by Jack Lynch
“Well it’s kind of you to ask, but I really don’t care for anything right now. I seldom drink this early in the day, even when I’m not working.”
“Seldom. When?”
“What?”
She uncurled a finger and pointed to the sofa behind me. “Go and sit down again. I’ll join you in a minute. After I’ve had a chance to size you up. I said when. You said you seldom drink this early in the day. When do you drink this early in the day?”
“Sometimes when I’m off on vacation somewhere. Or maybe at a brunch, with friends. Sometimes on a Sunday I’ll have a Bloody Mary or two while I’m watching football on television.”
“Football,” she said in a way that implied clear disapproval. Then she turned her head and shouted over her shoulder. “Rhoda!”
Rhoda shouted back to her from the rear of the house.
“Bloody Marys, a pair of them,” she called. She turned back to me. “Today will be one of the days you drink this early in the day.”
I shrugged. “Yes, ma’am.”
“The reason is, I couldn’t possibly carry on any sort of conversation with a complete stranger from San Francisco via Seattle without a little giddyup out of the bottle under my belt. And if I sat around doing that without company joining in, I might get the reputation that I’m a solitary daytime drinker. And I have enough reputations to bear up under as it is without acquiring another.”
I leaned back into the sofa. She stared at me some more.
“Married?”
I was beginning to catch on to her ways. “No, Miss Beyerly, I’m not married. Was one time in the past.”
“When?”
“About a dozen years ago.”
“I’ve never been married,” she told me, “and I don’t expect I ever will be, now. I think if you have a strong mind and if you don’t get all caught up during that surge of sexual excitement when you’re young, you’re apt to not get married.”
“Living alone has its advantages,” I agreed. “Once you get used to it.”
“Right on.”
She stepped back out of the doorway as the Indian woman named Rhoda came in bearing a tray that had not two but four generous-size Bloody Marys on it. She placed the tray on a coffee table in front of the sofa, nodded to me and then to the Beyerly woman and left the room.
Miss Beyerly came over to take one of the drinks off the table and carried it over to one of the Danish modern chairs. She sat down and took a good, long swallow of the drink.
“Drink up,” she told me.
I drank. It was a good drink. It wasn’t the first time the Indian woman had been asked to pour a Bloody Mary or four.
“President,” she said.
“Precedent?”
“Our president in the nation’s capital. What do you think of him?”
“I’m not all that impressed by him. But maybe I’m too hard to please. I haven’t been overly impressed by a lot of people we’ve sent to the White House. What do you think of him?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think of him. Can’t do anything about it anyway.” She had two more swallows of the Bloody Mary. That drained the glass, except for the ice. She came across the room to get another. When she was settled down back in the chair again, she winked at me.
“I’ve got a secret.”
I winked back. “I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of secrets, Miss Beyerly. Most of the women I know seem to.”
“You can call me Barbara.”
“Thank you. Do you want me to ask you what your secret is, Barbara?”
“Not just now. Later, maybe. Out in the loft.”
I shifted my position on the sofa. “The loft?”
“Yes. I’ll show it to you later if things go right between the two of us.”
“Well, I want you to feel comfortable with me, Miss Beyerly, or Barbara, rather. But I was hoping I’d get a chance to ask a few questions of my own. I’m really here to try to help a friend out of a lot of trouble he seems to have gotten himself into.”
“Yes, I know. Dolph told me. Benny Bartlett. We can get to him a little bit later. When was the last time you slept with a woman?”
“Last night.”
“I knew it. You look a little gaunt around the eyes. Who was she, some prostitute you picked up in Seattle?”
“No, as a matter of fact it was my ex-wife.”
She nearly fell out of the Danish modern chair. She choked on her drink and some of the vodka and tomato juice blew out of one corner of her plain old mouth and stained the collar of the white silk blouse she wore under the red sweater.
“That’s rich,” she told me when she’d gotten herself under control again. “Is that the truth?”
“It really happened.”
“How? How did it come about?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“But you will, because you want some information from me. And I think I know what information you need. Because I have an active mind, and I think I solved your mystery. I remember back when your friend was around planning to write a story about us all. And when Dolph told me what you wanted to talk about, I sat down upstairs and thought about it. That’s what I was doing while you were waiting for me down here. And I think I know what you need to know. I think I might know who’s causing your friend all his trouble. But I lead a pretty solitary life, Mr. Bragg. What’s your first name again?”
“Pete.”
“Yes, Pete. And I think it’s only fair for people to exchange things. You want information I can give you, and in turn I’d like a little entertainment. And I think the story of how you and your ex-wife ended up in bed again, along with all the gory details, would be very entertaining indeed. And maybe after that I’ll just go on out to the kitchen and get us a bottle of bourbon and we can take it on up to the loft, where I like to just kick back and get a little drunk and look out at the horses. It’s in a barn out back. Been my favorite spot around here since I was a little girl. And that’s where I’ll tell you about my family. Tell you the things I think you want to know. But first you have to tell me about how you and your ex came to crawl into bed together. And about what all you did there.”
My hunch had been right. She was nuts. But very serious nuts. So I took a swig of the Bloody Mary and told her tales about Lorna.
FIFTEEN
She lapped it up like a puppy with a bowl full of warm milk, this woman in her early thirties who ran a fifty-acre horse ranch, or at least was able to hire others to run it for her. A little fire came into her eyes when I described the dancing around on the carpet Lorna and I had done the evening before, my hands beneath the sweater, discovering that my ex-wife wasn’t wearing a bra and what that led to. I let her anticipate some of it; tried to take her breath away, as near as I could. I figure if you’re going to go out onstage you ought to at least be able to keep up with the animal acts. I thought she’d swoon when I quoted the Robert Louis Stevenson lines.
I probably made up as much as I remembered. I hadn’t, the night before, known that questions were going to be asked later. And then I spun my little fairy tale a trifle too far. I told her when it was all over, “we went downstairs and had a shower then went on back up and went to sleep.”
“Hogwash.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said hogwash. You took a shower together?”
“That’s right. She has a large shower stall. Sort of a double.”
“And you’re trying to tell me you didn’t soap each other up and start to get excited all over again?”
We hadn’t actually taken a shower together. Why, during my feeble-minded accounting, had I said we did? Not enough sleep the night before, I guess.
“Come on,” she said. “Tell me. All of it.”
And so I spun it out some more, telling her the things I thought she wanted to hear. It was hard. I pretended I was the court jester and if I didn’t put on a good show I’d lose my head. I didn’t feel terribly good about what I was doing, for a number of re
asons. And I finally came to a stuttering stop with my hands locked in front of me, staring at the carpet. I just couldn’t think of anything more to tell her.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Are you ashamed of what you did?”
“No, I’m not ashamed of what I did. Not what I did last night, at least.”
“What then?”
“I am a little ashamed of myself for letting somebody make me tell her about it. It’s not fair to Lorna, at the very least.”
“Pish,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ve been made to feel shame my entire life. And now you know what it’s like, Bragg.” She stood looking out the windows, one hand alongside her face. “Well, maybe now I can tell you about my family. Wait here while I get a bottle.”
I heaved a sigh and finished the last of my own Bloody Marys. I was beginning to think I might not make it back to Seattle that afternoon.
True to her word, she came back from the kitchen with a full bottle of bourbon and a couple of glasses and a canister of ice cubes. She handed me the ice and the glasses and led me around back to a barn. I didn’t know just what she had in mind, but I figured it wouldn’t be any tougher than the act it followed.
A wooden stairway led up to the loft, where she had herself a comfortable perch. There was loose fresh straw on the floor and some bales to lean up against and a couple of wooden doors that opened inward, giving a nice view of horses grazing across distant hills.
I politely declined the whiskey when she started pouring, but she ignored me and put some cubes in a glass and poured generously.
“Drink,” she told me, handing over the glass.
So I drank. And then she began telling me about her family and what was going on around the time Benny had come up to interview them for the People magazine story.
“We all were leading a pretty smug and comfortable life back then,” she told me. “Papa had retired from active participation in the bank down in Everett, and he and Mama had just gotten back from an extensive tour of Europe. I mean extensive. Eight months, they were gone. Papa was making plans to head on down to Kentucky to see about getting some special breeding stock for his string of ponies. Mama was entertaining her sister Flo, down visiting from Victoria, and I was spending my time between working the horses in shows and such and carrying on halfhearted liaisons with a couple of different fellows in town. I was about coming to the conclusion I liked the horses far better than I liked the fellows, mostly because I had the feeling I could trust the horses but I never was sure about the fellows. I happen to realize that I am a plain-looking woman and that when a fellow looks at me he isn’t looking at Barbara Beyerly, the girl with a face that looks like squash, but rather is looking at the Beyerly Bar-4 Horse Ranch and Breeding Farm. Or at what they knew would be at least a one-third interest of it down the road.”
She put down her glass and thumped a hay bale beside her. “You know, Bragg, that’s something I never worked out until after Mama moved up to live with Aunt Flo, after the tragedy and then Papa dying and all. My mama didn’t let me forget for a single day that I wasn’t what you’d call pretty. She didn’t do it in a vicious way, but my God, how would you like to have somebody telling you all the time, ‘Well now, Barbara, you just can’t let your looks get you down. Looks aren’t everything, honey. You’ve got a good brain and a winning personality, and that’s what’s going to count in the long run.’
“Ye gods,” she continued, “I should have strangled that woman in her sleep. That’s just a terrible thing to keep telling a little kid.”
She took a swallow of the bourbon. I had some of my own.
“But then my sister, Beverly, that fall,” she said, leaning back. “Beverly was in love. God, she just glowed like a sapphire.” She thought about it for a moment, a little smile on her mouth. “Did I show you a picture of her? No I didn’t, did I?”
She sat up and pulled a man’s wallet from her hip pocket and flipped it open. She showed me a photo of a girl in her graduation cap and gown. The resemblance to her sister was there; in fact I couldn’t see her as looking much prettier than the girl beside me.
“Roger Hampton was his name. He was a cousin of one of the girls Beverly knew down at Reed College in Portland. She met him down there, then he came up here that summer looking for some part-time work, and I must say he was very ingratiating. Handsome. A good horseman, polo player. Almost professional-caliber tennis player. Smooth dancer, smooth talker. And he and Bev seemed to hit it off big. I don’t know, maybe they’d been seeing some of each other before down in Portland. That summer they were together nearly every spare moment they had. I’d never seen Bev so happy, and Roger seemed just as daffy about her.”
She made a little snort. “They were having sex together. I know because I accidentally rode up on them down in the meadow one afternoon when they were in the middle of things. It didn’t embarrass them at all. They just waved and called hello and I clip-clopped on past.
“Then,” she continued, a little more quietly, “the two of them became secretive. Bev had taken to giving him things. Roger never seemed to have very much money of his own. Bev gave him her Porsche one afternoon. It was two years old and Bev said she was tired of it. She just brought out the title and registration and signed it over to him. Papa wasn’t exactly pleased about that, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. She was of age and had what you could call a pretty handsome bank account in her own right. That was from Mama’s side of the family. And now maybe you can see where this is all leading.” She stopped talking and sipped at her drink. She was right. I was beginning to see where it was leading.
“Roger had been away for a few days. Bev wouldn’t tell us where he’d gone. That was a part of the secrecy that had been building between them. And then along about the middle of the week, Beverly got a letter from Roger. It was a—what do you call the counterpart of a Dear John letter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s what it was. Roger had written to tell her he’d found somebody else and he wouldn’t be coming back to the ranch here. Bev never showed that letter to any of us, so we don’t really know what all he might have said. But it left my sister Bev in a state of paralysis.
“For four days it was like having a vacant-eyed zombie for a sister. Then on Saturday, while I was out riding, she went into my bedroom and put a little diamond brooch on my dresser. It was something I’d admired for as long as she’d had it. There wasn’t any note or anything, just the brooch. And then she drove into town, to the yacht harbor where we kept a little twenty-two-foot runabout berthed in a boathouse. She hung herself that afternoon, from a rafter in the boathouse. They didn’t find her body for two days.”
She drank some of her bourbon.
“Later, we found out from the bank in town where my sister had her accounts that Bev had given a cashier’s check for twenty thousand dollars to Roger just before he left town for the last time. The people at the bank said Bev told them only that it was for a business venture she and Roger were going into.”
Barbara Beyerly reached over to where she’d put the bottle of bourbon and refilled her glass. She looked across at me. I finished what was left in it and held it out to her. She poured and recapped the bottle.
“That was when the family began to come unglued, you might say. Papa hired somebody like you to try to find Roger—to exact some sort of retribution—but nothing came of it. Roger’s cousin didn’t know where he was. It turned out Roger had sold the Porsche in Seattle. The cashier’s check was cashed there as well, a couple of days before Bev got the letter. Papa’s health began to fail then and just continued to plummet until he died, fourteen months later. Mama became a reclusive neurotic and began imagining things. Her sister Flo was the only one who seemed able to calm her. Flo finally talked Mama into moving in with her. And I took up the bottle and I haven’t let go since,” she concluded lamely.
It was several moments before she spoke again. “It turns out Roger apparently h
as made a living at this sort of thing. The detective Papa hired found out he’d gotten a lot of money out of a girl down in Santa Barbara before he came up here.”
She was silent another moment before she glanced across at me. “The end.”
“You mean that’s it?”
“That’s it. One family blown away. Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s enough suffering, God knows, for all of you to have to put up with. But what I meant is, I don’t see the connection to my friend Benny in this.”
“Your friend Benny took pictures of us all that summer. The family and the ranch and some of the horses and Roger Hampton. When Roger learned about that, what they were for, he got very upset. He wanted Beverly to get them back, the ones of him, at least. Bev told me later it was the only thing they ever argued about.”
“Did your sister ever take photos of Roger? Do you have any now?”
“Bev had some. She burned them between the time she got his letter and went down to the boathouse.”
I mulled it over. It made a kind of sense, the way things had been going. At least it was a possibility that Roger was behind the threats to Benny.
“The photos Benny took up here have been stolen from his files,” I told her, “along with the information he’d been gathering. But if Roger Hampton is the one doing all this, why would he have waited until now to do it?”
“Maybe he’s been away, duping women in other parts of the country, been moving around. Maybe just now he’s back around here and onto a good thing in Seattle. There must be some gullible women in Seattle, the same as anywhere else. Maybe Roger’s going to be showing up in the society pages. Maybe your friend could ruin the next scheme he’s planning.”
“But Benny didn’t know anything about all this. He still doesn’t. All he knows is that your sister died. That was enough to kill the story. He didn’t know that your sister hung herself or the rest of it.”