets of paper from his pocket and unfolded them. One was Ravin Gould’s will. The other was the sample from Gould’s typewriter. He reached into a drawer for the envelope containing the fragment from the Eyrie’s fireplace, and smiled. The type matched.
Which still didn’t explain why Savanna had burned part of Gould’s manuscript.
Conan lighted a cigarette, turned his chair to face the carton on the floor, then, with a sigh, picked up the top sheet and began to read.
The format made that difficult enough, and as Angie had hinted, Odyssey was a labyrinth of flashbacks. At any point in the story, Jimmy Silver might be reminded of something that had happened in his childhood. And Gould had fixed on one event in Jimmy’s childhood as the focus of suspense, teased the reader with intimations and scattered incidents establishing the context for it. After the first hour and first four hundred pages, it was clear to Conan that Gould didn’t intend to fully reveal that event until near the end of the manuscript.
And thus Conan, who once promised himself he would never waste a moment on a Ravin Gould novel, spent the long afternoon doggedly reading, or at least skimming, each dot-matrixed page in search of that crucial event, because it might also be crucial to Gould’s murder.
At 6:45, with the second movement of the Ninth, the Molto vivace, just beginning, he dropped the final page on the pile that had accumulated on the floor, and the thick brass chords and hoofbeat thuds of the timpani paced his thoughts. He had never before been aware of the passionate irony in this movement.
Now he understood that sardonic “Doctor, lawyer, po-lice chief.”
But there was more he didn’t understand.
For one thing, why, when Gould devoted a long chapter to each of his first three wives, did he ignore his fourth? He had fictionalized the names; for instance, using Alice Rose for Allison Rosenthal, whom he treated with atypical kindness, even romanticizing her. Rather, romanticizing Jimmy Silver’s grief at her death. But there was no character Conan could equate with Savanna, except one who was represented by no more than a name, Anna Vas, a device Conan found cloyingly cute. He also found the name mentioned only once, and that as a guest at a bacchanalian party at best-selling author Jimmy Silver’s Hawaiian mansion.
And why was there no mention of the character Mayley, who appeared in the fragment from the fireplace?
And why was there no Chapter 11?
Conan opened the local phone book, found the MacGill number, and reached for the control console on his desk to lower the volume on the music. When he punched the number, it was Angie who answered.
He said, “Angie, I have a printout from those disks.”
“Conan, that’s incredible! Did you find what you’re looking for?”
“Possibly. But there’s no chapter eleven in this printout. The question is, was the chapter lost in an electronic cul-de-sac, or did Gould inadvertently misnumber a chapter, or what?”
“Oh, I remember about that. There wasn’t any chapter eleven. I asked Ravin if I should change the chapter and page numbers, and he just said to stet it. That means let it stand.”
“He offered no explanation, I suppose.”
“No. He never offered me any explanations.”
“Thanks, Angie.” Conan cradled the phone, turned up the volume, savoring the lyric theme and lush strings of the third movement, before he added yet another question to his notes.
Abruptly he realized he was no longer alone and sprang to his feet, then let his breath out in a shudder of relief when he saw Marcus Fitch lounging at the patio door, a white paper sack in each hand.
“I brought sustenance,” Fitch shouted. “Will corned beef do?”
Conan turned down the music. “Anything will do. Thanks, Marc.”
Fitch handed him one of the sacks and pulled a chair up to the other side of the desk. While Conan delved into his sack, found a thick sandwich and a vanilla milk shake, Fitch said, “I wasn’t sure about the milk shake, but it sounded good after an afternoon in the sweltering halls of the Taft County Courthouse.”
Conan tasted his milk shake. “Haven’t had one of these for years. Reminds me of the soda fountain in the old drugstore in Pendleton.”
“Reminds me of the Dairy Queen across the street from my high school. The parking lot behind it was dubbed the candy store, as I remember. Incidentally, my client is again enjoying Earl’s hospitality. The judge denied bail. And what in God’s name is that pile of paper?”
Conan didn’t answer until he had finished chewing a mouthful of sandwich. “A printout—of sorts—of Ravin Gould’s last masterpiece.”
“Ah. You’ve read it?”
“I had no choice. It’ll be another blockbuster, no doubt, which should make Savanna happy. And the Laskys.”
Fitch paused with his sandwich poised. “How so?” Conan pushed aside his notes and found the copy of Gould’s will. He planed it across the desk to Fitch, then watched a wolfish grin light his face as he read it. “I love it! Oh, Conan, my man, this is lovely!”
“It’s also our little secret for the time being.”
Fitch nodded. “I wonder if the redoubtable Gifford has confronted the Laskys with this yet.”
“Who knows? Oh—I stumbled on another piece of the puzzle today. Maybe it’s a piece. Savanna had a meeting on the beach with Dana Semenov. Before they parted, Dana gave her a manila envelope.”
“What was in it?”
“Savanna says a contract for a book deal with Nystrom. They want to publish her autobiography. With a four-million-dollar advance.”
“Damn, I’m in the wrong business. I should’ve turned my talents to authorship.”
Conan laughed. “I have a write
r friend who told me the average writer in this country makes less than ten thousand a year. If you’re in it for the money, you might as well go to Vegas. The odds are better.”
“You think the deal for La Barany’s autobiography is legitimate?”
Conan looked toward the corner where the Knight haunted the shadows. “It could be. Part of it, anyway.”
“Was there anything about Savanna in Gould’s opus?”
“She was conspicuous by her absence.”
“Any sign of the Laskys or anyone else we know?”
“Only Byron, possibly, in a very minor role. And Marian was transfigured into a young, voluptuous blonde who made Jimmy Silver’s author’s tours sexual as well as public relations marathons.”
“Flirting with libel, wasn’t he? What else did you find in that pile?”
Conan absently stirred his milk shake with the straw. “Marc, there was one key event in Jimmy Silver’s life, and it happened in his childhood in Forsuch Beach.”
“Does that translate to Gould’s childhood in Holliday Beach?”
“I think it does. Gould’s father was a logger named Tom. Jimmy Silver’s father was a logger named Tim. Gould’s mother had red hair and blue eyes, and her name was Loretta. Jimmy’s mother, also redheaded and blue-eyed, was named Laura. Anyway, Gould characterizes Tim Silver as a heavy drinker when his family was destitute, a gambler and cardsharp who cheated, a womanizer who slept with his best friends’ wives, who beat and raped his own wife, and who occasionally beat his son. Yet it seems Tim Silver was a man of mesmeric charm. No one in Forsuch Beach realized what a bastard he was. Then when Jimmy was twelve, Tim disappeared.”