Devil's Waltz

13

The next morning I woke up to clean spring light. I jogged a couple of miles, ignoring the pain in my knees and fixing my thoughts on the evening with Robin.

Afterward I showered, fed the fish, and read the paper while eating breakfast. Nothing more on the Ashmore homicide.

I called Information, trying to match a phone number to the address Milo had given me for Dawn Herbert. None was listed and neither of the two other Herberts residing in Culver City knew any Dawn.

I hung up, not sure it made much of a difference. Even if I located her, what explanation would I use to ask her about Chad’s file?

I decided to concentrate on the job I’d been trained to do. Dressing and clipping my hospital badge to my lapel, I left the house, turned east on Sunset, and headed for Hollywood.

I reached Beverly Hills within minutes and passed Whittier Drive without slowing. Something on the opposite side of the boulevard caught my eye:

White Cutlass, coming from the east. It turned onto Whittier and headed up the 900 block.

At the first break in the median, I hung a U. By the time I reached the big Georgian house, the Olds was parked in the same place I’d seen it yesterday and a black woman was stepping out on the driver’s side.

She was young — late twenties or early thirties — short and slim. She had on a gray cotton turtleneck, black ankle-length skirt, and black flats. In one hand was a Bullock’s bag; in the other, a brown leather purse.

Probably the housekeeper. Out doing a department store errand for Ashmore’s grieving widow.

As she turned toward the house she saw me. I smiled. She gave me a quizzical look and began walking over slowly, with a short, light step. As she got closer I saw she was very pretty, her skin so dark it was almost blue. Her face was round, bottomed by a square chin; her features clean and broad like those of a Nubian mask. Large, searching eyes focused straight at me.

“Hello. Are you from the hospital?” British accent, public-school refined.

“Yes,” I said, surprised, then realized she was looking at the badge on my lapel.

Her eyes blinked, then opened. Irises in two shades of brown — mahogany in the center, walnut rims.

Pink at the periphery. She’d been crying. Her mouth quivered a bit.

“It’s very kind of you to come,” she said.

“Alex Delaware,” I said, extending my hand out the driver’s window. She put the shopping bag on the grass and took it. Her hand was narrow and dry and very cold.

“Anna Ashmore. I didn’t expect anyone so soon.”

Feeling stupid about my assumptions, I said, “I didn’t know Dr. Ashmore personally, but I did want to pay my respects.”

She let her hand drop. Somewhere in the distance a lawn mower belched. “There’s no formal service. My husband wasn’t religious.” She turned toward the big house. “Would you like to come in?”

The entry hall was two stories of cream plaster floored with black marble. A beautiful brass banister and marble stairs twisted upward to the second story. To the right, a large yellow dining room gleamed with dark, fluid Art Nouveau furniture that the real housekeeper was polishing. Art filled the wall behind the stairs, too — a mix of contemporary paintings and African batiks. Past the staircase, a short foyer led to glass doors that framed a California postcard: green lawn, blue pool sun-splashed silver, white cabanas behind a trellised colonnade, hedges and flower beds under the fluctuating shade of more specimen trees. Scrambling over the tiles of the cabana roof was a splash of scarlet — the bougainvillea I’d seen from the street.

The maid came out of the dining room and took Mrs. Ashmore’s bag. Anna Ashmore thanked her, then pointed left, to a living room twice the size of the dining room, sunk two steps down.

“Please,” she said, descending, and flipping a switch that ignited several floor lamps.

A black grand piano claimed one corner. The east wall was mostly tall, shuttered windows that let in knife-blades of light. The floors were blond planks under black-and-rust Persian rugs. A coffered white ceiling hovered over apricot plaster walls. More art: the same mix of oils and fabric. I thought I spotted a Hockney over the granite mantel.

The room was chilly and filled with furniture that looked straight out of the Design Center. White Italian suede sofas, a black Breuer chair, big, pockmarked post-Neanderthal stone tables, and a few smaller ones fashioned of convoluted brass rods and topped with blue-tinted glass. One of the stone tables fronted the largest of the sofas. Centered on it was a rosewood bowl filled with apples and oranges.

Mrs. Ashmore said, “Please,” again, and I sat down directly behind the fruit.

“Can I offer you something to drink?”

“No, thank you.”

She settled directly in front of me, straight and silent.

In the time it had taken to walk from the entry, her eyes had filled with tears.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

She wiped her eyes with a finger and sat even straighter. “Thank you for coming.”

Silence filled the room and made it seem even colder. She wiped her eyes again and laced her fingers.

I said, “You have a beautiful home.”

She lifted her hands and made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know what I’ll do with it.”

“Have you lived here long?”

“Just one year. Larry owned it long before that, but we never lived in it together. When we came to California, Larry said this should be our place.”

She shrugged, raised her hands again, and let them drop back to her knees.

“Too big, it’s really ridiculous... We talked about selling it...” Shaking her head. “Please — have something.”

I took an apple from the bowl and nibbled. Watching me eat seemed to comfort her.

“Where did you move from?” I said.

“New York.”

“Had Dr. Ashmore ever lived in Los Angeles before?”

“No, but he’d been here on buying trips — he had many houses. All over the country. That was his... thing.”

“Buying real estate?”

“Buying and selling. Investing. He even had a house in France for a short while. Very old — a château. A duke bought it and told everyone it had been in his family for hundreds of years. Larry laughed at that — he hated pretentiousness. But he did love the buying and selling. The freedom it brought him.”

I understood that, having achieved some financial independence myself by riding the land boom of the mid-seventies. But I’d operated on a far less exalted level.

“Upstairs,” she said, “is all empty.”

“Do you live here by yourself?”

“Yes. No children. Please — have an orange. They’re from the tree in back, quite easy to peel.”

I picked up an orange, removed its rind, and ate a segment. The sound of my jaws working seemed deafening.

“Larry and I don’t know many people,” she said, reverting to the present-tense denial of the brand-new mourner.

Remembering her remark about my arriving earlier than expected, I said, “Is someone from the hospital coming out?”

She nodded. “With the gift — the certificate of the donation to UNICEF. They’re having it framed. A man called yesterday, checking to see if that was all right — giving to UNICEF.”

“A man named Plumb?”

“No... I don’t believe so. A long name — something German.”

“Huenengarth?”

“Yes, that’s it. He was very nice, said kind things about Larry.”

Her gaze shifted, distractedly, to the ceiling. “Are you certain I can’t get you something to drink?”

“Water would be fine.”

She nodded and rose. “If we’re lucky, the Sparkletts man has come. Beverly Hills water is disagreeable. The minerals. Larry and I don’t drink it.”

While she was gone, I got up and inspected the paintings. Hockney verified. Watercolor still life in a Plexiglas box frame. Next to that, a small abstract canvas that turned out to be a De Kooning. A Jasper Johns word salad, a Jim Dine bathrobe study, a Picasso satyr-and-nymph gambol in China ink. Lots of others I couldn’t identify, interspersed with the earth-toned batiks. The wax pressings were tribal scenes and geometric designs that could have been talismans.

She returned with an empty glass, a bottle of Perrier, and a folded linen napkin on an oval lacquer tray. “I’m sorry, there’s no spring water. I trust this will be acceptable.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

She poured the water for me and took her seat again.

“Lovely art,” I said.

“Larry bought it in New York, when he worked at Sloan-Kettering.”

“The cancer institute?”

“Yes. We were there for four years. Larry was very interested in cancer — the rise in frequency. Patterns. How the world was being poisoned. He worried about the world.”

She closed her eyes again.

“Did the two of you meet there?”

“No. We met in my country — the Sudan. I’m from a village in the South. My father was the head of our community. I was schooled in Kenya and England because the big universities in Khartoum and Omdurman are Islamic and my family was Christian. The South is Christian and animist — do you know what that is?”

“Ancient tribal religions?”

“Yes. Primitive, but very enduring. The northerners resent that — the endurance. Everyone was supposed to embrace Islam. A hundred years ago they sold the southerners as slaves; now they try to enslave us with religion.”

Her hands tightened. The rest of her remained unchanged.

“Was Dr. Ashmore doing research in the Sudan?”

She nodded. “With the U.N. Studying disease patterns — that’s why Mr. Huenengarth felt the donation to UNICEF would be an appropriate tribute.”

“Disease patterns,” I said. “Epidemiology?”

She nodded. “His training was in toxicology and environmental medicine, but he did that only briefly. Mathematics was his true love, and with epidemiology he could combine mathematics with medicine. In the Sudan he studied the pace of bacterial contagion from village to village. My father admired his work and assigned me to help him take blood from the children — I’d just finished my nursing degree in Nairobi and had returned home.” She smiled. “I became the needle lady — Larry didn’t like hurting the children. We became friends. Then the Muslims came. My father was killed — my entire family... Larry took me with him on the U.N. plane, to New York City.”

She recounted the tragedy matter-of-factly, as if numbed by repeated insults. I wondered if exposure to suffering would help her deal with her husband’s murder when the pain hit full force, or would make matters worse.

She said, “The children of my village... were slaughtered when the northerners came. The U.N. did nothing, and Larry became angry and disillusioned with them. When we got to New York he wrote letters and tried to talk to bureaucrats. When they wouldn’t receive him, his anger grew and he turned inward. That’s when the buying started.”

“To deal with his anger?”

Hard nod. “Art became a kind of refuge for him, Dr. Delaware. He called it the highest place man could go. He would buy a new piece, hang it, stare at it for hours, and talk about the need to surround ourselves with things that couldn’t hurt us.”

She looked around the room and shook her head.

“Now I’m left with all of it, and most of it doesn’t mean much to me.” She shook her head again. “Pictures and the memory of his anger — he was an angry man. He even earned his money angrily.”

She saw my puzzled look. “Please excuse me — I’m drifting. What I’m referring to is the way he started. Playing blackjack, craps — other games of chance. Though I guess playing isn’t the right word. There was nothing playful about it — when he gambled he was in his own world, didn’t stop to eat or sleep.”

“Where did he gamble?”

“Everywhere. Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno, Lake Tahoe. The money he made there he invested in other schemes — the stock market, bonds.” She waved an arm around the room.

“Did he win most of the time?”

“Nearly always.”

“Did he have some kind of system?”

“He had many. Created them with his computers. He was a mathematical genius, Dr. Delaware. His systems required an extraordinary memory. He could add columns of numbers in his head, like a human computer. My father thought he was magical. When we took blood from the children, I had him do numbers tricks for them. They watched and were amazed, and didn’t feel the sting.”

She smiled and covered her mouth.

“He thought he could go on forever,” she said, looking up, “making a profit at the casinos’ expense. But they caught on and told him to leave. This was in Las Vegas. He flew to Reno but the casino there knew also. Larry was furious. A few months later he returned to the first casino in different clothing and an old man’s beard. Played for higher stakes and won even more.”

She stayed with that memory for a while, smiling. Talking seemed to be doing her good. That helped me rationalize my presence.

“Then,” she said, “he just stopped. Gambling. Said he was bored. Began buying and selling real estate... He was so good at it... I don’t know what to do with all this.”

“Do you have any family here?”

She shook her head and clasped her hands. “Not here or anywhere. And Larry’s parents are gone too. It’s so... ironic. When the northerners came, shooting women and children, Larry looked at them in the face and screamed at them, calling them terrible names. He wasn’t a big man... Did you ever meet him?”

I shook my head.

“He was very small.” Another smile. “Very small — behind his back my father called him a monkey. Affectionately. A monkey who thought he was a lion. It became a village joke and Larry didn’t mind at all. Perhaps the Muslims believed he was a lion. They never hurt him. Allowed him to take me away on the plane. A month after we got to New York, I was robbed on the street by a drug addict. Terrified. But the city never frightened Larry. I used to joke that he frightened it. My fierce little monkey. And now...”

She shook her head. Covered her mouth again and looked away. Several moments passed before I said, “Why did you move to Los Angeles?”

“Larry was unhappy at Sloan-Kettering. Too many rules, too much politics. He said we should move to California and live in this house — it was the best piece of property he’d bought. He thought it was foolish that someone else should enjoy it while we lived in an apartment. So he evicted the tenant — some kind of film producer who hadn’t paid his rent.”

“Why did he choose Western Pediatrics?”

She hesitated. “Please don’t be offended, Doctor, but his reasoning was that Western Peds was a hospital in... decline. Money problems. So his financial independence meant he’d be left alone to pursue his research.”

“What kind of research was he doing?”

“Same as always, disease patterns. I don’t know much about it — Larry didn’t like to talk about his work.” She shook her head. “He didn’t talk much at all. After the Sudan, the cancer patients in New York, he wanted nothing to do with real people and their pain.”

“I’ve heard he kept to himself.”

She smiled tenderly. “He loved to be alone. Didn’t even want a secretary. He said he could type faster and more accurately on his word processor, so what was the purpose?”

“He had research assistants, didn’t he? Like Dawn Herbert.”

“I don’t know names, but yes, from time to time he’d hire graduate students from the university, but they never met his standards.”

“The university over in Westwood?”

“Yes. His grant paid for lab assistance and there were tasks that he needn’t have bothered himself with. But he was never happy with the work of others. The truth is, Doctor, Larry just didn’t like depending on anyone else. Self-reliance became his religion. After my robbery in New York, he insisted we both learn self-defense. Said the police were lazy and didn’t care. He found an old Korean man in lower Manhattan who taught us karate, kick-fighting — different techniques. I attended two or three lessons, then stopped. It seemed illogical — how could our hands protect us against a drug addict with a gun? But Larry kept going and practiced every night. Earned a belt.”

“Black belt?”

“A brown one. Larry said brown was enough; anything more would have been ego.”

Lowering her face, she cried softly into her hands. I took a napkin from the lacquer tray, stood by her chair, and had it ready when she looked up. Her hand gripped my fingers hard enough to sting, then let go. I sat back down.

She said, “Is there anything else I can get you?”

I shook my head. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“No, thank you. Just your coming to visit was gracious — we don’t know many people.”

She looked around the room once more.

I said, “Have you made funeral arrangements?”

“Through Larry’s attorney... Apparently Larry planned it all out. The details — the plot. There’s a plot for me too. I never knew. He took care of everything... I’m not sure when the funeral will be. In these... cases, the coroner... Such a stupid way to...”

Her hand flew to her face. More tears.

“This is terrible. I’m being childish.” She dabbed at her eyes with the napkin.

“It’s a terrible loss, Mrs. Ashmore.”

“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” she said quickly. Suddenly her voice was hard, plated with anger.

I kept quiet.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose I’d better attend to business.”

I got up. She walked me to the door. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Delaware.”

“If there’s anything I can do—”

“That’s very kind, but I’m certain I’ll be able to handle things as they come up.”

She opened the door.

I said goodbye and the door closed behind me.

I began walking toward the Seville. The gardening noises had died and the street was beautiful and silent.