Ellipsis Read online

  Ellipsis

  A John Marshall Tanner Mystery

  Stephen Greenleaf

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  Chapter 1

  I’ve been in the business a long time, so these days I make them come to me.

  They don’t like it much, the lawyers and their satraps, and they like it even less when they compare the pedestrian decor of my office to their own palatial work environments, but if they want me, they put up with it for as long as it takes to hire me. Sometimes it takes quite a while. Like this time, for instance.

  Her brown hair was flecked with gray and crimped into a Brillo bun that reminded me of my grandmother, the one on my father’s side who always made me take off my shoes before coming indoors, the one I didn’t like very much. Her powder blue blouse buttoned to the throat with mother-of-pearl, her navy blue suit jacket covered the entire topology of her torso, and her matching straight skirt was hemmed well below the knee, at the point of maximum frumpiness. Her shoes were as sensible as snow tires; the eyeglasses on her nose made her look like a jungle bird on the brink of capture. Some people think women lawyers are like Ally McBeal. Those people have never met one.

  She didn’t have an ounce of fat or of irony either. Whatever had brought her to my place of business was deadly serious, in fact, or so I was urged to believe by her demeanor.

  We faced each other like bookends in the reference section. “Mr. Tanner?”

  I glanced at the calendar, the one labeled HARD BOILED. “Ms. Sundstrom?”

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” she said without meaning it, and extended a ringless hand.

  “Same here,” I said as we shook. Her flesh was as cold as custard. Her knuckles were as faceted as fine jewelry. “And please call me Marsh.”

  “Karla.”

  “With a K?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll bet your father was Karl and you were an only child.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Elementary, my dear Ms. Sundstrom.”

  After a twitch of indecision that no doubt questioned my sobriety, she gestured toward a chair. “May I sit?”

  I’m nothing if not magnanimous. “Of course.” I gave her credit for not trying to dust it off.

  She squirmed this way and that, trying to find a comfortable angle of repose, but it would have been easier to find a four-leaf clover in the carpet. Her focus on her own contentment was such that she didn’t even respond to the painting on the wall at my back. It was just as well. She probably viewed Klee as random and racy and therefore profane.

  She clasped her hands and launched her pitch. “Before we get into details, I should mention that the engagement I’m going to describe will occupy virtually all of your time, at least periodically. Are you in a position to take on such a task, assuming we formalize the arrangement?”

  My mind glided across my active case list the way a seagull glides across a landfill. “As it happens, I’m between projects at the moment.”

  “Good.”

  “Not according to my accountant.”

  She frowned until she deciphered it. “Yes. Of course. Well, I’m sure the hiatus is only temporary. What are your rates, if I may ask?”

  I employed the fudge factor I use when the job seems tedious or the client obnoxious. “Sixty dollars an hour plus expenses.”

  She raised a well-penciled black brow. “That seems rather high.”

  I crossed my arms and propped my feet on the desk, assuming my own favorite angle of repose. “You’re a lawyer and you’re here on behalf of a client, am I right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So your meter is running, as they say.”

  “I … yes. If you want to put it that way.”

  “Then I’ll charge whatever you’re charging.”

  She colored and looked away. “That wouldn’t be at all appropriate.”

  “Why not? I’m the one loaded with free time. Seems to me it’s a seller’s market.”

  She readjusted her position and recrossed her shapeless legs. When she was adequately arranged, she tugged so hard on her skirt I was afraid she was going to rip it off. “You seem rather out of sorts this morning, Mr. Tanner.”

  “And you seem rather dour and reluctant, Ms. Sundstrom.”

  We locked sight lines until we decided to mutually disengage. “I find a certain reserve helps me be more effective in my work,” Ms. Sundstrom acknowledged finally, though not without embarrassment.

  “As do I,” I countered.

  “Plus my expertise is in personal services contracts and intellectual-property issues. I’ve never dealt with a potentially violent situation before.”

  “Whereas I deal with such situations all the time,” I exaggerated.

  She took the bait. “I suppose that’s why I’m here.”

  “And I suppose that’s why I charge sixty bucks an hour.”

  After a philosophical struggle that seemed to be unique to her experience, Ms. Sundstrom bowed in homage to my trump. Then she consulted a watch that was thinner than her wrist but not much. Then she looked up. “Shall I proceed, or have we decided we’re terminally incompatible?”

  I laughed because I assumed she’d made a joke. “You tell me.”

  “I’m prepared to go forward.”

  “So am I. Though not necessarily all the way, since this is our first date.”

  Her lips wrinkled and her nose lifted. “Men frequently assume I’ll be undone by double entendre. I have four older brothers; I’ve yet to hear a scurrile reference that wasn’t inflicted upon me with regularity from about the age of nine.”

  Now I was the one who blushed. “I apologize.”

  “What for?”

  “For being like all the other men in your life.”

  “I have no men in my life.”

  “I guess that’s what four brothers will do for you. Shall we get down to business?”

  “Please.” She retrieved her briefcase from the floor and extracted what looked like a contract. “I have a client who’s in danger, Mr. Tanner.”

  “What kind of danger?”

  “Her life has been threatened. Several times.”

  “Threatened by whom?”

  “The threats were anonymous.”

  “Have there been actual attempts to harm her?”

  “Not yet. Thank God.”

  “But you take the threats seriously.”

  She nodded. “More important, so does my client.”

  “Who is?”

  “Chandelier Wells.”

  Now my brow was the one that elevated. “The writer?”

  “Yes.”

  “My hourly rate just tripled.”

  I finally provoked an infinitesimal grin. “I take it you’re familiar with her work.”

  “Not her work; just her reputation.”

  “Yes, well, whatever you may have read or heard about her, shall we say, personal peccadilloes, Chandelier Wells is the most successful novelist in San Francisco, Danielle Steel and Richard North Patterson not excluded.”

  “Good for her.”

  “But I’m afraid success comes at a price.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “The price in this instance is danger.”

  For some reason I looked at my sagging couch and my faded carpet and my peeling paint and wondered how long it would be till I could stop taking on troubles for a living. “What does Ms. Wells want from me, exactly?” I asked before I’d answered my question.

  Like all good lawyers, Ms. Sundstrom was ready with a succinct answer to a predictable inquiry. “She wants you to serve as her bodyguard until the source of the threats is identified and neutralized. The precise nature of the relationship is spelled out in this document I’ve prepared for yo
ur signature.”

  As Ms. Sundstrom placed the document on the desk, I pushed back my chair and stood up. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t do that kind of work. I don’t even go to those kinds of movies.”

  Ms. Sundstrom stayed seated. “Please hear me out.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because Chandelier asked for you by name. And because she doesn’t take no for an answer.”

  I did a partial pirouette. “Take a look, Ms. Sundstrom. I don’t have enough muscles to make anyone think twice, I have only one gun and I’m not sure where it is at the moment, I’ve never attended defensive-driving school or counterinsurgency training or even learned CPR, and I don’t like being cooped up with strangers even on a bus ride. You’d better get a new boy.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not an option, I’m afraid.”

  “But why me?” I asked, more plaintively than I intended. “There are all kinds of mammoth security firms that can guard Ms. Wells day and night and she won’t even know it’s happening. I can give you names if you want. I’ll even make you an appointment.”

  She was shaking her head before I finished my screed. “Sorry, Mr. Tanner. I don’t want names, I want you.”

  “I still don’t understand why.”

  “Because you come highly recommended.”

  “By whom?”

  “Millicent Colbert.”

  I sank back to my chair, heavily and disconsolately, and propped my head with my hands. “How does Ms. Wells know Mrs. Colbert?”

  “They have children in the same preschool.”

  “Laurel Hill.”

  “I believe that’s the one.”

  “And Millicent told Chandelier I could take care of her problem.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. It began to look like I was about to guard a body.

  Chapter 2

  I asked Karla Sundstrom for more details about the anonymous threats to her client, but she told me that would have to wait until I met Chandelier Wells in person—apparently Ms. Wells was not about to buy a pig in a poke no matter how effusively I came recommended at preschool. We set an appointment for eight that evening at Ms. Wells’s Pacific Heights home, then Ms. Sundstrom went back to her law firm, where the bad mood she’d brought to my office would undoubtedly be fully restored.

  After a trip to the bank to deposit the $123.42 I’d earned last week and an early lunch of patty melt and American fries at Zorba’s, I spent the rest of the day clearing the slate of old business and warding off a platoon of second thoughts. The old business had to do with bunko—my client had been ripped off by a time-share scam up at Tahoe; luckily, the scam was widespread enough that the attorney general had shut it down and filed suit for recision and restitution. The second thoughts were of going to work for Chandelier Wells.

  All I knew of her had come from the media, which of course made it suspect by definition. Almost daily, it seemed, the Chronicle contained a feature piece on her doings in sections ranging from style to society to business to the gossip column. Almost as often, the local talk shows throbbed with praise of her prose or her sales records. What I knew for sure was that Ms. Sundstrom had not exaggerated—Chandelier Wells was a fabulously successful writer, one of those whose glossy fat paperbacks overflow the racks and shelves to rise like stalagmites from the floors of bookstores and supermarkets, to say nothing of Costco and Walgreens and S. F. International. According to snippets of reviews I vaguely remembered, what she wrote was romantic suspense of a sort, wherein the heroine runs afoul not only of a roguish male and a recalcitrant private life but also of one or another brand of social injustice that she always manages to set right in the penultimate chapter.

  Each book was part of a series that featured a middle-aged newspaper columnist named Maggie Katz. Apparently to millions of women, Maggie was the embodiment of their fears and desires and hopes and frustrations, an irresistible mix of their real lives and their feminist fantasies in which all always came out right in the end. An hour with Maggie Katz was better than an hour with Newman or Redford or even Oprah, or so Chandelier’s sales levels suggested. It was an idolatrous phenomenon I understood myself, at least partially—during my college and army years, it had done me worlds of good to hang out with Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe on a regular basis and pretend their triumphs were somehow my own. In fact, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald were to blame more than anyone else for my becoming a private eye.

  My problem with Chandelier Wells was not with her work, my problem was with her person. First, she was a celebrity, and most celebrities inhabit nothing beyond the universe of their own desires, which is a swell definition of boring. Second, she was vastly wealthy, her income exceeded among her peers only by Grisham, Crichton, and King, and I had a genetic aversion to the upper crust. She was also, if you could believe the papers, opinionated, arrogant, and autocratic. Which is to say, she was like most of the titans of industry in the city. Also, like the most notorious of those titans, she had somehow managed to convince the struggling middle class that she was on their side, nonetheless.

  Her personal life was off-putting as well. Divorced for many years from a youthful marriage to a ne’er-do-well, she had dated and discarded most of the city’s eligible bachelors, several of whom were as rich and famous in their own sphere as she was in hers, and the details of the denouements always made it into the press. Worse, at least in my view, she was a public mother, exhibiting her sloe-eyed daughter at all the right social and charitable events when she wasn’t being photographed romping with her child at the zoo or on the Marina Green, the quality time coincidentally captured in some flattering media profile. Admittedly, she donated lots of time and money to good causes, always generously but always publicly as well. She was also rumored to have political ambitions of the moralistic bent that is so predominant in the Southern reaches of the nation. In sum, I wasn’t sure I could endure fifteen minutes of her time over a fast-food lunch, let alone guard her person for eighteen hours at a stretch.

  Nevertheless, I rang her bell at 8 P.M. Behind me, the grounds of the estate stretched toward Pacific Avenue like a cleverly built quilt abundant with botanical appliqués. Above me, the house rose like an advancing glacier, its white stone facade broken by narrow slits of windows, pebbled with ornamentation of a medieval motif, and topped by a gray slate roof rising beyond a row of battlements that in the gloom of a late winter evening resembled a derelict’s teeth. Thanks to her bankroll and her architect, Chandelier was ready to repel invaders—all she lacked was a moat and a drawbridge and a knight in shining armor. Or maybe that was me.

  The bell was answered by a young woman who gave me a smile full of bright teeth and pink gums and told me her name was Lark McLaren and that she was Ms. Wells’s executive assistant. She wore brown slacks over flat heels and below a beige cable-knit sweater that advertised a trim figure and an understated sense of style, which was the only understated object I’d seen since I’d parked my car.

  When we shook hands, hers was warm and agreeable, in contrast to Karla Sundstrom’s clammy clasp. She told me Ms. Wells was waiting in the sunroom. Since this part of the city hadn’t seen the sun since Christmas, I figured Chandelier had borrowed one from an adjacent solar system. Rich people can do anything when they set their mind to it.

  The sunroom was off the dining room, which was beyond the great room flanking the foyer—I’ve taken shorter hikes in search of a loaf of bread. When we reached a massive walnut door, Lark asked me to take a seat on the adjacent oak bench, its contours as rigid and unsettling as if it had been stolen from Chartres. “She’s on the phone with her Japanese publisher,” Lark added. “Certain errors in the translation of her last book need to be corrected before the softcover version comes out.”

  “Chandelier speaks Japanese?”

  “No, but for comparison purposes she has her foreign editions translated for her by some professors down at Stanford. Chandelier is extreme
ly diligent about protecting the integrity of her prose,” Lark added when she saw my expression, which was a mix of wonder and dismay.

  “Does that smile contain a dash of sarcasm, Ms. McLaren?” I asked.

  She blinked with genuine surprise. “Why would it?”

  With that succinct and justifiable rebuttal, Lark McLaren disappeared inside the sunroom, leaving me waiting my turn on the bench like a donor at the local blood bank.

  I looked up and down the hall. At one end, I heard the clatter of crockery and culinary gear—someone was cleaning up after dinner. At the other, a massive staircase led to the second floor and conceivably on up to the clouds. Between the extremes were various arts and crafts in the manner of the French baroque, which oddly were a fit to my mood—I was as antsy as if I were waiting for Louis Quatorze.

  The door beside me finally opened, but instead of Lark McLaren, a little girl emerged. She was four or five, black-haired and -eyed, dressed in a light blue pinafore and patent leather shoes that were far too nice to play in. Her hand was held by an older Hispanic woman I took to be her nanny.

  “Night, Mommy,” the girl called into the room. “Night, Mommy,” she repeated, this time more sternly.

  Mommy said something I couldn’t hear.

  “I love you, Mommy.”

  I bet Mommy loved her, too.

  “Come, Violet,” the nanny said, tugging the girl’s slender arm to add some muscle to her instruction.

  As flighty as a colt, the little girl pulled away from the older woman and twirled to look at me. “Hi,” she said happily, clearly at ease with strangers, even ones who looked mean and ugly.

  “Hi, there.”

  “My name’s Violet.”

  “Mine’s Marsh.”

  “Are you here to see my mommy?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Are you a fan?”

  “I … sort of, I guess. Sure.”

  “Mommy has lots of fans. Millions, even.”

  “So I hear. I also hear you know a girl named Eleanor.”

  Violet frowned in concentration. “I know two Eleanors.” She held up the appropriate fingers. “Eleanor Colbert at Laurel Hill and Eleanor Mitchell at church.”