The Secret Keeper (14 page)

A call to Alan Bement resulted in another answering machine response—a woman’s voice—and another left message.

Knowing that both Patricia and Gregory Fowler worked during the day, I determined to try to reach them from home after dinner. Gregory, Patricia, Richard, Alan, Stuart, George, Mel…uh…Mel’s mom, whose name escaped me at the moment—Lord, I hoped I could remember who was who and who said what.

I left the office at a quarter till two and opted to take the bus rather than going through the hassle of looking for a parking place near the Montero or paying the exorbitant parking fees in the nearby public garages. Hey, money’s money. 

It was two fifteen, and I was early as usual when I walked into the crystal, brass, and polished-mahogany lobby, which never failed to bring back memories of past cases and lost loves, mine and others’. The relatively small cocktail lounge off the main dining room had been completely redone, greatly expanded, and renamed since I was last there. A small stage had been added to allow the room to be used as a show lounge.

There were only half a dozen people in the place when I entered—all in pairs, which saved me wondering if one of them might be Richard Bement. I walked to the bar and, in honor of the occasion of breathing the rarified air of the wealthy and not having had to pay parking fees, ordered a whiskey sour from the red-vested bartender, whose hair was so shiny with grooming gel it almost reflected light.

*

My watch told me it was a quarter to three, and I was contemplating ordering another drink when an imperious figure strode into the room and marched directly to the bar. Without once having looked around, he sat at the next-to-last stool at the far end of the bar, summoning the bartender to bring him a Bombay gin martini with two garlic olives. 

The fact he had kept me waiting and that he didn’t bother to check to see if I might be there was pretty much what I’d anticipated. He was the mountain, and I was Mohammed. Getting up from my stool, I walked over to him.

“Mr. Bement,” I said, standing slightly behind him so he would have to turn a bit to see me. (If games he wanted, games he’d get.) I then passed behind him to take the last stool, forcing him to turn again in the other direction. “I appreciate your agreeing to see me.”

He totally ignored me while he removed his wallet from the inside pocket of his silk-lined suit coat and from a thick stack of bills selected a twenty, which he placed on the bar. He could just as easily have handed it directly to the bartender, but this way it was necessary for the bartender to reach for it. Games, games, games.

“Would you like another, sir?” the bartender asked me before moving off to the cash register.

“Yes, please,” I said, noting Bement did not offer to take it out of his twenty. I neither wanted nor expected him to, but small gestures, or lack thereof, tell a lot about a person.

Waiting until he had removed the speared olives, tapped them on the edge of the glass, eaten one, set the spear and second olive on his napkin and taken a slow sip of his martini—all the while staring at something in the empty space between him and the back bar—he finally said, “So, exactly what is it you expect me to tell you about my father?”

“Do you think it possible he did not commit suicide?”

The bartender brought my drink and I paid him. Bement waited until he’d gone before speaking.

“It seems my nephew is light in the brain as well as the loafers. But anything’s possible. A man in my father’s position inevitably has a long roster of enemies. And though he outlived most of them, I don’t suppose it is impossible for someone to still harbor a grudge.”

“But wouldn’t it be strange if after all these years—”

“The world abounds in ‘strange,’” he observed. 

Despite the very short time I’d spent in his company, I tended to agree.

“I gather you and your father were not close.”

He picked the remaining olive from his napkin, put it in his mouth and pulled out the empty skewer before replying.

“Please, Mr…Hardesty, was it?” He of course knew damned good and well it was. “I’m sure my nephew has taken great pleasure in parading all our family skeletons before you. Despite what I’m sure he told you, I did not hate my father. I was totally neutral to him. I fully realized his shameful treatment of my mother had nothing to do with me, though I’d be lying if I didn’t say it and she clouded my relationship with him.”

“So, you’re not aware of any enemies he may have had, or made recently?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. He was once a powerful and formidable man, but as he grew older he grew weaker in every sense. At the end, he was just a pathetic old man with no friends and no dignity. So did someone put him out of his misery? Or did he gather the last bit of courage to do it himself? I’d like to think the latter.”

“What can you tell me about Esmirelda Taft?”

“What about her? She’s a housekeeper, nothing more.”

“Well, for one thing, I’m curious as to whether she ever told you, as she did the police, that your father had mentioned suicide several times.”

There was a long pause, as though he was thinking over his response options.

“Yes, I seem to recall she mentioned it.”

“And you knew he had a gun?”

“I knew he had been given one several years before, but he had never mentioned it.”

“But you knew he had one, and you weren’t concerned when you heard he’d talked of suicide?”

“It never occurred to me he would follow through on it. Talking is one thing, doing quite another.”

“I see,” I said, wondering as I did so why people feel it necessary to say “I see” at all. “So, back to Ms. Taft.”

He raised an eyebrow and gave a slight shake of his head. “She was, and is, an employee. Nothing more. She sails through life, doing what she is paid to do while remaining totally unaffected by and uninterested in anything around her. In that regard, she’s the perfect housekeeper.”

“I understand she has a brother who spent time in prison.”

He looked at me strangely. “I won’t ask how you came by that knowledge, but yes. Esmirelda is a very private person, and in all the time she was with us, I can’t say I ever heard her say a word about her personal life.”

“How did
you
find out about her brother?”

“My late wife became aware, shortly before she died, that Esmirelda was apparently padding our grocery bills—not a great deal, perhaps twenty dollars or so a week—and confronted her. Esmirelda readily admitted it, explaining she had a brother in prison, and that she had taken the money only to help support his family while he was incarcerated.”

“And you didn’t consider that grounds for dismissal?”

“I certainly did, but my wife was a very compassionate woman. She pointed out that Esmirelda was an excellent housekeeper who could have made considerably more money with any number of other families. She said Esmirelda had sworn it would never happen again. My wife promised to keep a careful watch on her, so I agreed to keep her on. It was only after my wife’s death I learned she had subsequently given Esmirelda a raise in the equivalent amount of what she’d been taking so she could continue giving money to her brother’s family. Shortly thereafter, my father’s housekeeper quit, and I decided he needed Esmirelda more than we did.”

So, you got rid of her
, I thought.
Problem over. At least for you. Clever.

“And did you mention this to your father?”

“I saw no need. It was a closed issue.”

“Did your wife or you ever learn why her brother was sent to prison?”

He shook his head. “Not specifically. Some relatively minor offense, I assume. My wife saw no point in pressing her.”

A most interesting story, and I wondered how much actual truth there was in it. I wondered, too, if Esmirelda might have pulled the same routine with Clarence Bement, and whether he might not have been so “compassionate” if he’d found out about it.

But even if she had been padding the bill, and Clarence had known about it—and I couldn’t envision a multimillionaire looking through grocery store receipts—I could hardly see being caught at padding a grocery bill as motive for murder. On the other hand, if he had threatened to fire her because of it…

I filed it all away in my “to be considered” file, and was thinking of a way to pull the conversation back to the main topic when he saved me the trouble.

“As for my sons, which I assume will be the subject of your next question, my father made a pathetic attempt to buy their affection on the assumption his money could make up for the damage his earlier scandalous behavior had done the family. Then, after encouraging them to come to him if they needed anything, he suddenly cut them off.”

“And how did they react to that?”

Shaking his head, he said, “They were not happy, of course. He’d led them on and led them on only to drop them. None of them, I readily admit, is without flaw, and there’s always been a healthy rivalry among them.”

Healthy rivalry? An interesting way to put it.

“But frankly,” he continued without missing a beat, “I find even the most remote implication that either I or any of my sons could possibly be involved in any way in my father’s death to be insulting.”

“I was not implying you were.”
Directly
, one of my mind-voices amended. “But as I told you on the phone, Mel is convinced your father would never have committed suicide, and my job is to see if there might possibly be any real justification for his belief. If there is none, he won’t pursue the matter further.”

His look told me he wasn’t buying it.

“Does anyone in your family drive a black Mercedes with tinted windows?” I asked, deciding to switch the subject, and suddenly remembering Jonathan’s description of the car that had followed him when he left work the day after the shooting incident.

He looked at me a bit strangely, then said, “That’s a rather odd question. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” I lied, then compounded it. “I drove by your father’s house the other day and saw a black Mercedes in the drive.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, our entire family is partial to black Mercedes. I have one, but I’ve not been to the house in some time. Stuart has one, too, but I can’t imagine what he would have been doing there. Alan had one but wrecked it. George doesn’t drive. It was probably Esmirelda.”

“Esmirelda Taft has a black Mercedes with tinted windows?” Why hadn’t I asked her when I first went over to Bement’s home—or checked out the garage?

Maybe it’s time you switched careers
, a mind-voice—the one in charge of sarcasm—said.
Flower arranging would be nice.

He smiled. “No, she’s not paid that well. My father has—had—one, though he hadn’t driven in several years. She has her own car—an old junker—but she keeps it in the garage and uses the Mercedes for shopping and errands.”

I quickly filed the information away for later consideration and moved on.

“I understand Eli Prescott was to be your father’s executor, but that you and your sister assumed duties as alternates when Prescott was killed.” I deliberately chose the word
killed
rather than
died
to see if there might be any reaction. There was none.

He nodded, taking another sip of his martini. “Yes, though I’ve been doing most of the work.”

I wondered, since the will had not yet been read, what “work” there might be at this point. I also noted his glass was almost empty, and was quite sure that, when it was, he would find reason to end the discussion and leave.

“Do you know anything about the whereabouts of the new will your father made out shortly before Eli Prescott’s death?”

He turned his head only slightly in my direction. “Nothing at all. I wasn’t even aware there was one until the lawyers called to ask if I knew where it was. Apparently, there was only one copy, and it was never signed so, therefore, is not enforceable.”

“Do you know any details of the new will?” Mel’s mom had already told me the lawyer wouldn’t tell her.

“No, and it really doesn’t matter, since it is not valid.”

“What if a signed copy of the new will were to show up?”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “Then we would just have to see. But I’m not holding my breath.”

I wondered what might lie beneath that statement.

“One more question,” I said. “Do you or any of your sons own a twenty-two rifle?”

“For hunting, you mean?”

“Hunting or any other reason.”

“No. Guns of any kind have only one purpose—to kill, as my late father’s death can attest. Neither I nor any of my sons possess or have ever possessed a gun.”

He drained his martini and picked up his change from the bar—leaving a one dollar tip. “Now I must be going. I trust we will not be meeting again.”

I wouldn’t bet on that
, I thought.

Turning away from me as he got up from his stool, he left.

*

Regarding Richard’s response to my question about having a .22 rifle, I really couldn’t picture him or his sons as outdoorsmen. I rather doubted they had ever seen a wild animal, let alone hunted one. Still, .22s were relatively easy to acquire and so ubiquitous as to be difficult to trace.