Deadfall (Nameless Detective) (17 page)

“Your confession saddens me,” Daybreak said. “It comes without shame. There is so much sin in today’s world, so little shame.”

“And I suppose the Moral Crusade is going to reverse the trend?”

“We will do our part,” he said passionately. “Yes, we will.”

“Well, let me tell you this,” I said. “Sinners have rights, too, the same as moral crusaders. And one of them is the right to live our lives without interference—”

I broke off because Daybreak was shaking his bald head. He said, “Sinners forfeit their rights until they renounce their wicked ways. God has no patience with those who spurn His teachings, who foul the paths of righteousness.”

“Did He tell you that?”

“Sir?”

“Do you talk to God, Reverend?”

“Of course.”

“Does He answer you?”

“Of course.”

I was starting to get flustered, which in me is one step shy of losing both my patience and my temper. I said, “And I suppose He told you it’s okay for a man to hound his ex-wife just because he—”

“A man does not have an
ex-
wife
,
sir,” Daybreak said. “When a man marries it is for his lifetime and that of his wife’s; in God’s eyes it is for all of eternity. If his wife should leave him he is justified in demanding that she return to his house and his bed.”

“No matter what she wants, is that it?”

“It is what God wants that matters.”

“There are laws—”

“God’s laws are higher.”

I could feel myself sliding toward the edge of unreason. And at this point I was not even sure I wanted to stop the slide. I said, “Listen to me, Daybreak. I’ve had just about enough of—”

“Oh, stop it,” Kerry said suddenly. “I’ve had enough of this myself.”

Daybreak and I both looked at her. She sneezed, blew her nose, snuffled, and said to him, “You win, Reverend—you and my ex-husband both. I can’t fight it anymore. I’ll go back to him.”

I gawked in disbelief. Daybreak beamed. “The Reverend Dunston will be pleased to hear that, my dear,” he said. “Surely the Almighty will be, too.”

I said, “Kerry …”

She ignored me. “Does Reverend Dunston live here at the church?” she asked Daybreak.

“Oh yes. He has an apartment in our main house.”

“Then that’s where I’ll be living, too?”

“Yes. You’ll find it quite comfortable.”

“But you know, I’m not going to remarry him.”

“There’s no need, my dear. You’ve never been
un
married.”

“Oh, I understand that,” she said. “But I wonder if everyone else will.”

“Everyone else?”

“Everyone in your flock. And everyone in the Bay Area, not to mention other parts of the country. And especially NOW and the other women’s organizations. Oh yes, and let’s not forget the American Civil Liberties Union.”

“I don’t understand …”

“Well,” she said, “the Church of the Holy Mission may not believe in divorce or the individual freedom of women or the laws of the land, but a lot of people do. I’ll bet the newspapers will be delighted to hear from me.”

“Newspapers?”

“Yes. As soon as I move in with Ray … I mean the Reverend Dunston … I’ll call half a dozen papers and tell them both your church and your so-called moral crusade sanctions the keeping of women in religious bondage.”

“Bondage?”

“Exactly. When the women’s organizations hear about it they’ll come here in droves and picket the church and disrupt your activities. Then there’ll be national wire service stories and all sorts of television coverage. The church and the Moral Crusade will get a
lot
of publicity, Reverend Daybreak. Won’t that be nice for you?”

He sat there blinking at her. Me too, only my blinks were ones of admiration. She had succeeded in doing with a few well-chosen words what I hadn’t even come close to doing with a barrelful: rattling him right out of his sanctimonious self-assurance. He said lamely, “My dear Mrs. Dunston …”

“I can see the headlines now,” Kerry said. “ ‘Church Forces Woman to Live with Ex-Husband.’ ‘Church Condones Bondage of Women in the Name of Religion.’ ” She let him have a sweet, guileless smile. “The whole thing will probably become a nationwide
cause célèbre,
” she said. “In fact, I’ll make sure it does. I’m in advertising, you know—the Bates and Carpenter agency in San Francisco. We’re very good at saturation promo campaigns, the manipulation of public sentiment. Even better than you are.” Another sweet smile. “That should help no end when the lawsuit comes to trial.”

“Lawsuit?” he said. “Trial?” he said.

“Oh, I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? If I can get the right lawyer—and I’m sure I can—we’ll ask as much as, oh, ten million dollars in punitive damages. We’ll settle for less, of course. It all depends on the church’s assets at the time.”

Daybreak got jerkily to his feet; the look on his face was one of pure horror. He seemed to realize that, because he wiped it off and then turned his back to us and stood staring out through the venetian blinds, his hands washing each other just above his tailbone.

I looked at Kerry and mouthed the words
You’re terrific
. She wrinkled her nose at me, snuffled, and sneezed again.

For about two minutes it was very quiet in there. Then Daybreak turned around, slowly, and looked at Kerry; I might not have been there anymore. He had the mask of serenity in place again. He even managed to work up a faint nervous smile as he said, “You’d go through with it, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Dunston—everything you said?”

“Yes, Reverend, I would. And my name is Wade, not Dunston —Kerry
Wade
. Please remember that.”

“As you wish.”

“As it
is.
”

“What do you want from me, Ms. Wade?” “I want you to have a nice long talk with my ex-husband. I want you to tell him to leave me
and
my friend alone from now on. I want you to explain to him exactly what will happen if he doesn’t.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, do you?”

“I will speak to Reverend Dunston,” he said.

“Immediately?”

“Immediately.”

“Good.” She stood, and I bounced right up alongside her. “I do hope you can make him understand,” she said, smiling. “If not … well, I’ll have no choice but to pack my bags and move right in.” He smiled back at her—there wasn’t a trace of humor in his smile—and she said, “Goodbye, Reverend Daybreak,” and went to the door and I followed her out like a puppy.

Neither of us said anything until we were clear of the now-deserted church grounds. I said then, “You amaze me sometimes, lady. Where did you get all of that stuff in there?”

“It just came to me.”

“Good thing it did. I wasn’t doing too well.”

“No, you weren’t. Another thirty seconds and you’d have been calling him a crook and a charlatan.”

“He is a crook and a charlatan.”

“Maybe. But he doesn’t think so.”

“I thought you’d gone nuts at first. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing.”

“Women’s wiles, my dear.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, that put an end to it; you hit him right where he lives. We won’t have any more trouble with Dunston.”

“Lord,” she said fervently, “I hope not. I would
hate
to have to follow up on all those threats.”

“You don’t mean you’d actually move down here?”

She gave me an enigmatic smile, and then sneezed in the middle of it. “What do you think?” she said as we reached the car. “You old fornicator, you.”

It was after two when we got back to San Francisco. I was pretty hungry by then, but there was no time to even grab a sandwich; I would be cutting it close as it was, getting to the Fairmont in time for my three o’clock appointment with Margaret Prine. I dropped Kerry off at her apartment and hurried downtown and up onto Nob Hill and parked more or less legally on Taylor Street, opposite Grace Cathedral and around the corner from Mrs. Prine’s fancy apartment house. I was exactly one minute late when I walked into the hotel.

The Fairmont has been a San Francisco landmark for close to eighty years and is still one of its finest luxury hotels. It has posh bars and restaurants and shops, a couple of suites that would cost you a grand a day
if
you had the right pedigree, a twenty-nine-story tower addition built in the early sixties, and a lobby notable for its late-Victorian elegance: dark, brownish marble pillars and staircases, ornate wood-paneled ceiling and walls, antique furnishings. If you’re wearing a hat when you walk in there you invariably find yourself taking it off. It has that effect even on lowbrows like me.

The lobby was moderately crowded at the moment; I walked the length of it, feeling out of place and looking for an elderly woman with a gold-headed cane. There were plenty of elderly women and even a couple of canes, but none of the latter had a gold head. I made another circuit and then decided I ought to sit down somewhere, before one of the security people spotted me and took me for an undesirable. There was some plush maroon furniture near the entrance to the Squire Restaurant, opposite the hotel’s main entrance off Mason Street. I parked myself on an overstuffed couch and watched people move in and out, back and forth. And waited.

At 3:20 I was still waiting. Maybe Ozimas didn’t go to Big Sur after all, I thought. Maybe she got hold of him and he told her he didn’t know any dealer in antique miniatures named Charles Eberhardt, and that made her balk at keeping our appointment.

I was fretting with that possibility when I saw her. She came in through the main entrance and stopped and held her cane up in front of her in a discreet away, so that the gold head was visible. I got off the couch and went her way, taking my time so I could size her up. From a distance she looked small and frail in a bulky fur coat, like somebody’s nice old white-haired grandmother—one who happened to have a couple of million dollars or so. Up close there was no mistaking the toughness in her seamed and rouged face and her shrewd gray eyes, the imperiousness of her bearing. Or the fact that she was a woman who knew what she wanted and usually got it, one way or another.

“Mrs. Prine? I’m Charles Eberhardt.”

She looked me up and down, once, as if she were examining a curious artifact. If the artifact made any impression on her she didn’t show it. She said, “How do you do, Mr. Eberhardt. I apologize for being tardy; I was unavoidably detained.”

Sure you were, I thought. She’d been late on purpose—I understood that now. A double-edged ploy, no doubt, designed to test Mr. Eberhardt’s sincerity and to froth up his eagerness to sell her a Cosway snuff box.

I said, “No apology necessary, Mrs. Prine.”

“You’ve bought the Cosway?”

I smiled at her. “Shall we go into the lounge, where it’s more private?”

“No. It’s too dark in there. I’ll want to examine the piece, of course.”

“Of course.” I gestured toward where I’d been sitting before; none of the furniture there was occupied. “Over this way?”

She nodded and we went that way and took opposite ends of the same lumpy couch. She said, “Now then, Mr. Eberhardt, the Cosway.”

I said pleasantly, “Now then, Mrs. Prine, my name isn’t Eberhardt and I don’t have any Cosway box.” I told her what my name
was
and that I was the private detective she wouldn’t talk to last week. I also offered her one of my business cards.

She didn’t take the card; she looked at it as if it were something unclean. Looked at me the same way, with a sprinkling of contempt and malice thrown in. “I do not care to be lied to,” she said in a chilly voice, and started to get up.

“I think you’d better stay a while,” I said. “I know you’ve got Kenneth Purcell’s Hainelin snuff box; I know you paid Eldon Summerhayes seventy-five thousand dollars for it four months ago.”

She went rigid. She seemed to pale a little, too; at any rate the rouge on her cheeks appeared redder now. The look she gave me this time was one of hatred. She said in a biting whisper, “Blackmail.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Prine. I don’t want anything from you except the answers to some questions.”

That pushed her a little more off balance, which was where I wanted to keep her. The way to handle Margaret Prine, I had decided, was the same way Kerry had handled the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak.

“Questions?” she said. “What questions?”

“About the Hainelin box. About where Summerhayes got it and why everybody pretended it was lost when Kenneth fell.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she said.

“That’s right, you don’t. But how would it look for you if I took my information to the authorities?”

“I admit to nothing. You can’t prove I have the Hainelin.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But does it matter? Kenneth Purcell was murdered, Mrs. Prine; I think I
can
prove that. So was his brother. How would you like to be arrested as an accessory to double homicide?”

“Accessory?” The hatred was still in her eyes, but so was uncertainty, now, and the emotion I most wanted to see: fear.

“That’s right. The Hainelin box may be important evidence in Kenneth’s murder. You bought it and are holding it without having informed the authorities of the transaction; technically that’s suppressing it, and suppressing evidence in a homicide case is a felony.”

“I had nothing to do with Kenneth’s death!”

“Whether you did or not, you could still be tried on a felony charge. A good lawyer could probably get you off—but what about the publicity? What would that do to your reputation?”

She clamped her mouth shut as a group of people passed, on their way into the Squire Restaurant. She didn’t speak when they were gone, either; she was thinking over what I’d said. The seamed skin of her face had the look of parchment stretched too tight around the shape of her skull, so that it might tear at any second.

It didn’t take her long to make up her mind. Not much more than a minute had passed when she said in a stiff, controlled voice, “Ask your questions.”

“Where did Summerhayes get the Hainelin box?”

“From Alicia Purcell. Or so he told me.”

“How did she come to have it?”

“He said she found it among Kenneth’s effects.”

“When?”

“Two days after his death.”

“Then why did she keep up the pretense that it was lost?”

“She told Eldon she needed cash. If she had reported finding the box it would have legally become part of Kenneth’s estate; she would not have been able to sell it until his will cleared probate.”

“That sounds pretty flimsy,” I said. “She sold it illegally anyway, didn’t she?”

“I’m sure I don’t care how it sounds to you. I am only telling you what Eldon Summerhayes told me.”

“Meaning you didn’t care how flimsy it sounded, or how illegal the deal was, as long as you got the Hainelin.”

Her lips pulled in tight at the corners and her eyes snapped at me. But she held her tongue.

I said, “Why did Mrs. Purcell need such a large amount of cash?”

“Some sort of investment, I gathered.”

“You gathered. Didn’t you ask Summerhayes?”

“No. I did not.”

“Did he tell you how much he paid her for the box?”

“Seventy thousand dollars.”

“So his commission for arranging the deal was five thousand?”

“That is correct.”

“That is incorrect,” I said. “He paid her fifty and kept twenty-five for himself.”

That surprised her, and it made her even angrier than she already was; I could see the anger like sparks in those sharp gray eyes. But it also served to tighten her control. When she spoke again it sounded as though the words were being squeezed out through a roller press.

“If you are telling the truth,” she said, “that is a matter between Eldon and myself. It has no bearing on anything else.”

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Have you had any contact with Mrs. Purcell since you bought the box?”

“Hardly.”

“Why ‘hardly’? Don’t you get along with her?”

“I despise her. She has the morals of an alley cat.”

So do you, Maggie, I thought, in your own sweet way.

I said, “How about Kenneth? What did you think of him?”

“As little. He was a boor, a drunkard, and a womanizer.”

“Uh-huh. Who do you think pushed him off that cliff?”

“I don’t believe anyone pushed him, no matter what you say. His death was an accident.”

“His brother’s wasn’t.”

“I know nothing about that.”

“Did you have any contact with Leonard after Kenneth’s death?”

“Certainly not. I told you, I know nothing about his murder.” She drew herself up even straighter and pointed the gold head of her cane at me as if it were a weapon. “Now are you quite finished with your questions?”

I wasn’t, but asking any more wouldn’t get me anything: the set of her jaw and the look in her eyes made it plain that she’d said all she was going to say. If she knew anything else it would take an official inquiry to get her to admit it.

I said, “That’s all for now, Mrs. Prine. You can go.”

“How generous of you.” She got slowly to her feet, using the cane as a fulcrum; I didn’t much feel like being a gentleman, not where she was concerned, so I made no effort to help her. When we were both standing she said, “Do you intend to tell anyone about what we have just discussed?”

“If you mean the police or the newspapers, no. Not unless it has a direct bearing on either Kenneth’s death or Leonard’s.”

“If you do I will deny having spoken to you. I will deny having purchased the Hainelin box and I will see to it that Eldon Summerhayes denies having sold it to me. I will also speak to my attorneys about suing you for harassment and defamation of character.”

“You’re a nice lady, you know that?” I said. “I wish I had a granny like you.”

Her tight little mouth worked; if we had been somewhere other than the lobby of the Fairmont, somewhere alone, she might have spit in my eye. As it was, she settled for a contemptuous sneer and then turned abruptly and thumped off across the lobby.

Back in the car, I looked up the Moss Beach number in my notebook and called it on the mobile phone. Alicia Purcell was in; she answered herself. Her voice was cool, but she didn’t sound unhappy to hear from me again—not yet.

“Have you found out anything new?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes. I’ve just had a long talk with Margaret Prine. I know all about the Hainelin snuff box.”

“… What do you know?”

“I know it didn’t go over the cliff with your husband,” I said. “I know you sold it to Eldon Summerhayes for fifty thousand dollars four months ago, and that he in turn sold it to Mrs. Prine. What I
want
to know is why you lied about having it.”

There was a lengthy pause. When she spoke again the coolness in her voice had frozen into solid ice. “I resent you meddling in my private affairs.”

“Meddling is one of the things I get paid for,” I said. “Answer my question, Mrs. Purcell.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you’ll answer it for the police.”

“I’ve done nothing illegal. The box was mine to sell as my husband’s legal heir.”

“Not until his will clears probate.”

“All right, yes, I admit that. But I needed cash after his death; he left me cash-poor.”

“So you needed the fifty thousand for living expenses.”

“Among other things, yes.”

“What other things?”

“Nothing that concerns you.”

“Suppose you let me be the judge of that.”

“Oh, all right. There were things I wanted—clothing, jewelry.”

“Wouldn’t your husband let you buy them when he was alive?”

“If you must know, no, he wouldn’t.”

“But you told me the other day you never wanted for anything the entire time you were married.”

“… I wasn’t being completely candid with you then.”

“And you are being candid with me now.”

“Yes.”

“How did you get the Hainelin box?”

“Kenneth gave it to me.”

“When?”

“Before he left the house. When we talked in his hobby room.”

“Why did he give it to you?”

“I asked him to. He’d been drinking so heavily … I was afraid he’d lose it.”

“He just handed it over?”

“Yes.”

“No argument or anything?”

“No.”