You Made Your Bed: A Novel

by Cornelia Goddin

  Her head snaps around. “Hurt him? What are you saying?”

  Franks shrugs. “Just covering all the possibilities here, Rebecca.”

  “He had a heart attack, right? Someone found him out on the trail—”

  “It’s true, someone did. And maybe he was out running, pushed himself a little too hard, and dropped dead all of a sudden. Maybe it was like that. But I’m just one of those guys, I like to dot the i’s and cross those t’s,” he says, giving her a wink. “So I ask a lot of questions that might sound foolish, and probably insensitive. Don’t give it much thought. I know you’re going through a terrible thing, it’s an awful loss, yours and the baby’s. Please don’t fret. You leave all the worries about the case to me.”

  She looks at him with gratitude.

  He smiles at her. “Thatta girl. Never had any kids, myself,” he says. “Regret it now, but don’t tell any of my old girlfriends.”

  Rebecca nods. “I’m glad…at least…” she says, almost whispering, her hands moving in circles over her belly.

  “Must make a real difference,” says Franks, resting his hand on her shoulder for just a moment. “I don’t mean to put you out, but could I have something to drink? Just a glass of water would be fine.”

  “Sorry!” she says, jumping up and going to the refrigerator. “Want seltzer? Or lemonade?”

  “Lemonade! Now you’re talking,” he says, grinning.

  She’s got a great ass for someone eight months pregnant, he thinks, watching her walk to the kitchen.

  “At least you don’t have to worry about how to feed and clothe your baby. Sorry to be crass, but that Crowe money is gonna be a mighty nice cushion,” he says, still looking at her backside.

  She brings Franks his glass of lemonade, nothing for herself, and sits back down. “I already got a few calls from so-called friends, sniffing around after handouts, can you believe it? It’s so fucked. I mean first of all? This just happened. I haven’t even figured what to do about a funeral, and people are calling already looking for loans? And also...we’ll be comfortable, for sure, don’t take this as complaining—but that Crowe money isn’t coming to us.”

  “No? Did Wilson talk to you about a will?”

  “Oh yeah,” says Rebecca, this time with a genuine laugh. “The Crowes can’t talk about feelings but they love to talk about money. He laid it all out for me when I signed the prenup. And you know? Some people might think that’s not romantic and all, but I actually liked that he was being direct. All the cards on the table. No bullshit.”

  “Can you tell me more about the prenup? I know it’s personal.”

  “Oh, I don’t care. Given the circumstances, it made some sense from their perspective, you know?”

  “The circumstances?”

  “I was pregnant when we got married. Pretty sure Gordon and Lillian thought I’d entrapped their son on purpose. Which, God no. Getting married was Wilson’s idea. He had this streak of…what would you call it…like he was sort of an impulsive risk-taker on the outside, but a do-gooder underneath. He wanted to be a good dad, to have a real family. And the truth? It might have started out as a crazy heat-of-the-moment thing, but we…we loved each other.” She bows her head and Franks sees her shoulders tremble.

  After a moment she lifts her head again. “Anyway, I was happy to sign pretty much anything they put in front of me, to show them I wasn’t after the money.”

  “By ‘them’ you mean the whole family, Wilson included?”

  Rebecca thinks this over. “I sort of think of the Crowe family as one big lump somehow. Not Wilson so much. But the rest of them—Lillian, Gordon, Caroline—they’re just…the family.”

  Franks watches her carefully, trying to hear what she means.

  “Now that you bring it up, yeah, I probably did take that attitude because I wanted to prove something to Wilson, to make sure he understood I wasn’t after his money. Because I really wasn’t,” she says, looking at Franks with a flash of anger.

  “Understood. I’m sure you did the smart thing. Still, I hope they do right by you and their grandchild.”

  “I’m fine, I really am. I’ll get money Wilson had inherited from his mother’s side, and it’s not chickenfeed. But,” she adds, “his mother’s side isn’t where the big money is. Which is fine by me.”

  Franks takes a long pull on his lemonade. “Money can cause a lot of problems in this world. In families, especially. I can’t tell you the number of murders I’ve investigated where money was the motive. Maybe the majority of ‘em.”

  “Do you really think Wilson was murdered?” Her voice drops so low he has to turn his head to hear her.

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I’m just dotting t’s at this point.” He winks again and takes another sip of his lemonade, arranging his face to look placid, as though he’s asking questions by rote, just running down a standard list. “Tell me, if you’re not getting his money, who is?”

  “Caroline.”

  He waits to see if she’ll add anything, but they just look at each other, not speaking.

  Finally Rebecca continues, “Wilson told me that Gordon set up some kind of trust, where all his money gets split between the two of them. There are whatever legal protections to make sure any wives and husbands can’t get their mitts on it. And when one of them dies, the other gets that share.”

  “A giant fuck-ton of cash, excuse my French.”

  “Yeah,” says Rebecca. “Billions.”

  I’m ready to place my bet, thinks Franks. Forty-two years of experience are telling me this death was no accident. Number one, healthy people with that much money just don’t die of natural causes in their twenties, and two, the Crowe family sounds like a bunch of sharks. He stays another half hour talking with Rebecca, and is ninety-nine percent sure she had nothing to do with it.

  He’s anxious to sit down with Caroline Crowe, but there is an infinitude of hoops to jump through first.

  Starting with a goddamn autopsy.

  49

  Caroline

  I have to fight through an ungodly mass of chattering youngsters at the monkey house. The jeerlings are going at it hammer and tongs until I fear my ears are going to be in tatters, just shreds of skin flapping on the sides of my head.

  I shove my way through, up to the railing where I saw the white-ruffed lemur last time, and sure enough, he’s in the same spot. I wish all these people would go away so the lemur and I could have a nice chat. He is undeniably wise, you can just tell. I want to pet his small head and see if he will murmur things to me. I am looking for mammalian calm, an escape from the raucous cries of crows that almost constantly besiege me.

  You think perhaps I’m being overdramatic? Think what you like. I am only trying, as best I can, to describe these minutes as they plod awkwardly and often painfully by. Having gobs of money is no insulation from trauma, remember that above all. Isn’t what happened to me and Wilson proof of that?

  All of a sudden my throat closes up. Somehow, despite the best planning I could manage under the circumstances, I realize there might be a hole, a gap, a freaking chasm I could fall through all the way to Rikers and even the electric chair. One of the reasons I chose Amanita phalloides is that the mushrooms are not difficult to find near Wilson’s house. It seemed as though the simplest explanation for a poisoning would be that he had foolishly eaten some by mistake, and the case could be closed quickly.

  Now, I know I’m getting ahead of what’s going on. As far as I know, Gordon has blocked the autopsy, in which case my worry is for nothing. As long as the cops are going with heart attack, I’m golden.

  But if you live your life not anticipating how things can go wrong—including massively, horrifically wrong—then you are a fool, as I’m sure you’d agree. If the autopsy does go forward, and if the Amanita is discovered and identified (and I believe it almost certainly would be, having no reason to think that law enforcement in Berkeley is headed by Inspector Clouseau)—if that happens, they will not con
clude that the mushroom ingestion was accidental, because they will also find midazolam. It’s a date-rape drug, not something anyone would take for fun.

  I’ve been incomprehensibly stupid. I almost deserve to get caught.

  The crucial thing is how long the half-life of midazolam is. In other words, there are some wild cards in the hand I’m playing, and they could be quite valuable or get me in a whole lot of trouble. The not-knowing, obviously, is excruciating, not to mention dangerous. If I could only look some things up online, I would feel so much better, even if what I found out wasn’t perfectly encouraging.

  The lemur swings up and disappears into the foliage, and the crowd groans all together like a choir. I am rooted to the spot, unable to figure out a smart next step.

  I would go to a library and use one of their computers, but I am too afraid of being seen, being tracked. If they find midazolam, I consider myself first in line among the suspects—or at least tied with Rebecca—since Wilson’s death potentially enriches me rather significantly. Which is frustrating, since the money never had anything to do with it.

  There is nothing to do but wait in the darkness and try to fend off visions of myself in an orange jumpsuit.

  50

  Oates closes the door behind Franks. “Settle down, you’ll give yourself a heart attack.”

  “Very funny. Hilarious, given the circumstances. The ME’s really going along with this? I wouldn’t think he’d like having his autopsy snatched away like this. Not everyone is happy to bend over for any rich guy who waddles his way into a case.”

  “Watch it.”

  Franks shrugs. His pension gets fatter every month he works. If he goes too far and someone has the balls to can him, he’s not worried. He’d get eased out if it came to that, and spend the rest of his days at the beach. “You know I fucking hate men like Gordon Crowe. There are too many of ‘em here in Berkeley, makes me look forward to going back to Fresno when I retire.”

  “You’re moving back?”

  “If this town gets any more stuffed with tech money and guys like Crowe, yeah, I’ll move to wherever they ain’t. If not Fresno, there’s got to be someplace somewhere that’s not overrun with assholes, right?”

  Oates goes to his desk and shuffles some papers around. “Okay, well, don’t get your panties in a wad over this, Scotty. Crowe says he doesn’t want his son marked as a druggie. Says he’s dead, nothing anybody can do about it, why not let the kid hold on to his reputation. Gordon Crowe…he’s a convincing kind of guy.”

  “No doubt. Just hear me out, willya? Number one, there was bad blood between the son and the father. In which case trying to weasel out of a required autopsy doesn’t look so good.”

  “What kind of bad blood?”

  “Gordon Crowe is based in New York, his son moves to California. If you think that’s not a big middle finger to daddy then you don’t know anything about controlling fathers. Plus, the kid got married because he knocked the girl up, and the family had some suspicions about that.”

  “How do—”

  “I might have had a brief chat with the wife.”

  “Scotty—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Mea culpa, all right? I’m not working any cases at the moment, what do you want me to do, rearrange the furniture in your office?”

  Oates runs a hand over his face and blows out a lungful of air. “And is there a number two?”

  “Number two—it’s an embarrassment, having to spell this out, it really is, Lieutenant—an unattended death triggers an automatic autopsy. Same for Wilson’s age, the fact that he died outside, that the death was unexpected. As you well know. That’s a lot of boxes ticked right there. ‘Automatic’ being the operative word here, not ‘if you happen to feel like it’ or ‘if Daddy Warbucks says it’s okay.’”

  “For a guy who’s been known to color outside the lines, you sure get prissy about rules when you feel like it.”

  “Prissy this, Oates,” says Franks, grabbing his crotch.

  Oates snickers. “What else you get from the wife? You’re thinking she might have done something to help her husband along?”

  He shrugs. “Not quite.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t think she killed him. But someone did. Bet me?”

  “I don’t bet.”

  Franks shrugs again.

  “You think the father did him?”

  Franks grins. “I have no idea. But hell, it would be satisfying to nail him for it, wouldn’t it? And if that doesn’t float your boat—you want everyone knowing you’ve let Gordon fucking Crowe push you around about this autopsy?”

  With a deep sigh, Oates gets up and sits on his desk, narrows his eyes at Franks. “I’m know I’m going to regret this. But okay, okay, you made some half-decent points in your usual charming way. I’m willing to let the autopsy go through. But if it turns out to be a heart attack? I want a bottle of Glenfiddich on my desk with a note of apology.”

  “And if I’m right?”

  “You work the case,” says Oates.

  Franks nods with a small smile, closing the door quietly when he leaves Oates’s office.

  “Usual?” Joe the bartender says to Franks.

  Franks drops onto a stool. “Yep. Make it a double.”

  Joe gives him a tired smile, gets out a big glass and fills it with Sprite from the tap. “Any hot cases lately?”

  “Nah,” says Franks. He likes Joe, it’s not personal, but there’s a thing where you can overtalk something and sap the juice out of it. It’s better if he keeps the Crowes up in his head for a little while, all to himself, while he tries to work out what happened and the ME does his job.

  Joe wanders down to the other end of the bar where some college girls are sitting. Franks takes a long pull on his soda and thinks about the case; he outlines first steps, second steps, third steps. He’s got a famously wicked memory for conversations and goes over the interview with Rebecca, sentence by sentence, turning her words upside down and inside out, squeezing all the meaning out of them. Finally, he considers the information he’s gleaned from computer searches for each member of the family.

  Gordon Crowe has had so much press it would be impossible to get through it all, and Franks has been skimming headlines and reading only the more substantive articles, trying to take the measure of the man. Lillian Crowe’s public presence is exactly what he would expect—photos in society pages, mentions in various philanthropic organizations, one museum in particular. Nothing unexpected or out of the ordinary for either of them.

  But the children, Caroline and Wilson, are another matter. So far, their online footprint is almost non-existent, which is not only unusual but something Franks has never seen before. Kids in their twenties, with no social media presence? Caroline and Wilson Crowe might as well be ninety years old as far as the internet is concerned: it doesn’t know who they are, where they are, or what they spend their time doing.

  He’s found their names in a few alumni publications, but only as part of a list of other students. There is not, as far as he’s been able to determine, a single communication from either Crowe child, to anyone, that is findable online. No Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, and nothing from failed platforms like MySpace either. There are some photographs—a few from the New York Post during the period when Gordon Crowe was involved in a financial scandal, and several from a society website full of pictures of rich kids in expensive clothes riding horses or playing tennis.

  Somebody has something to hide, thinks Franks. This isn’t simply a rich family looking for privacy—we’re not talking little kids here, either. He taps his fingertips on the bar, running Rebecca’s comments through his mind again.

  The college girls get up to play pinball and Joe drifts back. “You hear the latest from the neighborhood?” he asks. “That storefront a few doors down from here? Some kind of tech startup, bunch of kids who used to come in here all the time. Crazy hours they kept. You talk to any of ‘em?”

 
“You mean the place with that swirly logo in the window? Yeah, I talked to ‘em. You know I talk to everybody, Joe.”

  “Well, somebody came in and bought up the joint a few weeks ago. They were on top of the world, so thrilled someone believed in their idea. The next minute, the new owner fired all the kids and put in his own people. People suck, ya know?”

  Franks nods. “Don’t get me started.” He drums his fingers on the bar. “Goddammit.” He turns on the stool to face the door, as though expecting some of the out-of-work kids to come in. “My dad,” he starts, then spins the stool back around. “My dad cofounded a manufacturing company, auto parts, back in Fresno. He was great at knowing how to make parts but terrible at business politics.”

  Joe shakes his head.

  “He wanted to give this great benefits package, you know? Wanted to treat his workers right. Ended up getting pushed out of his own company by a bunch of sharks he’d asked to be on the board of directors. Just like that, our family was on food stamps.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” says Joe, still shaking his head. “Terrible what some people’ll do.”

  “He never recovered,” Franks says quietly. He puts his hands in his pockets and presses his lips together. “These people who put money above everything…just fuck ‘em all. Sideways.”

  “Well, the kids from down the block, they’re not even twenty-five, most of ‘em. They’ll bounce back.”

  “Hope so,” says Franks. “Gimme another Sprite, willya?”

  According to Rebecca, Caroline Crowe only visited Berkeley one time, last April. If Franks can only prove she was here again…and even better if he gets her to lie about it….

  He slams his glass down on the counter, throws some bills on the bar, and hurries outside. He’s got a pal at the airport he needs to talk to right away, before the video gets wiped.

  51

  Sandie Shearer clicks out of the local news page on her laptop, then shuts the machine off. She has been a therapist for twenty-two years; it is not the first time a client has died during treatment. But of course it is still jarring and unexpected.