“Of course. I don’t care about the details. Call it professional curiosity.”
“I can’t discuss it in any case.”
He shrugged. “I respect that. As I said, I don’t really care. I’m over Nedra now. I’ve been over her for a long time.”
The hell he was.
He wouldn’t be over Nedra Adams Merchant if he lived to be a hundred and ten.
***
THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING downtown! So what had I gotten from Walter Merchant? Was his ex-wife the cold-hearted, man-eating bitch he’d portrayed her to be? Or was the portrait a distorted one, painted in colors of bitterness, frustration, vindictive hurt? I’d have liked to believe that the true image of Nedra Adams Merchant was a mixture of good and evil-like the true images of most of us, with shadings toward one extreme or the other. And yet, the things Kay Runyon had told me yesterday, the memory of Victor Runyon entering the Crestmont house with his arms full of flowers, argued in favor of Walter Merchant’s representation. Well, I’d have to talk to some other people who knew the lady before I could begin to see her for myself as she really was.
I was inclined to rule out Merchant as the anonymous telephone caller. On the one hand, he was carrying a torch and it might have burned his psyche in bizarre ways. On the other hand, five years is a long time to be still warning men away from an ex-wife; and he obviously enjoyed being the shrewd and successful lawyer, took too much pleasure in using the law to get back at his enemies. Threatening phone calls just weren’t his style.
The one piece of hard information he’d given me was the uncashed alimony checks. And it made matters even more puzzling. If Nedra Merchant had been in the throes of a financial crisis for three months, why would she fail to make use of six thousand dollars in ready cash?
CHAPTER 4
LAWRENCE APRIL WAS black.
Merchant hadn’t mentioned this fact, which told me something good about Walter Merchant. There was no question that he hated April, but the hatred was strictly personal; it had no racial overtones of any kind. Which made Merchant that embraceable rarity in today’s society, a person who was wholly unbigoted, truly color-blind. Shyster lawyer or not, this elevated him several notches in my estimation.
April’s offices were downtown on New Montgomery-Cooley and April, Investment Consultants. I figured I would have difficulty getting an audience with him if I used the more or less straightforward approach I had with Merchant, so I went in with a lie ready about being in dire need of financial advice. That wouldn’t have gotten me in to see April either; I knew that as soon as I saw the plush decor, the expensive artwork on the walls. This was a high-rolling outfit. Potential clients wearing seventy-five-dollar Ross Dress for Less suits and a tie without a pin or a tack (this morning I’d been unable to find the gold one Kerry had presented to me last Christmas) would be given the gate as fast as a street person looking for a handout.
The only reason I got to talk to April at all was that he happened to be in the anteroom when I entered, having a discussion with a brittle-looking blond receptionist. As I came up to her desk I heard her call him Mr. April. So I switched gears to the direct approach and said to him, “Excuse me. Are you Lawrence April?”
He looked up. An expression of vague irritation crossed his face when he saw that I wasn’t anybody he knew or was likely to want to know. He bore a small resemblance to Harry Belafonte, although his features were more angular and his hair longer than Belafonte had worn it at the same age. Fortyish, lean, with a sensual mouth and hot dark eyes. Self-assured and impeccably dressed in a three-piece Armani suit. He’d have been a good subject for a Forbes or Business Week profile on the successful black businessman. For all I knew, one had already been done on him.
“Yes?”
“I wonder if I might have a few minutes of your time.”
“I’m afraid not. I have a full schedule today. If you’ll state your business to Ms. Green, perhaps she-”
“It’s a private matter,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Concerning Nedra Adams Merchant.”
It was as if I’d driven a bolt through his neck and down the length of his spine; his body reacted with the same seizurelike stiffening. His eyes seemed to ignite, then to glow like drops of molten glass. A man prone to sudden rages, for a fact. You could see the turbulence working in him, the struggle for control of it that was going on at the same time.
He said, “Who are you?” in a dead-cold voice.
I handed him one of my cards. He read it, looked at me again with something close to hatred. Then he put the card in his pocket and said to the receptionist, “If you’ll just make that call, Andrea.” To me he said, “Five minutes, no more,” and turned on his heel and went through a door and along a hallway beyond. I trailed after him.
His private office was considerably more opulent than Walter Merchant’s, complete with a small mahogany wet bar. The carpet and the upholstered chairs were an elegant silver-gray. On one wall I noted a framed diploma that said he had an M.B.A. from Stanford. On his desk, angled so that I had a clear look at it from where I stood, was a gold-framed photograph of an attractive African-American woman and two male preteens.
April didn’t invite me to sit down; he didn’t sit down himself. As soon as he shut the door he moved in on me until his nose was about six inches from mine. I don’t like my space invaded, particularly in an aggressive fashion, but I let him get away with it. I was not about to give ground and I didn’t want to make the situation any more unpleasant by crowding him.
He said between his teeth, “Who sent you here?”
“Nobody sent me, Mr. April. I-”
“Five years. It’s been five years.”
“What has?”
Veins pulsed on his temples, on his eyelids. “What do you want?”
“To ask you a few questions about Nedra Merchant.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Pertaining to a matter I’m investigating-”
“What matter? Whom are you investigating?”
“Not you, Mr. April.”
“Nedra?”
“Among others.”
“If you try to drag my name into any sort of scandal…”
“I don’t do divorce work, Mr. April, if that’s what you mean. I’m a reputable investigator and have been for more than twenty-five years. If you doubt that, I’ll give you half a dozen references and you can check them out before you say another word to me. Fair enough?”
His eyes remained fixed on mine, but the heat in them was cooling. His face lost some of its blood-swell. After ten seconds or so, he abruptly backed off and ran a long-fingered hand over his face.
“I suppose,” he said, and stopped, and then went on with it, “I suppose you know all the sordid details of my relationship with Nedra.”
“I’m not interested in sordid details, Mr. April.”
“But you do know all about it.”
“I’ve been told some things.”
“She was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said. “I don’t like to be reminded of it. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can. If you’ll just answer some nonthreatening questions, I’ll go away and you can forget about her again. About me too.”
He moved away from me, to the wall where the framed diploma hung. He appeared to stare at it for about thirty seconds, but I doubted that he was actually seeing it. Then he turned and came back to face me again, not too close this time.
“What is it you want to know?”
“To begin with, how long it’s been since you’ve seen or talked to Nedra Merchant.”
“Nearly five years. When I came to my senses after the incident with that shyster husband of hers… you know about that?”
“Yes.”
“In explicit detail, no doubt, if you’ve spoken to him. As I expect you have.” When I didn’t respond to that he said, “All right. Once I accepted the fact that I’d made an utter fool of mys
elf over Nedra Merchant, I vowed never to have anything to do with her again. For my sake, for the sake of my family, and for the sake of my business partner and clients.”
“And you haven’t broken that vow.”
“I have not.”
“Have you kept tabs on her, on her career?”
“No.”
“Don’t have any idea how her graphics design business is doing.”
“No.”
“Suppose I told you she’s had serious financial problems in recent months.”
“I’d tell you I’m sorry to hear it, the same as I’d be sorry to hear anyone is in financial difficulty.”
“What if she came to you for advice? Or a loan?”
“She didn’t.”
“It was a hypothetical question.”
“I would refuse to see her. Under no circumstances would I offer my professional services to Nedra or loan her so much as a penny.”
I nodded. “Were there other men in her life while you were seeing her?”
“Her ex-husband.”
“Other than him.”
“No.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“I would have known,” he said.
“But you weren’t her first extramarital affair.”
“No. She admitted that to me. But she was forced into accepting the attentions of other men.”
“Forced by who? Walter Merchant?”
“His stifling treatment of her, yes. It wasn’t something she was proud of. Why do you suppose she was seeing a therapist?”
“I didn’t know she was seeing a therapist.”
“For some time before I met her.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
“Do you recall his name?”
“Duncan? Something like that.”
“Offices downtown here?”
“I don’t remember where his offices were.”
“Did she feel he was helping her?”
“She seemed to. In my opinion he was a crutch.”
“You’re not a believer in long-term therapy?”
“No.”
“Did she ever talk to you about her former lovers?”
“Hardly.”
“Never let even one name slip?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“I didn’t want to know.”
“So you wouldn’t have any idea who she’s been involved with since the end of your affair.”
“No. Nor do I care.”
“Do you know a health club employee named Glen Rigsby?”
“No.”
“How about an architect, Victor Runyon?”
“No.”
The names didn’t seem to sting him any, as they might have if he, like Merchant, was carrying a torch. That strengthened my impression that he’d been telling me the truth.
I asked, “How long did your affair last?”
“A little over four months.”
“You must have gotten to know her fairly well in that length of time.” The look on his face made me add, “Or did you?”
“Not as well as I thought I knew her,” April said. “What kind of food and music and shows she liked, what gave her pleasure, what made her laugh and cry. But not what she was like down deep inside.”
“The real Nedra Merchant.”
“Yes. Glimpses, that was all. Just… glimpses.”
“How would you characterize her?”
“As a good person, basically. Kind, generous.”
“Caring, loving?”
“To a point.”
“What point is that?”
“The point when things… when I allowed matters to get completely out of hand. When I told her I was ready to throw away my marriage and my family for her. Then she rebelled.”
“Rebelled?”
“She became cold, distant. Possessiveness turned her off, she said. She’d had enough of that from her husband. Once she was free of him, she wouldn’t permit herself to be tied down again to anyone.”
“So she’s the one who ended your relationship.”
“Yes. I was bitter at the time, but now I understand that she had my best interests at heart, as well as her own. Forcing me out of her life was an act of kindness.”
“Then you don’t think it would have worked for the two of you in the long run.”
“No. Not anymore I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Many reasons. Race, temperament, attitude, the fact that I really didn’t know her and she didn’t know me. What we had… it was physical, not spiritual.”
“One person I talked to thinks she’s obsessed with men. That she’s a control freak who uses them for her own amusement, then casts them aside. Would you say there’s any truth in that?”
April frowned. “No, I wouldn’t. She isn’t that way.”
“Isn’t a controlling personality? Doesn’t encourage her lovers to become obsessed with her?”
“Absolutely not.”
“But you were obsessed with her.”
“The fault was mine, not hers. I suppose the person who defamed her character is Walter Merchant?”
I neither confirmed nor denied it.
“Have you met Nedra? Talked to her at any length?”
“No,” I said, “not yet.”
“When you do,” April said, “you’ll see the truth. She’s not some sort of modern-day Circe, for God’s sake. She is a good, warm person who…” He couldn’t seem to find the rest of what he wanted to say. He finished lamely, or maybe not so lamely, “She’s innocent.”
Maybe he believed that, but I didn’t. She might not be the wicked sorceress of Walter Merchant’s depiction; she might even be the basically good person who lived in Lawrence April’s memory. But whatever Nedra Adams Merchant really was, she damned well wasn’t innocent.
***
THERE ARE HALF A DOZEN health and athletic clubs in the SoMa area, where you can swim, play tennis and racquet ball, take aerobic and tae kwon do classes, work on the old jump shot, lift weights, challenge Nautilus machines, and sweat your ass off-literally-in steam rooms. Two of them hadn’t been there five years ago; two others were out in the Showplace Square area, a couple of miles west. The remaining two were within walking distance of New Montgomery, and of Nedra Merchant’s old office on Second Street, and it took me a little better than an hour to check out the pair of them.
Nobody at either place knew Nedra Adams Merchant.
Nobody at either place had ever heard of a man named Glen Rigsby.
***
WHEN I GOT BACK TO my office I found one message waiting. From Kay Runyon: Had I found out anything yet? Would I please call her as soon as possible?
No, I would not please call as soon as possible. I was not ready yet to make a report; I wanted a better handle on Nedra Merchant first. Premature reports do more harm than good. All too often they distort the facts and build more anxiety than they relieve. A prime example of that is the broadcast media’s handling of sudden-disaster situations, such as the ‘89 earthquake. They disseminate all sorts of conflicting and hyperbolic information, whip everybody into a frenzy, and then after it’s all over, instead of issuing apologies they blithely pat themselves on the back with endless promos telling you what a fine job of “responsible reporting” they did.
Another thing Kay Runyon wanted was her hand held. I didn’t blame her for that, but I’m no good at coddling and empty reassurances. It’s awkward for me and awkward for the client.
I looked up Glen Rigsby in the White Pages. No listing under that name, nor under G. Rigsby. I tried a few variants in case Walter Merchant had misremembered the exact name: Rigby, Grigsby, Grigby. No listing under any of those either.
So maybe he lived in another Bay Area city. Or maybe he’d moved to Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, or maybe he was dead: five years is a long time. And even if I did find him alive and cooperative, he was a prohibitive long shot to be the threa
tening caller.
I checked in the White Pages, then in the Yellow Pages under Physicians-Psychiatry and under Psychologists. Nobody named Duncan was listed. It might be that Lawrence April had misremembered his name. Or he worked for a clinic. Or he had moved away, or changed professions, or retired, or died. And if I found him alive and still practicing, professional ethics would prevent him from telling me anything revealing about Nedra Merchant. Besides which, a psychiatrist or psychologist was a highly unlikely candidate for a phone freak.
Not for the first time today I thought: What the hell am I doing all this for? Chances are, it’s going to break open by itself before much longer. If Nedra Merchant was in fact a man-eater, she was due to toss Victor Runyon over pretty soon anyway, for the crime of possessiveness. When that happened, the caller would go away, too, to devil Nedra’s next conquest. Kay Runyon confronting her wasn’t likely to do either of them any good, and it was not going to save the marriage; if their little family unit was to be saved at all, it would be by Victor coming to his senses as Lawrence April had apparently done.
Just a job, another job-sure. Do your work, earn some money to pay the bills. But the work ought to matter, right? Or at least you ought to be able to convince yourself that it matters while you’re doing it, even if you suspect in your more cynical moments that it doesn’t mean much in the long run and that maybe not a hell of a lot of human endeavor does. I had never been somebody who could just go through the motions. And that was what this felt like-going through the motions, for no real purpose, to no real resolution.
Well, then? Nobody to blame but myself. Mr. Bleeding Heart. Seduced by a sob story in a Dreamsicle room by a woman who paints pictures with dryer lint. It made me feel like the butt of some cruel cosmic joke. Mr. Bleeding Heart? Mr. Butthead.
I called TRW and requested a credit check on Glen Rigsby or Grigsby, picking the two most likely spellings. While I was at it I asked for credit checks on Lawrence April and Walter Merchant as well. Then I called the AMA and the San Francisco Bay Area Psychological Association, and requested information on a psychiatrist/psychologist/therapist named Duncan practicing in San Francisco five years ago. Might as well give Kay Runyon full value for the fifty-five dollars an hour she was paying me.
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