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Authors: Michael Craft

BOOK: Desert Spring
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Through a twisted smile, she answered, “We had very few heart-to-hearts, Claire.”
“I understand. But you did read the script of
Photo Flash.
Bryce has one too.”
“Yes, but that's not typical. Spencer seemed especially proud of this one. He had high expectations for it.”
“Let's hope his expectations prove justified. It'll make a fitting final tribute.”
“Perhaps,” she said, unsure of her own feelings.
I patted her hand. “Try to get some rest.”
“I will.” With a weak smile, she added, “I need it.”
I told her attorney, “Good to meet you, Bryce. Take care.”
“Sure thing, Miss Gray.” He opened the door. “Good day.”
They left. I watched them walk together toward the street. Then I closed the door with a light, uncertain sigh.
Larry seemed to be finishing on the phone—he was returning his notes to his pocket—so I strolled out to join him on the terrace, hoping for an update. The noontide sun had turned hot. As I arrived, Larry snapped the phone shut and clipped it to his belt.
“That was the coroner,” he said.
Trying not to sound too eager, I prompted, “And … ?”
“The autopsy is complete,” he informed me, “and the medical examiner has some initial findings. I was wrong, Claire, and your hunch was correct. Wallace tested positive for cadmium. What's more, he had severe kidney and liver damage, which is consistent with chronic cadmium poisoning, as are
all
the symptoms we discussed earlier—weight loss, anemia, irritability, yellow-stained teeth, even his loss of the sense of smell. He was a heavy smoker, which increases the toxic effect of cadmium. It could have been inhaled as fumes from his photo baths, which may have been spiked with cadmium chloride. Or the lethal compound could also have been dissolved in something acidic, then ingested—he was drinking tomato juice last night, which would do the trick.” Larry paused before concluding, “In short, this investigation has entered a new phase.”
I spoke the words slowly: “It was murder.”
“Yes.”
“And the killer was someone who either had access to Spencer's darkroom or attended last night's party. Or both.”
Larry nodded. “Yes.”
“Which means”—hoping for a rebuttal, I needed to voice the unthinkable—“which means, I'm a suspect.”
Larry eyed me with an odd expression for a moment. When he spoke, his voice cracked. “I don't … I don't mean to alarm you, but by any objective measure …” He hesitated. “Yes, Claire, you are indeed a suspect.”
Was it my imagination, or had the earth stopped spinning?
Birds hushed. The breeze died.
The sun glared, its intensity magnified by its reflection in the pool.
Not a single ripple broke the mirror of the water's flat surface.
developments
“Good God, Claire,” gasped D. Glenn Yeats over the phone, “you must be beside yourself. Such a dreadful turn of events.”
It was Sunday afternoon, shortly after Larry Knoll had left my home. Glenn had just gotten word of Spencer Wallace's death and had called to talk about it. Frankly, I'd been expecting to hear from the computer tycoon and college founder since sunrise, but apparently he hadn't turned on a television that morning, and none of his underlings had been willing to deliver the unwelcome news that the head of his theater department had, once again, been thrust by circumstance into a police investigation.
He continued, “Let's hope it was all just an unfortunate accident. Sometimes, suspicious death is mere happenstance, a peevish twist of fate.”
I hated to disillusion him. “Sorry, Glenn. The coroner has already determined that
this
suspicious death was no mishap; it was murder. Spencer didn't die because he was drunk and stumbled into my pool. No, he was the victim of chronic cadmium poisoning. The drowning merely finished him off.”
As soon as I'd said the words, I realized that my phrasing had been too blunt. Perhaps I had already been jaded by the facts of the case, but to Glenn's ears, my hard-boiled pronouncements must
have sounded cold and uncaring. I myself was taken aback by my seemingly callous tone.
“Claire,” said Glenn, at a temporary loss for words, “let's not discuss this on the phone. I'd like to see you. Soon.”
Pleading fatigue—true enough—I managed to fend off an afternoon meeting, but I was unable to defer his requested rendezvous for more than a few hours, so I agreed to join him for dinner at his home that night.
I had insisted that we make it an early evening. Shortly after six, I passed the gatehouse and revved the engine of my Beetle, preparing for the steep ascent of the winding roadway that led up past the Regal Palms Hotel and onward to Nirvana, the exclusive community of mountainside estates that Glenn Yeats called home. My ears plugged as I neared the top; when I swallowed, they popped. Rounding a final curve in the road, I saw the dramatic lines of Glenn's sanctuary appear from the uppermost terrace of the development.
During the seven months since I had moved to the desert, I had been a frequent visitor to Nirvana, but the sheer power of wealth displayed there never failed to impress. I was as agog that Sunday evening as I had been the previous September when I had first set eyes upon Glenn's magnificent dwelling. Like the college campus he had built, his house was also the work of the famed architect I.T. Dirkman, and it was no less a contemporary masterpiece.
Tonight, though, was different from most of my previous visits because I was not to be one of scores of guests invited to a party. Glenn had a habit of opening his home for all manner of events—from faculty get-togethers to memorial services—but tonight's gathering would be decidedly more intimate. I was to be the single guest at a dinner for two.
Pulling into Glenn's driveway, I found no parking valet waiting to whisk away my car—we were indeed roughing it tonight. I
wondered wryly if Glenn would press me into duty washing dishes after our meal.
At the sound of my car (or had the gatehouse guard alerted him?), Glenn stepped out to the courtyard to greet me. He wore a casual but expensive-looking outfit—silk shirt and gabardine slacks—giving the unfortunate impression of a rich nerd out of his element. Behind him, from the house, a huge, modern, asymmetrical chandelier glowed with warm, yellow light in a front hall big enough to be aptly described as a lobby. Outdoors, overhead, the sky shone with cool, blue twilight. The sun had just begun to slip behind the peaks of neighboring mountains, which jutted from the horizon as saw-toothed, abstract silhouettes.
Crossing the courtyard toward each other, we met midway and paused to embrace. “Good evening, Claire. Welcome.”
“Glenn,” I said, taking his arm, strolling toward the house, “you're the perfect host. Once again, you've arranged for a perfect night in a perfect setting.”
“This could all be yours,” he reminded me. His tone was so offhanded, he might have been offering me a drink or a Kleenex, not half his empire.
We had not explicitly discussed marriage; I had never let the conversation go that far. But I had no doubt that the subtext of Glenn's patient, persistent wooing was matrimonial. He had previously set his sights on snagging me from Broadway to chair the theater department at his fledgling college, and he had won. He had now set his sights on snagging me as the third Mrs. Yeats, and he intended, as always, to win.
The prospect of immense wealth was appealing, naturally, but the prospect of losing my independence was not. After all, I had evaded the altar for fifty-four years. Had I felt the need to be kept or protected, I'd have tied a knot at a more knot-tying age.
Now such a commitment struck me as silly and pointless.
Now I was winding down a live-in tryst with Tanner Griffin. What possible interest would I have in bedding D. Glenn Yeats, who could not begin to compete with Tanner at a raw, physical level?
Still, Glenn had many other sterling attributes that made him an enviable potential partner. To his credit, he had shown the longsightedness to let me sort through my jumbled feelings. To my discredit, I had been unable or unwilling to weigh his advances seriously.
“ … every bit of it,” he was saying. “It could all be yours.”
“Not now,” I said softly, pausing at the entry to his home. Patting his hand, I added, “It's been a hellish day. I can barely think straight.”
“Let's get you a drink.”
“Now,
there's
an offer I needn't consider twice.”
Glenn laughed. “Come on in.” He led me into the house, through the hall, and directly back to the pool terrace, where a table for two awaited. A cocktail cart stood at the ready, stocked with ice, liquor, glassware, and a tall, silver martini shaker—he didn't even need to ask. Wordlessly, he set about fixing my drink.
Since moving from the condo into a house, I had come to appreciate the sybaritic pleasures of having my own swimming pool. It seemed I now
lived
on my terrace, enjoying a nude dip whenever a free moment allowed. Landscaping and a garden wall assured total privacy, an incredible luxury to this transplanted New Yorker.
But my delightful new circumstances paled to the splendor of Glenn's outdoor living area. Not only was it bigger than mine—considerably so—but both its setting and its design set it apart as one in a million. For starters, Glenn's privacy was established not by walls or plantings, but by sheer, open space. He overlooked the entire valley some thousand feet below, with only a low stone parapet
separating his terrace from the granite slopes beneath. The pool itself was black, of seemingly infinite depth; at its sleek edges, water met the stone paving in a perfect plane. A gargantuan fireplace, the twin of another indoors, lent a finishing touch of fantasy. This evening, it was still too warm and not yet dark enough to warrant a fire, but the massive hearth felt homey and comforting beneath the endless expanse of sky. A pair of planets glimmered near the rising crescent moon.
“I would never leave this spot,” I said with breathless awe, taking it all in.
“You needn't.” He winked at me, destroying the sublime moment, though the icy martini he passed to me soon restored my sense of peace.
We sat and sipped, and I realized I was grateful for his invitation that night. “It feels good to relax,” I said.
His gaze moved from the distant airport, below, to me, at his side. With a tone of genuine concern, he asked, “How bad
is
it?” The question was vaguely worded, but Glenn's meaning was clear. He wondered how deeply I'd gotten tangled in the investigation.
“Pretty bad,” I admitted. “I'm an active suspect.”
Glenn nearly choked on his drink. “
What?
You can't be serious.”
“Afraid so.” I summarized, “Not only did Spencer Wallace die in my swimming pool, but I'd made threats against him that evening, twice—once at the party, in the presence of the catering staff, and earlier, to a reporter, the one you foisted on me, by the way.”
Glenn groaned. “Sorry. I was thinking of the school, but I should have realized you were tired.”
I hadn't been tired; the curtain call had left me with an adrenaline rush. But that was beside the point. “What's more,” I continued, “Larry Knoll has since determined that Spencer was being slowly poisoned by cadmium, a possibility that I myself suggested, having read Spencer's screenplay, in which he seemed to spell out
the recipe for his own undoing. The killer may have poisoned Spencer at the party or in his home darkroom—or both. In either case, I was there. So I had ample
opportunity
to do the deed, and my knowledge of the script gave me the
means.
”
“But, Claire”—Glenn set his glass down—“Detective Knoll is surely aware that you had no conceivable
motive
to kill Wallace.”
“Didn't I? Not to play devil's advocate, but you can't just dismiss my threats. Sure, they were empty; they were merely dramatic exaggeration, easily understood as such when I spoke them. But now, with Spencer murdered, it looks as if I was hell-bent on paying him back for stealing Tanner from DAC's theater program.”
“That's absurd,” Glenn burbled. “You
invited
Spencer Wallace to our opening production at the college. You
knew
he was scouting for talent. And Tanner's rise to stardom will be a
credit
to the school.”
“
We
know that, but anyone else might draw the conclusion that I'm a scheming, vengeful, murderous bitch.”
“You, Claire?” He laughed. “Never.”
I took his hand. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but objectively speaking, I had a motive.” I might have pointed out that I'd had a double motive. Whisking Tanner off to Hollywood, Spencer had raided not only my program, but also my bed. It seemed injudicious, however, to share this latter consideration with Glenn.
With his free hand, Glenn swirled his drink. “What does Larry think of your, uh, ‘motive'?”
I let go of Glenn's hand and sat back, mulling over my predicament. “Larry is professional enough to realize that he can't ignore suspicious circumstances. Obviously, the best way to clear
me
of suspicion is to name someone else as the real killer. I was disposed to help him do that even before I had a direct interest in the case.”
Glenn cringed. “Oh, God, Claire—not again.”
In the few months since my arrival, I had already gotten
involved with two other murder investigations, and Glenn had made no secret of his disapproval. His claims of fearing for my safety had only strengthened my resolve to assist the police; his protective instincts had also diminished any appeal I might have found in his overtures to romance. The whole issue had grown even more touchy when, to Larry's satisfaction and to Glenn's chagrin, my help on those earlier cases had proved valuable and productive.
Sidestepping past quibbles, I told Glenn with a meaningful stare, “This time, it's different.”
“Oh?” His tone conveyed not only skepticism, but a hint of condescension. If he was trying to jeopardize what affection I felt for him, he was succeeding.
Resisting the temptation to debate matters that would only antagonize him, I stayed the course, explaining in terms he would readily understand, “This time, my own good name is at stake, as is the reputation of the school.”
He seemed to catch his breath for a moment as my logic led him to the very conclusion he had hoped to avoid. “Then, uh”—his features twisted—“if Detective Knoll can make use of your assistance, perhaps you should provide it.”
“I intend to.”
Once Glenn had given his blessing (not that I thought I needed it), we both sensed that a fragile stasis had been achieved, so our conversation drifted to safer, less contentious topics, mainly those involving the school and my plans for the theater department. When I mentioned that I was giving serious thought to conducting a summer workshop, Glenn beamed like a child who'd been handed an unexpected gift adorned with a frilly bow.
“I'm surprised you'd even consider it,” he told me. “After finishing your first season, I should think you'd want to take a break.”
“I would,” I admitted, “but with Tanner leaving the program, I
need to start grooming other actors as leading men. We have an ambitious slate of productions ahead of us next year.”
“Excellent,” he bubbled, rubbing his hands together. “I like your thinking—
and
your dedication.” Christ, he was easy.
Without further discord, cocktails led to dinner. Glenn had called upon staff from the nearby hotel to prepare and serve our meal. When the evening had waned and dusk had turned the sky an inky shade of indigo, a tuxedoed waiter appeared with candles for our little table, followed by another who brought out the appetizer course. It was delicious, as one would expect, considering its source, but in truth, I had no idea what I was eating. With no menu to guide me, I was at a loss to identify whether the sauced, flaky crust on my plate concealed fish, fowl, or cheese. Though generally not reticent by nature, I was nonetheless unwilling to ask crudely, What's this? While Glenn prattled on about something, I recalled Kiki's discourse earlier that day regarding the proper delivery of the query—Aowww? Hwat's this?

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