The Rich Shall Inherit (9 page)

“Margaret? Dead?” Rosalia whispered, clutching her hand to her heart. “Oh, no … no, it’s not true ….”

The Indian’s strange opaque eyes met hers. “It is true,” he said impassively.

“But why didn’t you send for help?” she wept.

“Missus not need help. It is what she wanted,” he said, “I know it.” He turned to the door. “Come with me.”

Rosalia followed him outside, staring at the basket, hastily made from grasses, placed in the shade of a young sycamore. In it lay Poppy, fast asleep.

When he was in L.A., Mike always stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He felt sure there were creative vibrations lingering there, left over from the early days when it was home from home for famous movie stars and flamboyant directors and hardworking writers. Or maybe it was just the calm luxury and old-fashioned glitz of the place that inspired him. Whichever, he’d written most of
Robbelard’s Getaway
in a glorious, inspired two-month spurt in one of their pink “cottages,” and he’d been fond of the place ever since. The hotel had been built in 1912 when the township of Beverly Hills consisted of nothing more than tilled fields and a few new, bare roads, and right from the beginning, it had fulfilled its role as the glamor hotel queen of Hollywood.

His breakfast was delivered at nine-thirty promptly, after he’d completed an hour on the tennis court with the resident pro, and was already showered and changed and ready for what the day might bring. Over his coffee and rye toast he studied Lieber’s list of the claimants to Poppy Mallory’s estate. The lawyer had divided it into two sections—the “Possibles” and the “Improbables.” There were several hundred names in the last section—and just five in the Possibles … Aria Rinardi, in Venice; the twins, Claudia Galli in Paris and Pierluigi Galli in New York—who seemed to have a joint claim, though they had contacted Lieber separately; Orlando Messenger in London; and Lauren Mallory Hunter—right here in Los Angeles.

Might as well begin with the local girl, Mike thought, reading Lieber’s brief resume of Lauren’s claim—at least she had the right name. Her great-grandmother was reputed to have been brought up on a ranch near Santa Barbara … both great-grandmother and -grandfather were deceased before she was born … mother’s
name Sonia Mallory Hunter. Mike checked Lauren’s age again; she was only eighteen. Then why wasn’t
Sonia
Hunter claiming the estate? Trouble between mother and daughter perhaps? Or maybe Sonia had simply missed the ad; after all, some people never read a newspaper from one month to the next.

Anyway, Lauren’s story of the grandmother in Santa Barbara was the most tenuous claim possible, and completely unsubstantiated—although she did have a family Bible with proof of the name Mallory. Lieber had included her on the strength of that—and the fact that the dates fitted. And Mike thought that when you compared it with some of the fantasies in the Improbables list, maybe it wasn’t so farfetched after all.

Picking up the phone, he dialed Lauren’s number. He let it ring a dozen times but no one answered so he tried Denny’s Coffee Shop on Ventura, thinking maybe she was already at work. The girl there told him it was Lauren’s day off. “But she’ll be at Teddy’s Barn later,” she told him brightly, “she works there as a cocktail waitress most every night.”

Mike tried her number again—surely she’d be home if it was her day off. But there was still no reply and he put down the receiver irritatedly … there was nothing for it but to wait until tonight.

Lauren just let the phone ring. It couldn’t be anything important, probably just Denny’s to say they needed a relief waitress and could she come in? But not today she couldn’t, not even if they paid her triple time … today was her day with Maria. She lay in bed, lazily contemplating what they might do. The baby was kicking her plump little legs in the air, making gentle noises as she tried to catch the gaily colored bird mobile over her crib. Lauren had heard of children who cried all the time and drove their mothers crazy, but Maria was such a quiet child and never a moment’s trouble. She never cried when she was left at the baby-minder’s during the day, or with a sitter at night; and she was always full of smiles when she saw her.

“Maria,” she called to her, smiling delightedly as the child’s lips seemed to copy hers and form the word; only the sound that came out of her mouth was strangely high-pitched and bore no resemblance to Maria. “You’ll get there, honey,” she said encouragingly, “just you keep on trying.” But if she were truthful with herself, she wasn’t at all sure she would. When the baby-minder
had first heard Maria, she’d given Lauren one of those sympathetic looks and said, “Maria’s just a bit ‘different,’ that’s all.”

Lauren had snatched the child away and hurried home, trying not to think of the look in the woman’s eyes as she’d said it, because it only confirmed what she had suspected herself. She’d finally been forced to come to terms with the fact that Maria was different, lost in some private world of her own. She was “damaged,” thought Lauren sadly, using the easiest word she could bear, because she would never ever say that Maria was “retarded” or “mentally disabled”—or any other of those awful truths, and anyway it just made her love even more fiercely protective. And it wasn’t surprising considering what Maria had gone through before she was even born. In Lauren’s worst nightmares Maria was old enough to go to school and the authorities had realized what was wrong. She’d be clinging to Maria, screaming as they tried to snatch her away. So many nights she’d woken sweating with fear, unable to see any way out of her dilemma. And she just knew that when it happened, as it surely would, both she and the child would die of broken hearts.

She lay back against the pillows, watching the little girl, absorbed in her game with the bird mobile, wondering how many times a heart could be broken. The first time it had happened she’d been twelve. Someone had telephoned from the Boeing factory where her father worked as a production manager to say that he’d had a coronary and that he’d been dead before he hit the floor. Her mother had repeated those exact words to her, and the awful image of her dead father falling to the ground had stuck in her mind for ever afterward.

She’d wondered then how she could cope with the leaden weight that had once been her heart but, like most things, with time nature had eased the pain, and after a while she’d gotten over it. The next crack in her heart had come two years later when her mom had told her she wanted to get married again. Up until then Lauren had been an ordinary conscientious student at Redlands High, doing all the usual things fourteen-year-old girls did—studying hard when she had to, and playing hard when she didn’t. There had always been a party to go to on the weekend, or a sleep-over at one of her friends’ houses. They’d shopped in groups in the malls on Saturday mornings and cheered the high school football team on autumn Saturday afternoons. Now, of course, she realized that her mom had still been young, only thirty-four, and it was only natural that she should fall in love
and remarry. But at the time, after all the grief they’d gone through together because of her father, it had seemed like the supreme act of betrayal.

She’d been wildly jealous and she knew now she’d behaved unreasonably and made their lives a misery, but it had been the only way she’d known how to make her opinion felt. “You never told me you were going out with him,” she’d shouted at her mom, “you never said a word. I bet he doesn’t even
know
about
me!”

“Of course he knows about you,” Sonia Hunter had told her soothingly, “why, I’ve told him every single thing about you … he knows you’re a great swimmer and he knows you’re doing well in school and you want to try for Stanford. He even knows you had chickenpox when you were three and how much the braces on your teeth cost.”

“Why’d you tell him
those
things,” she’d screamed, “those are things my
real
dad knew, not
him!”

Sonia Hunter had sighed resignedly; people always said you could expect this kind of trouble when you told your kid that you were marrying again, but it surely didn’t make it any easier. Sonia had shoulder-length blond hair, its lightness helped by regular visits to the hairdresser, and she had that very neat, burnished look of a woman who kept herself in shape. She took exercise classes at the gym and worked out on the Nautilus until she was aware of every muscle in her body. She drank lots of fresh juices and was passionate about health foods, and she’d brought her daughter up on the same healthy diet. Lauren’s teeth might have braces, but they shone as whitely as if they’d been polished, her pretty blue eyes were clear and her skin flawless, and like her mother, she didn’t have an extra ounce of fat on her body.

Sonia had put a brave face on Lauren’s rebellious attitude, and on weekends when Doug came up from San Diego where he worked as an attorney, she’s tried very hard to keep things “family style” so that her daughter didn’t feel left out. But Lauren had been fourteen and going through a tough adjustment into young womanhood. She’d hated the idea of her mom sleeping with Doug, and hated the idea that all the other kids at school would know that too. She’d begun to do badly in class and took to skipping her homework and going out instead, cruising along the boulevards with a bunch of other kids in some sixteen-year-old’s hot rod.

Lauren had been a shy girl, happiest when she was part of a crowd. She wasn’t even sure she’d know what to say to a boy if she went on a
real
date. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, and she wished she were taller, but she was surely cute, with a limber, slender-hipped body, shapely legs, and small pointed breasts. Her mother always told her she had a “fresh, well-scrubbed look,” with her polished skin and shining hair, and her natural California tan.

When her railway-track braces came off, all at once the boys’ attitude toward her had changed and her own private phone never stopped ringing. She’d begun to wear shorter skirts to show off her legs and finally had enough confidence to go out on dates alone. She was still shy, but so were the boys, and mostly they would just eat at the coffee shop or the Chinese restaurant and maybe take in a movie. Then they’d cruise around for a while until they found a quiet spot to park and make out a little in the backseat—but she never let any of them get beyond first base. She didn’t quite know why, because she knew some of the other girls did—or at least they
said
they did—but it just wasn’t something she wanted. It was all too much responsibility—too much growing up. She’d decided that on the whole, she much preferred sleep-overs at her friends’ houses and their gossip and hilarity, to a sweaty struggle fending off some overeager boy in the backseat of a car on a sultry California night.

When her mother and Doug finally got married, they said Lauren would have to leave Redlands High and move to a new school in San Diego, where they were to live. They’d watched stunned as she’d rampaged around the house in storms of tears, asking how they could do that to her. Didn’t they know all her friends were here? Everybody she’d ever known, all her life? And now, just because they’d gotten married she was supposed to give them all up and begin again from scratch. And what about her exams? She was almost seventeen, her SAT college entrance exams were coming up … how did they expect her to pass if she went to a new school? With a new routine and new teachers who didn’t understand her. They knew how important it was to her to get into Stanford. “It’s unfair,” she’d wailed, and she wouldn’t go, she refused!

“She’s right,” Doug had told Sonia nervously, “the kid’s absolutely right. It’s
not
fair.”

Lauren had stopped crying, staring at him suspiciously, wondering what he was up to. But then he’d said, “It’s only another
year, Sonia, she has to have her chance. I’ll just have to commute to San Diego and then when she goes off to college, we can all move down there.”

Lauren had looked at him, smiling; it had looked as if everything was going to be all right after all. And then all of a sudden, it all went terribly wrong. And she wished with all her heart she’d never complained, and that she’d gone quietly to live with them in San Diego.

By seven o’clock that night, she didn’t know who was more exhausted, she or Maria. The baby, surfeited on fresh air and the new experiences of the zoo, was already fast asleep in her crib. Lauren wearily applied her makeup and stepped into her leotard, black tights, and high heels. Teddy had been complaining lately that she looked too skinny. “You’re losing all your curves, Lauren,” he’d warned. “If it weren’t for the fact that you’ve got a nice ass and a good pair of legs, I’d have to fire you.”

“Thanks a lot!” she’d retorted angrily.

“You’re a cocktail waitress,” he’d said, shrugging, “you know why you were hired. Sure you can carry the drinks without dropping them, and give the right change
and
you don’t try to slide the odd ten-dollar bill into your pocket—but so can a hundred other girls. The guys like to look at you when you serve them. So you’d better get off whatever diet you’re on and get yourself together.”

Much as she hated to admit it, Lauren knew he was right; Teddy’s Barn was famous for its attractive waitresses. She just never had the time or the money to eat properly, and she lived on cheap junk food.

The club was quiet when she got there, just a couple of guys up at the bar and one or two people drinking at the dimly lit tables in the back. The group who were to entertain that night were setting up on stage, testing the mikes, and the other waitresses were standing around gossiping. She combed her hair, added a touch more lipstick and a splash of Giorgio scent, and went to join them.

Mike Preston watched her from his seat at the bar, checking her appearance against the small color photograph attached to Lieber’s notes. The picture looked as though it had been taken from her high school yearbook and in it she looked juvenile and sweet, with polished red-blond hair and wide blue eyes and a sparkling, if shy, smile. But the girl in the leotard was too thin;
she looked tired and there was a little frown of worry between her brows. He wondered uneasily what had happened to change the eager young teenager into this careworn young woman.