When Elliott introduced himself Leon’s face was so flooded with fear that for a moment I half expected him to bolt and run. But Elliott, speaking firmly, managed to steer him out the back door into the alley behind the restaurant. Even so, it took several minutes for Leon to calm down. The police, it seems, had come to see him earlier in the day and his panic at all the sudden interest in him was palpable.
Still, he was eager to convince us of his innocence, at least of trying to harm Peaches.
“I would never hurt my Peaches! Never!” he insisted in a juvenile whine. “She’s my wife, you know. A man never does nothin’ to hurt his wife!”
“She’s not married to you, Leon,” Elliott said in the tone of someone breaking bad news. “She’s married to some guy named Jack Cavanaugh who owns a big factory in Bridgeport.”
“She just says that on account of the aliens,” Leon explained. “They’re trying to confuse her, sending those beams through the TV. They’re tricking her into thinking she’s married to somebody else.” He moved a step closer. “She doesn’t really love him,” he confided. “Her heart belongs to me. To me. She told me that at our wedding. She was a beautiful, beautiful bride.”
“I heard the cops caught you hanging around her house a couple weeks back,” Elliott scolded him. “I thought the judge told you what would happen if he caught you near her again. You don’t want to go back to jail, do you, Leon?”
“She never came to see me in jail,” Leon whined. “Not once. Other guys, their wives came. Wrote letters. Not Peaches. I used to be able to see her at least, see her on the news. But now that man made her stop. He made her quit to keep her from me. He’s very jealous. I know that about him.”
“What were you doing near her house, Leon?” Elliott demanded.
“I didn’t do nothin’,” Leon protested sullenly.
“The police think that someone might have sent her poison in the mail, someone who might want to hurt her.”
“I’d never hurt her! Never!” Leon shrieked.
“What were you doing at her house, Leon? You know what the police think? They think it was you!”
“No, no, no!” Leon shrieked, clamping his hands over his ears as if to blot out the horror of Elliott’s words. “I would never hurt her. I was just watching. Just w-w-w-watching over her.”
I bought Elliott a cappuccino at the Starbucks on the comer of Monroe and LaSalle. We sat side by side on a low brick wall surrounding a tiny patch of public grass at the foot of the El station.
“So what do you think of Leon?” he asked, carefully prying the white plastic lid from his cup.
“Nothing in my background has given me any insights into evaluating psychopaths,” I confessed, taking a sip of coffee. “But I’ll say one thing, aside from being seriously nuts, he doesn’t strike me as being particularly bright.”
“Joe went back to the files and pulled the original arrest jacket and let me read the psychiatric evaluation last night. According to the shrink who wrote the report on him, Leon is a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from delusional psychosis in the form of the belief that Peaches Parkenhurst is his wife and that space aliens are interfering with her memory. According to Leon, he and Peaches are pawns in a secret war being waged between the aliens and NASA.”
“He mustn’t be as dumb as he looks. That sounds like a pretty sophisticated delusion.”
“Don’t be impressed. It’s actually the plot of an old episode of the Twilight Zone.”
“He seemed very upset that we’d think he would hurt her.”
“Who knows what someone with bat shit for brains thinks? Maybe he thinks that if he kills her, he’ll be saving her from the aliens. Maybe he got jealous and decided the only way he could keep her from Jack would be to kill her. You never know. Joe pulled copies of the phone records for all of the Cavanaughs. There’s no denying that Leon started calling her the day he got out of prison. Maybe he turned violent in jail. It’s been known to happen.”
“Again, I’m no expert, but I could see Leon breaking into her house and killing her in a jealous rage, even lying in wait for her. But putting together something as sophisticated as mixing cyanide with Fluorad? And what about the package? How would he have gotten his hands on the business cards? All those things would be hard for him to get. Even if he could have thought of it—and how the hell would he know about the Fluorad and what it can do?—I can’t imagine that he’d be able to think clearly enough to pull it off. The space aliens would always be getting in the way.”
“Joe showed his picture around the Superior Plating plant this morning.”
“And?”
“Nobody’s seen him.”
“So where does that leave us?”
Elliott stared thoughtfully into his coffee. “It leaves us exactly nowhere,” he said.
* * *
Back at the office there were still no messages from Jack Cavanaugh. Just to be on the safe side, I had Cheryl call his office to make sure that he had indeed received Philip’s letter. Loretta, his secretary, assured her that he had, but when Cheryl asked if he was available to speak to me, his secretary said that he wasn’t taking calls.
Fine, I thought to myself, when Cheryl came in to tell me about it. Be that way.
“Did you still need to see Madeline?” asked my ever-efficient secretary as she turned to go back to her desk.
“Is she in today? I’d have thought she’d at least take the afternoon off after the funeral.”
“No. She’s here. I just bumped into her in the ladies’ room, that’s what made me think of it. I’ll ring her extension and see if she’s free. And while I’m thinking about it, don’t forget you’re going to dinner at Hard Rock at five-thirty.”
I dug through the papers on my desk for the things I’d set aside to ask Daniel’s secretary about.
“I see you’ve put that picture of Dagny out,” Madeline observed. “It was a favorite of Mr. Babbage’s, too. I guess he must have been right about the two of you hitting it off. He was a good judge of people, you know. That’s one of the things that made him so good at what he did.”
I reflected that in the short time I’d had the Superior Plating file, I’d managed to piss off practically every member of the Cavanaugh family. And with Jack Cavanaugh I’d done such a good job that he wasn’t even taking my calls. But I didn’t say anything about it to Madeline.
“Here’s what I’m looking for,” I announced, finally pulling the documents out from underneath the Frostman Refrigeration file and passing them to her. “There were just a couple of things with no explanation. I didn’t want to bother Jack Cavanaugh unnecessarily, so I thought I’d check with you to see if you knew what they were about.” She took a quick look at the hank statements and handed them back to me.
“This one’s easy. It’s a retirement fund that Mr. Cavanaugh asked Mr. Babbage to set up when their old housekeeper retired. Her name’s Henrietta Roosevelt, but they always called her Nursey. I’m not exactly sure how it’s set up, but I think the money came from Superior Plating. Dagny transferred it into an account with a bank in Chicago every quarter and they paid it out to her bank in Georgia.”
I wrote a note to Cheryl and clipped it to the statements. She would need to figure out the mechanics of the transfer. I didn’t want old retired Nursey to miss out on one of her checks.
“What about this?” I asked, handing her the yellowing trust agreement pertaining to Zebediah Hooker. “It looks like some sort of trust was set up and I was curious what it was all about.”
“I couldn’t tell you anything about that,” Madeline said tersely. I could tell immediately that she knew more than she was willing to tell.
“I just thought you might remember something about it,” I said, flipping to the last page where the originator of the document and typist’s initials were noted. “See, Daniel dictated this and you typed it.”
“I typed a lot of things for Mr. Babbage. I never remembered from one day to the next what they wer
e about,” she snapped defensively.
“It doesn’t matter.” I tried to sound casual. “I’ll just ask Jack Cavanaugh next time I see him.” I looked at Madeline sitting rigidly in my visitor’s chair. She looked miserable. “That’s all I wanted to talk to you about,” I continued, obviously dismissing her. Still she made no move to go.
“I think it’s something that Jack Cavanaugh doesn’t want to talk about,” she said finally, every word like pulling teeth.
“If you’ll tell me what it’s about I promise, I won’t mention it,” I coaxed. Still it took her a moment to make up her mind to speak.
“Mr. Babbage never told me the details. I don’t think he ever told anybody. But I know it had something to do with his son. The money in the trust was to compensate someone who’d been hurt because of his son.”
“Which son?” I asked.
“Jimmy. The one who died.”
30
I finally heard from Jack Cavanaugh just as I was leaving to meet Claire and Nora Masterson, the attorney from trusts and estates, for dinner.
“I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands,” he bellowed over the phone. I wondered what that meant. “Without Daniel, I’ve let myself be talked into all sorts of pussyfooting nonsense. By God, I didn’t get where I am today by listening to a bunch of lawyers—and I didn’t get here by asking nicely or asking for favors from my own goddamn children!”
“So what have you decided to do?” I inquired, bracing myself for the answer.
“I put them on the plane down to Tall Pines, that’s what. Just the three of them; no wives, no husbands, no outside influences. They’re all staying in my house—in the same rooms they had when they were kids. I’ve had Tom change the locks on their houses. I don’t want them hiding from each other.”
“Do you really think that locking them out of their own houses is a good idea?” I ventured.
“They’re my goddamn houses!” roared Jack. I wondered how many bourbons he’d put away before coming up with this harebrained idea. “I own the land, I own the buildings, and every stick of furniture was bought and paid for by my money. It’s all my money, and from now on it’s all my way. What’s more, they’re not leaving until they’ve figured out a way to get along together. Period.”
“Jack, they’re adults,” I reasoned. “I don’t know whether treating them like little children is going to help.”
“If they act like little children, then that’s how they’re going to be treated. They are children, my children. And you’re my lawyer, so from now on stick to writing letters and checking contracts and leave my children to me!”
I had only been to the Hard Rock once before and I hated it. Stephen and I had taken a group of Japanese lipid chemists there when it first opened. All I remembered was loud music, indifferent service, and mediocre food. The appeal of a restaurant with a thirty-foot neon sign in the shape of an electric guitar out front, rock memorabilia hanging from the ceiling, and a souvenir stand by the front door eluded me completely.
But one look at Claire’s face as she and Nora bent over their menus and I knew that they’d hit it off. By the time I sat down, they were already tasting each other’s milkshakes and had agreed to share an order of onion rings.
Claire was looking better. The color had come back to her face, and when she spoke some of her usual animation had returned. I couldn’t help but admire her resilience.
“How are things at your aunt and uncle’s house?” I asked. “Are you settling in?”
“I guess. It’s hard being so close to my old house. I try not to look at it, but it’s sort of impossible since it’s on the same street and all. Still, it helps that I can be with Mary Beth all the time and I like having all the little kids around. It’s hard to be depressed with so much going on. All the church stuff takes some getting used to, though. Did you know that Aunt Vy and Uncle Eugene kneel down and say the entire rosary every night before they go to bed?”
“I heard your uncle Eugene’s down in Georgia,” I said.
“That’s right. Aunt Vy says that Grandpa’s laid down some sort of ultimatum. The whole thing’s made Vy really unhappy and I’m not sure it’s such a good idea either. Uncle Eugene’s been so strange since Mom died—angry and withdrawn. You heard that he sort of went crazy when my uncle Jimmy died. I think Vy’s worried having him down in Georgia. She doesn’t come out and say so, but I think she’s afraid he’ll crack up without her.”
“I’m afraid they’ll all crack up,” I said, with more honesty than tact.
“No they won’t, they’ll just tear each other’s hair out! You should have heard the fight they had the night of Mom’s party. Mary Beth and I were over at Peter’s house watching a movie and the yelling was so loud we couldn’t hear the TV.”
“What were they fighting about?” Nora inquired.
“According to what Mom told me afterward, it all started over a piece of jewelry that used to belong to my grandma. I guess Grandpa gave it to Peaches as a present and Aunt Lydia was really mad about it.”
“That’s not that unusual,” Nora counseled. “Families fight all the time about who gets what. The thing to remember is that the jewelry, or the house, or whatever it is they’re arguing over, is not what the fight’s really about. Those arguments are always really about love and different people’s place in the family.”
“Well, by the time they got back to Peter’s house, they were fighting about a lot more than that,” continued Claire. “I never realized how much Aunt Lydia hates Grandpa—I mean really hates him. She was screaming that he didn’t really love any of them, that he just wanted to control them—stuff like that. Lydia just went on and on, with Uncle Philip trying to calm her down. In a way it was neat to listen to, because Aunt Lydia dragged out all the dirty laundry and the three of us heard about a bunch of stuff the grown-ups never told us about—like that Grandma’s sisters wanted to take Philip and Mom and the rest of Grandpa’s kids away from him after Grandma died and all the stuff about how Uncle Jimmy really died.”
“What about your uncle Jimmy?” I asked, thinking about the old documents that Madeline had unearthed from Daniel’s personal files.
“I don’t know. By that time they’d stopped shouting and it got kind of hard to hear, but it sounded like Lydia was accusing Philip of knowing something that he wouldn’t tell—you know, some big secret that he was keeping for Grandpa.”
Back at the office I pulled out the copy of the trust agreement that had been among the documents that Daniel had kept about the Cavanaughs. I read it through carefully. It was a straightforward document that set up a trust to pay for the care and maintenance of one Zebediah Hooker until the time of his death. Nowhere was there any mention of who Mr. Hooker might be, what he was being paid for, or where he might be found. From the notary’s seal I learned that it had been signed and witnessed in Thomas County, Georgia—a fact I didn’t find particularly enlightening.
I still had it in my hand when Elliott Abelman appeared in my doorway. “I brought you a present,” he said. He set a small box wrapped in gold paper on the desk in front of me. “Pretty flowers,” he said, bending to smell the roses on my desk. “I guess they’re from him.”
I didn’t say anything. Instead I went to work unwrapping the box. Inside, I found a small bottle of perfume in a red velvet box lined with white satin like a small coffin. The stopper of the bottle was made of frosted glass and shaped like a perfect rosebud. The name of the perfume was Forever.
“Can I smell it,” I asked Elliott, “or will it kill me?”
“There’s no poison in this one.”
“But am I correct in assuming that this was the kind?” I asked, pulling the stopper from the bottle and giving it a sniff. Normally, I think it must have been a heavenly perfume, but for me there were too many associations. I remembered the scent distinctly and for me it would forever be linked with death.
“This is the one.”
Self-consciously I put my finger
over the top of the bottle and turned it over to get some on my finger. I dabbed some quickly behind my ears—the same innocent gesture that had killed Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked lightly. “You’ve never come bearing gifts before.”
“Jack Cavanaugh just called me up and fired me,”
Elliott replied, Stretching his legs out in front of him. “Under the circumstances, I thought I should do something to mark the occasion.”
31
“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “Why on earth would Jack Cavanaugh fire you?”
“He told me the police were about to make an arrest and my services were no longer needed.”
“Are they? The cops, I mean.”
“I talked to Joe this afternoon. He didn’t mention any big breakthrough.”
“So what’s Jack Cavanaugh talking about?”
“I think he assumes that because Joe has his boys following up the Leon Walczak thing pretty hard that Leon’s the bad guy. But let’s get serious. You’ve seen the guy. Do you honestly think he could walk up to the perfume counter at Neiman Marcus or Saks—and believe me this junk’s only sold at the most expensive stores— plunk down two hundred plus dollars for a bottle of perfume, and not have anyone remember him?”
“Maybe Joe’s right. It could have come from anywhere. The duty-free shop at some airport.”
“And what would Leon Walczak be doing in the dutyfree shop?”
“Maybe he stole the stuff.”
“Not the perfume. They keep testers on the counter for the cologne, but the perfume is kept under lock and key. I won’t bore you with all the fascinating information I’ve managed to absorb recently on the subject of perfume, but believe me, they guard the expensive stuff like it was diamonds. Come to think of it, they have a hell of a lot tighter security at the perfume counter than they do for the cyanide at Superior Plating.”
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