Bum Steer

  37

  For once, the sun was shining in Kansas City.

  “Mr. Brady will see you now, Ms. Cain.”

  His legal secretary reminded me of my assistant, Faye, back home, so I gave her a particularly warm smile. She looked surprised and offered to bring me coffee.

  “Hello, Jenny.”

  Dwight Brady stood up behind his desk to greet me.

  “What a nice coincidence,” he said. “You’ve come just in time to meet one of the heirs. Jennifer Cain, may I present one of Mr. Benet’s other daughters—”

  “Suanna!” I cried.

  “Jenny!” she exclaimed.

  Brady sank back down in his chair.

  “Jenny, you’ll never believe what’s happened!” I sat down in the chair next to her. The stiff, shy woman from Winnetka was transformed; this new woman had a new suit and a new hairdo and she was nearly bouncing with excitement about something. “We have found the money! Father didn’t steal it! At least, not exactly. He put all of it in an ordinary bank account, where it couldn’t earn interest, and he left it all there.”

  I stared. “All of it? All of this time?”

  “Yes, isn’t that amazing? I have just been telling Mr. Brady that there is not one cent missing.”

  “Why, Suanna?”

  “Because he was insanely jealous of the fact that Mother had been married before to a rich, attractive man. He couldn’t stand to let her have the independence the money would have given her.” Suanna’s voice suddenly deepened and thickened with emotion. “And given us. He is a sick, jealous, stupid man.”

  Brady asked, “How did you find out, Ms. Railing?”

  “We didn’t,” Suanna said. “We were still busy getting ourselves a lawyer and planning our attack when Father confessed all of this.”

  “No!” I said. I could not imagine that was true.

  “Yes, we don’t know what happened, except that maybe he was in a weakened condition, and he may even have been affected by the medication.”

  Brady and I glanced at each other. He looked every bit as confused as I felt.

  “What medication?” I asked.

  “The drugs he’s on for the pain.”

  “Suanna—”

  “Oh! Of course, you don’t know! Mother and Father’s house was broken into the other night. The burglar didn’t actually steal anything, but he beat up Father. The police think Father must have surprised him in the act, and that’s why he was attacked. I suppose he’s lucky he wasn’t killed.” The dubious expression on her face testified to the ambivalent feelings she had about that narrow escape. “Father’s nose is broken, and his jaw is dislocated, and he has a lot of bruises. Oh, he is really a mess.”

  She said it with enormous, undisguised satisfaction.

  I said, “And it was right after this happened that he … confessed, Suanna?”

  “Yes, the very next day in the hospital. He insisted on telling Mark and me all about it! He acted as if he just had to get it off his chest, as if he just couldn’t wait another minute to do it!”

  I looked over at Brady. He held my gaze steadily.

  “Suanna,” I said, “was there only one burglar?”

  “He wasn’t sure about that, Jenny.”

  “And I don’t suppose he can describe anyone?”

  “No, they wore stocking masks.”

  “That’s what your father said?”

  “Yes.”

  Brady interrupted. “Do you want to initiate any legal action against your adoptive father, Ms. Railing?”

  She sighed, and some of the exuberance seeped out of her. “Mark and I haven’t decided what to do about that. We’re kind of afraid of the effect”—she sneaked a glance at the lawyer—“that might have on Mother. Anyway, Father says he will let Mother divorce him, which is what she has wanted to do for so many years. And frankly, that may settle it for us. We can’t erase the last sixteen years, but with Father gone, at least we can begin to try to enjoy the years to come.”

  “I wish you luck,” I said, knowing they would need it.

  “We’re very grateful to you, Jenny.”

  “Why?” Brady asked sharply.

  “Oh,” Suanna started to say, “she—”

  “Why are you here?” I asked her quickly.

  “To talk to Mr. Brady about our inheritance.” Suanna Railing smiled. “Mark and I decided that I didn’t have to phone him. I can afford to fly down personally to see him. So I did. I think we’ve settled all of our business, haven’t we, Mr. Brady?”

  “I believe so,” he said.

  “So I’ll let you talk to him now, Jenny.”

  She surprised me again by embracing me before she left his office. “I thought I’d call my stepsisters while I’m here in Kansas City, Jenny. I tried calling a number at the address you gave me for Ladd Benet in Texas, but the operator told me that number had been disconnected. Do you know where I might be able to reach him now?”

  I suggested that she contact him through Miss Rose Sachet in Fort Worth. Let Miss Rose tell her, I thought, that her cousin won’t want to hear from her. I just didn’t have the heart to do it when she was feeling so high and hopeful.

  After Suanna left, Brady said to me, “It’s a nice day. Let’s take a walk.”

  38

  It was a long walk, all the way from his office south of the Country Club Plaza to a Vietnam veterans’ memorial on Broadway. Luckily, I was in flat-heeled shoes, so if he thought he’d torture the truth out of me—about where I’d been and what I’d been doing—by making me walk twenty blocks in stiletto heels, he should have first looked at my footwear.

  For the first five blocks, he tried to worm out of me where I had been for the last week. I found numerous ways of saying, essentially, “nowhere.” He quizzed me about Suanna Railing, about how I knew her, where I’d met her, what she had meant by thanking me. To all of that, I hedged, fudged, and equivocated. He finally gave up, and for the remainder of the walk we discussed the transfer of the Crossbones Ranch to the Port Frederick Civic Foundation.

  When we reached the memorial, Brady sighed down onto a concrete bench and said, “I like to come here for some reason. I wasn’t even in this war. But I guess this reminds me that I am not the only man in the world ever to make foolish mistakes. It reminds me that there are victims of worse things than divorce cases. It reminds me that there are a lot of men of my generation who might like to be alive to have what I call problems: too much work, too little time.” He gestured toward the names of the Kansas City soldiers engraved on the monument wall. “They know what it means not to have enough time.”

  “Or maybe they know time is not the question.”

  Much of the memorial consisted of a series of fountains that poured into each other, like separate pieces of experience contributing to a general pool of feeling. I recalled what the psychiatrist had told the Hyatt waiter: wounds that aren’t allowed to close can never heal. I hoped this memorial was a stitch in the closing of some wounds.

  “Something’s not right about this bequest, Dwight.”

  He sighed. “I know.”

  “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “No.” He glanced at me. “Honestly, I don’t.”

  “Do you know, really, why he left us the ranch?”

  He had his legs apart, his hands clasped between them, and he was staring at the fountains. “I think they don’t want anybody to know what’s going on down there. And no, I don’t know what that is. But I think that’s the answer.”

  “Only part of it, I’m afraid.”

  “I knew it,” he said in a low voice.

  “Knew what?”

  “Knew something was fishy. Here was this rich rancher who comes up from another state where he undoubtedly had plenty of attorneys working for him at one time or another. But who does he pick to do his will? Me, somebody who doesn’t know anything about him, or even about ranching.”

  “Like me, like my foundation.”

  “Exactl
y. Only I was too greedy to question it.”

  “Well, it was a chance for a big client.”

  Brady shrugged, not forgiving himself, and for the first time I liked him a little.

  “Did you like Mr. Benet, Dwight?”

  “He was all right.”

  “How many times did you meet with him?”

  “Ten, twelve.”

  “Was he clear about what he wanted?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “How was he to work with?”

  “Difficult at first, until I caught on to the fact that he was never impulsive. He would never commit himself to a decision without first thinking it over. I’d raise a point, he’d listen carefully, take notes, then he’d promise to have an answer for me the next time he saw me, and he’d have it, every time. Maybe that’s what made him rich, that kind of calm deliberation. I’d say he was a careful, calculating man.

  “He didn’t seem wealthy, Jenny, he was common as an old shoe. Had me call him Cat, right from the first. It seemed to tickle him. There he was, richer than Croesus, and all the nurses and doctors and orderlies and lawyers were calling him by his nickname. You would have thought he was just some old ranch hand.”

  “Why did he want to meet me?”

  Brady took his gaze off the pools to glance at me. “He said he wanted to size you up, to see if you could handle the job. I think he wanted to make sure you couldn’t handle it.”

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  Brady gazed into the pools cascading into each other. “As I said, Jenny, there are in this world even bigger fools than I, and I think it may turn out that Cat Benet was one of them.”

  39

  After I left Brady’s office, I drove to the Lawrence-Stewart mansion on Ward Parkway Boulevard.

  Sister Margaret was upstairs in her living quarters, I was informed by Alice, and Merle Lawrence was watching television. When I asked Alice if she had a cup of coffee to spare, she seemed to understand that my real purpose was to talk to her privately.

  “Mrs. Lawrence,” I began.

  “Please call me Alice.”

  “Alice, there’s a homicide detective here in town who would dearly love to pin your father’s murder on me. Would you help me? Would you please tell me the real story of what happened on that ranch down in Texas when your husband was injured and your brother-in-law died?”

  A shadow of old pain passed through her eyes.

  “I can’t imagine why you want to know.”

  “I just do, please.”

  She shrugged. “There’s nothing much to tell, really. Merle and I went on a picnic with my father. We rode horseback to reach the meadow where Father’s wife had laid everything out for us. Father was, of course, a superb horseman. I think he grew rather bored plodding along beside us on our old nags, and so he began racing ahead of us, and then returning to our sides. Once or twice, he had to jump a fence to do it. He rode a beautiful big palomino; I can still remember how powerfully that horse gathered itself for each jump.”

  She licked her lips, then pressed them together as if she were blotting lipstick.

  “Well, Merle was a young man, adventurous as any young man, and it must have looked glorious to him to see my father take those fences. So, against my protests, and Father’s, he tried it, too. He made it over the first one, barely, but on the second one, the horse balked and stumbled. Merle fell between the animal and a fence post, and that is how and when it happened …”

  “Your father’s fault,” I suggested.

  “Oh, no,” she said firmly. “It was not.”

  “How does your husband feel about that?”

  “If you mean, has my husband nursed a grudge all these years against my father, and did it finally result in an act of murderous revenge, the answer is no.”

  I felt myself properly rebuked, if not convinced, until she added softly, “I would say that if Merle has nursed a grudge all these years, it has been against … me.”

  “You? Why?”

  “Why not?” She shrugged, but I saw tears come to her blue eyes. “If a person is not capable of blaming himself, he must blame someone, mustn’t he? It was my father, it was my father’s ranch, it was my choice to visit there … you see, none of it adds up to a logical reason to blame me, but logic is not the issue here, anger is.”

  “Why not blame Margaret?”

  “My sister?”

  “Wasn’t she the one who insisted that you all go?”

  “Yes.” Alice inhaled deeply. “But it is difficult to hurt my sister. She is impervious to criticism. Believe me, I know. No, I am the object of Merle’s anger, my sister is merely the vehicle through which he expresses it.”

  What? And then I remembered that Merle and Margaret had been together when they greeted me, seeming much more of a couple than he and Alice. “A close family?” I had asked Dwight Brady. “Evidently,” he had replied. Now I wondered how much of an understatement that was, but I couldn’t bring myself to push her any closer to the truth. She’d hinted pretty plainly at it anyway: that Merle Lawrence lived out his bizarre, unjust revenge by residing as intimately in this house with his wife’s sister as he did with his wife. No wonder Lilly Ann rebelled against the values of this house.

  “Alice, did your brother-in-law commit suicide?”

  “Of course,” was her simple reply.

  “So did Father.”

  I was startled, but Alice was totally undone by the sudden appearance of her sister in the kitchen doorway. Alice stood stock-still, seeming unable to know what to do or say next.

  Margaret swept regally into the room, with only the tiniest of sardonic smiles on her lovely face to hint that she might perhaps have heard more of the conversation than merely the last few words. With a mocking gentleness she placed her hands on her sister’s arms to move her out of the way of the coffeepot. Then, as Alice trembled and I stared, Margaret calmly poured herself a cupful. She dropped in three cubes of sugar, one, two, three, slowly and deliberately so they made plunking sounds going in. Then she stirred, her spoon going round and round, grating on the sides of the cup and on my nerves. All the while, she smiled her cat’s smile. I was beginning to think of it as a dead cat’s smile.

  I broke her spell, with scorn.

  “You think your father smothered himself?”

  “Of course he didn’t do it himself. He paid someone, some hospital flunky to do it, out of remorse for being such a rotten daddy. For having caused Ray’s death. For ruining Merle’s life. And because he was a coward.” Her glance at her sister was malicious. “An impotent coward, just like Merle, isn’t that right, Alice?”

  Her sister stared down at the countertop.

  Was that how Margaret and Merle had managed it? I wondered. Did he claim impotence with his wife, so that she had to live with only the suspicion that it wasn’t true where her sister was concerned? Or was he truly impotent, and Margaret only taunted her sister with the possibility of its being a lie?

  “What a convenient theory that is, Margaret,” I said. “If it was suicide, then maybe he wasn’t of sound mind, and that would be grounds for invalidating the will, wouldn’t it? And then maybe you could get the ranch for the Longhorn Foundation, or maybe even for yourselves.”

  Alice looked up at me, and I was astonished to see greed and interest in her blue eyes. Margaret was a witch! The woman could twist truth in upon itself until it resembled the exact opposite of itself.

  “Mirrors,” I said to her.

  “What?”

  “I think you do it with mirrors.”

  She ignored me and turned to her sister. “Alice, dear, Lilly’s gone again. This time she took a suitcase and left a note, the gist of which is, basically, screw you all. Both pairs of her boots are gone, I don’t know how many shirts or pairs of blue jeans, and that awful fringed jacket you won’t let me throw out. The girl left dressed for the country, dear. You have to get her back, and when you do, I’m going to tie her to the bedposts.”

&n
bsp; Alice didn’t even react; she seemed not to care.

  I slid off the stool on which I’d been sitting.

  “I’ll stop her,” I said, “give me the phone.”

  I called the ranch and got the damned answering machine, but I had more success in calling Sheriff Pat Taylor in Rock Creek.

  “Sure,” the sheriff said, “I’ll try to keep an eye out for her, but I’ve got to tell you I can’t watch the highway every minute. You understand. Say, that was some rotten trick they pulled on you the other day, wasn’t it?”

  “What trick?” I said.

  “That snake. I heard those shots, and I came roaring back up to the barn, and then Carl Everett showed me that dead rattlesnake. Heck, I guess it was dead, like about three weeks dead.”

  “Three weeks?”

  “Yeah, you mean you didn’t know? Well, listen, those fellows pulled an old, old trick on you. It’s the one where they tie a line to a dead snake and then they hide and then they pull it across your path so it scares the peewaddin’ out of you. Then they laugh like hell.”

  “So the joke was on me,” I said.

  But I was not laughing when I left the Lawrence-Stewart home and got back into my rental car. It was Slight Harlan who’d seen me shiver at the mention of snakes, and it was Slight who’d sent me into the barn with the bottle to feed the calf. I peeled out of the Lawrence-Stewart driveway in a tire-squealing humiliated rage that would have gotten me ticketed if there’d been a cop around. On the long drive, the rage turned to fear for Lilly Ann.

  40

  It took me three hours to drive to the Crossbones Ranch doing eighty-five all the way. When I started, the sky was clear, two hours down the highway, the wind picked up so that the car kept swerving to the left as if it wanted to return to Kansas City. Monstrous black cumulus clouds were building to the southwest and moving fast. By the time I drove past the Pizza Hut across from the Rock Creek Motor Inn, the rain had started to fall, the clouds overhead looked as if they were boiling, and the air had a greenish look to it. It reminded me of the way the movie sky had looked right before Dorothy got whisked off to Oz. “Oh, Auntie Em!” I thought. As a coast dweller, I’d battened down for hurricanes before, but the mere idea of Kansas tornadoes turned my knees to yogurt.