Hush Money (8 page)

All he said specifically of Karen was that she was a good fuck, but not like you or I would say it. More the way he might have said a good surfer, a good skier, in other words an appreciation of her talent. And still, in a funny way, I got a lot sharper picture of her from him than anyone else I'd talked to, a different one too: of a wild little prickteaser of a bitch, skinny as a rail and running at the nose in the cold wind, her hair chopped off like a boy's, with a mean streak and an inheritance she could never spend her way through and a yen for something, what she didn't know and probably never would, only that her daddy's money wouldn't buy it.

Maybe all I mean to say is that once I'd known a Karen too.

All in all they were on the road together a little over a month. She'd kept a journal, he said. I asked him what had happened to it. He said he didn't know, but either he did or he had one hell of a memory for the names of places, people. But how come it had blown, I asked him, had the money tree run out of apples? No, he said, and his eyes went a little tight. It turned out, putting together what he said with what I learned later, that somewhere around the metropolis of Winnemucca, Nevada, they'd taken up with a family. A real one, as it happened, and godfearing, running all the way from the baby to the head man, in a caravan of station wagons with all their stuff in the back, and the head man was a big son of a bitch in a beard and suspenders who was leading his people to the promised land of the state of Washington. And when they split, Karen went with them. Only when the University opened in the fall, she was back.

Maybe a shrinker would say she'd gone looking for Daddy and Mommy and hadn't found them, and I'd be the last to argue with him.

“Who pushed her?” I asked him.

He shrugged, as though he accepted the idea readily enough, but either he didn't know or didn't care.

“She pissed a lot of people off,” was all he said.

It got very quiet then, except for the crash and suck of the waves. Seeing that I hadn't clubbed him to death, some of his gang had gone back into the sea to try their luck, and in between us and them a troop of sandpipers were skipping at the water and darting back from the surf like they were afraid of getting their feet wet. I was trying to put a few things together in my mind, but the squiggles he'd drawn in the sand weren't much help.

“You and Robin Fletcher must go way back together,” I said finally.

He'd let on along the way that he came from Visalia, which is up in Tulare County, and there aren't enough people up there yet so that the one doesn't know the other, unless the other's a grape-picker from Teotihuacan.

“Yeah,” he said, “you could say that.”

“Is she on the Jesus trip?”

“Yeah,” with a half laugh, “I guess she still is.”

I tried on the Society of the Fairest Lord for size, but he didn't flinch. On the other hand he didn't laugh either.

“Was Karen into Jesus?”

“Yeah,” he said. “At one time or other she was into just about everything.”

I'd heard that before, and also the answer to my next question.

“What about you?”

“I've been there,” he said, and in that same tone which had made Sister Robin seem a lot older than her tender years.

It surprised me. I mean, I don't know what makes one person go looking for Jesus and another not, but he didn't seem the type any more than Sister Robin did, any more than it fit for two country kids like them to come on with battle-weary eyes like they'd seen the future and couldn't stand the sight of it.

“Did you take Karen into it?”

He looked at me like I was out of my mind. Then he laughed, the first big-hearted laugh I'd gotten out of him, also the last. But all he'd say was: “No, I didn't take Karen into it.”

And that was that, or almost. We walked back along the beach, watching the non-action of the surfers, talking hardly at all. Once I asked him about his degree, what he was working toward, and he said, “I'm in no hurry,” and I guess that's typical enough these days. But then when we were most of the way, he stopped and looked at me directly, a little trace of smile in his eyes, and he laid it on me:

“Listen,” he said, “I've got nothing special against you, Mister Cage, you play your game the way you have to and you take what hits you, but you give a message to the people you work for. Tell them they're not going to get what they want sending a pigeon around to do their dirty work for them, any more than the other ways they've tried. It won't cut it. We've got it and they'll get it when the time's right. We'll decide that, also the price. Meanwhile you can tell 'em to lay off. And I guess that goes for you too.”

It came out flat and easy, not at all like a prepared speech but more the punchline of some other conversation we'd been carrying on the whole time, one where the words meant other words entirely.

Except that somebody had forgotten to clue me in on the code.

7

Never once but twice, they say.

I wanted to take a look inside that van, but two of Ford's spear-carriers were standing guard over it, and rather than make a ruckus I got into the Mustang and took off. I checked in with my bereaved father over at Bay Isle and gave him the five o'clock news. If Ford's message had been intended for him, he gave no sign of it over the phone. Nor did the story of his daughter's grand tour seem to faze him. Nor did my aching head. I told him I was going to see the Diehls, and he told me to report in again that night.

So I drove my beat-up Mustang back to civilization, meaning Diehl civilization, meaning what used to be the home for ailing Diehls and is now for ailing friends of the Diehls, two- and four-legged. Bryce Diehl had gone there to die, and, in memoriam you could say, the old bay-windowed building, sprawling over almost an acre of Diehl hill land, plus later improvements (like a modern double-winged inn), had become the clubhouse and bingo parlor for a retirement community of rich and aged. Almost at the front door is the first tee of an eighteen-hole golf course good enough to distract the pros one weekend every February. The houses of the inmates begin on either side of the first hole, and probably they never stop till the course runs out of green. There are no stairs of course, they ride around the paths on those little golf carts, their meals are catered at the clubhouse and delivered to the door, there's a fulltime M.D. on the staff, and so on.

I guess it beats Mrs. Cage's Nursing Home at that, although the food mightn't be as good.

But the extra added attraction, and what brought the Diehl brothers there (who after all weren't quite ready for the men in the white coats) was out the back door, where you happened onto the prettiest little horse farm this side of Lexington, Kentucky. Little, I should say, by Santa Anita standards. They've got a half-mile training track with a grass course as well as dirt, barns for over half a hundred bangtails, even a show-jumping layout. The Diehls have always kept their stock there when they're not out winning their oats, but lately it's become a moneymaker, on account of Doc Al Yuster and his miracle cures for broken-down Native Divers. If you follow the horses at all, you'll have heard of him. Time was that when a nag with a little breeding in his blood busted his sesamoid running down the homestretch, they shot him through the brain and called for the meat wagon—for humane reasons. Nowadays they take him to Doc Al Yuster—because it's more humane, they say, but the Doc has had enough luck bringing them back to the races that there must be more to it than soft hearts and sentiment.

In all of this, of course, you could see the smooth hand of Twink Beydon, turning the watering holes of the rich into profitmakers for InterDiehl Holding. My two Diehls, Bryce Jr. and Andrew, gave me the million-dollar tour. Why I didn't know, any more than I knew where the missing brother was. By that time of day, with the sun almost gone and the hills turning purple, there were no horses on the track, but I got to meet the great veterinarian in one of the barns.

The Diehls had a lot of cordiality and they turned it all on for yours truly. They were good-looking men in the California model, and the wear-and-tear of living off their fortune had left no marks. They were appropriately distressed about having lost their niece, no more no less, and they saved their grief for Twink in a way that made you wonder. As to the whereabouts of their brother Boyd, while we were sitting in the bar swapping horse stories and admiring the sunset, a phone call came through from him in New York City. Bryce Jr. took it. Though they talked the better part of ten minutes, all I could deduce from it was that Brother Boyd had spent that day, or several, in conference with a group of Wall Street underwriters. It only occurred to me later that Bryce Jr. could easily have disguised that part too if he'd felt like it.

To me, an underwriter is a guy who brings the grabbers together, the one to sell what he's going to grab before he's grabbed it, the other to give up his cash for a piece of it, the whole deal sanctified by the issue of fancy pieces of paper called stock certificates. Another one of those dirty jobs, in short, which is buried under swank offices and titles and for which the guy who does the laundry gets a nice percentage.

Anyway the leak, if it was a leak, surprised the hell out of me. The Diehl Corporation had always been a family swindle, the rumors of public stock offerings had always turned out to be just that. According to Freddy Schwartz there was enough Diehl cash in the till to keep the tracts growing from here to San Diego and back. Not that it could have made any difference as far as I was concerned—my personal horde is far too small to get people like the Diehls all hot and bothered—but it sure could have interested someone I knew, and who they knew I knew.

It was a leak all right.

The more so since a few minutes after Bryce Jr. hung up, Andrew Diehl said to me:

“We've been wondering—just between ourselves, and of course it won't go any further than right here—but why don't you come to work for us? I think we could make it interesting to you. After all, we're all in this together more or less. At least we're after the same thing. Instead of working at cross-purposes, why couldn't we join forces?”

“What we mean,” Bryce Jr. said, “is that if you're interested, we think we could make you a very attractive proposition.”

It had all been a show then, put on for my benefit, a way maybe of pointing out that their grass was at least as green as his, and maybe there was more of it.

I suppose I could have said: I don't know what it is you're looking for. I could have said: All your brother-in-law is paying me to do is find out how your niece dropped seven stories' worth of air and by the laws of gravity met her untimely death, and so far he's not getting much of a return on his investment. I could also have said: You can stick your proposition up your brotherly ass.

“By the way,” I asked innocently enough, “what's going to happen to Karen's estate?”

Which, as it happened, served the same purpose.

Call it 90 percent luck and 10 percent intuition, or a legacy from beyond the grave of the Karen I'd known, but it was the answer they didn't want to hear. You could tell it not only in the twitch of their aristocratic cheeks but in the signal that dotdashed between their eyes.

“I'm … I'm afraid we wouldn't be the ones who could tell you that,” Andrew Diehl said stiffly.

“After all,” Bryce Jr. said, “the poor girl's only just been laid to rest.”

And on her way to St. Peter, amen, but that hadn't kept one of them from hopping a plane to New York in the midst of their bereavement.

“But she must have left a will,” I said. “Or …”

But, it suddenly occurred to me, why should she have? Twenty-year-old coeds didn't go around writing their wills. Then …?

“I'm afraid we wouldn't know about that,” Bryce Jr. said.

“But somebody would,” I said. “George Curie would, for …”

“Mr. Curie doesn't represent us.”

“Ah,” I said, “but it seems to me somewhere I heard he did.”

“He did,” Bryce Jr. said. “He doesn't any more. We severed the relationship.”

“Oh?” I said. “When was that?”

But all of a sudden the bar was closed, to me anyway. I could have hung around there till Doomsday and no one would have told me how Man o' War's great-great-great-grandson was going to run in Saturday's feature.

I got the message. I flipped them mentally for the bill, and they lost. Then we shook hands, like proper gentlemen mind you, but it was still:
on your way, buster
.

It was dark outside when I came across the parking lot. The stars were out, and a yellow California moon was climbing over the hills. The Mustang eyed me balefully. My mind was working overtime with variations on a theme: the theme being that young Karie Beydon had had something her uncles wanted, and probably my employer too though I still wasn't sure about that, and that whatever it was it had fallen into the wrong hands. Andy Ford's? The perfect setup for a shakedown, sold to the highest bidder … with yours truly as the unsuspecting broker? But the variations were endless. For instance: did Robin Fletcher, Karie's roommate, know about it? Or enough about it to warn me off? There was something I didn't yet believe in called the Society of the Fairest Lord, and Robin Fletcher, strange as it sounded, was queer for Jesus. But Robin Fletcher had thought I was working for Twink, while my friend on the surfboard had given me a message for more than one. The Diehls? Who meanwhile were negotiating with the Eastern money about something, or at least talking like they were? In other words: around and around and around, and through it all the unanswered question of whether Karie Beydon had come out of that window feet or head first.

It was too much for a stud with only a B.A. in Accounting, particularly since at the same time a corner of my mind had registered something else.