Nightshades (Nameless Detective) (7 page)

There was a message waiting for me at the Sportsman’s Rest. And it surprised me a little when I saw who it was from: Mrs. Helen O‘Daniel. She had called about ten o’clock, left a telephone number and an address, and asked that I either get in touch with her by phone or drop by any time this afternoon. She hadn’t said what it was she wanted. Or, for that matter, how she’d known where I was staying, although she’d probably got that information from her husband or from Shirley Irwin.

I ruminated for about ten seconds and decided to go see her in person. I wanted a look at the lady, for one thing; and I wanted to find out if there was anything to Penny Belson’s intimations of an affair between her and Munroe Randall. You can’t bring up delicate matters like that on the telephone, or even do any subtle probing. Telephones are blunt instruments in more ways than one, especially among strangers.

The address she’d given me was a number on Sky Vista Road; that was a ritzy section up in the hills west of town, the motel clerk told me. I got directions from her and then returned to the room to tell Kerry where I was going. She said, “I hope you don’t make an ass of yourself with her too.” I sighed and went out and got into the car and drove away feeling grumpy.

It took me half an hour to find Sky Vista Road and the O’Daniel house. It was one of these split-level jobs built into the side of a hill, made out of redwood-and-brick with waves of ivy clinging to it. There was a covered platform deck that served as a garage, and parked on it was a lemon-colored Porsche with a personalized license plate that said FAST UN. You couldn’t see the back end of the house from the road, because of the way it was built and because of oak and pepper trees that crowded in close on both sides; but you knew there would be wide balconies on at least two levels, with a sweeping view of the town and the mountains and Mt. Shasta in the distance.

I found a dirt turnaround to park in nearby, walked back and down some stairs to the front porch. A little card above the bell read: NO SOLICITORS. I pushed the bell anyway and stood there waiting.

The door opened before long and I was looking at the woman in the photograph on Frank O’Daniel’s desk. The dark hair was piled up on her head and fastened with a barrette; she was wearing a tank top and a pair of white shorts that revealed a lot of skin the color of burnt butter. She had very good legs.

She let me look her over for about five seconds, while she did the same to me. I was more impressed by what I saw than she was, but not by much. Her expression was even more snooty than it had seemed in the photograph.

She said finally, “Yes? May I help you?”

“If you’re Helen O’Daniel, maybe you can,” I said, and I told her who I was.

The name worked a kind of metamorphosis on her. The snootiness vanished, her mouth got smiley, she put a hand up to touch her hair; she went a little soft-looking, too, at least around the edges. She wanted to do all of that slowly and subtly, so it didn’t look like she was putting it on just for me. But she wasn’t good at that sort of thing. It all seemed to come at once, like a quick-change artist shedding one costume for another: within the space of two heartbeats I was looking at a completely different version of Helen O’Daniel. I doubted if I was going to like the second one any better than the first.

“Forgive me,” she said, “I didn’t mean to sound rude. It’s just that there have been so many interruptions today . . . and I wasn’t sure if you’d call first . . .”

“I probably should have,” I said, “but your message said to drop by.”

“No, it’s perfectly all right. I’m glad you did. Come in—we’ll talk out on the deck.”

She led me through a maze of white, hairy-looking furniture, suspended mobiles made out of silver doodads and colored glass, big tropical plants with thick trembly leaves that had the malevolent look of carnivores. Most of that stuff was in a massive living room or family room or whatever they call them. Part of its outer wall was made of sliding glass, open now; the other part was a brick fireplace with some weird abstract paintings mounted above the mantel. The deck beyond was about what I’d expected: a wide balcony complete with a tinted-glass sunroof and a view that had probably added another twenty thousand to the price of the house.

Mrs. O’Daniel stopped in the middle of the room and faced me again. “I was just about to have a gin and tonic,” she said. “Will you join me?”

“Thanks, no.”

“Something else, then? I have just about everything . . .”

“Nothing right now.”

“Well. Excuse me just a second?”

“Sure.”

She went out of the room through a doorway beyond the fireplace, rolling her hips a little the way she had on the way in. It wasn’t an exaggerated roll, but I thought that it was deliberate. Whatever her reasons, Helen O’Daniel was about as subtle as an elephant’s hind end.

I decided I didn’t want to keep on standing there like another piece of furniture. Besides which, the nearest tropical plant seemed to be looking at me in a hungry sort of way. So I went and examined one of the hairy items. It was large, it was oddly shaped, it had tufts of white furry stuff sticking out of it. It looked like nothing so much as a giant rabbit that had been decapitated, stuffed, and turned into a chair.

Helen O’Daniel was still out in the kitchen; I could hear her rattling ice. I wandered over to the fireplace for a closer look at the weird paintings. One of them was tolerable: it had a sort of design and at least its riot of colors—reds and blues and blacks—didn’t clash. The other one looked like somebody had vomited up a purplish succotash and stirred it around on canvas with a stick. Things like this made me glad I was a lowbrow and didn’t know the first thing about art. A name was scrawled in one corner, and idle curiosity about who had perpetrated such a piece of crap made me lean down and peer at it. Only then my curiosity quit being idle and I wasn’t thinking about art any more.

The name of the artist was Paul Robideaux.

Mrs. O’Daniel came back just then, carrying a tall glass. She saw me standing in front of the painting, blinked, and came to a standstill. Her face didn’t show much, though, not even when I pointed to Robideaux’s atrocity and said, “Nice piece of work here. I was just admiring it.”

“Yes. It’s quite good, isn’t it.”

“Local artist?”

“I imagine so. I bought it at a crafts fair a year or so ago. Shall we go out on the deck?”

I considered pushing the topic a little further, maybe coming right out and asking her if she knew Robideaux, but it didn’t seem to be the way to handle her. And I’d made enough mistakes by being blunt today as it was. So I shrugged and said, “Sure,” and we went out on the deck.

A chaise lounge had been pulled out near the balcony railing, to catch the last of the sun as it passed over to the west; Mrs. O’Daniel sat on that. The only other chair in sight was a Chinese rattan thing with a fanlike back and a narrow seat that looked uncomfortable. And was.

She said, “You’re wondering why I wanted to talk to you, of course. It’s nothing earthshaking. My husband and I were talking at dinner last night and he mentioned you were here investigating poor Munroe’s death for the insurance company, talking to people who knew him, that sort of thing, and that we should all cooperate in any way we can in order to get the matter settled as quickly as possible.”

Some sentence. Some Mrs. O’Daniel, too. She had a better reason than that for wanting to see me; and I had a pretty fair idea what it might be. She hadn’t had dinner with her husband last night, either, or found out about me that way. He’d reminded her on the phone yesterday that he was leaving from the office for some lake in the area, to spend the weekend on a houseboat.

But I said, “You knew Mr. Randall pretty well, did you?”

“Oh yes. I met him when Frank and I were married several years ago. His death was a terrible shock.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“Such a tragic accident,” she said. She had lowered her voice a couple of octaves and given it a sepulchral tremor; it sounded only about half sincere, like an undertaker sympathizing with somebody else’s loss. “That garage of his . . . well, it was an awful firetrap. I don’t know how many times Frank and I warned him to clean it up.”

I said something noncommittal.

“The police said that’s where the fire started—in the garage. Spontaneous combustion. I suppose your findings concur with that?”

“So far they do, yes.”

“So far? You mean you think the fire might have started somewhere in the house?”

“I mean it’s possible the cause wasn’t spontaneous combustion.”

She took a large bite out of her gin and tonic; she looked vaguely uneasy now. “I can’t imagine what could have caused it then,” she said.

“A match, maybe.”

“Match? You don’t mean arson?”

“It’s possible. I haven’t ruled it out yet.”

“But that’s absurd!”

“Your husband doesn’t think so. Neither does Martin Treacle.”

“They don’t believe the fire was deliberately set.”

“They admitted the possibility.”

“I don’t believe it either. It was an accident.”

I waited, not saying anything.

Pretty soon she said, “Those people in Musket Creek . . . are they the ones you suspect?”

“I don’t suspect anyone, Mrs. O’Daniel. Not yet anyhow.” I paused. “But it could be one of them; they all seem to have had good reason to hate Randall.”

“I suppose so. I know very little about their problems with Northern Development; I’m not a woman who takes an active interest in her husband’s business activities.”

I felt like grinning at her: she just wasn’t a very good liar. “You don’t know any of the Musket Creek residents personally, then?”

“Of course not.” She said it too quickly, seemed to realize that, tried to cover herself by saying something else, and botched that too: “Why would I have anything to do with anyone who lives in the backwoods?”

“Lots of people live in the backwoods,” I said. “Writers, gold hunters, homesteaders. Artists.”

She made the rest of her drink disappear. She didn’t look at me while she did it.

Time to back off on that angle, I thought. I asked her, taking a new tack, “Did your husband tell you about the threatening note he received?”

“Yes, he told me.”

“You don’t sound very concerned about it.”

“Why should I be? It was nothing but a crank note, like those telephone calls we kept getting last year. I’m sure Frank mentioned those?”

I nodded. “And did he also tell you that Jack Coleclaw attacked him in his office yesterday?”

“Well, he said there’d been a minor altercation. But he didn’t elaborate.”

“It wasn’t so minor. If I hadn’t been there, your husband might have been badly hurt.”

She looked at her empty glass, seemed to want to get up and refill it, then just sat there with it in her hand. Her face revealed nothing. Maybe she had a hard shell that was full of feeling on the inside, like a piece of rock candy with a liquid center. Or maybe she just didn’t give a damn about her husband’s welfare. I thought it was probably the latter; the way it looked to me, the only person Helen O‘Daniel cared about was Helen O’Daniel.

I said, “Let’s get back to Munroe Randall. I understand he was quite a ladies’ man.”

She stiffened a little. “What do you mean by that?”

“I was told he had relationships with a lot of different women. Intimate relationships. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“I . . . yes, I suppose it is.”

“Do you know any of his women friends?”

“Not really. I may have met one or two, but . . .”

“How about Penny Belson?”

“That bitch. Munroe should have known better.”

“You know Miss Belson, then.”

“Yes, I know her. Why? Have you been talking to her?”

“Yesterday at her salon.”

“What did she tell you?”

“About what?”

Pause. “She’s a liar, you know. And a tramp.”

Pot calling the kettle black, I thought.

“What did she say about me?” Mrs. O’Daniel asked.

“Nothing specific. I understand you used to be one of her customers. What happened?”

“I decided to go to another salon, that’s all.”

“Why? Did you have some sort of trouble with Miss Belson?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

Time to back off again. “Who else did Randall date regularly?” I asked.

“I told you, I don’t really know.”

“But you were a friend of his—”

“I didn’t pry into his personal life.”

“You saw him socially, though, didn’t you? Often?”

“Not very often, no.”

“Did you see him on the day he died?”

“Of course not.” But again she said it too quickly. “I don’t see the point of all these questions. Just what are you leading up to?”

“I’m not leading up to anything. I’m only doing my job—asking questions, looking for answers. Trying to find out if anybody has anything to hide.”

“Are you insinuating I have something to hide?”