by Jan Burke
I took the coast route, even though Pacific Coast Highway was bound to have heavy summer traffic. As it turned out, I didn’t have to pay too high a price for choosing it over the inland route; PCH was crowded, but the traffic moved. No local would think of expecting more.
I crossed the bridge over Anaheim Bay, passed the wildlife refuge and took my last good look at nature until I reached Warner Avenue. For the next few miles, the highway is dominated by a motley assortment of buildings: houses, bars, surf shops and restaurants.
Technically, Huntington Beach begins on the left side of the highway just over the bridge, the right side belonging to Surfside and Sunset Beach. But growing up in an area where there are now high school classes that will teach you how to hang ten, I had long ago developed other ideas about true local geography. For me, the real Huntington Beach begins when you get within sight of the pier. The two beaches on either side of that pier boast some of the most well-known surfing territory on the coast. That’s Huntington Beach.
Before long, I was at the edge of the oil fields that brought on the first boom years in Huntington Beach, back in the 1920s. There were still big platforms just off the coast, but fewer and fewer signs of drilling on shore. Most of the oil fields had given way to developments packed with large, imitation villas in pastel stucco on streets with names like “Sea-point” and “Princeville” and “Castlewood.”
I took a last look at the water before turning left on Golden West, still thinking about my surfing days, wondering if I d ever work up the nerve to paddle out again.
The DeMonts lived in a section of the city that was older that the ones I had just passed; their homes were on one of the numbered streets between Main and Golden West. Although the neighborhood was older, that didn’t mean the homes were—it soon became apparent that most of the original structures on these streets had given way to new buildings. The result was a mixture of housing: many of the lots had condos and apartment buildings on them; others, large single-family dwellings; a few were smaller, older homes. There was even a strip of colorful faux Victorians.
I turned right on Acacia, found the street I was looking for and slowed when I came to the address for Leda DeMont Rose and her father, Horace—a corner lot. I got lucky with parking and found a space not far away, then walked back to the corner.
It was a large house, though not among the very newest on the street. Judging by its design, I thought it probably had been built in the 1970s. I studied the addresses and realized that Robert’s home was on the same side of the street, at the beginning of the next block, on the opposite corner of the intersection. His was a single-story crackerbox that was probably built in the 1940s. My guess was that a similar house had originally occupied Leda’s lot.
While Leda’s property was neatly kept, her brother’s was a little less so. Robert’s place could have used a coat of paint, and looking at the brown, patchy grass in his yard, I saw that no one could accuse him of wasting water on a lawn. The place wasn’t so far gone that you’d call it an eyesore, but it didn’t look like the owner had a lot of domestic enthusiasm.
I stood debating which household I should upset first, and decided that even in my current condition, I could take on a guy who was almost a hundred and live to fight another day. I wasn’t sure how old Robert was, but Gerald’s story about Robert’s arrest was enough to make me decide to save Robert for round two.
There was a low wooden fence around the front yard of Leda De-Mont’s home; I lifted the latch on the gate and made my way along a set of long, flat platforms set at right angles to one another. The platforms served as steps. On either side of each platform were carefully pruned bushes and shrubs that added privacy as well as greenery. The platforms ended at a deck that was concealed from the street by more plant life. At one end of the deck was a small rock grotto with a stream of water flowing through it. The water pooled at its base; the flow produced a soft gurgling, a not-quite-babbling brook effect.
Tall, ornate double doors stood across from the grotto. Looking at those doors, I made a set of predictions: cathedral ceilings, Italian marble entry, a huge stone fireplace, a loft, white walls and white carpet, and—not really going out on a limb here—lots of tinted windows on the ocean side, which was also the side that faced Robert’s place. I rang Leda’s doorbell.
I was so surprised when a young woman answered the door, I nearly forgot to congratulate myself on knowing what to expect inside. She looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. She was a pretty girl, with big brown eyes and light-brown hair, which she wore in a long braid. She had on jeans and a red tank top. She was about five-six or so, and slender.
“Hello,” I said. “Is Leda DeMont in? No, I’m sorry—is Leda Rose in?”
She pulled her gaze away from my bruised cheek and forehead, smiled and said, “Sure, just a minute.” She turned toward a hallway and shouted, “Grandma! It’s for you!”
“Who is it?” a voice called back.
“Irene Kelly,” I said, knowing the name probably wouldn’t mean anything to her.
I heard my name shouted back and forth a couple of times, then the voice in the background said, “I’ll be right there.”
Taking this for permission to let me enter, the young woman guided me to a seat on a white leather sofa.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.
“No, thanks. Do you live here with your grandmother?”
“No, I just come by on the weekends. I help her take care of my greatgrandfather.”
At this moment, Leda came out of the hallway. “Laurie?” she called.
“Over here, Grandma,” she answered.
Leda DeMont Rose was an older and slightly heavier version of her granddaughter. Her hair was cut short and the brown was a little less natural in shade, but their features were very similar.
She smiled at me and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t seem to remember where we’ve met.”
“We haven’t met,” I said, standing and extending a hand. “I’m Irene Kelly.” I took a breath and then launched into the story I had decided to use. “I was hoping to speak to you privately about a rather personal family matter.”
She raised a brow, then turned to her granddaughter and said, “Laurie, why don’t you keep an eye on old Grumpypuss?”
Reluctantly, and as slowly as possible, Laurie left us.
“Now,” Leda said. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, this is rather embarrassing, and I hope it won’t be too upsetting to you, but I need to talk to someone who might be able to give me some advice. I’ve been approached by a private investigator, a Mr. Richmond?”
She sat up a little straighter, but said nothing.
“Mr. Richmond claims to have some information of interest to a cousin of mine, Travis Maguire. You may think of him as Travis Spanning.”
Her lips flattened, but she didn’t say anything.
“The problem is that my own family has had very little to do with Travis. Even though his mother is my mother’s sister, we haven’t had much to do with her since the death of your own cousin, Gwendolyn.”
“The murder of my cousin,” she corrected.
“Yes. I’m sorry. But you see, my mother died not long after Travis was born, and my father didn’t like Arthur Spanning, so we never had much to do with him. My parents are no longer living, and I never heard the full story, so this isn’t a personal grudge of my own. My problem is, I suppose I could locate Travis, but before I do, I’d like to be a little more sure of Mr. Richmond. He said he worked for you.”
At that her mouth fell open in what was clearly unfeigned amazement. “He did? Why that lying scoundrel! I—I can’t believe it! Of all the unmitigated gall!”
“Excuse me?”
That man—that man is the last person I would ever hire to do any detective work for me, I can assure you! Don’t do a thing to help him! Oh! I blame him for—oh, for so much!“ she finished bitterly.
I waited.
“Mr. Richmond’s incompetence has been the cause of a great many ills, not the least of which is that my aunt’s murderer remains at large.”
“You’re speaking of Arthur Spanning?”
“No, of course not!” she said.
I was stunned. This was the last response I had expected.
“I don’t know what problem your father had with Arthur, but I can tell you that he never would have harmed Gwen.”
“Never harmed her? But he was a bigamist—”
“Yes. Yes, he was. And that was very wrong. Not that I don’t understand what led to that, but it was wrong. And that poor little boy—”
She stood up and paced, wringing her hands. “Do you think there is any chance you will find your cousin?”
“A very good chance,” I said.
She began pacing again. I decided to stay silent; she was apparently debating something with herself and I was too unsure of the territory to push her into answering questions.
“You’ve misjudged him, you know,” she said at last.
“My cousin?”
“No, Arthur. You’ve believed Richmond’s story, haven’t you?”
“Well, until I got here, I suppose I did,” I lied. “But I did think there was something about Mr. Richmond that seemed a little strange.”
“Forget Mr. Richmond. Perhaps,” she said, sitting down again, “I can do a little something to right an old wrong. Are you willing to keep an open mind, Ms. Kelly?”
“Yes, of course. And call me Irene, please.”
“All right, Irene.” Several moments passed before she spoke again. “First of all, let me tell you that your uncle Arthur never killed Gwen. If Arthur had wanted to end his marriage to Gwen, he would have divorced her. I haven’t seen him in years, but I knew Arthur then, my dear, and believe me, he would have never chosen murder over divorce. There was no reason for him to do so.”
“Her fortune—”
“Hah!”
“Pardon?”
“I said, ”Hah!“ Tell me, Irene, did you see the house across the street on your way in?” Yes.
“That’s my brother’s place. Robert DeMont. Do you know why this house looks better than that one?”
I shook my head.
“Because I married a wonderful man named Elwood Rose, and he wouldn’t let my father or brother involve him in any of their harebrained investment schemes. For a number of years, Gwen did not have such a protector, and my father and brother did a great deal of damage to that fortune.”
“I don’t understand.”
She sighed. “You’ve heard of my grandfather, Quentin DeMont—the man everyone called Papa DeMont?”
I nodded.
“He ruled that farm and everyone on it as if he were a king anointed by God. I loved him, and so did Gwen, but because my father argued with him so often, I wasn’t in Papa DeMont’s shadow the way Gwen was. You know that my grandfather raised her?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, my father was on the outs with Papa DeMont. Some of it was my dad’s own fault, but a lot of it was just that he wasn’t willing to be under Papa DeMont’s thumb. I later came to think that was a lucky thing for me.”
“How so?”
“Gwen never learned how to stand up to him, or anyone else, for that matter. And I think Papa thought he’d be able to take care of her forever, so he didn’t teach her the things she needed to know about life. She was this hothouse flower, you might say.”
“So when he died—”
“When he died, she was just about as lost as any one soul could be. Suddenly she was being asked to cope with a set of responsibilities she was totally unprepared for—a business she had never participated in.
“I was younger than Gwen, about fourteen years younger, but I swear to you, I often felt as if our age differences were reversed. I was almost thirty when Papa DeMont died, and Gwen was in her mid-forties. But I was married and raising kids, and you would have thought she was still in high school, for all she knew about getting along in the world.” She glanced toward the hallway and said, “I love my father, but I haven’t always been proud of him, and I am truly ashamed of how he took advantage of her after Papa DeMont died.”
“In what way?”
After a long silence she said, “He told her his favorite sad story, the one about how Papa DeMont didn’t love him—which was untrue—and what a rough life he had had, and on and on, giving her a spiel just as if he were panhandling back in his tramp days. Pretty soon she felt so guilty, she started opening her checkbook to him.”
“Did Arthur know?”
“They weren’t married yet. Gerald—Arthur’s brother? He used to try to warn Gwen, to tell her that there was a reason Papa DeMont never let my father have money—namely, it was spent before Daddy could fold it up and put it in his wallet. Bobby—my brother—was the same way. Both of them hated Gerald for that.”
“So if the handouts stopped when Arthur married her—”
“They didn’t. Arthur didn’t try to stop them until later. I’m not sure he realized what was going on at first—you know he was only sixteen?”
“Yes. I guess I’ve often wondered—”
“Why a sixteen-year-old boy would marry a woman that old?”
“Yes.”
She thought for a moment before answering. “I guess you would have to have known the two of them, and the situation there on the farm. It was a little world of its own, in many ways. In each of their cases, after their parents died, Gwen and Arthur had no other world, really. Gwen was afraid of most men—most people, really. She was so lonely.
“And Arthur—even as a boy, Arthur was the kind of person who wanted to be helpful. I guess he wasn’t any good in school—which I could never figure out, because he was smart, and don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise. So when Papa DeMont let him help out in the gardens, he just—I don’t know, I’d say he changed. You could see how much happier he was to be there than at school. I think the schoolkids might have been mean to him, I don’t know. He never did like kids his age. He’d rather be around adults.”
“Were there any other children on the farm?”
She shook her head. “No. None that Gerald would let him spend any time with. So in his own way, I think he was lonely, too. He tried to make up for it by being helpful, I think, to get the adults to like him. If anyone else needed a hand, even when he was little, Arthur rushed to help them out.”
“And so he helped Gwendolyn?”
She nodded. “It was as if he was determined to do whatever he could to make her smile or laugh. To be honest, I don’t know anyone who made her smile more often. And when he got to an age where—well, boys get to be men, physically if in no other way, and if he hadn’t started thinking about the one thing that seems to take up most of the male brain, he wouldn’t have been normal, would he?”
“There weren’t any other women around?”
“You have to remember that Gerald kept as tight a rein on that kid as Papa DeMont kept on Gwen. Only I don’t think Gerald was above smacking Arthur around. He was a kid raising a kid.”
I thought of the photo of the wedding day, and wondered if that was why Arthur looked different—was his face a little swollen?
“Gerald made sure Arthur learned gardening and landscaping—and not the type of farmwork that would put him out in the fields or in the factory,” Leda was saying. “Gerald was proud if nothing else.”
“Forgive me, but Gwendolyn’s—” I hesitated, sought a word. “Gwendolyn’s availability might explain why she was his first sexual partner, but it wouldn’t explain why he married her.”
“Gerald. Gerald pushed that. It surprised me at first. At the time, I thought maybe Gerald figured he could control Arthur and Gwen’s money both—prenuptial agreement or no. I don’t mean to say that his intentions were bad. He was very fond of Gwen, and since he was one of Papa DeMont’s favorites, he was close to her, too. He was protective of her, and he resented what my
father and brother were doing.”
“You had more than one brother, didn’t you?” I asked.
“I had two, but Douglas died in 1980,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Doug left home early on, and never had much to do with any of us. That may make him the smartest of the bunch. When he heard what had happened to Gwen, he was angry, and he fell for Richmond’s theory. But I think anyone who didn’t know the whole story would have believed what Harold Richmond was telling them. And of course, my father and Robert backed Richmond all the way.”
“Because they wanted the money?”