Blood Type Page 13

  The doctor said nothing for a long time. “Are you asking me to say it’s impossible?” he mused after a moment. “Well, I can’t. Nicholas Crandall is a very sick young man.”

  “Do you have any indication that’s what really happened? That Nicky murdered his brother?”

  “Not at all. Why would I?”

  “Tom had become concerned about Nicky in recent weeks. Do you have any reason to believe something has happened to him? You seem to have kept track of him over the years.”

  “I don’t keep track of Nicky; he keeps track of me.”

  “Whatever. I thought maybe you could tell me what was going on between the brothers Crandall.”

  Marlin shook his head.

  “Was Nicky sick?” I persisted. “Other than mentally, I mean? Tom seemed to think he was.”

  Marlin shrugged. “I have no idea. His health habits were abysmal, of course. A serious illness—pneumonia, venereal disease, even TB—would hardly be surprising.”

  “So you have no information that Nicky Crandall is ill. Or dead.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Will you at least tell me if there was trouble between the two of them? There seems to have been some twenty years ago. Trouble over a girl. I’m wondering if Nicky might have carried a grudge.”

  “What girl are you referring to?”

  “Ellen Simmons.”

  Dr. Marlin’s eyes slid toward the window to his left. When I followed his glance, I looked out into a tiny parking lot, empty but for a double line of cars and a young man in a tattered pair of jeans and a Guns ’n’ Roses T-shirt who was talking with a well-dressed businessman who was about to enter a blue Mercedes. The young man—a street person or a duplicate—put his hand on the executive’s arm. The executive angrily shrugged it off. As he did so, his face turned in profile, and I recognized him—the man in the blue suit who had fetched Clarissa Crandall from the Velvet Room and delivered her to the Sandstone Club.

  I looked back at Marlin. “Who’s that?”

  Marlin blinked and looked at me. “Who?”

  I pointed to the window. “The guy with the Mercedes.”

  Marlin didn’t need more than a glance. “I don’t know. Probably a landlord, from the look of him. You’d be surprised who owns some of these tenements.”

  “How about the kid?”

  “Street trash, obviously,” Marlin said impatiently. “Now. Where were we?”

  “Ellen Simmons.”

  “Ellen. A delicate child. Whatever happened to her, I wonder?”

  “Not very much,” I said.

  The doctor frowned, then started to ask what I meant, then thought better of it and tried to wrap things up. “I’m afraid I have work to do, Mr. Tanner. I will give you a small piece of advice before you go—if you are the one who informs Nicky about his brother’s demise, you should be most careful.”

  “Why?”

  “Nicky’s relationship with Tom was … complex. I’m sure you know that schizophrenics frequently hear voices they regard as precatory—commanding them to perform deeds that are often violent or self-destructive. Well, the voice Nicky hears most often is Tom’s. At times Nicky believes he is Tom, or that Tom has taken control of his mind, which amounts to the same thing. It creates a volatile situation, to put it mildly.”

  “Has that situation become violent in the past?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

  “Had they seen each other recently, to your knowledge? And if so, where?”

  The doctor was on edge. “Please. I have other patients. You must leave.”

  “Is it possible Tom’s death isn’t all that bad from Nicky’s point of view, Doctor?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Maybe the voices will stop now that Tom’s no longer with us.”

  “I doubt it, although for Nicky’s sake I would certainly hope so.”

  “Maybe Nicky hoped so, too,” I said.

  SIXTEEN

  The stairway to my office opens onto an alley. It’s a narrow alley, as are most, and cars seldom try to navigate it. Nonetheless I discovered, as I trudged toward work just before high noon after my session with Dr. Marlin, that the tacit roadblock had been breached and my alley was completely clogged. What was clogging it was a Cadillac, big and black, as impenetrable as a knot of union pickets smack in front of my office door.

  At first I thought it was one of my landlord’s customers getting a preview of Carson’s latest shipment of antiques off the boat from Leeds. But Carson doesn’t even brush his teeth till noon, flush customer or no, so I stopped thinking about Cadillacs and their owners and mounted the stairs to the second floor, reminded once again that stairs were more of a chore than they used to be.

  I opened the outer door, the one that’s never locked. The lights were off, shades drawn, room befogged with shadow. No one was waiting on the couch or working behind the desk. Clearly the Cadillac had nothing to do with me.

  The mail lay where it had landed after the mailwoman shoved it through the slot. Since my balance sheet was such that I needed some receivables to be paid posthaste, my attentions were diverted by the possibility that one of the envelopes contained a check. Which is why it was only as I was listening to the creaks in my knees as I bent to pick up the mail that an itch in my nose and a coagulation in the air suggested someone was sharing the room with me. Which meant the Cadillac customer was mine.

  She was standing by the window, arms crossed, peering through a slit in the blinds at the sliver of Jackson Square that was visible from my suite. Amidst my plain and hard-edged furnishings, her figure was as noteworthy as a pouf. I gave a good impression of being speechless when she asked me if I was Mr. Tanner, and again when she asked if I had time to see her even though she didn’t have an appointment. I would have made time to see her if my next appointment had been with the chief of police.

  I invited her into the private office and didn’t bother to hide my gape as I watched her high heels carry her across the floor and into the inner chamber. Without being asked, she slipped into the client chair as easily as bills slip into a change machine, her jewelry toying with the light the way magicians toy with coins. Her dress proved that she regarded her figure as an asset; her red hair fell in a curve that must have taken an hour to sculpt; the gold at her ears and throat could have paid the rent on the room for a year. The thighs that crisscrossed as she made herself comfortable were sheathed in silk as white and filigreed as a plastic sack of snowflakes. The scent in the air that had forecast her presence crawled into my nose again and stayed there. Because I wanted to show off, I summoned the strength not to sneeze.

  I made it behind the desk without tripping over anything, her long legs included, and sat back in my chair and tried to pretend that women like this visit me every day. Neither of us bought it, though we didn’t say so out loud. In a variation of hard-to-get, I thumbed through the mail as though I were expecting a pouch from my operatives in Djakarta and Katmandu. When I didn’t find anything more weighty than a flier from Sears or anything resembling a remittance, I tossed the mail aside and asked my visitor if she wanted some coffee.

  “I’ll have to make it,” I added. “It takes six minutes. Do you think our business will take that long?” I asked, hope a lacquer on my words.

  Her look was arch and aristocratic and some other things I usually resent, but this time they didn’t faze me. “I suppose that depends on how badly you want a job,” she said, her voice as expensively modulated as her Cadillac.

  In response to her question, I gave some thought to my bank balance, then to Tom Crandall and to how much uncompensated time I could afford to devote to his case even if it was a case. Then I looked at the way her thigh smoothed out every single wrinkle in the stretch of gray jersey south of her lap. “Semi-badly,” I said. Then something clicked, a connection was made, and I quit acting like a schoolboy. “You’re Deirdre Sands.”

  She recrossed her legs and tucked the curl on her s
houlder behind her left ear. “Apparently my fame precedes me. My press agent will be pleased.”

  “If it makes any difference, my interest in that job you mentioned just climbed a notch.”

  “To semi-plus?”

  “To very-minus.”

  She took a breath, fiddled with an earring, took inventory of the room. Most people don’t find anything worthwhile till they get to the painting above the desk. It’s a Klee, an original, painted in 1919, given to me by a client in return for services I never talk about, worth more than everything else I own combined. People are always telling me to lock it away in a vault somewhere, and I’m always telling them only if they lock me in with it. I need to read Ross MacDonald every six months or so, and to hear a Mozart concerto every week. But if a day goes by and I don’t lay eyes on my Klee, life starts slipping out of sync. I suppose I’m addicted to it in some strange ophthalmic sense, but it doesn’t bother me, because I’m addicted to worse.

  “I like it,” Mrs. Sands was saying.

  “The Klee?”

  “The whole thing. Not too gaudy, not too tawdry, a functional environment with a dash of something exquisite to keep it from being banal. I’ve paid a lot of money to a lot of decorators who’ve failed to come up with anything remotely as appropriate.”

  “Coming from someone with your taste, I take that as a compliment.”

  She raised two hundred dollars’ worth of eyebrow enhancements. “How would you know about my taste?”

  “The Style page of the Chron runs a spread on one of your homes every other month. The last was your pied-à-terre on Outer Broadway, if I recall.”

  She smiled fondly. “My little flat. I go there to get away from it all.”

  Going to Outer Broadway to get away from it all was like going to Washington to get away from hypocrisy. “What brings you by, Mrs. Sands?” I asked.

  She straightened her back and clasped her hands. What made it a triumph was the number of rings that were in the way of a good fit. “Mr. Standish,” she said.

  “The detective you hired to tail your husband after sundown.” I reddened as I spoke, because he was also the detective I’d forgotten to report to as promised.

  She nodded curtly. “I caught Garth in a little white lie this morning. When he finally explained the situation—the arrangement he’d made with you in order to catch his forty winks—I became curious as to the reason for your presence at the club at that hour. Since Mr. Standish seemed incompletely informed on the subject, I decided to inquire myself. I hope you’re not going to be tedious about privileged communications; I happen to know that private detectives have no privileges.”

  “Privilege and private eyes are pretty much strangers across the board all right. But it’s not a problem, because I don’t have a client.”

  She raised that brow again. “Really.”

  “Sad but true.”

  “How interesting.” She patted her purse the way other people pat their cats. “If we get along, perhaps I can remedy the situation.”

  It seemed time to come up with some professional detachment, so I leaned back in my chair and cut off the view of her legs. “Did talking like that come naturally to you, or did you take a night course in elocution?”

  She laughed. Like the rest of her, it was unrestrained and sensuous. “I spent two years in Cambridge after I dropped out of college, working as a governess. Or nanny, if you prefer. Cambridge in England, that is.”

  “You were a nanny?”

  She nodded. “It’s my husband who was born to the purple, Mr. Tanner. I grew up in Albuquerque, on the wrong side of the cactus to boot. The college I dropped out of was UTEP.”

  “Amazing.”

  A brow levitated. “In what way?”

  “It always amazes me when poor people get used to being rich.”

  She darkened for just an instant, then erased it expertly. “It’s quite easy, really.” She was trying to be blasé, but her smile had flattened just a tad. “As long as you keep moving.”

  We lingered over the image for a while, of the hooks and barbs of wealth being obliterated by perpetual motion, and by the end of the hiatus I liked her a little better. “Speaking of your husband,” I said, “why are you having Mr. Standish follow him?”

  “That’s premature, Mr. Tanner. I came to ask as much of you.”

  “The answer is, I wasn’t following your husband.”

  “Really?”

  I held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  Her lips pursed. “Then you must be interested in his friend.”

  “Mrs. Crandall.”

  Her eyes flashed blue steel for an instant. “I believe that’s her name.”

  “You know damned well it is. So why did you hire Standish?”

  She thought it over to see if there was any reason not to tell me. “To see if I’m in jeopardy, of course.”

  “Physically?”

  “Don’t be silly. Conjugally.”

  “And what have you concluded?”

  “That it’s too soon to tell.”

  “You don’t seem overly concerned about the situation. Aren’t you worried that Sands might leave you?”

  Her look became as focused as an assassin’s. “I’m less concerned about him leaving than about what he might take with him.”

  “You mean who.”

  She shook her head. “I mean what. When I met him, Richard was worth barely a million dollars. As of last July, his fortune had grown to some forty-three million and change, based on commonly accepted accounting principles. Under the community property laws of this state, I’m entitled to one-half the accumulation, or so I’m told by my advisers. If my marriage explodes in my face, I want to make sure my share of the booty is still around to cushion the blow.”

  I looked at her closely. “You’d feel nothing at all if your husband left you for Clarissa Crandall?”

  Her expression became blithe and distant. “Naturally I’d feel something. Relieved, for one. Rejected for another.”

  “If the marriage is as arid as you suggest, why don’t you leave him first?”

  Her nose wrinkled as though the wind had shifted and she had just gotten a whiff of the perfume herself. “I’ve been advised against it.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a sticky prenuptial thing. Apparently I have to remain the wide-eyed innocent to have any chance of setting it aside.”

  “So says your lawyer.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the meantime, you’re making sure Richard doesn’t abscond with the community property.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So why come to me? You’ve already got Standish on the case.”

  Her eyes narrowed. On her lap, her hands made fists that resembled diamond-studded baseballs. “It would help matters immensely if I could show my husband is a bastard.”

  “That he’s sleeping with Mrs. Crandall, you mean.”

  She waved a hand to reroute me. “No one cares who sleeps with whom anymore, Mr. Tanner—it’s assumed everyone’s sleeping with everyone.”

  “I didn’t know. I guess I missed Geraldo that day.”

  She was irritated by my answer, so she stood up and went for a closer look at the Klee. When she got within range, her hip was an inch from my cheek. It was quite a hip. If I turned my head, I could lick it. I wondered if she would like it if I did. I decided she wouldn’t notice.

  When she’d found what she was looking for in the Klee, she returned to the chair and started looking for something in me. “Our daughter went off to college last fall,” she said abruptly. “A freshman—exclusive school, co-ed dorm. The first week they had a floor meeting, and at some point it was proposed that by the end of the year everyone on the floor should have slept with everyone else. Heterosexually speaking, that is. When they put it to a vote, the motion passed unanimously. By the end of the year, everyone had kept the pledge.”

  “Your daughter told you this?”

  “Her boyfrie
nd did. He goes to school a thousand miles away. He seems quite proud of what Diana and her classmates wrought.”

  “I guess that’s why they call it the liberal arts,” I said as I compared her story to the endlessly chaste days of my own undergraduate experience. It really was a different world; maybe I should start watching Geraldo after all.

  “If not sex, what is it you do want me to pin on your husband?” I asked. “Some kind of financial shenanigans?”

  Deirdre Sands narrowed her eyes and spoke like a spy. “I was thinking in terms of murder.”

  “I think I hope you’re kidding.”

  Our eyes did battle for a while, until mine yielded to the superior or at least the franker force. “Are you asking me to frame your husband for a homicide, Mrs. Sands?”

  She shrugged nonchalantly. “The beauty of it is, there’s a good chance he’s really committed one, don’t you think?”

  “We’re talking about Tom Crandall, I take it.”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you know about him and me?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “I hope they’re better at gossip than Mr. Standish is at a stakeout.”

  Her lips wrinkled. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “You certainly are.” I matched her grin. “What makes you and your sources think Tom Crandall was murdered?”

  “This.”

  She dipped into her purse, then held out her hand. In it was a note, brief, to the point, written and signed in what was definitely Tom’s hand: Your husband’s atrocities must be exposed. If you are willing to assist me, call this number. But be aware that he will be brought to judgment, with or without your help.

  The phone number was Tom’s; the discomfort was my own. I looked around the office, then out the window. “Have I stumbled onto a movie set, Mrs. Sands? This has a decided air of unreality about it.”

  “My life has been unreal since the day I met Richard at a pool party in Piedmont. This is merely the next chapter in the fantasy. Which is rapidly becoming a horror story.”

  I held up the note. “I’m supposed to take this seriously?”

  “Its author obviously did. I’m willing to pay you handsomely to find out if he was right.”