Natural Causes Read online

  NATURAL CAUSES

  The Harry Stoner Series, #5

  Jonathan Valin

  TO KATHERINE

  Copyright © 1983 by Jonathan Valin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition 2012 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-320-4

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9348-9

  Cover photo © RetroAtelier/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS

  NATURAL CAUSES

  1

  I WAS trying to install an air conditioner in my office window when a short, bearded man in a three-piece suit walked into the room.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” I said, waving a Phillips screwdriver at him. “Have a seat.”

  “Take your time,” the man said in a jovial voice. He walked over to one of the captain’s chairs by the desk and sat down. “I don’t know how you could get by without one in this heat.”

  “That’s what I told myself this morning.” I fastened the last two screws in the casement, plugged the thing in, and turned it on. The air conditioner shuddered once then began to chug and hum noisily. A stream of warm, fetid air came pouring out the vents. I sniffed at it and frowned.

  “It takes awhile for the coolant to circulate,” the man said with amusement.

  “Yeah?” One of the windowpanes began to shake. “What about the noise?”

  He shrugged. “That you’ll have to live with.”

  I sat down behind the desk, wiped my palm on my pants leg, and held out a hand. “Harry Stoner, part-time electrician.”

  “Jack Moon,” the man said, shaking hands. He pulled a card out of his coat pocket and held it up in front of me, like a cop flashing his buzzer. His name was printed on it above a familiar corporate insignia. I stared at the emblem for a second; the company had been in the papers a good deal that summer, because of a rather nasty class action suit filed against it. But I would have recognized the logo anyway—it was embossed on every bar of soap I’d ever bought.

  “You work for those bad folks at United American,” I said.

  “Ha, ha,” he said distinctly. He laid the card on my desk. “Keep it. The way things are going it may become a valuable charm, like the hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouses.”

  I smiled at him. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “A thousand letters a day after the ‘Clean & Fluffy’ fiasco. Boycotts all over the Bible Belt. It’s bad.”

  “I read where you’d taken some legal action of your own.”

  He rubbed the nape of his neck. “Yeah, well, we didn’t have a choice. It turned out that a couple of competitors were spreading the rumor that ‘Clean & Fluffy’ was the work of communist conspirators. It seemed to help their business.”

  “Is that what you’re here about? Your reputation?” I said, picking up the card.

  “Nope.” Moon plucked a pair of turtle-shell glasses from his jacket, flipped them open like a gravity knife, and stuck them firmly on his nose. The glasses were round and thick; Moon’s face was round and thick, swarthy and acne-scarred above a curly black beard. He looked a little like a Hassidic rabbi in mufti—small, genial, with something lively and clever in his dark brown eyes. “United wants to take you to lunch, Mr. Stoner.”

  “They do, do they?”

  “They do.” He reached into his pocket again and pulled out a folded document. “But first there’s the little matter of selling us your soul. It’s just a formality. Sign at the bottom.”

  I examined the document. It was an agreement not to discuss United’s business with any other company or agency. “I have a standard contract of my own,” I said, as I scanned the fine print.

  “I’m sure you do,” Jack Moon said pleasantly. “And we will be happy to sign one of your contracts after you’ve signed ours.”

  “Yeah? What’s this about?”

  Moon put a finger to his lips. “It’s a secret,” he said.

  ******

  We went to lunch—to the Maisonette, no less.

  “As long as United is paying, why not?” Moon said over a bowl of vichyssoise. “You’ll find that we’re a very easy company to get along with.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No,” he said, spooning the soup into his Cupid’s-bow mouth. “I lied. I’m supposed to say that to put you off your guard.”

  “Are you always so agreeable?”

  “Always,” he said and slurped the soup. When he was finished, he laid the spoon gently on the saucer, propped his elbows on the damascene tablecloth, and locked his hands beneath his chin. “I like you, Harry,” he said. “You’re a real Cincinnati square.” He flipped his pinkies out and drew a square in the air.

  “I thought you guys were the ones with the reputations for being squares.”

  “Oh, we are,” Moon said. “At least, most of us are. Like our competition says, ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure.”

  “I guess you fall into that other fifty-six hundredths percent.”

  He laughed. “What can I tell you?” he said, unlocking his hands and opening them expansively. “It’s a job and I was tired of living the life of a starving actor.”

  “You were an actor?”

  “You don’t think I was born like this, do you?” he said, pinching the lapel of his suit. “Sure I was an actor. Off-Broadway in New York. I wasn’t a very good actor, but I enjoyed the work.”

  “Then why did you stop?”

  “Got married, had a kid, got civilized, I guess.” Moon looked uneasily at the cart of seafoods that a waiter had rolled up to our table. “A man’s got to eat, doesn’t he? And for a little guy I’ve got a big appetite.”

  Moon dug into a cold lobster tail. “I’m always hungry,” he said, as he chewed. “Only it’s the wrong kind of hunger. That’s why I’m living here, instead of in New York. That’s why I didn’t make it as an actor.”

  “Look on the bright side—that’s probably why United hired you.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a nod. “But they made a mistake. I’m not United material.”

  He certainly didn’t seem to be, from what I knew about the company. But then I didn’t know much. For an organization that owned most of the city and a good deal of the rest of the world, United American was a remarkably low-profile outfit. Their products were visible everywhere; the inner workings of the soap factory were veiled in bubbles. My impression of the corporation, before I’d met Moon, was of one vast minion of sedate, gray-suited, clean-shaven, clean-li
ving men, working in ecumenical harmony—like a band of angels or the C.I.A.

  “What do you do at United?” I asked him.

  “Sell soap. What do you think?” He patted his lips with a linen napkin and called for the check. “I’m in U.A. Teleproducts, which is a separate corporation from the brands manufacturers. We make the shows that sell the soap.”

  “Soap operas?” I said.

  “We prefer to call them daytime dramas. I’m the executive producer on one of the shows—a little number called ‘Phoenix.’”

  “You guys are going to run out of sunbelt boom-towns one of these days,” I said.

  “Oh, hell, we might as well have called it ‘Little Rock’ for all it has to do with the sunbelt. We were just looking for a typical American city, full of alcoholics, nymphos, drug addicts, bitches, and twins.”

  “Twins?” I said.

  “Always,” Jack Moon said as he signed the check. “Everyone in soap opera has a twin. In fact, someone ought to write a thesis on it. You know, the doppelganger in the American Southwest or the theory of parallel universes on daytime television. We’ve got to have twins, in case we kill the wrong character off and the audience wants us to bring him back.”

  “I see.”

  “Well,” Moon said, “are you ready to sign now?”

  I laughed. “Hell, why not?”

  “Dandy,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Then we can go talk to the big boy about our little problem.”

  “And what problem is that?”

  Moon stood up. “I think I’d better let Frank tell you,” he said. “He’s so much more impressive and dignified.”

  2

  WE WALKED down Ninth Street to United American headquarters. It was a large, ugly, unadventurous building, Spartan in its plainness.

  “From Bauhaus to outhouse,” Jack Moon said, staring up at the unadorned rows of windows. “The place looks like a giant tool shed.”

  “At least it’s modest,” I said, thinking of the chrome and glass extravaganzas uptown.

  “Oh, it’s modest, all right. It’s modest the way Orson Welles was modest when he stuck his name at the end of the credits in Citizen Kane. This is the height of immodesty, man. Presbyterian chic.”

  We walked in through the Ninth Street entrance, past a homely, middle-aged receptionist, over to a bank of elevators. The place really was as conspicuously unadorned as a Presbyterian church—no logos, no paintings. Just plainly lettered signs and arrows and a couple of scraggly rubber trees parked in empty corners.

  “See what I mean?” Moon whispered. “This is a mega-billion dollar corporation and the reception area looks like a suburban bank.”

  “Why did they do it this way?”

  “They don’t want anyone to get the idea that they’re not just plain folks,” Jack said. “It’s their idea of unpretentious.”

  The elevator smelled like a fresh roll of toilet paper. When I asked Moon why, he said, “It’s the brands. They’re located on the lower floors and they’ve got product displays in each of the lobbies. What you’re smelling is the combined essence of U.A.—a little toilet tissue, a dab of laundry soap, a touch of bath oil beads. It’s the sweet smell of cleanliness, Harry, the very odor of sanctity.”

  When we got up to the tenth floor, Jack gave me a push in the small of the back and said, “You’re on your own, now, fella.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Oh, I’ll be around, if I’m needed. You just go over to the secretary, Jodie, and tell her you’re here to talk with Frank Glendora. I’ll see you afterward. I’ve got the terrible feeling I’m going to be appointed tour guide for this trip.”

  He wandered off down the carpeted hallway and I walked over to the reception booth, where a young woman with teased red hair was reading a copy of Soap Opera Digest. She looked up at me and her eyes got big.

  “God!” she said, holding the magazine to her mouth. “You’re so large!” She tittered like Goldie Hawn. “I mean, are you a football player or what?”

  “I’m a private detective.”

  “God!” she said again and shook her head in disbelief.

  Jodie was apparently one of those secretaries who need a secretary of their own—cute but rattlebrained. I gave her my name and told her who I wanted to see.

  “Oh, God, Mr. Glendora,” she said. “Is he in trouble or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  The girl pressed a buzzer on an intercom and said, “Mr. Stoner to see you.”

  “Send him in,” a man said.

  “It’s at the end of the hall to your right,” Jodie said.

  I started slowly down a corridor lined with office doors, looked back at Jodie, who was craning her neck to watch me, then picked up my pace. Toward the end of the hall, I had to step around a couple of guys in vests, who were talking about the contents of a folder that one of them was cradling in his arms. They lowered their voices as I got near them and stopped talking as I passed by, eyeing me with something akin to the wonder in Jodie the Secretary’s voice. I glanced at my shirtfront to see if I’d left a button undone or spattered myself with cocktail sauce. But I was presentable. It wasn’t really me, I decided; it was the novelty of a stranger in town.

  I passed another guy at a water cooler, who gave me the same “Bad Day at Black Rock” look. But I’d grown fond of it by then.

  “Where’s Frank Glendora’s office?” I said to him just to see how he’d react.

  He pointed wordlessly at the double doors in front of me.

  I stepped up to the doors and knocked.

  “Come in,” a man called out. I walked in.

  Glendora’s office was large and tastefully decorated. There were posters on the walls, framed in glass. Broadway playbills, opera festivals, gallery showings. A set of shelves built into the east wall was filled with editions of plays. I went over to the desk and sat down on a tan, tufted arm chair. The man sitting behind the desk stared at me for a moment.

  “You’re big,” he said in a whimsical voice.

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  Glendora smiled to himself. He was a good-looking man in his late fifties. Very thin and gray, with sad eyes and large, uneven teeth. Perhaps it was all the talk of Presbyterian decency, but something about Glendora’s face reminded me of Billy Graham’s haggard, resolute handsomeness: they both had the same burnt-out look of suffering for a cause.

  “Did Jack fill you in on things?” he asked.

  “Only on this.” I handed him the agreement.

  “You signed it?”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” he said with a sigh of relief. “I like to have things in writing. Force of habit, I guess.” He read through the agreement quickly, said “good” again, then laid it down on his desk.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said, staring sadly into my face. He spoke very slowly and deliberately, like a man reading aloud from a difficult text.

  “You’ve also got your own security people, don’t you?”

  “It’s not that kind of problem. I suppose you know that we’ve been suffering through a crisis of sorts.”

  “You mean the flap about your soap?”

  Glendora frowned. “It’s all so very silly that I don’t know what to say. However, the suit is a fact, and it must be dealt with. And so,” he said with another sigh, “is this Quentin Dover thing.”

  “Is that what you need me for?” I asked. “This ‘Quentin Dover thing’?”

  He nodded. “It’s important for you to understand our position in this matter. If it weren’t for the pending court action and the unfortunate publicity surrounding the suit, we would probably be much less concerned about Quentin. I mean, in a business sense only. Naturally we’d be concerned. We’re always concerned when one of our employees dies.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yesterday. Or, at least, that’s when they found his body—on Monday. In L.A. My understanding is that he’d been dead for some t
ime.”

  “And what did he die of?”

  “No one seems to know at this point. Of course, an autopsy was performed, but the preliminary findings were inconclusive. His body...it had decayed. Right now the Los Angeles police are officially terming it an accident. Death of natural causes, precipitated by a fall in the shower.”

  I glanced at the agreement I’d signed and then looked up at Glendora’s sad-eyed face. He was having trouble getting to it—the reason why Quentin Dover’s death needed investigation—so I decided to make the next step easier for him. “I take it there is some reason to believe that his death was not an accident.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And what is that?”

  Glendora looked embarrassed. “This is difficult for me, Mr. Stoner. I am not a gossip. Moreover, I believe that every man has the right to live his own life in any way he chooses. I know we have the reputation for being an ultraconservative organization, with all that that implies. And while the company would undoubtedly prefer its employees to be ethical people in every aspect of their lives, all that it demands is that they be ethical, productive workers. Quentin Dover was a brilliant writer and a very charming man. I, personally, liked him enormously. And if it weren’t for certain circumstances, I would just as soon let the poor, troubled soul rest in peace.” He said the last part with quiet dignity, as if he were literally speaking for himself. He was so convincing that I had to remind myself that he hadn’t gotten that office on the tenth floor by questioning company policy.

  “I have heard some reports, mostly from members of the production team, that Quentin ...well, that he didn’t always comport himself the way a man should.”

  I hated to make him say it, since it obviously embarrassed him, but I couldn’t conduct an investigation on the basis of euphemisms. “Are you saying he was a homosexual?”

  “I don’t know what he was,” Glendora said. “No man is just one thing or another, anyway. All I know is that the company feels that we can’t afford even a small scandal at this time. God knows we’ve had enough bad publicity as it is. In order to forestall that possibility, we would like you to conduct an independent investigation of Quentin’s death. Of course, if there is reason to suspect something more than a scandal, we would expect you to consult with the proper authorities at the proper time.”