Born Innocent

by Christine Rimmer

  Claire shivered a little, partly at the memory of the hatred in the woman’s blue eyes the one time Claire had seen her, and partly with anticipation. She’d almost given up hope that she might get a chance to talk to Henson’s wife.

  She asked, “Did your friend see her?”

  Joe shook his head. “I said, it looks like she’s in town. Ted came off an all-night surveillance job and decided to stop by there on his way home. He managed to get into the parking garage.”

  “And?”

  “Her car’s there.”

  Claire was already halfway to the bathroom. “Don’t just lie there, Joe Tally. We have to get going, talk to her while we have the chance. Order breakfast. We don’t have all day.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He was laughing at her enthusiasm as he picked up the phone again.

  Mariah Henson’s apartment house wasn’t that far from Professor Lionel Whitling’s run-down residence hotel. It would have taken less than half an hour to walk from one place to the other.

  But the two places were universes apart in every other way. The professor lived in a dreary room in a drab building on a narrow street.

  On Mariah Henson’s street, the charming turn-of-the-century architecture that usually distinguished San Francisco had been swept away. In its place were modern buildings of marble, steel and glass, structures that looked more like places to do business than somewhere anyone would want to live. The buildings weren’t skyscrapers by any means, but they seemed to loom and intimidate nonetheless.

  The street was spotless, and the sea wind swept in off the bay, smelling assertively clean and crisp. Trees were contained in big stone planters along the sidewalk, and security guards waited just beyond front entrances to quickly discourage anyone who had no business there.

  The guard in Mariah Henson’s building stopped them the moment they stepped beyond the big smoked-glass doors. “Good morning. How can I help you?” He stood behind a stone desk in front of a polished stone wall opposite the main door.

  Claire cast Joe a quick glance, to let him know she wanted first crack at this one. His response was a nod so brief that only she could have seen it.

  She said, “We’d like to speak with Mariah Henson, please.”

  “Is Mrs. Henson expecting you?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The guard’s dark brows drew together over his large nose. Claire’s evasive response had gotten nowhere with him. He demanded, “Is she expecting you or not?”

  Claire drew herself up and decided that the best defense was to get pushy. “No, she’s not expecting us. Ring her apartment and tell her Claire Snow would like to speak with her, please.”

  The guard grunted. “Fine. Just a minute.”

  He punched some buttons behind his stone podium and made the call Claire had told him to make. As he waited for someone to pick up on the other end, Claire tried not to look worried. After all, it was highly unlikely that Henson’s wife would actually consent to speak to them.

  In a moment, she knew, she and Joe would be told to leave. She wondered if they should try finding their own way into the parking garage and lurking near Mariah Henson’s car until she showed up to claim it.

  So sure was she that they would be turned away, she had to stifle a gasp of surprise when the guard said, “You can go up. The elevator is down that hall. Tenth floor. Number D.”

  The tenth floor was also the top floor, it turned out. Claire and Joe got in the glass-walled elevator and stared at their own reflections as they smoothly ascended the floors.

  At the top of the building, they stepped out into a hallway. At one end of the hallway there was a huge round window that offered a breathtaking view of the bay. At the other end, there was a marble wall with brass letters on it: 10A and B were to the left, C and D to the right.

  Joe and Claire approached the marble wall and turned right. They walked to the end of that hall, where they could choose between C and D. They turned right, and at last came to a pair of tall double doors. The brass plaque beside the doors informed them that they had reached apartment 10D.

  A maid straight out of a B movie let them in. She wore a black dress with white apron, collar and cuffs. She was tall and Swedish-looking, her hair pulled back in a French roll.

  “This way, please. Mrs. Henson expects you.” She led the way from the high-ceilinged, skylit foyer to a high-ceilinged, skylit sitting room. “Sit down, please.” She gestured at the plush modular couches and chairs arranged around a black marble fireplace.

  Claire sat down in one of the chairs. Joe went and stood by the fireplace. The maid left them.

  As she and Joe exchanged a telling glance, Claire had to stifle a laugh. Mariah Henson’s apartment was so aggressively luxurious, it almost didn’t seem real. It was a palace of areca palms and leather and polished stone and glass. The view of the bay out the one window wall was stunning in its splendor. A huge crystal nautilus shell displayed on an ebony pillar drew the eye back in disbelief time and again—the thing was four feet in diameter, at least.

  Mariah Henson kept them waiting for several minutes. She was giving them time to be intimidated by the sheer opulence of her living room, Claire had no doubt.

  But at last she appeared, looking calm and aloof, wearing a silk jumpsuit the same maroon color as the business suit she’d worn to Claire’s preliminary hearing four days before. She swept into the room and took the big leather chair across from the smaller one Claire had chosen.

  She rested her hands on the chair arms, and she looked slowly from Claire to Joe. Her blue eyes were flat. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t offer you coffee. I don’t imagine this is a social call.”

  “No,” Claire answered evenly. “It’s not.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  Claire decided to cut right to the point. She leaned forward. “Mrs. Henson, we’re trying to find out who shot your husband.”

  Mariah Henson’s maroon fingernails dug into the butter-soft leather of her chair. “Don’t insult my intelligence. He was shot in your little bungalow, with your gun, after having some kind of a fight with you. If you really want to know who shot him, the best place to look is in a mirror.”

  Claire said simply, “But I didn’t do it.’ ’

  Mariah Henson loosed a delicate but quite audible humph. “You seem to think I actually might believe you. Well, you can give that up. I am not a fool.”

  “No, Mrs. Henson, you’re not a fool.” Joe spoke up from his post by the black fireplace. “And that’s why we think that you are aware of all the people who hate your husband—all the people who have very good reasons to wish your husband was dead.”

  The woman glared at Joe. “The police have been thorough, in case you weren’t aware. There is no one else who had both a reason to shoot Alan—and the opportunity.”

  Claire said, “You’re wrong. I may have had the opportunity, but I had no reason to shoot him. We had a...disagreement, and it was settled without having to resort to—”

  Mariah Henson groaned aloud. “Oh, please. Let’s be specific here—because I am curious. Just exactly what kind of disagreement did you have with my husband?”

  Claire swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what, exactly, was going on between you and Alan? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Nothing was going on between your husband and me.” Mariah Henson gave another of her delicate little humphs.

  Claire stared at the woman. Things were becoming uncomfortably clear. Claire could see now why the woman had agreed to talk to them—because she had a few questions of her own. Questions that, when answered, would give Mariah Henson all the reason she needed to call the guard down in the lobby and order them thrown out. They’d end up learning nothing, and in the meantime, Mariah Henson could enjoy making Claire squirm.

  “Well?” Alan Henson’s wife inquired. Her sculpted brows lifted a fraction.

  Joe said, “He tried to rape her.”

  Mariah Henson gas
ped.

  Joe went on as if he hadn’t heard the sound. “But Claire is smart and quick. She grabbed a glass and broke it on the side of his head. It was a thin glass, so it shattered on impact, causing no harm to your husband, but scaring him enough that he let her go. She ordered him to get out of her motel. And that is the last she saw of him, until she found him unconscious the next day.” He casually readjusted a cloisonne egg on the black marble mantel. “Does that answer your question? Or would you like to hear more? We’ve gathered a lot of information about the other people in your husband’s life. You know, all those poor folks your husband has ripped off in his brilliant career as a financial planner, not to mention all the women he—”

  “Enough! That is it, that is enough....” Mariah Henson sputtered. Joe shrugged and said no more. In the deadly silence that followed, Mariah Henson rose to her feet. When next she spoke, her voice vibrated with righteous wrath. “That... what you just told me... is a rotten lie. And that woman—” she pointed a finger at Claire “—knows it. Alan would never force a woman. Alan is a lot of things, but a rapist is not one of them. Deep down, he’s a good and gentle man, a man no one—except for me, of course—understands. He has a... weakness for other women, and a few professional problems of late, but when he regains consciousness and is well once again, we’ll work everything out.”

  “If you feel that way,” Joe asked pleasantly, “then why did you steal Claire’s gun and shoot the sonofabitch?”

  That did it. Mariah Henson’s face turned the same color as her jumpsuit. “Out!” she shouted. “Out of my home!”

  “Sorry,” Joe said a little sheepishly, once the security guard had shown them the street.

  “For what? You were great. We were getting nowhere being nice, so you made the right move to go for broke.”

  He chuckled and put his arm around her. “You do catch on quick.”

  She shivered a little. It was still early in the morning, and the wind off the bay had a real chill in it. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere warm for a few minutes. I’m freezing.”

  They walked a few blocks until they found a coffee shop. They went in, took a booth, and ordered hot cocoa. Then they discussed the encounter with Henson’s wife, and Joe jotted down notes.

  “Okay, Snow, so what did we find out?”

  Claire sipped her cocoa and savored the heat of it. “This is just an opinion...”

  “Opinions are allowed.”

  “I think Mariah Henson’s got her eyes open about her husband. It looks to me as if she’s known exactly what he is all along, and, in her own way at least, she loves him, anyway. She keeps him away from her money—and she blames the other woman whenever he gets into trouble with one.” Claire fell silent. She stared out the window by their booth at the gray buildings and the windswept street.

  “What else?” Joe asked.

  “Nothing. That’s all, really.”

  “There’s something. You’re holding back.”

  She sighed. “Oh, I suppose it’s just that, after talking to her, I feel let down.”

  “Why?” Joe raised his eyebrows at her over the rim of his own cocoa mug.

  “Because now, I just don’t think she shot him.”

  “You’re saying that until now, you did think she did it.”

  “Yes, I guess I did. Even though she supposedly can prove she couldn’t have been in Pine Bluff, I thought she’d set up an alibi—or hired someone to do it. After all, she certainly has the money to pay for something like that.”

  Joe grunted. “If she paid someone to kill him, she got taken. After all, that job was left undone.”

  Claire lifted her mug again. “Yeah. I guess so.” She drank the rest of the sweet, warm chocolate.

  Joe reached across the table and chucked her under the chin. “Hey. Chin up.”

  She set down her cup. “I can’t help it, Joe. I really don’t think she had anything to do with shooting Henson. After all, she knows what he is. It looks to me like she’s always known just what he is, and she doesn’t care. If she stole my gun, she’d have come after me, not him. We’re getting nowhere, Joe. Worse than nowhere. Before we talked to Mariah Henson, I still suspected that she was the one. Now, I don’t even have that.”

  Her hand was lying on the table. Joe covered it with his own. He gave it a squeeze, and smiled into her eyes, and said nothing—not even “I told you so,” which he certainly had a right to say. She turned her hand and squeezed back, forcing a smile to match his.

  Lord, he was a wonderful man. She didn’t think, in all her years of hopelessly loving him, that she had ever loved him as much as this moment, when he held her hand across the table of this little booth, and smiled into her eyes and didn’t say “I told you so.”

  He suggested, “We could take a break from this. Sometimes a break helps to put things in perspective. We could do a few touristy things—go to Fisherman’s Wharf, visit Ghirardelli Square...”

  She shook her head and gave his hand one more squeeze. “Thanks, but I’m okay.” Gently, she pulled her hand from his. “Now who’s next?”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he shrugged. “We’ll give the Radners another try.” The Radners were the owners of the row house in town. “And then we’ve got the two addresses in Sausalito and a Dr. Simonsen in Berkeley—and that lady in Oakland we didn’t reach yesterday.”

  And that’s all, she thought but didn’t say. She kept her smile in place. “Let’s get moving, then.”

  The row house was, as before, deserted. This time they tried knocking on the doors to either side of the house and across the street, but the neighbors either didn’t come to the door or claimed ignorance of the whereabouts of Mr. and Mrs. Radner.

  Joe decided, “All right. When we get back to the hotel, we’ll try calling. And if that gets us nowhere—”

  “I know. It’s time to give up on the Radners.”

  “That’s about the size of it, at least for this trip.”

  They went back to the hotel, but only to get the car; they didn’t even bother stopping in the room. They drove across the bridge to Sausalito and found that no one answered the doors at either of the addresses they had there, either.

  They had lunch, and then backtracked over the Golden Gate, to the Bay Bridge and up to Berkeley. They found Dr. Simonsen at his office; he was a pediatrician. He agreed to talk to them, and led them to a small consulting office with a window on the parking lot and stuffed animals on top of the file cabinets.

  He explained that he’d met Alan Henson at a small art gallery opening. He’d liked the man right off, and they’d become friendly acquaintances. When Henson called to offer him some very special business opportunities, naturally he’d listened. And he’d bought in.

  He’d lost thirty-five thousand dollars before he realized he was being had. He’d hired a lawyer, and that was that. Henson had not ruined him, which was more, he understood, than some of the people the man had “advised” could say. He’d spent all last weekend, when Henson was shot, in Oregon visiting his mother and father on their small ranch.

  “Anything else?” The doctor smiled politely at them across his desk.

  Joe asked if he knew of anyone else who might have reason to want to cause Alan Henson pain. Dr. Simonsen could think of no one.

  Claire and Joe thanked him and left, driving south to the Bay Bridge and then returning to the hotel.

  It was after six when they reached their rooms—and the red light was blinking on the telephone, letting them know someone had left a message while they were gone.

  Claire immediately thought of Ella, and imagined some crisis had probably arisen at Snow’s Inn. Joe called the desk right away.

  “Ella did call,” he said after getting the messages. “But so did Sheriff Brawley. He called a little after noon, and said we were to call right back. He’s tried to reach us twice since then.”

  Claire’s spirits sank another notch. She reached to take the phone from Joe. “I’ll do it. We bot
h know it’s about me.”

  “I don’t mind,” he told her gently.

  She looked at him and knew she should insist; their being here was her doing, after all. “Joe, I should do it.”

  He saw her indecision and took over, punching up the number of the sheriff’s office without discussing it further.

  The sheriff wasn’t near the phone. The dispatcher told them to wait at that number. He would reach the sheriff and have him call them back.

  Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again. Joe answered. His side of the conversation was cryptic.

  “Yes, Dan. I understand....But I want to tell you that she did invite us up....All right. Don’t worry. I know. I understand, but this is a tough time for her. You have to realize....All right. Yes. Tomorrow noon, you have my

  word.” He hung up.

  Claire knew what he would tell her before he began. She said it for him. “Mariah Henson called in a complaint.”

  Joe nodded. “The sheriff says we’re lucky. She called and insisted on talking to him personally. He was able to settle her down pretty much. He called your mother, and got the number here from her. And he’s giving us the rest of the night here, with the understanding that we’re to talk to no one else about Alan Henson. We have to report to him at the Excelsior County sheriff’s office at noon tomorrow—or else.”

  Claire thought about the Radners, and the two people in Sausalito... and the woman in Oakland. They represented her last tiny hope of helping herself out of what was happening to her. And now, with a phone call, Sheriff Brawley had snatched her hope away from her.

  “You want me to go ahead and call Ella?” Joe asked.

  “No.” She’d let Joe handle the toughest call. The least she could do was take care of her own mother. “I’ll do it.” She took the phone and dialed Snow’s Inn.

  “Dear, I’ve been worried sick,” Ella said as soon as Claire identified herself. “Dan Brawley called here and—”

  “I know, Mother. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.”