Natural Causes Page 16

  “When was that?”

  “On Friday morning,” Murdock said. “He mentioned a new project he’d become involved in. I had the impression it was something lucrative.”

  “Did he tell you anything specifically about the project?”

  “We were supposed to discuss it in detail when he came back to town on Wednesday. There were apparently some papers to sign.”

  “Were you in the habit of negotiating Quentin’s contracts for him?”

  “Those that didn’t involve show business, yes.”

  “So you had the feeling that this wasn’t a show business project?”

  “That was my impression.”

  I laughed softly and Murdock gave me an odd look. He’d had a story for everyone—Quentin. I wondered if I’d ever find out which one had been true.

  “What exactly was the nature of Quentin’s financial problems?” I asked.

  “He’d made some poor investments,” Murdock said. “Against my judgment, he’d purchased a condominium for his mother. I don’t suppose I need tell you that the condominium market is not the place to be buying at this time. Then Connie ran up quite a number of bills furnishing the place. And Marsha did the same with his estate house. He also bought a ranch in New Mexico that gave him nothing but trouble. It was situated near a dry wash and every spring it was flooded out. Quentin spent a small fortune keeping it in repair.”

  “Why didn’t he sell it?”

  “Why, indeed?” Murdock said. “I urged him to on several occasions, but he claimed to be attached to the place. Why, I don’t know. I saw no good reason why Connie had to have her own condo, either. That mansion house is far too big for two people.”

  “Perhaps the three of them couldn’t get along.”

  Murdock looked at me as if that were balderdash. “With thirty-odd rooms they could have found a way.”

  I smiled at him. “How long have you known Quentin?”

  “Since he was a boy. I used to be a friend of his father’s.”

  “The mansion house belonged to his father?”

  Murdock smiled. “Christ, no. Jim Dover was a chemical engineer. They lived in Mariemont. Quentin bought the house after he began to work in television. It was Connie’s idea, I think. Few of Quentin’s excesses were his own.”

  “He was run by his mother?”

  “Not run,” Murdock said. “But heavily influenced. And also influenced by his wife. That’s not unusual in men who have grown up without a father.”

  “His father died when he was a boy?”

  “Of heart disease. When Quentin was ten. It was a tragic thing and I’m sure it left its scar on Quentin. He was always haunted by a fear of premature death.” Murdock stubbed his cigarette out in a glass ashtray. “It appears his fears were justified,” he said.

  “He seemed to be a very insecure man.”

  “That was his mother,” Murdock said. “She’s distantly related to the Swifts and she filled him full of stupid ideas—about who he should be and how he should live. It was a bad game plan for a kid of ten. He just couldn’t ever live up to her ambitions for him.”

  “He had the house and the money,” I said.

  “Yes, but he wasn’t the real thing. And he knew it. He’d had to work too hard to get what he wanted. He’d had to make too many compromises. It tainted everything. He told me that once, that by the time he’d gotten what he wanted, he didn’t want it anymore. If he could have had it all at once—if he’d been born to it—maybe it would have been different. But...” Murdock waved his hand in the air.

  I thought of Walt Mack, who had said virtually the same thing about his job.

  “Quentin seemed to have told a lot of stories.”

  “You mean lies, don’t you?” Murdock said.

  “I guess I do.”

  “It was an affliction with him. It was also part of his charm. You know the story of the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ That was Quentin. Only in his case nobody ever disbelieved him. He kept crying and people kept paying attention. And before you knew it, it had become a mainstay of his personality. When in doubt, he lied. When not in doubt, he lied. He did it the way some people eat—obsessively. To comfort himself for whatever he lacked in natural charm or grace or breeding. One got used to it, after a time. I actually grew rather fond of it myself, but then I could generally tell when he was lying.”

  That was what his mother had thought, too. And Murdock sounded like an adoptive father—one of the many, from Harris Sugarman to Frank Glendora, that Quentin had cultivated.

  “Was he lying about the new project?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think so. When it came down to it, Quentin could be pretty shrewd and pretty hard about money. All those years hustling a dollar on the West Coast hadn’t been wasted. He needed money and I’m fairly sure he would have found a way to get it. He was ten thousand in the hole over the condo. And a hundred thousand in the hole over that damn house in New Mexico.”

  “A hundred grand?” I said.

  “The last flood almost wiped it out. He had to sell off most of his stocks and bonds to get the cash. Of course, it was just like throwing it into a dry well. But I couldn’t talk him out of it.”

  “This was recently?”

  “Over the last couple of months,” Murdock said.

  “Then he really needed to score?”

  “What he really needed was a few months of solitude. A few untroubled months to do his work. That would have been sufficient, at the salary he was making.”

  “If he could have kept making it,” I said.

  Murdock nodded.

  I got up to go. Murdock stood up, too.

  “One last question,” I said from the door.

  “Yes?”

  “You knew him. Do you think he might have taken his own life?”

  Murdock didn’t say anything for a time. “What makes you ask that?” he finally said.

  I told him the story that Frank Glendora had told me—about Quentin’s odyssey through the past.

  Murdock thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “It’s possible. If he saw no other way out.”

  25

  IT WAS close to five when I got to the big house on Camargo. I drove through a confetti of sunlight and shade, up the oak-lined drive to the garages. There was nobody mowing the lawn this time. No farrago of sounds. Just the squawking of cardinals hidden in the oaks and that green, placid, sunlit lawn, and that great house, half-hidden in its own shadow. I walked up to the door and knocked. A few minutes passed and Marsha Dover answered. She looked as if she’d been running from someone—someone she hoped would catch her. Her beautiful face was ruddy and full of laughter. Her blonde hair was tangled about her forehead and cheeks, jeweled at the hairline with beads of sweat. She brushed the damp hair back and eyed me breathlessly.

  “Hi, there,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  She was wearing a loose cotton blouse, unbuttoned at the top. I could see her beautiful breasts when she leaned over to roll up the cuffs on her shorts. Her breasts were beaded with sweat, too. She smelled strongly of sweat, alcohol, and musk. For the second time since I’d met her, I had trouble concentrating on anything but that face and body. She was that stunning.

  She looked up at me, still bent over her shorts, and smiled. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “Stoner. Harry Stoner.”

  She straightened up. “Wanna play, Harry Stoner?”

  I almost said yes. Instead, I asked, “What’s the game?”

  “Hide and seek.”

  Just as she said it, a tall shirtless kid with a brown, muscular chest sprang out from somewhere behind the door and grabbed Marsha around the waist. The girl shrieked with laughter and struggled wildly in his arms.

  “I win,” the boy said.

  The girl stopped struggling and twisted her head around to face him. “What do you win?” she said huskily. I could almost see the kid weaken at the knees. I felt my own knees give a little. She couldn’t have been mo
re inviting if she’d been lying naked on the floor.

  The boy stared at her a long moment. “Christ,” he said heavily and rubbed her breasts through the shirt.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  He looked up. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  “The name is Stoner.”

  “Fine,” he said. “We don’t want any.”

  The girl laughed and her boyfriend started to close the door in my face. I pushed it back at him, a little harder than I should have.

  “Hey!” he said, catching the door in one palm. “What’s the idea?”

  “I want to talk to Marsha.”

  “Well, suppose she don’t want to talk to you?”

  “Why don’t we ask her and see?”

  “Marsha, what is this shit?” the boy said, turning to her.

  She shrugged. “I dunno. He was there when I opened the door.”

  The boy turned back to me and flexed his arm menacingly. “Beat it.”

  Maybe it was the girl. Maybe it was Quentin Dover. Maybe it was the heat and the jet lag. But I wasn’t in the mood to play. I stepped through the doorway and jabbed the kid in the chest with my right hand. “You beat it,” I said. “Go on out to the pool and cool off.”

  The girl laughed again and the boy rubbed his chest where I had poked him. I was a lot bigger than he was, and he was smart enough to know that I meant business.

  “I’m gonna go out to the pool,” he said to Marsha. “Call me if you need me.”

  The girl gave him a disappointed look as he walked away.

  “You wanted to see a fight, didn’t you?” I said to Marsha.

  The girl nodded stupidly and giggled.

  I felt like slapping her. I wondered how Dover had resisted the same impulse. I wondered how he’d dealt with her at all.

  I stared at her for a moment, and she seemed to sober up a little. She fidgeted with a button on her shirt and dropped her eyes nervously to the floor. “What do you want?” she said.

  “We met before, remember?”

  “I remember,” she said, although I wasn’t sure she did.

  “I’m the guy that’s looking into your husband’s death. Remember him? Quentin Dover?”

  She made a sulky face. “Yeah, I remember Quentin.”

  “What’s it been—six days now since he died?”

  “And you figure I oughta be wearing crepe, right?” She stared at me with defiance. “What the fuck do you know about it, anyway? What do you know about anything?”

  “I know that he’s dead,” I said. “I’d like to know why.”

  “Why don’t you ask Connie why?” the girl said. “She’s the big cheese, isn’t she? The one with all the class? I’m just the slot that Quentin parked in at night.”

  “Quit feeling sorry for yourself,” I said.

  She sucked her breath in sharply, as if I’d slapped her. “You think I’m feeling sorry for myself? O.K., Buster Brown. You wanna hear about ol’ Quentin. I’ll tell you. C’mon.”

  She led me down the hall to the back of the house. It was the first time I’d seen Quentin’s home by daylight, and I was a little disappointed in what I saw. The house itself was beautiful—big, high-ceilinged rooms, with hardwood floors and Rookwood mantles and glossy mahogany trim around doors and windows. It was what was inside the rooms that was disappointing. All the furniture was new, and I mean brand new. The place looked as if Marsha or someone had gone on a shopping spree in Closson’s or Pogue’s, had them box up an entire floor of display items, and had the stuff delivered to the house. Individually the pieces were handsome but they were stacked in the rooms without rhyme or reason. Or if there was a reason, it was simply that all the junk was expensive.

  We ended up in the same study that I’d taken Marsha to when she’d tried to drown herself on Tuesday, if she had tried to drown herself, if it hadn’t been an ostentatious display like the furniture. Through the sliding glass doors I could see the sunlit terrace, the umbrella table, and the chaise beside the pool. The kid I’d chased off was lying on the chaise, holding the sun-reflector under his chin. There was a sideboard on the wall by the door, with whiskey decanters on it. Marsha went straight to it, as if she were being drawn on a string.

  “Buster Brown,” she said with a laugh. She pulled the crystal stopper out of one of the decanters, dropped the stopper on the sideboard, and splashed two fingers of bourbon into a cut-glass tumbler. She turned to me—the glass in her hand. “Well, Buster, what do you wanna know?”

  “You have one of those for me?” I said, pointing to the glass.

  “Help yourself.”

  I got up, walked over to the sideboard, and poured myself a Scotch. The girl brushed against me as I stood beside her. I could feel her nipples through the thin fabric of her blouse, like pebbles in her shirtpockets.

  “I got one of everything,” she said, pivoting on a foot.

  I looked at her, as she leaned against my arm.

  “Why the hell did you marry him, Marsha?” I said.

  She leaned back against the sideboard and took a long drink of whiskey. “For his money, why do you think?”

  “You said something about love the last time I saw you.”

  “I always say something about love when I’m crocked.”

  I walked over to the couch and sat down. Marsha braced one arm on the sideboard and stared at me knowingly. “You think I’m a real cunt, don’t you?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  Her face fell. “You’re kind of nasty, aren’t you, Buster? Are you that way in bed, too? Quentin wasn’t.” She took another long pull of bourbon. “I got news for you, friend. Cunts are made, not born. If I’m a tramp, Quentin made me that way. I was just a dumbass kid when I met him. Just a dumbass kid—”

  “I’ve heard it, Marsha. I heard the part about your family, too.”

  She gave me a hurt look. “You think I was lying?”

  “I think it takes two to tango.”

  “Sometimes it takes three,” the girl said with a bitter laugh. “With Quentin, it took three.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Put on your thinking cap, Buster. It’ll come to you.”

  “Why don’t you spell it out instead?”

  “He couldn’t get it up. Is that plain enough for you?”

  “After the heart surgery?”

  “Before, during, and after,” she said coldly. “Let’s see if I can explain it so even an asshole like you will understand. See, there was this dumb cunt...oh, but you heard that part, didn’t you?”

  “I’ll hear it again.”

  “No. I’ll skip over that crap and get to the hardcore. She meets this guy one day, see? And he’s really sweet. He doesn’t even try to get into her pants, which she wouldn’t mind, you know? But this one’s different. He’s smart. He knows things. He really makes this dumb little cunt feel like she’s something. And he ain’t even good-looking. He’s just the best thing the cunt ever met. And he’s loaded, to boot. Which doesn’t hurt. And he treats her like a goddamn princess, like she’s too good to fuck. He tells her that she’s what he’s always wanted. And the dumb cunt believes him, because that’s what she’s always wanted to hear from someone like that.” The girl splashed some more whiskey into the tumbler. “So they live happily ever after. The end. Right?”

  She raised the glass and smiled. “Not quite right,” she said. “It turns out the prince has some funny ideas. It turns out the prince isn’t a prince, after all. But the dumb cunt doesn’t care. In fact, she wants to do anything she can for him, ‘cause he’s had such a hard time. He’s had to do some bad things. He’s had to suck and fuck and ream just about every wet asshole in Hollywood. And if the poor son-of-a-bitch can’t fuck anymore, then there are other ways to get diddled.” She laughed. “I guess I know. I’ve tried them all. But pretty soon that isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to sit and watch the cunt stick things up inside her, while the prince pulls his pud. Pretty soon, the prince wants so
me real hard-core action. And when the cunt doesn’t want to go along with it, the prince tells her the facts. He tells her what a cunt she really is—what a fool she is to love him, because anything that would love him ain’t worth two shits, because he ain’t worth two shits, because nothing in the whole goddamn world is worth two shits. He really opens her eyes, you know? Only she still wants to make it with him. She thinks, maybe, if she does what he wants, he’ll want to make it with her, too. So she starts fucking around. She goes out to a bar, while the prince waits in the car, and picks up some jerk—the cruder, the better. Then she and the prince take the jerk home. And they all get real loose. Then the prince says, ‘Goodnight.’ Only he doesn’t go to bed. He goes to a hole in the wall or a closet and he watches. And sometimes the cunt forgets that he’s watching. Sometimes she gets a little messed up, and she thinks there’s nobody there. She thinks, ‘There never was anybody there.’ And after awhile, it’s like there isn’t. It’s like it’s just her and whatever she brings home. The kinkier, the better. The more it hurts, the better. Like she’s trying to see just what it would take to make princey reappear. Only he never does. And now he never will.”

  She swallowed the rest of her drink and stared at me. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  The girl smiled. “Stop feeling sorry for me, Buster. Why the hell should you feel sorry? You’re just snooping around for Connie. Trying to find out what I’m up to. Just like she used to do with Quentin. God, how he hated that bitch! Well, you can go on back and tell her that the cunt’s doing fine. The cunt is mourning in her own way—the way Quentin would have liked it.”

  She started to cry. I got up and walked over to her.

  “Stay away from me,” she said through her tears. “I don’t want you touching me. I’m no charity case, man.”

  I put my arm on her shoulder, and she threw the tumbler at me. It hit me in the chest and fell to the floor.