Death by Surprise Read online

  Everyone agreed finally, at least on the surface, to let me handle Francine until Thursday. After that, it was anyone’s game.

  I had intended to settle it quickly but it was almost an hour before I could disengage and hurry back upstairs. Amanda’s door was closed and Megan sat on a chair in the hall.

  “How is she?”

  “Sleeping. Rudolph came. He gave her a sleeping pill. He said she was doing all right and didn’t need to go to the hospital but he’s called a nurse to come for the night. I’m waiting for her.”

  “Does Rudolph think she is going to be okay?”

  Megan nodded. “Don’t worry, K.C. She just worked too hard tonight. And she seems upset about something but she didn’t want to talk. Rudolph said she was very tired and needed to rest.”

  I nodded and thanked Megan and asked her to tell the night nurse I would talk to Amanda tomorrow. I left Megan at Mandy’s door. I didn’t go in to see her. I didn’t want to disturb her. I thought, of course, that I would see her in the morning.

  I woke John Solomon up on Tuesday morning. A nippy wind scudded paper cups and soiled newspapers down the alley. It was eight o’clock but the sun hung behind thin grey clouds. John’s face sagged in folds like a dewlapped frog. He grimaced.

  “The office opens at nine.”

  “So does mine. John, I need more help.”

  He gave an elephantine sigh. “The coffee’s made. Come on in.”

  He shuffled ahead of me, pointing me vaguely toward his office while he disappeared down a short hall to the right. In a moment, he returned with a tray and two mugs with wreaths of steam curling over the coffee.

  “Thanks, John.”

  He slumped into his chair, loaded his coffee with four packets of sugar and took a deep drink.

  “K.C.,” he observed mildly, “you are becoming a pain in the ass.”

  “I’ll pay you enough that you can take your daughter to Lake Tahoe.”

  “I’d just lose money in the casino.”

  “How about Disneyland?”

  “She’s seventeen.”

  “Invite her boyfriend to go, too. They’ll love you, Pops.”

  He managed a sour smile. “What do you need now?”

  I told him.

  He thought for a long time. “I don’t want to lose my license,” he said finally.

  “John, that’s not a problem. Just get me the equipment, that’s all I ask.”

  “But the key?”

  “It could be a key to anything.”

  “Breaking and entering.”

  “Breaking and entering what?” I replied quickly. “Don’t ask me any questions. All you know is that you supplied me with some electronic gear—I could be planning on taping my niece’s birthday.”

  “I didn’t know you had a niece?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Hmm.” He finished his coffee and tugged at the whitish stubble on his chin. “Hell, I haven’t even shaved.”

  “That’s all right. It’s manly.”

  “Shut up.” He took off his glasses, rubbed at his eyes then peered at me. “It will be expensive.”

  But he knew that didn’t matter and, finally, he agreed.

  “By noon,” I stressed.

  “All right, if I can manage it.”

  “You will.”

  The day, as usual, sped. Does any lawyer ever catch up? And, if I didn’t bill some of my time pretty soon, my cash flow was going to be non-existent. There always seemed to be more important things to do than to bill.

  I did try twice to call Amanda. Jason’s wife, Ophelia, answered each time. “She’s sleeping. Miss K.C.,” and “I knocked, Miss K.C., but she tol’ me to go on, she’s restin’.”

  I decided that I would drop by the house in the afternoon. I needed to be sure that some additions were going to be made to the staff so that Amanda would have some permanent easing of her burden.

  It was one-fifteen by the time I shook free from the office and went to John Solomon’s. He had everything ready for me. It was expensive, but clever and worth every penny.

  “It will fit a dozen places,” John explained. “As for the other request you made, I can’t provide anyone with means of opening locked doors. But, I suppose if someone happened to find a key on a floor somewhere and it just happened to be useful later . . .” He took a key off his desk, polished it quite carefully with his handkerchief and dropped it on the floor near my shoe. I bent down and picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of my blazer.

  Once in my car, I took a small plastic recorder out of its soft bag and very carefully polished it, too. I had already put on a pair of leather gloves.

  A block from Boutelle’s apartment, I stopped at a drug store and used a phone in a back booth. Had she answered, I would have asked in a heavily accented voice if Quang Ngo lived there. It was one of the advantages of living in a community with a fair number of Vietnamese refugees.

  There wasn’t any answer.

  I walked slowly back to the car, not eager now. It was easy to plan something like this, but the doing was another matter.

  I parked around the corner from the apartment complex. I was wearing an all-weather coat, a dark brown scarf, sun glasses, and gloves.

  I could be any woman between the ages of twenty and forty.

  I walked briskly around the corner and into the first courtyard entrance. The apartments were built in a square with passageways at each corner leading into a central patio. Each apartment had its own interior entrance. I walked slowly on a flagstone path across the patio. It was chilly and dreary. Leaves fluttered into the empty swimming pool.

  I saw no one.

  I walked up to 14-D, took the key out of my pocket, opened the door and stepped inside. I closed the door behind me very, very gently and listened.

  A clock ticked.

  I stood in a tiny vinyl-floored foyer and looked up a narrow stairway. Then I looked to my left into the shadowy reaches of the living room.

  It was dark and quiet, only the ticking of the clock breaking the silence.

  I wanted frantically to hurry, to get my job done and get out, but I forced myself to wait and to listen.

  The clock ticked.

  Someone, of course, could be asleep in the upstairs bedroom but should anyone stir I should hear in time to get away.

  Slowly, one step at a time, I moved into the living room. Then, with more confidence, I stepped into the kitchen. I unlocked the back door then hurried back to the living room. Now was the time to move quickly, to be done.

  I looked quickly around the room and studied the possible hiding sites. Beneath the wide arm of a maple easy chair. In the corner behind the love seat. Behind the thick rough trunk of the rubber tree plant.

  The rubber tree plant drew me. It was healthy, its wide curling fronds reminding me of the artificial greenery at a local cafeteria that ran to Polynesian decor.

  I took the recorder out of my pocket, handling it gingerly. I really had no idea how it worked, but, according to John Solomon, it was set to start recording anything within a 10-foot radius at seven o’clock tomorrow evening. It would run for three hours.

  It looked innocuous, a slender oblong box about the size of a typewriter ribbon spool box. The top was gridded. Tiny plastic buttons in an inset control panel regulated the recording. It was a marvelous product of miniaturization. You would think that a country that could produce such electronic marvels would be able to compete better in world markets. Then I saw the Sony label. Oh, well.

  I tucked the recorder behind the rubber tree’s trunk and used a swath of electrical tape to anchor it.

  I was dropping the tape back into my purse when I sensed rather than heard movement behind me. I swung around, my heart thudding.

  No one, nothing.

  But I knew something had moved.

  The clock ticked, outside the wind brushed a tree branch against a screen.

  He jumped through the air to land on the couch. He stared at me with
smoky blue eyes, his tail switching. Abruptly, he cried and the weird ah-yaah raised prickles on the back of my neck.

  “Hello, fellow,” I managed in a dry whisper.

  The Siamese flicked back his ears and crouched.

  I moved back a step. Where had he come from? From beneath a chair, from upstairs?

  The front door hadn’t opened. Had it? I craned my head but I couldn’t see into the foyer. Then I heard the closet door in the foyer close.

  I ran lightly, swiftly to the kitchen. As I pushed through the door, I heard her call, “Toby? Toby, where are you? Come here, kitty boy.”

  I didn’t hesitate. I kept on going, slipping by the kitchen table, pulling open the back door. I slid outside and shut the door as quietly as I could.

  Then I looked down. The damn cat was twining about my ankles.

  Desperately, I grabbed him up, opened the door a fraction, shoved him inside, shut the door, then fled down the graveled walk.

  I didn’t relax until I was around the corner and hurrying to my car. My hands were damp on the steering wheel as I drove to Mother’s. That had been too close. I hated to think how Francine Boutelle would have enjoyed catching me in her apartment.

  But now I was in a position to turn the tables on her. If she didn’t notice an intrusion in her house and make a search. If she didn’t decide to water her rubber tree plant.

  Would Francine notice that the back door wasn’t locked?

  No matter. I had done the best I could. Tomorrow night I would face her with what skill I could muster and hope for luck and arrogance. If I could get her talking, record blackmail in progress, well, then, Francine Boutelle might not be in the catbird seat.

  I turned into Mother’s drive. If it had seemed odd to be back last night, it seemed odder still to enter that familiar drive on a dreary October afternoon. Changes had been made. A freshly painted white fence marked the end of the parking area. Beyond it spread the rose garden. A pale pink marble nymph sat on a pedestal at the garden’s center. When I was growing up, a metal stag forever reared on back legs there. I wondered when the nymph displaced him.

  At the front door, I hesitated, rang the bell. Odd, too, to ring at a door where you once entered without thought.

  No one came.

  I waited several minutes, puzzled, rang again.

  No one came.

  Perhaps Jason’s wife didn’t hear well or was busy out in back, although garbage pails had long since been replaced by a trash compactor and the kitchen garden plowed under for grass.

  I rang again, then, finally, turned the knob and entered.

  The fountain splashed cheerfully in the tiled pool. The pale-rose Italian marble floor glistened with cleanliness.

  “Mother?”

  My voice echoed softly.

  A door slammed at the back.

  I began to walk down the broad hall with the Florentine paneling and the dark Spanish canvases hanging just above eye level. The swinging door from the kitchen burst open. Ophelia plunged toward me.

  “Oh, Miss K.C.” She looked relieved. “Is Amanda with you?”

  “Amanda? No. I’ve come to see her. Isn’t she in bed?”

  Ophelia’s face clouded. “Oh, Miss K.C., I don’t know what to think. I took up a nice luncheon tray, with soup and an avocado and fresh tea, but she isn’t there.”

  “Did you check the bathroom?” I asked, hurrying toward the stairs. “She may have fainted.”

  Ophelia trotted at my heels. “I looked in the bathroom, but she wasn’t there. And she made the bed and her bathrobe and gown are in the closet.”

  I stopped and stared at Ophelia. “You mean she’s dressed?”

  “Yes. She’s dressed and I can’t find her anywhere.”

  Twenty minutes later I knew that Ophelia was right. The house was empty except for the two of us. Grace was at her Tuesday bridge luncheon and Jason was at his regular job at the La Luz Hotel.

  “Perhaps she’s gone into town, to Rudolph’s office,” I suggested though it seemed unlikely.

  When I called, Rudolph was as puzzled as we. I called Rudolph’s wife, Mary Kate. She was puzzled, then worried. “I talked to Mother this morning. She sounded tired and she promised to stay in bed all day. We were going to come and see her tonight. Where in the world could she have gone?”

  I went back upstairs to Amanda’s room. I stared at the high narrow bed, the coverlet drawn up over the pillows, tucked just so, as Amanda had always made any bed. I opened the closet. Her gown and robe hung on a hook to the right. Her clothes hung neatly from their hangers.

  She had dressed, sometime before twelve-thirty, walked across the room and out the door to . . . Where could she have gone? And why? What could have called her out of the house? She was still weak, must still have been weak, from last night’s attack.

  Once again, I looked around the room. Such a simple shining room. A studio portrait of Rudolph, unnaturally solemn in his cap and gown, sat atop the narrow chest of drawers. The bulletin board, with its myriad pictures of all of us, hung next to the window. An old-fashioned footpress sewing machine sat next to a worn French Provincial desk that Grace gave Amanda the year the interior decorator redid the drawing room in Spanish baroque. Amanda was so proud of the lovely old piece. All she ever permitted on its top was her Bible.

  Nothing lay atop the desk.

  I walked slowly across the room. The desk top was bare.

  Amanda had dressed and left, carrying her Bible with her.

  I think I knew then.

  I ran out of the house and pounded down the brick walk to the garage. The garage had been built for another era, the world of town cars and station wagons. I yanked up the first of the seven overhead doors and flicked on a panel of lights. All of the stalls were empty, including the last one where Amanda parked her Chevy.

  She had driven away, carrying her Bible.

  I ran to my car and drove, too fast, to the Paradise Valley Baptist Church and the cemetery that spread up the hill behind it. I knew where Amanda’s husband was buried. I hurried up a twisting path to the plot bordered with a thin ridge of cement. A slender headstone carried the inscription, MORTON BRIDGEWATER, BELOVED HUSBAND OF AMANDA, B. 1905, D. 1945.

  “Amanda?” As I called, fog began to swirl around the tree trunks, glisten against granite stones. “Amanda?”

  A creaking wheel sounded behind me. I turned to see an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with fresh dirt. I called out, “Have you seen a woman, an old woman, not very tall?”

  How hard it is to describe someone you love.

  He shook his head. “No ma’am. Nobody’s come today. Nobody at all,” and he looked at me curiously.

  I walked slowly back to my car. The fog was thickening. As I drove out of the cemetery, I turned east on the narrow blacktop and I knew I was heading out of town, toward the lake.

  It is a half-hour drive usually. Now, with the fog filling low ground like murky pools of silver, it took almost an hour. I turned in between the stone entrance pillars, my face grim, my hands sweaty on the wheel. I never came back without a feeling of depression and fear. I had rarely returned since that summer I was fourteen. The rest of the family continued to come but I went to camp and, later, to summer school. The fog helped. It danced and twirled ahead of me, making everything strange and different.

  It could have been any country road, anywhere.

  I didn’t stop at the entrance to the wooden, two-story house, long since closed for the winter. I drove past, turned to the left and the road plunged down. The fog was so thick I switched on fog lights but I drove more from memory than sight. Then my heart gave a sickening lurch. Off to the right, shrouded in fog, sat Amanda’s car.

  “Amanda.”

  I shouted but the fog muffled my voice. The thin high sound fell away and there was only the slap of the waves pushing against the pilings of the pier and the uneasy rustle of the foggy woods.

  “Amanda!”

  No answer.

&nbs
p; Hesitantly, I approached her car. The windows were rolled up. Of course, they were. Amanda wouldn’t want the fog to drench the seat covers. She took good care of her car as she cared for everything around her. Tiny droplets of fog had condensed against the shiny brown paint. I peered inside. It was empty except for the old Bible on the front seat. The keys hung from the ignition.

  “Oh, Amanda.” I said it to myself, cried her name to myself. Filled with dread, I turned and began to walk toward the steps that led down to the pier. I was so afraid of what I would find—or not find.

  Would the pier be empty? Was Amanda in that cold, cold water?

  I knew the water was cold. And deep. It had taken the divers three days to find Sheila.

  The fog pressed against me. I walked in a pulsing gray cocoon, able to see only a foot or two before me. I stepped out onto the pier and my shoes slapped hollowly. City shoes. Loud and out of place here.

  As fogs often do, this one thinned for a moment and I could see, at the end of the pier, the rickety wooden bench with its tall slatted back. A small figure huddled there.

  For an instant, hope surged. I began to run, calling out, “Amanda, Amanda.”

  The figure never moved. I stopped running, forced myself to walk. When I stood, looking down on her, I knew she would never move again, never smile at me with eyes full of love, never reach out work-worn hands to touch mine.

  She wore her Sunday hat, a winter felt with a little wreath of blue velvet around the crown, and her best navy blue silk dress with a piping of white at the throat.

  The silver of the shotgun, lying at her feet, shone with an obscene sparkle. The force of the explosion had blown it away from her hand. The front of her dress was torn and matted with blood.

  I don’t know how long I stood, staring down at the husk of the woman I had loved best.

  Amanda, why?

  I didn’t cry. I felt too old and emptied to cry. I was facing something I could not understand, a horror that made no sense.

  What could have driven Amanda to this bleak and lonely pier to end a good life, to end that life bloodily and brutally?

  I stood there for a long time. It began to rain, a soft quiet rain. I couldn’t bear to see the rain touch Amanda’s face, splashing onto her dress to drain darkly down onto the wooden planking.