Not Death, But Love (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  “What was the opposition’s overall strategy?” said El. “I mean, you wanted the county board to reject the application, but what did you think would happen after that?”

  “They’d have been over a barrel,” she said. “We’d been working with State Senator Don Allen, and he was ready to introduce a bill to add the peninsula lands to the state park system, but only if the county board refused the development. The London-Paris partnership would have had to take an offer from the state at that point, even if they lost money. Too bad for Ned, I suppose, but if you want to get rich, you have to take risks, and they don’t always pan out.”

  “Really?” said Gordon. “That’s not what the Parises said when I talked to them a couple of days ago. Ronald Paris said they would have come back with a smaller-scale plan and gotten that approved.”

  She laughed: A loud laugh that began as a hoot and descended into a cackle.

  “Is that what they told you?” she said. “Is that their lie? Because that’s what it is — a lie. If they came back a second time, they’d have been up against See-kwah.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “CEQA. The California Environmental Quality Act. I can see that doesn’t register, so let me explain. In September of 1970, the state passed a law that required, among other things, that an environmental impact report had to be done on any significant land development project. The application for The Peninsulas had been filed just before, so the law didn’t apply to it. But if the county board had rejected that first plan, any plan submitted after that would have had to go through the environmental review process. They couldn’t have done it.

  “It would have taken time to get an environmental report researched and written. It would have taken time to have county staff review it and make changes, especially since it would have been the staff’s first time doing something like that. It would have taken even more time to put it out for public comments and rewrite the report to include those comments and responses to them. And if the county had approved the second proposal, we could have sued, claiming the environmental report was inadequate. The whole thing would have taken so much time and cost so much money, the developers would have bled out financially.

  “And that’s not all. I happen to know for a fact that Ned and Roger took out a loan to buy that land, and they had to make a large balloon payment in December of 1971. With a plan approved, it would have been no problem to refinance. With no plan approved, or with a plan approved but in litigation, nobody would have loaned them a dime. So you see, it was all or nothing as far as they were concerned. If they didn’t get their original plan approved, they were beyond screwed.”

  She paused for another sip of lemonade.

  “But, of course, they did get it approved. So it was the rest of us who got screwed.”

  “THE MEETING IS CALLED TO ORDER,” Gordon said.

  Anna had joined the group and was sitting next to her mother on one of the couches, with Emma Crisp on the other side. Peter and Gina were on the other couch, their body language showing signs of tension. Gordon wondered what that was all about, but figured he’d get an answer soon enough. Karl and Alice sat in separate chairs.

  “Charlotte’s journal may take some time to discuss,” he continued, “so let’s get the other matters out of the way first. El, you want to brief the group on our meeting with Bart Sturges this morning?”

  “Well, he was charming, as always. Don’t look at me like that, Gordon. He went on at great length about how he’d left himself an option to vote for The Peninsulas back in 1971 and did it because of economic development. He went on a rant about term limits and what he’s thinking of running for next. He’s looking to move up politically, so if there was something shady about the way The Peninsulas were approved, it could give him a motive for wanting Charlotte and her manuscript out of the way.”

  “But wasn’t he in Sacramento Monday night?” asked Alice.

  “That’s the story, and if it checks out, he couldn’t have done it.”

  Karl coughed, an “excuse-me-but-can-I-have-your-attention” cough.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked. El looked at him. “It’s well known that Sturges is a pilot and has his own plane. Most of the time he comes here from Sacramento, he flies up. With no control tower at our airport, it’s possible he could have flown in and out that night and not been noticed.”

  “Good point,” said Peter. “Leave him on the list for now, but I’d like to see more than a ‘maybe’ motive before I take him seriously as a suspect.”

  “Gina,” said Gordon, “Can you tell us about your meeting with Gregory London?”

  “Not very productive,” she said. “He was out of the loop on the development; said he was mostly managing the existing property business while his dad worked on the project. Seems to have hardly known his sister, either.”

  Gordon looked around the room. Nobody had a comment.

  “All right. Remember what he said in case some of it jibes with something else we hear. The talk with Celia Strickland yielded a bit more. El?”

  “She remembers it like it was yesterday and resents it that way, too. But she had a lot of good information. What I got out of it was her saying the strategy was to get the original plan rejected, which would have put the London-Paris partnership in a financial trap. They apparently had a large balloon payment to make at the end of 1971 and couldn’t have made it or refinanced it without a project that was approved and ready to go.”

  “Along those lines,” Gordon said, “I came across something this morning. It was tucked into the back of Charlotte’s journal.” He took out Ned London’s memo on the Crocker Bank proposal and read it aloud. “I wish we knew what that was, but I’m guessing it was some risky way of refinancing the project. I’m sure the Parises could tell us about it if they wanted to, but I’m not sure I should be letting them know I have this memo. Any thoughts?”

  “Crocker Bank has never had a presence in this county,” Karl said.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Positive. I wrote a monograph for the historical society on the history of banking in Forest County. It’s a fascinating subject.”

  “No doubt,” said Peter, “but all that tells us is that they seemed to be looking outside the county for money and dealing with a bank that doesn’t exist any more. That’s going to be next to impossible to run down.”

  No one responded.

  “If anybody has any other ideas, speak up,” said Gordon. “Then I found this in the back of the journal.” He took out the Polaroid of the London and Paris families at the lake and passed it around.

  “Labor Day, 1970,” said Karl taking the first look. “Did she say anything in the journal about it?”

  “Just a throwaway sentence that they had the picnic. No details.”

  “Hold for more information,” said Peter.

  “Good idea, Peter. Is there anything else before I get to Charlotte’s journal?”

  “I’m dying to hear,” said Alice.

  “I’m afraid to,” said Gina.

  “First of all,” Gordon began, “I’m going to tell you that there’s next to nothing about The Peninsulas development. Charlotte mentioned that it was taking a toll on her father, but that seems to be the extent to which she was aware of it. Most of the journal, in fact, was taken up with a matter that was deeply personal and private, and I’m really not sure how much I should be disclosing at group level. Gina, you were her best friend. I’d value your opinion.”

  She shifted position on the couch.

  “Charlotte gave you that journal for a reason,” she finally said. “She was afraid and couldn’t have imagined that you’d end up dealing with so many people who knew her, but I feel she would have wanted you to follow through on it. And that could mean getting our help.” She took a deep breath. “I’d say tell us the bare facts and let us decide how much more we need to know for what we’re doing.”

  No one contradicted her.

 
“All right, then,” he said. “In 25 words or less, in the fall and winter of 1970 and 71, Charlotte was having a torrid affair with a married man.”

  The silence after he spoke was absolute. Gina put her face in her hands and shook her head.

  “Charlotte!” she moaned. “You dumb bunny.”

  “She’s hardly the only woman to do that, you know,” said El.

  “Who was he?” Gina asked, looking up sharply. “If the bastard’s still alive, I’ll kill him myself.”

  “I’m afraid she didn’t identify him. Or provide much in the way of clues. He was married, and she said at one point that the age difference wasn’t insurmountable, so I’m guessing he was older.”

  “Or he could have been younger than she was,” said El. “That happens sometimes.”

  Gordon had the grace to blush. “She was 35 then, so, yeah, he could have been younger.”

  “How did it start?” asked Anna

  “That’s one clue, at least. He started flirting with her at the annual Rotary Club new teacher luncheon in September, so it had to be someone who would go to that event.”

  “I hate to burst your bubble,” said Gina, “but that’s a really big deal around here. Everybody’s there except the town drunk.”

  “I’ve never been,” said Karl.

  “She meant everybody who wants to be,” said Alice helpfully. “But I agree; that hardly narrows the field.”

  “At one point, he quoted poetry to her. Sir Walter Scott.”

  “Not ‘Lochinvar,’ I hope,” said Gina. “She hated that poem.”

  “Actually, ‘The Lady of the Lake.’ Who in town is poetically inclined?”

  “Almost no one, judging from the traffic in the poetry section of the library,” said Alice. “But he knew she was an English teacher and could have come by to look something up to impress her.”

  “Not that any man would do such a thing,” murmured Peter.

  “Well, what did she call him?” said Anna. “Or did she just say ‘he?’ ”

  “Early on she called him Secret Admirer or SA,” Gordon said. “But later, she started referring to him as The Guv. British slang for governor, or lord.”

  “Hold it,” said Gina. “Some of the teachers at our school like to refer to the principal as the governor. Drove Charlotte nuts. Maybe that’s why. If we could find out who was principal at the high school then, we might have our man.”

  “Karl?” asked Gordon.

  “I’d have to look it up,” he said.

  “I can do better than that,” said Alice. “One of my neighbors is Virginia Bolton, who was the receptionist at the high school back then. She’s retired now, but still sharp as a tack. She could not only tell me who the principal was, but give me all the dirt on him.”

  “Sounds like we’re making progress,” said El.

  “But we shouldn’t put all our eggs in that basket,” Gordon said. “I’ve noticed a couple of men in town, including Judge Fletcher and Coach Iverson, who lit up a bit when they talked about Charlotte. A lot of people liked her, and one of them may have tried to take it a bit further.”

  “Point taken,” said El, “but let’s see what Alice comes up with. There’s one other thing you haven’t told us, Gordon. How did it end? Not well, I’m guessing.”

  “I don’t know if I should go into that.”

  “This is no time to be squeamish, Gordon,” said Peter. “I saw her, and she was clearly worried. Whatever she gave you may be the key to her murder. Out with it.”

  “I agree,” said Gina. “We can handle at least the critical facts.”

  “OK,” Gordon said, taking a deep breath. “Short version: She got pregnant and told him; he dumped her; and she had an abortion.”

  Again the room was utterly still. It was finally Anna who spoke.

  “That was 1970 or 71? Roe v. Wade wasn’t until 1973, so it was an illegal abortion, right?”

  “Actually, no,” said El. “California passed a very liberal abortion law in 1967. I know because I got pregnant that summer.”

  “In the Haight?” said Anna.

  El nodded. “The price of free love. I didn’t know what to do, but there was an Episcopalian minister who hung around the scene back then, and had a reputation for helping young women who had got in trouble. He connected me to a doctor who did abortions, and it was all up front and legal. I still feel bad about it, but I don’t know what else I could have done. My father would have killed me.”

  “I wish that had been true a few years earlier,” said Gina. “My best friend in high school got pregnant in 1962. It was against the law — abortion, I mean — but there was a doctor who was known to do it anyway. I borrowed my parents’ car one day and told them we were going shopping, but instead I took her to the doctor. Thank God he knew what he was doing! Another girl at our school went to a different doctor, started bleeding afterwards, and nearly died. She could never have children.”

  “Let me interject,” said Gordon. “What would have happened to Charlotte professionally if her pregnancy had become known?”

  “They’d have fired her for moral turpitude,” said Gina. “No ifs, ands or buts. She couldn’t have had that baby and taught here again. When I got here in ’81, an unmarried teacher got pregnant and the board refused to renew her contract.”

  “But that’s illegal,” said Anna.

  “Yeah, but they figured she wouldn’t sue, and they were right.”

  Anna shook her head. “It’s hard to believe it was ever like that,” she said. “There’s a woman in my law school class who broke up with her boyfriend right out of college and found out she was pregnant. It would have been almost impossible to go to law school and become a mother at the same time, so she did what she felt she had to do. She’s near the top of the class now.”

  “God,” said Alice, “This takes me back. I remember when Roe v. Wade came down, I expected my mother to be aghast. She was such a good Catholic. When the subject came up the next time I visited her, I expected a rant, and I got one. But the rant was all about how what a woman decides to do about her pregnancy is no one else’s business and she was glad the law finally caught up with that. I came away from it thinking she must have had a friend who went through that.”

  “Maybe she went through it herself,” said Karl.

  “Karl!” shrieked Gina.

  “No, it’s all right. I thought of that myself, actually. I’ll probably never know.”

  “Well, since we seem to have gotten into a discussion on the subject,” said Peter, “I’m wondering if Karl can give us a historical perspective.”

  Karl cleared his throat. “A couple of years ago, I was looking through the Forest Clarion for 1909 and came across a story. A prominent local woman — the wife of a banker, actually — got pregnant with what would have been their eighth child. She couldn’t face the prospect of having another baby, so she went to a midwife in town who had a reputation for taking care of such things. This time, though, something went wrong, and the banker’s wife died. The midwife was arrested and tried for murder, and the case went to a jury …”

  “Great,” said Gina. “They were all men, I suppose.”

  Karl nodded. “They were, and the verdict was not guilty.” He looked around the room. “They deliberated only 15 minutes.”

  “GETTING BACK ON TOPIC,” said Gordon, “Is there anything else for today, and if not, what do we have to try to find out before tomorrow’s meeting?”

  “I think it’s really important to find out who The Guv was,” said Gina. “Charlotte made a big point of getting the journal to Gordon in case anything happened to her. If the journal’s almost all about her affair, the identity of her lover is critical.”

  “I agree,” said Gordon, “and suggestions welcomed. The problem is that all we know about him is her love name for him, that he was younger or older than Charlotte, and that he had the wherewithal to look up poetry to impress her. That could fit any man who was halfway intelligent.”


  “Maybe this is a wild goose chase,” said Alice, “but for as long as I’ve been here, there have been rumors that Senator Sturges has an eye for the ladies.”

  “They’re not just rumors,” said El. “I know for a fact he’s capable of propositioning a woman who isn’t his wife.”

  Gordon shot her a quizzical glance, which she caught.

  “Hey,” she said. “It was only once and it was more than ten years ago. Can we move on, please?”

  “If he fits that part of the profile,” said Peter, “maybe we should take a closer look. How old is he?”

  “Fifty-five,” said Alice. “Six years younger than Charlotte. I looked up his biography when I knew we’d be talking to him.”

  “And back then he was a young politician on the make,” said Peter. “Maybe people joked he’d be governor some day, and that’s where the endearment came from.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” Gordon said. “But meeting him today, it’s hard for me to see. He’s kind of full of himself, and that seems to me to be something she wouldn’t like in a man.”

  “She wouldn’t,” Gina said, “but maybe he wasn’t so full of himself then. It’s possible.”

  “Everything’s possible,” Gordon said with exasperation. “That’s the trouble with that question and this whole case. All speculation and no fact.”

  “But speculations often lead to facts,” Karl said. “I’m just a history drone, but even I can see that the ideas are giving us something to look into. For instance, now that we’re taking a look at Sturges, I’m thinking that maybe tomorrow I can go down to the airport and see what I can find out about his plane.”

  “Good idea, Karl,” said Gordon. “No harm in trying.”

  “Something else,” said Anna. “Isn’t there a third Paris son, and didn’t he move out of the area?”

  “Richard Paris,” said Gina. “I think he lives in San Francisco.

  “I wonder if there was more to his leaving town than having the wrong vowel in his first name?” Peter said. “Maybe Gordon could call him up and ask a few questions in connection with the London family history. If we can find him, that is.”