Judith Krantz (53 page)

Actually, he thoroughly enjoyed watching another generation play out a variation of one of the classic dramas, Mike Kilkullen admitted to himself, as he took in the table in a long, happy, reflective look. Why should they have their way smoothed over too easily? His wayward daughter was at her most glorious when she was in one of her cheeky snits; it was good for Casey to be so obviously smitten and so clearly rejected. They’d work it out or they wouldn’t, and either resolution would be the right one as far as he was concerned, for the only essential was that Red would be by his side, his own Red, his unique darling, who would always remain a loving, adult woman, no matter how the kids kicked and screamed and reinvented the wheel.

Mike Kilkullen chuckled inwardly at his own philosophical distance. It felt like being in the middle of a warm, golden circle of light, as if he were pausing, at high noon, on the uplands of the ranch, and looking around for miles and miles in every direction over his empire, from the blue, beloved distant shores all the
way up to the top of Portola Peak, aware that even beyond his view, it all belonged to the Kilkullens. He had often done just that, but in earlier years those splendid moments had rarely stayed with him for long. Now, for many months, this feeling had become his inner climate. It had taken him a lot of years to achieve this state, he thought, but now that he’d arrived, it was one hell of a great and joyous place to be.

The rest of the meal passed in lively pleasure as Casey and Jazz, in a state of temporary truce, applied themselves to the spirit of the festive occasion.

“Where to now?” Red asked Mike as they made ready to leave the restaurant.

“Home, darling. This town is too full of people,” Mike answered.

When they reached the parking lot, Mike decided that he and Casey should go and get his prized car, a vintage 1966 Mercedes SE white convertible that Sylvie had given him. Jazz and Red waited on the sidewalk at the entrance. There was so much confusion, with shoppers carrying large bundles of packages and trying to fit unwieldy loot into their trunks, that progress toward the valuable car he had carefully parked at the very far edge of the lot would be difficult.

Red and Jazz waited, arm in arm, their warm coats wrapped snugly around them, in companionable silence.

Minutes passed and a number of cars left the lot. It shouldn’t take this long, Jazz thought impatiently. Suddenly she heard her father’s voice, shouting from a distance, raised in unmistakable anger. There was a yell from Casey, interrupted by gunshots. Both women, with the same instinct, raced through a mob of shoppers.

They reached the edge of the lot where the car was parked. Red and Jazz plunged into the crowd, clawing, shoving, elbowing their way through the crowd that had gathered, each of them growing more frantic by the instant. At the edge of the crowd, men held back the press of curious people, as if to prevent them from reaching the small cleared space around
Mike Kilkullen’s car, preventing them from seeing the bodies on the pavement. Jazz and Red shrieked at them with words they were never to remember, and the men let them through immediately.

Casey was lying spread on top of Mike’s body, his arms flung up as if to shield Mike’s head, his own face flat in the dirt, blood spreading out from his side.

Mike Kilkullen lay on his back, his short white hair wet in a pool of his own blood, his eyes open.

Jazz looked into their calamitous emptiness, and long before Red, she smelled the truth. She put her fingers onto his neck, just inside his collar, where she had always pressed against his strong pulse when she was a child carried in his arms. There was still warmth, but no flicker of a pulse. She heard Red imploring the crowd to call the paramedics, and she heard people yelling for the police, but she knew already, as if she had received a semaphore signal from the far ragged edge of her existence, that her father was dead.

She turned to Casey. He was still alive, still breathing, but unconscious. There was no way to move him off of her father’s body until the men came with stretchers, no way she knew to find out how he was wounded. All she could do was hold his limp hand and wait for the help she knew must eventually arrive. Even on the Saturday night before Christmas.

“M
r. White is reading the will in San Clemente this afternoon,” Jazz informed Red, as the two of them sat on a bench in a deserted children’s playground overlooking the water at Lido Island. “Valerie and Fernanda don’t intend to stay here a minute longer than they have to. When Father Joseph told them that he wouldn’t hold the funeral on Christmas Day itself, they couldn’t decently object, but anybody could see on their faces that they felt righteously inconvenienced. They wanted Mr. White to read the will this morning, but he said he wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, and he’s a law unto himself, probably because he’s about a hundred and two years old. He seems to have been ancient ever since I first met him and I was just a kid. The whole lot of them are planning to go back to New York tomorrow morning, first thing, which is the only good news I’ve heard.”

Jazz listened to herself rattling on in a desolate skein of wonderment that she could sound so prosaic when she wanted to lose herself in endless, keening
lament. She found herself thrust into the position of comfort-giver, although she had lost the most important person in her life, the father in whose love she had been secure from the day she was born. But Red was now so much less able to manage the most basic motions of life than she was. This helplessness was the only thing that kept Jazz from slipping into a bottomless pit of mourning the incomprehensible cruelty of his death. Her responsibility to Red had enabled her to survive through the past three bitterly demanding days without giving up, throwing herself on her bed and howling in a hideous grief that would have no end.

She and Red watched the sailboats and yachts riding at anchor, registering nothing but a gray shadow of that sunshiny, shimmering holiday scene on the morning of December 27. The previous day, Mike Kilkullen had been buried in the family plot in the graveyard of the Catholic church at San Juan Capistrano.

Every one of his children and grandchildren had been there; all the vaqueros and their wives and children had attended, almost the entire population of the town had thronged to the churchyard; leaders of the Democratic party had flown in from different parts of the country; ranchers from all over the West, who’d made friends with Mike Kilkullen during more than forty years of convivial auction weeks at the Cow Palace, had made the trip to San Juan; everyone who worked with Jazz at Dazzle had driven down for the funeral, except for Phoebe, who had had a sudden attack of flu. After the funeral it seemed as if most of them had come to the Hacienda Valencia to pay their respects to the family, an endless stream of visitors repeating the same words of utter disbelief and sorrow.

Only two people Mike Kilkullen loved had not been at his funeral. One was Casey Nelson, who was still confined to the hospital, beginning to mend from the massive loss of blood and the bullet through his lung that he had taken as he tried to shield Mike. The armed thieves had been surprised as they tried to steal
the twenty-four-year-old Mercedes for the sake of its parts, which were highly valuable to professional restorers.

The second absent mourner was Red Appleton, who was too locked in the shock of her incredulous heartbreak to endure the sight of the man she loved being buried. She wanted to remember him laughing and happy, the way she had seen him only minutes before his death, she explained in the emptied, ragged voice that remained to her, and Jazz, thinking of the coldness that Valerie and Fernanda would certainly display toward Red, had agreed it was best that way.

Since the night of the killing, Jazz had been sleeping at Red’s house on Lido Island. No less than Red, she could not face being alone with her stupefying grief, and Red needed her for survival through these first days. She had packed an overnight bag and shuttled the short distance up and down the coast highway between San Juan Capistrano and Newport Beach.

“Old Mr. White,” Jazz repeated, when Red didn’t respond to her flood of information on the reading of the will, “is that retired banker, the Governor’s father. Dad did all his banking in Mr. White’s bank in San Clemente, and for some reason or other, it seems that he gave him the only copy of his will. I guess it’s because he never trusted lawyers.”

“Oh, Jazz, you don’t have to take care of me,” Red said. “I know you don’t feel like talking.”

“Ah, come on, Red, darling, you’re taking care of me. I couldn’t stand being in the hacienda with six teenagers who hardly knew Dad, all trying to be well behaved while they’re wondering why this had to ruin their Christmas. Poor Susie, she can’t break down until they leave—that’s all that’s keeping her going.”

“Susie was going to teach me … how to cook,” Red said, as thinly as if she were trying to remember something that had happened a hundred years ago, to somebody else.

“That’s more than she ever did for me. That means she really approved of you.”

“We were planning … parties … I never gave Mike his Christmas presents …”

“Red, Red! Give them to me, I’ll take them back. It’s not good for you to have them around.”

“All right,” Red agreed emptily. “The packages are in the hall closet. Jazz, we opened the silver service. I knew what that box from Jensen’s had to be when it arrived last week, and I couldn’t wait till Christmas to show it to Mike. He was so … so proud of you …” Red burst into a racking spasm of sobs that doubled her over while she beat her fists weakly on her knees, trying to control herself.

Jazz wrapped her arms around her as tightly as she could. There was nothing she could say to help Red when one of these attacks of grief ambushed her, but she hoped that being held must be some tiny comfort.

“I’ll take it all back to the store, don’t worry, darling, I’ll take everything away,” she repeated over and over, meaninglessly, as if crooning to a baby, until Red finally was able to straighten up and dry her eyes.

“God, I’m so selfish. Look at you being brave,” Red reproached herself when she was able to speak.

“I’m lucky, I have things to keep me busy, and you have nothing to do but think. In fact, I have to get started for San Clemente now. It wouldn’t do to keep Mr. White waiting.”

“I didn’t know that they actually read wills anymore,” Red said, trying to show some interest in Jazz’s affairs.

“Neither did 1.1 thought you just got a letter from the executor, or something like that. But Mr. White is of the old school. I’ll be back as soon as it’s over and I’ve checked on Casey at the hospital. Tonight you’re going to eat a decent dinner—I won’t let you get up from the table till you do. Come on, walk me back to the house.”

The two women walked slowly back. Jazz wondered, from a far distance, how she was managing to put one foot in front of the other in her state of emptied, abandoned stupefaction, of wanting to be dead.

Mr. Henry White, in spite of his years, still kept an office in San Clemente, on the same street as the bank he ran for so long. There he read five newspapers every morning, looked after his investments for several hours every afternoon, and maintained his network of political contacts by telephone. The combination, in his case, had ensured a lively, contented and healthy old age that had been crowned by his son’s reelection as Governor of California.

After Mr. White had led Jazz, Valerie and Fernanda to the chairs arranged in front of his desk, he sat behind it as he addressed them. Since he had talked to each of them individually after their father’s funeral, he wasted no time in formal condolences.

“Young ladies, I never expected this occasion to arise, I never expected to outlive your father, but since it has, I would like to say, before I read this will, that I disapprove of it. I do not believe in holographic wills. ‘Homemade wills,’ I call them, and legal or not, I’ve never trusted them.”

Valerie bit her lips in irritation at his pedantic, fussy manner, and swung her foot nervously. Fernanda’s hands were twisting in her lap, and she blew her hair away from her face with a quick puff. Jazz sat in frozen stillness.

“I told your father many times,” Mr. White continued, “that his will should have been drawn up by a lawyer, and kept in a lawyer’s office, but he refused to listen to me. I had been entrusted with his own father’s holographic will, and he felt that what was good enough back then was good enough today. I did not agree, but that’s as may be.”

Fernanda looked at Valerie and raised her eyes heavenward in a manner that indicated clearly that she was practicing the utmost in self-control. Mr. White ignored her and kept on speaking at his own pace.

“This will, in spite of my objections, is, I assure you, perfectly legal in this handwritten form, and I have had some considerable experience with wills. Ha! It was written three years ago, on January 15,
1987, and I was present the entire time. Although the law doesn’t require it, I insisted that it be witnessed by my secretary and the present manager of the bank. As far as I am aware, no other will exists.”