“Yes,” Brady said. “They’re Benet’s hired hands.”
“Funny he didn’t list you, his lawyer.”
“Quentin Harlan would have called me.”
“Or a member of his family.”
“What?” Brady said.
“I say it’s funny he didn’t list any family members. Parents living?”
“No.”
“Was he married?”
“Divorced.”
“Where is she?”
“The first one died some years ago; the other three live in Chicago, San Diego, and Santa Fe.
“Four wives?” I exclaimed.
“Four wives.” Canales shook his head slightly and smiled a little. He took a card out of his breast pocket and passed it to Brady. “I would appreciate it if you would call and leave their names and addresses for me, as well as the names and addresses of any heirs and other beneficiaries.” Canales took out a second card and handed it to me. “If you think of anything I should know.” Then he put his notebook away. “Thank you.”
It was clear that we were dismissed.
After Canales left the waiting room, I used the telephone there to place a credit card call back home to the president of the foundation.
“Roy? It’s Jenny.”
“Well?” Roy Leland had such a booming voice he could practically have raised his window and hollered to me from Port Frederick, dispensing with AT&T altogether. “Is it legit, are we getting a ranch?”
“I’m afraid we’ve already got it, Roy. Our benefactor is dead, he’s been murdered.”
“No!” He had the forbearance not to refer to me as Typhoid Jenny, but he did say, with a heavy-handed attempt at macabre humor, “Well, if that isn’t the most discouraging word I’ve ever heard. What happened?”
I told him the little I knew, then added, “I think I’d better keep my appointment at the ranch, don’t you?”
“Hell, yes. I’ll call the other trustees and then get back to you.” I did not tell Roy I was a potential suspect, because I felt that would sound so absurd to that solid, practical man that he’d only think me paranoid. Well, all right, that’s not entirely the truth; the truth is that my bosses have put up with a lot from me, and I just couldn’t bear the idea of telling them, “Guess what, your executive director is now suspected of a murder in Kansas City.” I liked my job; I didn’t want them to pass it on to somebody with a slightly less “exciting” life than mine. I’d tell him later, if I had to. Which I certainly hoped I wouldn’t. Therefore, Roy’s only instructions were: “Call me back tonight, Jenny.”
“I will.”
The person I really wanted to call was on a boat in Cape Cod Bay. It was a comfort to know I’d be catching up with him in three days.
I looked up at Dwight, who had been standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, pretending not to eavesdrop as he waited for me.
“Okay,” I said, “now we can go.”
He led me past room 1080 and on to the stairwell, where we walked down one flight, then traversed a long corridor of hospital offices to a covered parking lot. (All of those office doors would have been closed last night, I thought, with nobody watching who came and went by that staircase.) I probably should have apologized to Brady for my impertinent question to Canales. He certainly should have apologized to me for not leaping to my defense any sooner, or any more strongly. But neither of us said a thing. I don’t know how he was feeling, but I was scared and furious. We walked the long corridor silently, but I turned on him the minute we reached the privacy of his Mercedes.
“Why didn’t you tell him about the family feud, Dwight?”
“What family feud, Jenny?”
“The one that prompted Benet to bar his family from the ranch, Dwight! That one! It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the old reprobate was married four times, could it?”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” he claimed as he backed out of the parking lane. “And he wasn’t all that old, fifty-four. He told me he got married and had his first child when he was only seventeen.” He straightened the tires and put the Mercedes in forward gear. “May I point out, it is not my job to create murder suspects for Canales.”
“It’s not your business to help convict me, either!”
“I think you’re exaggerating my role.”
He turned left onto a two-lane street, narrowly missing a taxi coming from the right. The cabdriver used his horn to express his opinion of Brady’s driving. Through the Mercedes’s tinted windows, the rainy day looked like a bleak evening.
“Jenny.” There was feigned patience in Brady’s voice. “The police will see Benet’s will. They’ll draw their own conclusions. It’s ridiculous for you to think you’re a suspect.”
“I am, even if indirectly, a beneficiary to a murdered man’s will, Dwight. I just happened to come into town the very night he is killed. The fact that he was so weak means that even if he struggled, he still could have been killed by almost anybody, big or small, male or female. And I haven’t a hair of an alibi for the probable time of his death. The only thing I’m missing is a few feathers from that pillow stuck to my suit! If the police don’t suspect me, they’re asleep!”
“I have a favor to ask,” he said.
I stared at him. “What exquisite timing you have.”
“One of Mr. Benet’s families lives here in town. I’d like to drive by their house and tell them the news of his death, personally, before we take you to the airport.”
“And you want me to go with you?”
“It’s on the way. I’d appreciate it.”
“I thought you didn’t know these people.”
“I don’t. But I know they’re here, and it seems only considerate.”
It also seemed to me like a way for an ambitious young lawyer to ingratiate himself with potential clients.
“You’re a case, Dwight, you know that?”
“That’s more or less what my wife says.”
“Poor woman,” I muttered as I leaned my head against the seat rest. “When she asks you to take out the trash, do you tell her it’s not your business to empty other people’s refuse?”
The look he gave me at that moment could have peeled the tint off his windows. Good Jenny, I thought, make an enemy out of the only friend you have in Kansas City. Nice going. Hang yourself.
I stroked the leather upholstery of the seat. “This is really a beautiful car, Dwight.”
5
We drove through the rain into the Country Club Plaza, an area If of streets lined with chi-chi restaurants and luxury stores. Brady called it the “first shopping center in the country,” a claim to fame I wasn’t sure I would care to make. This project looked as if it had been imported brick by brick from Seville, however, and was very pretty. The hands of a huge clock on a Moorish watchtower pointed to ten o’clock. We then proceeded west along a creek where the water rushed fast and deep along a cement bed, then south, up Ward Parkway, a winding boulevard lined with museum-sized mansions.
Brady pulled into a circle drive in front of one of them and parked parallel to its front door. I looked up at the immense brick house and thought: Either they still keep slaves in Kansas City, or else they have some horribly overworked housewives.
The woman who answered our ring was no maid.
“Mrs. Lawrence?” Dwight inquired.
“Yes, I’m Alice Lawrence.”
“I am an attorney for your father,” Brady said, and I watched her elegant eyebrows rise. She wore the most beautiful red suit I’d ever seen on anybody outside of Nancy Reagan. She was not tiny like the former First Lady, however, and I decided the suit must have been custom-tailored to fit her matronly figure that well. “My name is Dwight Brady, of Brady Buhl Freyer and Levinson.”
“Oh, yes?” she said coolly. “I know the Freyers.”
I nearly smiled—in Port Frederick, everybody knows everybody else, too.
“I have been handling your father’s w
ill, Mrs. Lawrence,” Brady told her in deferential tones he had never used with me. “We have just come from KCMC where he has been a patient for the past few weeks. I am extremely sorry to tell you that your father passed away this morning. I felt someone should tell you personally.”
“Oh, my.” She pressed her right hand between her breasts. “Oh, my goodness. What a thing to hear right out of the blue, and from a stranger.” She took a breath, composed herself. “I’m sorry, but why should I take your word for this, Mr.—”
“Brady.” He pulled out his wallet and attempted to give her a business card. “Dwight Brady. I certainly don’t blame you for wanting to be sure. If you’ll call our office, Mr. Freyer will vouch for me.”
“I’ll find the number,” she said.
And closed the door in our faces.
I refrained from looking at Brady, since I was taking a certain amount of pleasure from the reception he was getting. Which was a good thing, since the weather afforded me no pleasure at all. Luckily, we stood under a copper overhang, so only our backs got rained on. Water ran down the tops of the heels of my shoes, spreading under the soles of my feet. I looked at my watch. Ten-fifteen. Eleven-fifteen back home, and they’ll be barefoot, in jeans and T-shirts, deciding whether to eat on the boat or to tie up somewhere for lunch. It seemed a longer time than it probably was before she returned.
“You can hardly blame her,” Brady said.
“No, no, of course not.”
Finally, the door opened again.
“Come in, please.”
We walked into a foyer that looked like a wing of a thirteenth-century museum. Swords and tapestries adorned the stucco walls, and a full suit of armor stood in a corner. Mrs. Lawrence took our dripping trench coats from us and hung them on pegs. Since I couldn’t very well ask her to hang my shoes there, too, I squished my way into the living room behind her, hoping Dwight Brady’s black socks were as soaked as my hose. Walking across the tiled floor, we sounded like three drummers out of sync, but all was silence when we crossed onto the wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room.
There were two people sitting there, a man and a woman, who were looking up expectantly as if they knew we were coming in. As, how could they not, considering how we had clattered across the tiles? A lush arrangement of fresh flowers, mostly white orchids, stood in a black vase on a brass-topped table between them and us. I could smell the orchids from the doorway, that’s how profuse they were.
“This is my younger sister, Margaret Stewart,” Alice Lawrence said, “and my husband, Merle Lawrence. And this is Mr. Brady and his secretary, Miss …?”
“Cain,” I said. “Jenny Cain. I am the director of the Port Frederick, Massachusetts, Civic Foundation, to which your father has bequeathed the Crossbones Ranch.”
“Oh, forgive me.” Alice did not look particularly contrite, although she had warmed up since receiving Dwight’s bona fides. “Is that one of the Texas ranches?”
“No, it’s in Kansas.”
“Kansas!” She glanced across at her husband, then at her sister. “I didn’t know Father owned a ranch so close to us. Won’t you both sit down?”
We did, in chairs upholstered in silk.
The younger sister, Margaret, was prettier and thinner than Alice, with the fine-boned features of a lady in a tapestry. Her blond hair was twisted into a thick French braid; she wore a creamy-white, full-skirted wool dress, with creamy hosiery and matching high heels. If I had been a man, I suspect I would have thought she looked good enough to lick. The husband, Merle Lawrence, appeared to be older than the two women. He had the long-boned, aristocratic, hollow-eyed look of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In fact, he did sit in a wheelchair with a plaid wool blanket draped over his knees, continuously stroking a beautiful Burmese cat. His hand, with its long, graceful fingers, nearly covered the cat from ears to tail.
“What a lovely cat,” I murmured, to break the ice.
“Thank you,” he said.
Margaret smiled, quick and catlike herself.
“Now,” Alice said. “Please do tell us everything.”
She was probably Cat Benet’s first child, I thought, which meant she was only about thirty-seven, but she acted and dressed older, they all did, in fact, as if their wealth had brought them, like some investment bonds, early maturity.
Brady leaned forward, clasped his hands sincerely between his knees and said, “Your father died early this morning at the Kansas City Medical Center. He had been a patient there for several weeks.”
In the moment of silence that followed, I waited for him to tell the rest of the story.
Merle’s hand lay still on the cat’s back.
“Dead?” Margaret said. “At KCMC?”
“My goodness.” Alice frowned. “You’d think he could have let us know he was here in town! I hardly know what to say about this.” She seemed to force a smile for my benefit. “You must think we’re very coldhearted, Miss Cain, but you see, we hardly knew him, did we, Meg?”
The sister shook her lovely head.
Merle resumed stroking the cat.
“We weren’t Father’s only family, you see,” Alice continued. “We were his first family. Our late mother, Emily, was his first wife, that is. But he does have—had—one other family and two wives with whom he had no children. Four families in all, I suppose you’d say. He has four children that we know of, and I’m ashamed to admit to you that I don’t know how many grandchildren, besides my own Lilly Ann. We are not in touch with the others, you see.”
“Father was a character,” Margaret put in.
“Father left Mother when we were toddlers,” Alice said. “But his parents, our grandparents, made sure that he didn’t leave her destitute.”
Margaret waved her right hand gracefully as if to indicate the sumptuous room and smiled her quick cat-smile. “As you can plainly see,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” Alice agreed. She was evidently the earnest one, while Margaret played the witty beauty. Merle, meanwhile, contributed nothing to this, but only sat watching us, smiling pleasantly and petting the Burmese. I had never seen such a placid cat. “And later, when Father had money of his own, he was always quite liberal with us. Father was a fair man,” Alice added, “and a generous one. But he had a wandering soul.”
Her sister smiled. “Some might say philandering.”
“Mother never said so,” Alice chided her.
“That’s true,” Margaret conceded. “I was joking. Mother always said he didn’t leave her for another woman. He left her, and then he found another woman.”
Alice laughed at that, but it sounded hollow.
“And then another and another,” her sister added with a mischievous air.
The man in the wheelchair finally spoke, in a gently cynical tone. “Well, he could afford to, couldn’t he?”
Margaret smiled.
Alice nodded. “He was fortunate to be in ranching when he was. There aren’t many men like him anymore.”
“No,” Margaret said, “a rancher today would have a hard time keeping his ranch, much less four wives.”
We all chuckled politely.
Margaret smiled her cat-smile at me again before saying, “Especially if he had a foundation to support, as well.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
It had come so quickly, her little knife had sliced through the sweet cake of courtesy so cleanly, I had nearly missed feeling the wound.
“You’re the director of a foundation that’s getting one of Father’s ranches, you said. We have our own family foundation, Ms. Cain.”
“Meg,” Alice’s tone was soft, warning.
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said.
Merle scratched the cat’s head so roughly I was amazed the Burmese didn’t scratch him back, or at least jump down from his lap.
“Our foundation was established a generation ago by our grandparents.” Margaret walked over to a bookcase and pulled out a volume, then handed it to me. I looked at t
he title: Barons of Branchwater. “You may have this book. It will tell you the long and illustrious history of the family with whom you are dealing. Our foundation—you may have heard of it—is the Longhorn Foundation.”
I had. It was enormously rich, one of the big ones.
“I am naturally wondering,” she said in the same wryly courteous tones, “why Father would choose to leave a ranch to a small … obscure … unimportant foundation—”
“Meg!” Alice pleaded.
“—like yours, rather than to the Longhorn …”
Margaret’s voice trailed off gently, a parody of sweet courtesy. I noticed that there were two battle-axes crossed on the wall behind her. How appropriate. Alice avoided my eyes, but Margaret didn’t, not for a second, and neither did Merle Lawrence. Dwight Brady examined the tips of his shoes. I wanted to trod on those shoes, jump up and down on them, stomp them into sandals. The man was developing a very bad habit of getting me into nasty situations, then not lifting a hand to help me out of them.
I knew what was going on here because I’d run across it before—these wealthy people didn’t begrudge the ranch for their personal gain, they begrudged the power and control that comes with having ever-more-vast sums of money to dispense as you please through your own foundation. Altruism breeds its own form of greed when donors start competing to give the most and the best.
I waited them out.
Alice finally looked up, although she was a little pale, and so did Brady. Now they were all gazing at me with looks of polite expectation. As if Margaret hadn’t just gratuitously insulted me.
“Beats me,” I said finally.
“Ah,” the lovely Margaret murmured. I glimpsed the disbelief in her light blue eyes a moment before she glanced away from me. I had the feeling of being something distasteful from which she averted her gaze. “Where is this ranch that Father left your foundation?”
“In the Flint Hills.”
“How large is it?”
“Thirteen thousand acres.”
Bum Steer Page 3