“Do you still have Aunt Amity’s phone book in your purse?” Scott asked. “And your phone?”
Her mouth full, Madeline nodded.
“I’m going to try to talk to that Ostriker character, if he’s still alive. Mom wrote that they might offer a finder’s fee to him, for whatever the blackmail information was, and she wrote that if he squawked, they’d tell him he should be grateful they’re not exposing him. I’d really like to know what fact they were blackmailing her with—what it was that she wouldn’t want known, and to whom.”
Madeline swallowed. “Call him right now?” When Scott nodded, she opened her purse and began digging through it. “What are you going to say?”
Scott’s headache had not receded much, and he considered ordering a beer; but it would upset Madeline.
“I don’t know,” he said. She had laid the phone book and her pink cell phone on the table, and he opened the book at the O tab and found Adrian Ostriker. He picked up the phone and tapped in the number.
The line buzzed five times, and then he got a recorded message in a gruff male voice: “You’ve reached who you’ve reached. Speak.”
“Mr. Ostriker,” Scott said, “I’m Scott Madden, nephew of Amity Speas, or Madden. You may have heard that she passed away last week. She left me a message to give to you—”
The phone clicked, and a man’s voice, more clearly now, said, “She’s the one that wrote those detective books. I read she died. A message?”
Scott was sweating. Forge on, he thought. “That’s right.”
“So what’s the message?”
“She made me promise to deliver it in person.”
“How did you get this number?”
“She gave it to me, sir.” Across the table, Madeline rolled her eyes, and Scott shrugged irritably.
“Why should I bother meeting you?”
“Oh—curiosity, I guess. If you don’t want to hear it, that’s fine; I’ve done my best to keep my promise.”
“I can whup your ass.”
It occurred to Scott to wonder if the man was drunk. It was only a little past eleven in the morning, but Scott could understand it.
Before Scott could think of a reply, the man went on, “You got a pencil?”
“Just a sec.” Scott made writing motions with his hand, and Madeline quickly pulled a pen and a wrinkled Taco Bell receipt out of her purse.
Scott took them and flattened out the receipt. “Yes.”
“What was her favorite movie?”
“Salomé,” said Scott. “Alla Nazimova.”
“Okay. You’re in L.A.?” When Scott confirmed it, the man gave him an address.“It’s up Laurel Canyon from Hollywood Boulevard. Go left, uphill, at Jorgensen Road.” He described a few more turns, and added, “Come alone.”
“Right,” said Scott, but the line had already gone dead.
He sat back and laid Madeline’s phone on the table. Madeline spread her hands.
“He wants me to go over there,” Scott said, “to his house, it sounds like.”
“Right now?” When Scott nodded, she pushed her plate away and said, “Let’s go.”
“I have to go alone. He specified it. You could drop me off back at Caveat and I could—”
“I don’t care what he specified. I am coming with you.”
“Maddy, he sounds crazy. He said ‘I could whup your ass.’ I couldn’t let you—”
“Oh, big brother. They were my parents too. What, he’s going to think I’m threatening?” She quickly slid the phone and the phone book back into her purse. “If you don’t let me come along, I’m going to call him back. His number’s right on my phone, I just have to touch it.”
Scott smiled sourly. “What are you going to say?”
“I’ll say . . . your real purpose is to sell him a solar water heater. Anyway, he must be pretty old by now, right? I don’t think he could really whup your ass.”
Scott stood up from the booth and dug out a couple of twenty-dollar bills from his pocket. “Okay. You’re probably safer at his place with me than at Caveat anyway.”
MADELINE DROVE WEST ON Franklin to avoid the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard two blocks south, and at Wilcox Scott told her to pull into the parking lot of a dry cleaner’s so that he could look at the cars that had been behind them; he didn’t see Louise’s white Saturn, or a white Chevy Blazer, but he told his sister to wait until half a dozen cars had gone by before resuming their route. She fluttered the gas pedal to keep the engine from stalling while they waited.
As she steered the car back into the lanes, Madeline was frowning and hesitantly turning her head back and forth as if her neck was stiff, but when Scott asked her if anything was wrong, she lifted one hand from the wheel and waved dismissively.
Apparently to change the subject, she said, “You’ve got cigarettes? Go ahead and smoke if you want. And don’t forget you’ve got to buy cookies somewhere. They were Pecan Sandies.”
“. . . Okay.”
Past Wilcox, Franklin narrowed to one lane each way, and all the buildings beyond the curbside trees seemed to be apartments; after another half a mile the street was interrupted by the broad, curling lanes of Highland Avenue, but Madeline managed to get into the southbound right lane and catch Franklin when it resumed its westward course around the white Gothic bell tower of the United Baptist Church. Then it was apartment buildings again, of more modern architecture, that swept past on either side.
“You’ll want to take La Brea down to Hollywood,” said Scott. He had lit a cigarette and rolled down the window, and the grass-scented morning breeze ruffled his hair.
“There’ll be another street after La Brea,” Madeline said.
“Why bother—” began Scott, but she had already pressed the gas pedal, and the old Datsun roared ahead and rocked right across the La Brea intersection.
“Okay,” said Scott, “what’s wrong with La Brea?”
“This isn’t out of our way,” said his sister stubbornly. “Just a little farther—it can’t be more than a block or two ahead . . .”
“What can’t be?”
She didn’t answer, but a few seconds later hit the brakes suddenly enough to make Scott grab the dashboard and drop his cigarette.
“There!” she said, pointing to her left.
Scott bumped his head retrieving his cigarette and peered irritably past her at a very new-looking brown-and-tan four-story apartment building with well-trimmed palm trees standing taller than the sidewalk ficus trees.
“There what?”
A car behind them honked, and Madeline let the car roll slowly forward, still looking at the building.
“Eyes front,” said Scott. “What about that place?”
Madeline finally looked away from it to the lanes ahead and sped up. “That’s where the house was, where Kosloff shot me! Shot Natacha. It must have been La Brea where the taxi driver turned right, on the way to that hospital.” She gave him a brief, wide-eyed glance. “It makes it seem more real, to see the actual place where it happened!”
“Well—”
“It’s still the actual place, Scott, even if the house is gone.”
She finally turned left at Camino Palmiero and drove between still more apartment buildings, these separated from the street by wide lawns and ranks of stately palm trees, and drove down to Hollywood Boulevard, where she turned right.
“Up Laurel Canyon?” she asked.
“That’s what he said.”
“I wonder what would happen if I was to knock on a door, at that place we just passed.”
Scott was nervously puffing on his cigarette again, trying to think of what to say to this Ostriker person, but he mentally replayed what his sister had just said. “You think Natacha would open it? Or Kosloff?”
“Neither of them would know me by sight. I’d ask for sanctuary.” She glanced sideways at him. “In her last-person novel, Aunt Amity wrote ‘when is a door not adore,’ spelled like—”
“I remember.??
? Whatever I say to Ostriker, Scott thought, I have to frame it as a message from our aunt.
“And when Aunt Amity used to knock on it and ask us that, the answer wasn’t ‘when it’s ajar.’ It was—”
“‘When it’s a wainscot.’ Paneling.”
“Maybe we misunderstood her. Maybe she was saying, ‘when it’s a way in, Scott.’”
I’ve got to somehow ask him about Mom and Dad, he thought. “Hm? Well, it’s not a way in to anything. There’s a solid wall behind it.”
At Laurel Canyon Boulevard Madeline followed the slanting lanes north, and now a brush-covered slope was on their left, and Scott glimpsed an occasional house fronting the road or half hidden behind trees to their right. Through his open window he caught the smells of sage and wild anise on the chilly breeze.
After half a mile, Scott tapped the windshield. “Left there.”
Madeline swung the little car left, by a dozen blue and green plastic recycling bins at the foot of a grassy slope, and the four-cylinder engine was roaring as she drove up a steep narrow road between stone walls and the trunks of tall oaks and chain-link gates barring private driveways.
After several sharp curves and a tight turn onto a narrower road, Scott said, “I think this must be it on our right. Watch for a driveway or something.”
A low stone wall, stepped down every dozen feet because of the incline, partially blocked dense greenery on that side; and then there was a gap, a stone arch with a tall cypress on either side, the one on the left sporting a green branch stuck out sideways like a cowlick.
Madeline steered the Datsun through the arch and then up a curling driveway that was a tunnel through vine-hung tree branches. The pavement leveled out as soon as the road below could no longer be seen, and she braked to a halt on a wide cement apron and clicked the gearshift into park.
They were in front of a two-story adobe house tucked back into the trees. A wooden verandah ran along the entire front, matched by a long balcony hung below the red-tiled roof. A new neon-green Ford pickup truck and a gleamingly maintained black 1970 convertible Camaro stood on the far side of the house.
Madeline switched off the engine, and the depth of the trees and the expanse of the clearing seemed to become bigger in the ensuing silence; Scott could hear birds calling, and the breeze fluttering through high branches.
He clearly heard Madeline whisper, “We don’t belong here.”
“Tell him he needs a solar water heater,” Scott whispered back as he levered open the passenger-side door and stepped out onto the pavement.
Together they walked across the damp cement to the steps and clumped up onto the boards of the verandah, and Scott knocked on the iron-banded door. He heard floorboards creak inside, and he was sure someone was looking out through the iron-ringed peephole.
“You should have shaved,” said Madeline, still whispering.
A bolt clunked back, and then the door swung inward, and a burly man with long dark hair and a short gray beard assessed Scott and Madeline with narrowed eyes. He was wearing a baggy olive-green flight suit that seemed to zip from ankle to neck, and his right hand was held out of sight behind him. His unlined face reminded Scott of Claimayne, and even with the beard he looked no older than fifty.
He didn’t step back. “You’re the kid that called,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Do you remember me telling you to come alone?”
“I didn’t have a car,” said Scott. “This is my sister.”
Ostriker stared at Madeline for several moments and then nodded, and Scott briefly wondered if the man somehow recognized her. Then his gaze swept back to Scott. “You’re here. What’s the message?”
Scott had considered several things he might say. “It was,” he said now, “‘I want to protect my son, Claimayne. Let Scott’—that’s me—‘see you burn the originals of the birth certificates and the marriage license and the photographs.’”
Scott was hoping this might get a useful response—as the “finder,” Ostriker must at least have known of the items at one time, whether or not he had actually possessed them.
Madeline clearly remembered their mother’s note too, for now she piped up, wide-eyed at her own temerity, “She said there was the risk of wheelbugs getting involved.”
Ostriker was smiling and frowning. “Birth certificates, marriage license? Photographs? What is this, genealogy?”
Scott shrugged. “She seemed to think you’d know what she meant.”
“And that’s a threat, isn’t it,” the man went on, “about wheelbugs? What have you got, somebody holding a letter that they’ll open if you don’t report back that I . . . gave you what you want? You little shit.” Scott could smell brandy on the man’s breath.
Ostriker stared out over their heads for a while, as a drop of sweat ran slowly down over Scott’s ribs and Madeline shifted her old Reeboks on the porch boards.
Finally Ostriker looked directly at Madeline again and bared his very white teeth in what might have been a grin. “Come into my parlor, my dear.” He pulled the door open wider and stepped well back, and beyond him Scott could see a broad, polished expanse of pale hardwood floor and a standing lamp with three round chrome reflectors.
Scott stepped past Ostriker over the threshold and heard Madeline shuffle in behind him. The door closed with a boom that echoed in big empty volumes of air.
“Walk ahead,” said Ostriker, “to the kitchen on the left.”
Scott took Madeline’s elbow and started across the broad living room, the floor creaking under their shoes. A long couch on a zigzag frame of blond wood stood against the wall on the right, below bookshelves on which the books had been arranged by the colors of their spines in a rainbow pattern. Several issues of GQ were fanned out on a coffee table that was a sheet of glass supported by arcs of polished wood.
The open kitchen area was all chrome and glass and white enamel—the only spots of color were the deep amber of a pear-shaped bottle of Hennessy cognac on the marble counter and the interrupted red and green rings on a dartboard on the wall beside the refrigerator.
“You two stand over there by the window,” Ostriker said, and when Scott and Madeline had shuffled back to the far side of the kitchen, he shook his head and stared at them.
Finally he swung his right hand out from behind his back and carefully laid a stainless-steel semiautomatic pistol on the counter.
“Amity,” he pronounced, shaking his head as he twisted the cap out of the brandy bottle. “I’d offer you a drink,” he said, “but all I have is the good stuff.” He lifted the bottle and took a sip right from the neck of it, then exhaled sharply and leaned sideways to brace himself against the wall with his free palm against the dartboard. Scott noticed that the twisted-wire numbers on the dartboard were the twelve numbers of a clock face, not the nonsequential twenty numbers of a standard dartboard.
Ostriker inhaled noisily. He had regained his balance and now laughed heartily. “Was she crazy in her old age? She named a kid Claymation? For one thing, there’s no such thing as ‘the originals’ of birth certificates. They issue certified copies.”
It occurred to Scott that a forged one would be an original.
“I can only tell you what she told me,” Scott said, wishing now that he’d thought of a better opening line. “You did know her?”
“What would it matter? She preferred women.”
“She got married,” said Madeline. “She had a son.”
“That settles that, then, doesn’t it?” Ostriker picked up the gun again. “What do you two really want? Did she leave some kind of suicide note, mentioning me?”
“No,” said Scott, “there was no—”
“How did she kill herself? The paper didn’t say.”
“She climbed onto the roof,” said Madeline, “with a grenade, and blew herself to pieces.”
“That doesn’t sound like a suicide.”
Scott blinked at him. It certainly didn’t sound like a murder.
Ostriker went o
n, “Did her foot ever heal?”
“She always limped,” said Scott. He shifted his own feet on the tiles, and Ostriker quickly pointed the gun straight at him, with his finger inside the trigger guard.
“Okay,” Ostriker said, “you’ve used up your bullshit allotment.”
“Wait,” Scott said hastily, “we did come here about birth certificates and the rest of it, but not because Aunt Amity asked us to.”
Ostriker kept the gun pointed at him. “Amateurs!” he said, almost spitting. “Is this some kind of dipshit blackmail?”
“No.” Scott licked his lips, aching for the man to point the gun somewhere else. “You knew our parents,” he said carefully, “Arthur and Irina Madden.”
“They talked to you in 1991,” spoke up Madeline. “They wanted to blackmail Aunt Amity. They left notes, and copies of her birth certificate and her mother’s, and her mother’s marriage license, and some . . . pictures. Your name was in the notes, in quotation marks. Put the gun down, mister, we just want to know what happened to our parents!”
And find a way to force Aunt Amity to rest in peace, thought Scott.
Ostriker exaggeratedly raised his eyebrows. “Art and Irina,” he said. “Fat little bald charlie, and a ratty-haired beanpole, right? That them?”
Scott kept his voice level. “They disappeared on New Year’s Eve of 1991. They wrote that they spoke to you.”
“Yeah, I remember ’em. Couple of fools. Quotation marks is cute.” With his free hand Ostriker hoisted the bottle and took another swallow of the brandy. “They, yeah, they wanted some dirt on your Amity, and they figured I’d know something because she and I had a . . . history. So she knew about me, even knew my phone number! But all these years she never bothered with me. That would have to be because”—he laughed and swayed, and Scott exhaled silently in relief when the gun’s muzzle wobbled away—“afterward she found something else, something better.”
Scott wondered if he meant a woman or his uncle Edward.
“Did you ever hear from our parents after 1991?” asked Madeline plaintively.
Ostriker stared at her, shaking his head, and Scott wondered again if the man somehow recognized her. “I got no time for losers—or their idiot kids rummaging around. You, Little Miss Muffet,” he said directly to Madeline, “are a kid poking your hand through the bars at a zoo.”