Keegan looked around at the available seating. He chose a table in the corner, as far away from the Scout troupe as it was possible to be. He sat down facing the door. A red jar-candle flickered on the plastic tablecloth, next to a tin shaker of parmesan.
The girl from behind the counter came by, and Keegan ordered a glass of sauterne for Helen. He’d seen a bottle of it on her kitchen counter and hoped it might be her favorite—though maybe she only drank wine at home, to get through grading essays.
Five minutes later, the glass of wine stood warming on the other side of the table, the sides glistening with condensation. Keegan glanced at his watch. It was still ten minutes before eight. He wanted to order himself a beer, but he didn’t know how that would look. A glass of wine waiting for Helen would come across as thoughtful, he hoped. A big glass of Schlitz in front of him might just look uncouth. The truth was, fifteen minutes was time enough to do a lot of overthinking. Why had Helen chosen this place for their first real date? Was it some kind of statement? Was she telling him they’d just be friends? Did he look like a fool, wearing a tie in a place that had Little League team photos on the wall?
He shouldn’t have ordered the wine, he decided. It might come across as presumptuous, overtly masculine. He looked around for the serving girl, to ask her to take it away—but she was over in the kitchen doorway now, chatting with one of the cooks.
The problem with trying to outthink an English teacher, Keegan knew, was that he was guaranteed to miss the point—at least that’s what his grades at USC had always suggested. Maybe that’s why he’d gone into crime reporting after college. In the world of murder and mayhem, people ended up guilty or not; there was little necessity for subtleties or shades of meaning.
When Keegan looked up again, Helen was coming in through the doorway. She looked around for him as the door swung shut behind her. She wore a pair of gray slacks and a blue blouse with a darker-blue cardigan. As an outfit, it struck Keegan as neat, but not showy. She had dressed well but wasn’t trying to impress. A smile lit her face when she saw him sitting there.
That smile relaxed Keegan a little. He stood and watched her make her way through the mostly empty tables. She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.
“Cheap, good food,” Helen said, draping the strap of her purse over the post of her chair. It was as if she knew exactly what Keegan had been wondering—a Madame Lena parlor trick. “It’s simple, and it’s relaxed,” she went on. “And I’m not going to run into any of my students’ families and get the rumor mill started.”
Keegan nodded. It was a good point: this was definitely not a place the Saint Matthew’s crowd would ever deign to enter.
“What’s this?” Helen asked, as if she’d just now noticed the glass of wine.
“Sauterne?” Keegan said. It came out sounding like a question. “I saw some in your kitchen,” he said. “Maybe it was a stupid idea.”
She shook her head at him. “Not stupid,” she said. She raised the glass to her lips and took a sip.
Helen wasn’t wearing lipstick, Keegan noticed—and he scolded himself for wondering what that might mean. “Apparently, they don’t have menus,” Keegan said, so he would have something to say.
Helen smiled. “I know,” she said. “I come here a lot after work for takeout. Some nights I just don’t want to cook for one.”
Keegan nodded. He squinted over his shoulder at the chalkboard behind the counter and then looked back at Helen. “What do you recommend?”
Helen shook her head, still smiling. “I recommend you read the chalkboard and draw your own conclusions,” she said. “I’m off work tonight. I don’t want any responsibilities.”
When the girl in the denim apron came by, Keegan ordered the chicken with mushrooms because he thought he could probably manage that without making a mess of his good Botany tie. Helen ordered some kind of ravioli. She’d taken another sip of wine while Keegan talked to the server, so he felt safe in ordering a beer.
“So, did you get all your grading done?” Keegan said, when the waitress was out of earshot.
Helen shook her head with exaggerated sorrow. “It never ends,” she told him. “I will be adding commas, deleting words, and jotting pithy marginalia every night for the foreseeable future.” She adjusted the silverware in front of her. “So, how was your trip to Catalina?”
Keegan looked across the table at her. He liked the openness of her expression and the bright good humor in her eyes. “Don’t tell Mrs. Dodd,” he said, “but I think I might have seen a ghost.” Until that moment, he hadn’t planned on telling the story to anyone—but for some reason, it felt like something he could offer Helen tonight, a small token gift to atone for past sins.
Helen raised her eyebrows and tilted her head closer. “Are we speaking metaphorically?”
It was, of course, a very English-teacher question, and it made Keegan smile. He shook his head. “Neither metaphor nor simile nor symbol,” he said. “I thought I saw an actual, literal ghost. It threw me for the proverbial loop.”
“Well, this is a story I want to hear,” Helen said. She took another sip of wine and then leaned in and folded her hands atop the checkered tablecloth.
“It was Halloween night, and it was very foggy,” Keegan said, and, in the interest of full disclosure, “I might have had a few whiskeys.”
Helen was nodding and smiling, which Keegan took to be a good sign.
“And I saw the face of a dead woman through a window.”
“How do you know it was a dead woman?”
“It was someone I used to know,” he said.
Helen sat back in her chair and looked at him, suddenly more serious. “Not the young woman who…” She didn’t finish the sentence, but, after their late-night talk at her house, she didn’t need to. She was talking about Eve.
Keegan shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. It was the old lady who hired me a few weeks ago.”
“The one who drowned?” Keegan was a little surprised she’d heard about Ida Fletcher, and she seemed to read that fact on his face. “We do sometimes talk about things other than you,” she said teasingly.
“Yes, the woman who drowned,” Keegan said. “I was out on the street, and I thought I saw her face through the window of her house.”
“And what makes you think you didn’t?” she said. “See a ghost, I mean.”
“Don’t tell me a woman with a masters from Stanford believes such things.”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth…’” she said, but she had a playful look on her face.
“Shakespeare notwithstanding,” Keegan said, “why would the old lady be haunting me? I only met her a couple of times.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Helen said. She seemed to be enjoying herself. “In novels, isn’t it always some kind of unfinished earthly business? Exposing the truth? Avenging someone’s death? You, sir, need to think of what she wants from you. There is some kind of unfinished business to be taken care of.”
Maybe it’s time to move on, the Lieutenant had told him on the phone. But maybe Keegan wasn’t built that way. There was unfinished business in this whole ungodly mess, and right now, he was the only thing standing between Danny Church and the blood money he was about to inherit.
He was about to say as much, but the server arrived at the table with a bottle of Schlitz and an empty glass. “And how’s the wine?” he said instead, while he poured the beer.
THEY STAYED AT the table until they were the last ones in the place, and then they paid, and Keegan walked her out to her car.
“Can I see you again next weekend?” he asked her.
She unlocked the driver’s side door. “That could easily be arranged,” she said. She pulled the door open and sat down in the seat.
“What would you like to do?” Keegan asked through the open door.
“Mrs. Dodd said that I should ask to see your place,” she said. “Apparently, it has quite a view.” She pu
lled the door closed and rolled down the window. “She also said you shouldn’t get any ideas if I asked to come over.”
Keegan nodded and held up one hand in a Boy Scout pledge. “I promise I will get no ideas.”
ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, Mrs. Dodd put the phone call through to Keegan’s inner office. It was Roland Dion on the line.
“We filed the petition this morning,” he told Keegan. “And I’ve already got informal confirmation that it will sail through. We just need to wait for all the rubber stamps. Once she’s declared dead, we execute the will and see what happens in court.”
“I haven’t made much headway,” Keegan admitted. “No will, and Lillian Cole seems to have vanished into thin air.” It was just the latest in a string of failures that started with that first visit to the Chateau Marmont. No wonder Ida Fletcher was haunting him. Perhaps it was time for him to look for a new line of work.
“Well, from what I understand, there weren’t many changes to the document, anyway,” Dion said. “Whichever will the courts honor, it won’t make much difference to anyone.”
Anyone but Zinnia, Keegan thought. And the elusory Lillian Cole. And, of course, Madame Lena. “So, the nephew gets the money one way or the other,” Keegan said, resignedly. “The rich just get richer.”
“I suppose so,” Dion said. “I was just about to give him a call.”
Despite what the Lieutenant had said, he wasn’t ready to let things slide yet. Not with Ida Fletcher’s unfinished business. “Would it be okay if I told the nephew the news?” Keegan said. “I was going to run out there today anyway to give him the keys.” He was making it all up on the fly. “It would mean a lot to me,” he told Dion. “We’ve gotten to be friends.”
The lie left a sour taste in his mouth.
BEFORE HE LEFT the office, he took the black-and-white photo of Danny Church and his aunt out of the Steinbeck novel. He slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
KEEGAN DIDN’T CALL ahead. If he was going to have it out with the nephew, he didn’t want the kid to see it coming. He pulled through the big open gate on Monticello Drive and was pleased to see the red Jaguar parked on the cobblestones in front of the big house.
Keegan coasted quietly up the drive. He pulled in behind Church’s car and parked a few feet from its rear bumper. Before he went up to the door, he went around to the front of the red car and pressed his palm to the hood. It was cold. A couple of sycamore leaves were plastered at the base of the windshield. It had been sitting here a while.
Keegan went up the broad front steps and rang the doorbell three times without an answer. He glanced at his watch. It was after four in the afternoon, but for all he knew, the kid was still in bed. He might have closed down the yacht club’s bar last night, drinking Bruno’s unsurpassed whiskey sours until 1:00 a.m. Then who knew? He might have followed that up with a few strenuous hours aboard Milton Burritt’s boat, aboard Milton Burritt’s wife. The profligate lifestyle could be exhausting, Keegan imagined. He rang the doorbell again and beat on the burnished wood with the side of his fist. There was still no response. So much for his element of surprise.
Keegan had brought Ida Fletcher’s key ring with him. That was, after all, the ostensible purpose of this trip, the reason he’d given Roland Dion. He’d planned on handing the ring over to the nephew—but not before he’d had his say. Though it didn’t feel quite kosher, he still had a key to this very door. He could let himself in one last time, and it wouldn’t technically be trespassing. Ida Fletcher might be on the bottom of the ocean, but, until she was officially declared dead, she was still Keegan’s employer. And this was still her house. Keegan found the correct key and slipped it into the deadbolt lock.
He let himself into the broad tiled entryway and pushed the door shut behind him. He called out a half-hearted “Hello,” and felt the echo of his voice bounce back at him. He went along the hall and into the billiard room. Empty glasses dotted the tables and bar top. A leatherbound book lay on the ground next to a sofa. A crystal ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts. Cocktail by cocktail, cigarette by cigarette, Danny Church was taking the place over.
Keegan looked at the high ceilings, the cavernous fireplace, the French doors, and the formal garden beyond. It was all so extravagant, riches almost beyond imagining—and in a few days, it would all belong to Danny Church. And there was little Keegan could do to stop it. There was no way that he could see to resolve poor Ida Fletcher’s unfinished business. Nick Harris’s catchphrase had got it all wrong: crime sometimes did pay. Sometimes it paid quite handsomely.
A beige wire trailed along the floor, past the billiard table and out the French doors—which, Keegan now noticed, were open just a crack. Keegan went to the glass and looked out.
Church was outside, dozing by the swimming pool. He lay shirtless on a lounge chair in the sun. The small table next to him held a newspaper, a glass of something, and the black telephone at the end of the long extension cord. The wire, Keegan now saw, snaked across the concrete, skirting the pool’s edge.
Keegan pulled the door open. “I let myself in,” he called out. His voice made the nephew jump, which pleased Keegan a little. “I hope that’s okay. I still have the keys.”
Church sat up groggily and shaded his eyes with one hand. “James!” he said, scrambling to affect a jaunty good humor. “What brings you to my doorstep on this lovely day?”
“It’s your aunt’s doorstep,” Keegan corrected. “At least for a while longer.” He pulled the door shut on the extension cord and trudged across the concrete walkway.
The nephew sat up on his chair. His hair was a little mussed, and he stretched his arms above his head. He must have been sleeping in the tepid November sunlight.
“I’ve got some news,” Keegan said.
The nephew sat up straighter, suddenly roused. He nodded eagerly. “Good news, it is devoutly to be wished.”
“I suppose that depends on your perspective,” Keegan said. “You’ll consider it good. I’m not sure what Aunt Ida would have thought.”
“Well, splendid,” Church said. “I suppose.” He swung his bare feet down to the ground and rubbed his hands together. “Let’s have it.”
Keegan stopped walking. He was about ten yards from the kid but didn’t want to be any closer. He looked around the bright landscape. The once well-kept garden had already gone a bit rangy from neglect. The hedges were growing shaggy and the rosebushes needed pruning. It was nothing a new gardener couldn’t set straight in a few weeks’ time. Keegan stood at the pool’s edge and watched the water’s shimmer on the nephew’s face.
Church must have already guessed what Keegan was here to tell him. After all, this had been his plan all along, hadn’t it? But the irredeemable wrongness of the situation was impossible to ignore. It was one thing that Keegan had failed to protect his client’s interests; that had happened before; it was just part of the job. But it was another thing entirely to see this prodigal nephew scoop up all his client’s worldly belongings.
“Maybe we could talk inside,” Keegan said. “The sun’s giving me a headache.” He didn’t wait for Church to answer. He walked back to the French door, pulled it open again, and paused in the gap. “And maybe you could put on a shirt.”
“Very well,” Church said, keeping his voice chipper. He picked a blue polo shirt off the concrete next to his lounge chair and pulled it on over his head. He picked up the phone and came in Keegan’s direction, trailing the long phone line behind him. Keegan held the door open for him and waited while the long extension cord followed him inside.
Church set the phone on the green felt of the billiard table, and Keegan kicked the remaining extension cord in through the French door before he pulled it shut. When he looked up, Church was already behind the bar filling a couple of crystal tumblers with ice.
“Nothing for me,” Keegan said. He hadn’t had a whiskey since the night he saw Ida Fletcher’s ghost. His Old Grand-Dad hangover sti
ll haunted him as well, he supposed.
“Very well,” Church said again. He poured himself a generous three fingers of something, neat, and came out from behind the bar swirling it around in the glass. “And what glad tidings do you bear, James?” He sprawled on a love seat on the far side of the billiard table. He managed, with wide-flung limbs, to entirely occupy the space designed for two. “I await your dispatch with bated breath.”
Keegan held up the ring of Ida Fletcher’s keys and then tossed them on the billiard table between them, next to the black phone. “I came to give you these,” he said. “It won’t be official for a week or two, but the petition has been filed. Your aunt will soon be legally deceased. I won’t be needing them. I no longer have a client.”
The kid’s face registered no surprise. His scheme was unfolding just as planned. The old lady’s paranoia might have been frequently misplaced, but it was rooted in fact. The nephew took a sip from his glass and swirled it some more. “What if I wanted to keep you on retainer, James?” Church said. “You know, for old time’s sake. I think we make a splendid team. You’ve been very helpful since I got back in town.”
Keegan watched Church sip his drink. The idea of being beholden to a killer filled him with a hangover-like revulsion. “So, how did you manage it, Danny?” Keegan said. “How did you kill her?”
Even Keegan was surprised he’d finally said the words out loud. The drink in Church’s hand stopped swirling. The question hung between them in the startled air, like someone had struck a gong.
The shock that spread over his face looked almost genuine. It was a good act. “I’m sorry?” the kid said. Keegan had to hand it to him. He knew what he was doing.
“The old dear,” Keegan said, keeping his voice even and as clear, despite the fire he felt inside him. “How, exactly, did you kill her?”
Church flailed his limbs a bit to sit up straighter in the love seat. His lips moved, but they seemed unable to produce any sound.
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