M is for MALICE

by Sue Grafton

  I turned off the engine. Guy left his backpack on the front seat and the two of us got out. We slammed the car doors in two quick, overlapping reports, like guns going off. At the last moment, I opened my door again and tossed my handbag in the back before I locked the car. As we crossed the courtyard, Myrna opened the front door and came out on the porch. She was wearing a semblance of uniform; a shapeless white polyester skirt with a matching over blouse, some vague cross between nursiness and household help.

  I said, “Hi, Myrna. How are you? I didn’t think anyone was here. This is Guy. I’m sorry. I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning your last name.”

  “Sweetzer,” she said.

  Guy extended his hand, which flustered her to some extent. She allowed him one of those handshakes without cartilage or bone. His good looks probably had the same effect on her that they had on me. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” she replied by rote. “The family’s back around five. You’re to have the run of the house. I imagine you remember where your room is if you want to take your things on up.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that in a bit. I thought I’d show her the grounds first if that’s okay with you.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “The front door will be open if you want to come in that way. Dinner’s at seven.” She turned to me. “Will you be staying on as well?”

  “I appreciate the invitation, but I don’t think I should. The family needs time to get reacquainted. Maybe another time,” I said. “I do have a question. Guy was asking about his father and it just occurred to me that you might know as much as anyone else. Weren’t you his nurse?”

  “One of them,” she said. “I was his primary caregiver the last eight months. I stayed on as housekeeper at your brothers’ request,” she said, looking at Guy. Her delivery was staunch, as if we’d challenged her right to remain on the premises. From what I’d seen of her, she tended to be humorless, but with Guy she’d now added a grace note of resentment, reflecting the family’s general attitude.

  Guy’s smile was sweet. “I’d like to talk to you about my dad sometime.”

  “Yes sir. He was a good man and I was fond of him.”

  There was an awkward moment, none of us knowing how to terminate the conversation. Myrna was the one who finally managed, saying, “Well, now. I’ll let you go on about your business. I’ll be in the kitchen if you should need anything. The cook’s name is Enid, if you can’t find me.”

  “I remember Enid,” he said. “Thanks.”

  As soon as the door closed behind her, Guy touched my elbow and steered me off to the right. We crossed the courtyard together, heat drifting up from the sun baked cobblestones. “Thanks for staying,” he said.

  “You’re full of thanks,” I remarked.

  “I am. I feel blessed. I never expected to see the house again. Come on. We’ll go this way.”

  We cut around the south side of the house, moving from hot, patchy sunlight into shade. To me, it felt like another sudden shift in seasons. In the space of fifty feet, we’d left summer behind. In the gloom of heavy shadow, the drop in air temperature was distinct and unwelcome, as if the months were rolling backward into winter again. Vestiges of the hot dry winds blew down the mountainside behind us, tossing restlessly across the treetops above our heads. We rambled beneath a canopy of shaggy-smelling juniper and pine. A carpet of fallen needles dampened our footsteps to a silence.

  Near the house, I could see evidence of the gardeners-raked paths, the trimmed shape of bushes, a profusion of ferns ringed with small perfect stones but the larger portion of the property was close to wilderness. Many of the plants had been allowed to grow unchecked. A violet-colored lantana tumbled along the terrace wall. A salmon-pink bougainvillea climbed across a tangled stretch of brush. To our right, a solid wash of nasturtiums blanketed the banks of an empty creek bed. In the areas of bright sun, where the dry breezes riffled across the blossoms, several scents arose and mingled in an earthy cologne.

  Guy seemed to scrutinize every square foot we traversed. “Everything looks so much bigger. I remember when some of these trees were just planted. Saplings were this tall and now look at them.”

  “Your memories sound happy. That surprises me somehow.”

  “This was a great spot to grow up. Mom and Dad bought the place when I was three years old. Donovan was five and the two of us thought we’d died and gone to heaven. It was like one great big playground. We could go anywhere we wanted and no one ever had to worry. We made forts and tree houses. We had sword fights with sticks. We played cowboys and Indians and went on jungle expeditions in the wilds of the sticker bushes. When Bennet was a little guy, we used to tie him to a stake and he’d wail like a banshee. We’d tell him we were going to burn him if he didn’t shut up. He was younger than us and he was fair game.”

  “Nice.”

  “Boy-type fun,” he said. “I guess girls don’t do that.”

  “How could your parents afford a place like this? I thought your father made his money later, in the years since you left.”

  “Mom had some money from a trust fund. The down payment was hers. Actually, it wasn’t that much money even for the time. The house was a white elephant. It was on the market for nearly ten years and it was empty all that time. The story we heard was that the previous owner had been murdered. It’s not like the house was haunted, but it did seem tainted. Nobody could make a deal work. We were told it fell out of escrow five or six times before my parents came along and bought it. It was big and neglected. The wiring was bad and the plumbing was shot. Daylight was showing through big holes in the roof. Tree rats ran everywhere and there was a family of raccoons living in the attic. It took ‘em years to pull it all together. In the meantime, Dad’s plan was to buy adjacent properties if they came up for sale.”

  “What is it now, fifteen acres?”

  “Is that right? The original parcel was six. There, probably isn’t a lot more land available in this area.”

  “Is this city land or county?”

  “We’re right at the upper edges of the city limits. Lot of what you’re looking at up there is part of the Los Padres National Forest.” The term forest was a misnomer. The arching mountain range above us was overgrown with nettle, ceanothus, pyracantha, and coastal sage scrub, the soil too poor to support many trees. In the higher elevations, a few pines might remain if the wildfires hadn’t reached them.

  We passed the tennis court, its surface cracked and weedy along the edges. A tennis racket had been tossed to one side, exposed to the elements long enough to warp, its nylon strings sprung. Beyond the tennis court, there was a glass-enclosed structure I hadn’t seen from the drive. The lines of the building were low and straight, with a red-tile roof that had altered with time until its color was the burnt brown of old bricks.

  “What’s that?”

  “The pool house. We have an indoor pool. Want to see it?”

  “Might as well,” I said. I trailed after him as he approached a covered flagstone patio. He crossed to the building’s darkened windows and peered in. He moved to the door and tried the knob. The door was unlocked, but the frame was jammed and required a substantial push before it opened with the kind of scrape that set my teeth on edge.

  “You really want to do this?” I asked.

  “Hey, it’s part of the tour.”

  To me, it felt like breaking and entering, a sport I prefer to get paid for. The sense of trespass was unmistakable, nearly sexual in tone, despite the fact that we’d been given permission to roam. We entered an anteroom that was used to store an assortment of play equipment: badminton rackets, golf clubs, baseball bats, a rack lined with a full set of croquet mallets and balls, Styrofoam kickboards for the pool, and a line of fiberglass surfboards that looked as if they’d been propped against the wall for years. The gardener was currently keeping his leaf blower and a riding mower in the space to one side. While I didn’t see any spiders, the place had a spider
y atmosphere. I wanted to brush my clothes hurriedly in case something had dropped down and landed on me unseen.

  The pool was half-filled and something about the water looked really nasty. The decking around the pool was paved with a gritty-looking gray slate, not the sort of surface you’d want to feel under your bare feet. At one end of the room was an alcove furnished in rattan, though the cushions were missing from the sofa and matching chairs. The air was gloomy and I could hear the sound of dripping water. Any hint of chlorine had evaporated long ago and several unclassified life-forms had begun to ferment in the depths.

  “Looks like it’s time to fire the pool guy,” I remarked.

  “The gardener probably does the pool when he remembers,” Guy said. “When we were kids this was great.”

  “What’d you and Donovan do to Bennet down here? Drown him? Hang him off the diving board? I can just imagine the fun you must have had.”

  Guy smiled, his thoughts somewhere else. “I broke up with a girl once down here. That’s what sticks in my mind. Place was like a country club. Swimming, tennis, softball, croquet. We’d invite dates over for a swim and then we’d end up making out like crazy. Girl in a bathing suit isn’t that hard to seduce. Jack was the all-time champ. He was randy as a rabbit and he’d go after anyone.”

  “Why’d you break up with her?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Some rare moment of virtue and self-sacrifice. I liked her too much. I was a bad boy back then and she was too special to screw around with like the other ones. Or maybe odd’s the better word. A little nutsy, too needy. I knew she was fragile and I didn’t want to take the chance. I preferred the wild ones. No responsibility, no regrets, no holds barred.”

  “Were your parents aware of what was going on down here?”

  “Who knows? I’m not sure. They were proponents of the ‘boys will be boys’ school of moral instruction. Any girl who gave in to us deserved what she got. They never said so explicitly, but that’s the attitude. My mother was more interested in being everybody’s pal. Set limits on a kid and you might have to take a stand at some point. She was into unconditional love, which to her meant the absence of prohibitions of any kind. It was easier to be permissive, you know what I mean? This was all part of the sixties’ feel-good bullshit. Looking back, I can see how much she must have been affected by her illness. She didn’t want to be the stern, disapproving parent. She must have known her days were numbered, even though she survived a lot longer than most. In those days, they did chemo and radiation, but it was all so crudely calibrated they probably killed more people than they cured. They just didn’t have the technology or the sophisticated choice of treatments. It’s different today where you got a real shot at survival. For her, the last couple of years were pure hell.”

  “It must have been hard on you.”

  “Pure agony,” he said. “I was the child most identified with her. Don’t ask me why, but Donovan and Bennet and Jack were linked to Dad while I was my mother’s favorite. It drove me wild to see her fail. She was faltering and in pain, going downhill on what I knew would be her final journey.”

  “Were you with her when she died?”

  “Yes. I was. The rest of ‘em were gone. I forget now where they were. I sat in her room with her for hours that day. Most of the time she slept. She was so doped up on morphine, she could hardly stay awake. I was exhausted myself and laid my head on the bed. At one point, she reached out and put her hand on my neck. I touched her fingers and she was gone, just like that. So quiet. I didn’t move for an hour.

  “I just sat by the bed, leaning forward, with my head turned away from her and my face buried in the sheets. I thought maybe if I didn’t look, she might come back again, like she was hovering someplace close and might return to her body as long as no one noticed she’d left. I didn’t want to break faith.”

  “What happened to the girl you broke up with?”

  “Patty? I have no idea. I wrote to her once, but never heard back. I’ve thought of her often, but who knows where she is now or what’s happened to her. It might be the best thing I ever did, especially back then. What a bastard I was. I have a hard time connecting. It’s like somebody else was doing it.”

  “But you’re a good person now.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think of, myself as good, but sometimes I think I come close to being real.”

  We left the pool house behind, moving temporarily onto the sunny stretch of lawn where I’d watched Jack hit golf balls. We were on the terrace below the house, shadows slanting toward us as we crossed the grass.

  “How do you feel? You seem relaxed,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine once they get here. You know how it is. Your fantasies are always stranger than reality.”

  “What do you picture?”

  He smiled briefly. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I hope you get what you need.”

  “Me, too, but in the long run, what difference does it make? You can’t hide from God and that’s the point,” he said. “For a long time, I was walkin’ down the wrong road, but now I’ve turned myself around and I’m goin’ back the other way. At some point, I’ll meet up with my past and make peace.”

  We had, by then, reached the front of the house again. “I better scoot,” I said. “Let me know how it goes.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “No doubt, but I’ll be curious.”

  As I got into my car and turned the key in the ignition, I watched him head toward the front door with his backpack. I waved as I passed and then watched him in my rearview mirror as I eased down the drive. I rounded the curve and he was gone from view. It’s painful to think of this in retrospect. Guy Malek was doomed and I delivered him into the hands of the enemy. As I pulled through the gates, I could see a car approach. Bennet was driving. My smile was polite and I waved at him. He stared at me briefly and then glanced away.

  Chapter 11

  *

  At ten o’clock Monday morning I received a call that should have served as a warning. Looking back, I can see that from that moment on, troubles began to accumulate at an unsettling rate. I’d gotten a late start and I was just closing the front gate behind me when I heard the muffled tone of the telephone ringing in my apartment. I did a quick reverse, trotting down the walkway and around the corner. I unlocked the front door and flung it open in haste, tossing my jacket and bag aside. I snatched up the receiver on the fourth ring, half expecting a wrong number or a market survey now that I’d made the effort. “Hello?”

  “Kinsey. This is Donovan.”

  “Well, hi. How are you? Whew! Excuse the heavy breathing. I was already out the door and had to run for the phone.”

  Apparently, he wasn’t in the mood for cheery chitchat. He got straight to the point. “Did you contact the press?”

  It was not a subject I expected the man to broach at this hour or any other. I could feel a fuzzy question mark forming over my head while I pondered what he could possibly be talking about. “Of course not. About what?”

  “We got a call from the Dispatch about an hour ago. Somebody tipped off a reporter about Guy’s return.”

  “Really? That’s odd. What’s the point?” I knew the Santa Teresa Dispatch occasionally struggled to find noteworthy items for the Local section, but Guy’s homecoming hardly seemed like a big-time news event. Aside from the family, who’d give a shit?

  “They’re playing it for human interest. Rags to riches. You know the tack, I’m sure. A lowly maintenance worker in Marcella, California, suddenly finds out he’s a millionaire and comes home to collect. It’s better than the lottery given Guy’s personal history, as you well know.”

  “What do you mean, as I well know? I never said a word to the press. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Who else knew about it? No one in the family would leak a story like that. This is a sensitive issue. The last thing we need is publicity. Here we are trying to hammer out some kind of understanding
between us and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the first call came through.”

  “I don’t follow. Who’s been calling?”

  “Who hasn’t?” he said, exasperated. “The local paper for starters and then the L.A. Times. I guess one of the radio stations got wind of it. It’ll go out on the wire services next thing you know and we’ll have six friggin’ camera crews camped in the driveway.”

  “Donovan, I swear. If there was a leak, it didn’t come from me.”

  “Well, someone spilled the beans and you’re the only one who stands to benefit.”

  “Me? That makes no sense. How would I benefit from a story about Guy?”

  “The reporter who called mentioned you by name. He knew you’d been hired and he was interested in how you’d gone about finding Guy after all these years. He as good as told me he intended to play that angle: ‘Local PI locates heir missing eighteen years.’ It’s better than an advertisement for all the work you’ll get.”

  “Donovan, stop it. That’s ridiculous. I’d never blab client business under any circumstance. I don’t need more work. I have plenty.” This was not entirely true, but he didn’t need to know that. The bottom line was, I’d never give client information to the media. I had a reputation to protect. Aside from ethical considerations, this was not a profession where you wanted to be recognized. Most working investigators keep a very low profile. Anonymity is always preferable, especially when you’re inclined, as I am, to use the occasional ruse. If you’re posing as a meter reader or a florist delivery person, you don’t want the public to be aware of your true identity. “I mean, think about it, Donovan. If I’d actually given him the story, why would he be quizzing you about my methods? He’d know that already so why would he ask you?”

  “Well, you might have a point there, unless he was looking for confirmation.”

  “Oh, knock it off. You’re really stretching for that one.”

  “I just think it’s damn suspicious that you got a plug.”

  “Who’s the reporter? Did you ask where he got his information?”