False Conception Read online

  I decided to go with the truth. “My name is Tanner, Mrs. Colbert. I’m a detective. Your son has hired me to find Clara Brennan.” The words were muffled and modulated by my mask.

  I had half-expected her to be a drooler, or a mute, or a raver, or some other form of half-wit, so when she responded with perfect sense it was jarring. “What does he want with her?”

  “She made a deal, then tried to run away from it.”

  “That shouldn’t have been a surprise.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s run away from him before.”

  Mrs. Colbert made an infinitesimal adjustment to her position—it seemed to absorb all her attention. When she was comfortable again, she regarded me with a clinical detachment that duplicated the immediate environment. “You’re the first person to enter this room since my daughter came looking for money at Easter,” she said, as though it was some sort of accomplishment.

  “I appreciate the honor.”

  “It’s not an honor, it’s an indulgence. You mentioned my husband’s name to gain admission.”

  “I thought it was the only key to the palace.”

  “Indeed. And what does he want with Clara?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You’re not working for him?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m working for Stuart.”

  She closed her eyes; the lids were as thin as rice paper. “So Stuart is looking for Clara as well. Does that mean his marriage to Millicent has foundered so soon?”

  I shook my head. “They’re fine.”

  “I doubt it,” she demurred meanly. “What does he want with Clara?”

  “As I said, he hired her to do a job for him and he’s afraid she won’t finish it.”

  “What kind of job?”

  I was more circumspect than I had been with Opal Brennan. “That would be up to him to disclose.”

  “That will be difficult—I don’t communicate with Stuart.”

  “Why not?”

  Her back arched against the feathers. “He defied me over a matter of importance. I can’t forgive him for it.”

  “What did he do?”

  Her smile was surprisingly sassy. “That would be none of your business.”

  “It would be in your family’s best interest if Clara were found, Mrs. Colbert,” I projected doggedly. “And in her mother’s best interest as well.” The face beneath my mask was wet with sweat and spittle. I was beginning to feel like a felon.

  “Are people trying to harm Clara?” Delilah Colbert asked. “Is that what you’re implying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “All I know is, she’s disappeared and no one from her new life or her old life admits to having seen her. Do you know any reason why that might have happened?”

  “I know nothing about Clara’s life as an adult, but she was born in trouble and she was raised in trouble and she was in trouble the day she left Santa Ana Way. She has always had a shadow over her; I wish she didn’t, but she does. I would guess her life remains clouded.”

  “What kind of trouble are you talking about?”

  The women exchanged glances that reeked of a confederacy that I wasn’t party to. “That’s none of your business, either.”

  “I think it is.”

  “That’s not for you to say, I’m afraid. How is Nathaniel?”

  I blinked. “Who?”

  Mrs. Colbert looked at me for several seconds, then lowered her chin to her chest, which I took as her signal she was preparing to sleep. “It’s time,” Opal Brennan said at my back.

  I didn’t take the hint. “Have you heard from Clara in the past few weeks, Mrs. Colbert?”

  She spoke through the muffle of her bodice. “If Opal hasn’t heard from her, why would I?”

  My frustration won out. “What happened out here twenty years ago? Why do you two live like this? Why are you both estranged from your children?”

  Delilah Colbert didn’t speak and didn’t move. Opal Brennan put her hand on my biceps and tried to spin me away from her boss. “It’s time,” she said again.

  As she tugged me toward the door, I hurried to empty my quiver. “Do you know a woman named Greta Hammond, Mrs. Colbert?”

  Delilah Colbert’s bosom rose and fell like the tide. “Do we know such a person, Opal?”

  Opal lied and said they didn’t.

  “How about Clara’s ex-husband? Do you know where I can find Luke Drummond?”

  Her shrug made the satin gown ripple like a lake of milk. Opal gave me another tug. “One last thing,” I said as I was towed toward the door. “Did your husband ever get back the money Mr. Brennan stole from the stores?”

  Delilah Colbert raised her head off her chest and looked at me as though I’d quacked like a duck. “Ethan Brennan didn’t steal a dime,” she snapped. “That was a calumny cooked up by my husband. And everyone around here knows it.”

  She closed her eyes and returned her chin to the swell of her satin chest. Opal grasped my arm like a truant officer and led me to the solace of a normally infectious environment.

  I took off my mask and gown and put on my shoes, then leaned against the door as Opal Brennan waited with increasing impatience.

  “Who’s Nathaniel?” I asked her.

  “You leave Nathaniel alone.”

  “Maybe I would if I knew who he was.”

  She didn’t go for the bait; her look branded me a malefactor. “He can’t help you. You’d be ugly to try.”

  “What’s Nathaniel to Clara?”

  She shook her head without speaking, then opened the door to the street.

  I didn’t budge. “Your daughter took her father’s death pretty hard, but that doesn’t seem enough to justify disappearing from your life, too. What else happened out here? Why did Clara take a new name and seal herself off from her past?”

  She shook her head as though to launder all memory of it. “It’s over and done with.”

  “Did you see it happen, Mrs. Brennan?”

  “What?”

  “Your husband’s death.”

  She shook her head. “I was in my room—napping. I was groggy when they came and got me. I didn’t believe it till I saw the body. And even then …” She mopped at the corner of her eye. “He was a wonderful, kindly man. He didn’t deserve what was done to him.”

  “What was done to him?”

  “Everything he cared about got taken away by the Colberts.”

  “Except you.”

  Her laugh was high and inappropriate.

  “Did anyone witness your husband’s death, Mrs. Brennan? Did Clara, for example?”

  She gave it half a thought. “She might have. It was about then that she started acting strangely.”

  “In what way?”

  “She turned hateful to me. And to everyone else on the street as well.”

  “Except Luke Drummond,” I reminded.

  She nodded agreement. “She ruined her life by running off with that boy.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  She blinked. “She wanted to get away; he was the only one who would take her.”

  I groped for something else of significance. “Was your daughter dating Stuart Colbert at the time your husband died?”

  She nodded. “He was smitten to his toes. They didn’t think I knew, but I did. He came home from that fancy school in the summer and started sneaking around, taking her off in that big car he drove, necking in the driveway till all hours. They didn’t know it, but I watched them. Little by little he wore down her upbringing. I knew what was going to happen, but I didn’t know how to stop it. By the end of the summer he had what he wanted.”

  “What was that?”

  Her look turned hateful. “What his father told him to take. You have to leave now,” she added before I could ask what it was.

  She turned her back and stood by the door; I moved with the pace of a pallbearer. “Did your husband know Clara was dating Stuart Colbert?”

  “No
t for a long time. But in the end he did.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “I told him.”

  “How did he feel about it?”

  “He wanted to kill him.”

  “Stuart?”

  “Rutherford.”

  Her eyes strayed to the portrait in the parlor. When I asked another question, she shook her head and crossed her arms. The door locked at my back with a thud.

  CHAPTER 21

  Cynthia Colbert was spending her Sunday walking her dog in Stern Grove. Or so her maid informed me when I rang the bell of the sprawling Cape Cod house and asked to see her employer. When I asked what kind of dog it was, she told me it was a Russian wolfhound.

  Since Stern Grove was only a few blocks away, and since I didn’t have anything better to do on my Sunday afternoons now that Betty Fontaine had discarded me, I pointed my car toward the ocean, cranked it into a parking spot on Sloat Boulevard just west of Nineteenth Avenue, and entered the overgrown grounds of the park on a path between the tennis courts and the putting green, through a WPA gate built in 1935.

  The odds of finding Stuart Colbert’s sister within the expanse of the grove weren’t good, but it was a nice day—cool, bright, and snappy—and I hadn’t communed with nature since I’d visited the Academy of Sciences while waiting to spy on Greta Hammond, and even that had been a taxidermic substitute for the real thing.

  Biophilia notwithstanding, I don’t commune with nature all that much since nature seldom talks back to me, but once in a while an organic flush of my corroded urban pipes seems called for, if only from the standpoint of preventive maintenance. So I strolled down the steep path toward the core of the grove, was soothed by the breezy songs of conifers and ferns and buoyed by the sharp scent off the eucalyptus that soared overhead as I ambled with a host of others of similar inclination, keeping an eye peeled for a woman with a wolfhound. I didn’t know what a wolfhound looked like, exactly, but I figured there was a good chance that it was big and ugly and resembled Rasputin. From the descriptions I’d gotten from her brother, Cynthia Colbert must have been a twin.

  Stern Grove is the venue for a concert series during summer months—everything from jazz to opera to mime. The performances are staged at a natural amphitheater in the center of the grove. Along the eastern edge of the amphitheater are several picnic areas, complete with tables and benches and fire pits. Perched on a hollow log in the center of one such glade was a woman with a dog. The dog looked more like a collie than a mastiff, but I figured she was a possibility.

  I sat on a nearby bench and observed her. She was a large woman but not corpulent, ruggedly handsome and aggressively self-assured in the masculine manner far too many women adopt these days for reasons more Freudian than feminist. Her image was augmented by her outfit, a riff on the bush hat and safari suit motif that could have been plucked from a rack at Colbert for Men—if an emu had happened by, Cynthia Colbert would doubtlessly have gunned it down. On closer inspection, she seemed less a great white hunter than a metaphysician, her blinkless eyes raised to the treetops, looking into her soul or maybe into the solar system. She was oblivious to her surroundings, including her dog, who seemed content to lie at the end of his leash and slobber on the tuft of grass that cushioned his pointed jaw.

  After some minutes of procrastination, I strolled toward where she was sitting and positioned myself where she was forced to engage me. “Miss Colbert?”

  Her lips furled unattractively as she inspected me up and down. “I don’t know you, do I?” she said when her sneer didn’t get the job done.

  “My name’s Tanner. And no. You don’t.”

  “Then please respect my privacy. If you’ve got a quibble about our merchandise, take it up with the manager at the store where you made your purchase.”

  If she wanted me to be ashamed, she was going to have to pick a target more crucial than my attire. “When I have problems with my wardrobe, I take it up with parcel post.”

  “I get it,” she said. “You’re a voluntary member of the underclass. How noble. We running dogs of capitalism are forever in your debt.”

  “If the running dogs really felt that way, there wouldn’t be an underclass.”

  She shook her head the way she would have if her wolfhound had swallowed the neighbor’s cat. “Spare me the dialectic. If you don’t leave me in peace, I’ll be forced to call the park police.”

  “I’m not here to debate Utopian economics, Ms. Colbert. I’m here about Clara Brennan.”

  She had been scouting the grove for a policeman, but when she heard the name she stopped. “Who?”

  “Clara Brennan. Your childhood pal.”

  “I haven’t … who did you say you were again?”

  “Marsh Tanner.”

  It took a minute, but she came up with it. “The detective.” The label evoked images that discomfited her.

  “Do you happen to know what I’m doing these days, Miss Colbert?” I asked with as much nonchalance as I could muster, which was quite a bit.

  She recovered enough equilibrium to resume her aristocratic distance from both me and the world I live in. “Not precisely.”

  “I’m trying to find Miss Brennan.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s missing.”

  She shrugged with more indifference than she felt. “She’s been missing for twenty years, hasn’t she?”

  “That was from her former life. Now she’s missing from her new life as well.”

  Cynthia Colbert lifted her hat off her head, adjusted its bent brim, brushed hair away from her eyes, then fitted it back in place again, tilted at a more rakish angle. “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about? If so, I’m flunking the course. Not that I give a damn.”

  “I’m asking if you know the whereabouts of Clara Brennan.”

  “I do not. There. Can I go back to my walk now? Calvin’s arthritis sets in when he stays in one place too long.”

  “So does mine,” I said. “Is this Calvin?” I gestured toward the dog.

  “Calvin Coolidge Colbert, at your service.”

  “A fine animal.”

  “He’s a mess. But then, what man isn’t?”

  I decided she was serious. “Does the name Greta Hammond mean anything to you?” In the echo of Clara Brennan’s pseudonym, I thought I saw a flicker in the eyes beneath the brim of the bush hat, but I didn’t know what it meant yet.

  “I know lots of women professionally,” she said. “It’s possible the woman worked for me at some point, or we met at some sales thing or something. She’s not anyone I know socially.”

  “You weren’t arguing with her in an apartment on Kirkham Street a couple of months ago?”

  “I was not.” Her entire physique was summoned behind the denial, which probably meant she was lying.

  “When’s the last time you saw Clara Brennan?”

  “Eons ago.”

  “You don’t know where she lives—what she does?”

  “No idea. But I’m sure it’s something laudable.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Her smile was both arch and belittling. “Everyone always thought Clara was so fucking special. Teachers, my mother, the minister, everyone always went on and on about how sweet she was. And smart. And beautiful—Clara was the whole package, as opposed to the rest of us mere mortals. I figure she must be either a nun or a novelist by now. Is she?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said, and tried not to remember that my original assessment of the woman had contained many of the same adjectives. “Why did her father blow his brains out?”

  She was momentarily startled but her answer was elaborately offhand. “He was a thief and they caught him at it.”

  “Who caught him?”

  “My father.”

  “Did he report the theft to the cops?”

  She shook her head. “He handled it in-house.”

  “If it was handled, why did Ethan Brennan kill himself?”
r />   She shrugged. “I don’t know and I don’t care. And if you’re thinking of asking my father, don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked at me impatiently. “He’s seventy-four and has advanced emphysema. His lungs barely pump enough oxygen to maintain his motor functions, which means he doesn’t know much of anything anymore. Which, in the case of the Brennans, is a blessing. They caused him a lot of grief.”

  “It still might be in his best interest to talk to me before this thing blows sky high.”

  “What thing?”

  “Sorry. Can’t say.”

  “Well, Father’s not capable of knowing what his best interest is, so forget about it.” She yanked her dog to its feet; it grinned for the first time all morning. “Our tête-à-tête is finished, Mr. Tanner. Next time bring a picnic lunch.” She started to walk away.

  “Luke Drummond,” I said to her back.

  She jerked the dog to a stop so quickly he looked back and bared his teeth. I felt like doing the same thing. “Who?” she asked.

  “Luke Drummond. The family factotum.”

  She looked around with such open eagerness it was clear she was hoping Luke would be beckoning at her from the underbrush. “What about him? Is he here?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you did.”

  She cocked her head. “You sound as if something’s happened to him.”

  “Not to him; to his ex-wife.”

  “Clara? I thought you said she ran away.”

  “I said she was missing. I’m not sure how she got that way, but it could be something serious.”

  “How serious?”