The Murder of Miranda

Part VII

Shortly after Miranda Shaw was arrested Aragon went out to the county jail to see her. He was escorted to one of the consulting rooms, which was the size of a shoebox and smelled of disinfectant flowing in through the air conditioner along with cold dry air and the inescapable noises of an institution.

A policewoman brought Miranda as far as the door and then left, or appeared to leave. Aragon had the feeling she was standing just outside in the corridor.

He said, “Hello, Mrs. Shaw,” but she didn’t answer or even glance at him.

She had changed during the weeks since he’d talked to her in the cabana at the Penguin Club. The makeup around her eyes only emphasized their dullness and her face seemed frozen under its layers of pink and ivory. She’d been allowed to wear her own clothes instead of the cotton dress which was the women’s uniform. She had on a blue faille suit that made her look as if she were on her way to a cocktail party and had just dropped in at the jail for a visit with some erring relative.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

“Are you. Well, that doesn’t change a thing, does it?”

“I thought you’d like to be told anyway.”

“Thanks.”

They sat down on steel and plastic chairs riveted to the floor.

“Smedler sent me,” he said. “He wanted you to know that Admiral Young is arranging bail for you. It’s taking time because of the amount of money involved, a hundred thousand dollars. Though that’s much too high under the circumstances, there’s nothing we can do about it, the judge has an ulcer and quotes Scripture. However, you should be out of here by tomorrow morning.”

“Then what?”

“A trial date will be set, which won’t be definite because there’ll probably be a number of postponements. You can figure on three or four months minimum.”

“And where do I spend these three or four months?”

“Not here, that’s the important thing.”

“I have nowhere to go. I can’t very well return to the Admiral’s house. It wouldn’t look right and I wouldn’t feel right with those girls following me around, spying on me. They’d enjoy that, it would be like a new game to them.”

“Or not so new.”

She clutched the steel arms of the chair. He noticed that most of the coral polish on her nails had been chipped or peeled off and the nails themselves bitten. “Did they say evil things about me to the grand jury?”

“Evil? No.”

“Why does Cooper want to bail me out?”

“He thinks you’re innocent. A lot of people do.”

“It’s too bad some of them weren’t on the grand jury.”

“Some of them were,” Aragon said. “The vote of fourteen to five means that five people were against the indictment. After going over the transcript, Smedler agrees with them and so do I. Not only is the D.A.’s case weak, he broke half the rules of evidence in presenting it. He won’t be able to get away with that kind of stuff when the actual trial comes up... Do you feel like answering some questions?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Suppose we find out.”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you ever buy the Admiral any presents?”

“Of course not.”

“Both the girls claim they overheard him thanking you.”

“They’re mistaken. Surely nobody believed them. Why should I, living on a pitifully small salary, buy presents for Cooper with all his money? It’s ridiculous.”

“People do ridiculous things.”

“In this case two people heard ridiculous things. Surely nobody believed them,” she said again.

“The fact that both girls claim to have overheard it may make it twice as believable.”

“But the two of them are always in cahoots about everything.”

“I think we can find ways to establish that when the time comes.” He consulted the page of notes Smedler had made when he read the transcript of the hearing. “One of the points brought up was that you refused an invitation to go to a fireworks display at the club on the grounds that you didn’t want to leave Mrs. Young alone. Yet you left her alone anyway.”

“I walked the dog.”

“A couple of hours earlier than usual.”

“Yes. She asked me to. She said Alouette was acting sick. Heaven knows, that was nothing unusual. She fed the poor creature absurd things like chocolate éclairs and cheesecake.”

“At dinner that night you removed the candlesticks from the table because the flickering lights were giving Mrs. Young a migraine. Where did you put them?”

“On the buffet.”

“Then at that time both candlesticks would have had your fingerprints on them. Did you handle either of them again?”

“No. I had no reason to.”

Aragon felt encouraged. Though she couldn’t, under the circumstances, have been enjoying herself, at least she was coming to life. Her eyes were getting brighter and a trace of animation showed on her face.

He said, “A bottle of Dalmane was found in your medicine cabinet. Do you take it regularly?”

“No. Hardly ever. I’ve been afraid of drugs ever since that clinic in Mexico.”

“There were only six capsules left.”

“Six? That’s impossible. The bottle was nearly full the last time I noticed it.”

“And you don’t know what happened to the rest?”

“No.”

“Did anyone have access to your room?”

“It was cleaned twice a week by one of the day staff. Otherwise I kept it locked. I’m not positive, but I suspect the girls had learned some method of unlocking it. Occasionally items would be in a slightly different place from where I’d left them, or a drawer would be partly open.”

“They picked the lock with a credit card,” he said. “That’s how they knew about the lingerie from the bridal shop.”

“I see.”

“You bought it on June the sixth.”

“Around then, yes.”

“Why?”

“For my marriage to Cooper. I had to have a decent trousseau.”

“Mrs. Young was still alive at the time.”

“Yes, but she didn’t stay alive. Wasn’t it a nice coincidence that she—”

“Be quiet. I mean, for God’s sake, don’t say things like that. It wasn’t nice and a lot of people think it wasn’t a coincidence.”

“Well, you don’t have to be so mean about it. I see things from my standpoint and you see them from yours.”

“For the next few months we’re going to be sharing a standpoint. Mine.” In spite of the air conditioning he had begun to sweat. He loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt. “In fact, from now on you’ve got to consider yourself on trial. Watch what you say, what you do. Be careful where you go and with whom.”

“It would be simpler if I just stayed here in jail,” she said bitterly. “I might as well if I have no rights left, if I can’t even see the people I want to.”

“That depends on what people you want to see.”

“I won’t tell you. You’ll only get mean again if I do.”

“Grady Keaton. Is he one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because we love each other. And I must explain to him that whatever I did was for the two of us, so we could be together.”

“I think we should avoid bringing Grady into the case if we can,” Aragon said.

“What difference does it make?”

“It may seem peculiar in this day and age, but juries are more likely to vote for a conviction if sexual misconduct is involved. The events leading up to and down from Pasoloma — or down to and up from if you want to be geographical — can do you a lot of harm.”

“I want to see Grady.”

“I’m advising you not to, for the time being anyway. If you have a message for him, let me deliver it.”

She was silent for a long time, staring at the blank grey wall as though it were her window on the world.

“I love him,” she said finally. “Tell him I love him and when all this silly fuss is over we’ll be together again.”

The front doors of the club were propped open with rubber wedges and taped with Fresh Paint signs. There was no one in the office. Aragon walked in unchallenged.

Under a shroud of late-summer fog the terrace was deserted and in the pool only one swimmer was visible, a large woman moving slowly through the water like an overloaded barge.

In the corridor Walter Henderson, the manager, was occupied at the bulletin board tacking up some of the pictures from the last party, a backgammon and bingo tournament. By Henderson’s standards it had been a dull affair, with a great deal of confusion about who was playing what, and he was trying to plan something more dynamic for the next theme party, which would fall on Halloween. Since the social-events committee had vetoed any more money for decorations, he was working on a clever way to use the life-sized plastic skeletons from the previous Halloween. A Gallows Gala might be effective, with each of the skeletons dressed as a famous murderer or murderee and strategically placed throughout the club and its grounds, hanging from the diving tower and from a limb of the cypress tree (very effective if there was a decent wind), peeking into the ballroom windows from the oleander hedge, even sitting on one of the toilets in the ladies’ powder room. (What delicious screams — he could hear them now: Help, help!)

—“could help me,” Aragon said.

Henderson was jolted back to reality as the skeletons fell from the diving tower and out of the tree and off the toilet. “Oh, damn. What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Ellen Brewster.”

“She’s in the office.”

“No.”

“Well, she’s supposed to be in the office. But of course, that doesn’t mean a thing around here. Try the snack bar. She’s been drinking coffee by the gallon lately.”

“Thanks.”

Aragon went down the corridor to the snack bar. A couple of the tables were occupied by boys and girls in tennis costume. Little Frederic Quinn was among them, his tennis racket stuck in the back of his sweater in order to leave his hands free for shooting straws out of their paper sheaths. He acknowledged Aragon’s presence by shooting a straw at him. It missed.

Ellen was sitting at a corner table with a pot of tea in front of her and a doughnut with a bite taken out of it. She looked cold.

He said, “May I sit down?”

“I guess.”

“Anything the matter?”

“I hate the summer fogs. They depress me. Winter fogs are natural, you expect them and you’re depressed anyway and — Oh hell, the fog has nothing to do with it. I feel lousy, that’s all.”

“Sorry.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To see Grady,” Aragon said. “I have a message for him.”

“Really? Well, you’re about forty-eight hours too late. He took off as soon as he heard the news about Miranda. Oh, I think he wanted to leave anyway, I could see him getting restless, bored. Miranda’s arrest simply brought it to a head. He was afraid she’d drag him into it and the whole business about the Porsche would come out and maybe a lot of other stuff as well.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address. He just patted me on the head, told me I was a nice girl and packed his bags.” She had begun crumbling the doughnut and rolling the pieces into greasy little pills. “Want to hear something funny? I lent him fifty dollars.”

Frederic aimed a straw in her direction. It hit her on the side of the head but she paid no attention.

“Tell Miranda,” she said, “tell her he wanted to say goodbye to her but he had to leave right away because a chance for a decent job came up very suddenly. In Oklahoma.”

“A chance for a job came up very suddenly in Oklahoma.”

“Yes.”

“She won’t believe it.”

“Why not?” Ellen said. “I did.”

The indictment and arrest of Miranda also led to some less predictable events.

In early fall Cordelia, free of the restraint of her mother and to a large extent of the Admiral, who was preoccupied, bought an Aston-Martin guaranteed by the dealer to go one hundred and thirty miles an hour. Anxious to determine the accuracy of this claim, Cordelia chose for the test a side road that was practically deserted. When she floored the accelerator, only one other car was in sight, but unfortunately it belonged to an off-duty patrolman.

Cordelia’s defense was that nearly everything in the Aston-Martin was computerized and something must have gone wrong with the circuits controlling the speedometer. Her driver’s license was revoked anyway and she took up bicycling. Clad in matching jogging suits and plastic helmets the girls pedaled around town on a bright red tandem equipped with a horn on the main handlebars for Cordelia and a bell at the rear for Juliet.

Juliet had some criticism of this arrangement, which pretty well limited her view: “Your behind is enormous.”

“What do I care,” Cordelia said. “I’m in front.”

In late September, Frederic Quinn was, for a price, reinstated at Sophrosune School. For his first report in Social Studies class he chose a black widow spider. After spending two days (and a hundred and fifty demerits) in the search he found a specimen underneath a gopher trap in the garage and brought it to school in his sister April’s Lucite earring box. By this time the spider had lost a couple of legs and considerable joie de vivre as well as joie de tuer. However, the red hourglass on its abdomen was still visible, identifying it as dangerous.

“Get that damn thing out of here,” the teacher said. “You’re supposed to be making your report on a current event from the newspaper.”

“I am. It was in all the newspapers how a woman I know personally was arrested for murder just like a black widow spider stinging her mate to death, only it wasn’t her mate—”

“Put it in the wastebasket.”

“This is my sister’s best earring box. She’ll kill me.”

“You have a choice,” the teacher said. “Her or me.”

It was in mid-November, after Miranda’s trial had been postponed for a third time, that Charles Van Eyck received the letter from Tokyo. He didn’t know anyone in Tokyo, and those of his acquaintances financially able to travel in the Orient were no longer physically able.

There was no doubt, however, that the letter was meant for him. The envelope was neatly typed Charles Maas Van Eyck, 84 °Camino Azur, Santa Felicia, California, and even the zip code was correct. Still he hesitated to open it. At his age bad news outnumbered good by a considerable margin and he felt it would be wise to prepare himself for the worst with a glass of the best. He poured himself half a tumbler of Scotch from the decanter in his den.

It was a cold drizzly day, exactly the kind he remembered from his trips to Scotland — hardly any wonder the natives had invented Scotch, it was a simple matter of survival — so he lit the logs laid tepee style in the grate, avocado prunings, grey and smooth and no bigger than a child’s arm. Then, using his thumbnail as a paper knife, he slit open the envelope.

The receptionist in the District Attorney’s office wore a uniform of a mustard color which made Van Eyck quite nauseated.

He said faintly, “Some time ago, July, I believe it was, I wrote the D.A. a letter about the Iris Young case.”

“What is the name, please?”

“My name or the name on the letter?”

“I thought you said you wrote it.”

“I did. But I didn’t sign it. I never do. I mean, there are so many things one can express better without signing a name.”

“I’m sure one can,” the woman said. “But when you do sign a name, what do you sign?”

“I believe in this case it was Fair Play. That’s not important, however. I mentioned my letter to the D.A. merely to introduce — or rather to let it be known that my interest in the case is—”

“Wait here a moment, Mr. Play.”

“No, no. I’m not Mr. Play.”

“But you just said—”

“Forget about the name. The important thing is that I’ve just had a revelation, a most astonishing revelation.”

“We don’t have time for revelations in this department, especially those induced by alcohol. And you have been drinking, haven’t you, Mr. Play?”

“I told you I’m not Mr. Play. I don’t even know anybody called Mr. Play.”

“Then why did you sign his name to a letter?”

“Oh God,” Van Eyck said and turned and ran.

Back home he poured himself another tumbler of Scotch. Then he threw some more avocado logs in the grate and put the letter from Tokyo on top of them.

It flamed briefly, turned black, turned grey, and rode the updraft into the chimney.

Dear me, he thought with a little twinge of surprise. I believe I’ve just murdered Miranda.