Deadfall

Chapter Eleven

Moss Beach is a little town on the coast halfway between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, some twenty-five miles south of San Francisco. There isn’t much to it: a few dozen homes on both sides of Highway 1, some stores, a couple of restaurants, a somewhat dilapidated motel, and a year-round population of about four hundred. Some of the oceanfront and near-oceanfront homes are pretty nice, surrounded by wooded acreage and with easy access to the highway. The weather isn’t the best down along there-the fog likes to come in often and hang around for a while-or else Moss Beach would be prime Bay Area real estate. Even as it is, you needed to make a very comfortable living wage to afford property on the ocean side of the highway.

The weather wasn’t bad today: sunny, with those thin streaky cloud swirls that make the sky look as if it had been stirred by a giant stick. There was a sign where California Avenue intersected Highway 1 that told you to turn there to get to the James V. Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. I turned there and drove maybe a fifth of a mile, at which point California Avenue dead-ended at an unpaved road mysteriously called North Lake Street. If you turned right you ended up at the Marine Reserve-a long beach above which towered high sandstone bluffs and wooded parkland, and along which were rocky tidepools where you could take a close-up look at tiny mollusks, crustaceans, anemones, and other marine life. I went the other way on North Lake, south past some nice-looking houses on one side and the thickly wooded slopes of the park on the other.

Why Lake Street? I thought as I drove. There wasn’t any lake around here; just the ocean and the trees and the highway not far away. And why North Lake when there wasn’t any South Lake in the vicinity? Another of life’s little mysteries to annoy hell out of people like me, people with trivial minds, people who did too much thinking for their own good.

I came around a bend in the road, and on the right a narrow private drive, also unpaved, angled up through the growth of cypress and fir trees on the hillside. There was no name on the postbox at the drive’s entrance, but the number was the one I wanted; I swung past it, onto the narrow roadbed. After about a hundred yards, the drive leveled off into a gravel parking area big enough for maybe a dozen cars. The far end of it was bordered by a whitewashed stucco wall that curved away into the woods on both sides. The wall was about eight feet high, so that you couldn’t see over it, but the double-doored gate in the middle was made out of filigreed wrought iron and gave you a clear view of what lay within: a garden dominated by rosebushes and big ferns and a modernistic two-story house. The house, as far as I could tell, was all the same whitewashed stucco as the wall, with roofing that was part redwood shake and part Spanish tile. There was a squat, tower-like thing on the far side, and some odd angles here and there-as if its architect had begun taking hallucinogenic drugs halfway through the drafting of the plans.

I put the car up next to the gate and got out. Two other cars were parked there-a dust-streaked but new BMW and an elderly Fiat that needed body work and that may or may not have belonged to the maid/housekeeper. Set into the wall on one side was a bell-button and one of those speaker things. I pushed the button. Pretty soon a woman’s voice-the housekeeper’s, I thought-came through the speaker, asking me who I was and what I wanted. I told her. Nothing happened for maybe thirty seconds; then there was a buzzing and a click and the gate parted inward in the middle, an odd effect like something solid and substantial breaking open. Before I could take a step, the woman’s voice said imperiously, “Please close the gate again when you come through.”

I went in and closed the gate. A crushed-shell path bisected the garden to the front entrance. On both sides of the house, I saw as I followed the path, more cypress and fir trees rose up to give the place an even more secluded feel. But there were no trees to the rear; the ones that had grown there had been cleared off so as not to spoil the sea view. The other thing I noted was that the path branched near the front door, with the branch leading around on the north side to a kind of covered porch. Another path led away from the porch at right angles, into the woods.

The door opened just before I got to it and the housekeeper looked out. You’d have known she was a housekeeper anywhere you saw her; she was about fifty, she was dumpy, she had fat ankles and gray hair and the kind of mouth that seems always to be on the verge of shaping the words “Wipe your feet,” and she was wearing the kind of shapeless, nondescript dress nobody but a domestic would wear. She said, “Come in, please,” in the same imperious way she’d told me to close the gate. I went in, smiling at her on the way as a sort of experiment. It proved out, too: she didn’t smile back.

She led me down a hall to the back of the house, into the sort of room people like Alicia Purcell would call the “sun room.” There was no sun in it now, but there would be plenty later in the day, splashing in through a wide set of sliding glass doors. Outside the doors was a cobblestone terrace with a swimming pool at the far end and, closer in, some funny-looking tubular outdoor furniture-the umbrella over one of the tables had an artistically crooked pole and was made out of sparkly cloth the color of a loaded diaper. Nobody was on the terrace. Nobody was in the sun room, either, except the housekeeper and me.

Just me five seconds later. She said, “Mrs. Purcell will see you shortly,” and went away without waiting for a response.

I crossed to the glass doors and looked out. Fishing boats on the ocean, the tip of a point to the south-that was about all you could see of the surroundings from in there. Beyond the terrace were some scrub cypress and then the cliff that fell away to the sea. The land bellied out to the north, though, where the woods were thickest, to provide another hundred yards or so of clifftop in that direction.

It was quiet in there; whatever Alicia Purcell and the housekeeper were doing, they weren’t making any noise in the process. When I turned from the window my shoes made faint hollow thumps on the hardwood floor.

The furniture was all modernistic, and for my taste just as weird-looking as the outdoor stuff. The paintings on the walls were modernistic, too-abstracts or whatever. One of them caught my eye. Smacked my eye might be a better term. It was of a being with two heads. One of the heads was human enough and had red squiggles splashed down over the nose and mouth and chin; what the squiggles looked like was blood dripping from a wound on his forehead. The other head was that of a green horse. The name Chagall was painted in big childish blue letters across the bottom. If the two-headed thing was supposed to signify something profound, I couldn’t even begin to figure out what it was. And if this was great art you could have it and welcome. I’ll take vanilla.

I was still studying this monstrosity, with some of the same awe a little boy feels at the sight of his first potato bug, when the footsteps sounded in the hall. The woman who came in was in her early thirties, dressed in a black suede skirt and jacket, a white frilly blouse, and knee-high black boots. I could understand why some men would find her seductive. She was tall and leggy and on the regal side. Coal-black hair, eyes like black olives, pale skin, lipstick the color of blood. Sexy as hell, all right, if you liked your women looking as though they’d just crawled out of a coffin after a hard night of biting necks. She didn’t do much of anything for me, which was a good thing for several reasons. One of them being that I never did like having my neck bitten.

She came forward with her hand extended and a smile on her bright crimson mouth. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said as we clasped hands. Hers was soft, almost silky, and tipped by blunt nails stained the same crimson color as her mouth; the pressure of her fingers was somehow intimate, sensual. “I was attending to some personal business.”

“Quite all right, Mrs. Purcell.”

“I’m afraid I was a bit snappish on the phone last night and I’d like to apologize.”

“Apology accepted.” Evidently she had decided to be civil and cooperative-a point in her favor.

“It’s just that everything has been such a strain the past six months. My husband’s accident, the period of readjustment, and now the terrible thing that happened to Leonard… I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes.”

“Well. Would you like some coffee? Tea?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Shall we sit down, then?”

We sat on the weird-looking furniture. She got what looked to be a couch; I got a chair that appeared to have been made out of a bunch of twisted-up coat hangers and had a funny off-color orange cushion that seemed to massage my rear end as I lowered into it, as if it were something sentient and perverted bent on playing grab-ass. I almost came up out of the thing in reaction. As it was I managed to curb my imagination and stay put-but I sat gingerly, with no squirming around. I did not want to give the chair any ideas.

Mrs. Purcell crossed one leg over the other. They were nice legs, and she was letting me see plenty of them under the short hem of the skirt. I wondered if the free show was deliberate-if she just naturally came on to every man she encountered-or if she just didn’t give a damn.

She said, “I suppose it’s that call Tom Washburn received?”

“Ma’am?”

“The reason he believes Kenneth was murdered. The call he took that was meant for Leonard.”

“How did you know about the call?”

“The police told me when they were here-the San Francisco police, last week. He was a crank, of course. The caller.”

“Was he? Why are you so sure?”

“If he did know something… sinister about Kenneth’s death-and I don’t believe that for a minute-why would he have waited six months to contact Leonard?”

That was the sticking point, all right. But I said, “He might have had his reasons.”

“What reasons, for heaven’s sake?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Purcell.”

“Well,” she said, and waved a hand as if to wave away the entire issue. She probed in the slash pocket of her skirt, drawing the hem even higher on her thighs, and came out with a package of cigarettes and a platinum-and-gold lighter. I watched her light up and blow smoke off to one side. Marlene Dietrich, I thought. She didn’t smoke a cigarette; she made love to it.

I waited, not saying anything, to see what she would do with the conversation. Pretty soon she said, “Last night you mentioned some details you wanted to clear up. What are they?”

“They have to do with the night your husband died.”

“Yes?”

“According to the newspaper accounts, he disappeared at around nine-thirty-”

“Approximately, yes. That was the last any of us saw him.”

“Who saw him then?”

“Lina. He went out through the kitchen.”

I said, “Who would Lina be?”

“My housekeeper. She let you in.”

“Did your husband go out alone or with someone?”

“Alone.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Not long before that. In his hobby room.”

“May I ask what you talked about?”

“His drinking,” she said. “He’d had several Scotches and he was rather drunk. He had a tendency to make a spectacle of himself when he drank too much, so I-”

“How do you mean, make a spectacle of himself?”

“Oh, you know: he became obnoxiously loud, argumentative, sometimes insulting to guests.”

“But he hadn’t reached that state when you spoke to him?”

“No. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before one of his mood swings. I asked him to please not drink any more.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he wouldn’t.”

“Was he always that accommodating?”

“Not always, no. He was that night-I suppose because it was an occasion for him. He’d just bought a valuable French snuff box… you know about that, I’m sure.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that must be why he went out on the cliffs,” she said. “To accomodate me, I mean. To sober up.”

“What did you do after you left him in the hobby room?”

“I don’t remember exactly. It was such a hectic evening-parties are always hectic for the hostess-and I’d had a fair amount to drink myself. Champagne, at least that wears off after a while. I think I went to the kitchen to see how Lina was doing.”

“And after that?”

“Let’s see… That was when Leonard and I talked in the library.”

“Talked privately, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“What did you talk about?”

She reached over to crush out her cigarette in an ashtray that looked like the cross-section of a stomach in the Pepto-Bismol commercial. “It was girl-talk,” she said, and smiled.

“How do you mean, Mrs. Purcell?”

“Well, you know Leonard was gay…”

“Yes.”

“And that he and Tom Washburn had been living together for some time…”

“Yes.”

“Well, they were thinking seriously about getting married. Did you know that?”

“Washburn mentioned it, yes.”

“Leonard wanted my opinion,” she said. “He knew I wouldn’t laugh at him; he knew I would understand. That was what we discussed.”

“You and Leonard were close, then?”

“Close? No, I wouldn’t say that. We only saw each other a few times a year. But we could talk to each other; we had a kind of sisterly rapport. And I don’t mean that to sound facetious.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“I was shocked when I heard he’d been murdered,” she said, “but after Kenneth’s death… well, I couldn’t feel any deep sense of loss. I still can’t. Can you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please don’t call me ma’am,” she said. “It makes me feel like an old lady. Do I look like an old lady?”

“Not from where I sit.”

She smiled again and recrossed her legs and tugged the skirt down a little. Not much.

I said, “Do you feel a deep loss at your husband’s death?”

Her eyes moved over my face, as if trying to find a way inside my head so she could read my thoughts. Then she shrugged and smiled self-deprecatingly and said, “To be honest, no. Kenneth and I were no longer in love; we seldom even slept together any more. He led his life and I led mine.”

“Then why did you stay married?”

“He liked having me around, and I like this house.” The self-deprecating smile again. “He was a very wealthy man,” she said. “And if that sounds mercenary, so be it. I would much rather be rich than poor.”

“Did you know you were one of the principal beneficiaries of his will?”

“Of course. Kenneth had no financial secrets from me. Do you think I murdered him? For his money?”

“Money is a primary motive for murder,” I said.

“Not in my case. I never wanted for anything the entire time we were married. And I was here in the house when he fell; others have already vouched for that. Not that I or anyone else needs an alibi. My husband’s death was an accident; I believe that with all my heart.”

I said, “Let’s go back to you and Leonard in the library. How long were you together?”

“Fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Did you leave at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“Someone, I don’t remember who, asked me where Kenneth was. No one had seen him in a while. I thought perhaps he’d passed out in his bedroom-he’d done that more than once at a party-but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere in the house.”

“What did you do then?”

“I knew he must have gone out on the cliffs,” she said. “He’d done that before, too, even though I warned him not to; it’s dangerous out there at night. I didn’t want to go alone for that reason, so I asked Leonard and one of the other guests, George Collins, to come with me. We took a flashlight and when we reached the edge… there was a moon that night and we could see Kenneth down below-” She broke off, sighed, and lighted another cigarette. “Well, it was an ugly scene and I’d rather not talk about it. I’ve been trying to forget that night for the past six months.”

I watched her do her Marlene Dietrich number with the fresh coffin nail. “I understand he had the Hainelin box on his person,” I said, “and that it was lost when he fell.”

“Yes. It wasn’t among his collection or anywhere else in the house when I looked for it later. And the pocket of his jacket was torn in the fall, the pocket he’d put the box in.”

“Is there any chance he set the box down somewhere before he went outside? That it was picked up by one of the guests?”

“You mean stolen? Good God, no. None of those people is a thief.”

“Uh-huh. They’re all too civilized, right?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“But some of them are also dealers and collectors,” I said. “And the box was worth a lot of money.”

She was shaking her head. “No. Theft is out of the question.”

Not as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t. But I said, “I don’t know much about that type of antique art. Do you mind if I have a look at the rest of your husband’s collection?”

“I don’t mind, but I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I’ve had it unmounted and crated,” she said. “Antiques of that sort mean nothing at all to me; frankly I don’t even find them aesthetic. I intend to sell the entire collection as soon as Kenneth’s will clears probate.”

“I see. Do you have a buyer yet?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“It wouldn’t be Eldon Summerhayes, would it?”

One of her finely penciled eyebrows formed an arch. She said slowly, “You’re quite a detective.”

“I’ve been one a long time.”

“Yes, well, Eldon is an old friend. He is also a dealer in that type of art… but then you already know that, I’m sure.”

“May I ask how much he’s paying you?”

“Really, that is none of your business.”

“No, it isn’t. But I’m curious.”

She ran her eyes over my face again in that same probing way, and then took one last drag off her cigarette and scrubbed out the butt. “It’s no secret,” she said. “Eldon is paying three hundred thousand for the collection.”

“Cash on the barrelhead?”

“We’ve arranged a deal,” she said noncommittally. “He has several buyers.”

“Is Margaret Prine one of them?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Why do you ask about her?”

“Curiosity again. Did you know your husband got quite a few pieces in the collection from Alex Ozimas?”

The abrupt shift from Summerhayes to Margaret Prine hadn’t phased her; neither did the one from Prine to Ozimas. She said, “Yes, I knew that.”

“The Hainelin box was one of them,” I said.

“Was it? He didn’t mention where he’d got it, just that it had been a bargain. Kenneth could be close-mouthed at times.”

“Also about his business dealings?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of business did your husband and Ozimas transact together? Other than antique art, I mean.”

“Something to do with real estate. I was never particularly interested in the details of Kenneth’s business.”

Nothing changed in her expression as she spoke, but I sensed she was lying. She knew exactly the sort of quasi-legal dealings her husband had been involved in-and hadn’t given a damn as long as the money kept rolling in.

I asked her, “How well do you know Ozimas?”

“Not well at all.”

“I spoke to him earlier today. He indicated otherwise.”

“Did he?”

“He said you propositioned him once. At his penthouse.”

Her smile, this time, was sardonic. “I’m not surprised,” she said.

“Not surprised at what?”

“That he would tell you a thing like that.”

“Then it isn’t true?”

“Of course it isn’t true. A man like Alex? Good God, I hope I never have to stoop that low!”

“Why would he lie, Mrs. Purcell?”

“Vanity. Ego. He considers himself irresistible to men and women both, no matter what he might say to the contrary. He’s really a disgusting little shit.”

“Unlike Eldon Summerhayes?” I said.

The eyebrow formed another arch. “What does that mean? Are you asking if I’ve had an affair with Eldon?”

“Have you?”

“If I have it’s none of your concern. My sex life and partners are my business, no one else’s.”

“Ozimas says differently. So does your stepdaughter.”

“Oh, I see, you’ve talked to her, too.” The coldness of last night was back in her voice; I had pushed her just a little too far. “Well, my stepdaughter is a selfish, nasty-minded little drug freak, and if you talk to her again you can tell her I said so.” She got to her feet and smoothed her skirt down over her thighs. “End of interview,” she said. “I have nothing more to say to you and I’ve things to do. Please show yourself out.”

I stood too. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Purcell, I’d like to take a look at where the accident happened.”

“Go right ahead,” she said icily. “Stay there as long as you like. Once you leave you won’t be allowed back on my property again. Good morning.”

I watched her walk out of the room. Funny thing about sexy women like her: their hips hardly sway at all when they’re angry. When she was gone I went to the sliding glass doors and let myself out that way. A short distance beyond the side porch, I could see the path angling away through the woods. I pointed myself in that direction.

Some Alicia Purcell, I was thinking. I just didn’t know what to make of her. On the surface she had been open and frank with me about everything including her sexual freedom and her greed-a product of the permissive eighties, straightforward and up-front all the way. And yet there was something secretive and calculating about her, a kind of feral cunning that belied her candor and her casual seductiveness. Maybe she was both types of woman at once: one of those complex personalities made up of conflicting elements. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things she had concealed from me, but it could be that those things had nothing to do with her husband’s death or the murder of his brother.

I simply could not get a proper handle on her. And it bothered me, made me uneasy, that I couldn’t.