Put on by Cunning (16 page)

‘How long have you been living here?’

‘I just love your accent,’ said Mrs Romero. ‘How long have we been here? I guess it’d be four years, right? We came the summer Natalie went on that long vacation up the coast. Must’ve been the summer of ’76. I guess I just thought the house was empty, no one living there, you know, you get a lot of that round here, and then one day my husband says to me, there’s folks moved into 1121, and that was Natalie.’

‘But she’d lived there before?’

‘Oh, sure she lived there before but we didn’t, did we?’ Donna Romero said this triumphantly as if she had somehow caught him out. ‘She had these roomers, you know? There was this guy she had, he was living here illegally. Well, I guess everyone knew it, but my husband being in the Police Department – well, he had to do what he had to do, you know?’

‘You mean he had him deported?’

‘That’s what I mean.’

Wexford decided he had better make himself scarce before an encounter threatened with the policeman husband. He contented himself with merely asking when this deportation had taken place. Not so long ago, said Mrs Romero, maybe only last fall, as far as she could remember.

It was now noon and growing fiercely hot. Wexford reflected that whoever it was who had first described the climate of California as perpetual spring hadn’t had much experience of an English April. He went back across the road.

The presence on the drive of 1123 of a four-year-old manoeuvring a yellow and red truck and a six-year-old riding a blue bicycle told him Mrs Dobrowski was back. She greeted him so enthusiastically and with such glistening if not quite tearful eyes that he felt a thrust of guilt when he thought of her conferring later with the man at 1121 and with Patrolman (Lieutenant? Captain?) Romero. But it was too late now to abandon the role of Tina’s uncle. He was obliged to listen to a catalogue of Tina’s virtues while Mrs Dobrowski, small and earnest and wearing a tee-shirt campaigning for the conservation of the sea otter, pressed Tina souvenirs on him, a brooch, a pair of antique nail scissors, and a curious object she said was a purse ashtray.

At last he succeeded in leading the conversation to Natalie by saying with perfect truth that he had seen her in London before he left. It was immediately clear that Mrs Dobrowski hadn’t approved of Natalie. Her way of life had not been what Mrs Dobrowski was used to or expected from people in a nice neighbourhood. Turning a little pink, she said she came from a family of Baptists, and when you had children you had standards to maintain. Clearly she felt that she had said enough on the subject and reverted to Tina, her prowess as what she called a stenographer, the sad fact of her childlessness, the swift onset of the disease which had killed her. Wexford made a second effort.

‘I’ve often wondered how Tina came to live here.’

‘I guess Natalie needed the money after Rolf Ilbert moved out. Johnny was the one who told Tina Natalie had a room for rent.’

Wexford made a guess. ‘Johnny was Natalie’s – er, friend?’

Mrs Dobrowski gave him a grim smile. ‘I’ve heard it called that. Johnny Fassbender was her lover.’

The name sounded German but here might not be. When Wexford asked if he were a local man Mrs Dobrowski said no, he was Swiss. She had often told Tina that one of them should report him to the authorities for living here without a residence permit, and eventually someone must have done so, for he was discovered and deported.

‘That would have been last autumn,’ Wexford said.

‘Oh, no. Whatever gave you that idea? It was all of three years ago. Tina was still alive.’

There was evidently a mystery here, but not perhaps one of pressing importance. It was Natalie’s identity he was primarily concerned with, not her friendships. But Mrs Dobrowski seemed to feel that she had digressed too far for politeness and moved rapidly onto her visitor’s precise relationship to Tina. Was he her true uncle or uncle only by marriage? Strangely, Tina had never mentioned him. But she had mentioned no one but the brother who came over when she died. She, Mrs Dobrowski, would have liked Ivan to have stayed at her house while he was in Los Angeles but hadn’t known how to broach this as she had hardly exchanged a word with Natalie all the years they had lived there, Wexford pricked up his ears at that. No, it was true, she had never set foot inside 1121 or seen Natalie closer than across the year.

Wexford noted that what she called the yard was, by Kingsmarkham standards, a large garden, dense with oleanders, peach trees and tall cacti. In order not to offend Mrs Dobrowski, he was obliged to carry off with him the brooch as a keepsake. Perhaps he could pass it on to the Zoffanys.

‘It’s been great meeting you,’ said Mrs Dobrowsi. ‘I guess I can see a kind of look of Tina about you now. Around the eyes.’ She gathered the four-year-old up in her arms and waved to Wexford from the porch. ‘Say hello to Ivan for me.’

In the heat of the day he drove back to the Miramar and took Dora out to lunch in a seafood restaurant down by the boardwalk. He hardly knew how to tell her he was going to have to leave her alone for the afternoon as well. But he did tell her and she bore it well, only saying that she would make another attempt to phone the Newtons. In their room she dialed their number again while he consulted the directory, looking for Ilberts. There was no Rolf Ilbert in the Los Angeles phone book or in the slimmer Santa Monica directory, but in this latter he did find a Mrs Davina Lee Ilbert at a place called Paloma Canyon.

Dora had got through. He heard her say delightedly, ‘Will you really come and pick me up? About four?’ Considerably relieved, he touched her shoulder, got a wide smile from her, and then he ran out to the lift, free from guilt at least for the afternoon.

It was too far to walk, half-way to Malibu. He found Paloma Canyon without difficulty and encouraged the car up an impossibly steep slope. The road zig-zagged as on some alpine mountainside, opening up at each turn bigger and better views of the Pacific. But otherwise he might have been in Ploughman’s Lane. All super residential areas the world over are the same, he thought, paraphrasing Tolstoy, it is only the slums that differ from each other. Paloma Canyon was Ploughman’s Lane with palms. And with a bluer sky, daisy lawns and an architecture Spanish rather than Tudor.

She wasn’t the wife but the ex-wife of the man called Rolf Ilbert. No, she didn’t mind him asking, she would be only too glad if there was anything she could do to get back at Natalie Arno. Would he mind coming around to the pool? They always spent their Sunday afternoons by the pool.

Wexford followed her along a path through a shrubbery of red and purple fuchsias taller than himself. She was a tall thin woman, very tanned and with bleached blonde hair, and she wore a sky-blue terry-cloth robe and flat sandals. He wondered what it must be like to live in a climate where you took it for granted you spent every Sunday afternoon round the pool. It was extremely hot, too hot to be down there on the beach, he supposed.

The pool, turquoise blue and rectangular with a fountain playing at the far end, was in a patio formed by the balconied wings of the lemon-coloured stucco house. Davina Lee Ilbert had evidently been lying in a rattan lounging chair, for there was a glass of something with ice in it and a pair of sunglasses on the table beside it. A girl of about sixteen in a bikini was sitting on the rim of the fountain and a boy a bit younger was swimming lengths. They both had dark curly hair and Wexford supposed they must resemble their father. The girl said ‘Hi’ to him and slipped into the water.

‘You care for iced tea?’ Mrs Ilbert asked him.

He had never tasted it but he accepted. While she was fetching it he sat down in one of the cane peacock chairs, looking over the parapet to the highway and the beaches below.

‘You want to know where Rolf met her?’ Davina Ilbert took off her robe and stretched out on the lounger, a woman of forty with a good if stringy figure who had the discretion to wear a one-piece swimsuit. ‘It was in San Francisco in ’76. Her husband had died and she was staying with friends in San Rafael. The guy was a journalist or something and they all went into the city for this writers’ conference that was going on, a cocktail party, I guess it was. Rolf was there.’

‘Your former husband is a writer?’

‘Movie and TV scripts,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have heard of him. Whoever heard of script writers? You have a serial called
Runway
on your TV?’

Wexford said nothing, nodded.

‘Rolf’s done some of that. You know the episodes set at Kennedy? That’s his stuff. And he’s made a mint from it, thank God.’ She made a little quick gesture at the balconies, the fountain, her own particular expanse of blue sky. ‘It’s Natalie you want to know about, right? Rolf brought her back to LA and bought that house on Tuscarora for her.’

The boy came out of the pool and shook himself like a dog. His sister said something to him and they both stared at Wexford, looking away when he met their eyes.

‘He lived there with her?’ he asked their mother.

‘He kind of divided his time between me and her.’ She drank from the tall glass. ‘I was really dumb in those days, I trusted him. It took me five years to find out and when I did I flipped. I went over to Tuscarora and beat her up. No kidding.’

Wexford said impassively, ‘That would have been in 1976?’

‘Right. Spring of ’76. Rolf came back and found her all bruised and with two black eyes and he got scared and took her on a trip up the coast to get away from me. It was summer, I don’t suppose she minded. She was up there – two, three months? He’d go up and join her when he could but he never really lived with her again.’ She gave a sort of tough chuckle. ‘I’d thrown him out too. All he had was a hotel room in Marina del Rey.’

The sun was moving round. Wexford shifted into the shade and the boy and girl walked slowly was into the house. A humming bird, no larger than an insect, was hovering on the red velvet threshold of a trumpet flower. Wexford had never seen one before. He said:

‘You said “up the coast”. Do you know where?’

She shrugged. ‘They didn’t tell me their plans. But it’d be somewhere north of San Simeon and south of Monterey, maybe around Big Sur. It could have been a motel, but Rolf was generous, he’d have rented a house for her.’ She changed her tone abruptly. ‘Is she in trouble? I mean, real trouble?’

‘Not at the moment,’ said Wexford. ‘She’s just inherited a very nice house and a million from her father.’

‘Dollars?’

‘Pounds.’

‘Jesus, and they say cheating never pays.’

‘Mrs Ilbert, forgive me, but you said your former husband and Mrs Arno never lived together again after the summer of ’76. Why was that? Did he simply get tired of her?’

She gave her dry bitter laugh. ‘
She
got tired of him. She met someone else. Rolf was still crazy about her. He told me so, he told me all about it.’

Wexford recalled Jane Zoffany. Husbands seemed to make a practice of confiding in their wives their passion for Natalie Arno. ‘She met someone while she was away on this long holiday?’

‘That’s what Rolf told me. She met this guy and took him back to the house on Tuscarora – it was hers, you see, she could do what she wanted – and Rolf never saw her again.’

‘
He never saw her again
?’

‘That’s what he said. She wouldn’t see him or speak to him. I guess it was because he still hadn’t divorced me and married her, but I don’t know. Rolf went crazy. He found out this guy she was with was living here illegally and he got him deported.’

Wexford nodded. ‘He was a Swiss called Fassbender.’

‘Oh, no. Where d’you get that from? I don’t recall his name but it wasn’t what you said. He was English. Rolf had him deported to England.’

‘Did
you
ever see her again?’

‘Me? No, why would I?’

‘Thank you, Mrs Ilbert. You’ve been very frank and I’m grateful.’

‘You’re welcome. I guess I still feel pretty hostile towards her for what she did to me and my kids. It wouldn’t give me any grief to hear she’d lost that house and that million.’

Wexford drove down the steep hill, noticing attached to a house wall something he hadn’t seen on the way up. A printed notice that said ‘No Solicitors’. He chuckled. He knew very well that this was an American equivalent of the ‘nice’ suburb’s injunction to hawkers or people delivering circulars, but it still made him laugh. He would have liked to prise it off the wall and take it home for Symonds, O’Brien and Ames.

Dora was out when he got back to the Miramar and there was a note for him telling him not to wait for dinner if she wasn’t back by seven-thirty. Rex Newton, whom he had rather disliked in the days when they had been acquaintances, he now blessed. And tomorrow he would devote the whole day exclusively to Dora.

From the map it didn’t look as if there was much in the way of habitation in the vicinity of Big Sur, and Wexford’s idea that Natalie Arno’s trail might therefore easily be followed was confirmed by an elderly lady in the hotel lobby. This was a Mrs Lewis from Denver, Colorado, who had spent, it appeared, at least twenty holidays in California. There was hardly a house, hotel or restaurant, according to Mrs Lewis, between San Simeon in the south and Carmel in the north. The coast was protected, Wexford concluded, it was conserved by whatever the American equivalent might be of the National Trust.

The Miramar’s enormous lobby had carpet sculpture on the walls. Although it was probably the grandest hotel Wexford had ever stayed in, the bar was so dark as to imply raffishness or at least that it would be wiser not to see what one was drinking. In his case this was white wine, the pleasant, innocuous, rather weak Chablis which must be produced here by the millions of gallons considering the number of people he had seen swilling it down. What had become of the whisky sours and dry martinis of his reading? He sat alone – Dora and Mrs Lewis were swapping family snaps and anecdotes – reflecting that he should try to see Rolf Ilbert before he began the drive northwards. Ilbert was surely by now over Natalie and would have no objection to telling him the name of the place where she had stayed in the summer of 1976. Wexford finished his second glass of wine and walked down past the sculptured carpet palms to phone Davina Ilbert, but there was no reply.