No Questions Asked

12

It was warm the next morning, warm for me anyhow, about 60 degrees and cloudy. I had a mediocre breakfast in a coffee shop that I found across the street. When I came back to the motel I called Max Spivey. He wanted to know where I was staying and where I planned to start.

“I thought I’d talk to Maude Goodwater first,” I said.

Spivey was silent for a moment. “I suppose that would be all right.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“She’s still pretty upset because of Jack Marsh.”

“I have to start somewhere.”

“She’s had to talk to a lot of people in the last few days. We’ve talked to her. The cops have talked to her. I don’t think she really wants to talk to anybody else.”

“I’ll try to be both polite and brief.”

There was another silence that lasted a few seconds before Spivey said, “Okay. I’ll give you her address and phone number.” He read off the phone number and I wrote it down. The address was on Malibu Road. “You know where that is?” he said.

“No, but I’ll find it.”

After Spivey hung up, I looked at my watch. It was 9:15. I wondered if Maude Goodwater would be up yet and decided to find out. She answered the phone on its third ring. She had a low, quiet voice over the telephone. I told her who I was and why I wanted to see her.

“Were you there?” she said.

“Where?”

“In Washington when Jack was killed?”

“Yes. I was there.”

There was a silence. I seemed to be running into them that morning. Then she said, “Will you tell me about it?”

“If you’d like me to,” I said.

“Yes, I think I would. Where are you staying?”

“At a motel on La Brea.”

“Why don’t we make it eleven o’clock?”

I told her that eleven would be fine, listened to her directions, and then hung up. After that I sat in the lime green plastic chair and read the Los Angeles Times for a while. There was an interesting article about some coyotes that had found their way into Beverly Hills and were causing all sorts of fuss.

When the knock sounded at the door I looked at my watch. It was 9:30. I opened the door and it was Guerriero, wearing a blue shirt, white duck slacks, and loafers. He was also carrying a white paper bag.

“I brought some coffee in case you hadn’t had any,” he said.

“I can use some more,” I said. “Come in.”

He came in and took two coffee containers out of the paper sack. “How do you take yours?” he said.

“Just sugar.”

He ripped open a small packet of sugar, dumped its contents into one of the coffees, stirred it, and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said. “How far is it to Malibu?”

“This time of day, about thirty or thirty-five minutes. Maybe less.”

“We can make it by eleven?”

He nodded. “No problem. We can even take the scenic route. It’s slower, but if you don’t have to be there until eleven, we’ve got plenty of time.”

“What’s the scenic route?”

“Sunset Boulevard all the way to the beach. Or we can take the Santa Monica freeway. Another way is to take Wilshire out to San Vicente. That’s pretty quick, too, if you don’t like freeways.”

“Let’s try Sunset,” I said.

Sunset Boulevard hadn’t changed much since I had last seen it a few years back. It looked a little more seedy perhaps, and the colors might have turned a bit gaudier. You could still get a massage, if you wanted to, or look at some all-nude girls, or have your fortune told, or buy a secondhand Rolls, or even get something to eat and a place to sleep. At the end of the Strip was something new, two tall black glass buildings that had a gloomy, brooding look about them that made me think of twin sentinels who had been posted there to make sure that the gamier backwash of the Strip didn’t slop over into the residential section of Beverly Hills.

It was spring in Beverly Hills and in Bel Air and in Brentwood and I decided that, all things considered, it must cost at least five dollars just to grow a daisy there. As we drove past I admired some of the architectural efforts, which would have looked more at home in Virginia or Cape Cod or maybe somewhere south of Paris. But each of them was home to somebody and, as always, I wondered what it was that the people who lived in them sold or produced or provided and whether they felt just a bit uneasy about it all.

Sunset twisted and curved and dipped and rose and dipped again on its way down to the sea. Guerriero kept the van at a steady forty-five, even on the trickier curves, and we slid around them nicely.

As we went past the east gates to Bel Air he jerked a thumb at them. “If we ever have a fuckin’ revolution in this country, that’s where it’s going to start,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Yeah. UCLA’s right next door, you know, so all you have to do is get the crazies there all fired up. Then the blacks and the Chicanos will come sweeping in from east L.A. and they’ll just burn the goddamned place down.”

“When do you think it’ll happen? The revolution, I mean.”

Guerriero shrugged. “Not soon. Things aren’t bad enough yet. They’re going to have to get real bad, like in the thirties, or worse.”

“Where’re you going to be when it comes,” I said, “on the barricades?”

He gave me a hard, crooked grin. “Out of town,” he said.

The Pacific Ocean was grey that day, not blue, and the long heavy swells rolled in and pounded themselves flat on the beach. Some seagulls were out investigating the possibilities for lunch while a number of self-important sandpipers trotted briskly up and down at the edge of the surf, making sure not to get their feet wet. A solitary stroller, his head bent, worked his way down the beach, stopping now and then to kick at something maybe strange and wonderful that lay half buried in the sand.

We rolled along the Pacific Coast Highway with the ocean on our left and some mud cliffs on our right, which gave way to hills that weren’t quite mountains. For a while, on the ocean side, there would be a row of some boxy-looking beach houses, a restaurant or two, some shops, and then a stretch of beach bordered by a parking lot. On our right were more shops and houses and fast-food places and delicatessens and then there would be what looked like an almost carefully marked-off stretch of hill and heather, or whatever it is that grows there by the sea, as though somebody had decided that right here we will give them a taste of greenery and then get back to the commercial junk.

It went on like that for seven or eight miles until we came to a small shopping center with a big Market Basket chain food store sign. We stopped at a light at Webb Way, turned left, and right again onto a narrow blacktop road that hugged the beach and was almost completely lined with houses.

“This is it,” Guerriero said. “Malibu Road. A lot of them live along here.”

“Who?”

“Picture people.”

Although there were a couple of architectural adventures among them, most of the houses were of conventional-enough design. A few of them were even small enough to be called cottages, and nearly all of them were built out on pilings that had been driven deep into the sand.

“The Colony’s back that way,” Guerriero said. “They keep a guard on the gate to discourage the riffraff. Along here it’s not quite so fancy. You can probably buy one of these places for maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand.”

The house numbers along Malibu Road ran high, up into the 24,000’s, and the number we were looking for was attached in metal letters to a high brown cinderblock wall that ran for fifty or sixty feet before it ended at a two-car garage. Behind and above the wall I caught a glimpse of a white-graveled, sloping shed roof and some shake shingles, but it was only a glimpse because the high wall did just what it was intended to, which was insure complete privacy.

Guerriero parked the van along the wall in front of a No Parking sign.

“I’ll wait for you,” he said.

“I shouldn’t be long.”

I got out of the van and moved down to the wooden gate in the wall. It was open and I went through it. Behind the gate was a patio bordered by all kinds of succulent shrubs and bushes and small twisted trees that seemed to thrive in the sea air. Nearly all of them looked ripe and juicy and just on the verge of bursting into bloom, although I wasn’t sure that any of them ever did.

The patio grounds were covered with irregular pieces of slate that had been cleverly fitted together, like a jigsaw puzzle. Growing in the inch-wide cracks between the pieces of slate was green grass, cropped short and carefully tended. Here and there were a couple of lounges for sunning, a round metal table with a glass top, some metal chairs, and a metal barbecue affair with an electric motor to drive the grill.

I crossed the patio and went down three steps and rang an ivory-colored button. The door opened almost immediately and I got my first look at Maude Goodwater.

I must have had a preconceived notion of what she would look like — probably something blond and brittle and tall with too much green eye shadow. But she wasn’t very tall, not over five-five, and her hair wasn’t blond, but rather a thick, glossy black that hung straight down until it curved up and under itself just at the base of a slender neck.

Her eyes were green, really green like dark wet jade, and her high cheekbones made them seem to slant a little bit, although they probably didn’t. She had a nice enough nose and a full wide mouth and perhaps not quite enough chin, although there were many who would probably argue that it was just right.

Altogether it was a striking face, the kind that you would turn to look at because it just escaped being pretty and went into something that was richer than pretty and therefore more memorable. It could even have been beauty, although I’m still not sure.

She wore a sleeveless blue blouse and white pants and white sandals and nothing else, not even makeup, not that she would ever need it with that smooth skin that seemed to glow with its light tan.

She looked at me and tilted her head slightly to one side, as though she were looking at a curious picture that she couldn’t quite decide about, and said, “Hello, Mr. St. Ives, I’m Maude Goodwater.”

Then she held out her hand and gave mine a firm shake and stood back so that I could go through the door. As I went past her I looked carefully at her green eyes, but they didn’t seem to have done much crying recently.

I stood there in a small foyer with its white stucco walls and its cool grey tiles and waited for her to indicate which way we should go. She made a small gesture and I followed her into a large room that somebody had cleverly decorated with the Pacific Ocean.

The glass did it, of course. It ran from floor to ceiling on two sides and it seemed to bring the sea almost into the living room. There was a redwood deck that served to cut off the view of the beach so that, on first glance, the house seemed to be perched out over the ocean.

The sea made it hard to notice the rest of the furniture, but I remember some easy chairs in muted colors, a couch, a fireplace, some paintings and a few rugs here and there. But it was the ocean that demanded your attention and the only thing in the room that really competed with it was Maude Goodwater.

She indicated that I could try the couch, if I liked, so I sat down. She chose one of the easy chairs.

“It’s a remarkable view,” I said.

She nodded. “You never get tired of it. I’ve been trying to save the house, but I’m afraid that’s going to be impossible. I’m putting it up for sale. This house, Mr. St. Ives, is all that’s left of a rather large fortune accumulated by a man who didn’t understand much about money.”

“Your father?”

“Yes.”

“There’s also the book, the Pliny book.”

“Yes, I was counting on its sale. There’ll be the insurance money now, of course, but most of that will go for back taxes and debts.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all.”

I lit a cigarette. That gave me time to think about where I should start. I decided that the beginning would be as good a place as any. It usually is. “I was wondering how you went about finding a buyer for the book?”

“I’m afraid I turned that over to Jack,” she said. There was a silence as she looked away from me and out at the ocean. She was still looking at the ocean when she said, “Since Jack was killed I’ve been trying to sort out my feelings. It hasn’t been easy.”

“I can imagine.”

“I was very fond of Jack.” She looked at me. “That’s not really true. I loved him. As you probably know, we were living together.”

I nodded since there was really nothing to say.

“When he was killed and I found out what he had done, I didn’t stop loving him. I was hurt at first, I suppose, and bitter and deeply disappointed, but I went right on loving him and missing him and damning him for what he had done. I’m just now getting accustomed to thinking of him as dead. I still miss him very much. After a while, maybe I’ll learn to hate him, but I don’t think so because it would be such a waste of time. So to help me get over it, I mean all of it, it might be best if you told me how he got killed. It might help me realize — well, the finality of it all.”

She turned her head to look at the ocean while I told her. When I described how Fastnaught had come out of the snow to shoot Jack Marsh a tremor ran through her body but nothing changed in her face. She turned to look at me.

“So it wasn’t a trick? I mean you were really trying to buy the book back?”

“Yes.”

She smiled, but there was more regret in it than anything else. “Although I knew it wasn’t possible, I was hoping that you would turn out to be something entirely different.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe somebody who had a cigar stub in his mouth and looked slightly sinister and conspiratorial. Somebody I could blame for Jack’s death and who would confess that it was all a horrible mistake and that Jack was innocent.”

I shook my head. “He wasn’t.”

“No, I know that. I haven’t accepted it yet, but I know it.”

“I wonder if we could get back to how you, or Marsh, I suppose, went about finding a buyer for the book?”

Maude Goodwater rose and moved over to the glass and looked out at the sea. “Hindsight is very useful, isn’t it?”

“Useful and painful,” I said.

“I had gone over my financial situation with my attorney. I won’t bother you with the mess I’m in, but it’s bad. Very bad. So it was decided that I should sell this place and the book. By doing so I could pay off the debts and the taxes and have something left over. Not too much, but enough to last a year or so. I discussed it with Jack, of course, and he offered to arrange for the sale of the book. He said he had certain contacts that he could use to secure the highest possible price. I believed him, of course. Why shouldn’t I?”

“No reason.”

She turned from the glass and the sea and came back to the chair and sat down. “Jack brought a man out to see me, a most curious little man. I don’t mean to use ‘little’ in the pejorative sense, but the man was really quite small.”

“Did he have a name?” I said.

“Ambrose. Felix Ambrose. We discussed the book and Ambrose seemed quite knowledgeable. He used all sorts of rather esoteric jargon that sounded most impressive — to me, at least. He said that he had a buyer for the book who would pay seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but who insisted on anonymity.

“How much would Ambrose get?”

“He asked for two percent as his finder’s fee.”

“Fifteen thousand dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ask for any in advance?”

“No. He didn’t.”

“Did he say why the buyer insisted on remaining anonymous?”

“He said that the buyer was very rich and very eccentric and hated publicity of any kind.”

“But was just crazy about rare old books.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s the impression I got. I must be awfully naive. There probably never was a buyer, was there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m beginning to doubt if there was one who was willing to pay three-quarters of a million.”

“It’s so ridiculous, isn’t it? I’ve told all this to the police and to some insurance company investigators that Max Spivey asked me to see, and every time I tell it I have the feeling that I’m not talking about myself. I seem to be talking about some innocent little old lady who’s just been fleeced out of her life savings. But that’s not me. I always thought of myself as rather — well, I guess worldly. I watched my father die a broken man. I went through a nasty marriage and an even worse divorce. I’ve had my share of lovers — both men and women, if that matters. I’ve tried drugs. I even got terribly rebellious once and tried earning my own living for a couple of years and that was a real eye-opener. So I thought I knew what it was all about — out there in the big world where bad things happen. But this—” She shook her head. “This is just absurd.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” I said. “You got taken by someone you seem to have loved and trusted. It wouldn’t make it hurt any less for me to tell you how often it happens, so I won’t.”

She used a forefinger to wipe something away from her left eye. It may have been a tear although I don’t think so.

“It does happen to other people, doesn’t it?”

“Every day.”

“And what do they do about it?”

“Just about what you’re doing. They blame themselves mostly. After a while they get angry, really angry, and when the anger’s directed at somebody else instead of themselves it seems to help. Not much, but some.”

She chewed on her lower lip for a while as if thinking about something. “You haven’t given me any great advice, have you?”

“No.”

“But talking about it helps, doesn’t it? Just talking about it.”

“Almost always. If I weren’t here, you could find a priest or a psychiatrist or just somebody on a park bench. The result is often pretty much the same.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Sure, if you’re having one.”

“I am,” she said and rose and moved over to a small bar that was near the dining table, which was the kind that had a chrome frame and legs and a glass top.

“It’s not too early for martinis, is it?”

“Probably.”

“Well, we’ll have one anyway.”

She mixed them in a small pitcher and poured them into a couple of glasses. She carried them over and handed me one. After she took a sip she tried to grin and she almost made it. “Okay,” she said, “what else do you want to know about that son of a bitch, Jack Marsh?”

I smiled at her. “A couple of personal things.”

“Go ahead.”

“What kind of financial shape was he in?”

“Well, we had one of those oh-so-sensible, oh-so-modern arrangements. He lived here and we split expenses. He gave me a check every month for seven hundred and fifty dollars and I paid the bills — food, the mortgage, utilities, things like that. He was sort of a star boarder, I guess.”

“Did he spend a lot?”

She nodded. “He blew it — on clothes and that car of his and the track and in Vegas. I guess all. I really know is that he was always broke. Or said he was.”

“What about his business?”

“He worked hard, I’ll say that for him. But we never talked much about it. His cases, I mean. When he moved in here he moved his office from Hollywood out to Santa Monica. The commuting was better.”

“Did he have anybody working for him?”

“Just a secretary. Her name’s Virginia Neighbors and she’s in the book.”

“You wouldn’t have a key to his office, would you?”

Maude Goodwater looked at me over the rim of her glass. “You know, I thought there was something familiar about you.”

“What?”

“You ask questions the same way he used to. Jack, I mean. There’s that same low-key inflection. Both, of you would ask the time of day the same way you’d say, ‘And after you got through stabbing him with the butcher knife, Mrs. Smith, what did you do then?’ ”

“It’s sort of a trick,” I said.

“Did you used to be a detective?”

“No. I was a reporter once.”

“Same thing.”

“Detectives don’t think so, although some reporters do. What about the key?”

She went over and picked up her purse from where it was lying in a leather chair. She took out a ring and removed one key. She looked at it and then came over and handed it to me. “I wonder if that’s smart?” she said.

“I’m trying to find out what happened. Whether it’s smart or not depends on whether you really want to know.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “I think I do. At first, all I wanted to do was forget it, but now I think I want to find out what he was really like. I’m still not sure. I’ve got the feeling that I’ve been living with some stranger.”

“When I find out something, I’ll let you know.”

She looked around the room. “You like it out here?”

“Very much.”

“Maybe when you find out something, you could come to dinner. I’m a pretty good cook. What I’m really saying is that I’m probably not through wanting to talk about it and I just don’t want to go down to a park to find a friendly ear. Maybe... maybe we could even get to be friends. I’ve never been that with a man. You know, just friends.”

“We could try,” I said.

“I’ve talked a lot, haven’t I?”

“Not really.”

“Nothing else you’d like to know?”

“Is there something else you remember about the little man, Felix Ambrose?”

She wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember. “He was about five feet tall and he dressed rather oddly. I mean for out here. He wore one of those old-fashioned salt and pepper suits with a vest and a bow tie and he spoke well, but as if he had somehow trained himself to do it. You know what I mean?”

I nodded and closed my eyes for a moment because something was happening to my memory. Something was poking at it, trying to tear through. Closing my eyes didn’t help so I opened them and said, “Anything else?”

She thought for a moment “Jack called him Doc a couple of times. Not Doctor, but Doc. I didn’t think anything of it then, but I do now.”

The sharp stick that had been poking at my memory tore through. I sighed. “He carried a cane, didn’t he? A silver-headed cane.”

The surprise in her face was real. “Why, yes, he did. I’d almost forgotten. You know him, don’t you?”

“I did a long time ago, but his name isn’t Felix Ambrose, it’s really Harry Amber, although sometimes he’s called Doc Amber because after he got through being a jockey he doped racehorses, and after he got out of jail for doing that, he turned himself into a pretty successful con man down in Florida — Miami mostly, but sometimes Palm Beach.”

“Then it was a fake from the beginning, wasn’t it? This man Ambrose or Amber couldn’t possibly have had a buyer for the book.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Doc Amber knows a lot of people. When you told the police about him, did they seem to know who he was?”

“No, they just wanted to know whether I knew how to get in touch with him or where he lived.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I told them to try the phone book.”