He ignored her. Blood ran from the scratches on his hand, trickling between the fingers. He wrapped his handkerchief around it.
“I should’ve killed you in the barn!” Ashley screamed. “I should’ve hung you up with Manny like I wanted to!”
The deputy said, “You better be quiet, kid—”
“Fuck you!”
He took her arm, roughly, and lifted her to her feet.
“Leave me alone!” She looked at Runyon again. “Jerry’s dead, isn’t he? Tell me he’s dead.”
“He’s not.”
“You’re lying.”
“He’s in the hospital in Red Bluff. Expected to live.”
“Shit!” She squinted past him, to where the other deputy was putting handcuffs on Sandra Parnell while Rinniak recited her rights. “Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
Ashley wasn’t asking about Jerry Belsize now. Runyon knew who she meant, but the deputy said, “You heard him. In the hospital.”
“Not him, my father. Don Kelso, the big tough cop. Didn’t anybody tell him? I wish he could see me right now. Pay him back, the son of a bitch. No more telling me what to do, what not to do, how to live my life. No more orders, no more bullshit, no more Daddy’s good little girl!”
“Jesus,” the deputy said.
Sandra Parnell began to cry.
Rinniak finished helping the deputies load the two women into the caged backseat of their cruiser, came over to where Runyon stood waiting. “Okay,” he said wearily. “How’s your hand?”
“It’ll be all right.”
“You should have it looked at.”
“A little iodine’s all it needs. I’ve had enough of doctors and hospitals.”
They got into Rinniak’s car. Before he started the engine he said, “I keep thinking I should’ve let Kelso know before we came here. I’ve worked with the man off and on for ten years, I owed him that much.”
“He wouldn’t have gone along with this.”
“No. He wouldn’t.”
“Even if he had, you heard what she said. Twice as bad for him if he’d been here.”
“You’re right. Spared him that much, at least. But he’s got to know now and it’s my job to tell him. And it should be in person.”
“You can drop me off somewhere first.”
“I said should be in person. Truth is, I don’t think I can face him right now. So I’ll do it the coward’s way and call him from Red Bluff.” Rinniak put the cruiser in gear, eased it forward. “I have kids of my own,” he said. “One of my daughters is about Ashley’s age.”
“So’s my son.”
“Then you know why I can’t face Kelso right now.”
“Yes,” Runyon said, “I know why.”
25
I spent that night going over facts and suppositions, by myself and with Tamara and Kerry. Tamara had dug up two more pieces of connected, corroborating, circumstantial evidence—all there was left to find. On Wednesday morning I went to see Irv Blaustein at Pacific Rim Insurance and had a long talk with him.
Same conclusion, down the line.
There was nothing to do then but make an appointment with Celeste Ogden and deliver the news to her.
If anyone killed your sister, Mrs. Ogden, it was Anthony Drax.”
No visible reaction. She sat on the tufted velvet couch in her living room, her back straight, her hands palms up in the lap of her black slacks—the same posture as on my previous visit and in Dr. Prince’s office yesterday. Same expressionless demeanor, too.
“If?” she said.
“He was there the night she died and his actions indicate a certain amount of guilt, but whether he was directly responsible is open to question. If he was, it probably wasn’t a premeditated act.”
“Of course it was premeditated. On his orders.”
“If a crime was committed, it’s not likely Mathias was complicit except as a catalyst.”
“You’re not making sense. Why do you keep saying ‘if ‘?”
On the table in front of her was the file printout Tamara and I had put together, but Mrs. Ogden hadn’t opened the envelope. She wanted a verbal report first, which made this even more difficult for me.
I said, “It’s also possible your sister’s death was just what it was ruled to be, an accident.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“I’m sorry, but the facts support more than one theory.”
“Will you please get to the point? Tell me why you believe Drax is guilty.”
She wasn’t going to let me ease into explanations. All right then. Facts. I told her about the Mathiases’ neighbor Mary Conti and what she’d seen at approximately ten o’clock on the night Nancy Mathias died. I gave her the information Tamara had turned up: the three-year-old BMW Z3 owned by Drax’s girlfriend, Donna Lane, was silver colored; she’d been working a flight to Dallas on the night of the murder; the car registered to Drax had been in the shop for repairs on that same date.
“There’s one more thing that points to him,” I said then. The main thing, thanks to Kerry’s sharp eye. “The last entry in your sister’s diary.”
“. . . You mean the question ‘why adhere’?”
“Yes. Only it’s not the question we all took it to be. She wasn’t asking herself why she should stay in the marriage.”
“What, then?”
“Let me give you the reasoning first. Your sister often worked in her study at night, paying bills, writing in her diary. We know that from the date-and-time lines on the diary entries. And from the fact that Mrs. Conti often saw lights on in the upstairs front room. That is where Nancy’s study was?”
“Yes.”
“Directly above the front entrance.”
“Yes.”
“Was her desk close to the windows?”
“Close to them, yes.”
“Her last diary entry was made at ten-oh-five P.M. That’s approximately the same time Mrs. Conti saw the stranger park his car, walk toward Nancy’s house, and vanish. Suppose your sister had just opened up the diary file to make a new entry when the doorbell interrupted her. Suppose she swung around to the windows, looked out and down. Mrs. Conti said the night-light over the front door was on. Would Nancy have been able to see who was ringing the bell at that late hour?”
“Yes, if he was standing back slightly from the door. It’s set flush in the wall; there’s no vestibule.”
“Then suppose she was surprised and puzzled enough at the visitor’s identity to turn back to the computer and type that last sentence before she went downstairs to answer the bell. If it was on and open to the diary file, it’s not unlikely she’d have done something like that under the circumstances.”
“No. It’s not.”
“But it was an impulsive act and she was in a hurry, distracted. The question she was asking was the one in her mind at the moment, and when she typed it out she used her usual brand of shorthand—but she also made a pair of typing errors that she either didn’t notice or didn’t bother to correct, and that changed the entire meaning of the sentence. She touched the Caps Lock key when she shifted to type the first letter, so that the rest of the question was in capital letters. Three words, not two. Or rather, two words and one set of initials. Her second mistake was not hitting the space bar to separate the initials from the last word. The question wasn’t ‘Why adhere?’; it was ‘Why AD here?’ AD—Anthony Drax.”
Celeste Ogden nodded stiffly. “But you don’t think he went there with the intention of killing her.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “Drax is a smart man, and smart men don’t plan crimes where there’s a strong risk of being seen in the neighborhood, as he was seen. It’s more likely he went there to talk to her. If he did kill her, it was probably the result of tempers flaring out of control—a shove, an unintentional blow, a fall that resulted in a fatal head trauma. That kind of thing happens all too often.”
“Nancy wouldn’t have invited him upstairs. Or are yo
u saying he didn’t push her down the stairs?”
“Not the way you mean. In that scenario he panicked when he saw she was dead and tried to cover up by making it look like an accident. Carried her upstairs and threw the body down. Found her key and locked the door after him when he left. The other possible scenario is that he did nothing except argue with her and then leave. She was upset; she went upstairs; she tripped or lost her balance and fell.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“There’s just no way of knowing. Two things argue for the first scenario—the length of time Drax was in the house, more than half an hour, if Mrs. Conti’s memory is accurate, and the fact that he was hurrying, staying in the shadows, coat collar pulled up, when she saw him the second time, as if he was anxious to get away from there. But both could also have innocent explanations.”
Celeste Ogden got up and paced over to the windows, stood looking out at the city. It was quiet in the big sunroom, quiet in the penthouse flat. Somewhere I could hear a clock ticking, the only discernible sound. We were alone in the penthouse; Mrs. Ogden had let me in herself this time.
With her back to me she said, “Why would Drax want to talk to Nancy at that time of night?”
“It’s the kind of thing a man like him would do if he knew she was dying, knew she was angry at her husband and threatening divorce. Try to convince her to change her mind, stay with Mathias and keep quiet about her condition for his sake.”
That brought her around. “Now what are you saying? That Nancy was killed because she had a brain tumor?”
“Directly or indirectly, yes.”
“That’s insane!”
“I agree. But it’s the only reasonable explanation.”
“Why? Why? She would have been dead in six months.”
God, I hated this. I tried not to squirm as Celeste Ogden came back and sat down again. “Or she might have lived a year or more,” I said. “A long, difficult year for her and her husband—doctor and hospital visits, time demands, gradual physical deterioration, all the rest of it. The kind of situation you can’t ignore, can’t control, can’t keep under wraps.”
“Him,” she said as if she were uttering an obscenity.
“What I think happened,” I said slowly and carefully, “is that Mathias confided the situation to Drax. Needed to vent to somebody with the same mind-set who would understand his point of view. That’s what I meant about him being a catalyst. Nancy was forcing him to stand by her with the threat of divorce, of going public with her illness and what a coldhearted bastard he is—creating a scandal that might potentially damage his image, the IPO, his long-range plans. Yet if he played the dutiful husband it would mean putting his business interests on partial hold, delegating responsibility to underlings like Drax, and that could also be damaging. He was between a rock and a hard place.”
“Sufficient motive for paying Drax to commit murder.”
“Yes, but I don’t think he did. Even if the idea occurred to him, he’s too cautious, too self-protective, to take such a huge risk. I think it was Drax’s own idea to see Nancy that night. Mathias may or may not know about it; if he does, it’s in his best interest to keep quiet about it, and about Nancy’s terminal diagnosis, and let her death stand as an accident. Same for Drax, guilty or innocent. Nobody else besides Dr. Prince, as far as they’re aware, knows about the brain tumor; it didn’t turn up in the routine autopsy because the medical examiner wasn’t looking for it.”
“Savages, both of them,” Celeste Ogden said. “Monsters.”
I didn’t dispute it.
Almost immediately she was on her feet again. Yesterday she’d been calm and stationary throughout the explanation of her sister’s malignancy; today she couldn’t seem to sit still, as if the latest shock had unleashed something inside her. I watched her walk around the room picking up decorative knickknacks and putting them down again, straightening and rearranging paintings and wall hangings that didn’t need straightening or rearranging. That went on for three or four minutes. Then, abruptly, she sat down again in the same rigid, palms-up posture as before. Nothing had changed on the blank screen of her face, not even when she referred to Drax and Mathias as monsters.
“All right,” she said. “Do you call the police or shall I?”
“Neither of us.”
“What?”
“We can’t go to the police. It wouldn’t do any good.”
“What are you talking about?”
This was the worst part, the part I’d been dreading most. Bite the bullet; get it said.
“There’s no case against Drax, not even a circumstantial one. It’s all ifs and maybes, supposition and guesswork. No witnesses except for Mrs. Conti, and it was too dark for her to identify the man she saw. No crime-scene evidence. No evidence that Drax was in the neighborhood or inside the house that night. No probable cause for the police to arrest and charge him, much less for the district attorney to prosecute him.”
She stared at me. “Confront him, make him confess.”
“He’d only deny it and keep denying it. So would Mathias. Men like them never willingly incriminate themselves.”
“Beat it out of him then.”
“I don’t operate that way, Mrs. Ogden. And it wouldn’t do any good if I did. Confessions made under duress won’t stand up in a court of law. He’d recant it, have me thrown in jail, hire a lawyer, and sue me out of business.”
On her feet. Down again. “His fingerprints . . . they must still be in the house.”
“Probably, unless Mathias has had the place cleaned since. But they don’t prove anything. Fingerprints can’t be dated and Drax was a visitor there before.”
“Then for God’s sake find some other kind of proof. That’s what I hired you for.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“Why can’t you? I’ll pay you whatever you ask—”
“It isn’t a question of money. Or time. Or effort. The damn lousy fact is, there’s no proof to find. It doesn’t exist any longer, if it ever did. It stopped existing when Drax drove away that night and the Palo Alto police ruled Nancy’s death accidental and closed the case.”
The emotionless facade broke down all at once. It was like watching a wall collapse. Rage, disbelief, frustration, all ran dark and hot in her eyes and in her voice when she said, “Damn you, what are you telling me? Are you telling me nothing can be done, nothing? They’re going to get away with it, both of them?”
What could I say? That things always work out neatly in the end and life always delivers easy answers to difficult problems? That there’s no such thing as a perfect crime? That one way or another the guilty are always punished, justice is always done? No, I couldn’t lie to her. Some loose ends don’t get tied off, some problems don’t get solved, perfect crimes happen more often than you can imagine, the guilty all too often go free, there’s more than one reason the statue of Justice is blind. That’s the way things are. You have to accept it and deal with it.
But all I could manage was, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ogden.”
“No. No! I won’t stand for it.”
“I’m afraid you don’t have any choice.”
“There’s always a choice. Another detective . . . a criminal attorney . . .”
“That’s your prerogative. But give them the facts as I’ve given them to you, and they’ll tell you the same thing. There’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing anybody can do.”
Up again. “Get out of here,” she said. “I don’t want anything more to do with you. Get out of my sight.”
I didn’t blame her for that. She had nobody else to take it out on; might as well be me.
I beat it out of there without another word.
26
JAKE RUNYON
It was late Wednesday afternoon before he finally got on the highway back to San Francisco. Tamara understood about the delay when he called her to explain, but he still didn’t like leaving her and Bill hanging an extra day, un
avoidable or not. He’d been away too long already.
One reason was the long night; he didn’t get to bed until almost 3:00 A.M. Another was that he had to go back to the sheriff’s department in Red Bluff to sign a written statement of what he’d told Rinniak and Sheriff Macon the day before.
Rinniak was there, bleak and haggard, when Runyon arrived late in the morning, and they had a few minutes together. The two women had made separate signed confessions by then, Sandra Parnell tearfully, Ashley Kelso gloatingly. Turned out they were lovers, bisexuals—one angle he hadn’t figured on. No real surprises in the rest of it. Rinniak made no mention of Kelso, and Runyon didn’t ask.
Ashley was the leader, of course. Paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex—you didn’t need to be Freud to see that. She hated her father because of his strict authoritarian ways and she hated Jerry Belsize because she’d given him her virginity and he wouldn’t stand up to Kelso or have anything more to do with her after the ass-kicking incident. She itched to pay back both of them for the imagined hurt they’d done to her and, in her words, “have fun doing it.” Some of the “fun” had been spur-of-the-moment, but most had been planned over a period of months.
She and Sandra were still friends even though she had taken Ashley’s place with Belsize; the Parnell girl looked up to her. Ashley took their relationship to a different level by seducing her, “making her fall in love with me.” That gave her a hold on the weaker woman that became controlling, hypnotic. Sandra would do anything Ashley said—the torching of empty and abandoned places, for starters, using tins of kerosene Ashley swiped from Battle Hardware. Since she was a kid, Ashley had been “getting off on watching things burn,” the sexual thrill common to most firebugs. She also saw to it that Jerry found out about the homosexual affair—the reason he’d broken up with Sandra, told his parents that she wasn’t the girl he’d thought she was, and didn’t want anything more to do with her. Their relationship was stagnant anyway because of her deepening involvement with Ashley.
The breakup allowed Ashley to turn Sandra against Jerry, convince her that he deserved payback, manipulate her into the kidnap scheme. They lured him out to RipeOlive with the promise of three-way sex, and he was just dumb enough to go along with it. Ashley clobbered him with her favorite weapon; they dragged him into the warehouse and used a pair of her father’s handcuffs to leave him shackled to the beam. She didn’t care if he was alive or dead when they went back last night to torch the buildings. All she wanted, she said, was to watch him burn.
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