Natural Causes Page 2

  I smiled at him. “Who determines that, Mr. Glendora? The proper time?”

  He gave me an icy look. “Let me make this as plain as I can. We are not engaging you to perfect a conspiracy to obstruct justice. I am not hiring you to do that, nor have I suggested it at any time. Do you agree?”

  What could I say? “I guess so.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “That’s not good enough. I want it understood that you are being hired to conduct an investigation to determine whether Quentin’s death might compromise our company’s image and standing. We are not hiring you to cover anything up. On the contrary, we want to determine the truth of the matter.”

  I almost said, “And if that truth turns out to be disagreeable?” But I didn’t. I just said, “I understand.”

  “Good,” Glendora said. “We will make arrangements to fly you out to L.A.”

  “There are a couple of problems with that. I’m not licensed to practice in California, and I don’t have any contacts on the L.A. police force.”

  “We will make arrangements,” he said again.

  “Dover lived in California?”

  “He lived in Indian Hill. He sometimes worked on the coast—both coasts, actually. His wife and mother are here in the city. You will undoubtedly want to talk with them and with the members of Quentin’s team. I’ll have Jack arrange that for you. Jack will be your contact here and on the coast. And of course I will be available if you should need me.” He folded his hands on the desk. “I guess that covers it. All except for your salary. We will pay you twice your normal rate, plus all reasonable travel and other expenses. Is that agreeable?” He extended his right hand.

  “It’s downright generous,” I said, shaking with him.

  “Good. Welcome to the fold, Mr. Stoner.”

  3

  I FOUND Jack Moon sitting, cross-legged, on a visitor’s bench beside the secretary’s booth. He patted the cushion beside him and I sat down.

  “So how’d it go?” he asked.

  “All right. Glendora says I’m part of the fold.”

  He grinned at me. “You sold out, huh? Well, I guess everybody’s got his price. What did he offer you? Gold, jewels, women?”

  “Just plain old dollars.”

  “Yeah? How many?”

  I glanced at him. His pally voice said that he was only kidding, but something in his clever eyes really wanted to know. When he saw that I’d figured that out, he ducked his head.

  “Guess it’s none of my business. Did His Nibs have anything to say about me?”

  “You’re my contact.”

  “I figured,” he said without enthusiasm. “Well, you must have a few questions you want to ask, so let’s go down to my office and start cleaning up the mess that Quentin left behind him.”

  I had a few hundred questions I wanted to ask Jack, but when we got to his office—a small, windowless room furnished with a Steelcase desk and a padded desk chair and one visitor’s chair—the first one that came to mind was, “What kind of man is Frank Glendora?”

  “Frank?” Moon scratched his curly black beard. “Frank is one of those guys who didn’t miss his calling in life. He’s a born company man. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, sober, pliable, loyal, and discreet. United hired him out of college at the end of the Second World War, and he’s never forgotten the favor. Or ever let anyone else forget. Frank’s got what you could call a case of hard-core gratitude. The company gave him a home when times were hard and that makes anything the company wants to do O.K. by him. Jesus, you should hear him when he gets started on the subject. It’s like it never occurred to him that some of us don’t want to stick around for thirty-five years of regular promotions and Blue Cross, just to end up as head of production for a corporation that sponsors ‘The Young Interns.’”

  “He’s United’s head of production?”

  Moon nodded. “Yeah. Why are you asking about Frank?”

  “No reason,” I said. But I had a reason. I was trying to figure out what Frank Glendora really expected me to do if I unlocked the wrong door and found that scandal he seemed to be afraid of.

  “He’s relatively honest,” Moon said, “if that’s what you’re wondering about. He can be a bastard when the stakes are high enough, but then who can’t?”

  “All right,” I said. “How about Quentin Dover? How honest was he?”

  Jack sat back in his chair. “Ah, Quentin,” he said. “There I can speak with some authority. You know, I worked with him. He was head writer on ‘Phoenix.’”

  “Was he a good writer?”

  Jack threw his hand at me in disgust. “Naw, he was a terrible writer. A hack. What you got to understand, Harry, is that ‘good’ doesn’t enter into it when you’re talking about daytime TV. Frank and Helen aren’t interested in good; they’re interested in the old 41/42.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Forty-one or forty-two minutes of playable story, every day of the year, year in and year out, with no summer reruns. In that respect, Quentin was a great writer. Or, at least, he was up until a few months ago. Quentin was a rarity—a man with no mind of his own, no artsy pretensions, and no sense of shame. He was perfect for daytime.”

  “How was he during the rest of the day?”

  Jack grinned maliciously. “He couldn’t pour a cup of coffee without taking a stiff drink first. He was thirty-eight years old and he’d already had a quadruple bypass. Does that give you any idea? Quentin Dover was Type-A incarnate. He was a walking basket case. He once told me that he took fourteen different pills every day. Fourteen! He carried a thermometer in his coat pocket. He couldn’t pass a blood pressure machine in a drug store without slipping a quarter into it. His life was one long stifled scream.”

  “Glendora seemed to think he was charming.”

  “Glendora didn’t have to work with him every day,” Jack said bitterly and stared at his little desk with scorn. “Yeah, sure he could be charming. Most neurotics are. He had an act he went into when he was around the big boys. Frankly, I don’t know how he brought it off. For a man without a shred of real confidence, he could put on the damnedest show of self-assuredness you ever saw. They say money talks; well, if it does, Quentin had the accent down to a tee. He was a name-dropper, a gossip, a jetsetter without wings. You should have heard him go on about Back Bay Boston or about his days with Armand Hammer or about the time he escorted a starlet to a hot-tub orgy in Hollywood. He had the accent, all right. And that’s what guys like Frank love to hear. It gives them a little goose, like paging through the National Geographic. That’s what Quentin was to them: a trip to the respectable unknown, with a glimpse or two of naked savages along the way.”

  “It’s the not-so-respectable unknown that they seem to be afraid of,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about that,” Moon said. “Outside of work, Quentin and I didn’t do much socializing. You see, we weren’t in the same league—money-wise. And money was all-important to Quentin.”

  It seemed to be rather important to Jack Moon, too. But I didn’t make a point of it. Like he’d said, he had a big appetite and the job just didn’t satisfy his hunger.

  He must have recognized the rancor in his voice, because he straightened up in the chair and gave me a weary look of apology. “You don’t know what it’s like, Harry,” he said. “Having to nurse these talentless bastards all day long. That’s all I do—run a daycare center for neurotics. It gets old after awhile.”

  “I thought you were the executive producer of the show?”

  He laughed biliously. “Executive producer is just a fancy name for go-fer. I’m United’s boy at the plant, that’s all. The show is run by Helen Rose. She’s the producer, and the only person she’s responsible to is Frank. I’m along for the ride—to pat Helen’s hand for her when it needs patting and to count Quentin’s pills for him when he loses track. Shit, do you know how much money Quentin Dover was making?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Better than half a mi
llion dollars a year.”

  I stared at him. “For writing soaps?”

  “For writing soaps,” he said with disgust. “They pay me twenty-six grand, Harry. So don’t expect me to show much pity for Quentin. He had his house in Indian Hill. And his Rolls-Royce. And his centerfold wife, who had the brains of a Playboy bunny and fucked like one. They had the crew out to the house one Christmas Eve, and that woman got so loaded that she knocked over the tree. But she looked good doing it. I’ll give Quentin that. And that’s all I’ll give him. He had what he wanted—all that money could buy. And if he’s dead now because he bought the wrong stuff, well...that’s tough.”

  “What kind of stuff?” I asked him.

  “They found him dead on the bathroom floor in the Belle Vista. He’d been taking a shower and he apparently slipped on the soap and fell through the glass shower curtain and bled to death. Now, understand, this is a guy who couldn’t take a piss without saving the last few drops in a sample bottle. This is a guy who’d phone his internist to see if there’d been any calls. You going to tell me that Quentin Dover slipped on soap? And then lay there for almost two whole days without anyone knowing where he was?”

  “What did he slip on?”

  “His own obsessions, probably. Quentin was always looking for the easy way out. Anything that could kill the pain and the worry and ease the burden of having to make all that dough. Hell, you read the papers. So do the L.A. coroners. It’s just a matter of time before they figure things out. He’d probably been drinking; he bought his way into the wrong crowd; somebody fed him a little too much Dr. Feelgood; and he croaked. It happens every day—to much nicer people than Quentin Dover. And if he didn’t work for United, nobody’d give a shit.”

  “Not even his wife?”

  Jack shrugged. “You’d have to ask her.”

  ******

  That’s what I decided to do. I had Moon phone the woman to let her know that I was coming out to talk to her about her husband. While he was arranging the meeting, I found a phone in an empty office and called the L.A. police to see what they had on Dover’s death. They didn’t have much or, at least, they weren’t saying much. The officer I spoke to—a Lieutenant Escobar—read me a prepared statement, the gist of which was that Dover had died of loss of blood, following an accident in the shower. When I asked him what had caused the accident, he gave me the usual runaround.

  “That hasn’t been determined, yet. We’re waiting for the results of a chemical analysis of his internal organs. It may take weeks, even months.”

  “Why so long?”

  “He was in pretty bad shape,” the cop said. “You know, he’d been dead for several days.”

  “Is there any chance that it might not have been an accident?”

  “We’ve more or less ruled out homicide.”

  “Could it have been a suicide?” I asked.

  “Death by natural causes is what it says on this piece of paper,” the cop said with a sigh.

  “Then why are you running those tests?”

  “It’s standard procedure,” he said. “Look, are you a relative or what?”

  “I’m a Cincinnati P.I. My name is Stoner and I’ve been hired to look into Dover’s death.”

  “Hired by the family?”

  “That’s privileged information,” I told him, which really burned him up.

  “You said your name is Stoner?” he said, and I could hear him scratching my name down on a pad. That’s what they do when they want to put the fear of the Lord into you—take down your name.

  “Harry Stoner,” I said. “I’m registered with the Ohio Police Commission, if you want to check me out.”

  “O.K., Harry. We might just do that.”

  I’ll bet, I said to myself. “In the meantime, do you think you could get me a copy of the autopsy report?”

  Escobar snickered. “That’s privileged information,” he said and hung up.

  If United was pulling any strings in L.A., Escobar hadn’t heard about it. Which was both good and bad. Good, if it meant that the company wasn’t meddling in the official investigation. And bad if Glendora couldn’t find me a contact or an informant on the L.A. force. Of course, there was no way to know what United was up to on the basis of one phone call. And I wasn’t about to take Frank Glendora’s outraged protestations of corporate innocence at face value.

  I was pondering the difference between an “independent investigation” and a conspiracy to obstruct, when Jack Moon tapped me on the arm.

  “I just got through talking to Marsha Dover,” he said. “She was pretty drunk, Harry. And pretty upset.”

  “You think I should hold off on the meeting?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “At best the woman’s a foul-mouthed hick. And the sun don’t rise on the days when she isn’t drunk.”

  “I guess I’ll take my chances then.”

  “How about the trip to L.A.? When would you like to do that?”

  “As soon as possible,” I said.

  “There’s a red-eye at eleven.”

  “Book us on it, Jack. And while you’re at it, see what Glendora can do about finding me someone to talk to at the LAPD.”

  He said he’d get right on it.

  4

  I STOPPED at home before driving out to Indian Hill—to pack an overnight bag and a Dopp kit. After I finished packing, I put a quick call in to my lawyer, Laurel Gould. She didn’t offer any advice that I hadn’t already given myself, but it made me feel better to know that Laurel was around to help in case I slipped on a bar of soap.

  By the time I’d finished with Laurel and started off for my meeting with Marsha Dover, it was close to five-thirty. A brief August thunderstorm slowed traffic down on northbound 71; so it was almost six when I got to the Dover estate.

  I drove past an empty gatehouse, down an oak-lined drive, and parked in a gravel turnaround by the garages. An acre away from me, a boy on a lawn tractor was mowing grass in front of a hedge wall. It looked as if he’d been interrupted by the storm and was just finishing up. The air echoed with the sounds of the mower. The rain had stopped by then, although I could still hear it falling in the branches of the oaks. Somewhere on the estate someone was playing rock music on outdoor speakers.

  The house was huge. Three stories, with dormers on the top and gambrel-shaped windows on the second story. The windows on the first floor were bayed and flanked by louvered shutters. Two fieldstone chimneys stood at either end of the long shed roof, with a third chimney projecting from its center.

  A flagstone path led from the garages to the front door. I walked up it to the stoop, pressed the doorbell, and waited. No one answered. I pressed it again, and when no one answered again, I put an ear to the door and listened. There wasn’t a sound coming from inside the house. All the noise was out on the lawn.

  The roar of the mower got louder. I turned around and saw that the boy had driven up to within a hundred feet of me. He hopped off the tractor and walked over to the stoop. He was about sixteen, tall, skinny, and tan, with a red bandana tied around his head for a sweatband.

  “Are you looking for Mrs. Dover?” he said.

  “Yeah. Do you know where I can find her?”

  “I think she’s around back, by the pool. Just follow the path through the garden. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He swiveled on one foot, as if he didn’t really want to stop talking and go back to work. “She sure can use the company. She’s real low about Mr. Dover. Mr. Dover’s mom was here most of the day with her.”

  “Is she still here?”

  “No. She left about an hour ago.”

  “You live in the neighborhood?” I asked the kid.

  He pointed to the distant hedgerows. “Right over there. That’s where we live.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said again.

  The boy looked disappointed as he turned back to the mower. “I don’t really do this all the time,” he said. “I’m jus
t helping out until Marsha gets her head together.” He was going to have that conversation whether I joined in or not.

  I left him talking to himself and followed the path around the east side of the house into a topiary garden of rosebushes. There was a marble fountain in the center of the garden, ringed with shrubs. A despondent Cupid sat atop it, hands crossed, legs crossed, looking as if he were about to fetch a sigh and resign his post. The music I’d been hearing was coming from the top of the stairs.

  I climbed the staircase and found myself standing on a large, tiled terrace abutting the rear of the house. A heart-shaped swimming pool was sunk in the tiles, its calm waters reflecting the stormy sky. An umbrellaed patio table sat beside the pool. The umbrella was closed and beaded with rain. A brass liquor cart was parked next to the table, with bottles of whiskey, an ice bucket, and several heavy crystal glasses on its top shelf. Two small PA loudspeakers were propped on the lower shelf; and it was from them that the music was coming. Between the pool and the umbrella table, with the speakers at her head and an uncorked, half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s within arm’s reach, a blond girl was lying on a woven lounge chair. She was holding a rain-spattered silver sun-reflector beneath her chin, and she was wearing silver aviator glasses on her nose. She was very tan—too tan for a Cincinnatian—apparently drunk, and jay naked.

  The girl had long, beautiful legs and round, picture-perfect breasts, without a strap mark to mar the tan or a stretch mark to flaw her skin. Her hair was sun-bleached—very light, almost the color of sand—and what I could see of her face was breathtakingly pretty. Small mouth, darker than the surrounding skin. Small, shapely nose. Strong bones in her cheeks. She was more than pretty.

  I stood at the edge of the terrace and watched her, not knowing what to say. For awhile I didn’t think she realized I was there. Then she lowered the sun-reflector, spilling rainwater on her breasts and down her flat tummy. She tilted her glasses back on her forehead and gazed at me. Her eyes were dark blue, almost purple, and clabbered with whiskey.