Natural Causes (26 page)

"I know the vice-president," Glendora said.
"We play racquet ball together."

"Do you feel up to pulling a few more strings? I
think I've got a lead on where Quentin was last weekend, but I need
someone with access to phone company records in order to confirm it."

"It is Sunday," Glendora said.

"It's up to you, Frank," I said. "You
can call him now or you can call him in the morning."

He thought about it for a moment. "What exactly
do you need to know?"

"I need a record of any long-distance calls made
on Dover's private phone this past weekend."

"On his private phone here in town?"

"Yeah." I gave him the number.

"I'll see what I can do," he said. "Where
will you be?"

I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was
half-past five. "I'll be here for another couple of hours. After
that you can get me at the Dover home."

"Marsha's or Connie's?"

"Marsha's," I said.

He didn't say anything.

"I'll talk to you later, Frank," I said and
hung up.

Glendora wasn't a fool. I
figured he'd guessed why I was going out to the Dover house. It
wasn't a tough thing to guess at. All you had to do was know Marsha.
Or know me. Either way, it wasn't a flattering deduction.

***

At half-past six, Glendora called back.

"I've got what you wanted," he said. "Do
you have a pencil handy?"

I took one out of the nightstand drawer and tore off
a piece of the phone book to write on.

"Quentin made five long-distance calls last
weekend on his private line--all to the same number. One on Friday
night. Three on Saturday. And one that I don't understand on Monday
afternoon."

"Quentin didn't make the last few call--his
doctor did."

"I see," Glendora said. "Well, I don't
really see. But I'll take your word for it. The number called was
505-889-9206."

"That's not L.A.'s area code--505," I said
with surprise.

"No. It's New Mexico," Glendora said. "I
had it checked. It was Quentin's ranch in New Mexico."

"Well, I'll be goddamned," I said. "Then
he wasn't in L.A. on Friday night and on Saturday after all."

"Why do you say that?" Glendora said with
alarm. "Because his cardiologist talked to him at the 505 number
on Saturday morning."

There were other reasons--the timing of the phone
call to his mother on Friday night, the man with the Mexican accent
whom Feldman had talked to on Monday, above all the phone call
Quentin himself had made to his private phone in Cincinnati. It
hadn't made much sense for him to call-forward if he were trying to
reach someone in L.A., which is what I'd assumed. He could have
dialed directly from the Belle Vista and no one would have known whom
he'd talked to. But if he'd been calling someone at his ranch in New
Mexico--the man with the Mexican accent--then he would have had to
have made a long-distance call from the Belle Vista and he must have
known that the hotel kept a record of long-distance calls. So he'd
put call--forwarding on his own phone to disguise the destination of
the call. All of Quentin's behavior pointed to the fact that he
hadn't wanted anyone to know about, much less have a record of, his
New Mexican sidetrip. I didn't go into it with Glendora. He sounded
too confused already.

"How did he manage it?" he said with a
touch of awe. "Getting out of the hotel? Flying to Las Cruces?
Coming back again without anybody knowing that he'd gone?"

The answer was that he'd had some help--there was no
other way to explain how the rental car had gotten back to the Belle
Vista lot while Quentin was on his way to Las Cruces. Or how Quentin
had gotten back to the hotel on Sunday. "I'm more interested in
knowing what he was doing at that ranch," I said. "And I
won't be able to figure that out from here. Is Jack still on the
coast?"

"Yes."

"Call him and tell him to meet me at LAX
tonight. I'll come in on the red-eye, about twelve-thirty A.M. his
time. Tell him to get in touch with Sy Goldblum, too. I'd like to
have him at the airport when I come in."

"I'll see to it," Glendora said. "This
is very confusing to me."

"To me, too."

He sighed. "It appears to have been a deliberate
confusion, doesn't it?"

"I'm afraid so, Frank. Whatever Quentin was up
to, it looks as if it was unethical at best and illegal at worst.
There's no other way to explain the coverup. The whole thing was
clearly planned in advance--the call-forwarding tells us that."

"But why?" Glendora said.

"He apparently thought that he needed an alibi
to cover his trip to Las Cruces. Draw your own conclusions."

"Lord, Quentin,"
Glendora said unhappily and rang off.

***

I packed my overnighter and my Dopp kit again and
called Cincinnati International to make a reservation on the red-eye
to the coast. While I had the ticket agent on the line, I decided to
do a little digging. I had a fairly good idea of when Dover had left
L.A.--sometime after he'd picked up the rental car at eight P.M.
Pacific time. He'd called his mother at two A.M. Eastern time, which
was eleven Pacific time. Unless he'd stopped some place in L.A. for
the night and then gone on to Las Cruces in the morning, he was
probably at his ranch when he made that call to Connie.

Assuming my timetable was correct, he'd had three
hours to get from L.A. to Las Cruces--between eight and eleven P.M.
What I needed to know from the ticket agent was whether that could be
done on a commercial flight or whether, as I suspected on the basis
of all the other diversions, Quentin had found some other, less
public way of getting to New Mexico.

"I may need to catch a flight to Las Cruces, New
Mexico, next Friday," I said to her.

"From L.A.?"

"Yes. I want to leave between, say, eight-thirty
and nine-thirty in the evening, if possible. Can you set that up for
me?"

I could hear her punching buttons on her computer
terminal. "There are no direct commercial flights to Las
Cruces," she said. "The nearest I can get you is El Paso,
leaving at six-thirty, arriving at nine-thirty Mountain Time. There's
nothing flying later than that on Friday night."

"So I'll have to charter something?"

"Yes," she said.

I thanked her and made a mental note to have Wattle
check the L.A. charter flights. Then I dialed the New Mexican number.
I let the phone ring ten or twelve times, but no one picked it up. It
would have been too easy, anyway. The only things I could recall
being told about the ranch were that Quentin had sunk a bundle of
money into it and that it was run by an overseer named Ramirez, who
had visited Dover the week before he went on his trip. Connie Dover
had been the one who'd mentioned Ramirez. If anyone would know his
number, it was probably her. I called her up.

"This is Stoner," I said.

"Yes?" Her voice sounded more bitter than
usual. For a second I thought she'd found out about me and Marsha.
Then I remembered the way our last conversation had gone and decided
I was merely feeling guilty.

"I have some news for you," I told her.

"About Quentin?" she said anxiously.

"Yes. He left L.A. on Friday night and went to
his ranch in Las Cruces."

"On Friday night?"

"That's where he was calling you from--not from
the Belle Vista."

I don't believe it," she said flatly. "He
wouldn't have lied to me like that. You must be mistaken. He was in
Los Angeles, preparing for a meeting."

Whatever he'd been preparing for, it wasn't in Los
Angeles. But I saw no point in trying to convince Connie of that.
After what Murdock and Marsha had told me, I didn't see much point in
talking to her about her son at all. She'd hardly known him.

"You mentioned Quentin's overseer on Saturday.

"Jorge Ramirez?"

"Yes. He visited Quentin a week ago last
Wednesday?"

"So what?" Her voice sounded downright
hostile. She'd written me off. I could hear it. We had nothing more
to talk about. I went ahead anyway, even though I knew she wasn't
going to cooperate.

"Do you know what that meeting was about?"

"The ranch. I already told you that. There had
been flood damage."

"What was Quentin's plan?"

"To repair it."

"That's right. Quentin's lawyer told me that
he'd spent a fortune on it in the last two months. Over a hundred
thousand dollars."

I could hear her suck in her breath. "If you
knew that, why did you ask?"

"You wouldn't know Ramirez's phone number?"

"Find it somewhere else," she snapped. "I
don't think we have anything more to discuss. And let me assure you,
Stoner, that I know what you're up to. You may be able to dishonor my
son's memory with his tramp of a wife, but don't try it publicly."

I'd been wrong. She did know about me and Marsha. But
then she had a lot of practice prying into her son's life.

"If you proceed in smearing Quentin's name and
memory," she went on, "I will sue you. That is a promise.
You and United American and Frank Glendora. I wonder how happy they
would be about having the Russ Leonard story come out in open court?
I have enough materials at my disposal to create quite a stink. About
that and about any number of little incidents. And I won't hesitate
to use them, if it takes every penny I can raise. Leave this thing
alone, I'm warning you. And leave that whore alone, too."

"You'd like to see her dead, wouldn't you,
Connie?"

"Yes," she said.

Suddenly I was as sick of her as she was of me.

"How about Quentin?" I said. "Aren't
you a little glad that he's dead, too?"

"That's a horrible thing to say to me!" she
screamed.

"An unforgivable thing!"

"No more pretending everything's swell when it's
not. No more lies to cover up. Nice and safe in the ground, like his
father."

"Shut up!" she shouted. "You
son-of-a-bitch!" She slammed the receiver down in my ear.
 

31

At eight-thirty I drove out to the Dover house to say
goodbye to Marsha. But she wasn't there. I guess I hadn't really
expected her to be. The house was dark. After trying the front door,
I walked around to the garden and up to the terrace. I sat there for
a while on the chaise, listening to the wind in the oaks and staring
at the Dixie cup in the pool. Maybe it was better that she was gone,
I thought. At least she wouldn't be alone that night. The reflector
was lying on the tiles by the chaise. I picked it up and put it on
the liquor cart. Then I walked back to the car and drove to the
airport.

I thought about her on the flight out. Most of the
people on the plane were asleep. All the lights were dimmed, except
for a few reading lamps overhead. There wasn't any sound but the
engines and the rush of the wind. It was more like a Pullman than an
airplane--that late at night. I had my usual complement of Scotches,
smoked a pack of cigarettes, and thought about Marsha.

I thought about Quentin, too. About him and the girl,
when I should have been thinking about how he'd gotten to New Mexico
and how that rented car had gotten back to the Belle Vista lot and
why he'd gone so far away to die.

I should have been thinking about his project--the
one he'd been so happy and sad and noncommittal about, the one he'd
told his lawyer he might need his help on. Instead, I thought about
what Maria Sanchez had told me, about how Quentin had said that he'd
loved Marsha. Maria hadn't believed him. But I wasn't so sure. At
first Marsha had told me that he'd made her sleep with other men. But
later on, she'd said it had been her idea. I wasn't so sure that it
made a difference--whose idea it had been. Like Quentin had told
Feldman, they'd suited each other in some sad, indelible way. That's
what had made the difference.

The plane touched down at LAX at one A.M. L.A. time.
It was four by my watch and I was fagged out--rotten with booze and
cigarettes and fatigue. Jack met me at the arrival gate. He was
wearing a Hawaiian shirt and khaki pants. He looked as if I should
have been meeting him. Sy Goldblum wasn't there.

Moon smiled at me affectionately and I smiled weakly
back at him.

"Tired, huh?" he said.

I nodded.

He picked up my bag and carried it down the long,
empty corridor to the taxi stands in front of the terminal. We caught
a cab and Jack told the cabbie to take us to the Marquis.

"You can bunk with me," he said.
"Goldblum's going to meet us tomorrow morning for coffee. He
couldn't get away tonight. He said to tell you it was something about
the Sanchez killings. Christ, that made a splash out here. They love
their psychopaths."

"More homegrown fruit," I said.