False Conception Read online

  “Kidnaping, possibly.”

  She retrieved her scowl and patted her dog, who seemed unmoved by the experience. “The Clara Brennan I knew wasn’t anyone a kidnaper would find enticing. By the time she left Santa Ana, she didn’t have a dime to her name and neither did anyone else in her family.”

  “What makes you think she didn’t end up with the money her father embezzled?”

  She looked at me closely for the first time, her eyes sighting down her narrow nose, probing for the extent of my knowledge. “Daddy got the money back.”

  “Before Ethan Brennan killed himself? Or after?”

  “Before, of course. So like I said, who would want to kidnap Clara?”

  I didn’t mention that Clara Brennan’s major asset was growing inside her womb and that a man like Luke Drummond might regard interfering with that gestation as a way to retaliate for wounds that had been inflicted on him a quarter-century ago, wounds arising from a caste system that goes all but unacknowledged in this country but which wreaks havoc nonetheless.

  “You’re assuming Clara’s the victim,” I said, and waited for her reaction.

  “You’re saying Clara Brennan kidnaped someone?”

  “I’m saying she may be involved.”

  “But who’s been kidnaped? Not one of the family, surely. I mean, someone would have told me.” She suddenly seemed to realize that wasn’t a necessary corollary and glanced uncertainly around the grove, searching for reassurance.

  “Let’s get back to Luke,” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “For starters, did you like him?”

  She smiled salaciously, at details known only to her. “You could say that.”

  “Did he like you?”

  “He liked my taste, at any rate. I bought him enough cowboy clothes to outfit a rodeo.”

  “Did you go out with him back when you were in school?”

  Her chuckle was both earthy and disparaging. “Let’s say we ended up in the same room a time or two.”

  “A bedroom?”

  “That’s nobody’s business but my biographer’s.”

  “It sounds like you and Luke had a fling.”

  “Luke had lots of flings. Having a fling with Luke was something you did in those days—like chugging beer or smoking grass or making love while you were on the rag.”

  I let the crudity pass. “Did Millicent Stanley partake of Luke’s charms?”

  She laughed. “I very much doubt it, not that she would have resisted. In those days Milly was pretty much the bottom of the barrel. She’s made quite a comeback, as you probably know.” She wound the leash around her hand, ready to drag Calvin off by force.

  I hurried on. “I’ve been wondering about Luke and Clara.”

  “What about them?”

  “Were you surprised when she took up with him? Given the difference in their backgrounds?”

  She thought about it, then shrugged. “For a one-night stand, no. Luke was a hunk; any woman with a hormone could love him to death for one night, or even one summer. But permanently? Of course I was surprised. But Clara was completely shattered by the time she took up with Luke. It was any port in a storm by that time, I imagine.”

  “What was her problem?”

  “Her father disgraced himself and blew his brains out. How many more problems do you need?”

  “Did you talk to her about it? About her father, I mean?”

  “Some; not much. It was considered treasonous tor a Colbert to be seen with a Brennan by then.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “Clara? I guess I did. More than anyone else on the block, at least. She had a sense of humor and a brain and a body guys got wet dreams over. It was fascinating to watch her operate. I picked up some valuable tips.”

  “Tips about what?”

  “About how to get men to do what you want without them knowing they’ve been had.”

  “You make her sound pretty manipulative.”

  “Manipulative was her middle name.”

  “Who was she manipulating when she ran off with Luke?”

  She smiled. “You’d have to ask her. I was doing my own manipulating by then—I didn’t pay much attention.”

  Cynthia Colbert was lying—Luke Drummond had obviously been a lure for her back then, an erotic and powerful narcotic. But I didn’t see what difference it made at this point, so I decided to wrap it up. Cynthia was one of those people whose opinion of herself is so all-encompassing it sucks all the air out of the immediate environment and makes it exhausting to occupy the same space.

  “Have you seen Luke since he and Clara ran off together?” I asked.

  She shook her head, then leaned down and patted Calvin. “Clara’s mother works for my mother, you know,” she said, for some reason suddenly accommodating.

  I nodded. “I just talked to both of them.”

  Her temper ignited like tinder. “You’ve been interrogating my mother? My mother isn’t competent to dress herself, let alone talk about our past. How dare you invade this family behind my back like that.” She wrapped the leather leash around her hand a second time, as if to cushion her fist for a fight. “Does Russell know about this? What are you up to, anyway? What are you trying to do to us?”

  “All I’m doing is trying to find Clara Brennan.”

  “But why are you going into the old stuff? Who’s telling you to dig up the family skeletons? I know it’s not Russell.”

  “I can’t tell you,” I answered.

  “Ethics?” she sneered.

  “Policy. Does the name Nathaniel mean anything to you?”

  “You mean Ethan.”

  “I mean Nathaniel.”

  She shrugged. “No idea.”

  And just that quickly, Cynthia Colbert was bored. She looked at her watch, tugged the dog to its feet, and said, “I’ve got a date,” as she started marching up the path toward the street like a tour guide on the way back to the bus.

  When she’d gone ten yards, she tossed me an admonition. “If you’re smart, this will be the last I see of you. We don’t take kindly to snoops.”

  “What if I come up with Luke Drummond?”

  She stopped walking long enough to consider the question. “It might be worth money for a phone number.”

  I laughed. “I’d heard you didn’t like men.”

  “The men I don’t like shop at Colberts. The men I like wear shirts with snaps.” Her smile got lazy again, and this time its loop reached me. “You could deliver that number in person, if you have the inclination.”

  “I haven’t been a delivery boy in years. And I don’t think Russell would like it.”

  As her cheeks reddened to confirm my hunch, she resumed her march and I hurried to keep pace. “What about you and your brother?” I asked as she and Calvin waited at the light to cross Nineteenth Avenue. “How do the two of you get along?”

  “The way the Muslims and Serbs get along. I’m going to cleanse his ass right out of the retail business.”

  “Who’s going to make the decision?”

  “My father.”

  “You just said he’s not competent.”

  “Even a lunatic can pick the winner in this fight. I’ve been besting my brother for years. Now even Daddy will have to acknowledge it.”

  The light changed and she started to cross the street. When I didn’t accompany her, she came back to where I was standing. “I do hope you’ll let me know if you turn up Mr. Drummond.”

  I told her I’d think about it. “Why were you asking your mother for money a few months back?” I added.

  “Who told you that?” she bristled. “Mother? Well fuck her. And fuck you, too.”

  She looked up and down the street as traffic streamed by in a torrent of sheet metal.

  “How did your brother feel when Clara Brennan ran off with Luke Drummond?”

  “He was crushed. I couldn’t have been happier.”

  “So Clara dumped Stuart for Luke. Is that the wa
y it went?”

  “That’s what it looked like.” She laughed. “It would make sense if you’d ever laid eyes on Luke Drummond. My brother literally pales by comparison.”

  “Something Mrs. Brennan said made me think Clara might have been pregnant when she left home. Do you know anything about it?”

  Her expression became supercilious. “That’s what I meant when I said Clara was looking for any port in a storm. I don’t think anyone knew she was knocked up but me. And Papa Luke, of course, the bastard. So maybe if you find the kid, you’ll find the mother. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? With the maternal bullshit?”

  CHAPTER 22

  I waited for Cynthia Colbert to disappear up the block, then drove back to Santa Ana Way and parked down the street from her house, in the shade of an elm and a cypress.

  Five minutes later, she and Calvin rounded the corner and marched down the sidewalk to her home and went in the side door. Ten minutes after that, a blue Mercedes pulled into the drive. There are a lot of Mercedes in San Francisco, but only one with the vanity plate JORGY; from the way he slithered out of the car and slunk into the house, Russell might have been calling on Calvin instead of his mistress. Armed with a new set of questions, and maybe a few explanations, I drove to the office to take advantage of some Sunday silence.

  My plan was to dictate enough correspondence so the temp who comes in on Mondays would earn her keep for a change but, before I’d finished even one letter, I gave up. I can’t be alone in the office these days without thinking about Peggy Nettleton.

  Peggy had worked for me for ten years. We were employer and employee, then colleagues, and soon fast friends. Then we got snarled in a case involving a creep who was harassing her over the telephone. As an antidote to the frustration and embarrassment that are part and parcel of harassment, we added sex to our mix in the hope it would serve as a tonic. But the tonic turned out to be toxic, and the anomaly proved sufficiently awkward that Peggy exited my life in a huff once the creep was hauled to jail.

  For good reason, I suppose—there are always good reasons to dissolve a relationship if that’s what you’re looking for—but I wished she was back and that things were the way they had been before we had sacrificed our friendship on the altar of what it had been easy to believe was love. But that’s the problem with sex: its leavings aren’t easily eradicated and mistakes tend to be terminal. So I swore at the gods that make men and women need each other in ways they can’t define until it’s too late and made myself some coffee even though it was so late the caffeine would keep me up.

  It was still Sunday and the only person I wanted to talk to who was dependably available was Charley Sleet. It took them an hour to track him down—he was out in the Richmond District, busting a counterfeit ring. What was unusual was that it wasn’t currency that was being counterfeited, it was food stamps.

  “Sleet.”

  “Tanner.”

  “What?”

  Charley always sounds as if talking to me is the last thing on earth he wants to do, but if I don’t call him once a week, and we don’t get together for a ballgame or cards a couple of times a month, he sulks and calls in his markers, which are the meals I promise in trade for the official information he dispenses when he knows I really need it.

  “I request the pleasure of your company,” I told him as cheerily as I could manage.

  “When?”

  “ASAP.”

  “Where?”

  “Your pick.”

  “Bohemian. One hour.”

  An hour later, we were sipping Sunday beers in the triangular confines of the Bohemian Cigar Store, a venerable North Beach establishment whose prime attraction was its equidistance from the Central Station and my apartment. Charley and I try to keep things on an even keel between us, and somehow we’ve managed to keep our friendship from capsizing for nearly twenty years. Mostly it amounts to paying attention to both sides of the equation, just like with algebra.

  I bought the beers at the counter and took them to a table that was the approximate size of Charley’s fist. “What’s the occasion?” he asked when his draft was half gone. “More prints?”

  “Just a little history.”

  “Of what?”

  “The life and death of Ethan Brennan. Emphasis on the latter.”

  “I thought you were after the girl.”

  “It might help find the girl if I know why her father got his brains blown out.”

  “The file says suicide.”

  “He was found on the front porch of another man’s house, Charley.”

  “Rutherford Colbert’s.”

  I smiled. “You’ve been boning up. You must have known I was going to spring a pop quiz.”

  Charley didn’t say anything but I knew he was thinking—his ears get red when he’s thinking.

  “Colbert displaced a lot of weight in this town in those days,” I observed while he worked with his general disinclination to gossip.

  “Still does,” Charley said. “So what?”

  “Maybe enough weight to turn a homicide into a suicide.”

  Charley’s face darkened to match his ale. “No one carries that much weight.”

  “Bullshit. There were rumors, Charley.”

  “There always are with the gentry.”

  “So you don’t know anything?”

  He shook his head. “Not firsthand. I remember when it happened, but I didn’t get the call. I was on vice in those days.”

  I smiled. “You’ve got that look in your eye, Mr Sleet.”

  He hates it when I read him.

  “After you had me run the print, I came up with a little hearsay,” he admitted.

  I slapped his shoulder. “That’s my boy. So what was it?”

  “Homicide.”

  “Just as I thought.”

  “Not as you thought. It was homicide, but not murder. Justifiable. Brennan came gunning for Colbert, and Colbert had to blast him to keep from being shot himself. Open and shut.”

  “So where did the suicide notion come in?”

  “That was a fable that got started by someone off the record and no one saw any reason to stop it before it spread to the media.”

  “There was no inquest?”

  “No request for one, and no need. Check the Government Code if you don’t believe me—the cause of death wasn’t at issue. Family didn’t want to go public with their dirty linen and the department was satisfied there was no crime committed so it got taken off the board real fast.”

  “Speaking of dirty linen, why was Ethan Brennan gunning for Rutherford Colbert?”

  “Something about the business; missing money, I think.”

  “But Brennan was the bad guy, not Colbert.”

  Charley shrugged. “That’s all I know and it’s all anyone else in the department knows, too. You got a different story?”

  “Just a lot of guesses. Has old man Colbert been in any trouble that you know of? Particularly trouble with women?”

  Charley’s brows lifted the way garage doors lift. “Not that I heard. You know something?”

  I shook my head. “How about the rest of the family?”

  “Seems to me the kid had a beef a while back.”

  “Stuart?”

  Charley nodded. “Domestic thing, I think. Shoved his wife around. I don’t think he was charged.”

  I drank my beer in a contemplative shell while Charley debated a guy at the next table over the relative merits of Bonds and Canseco.

  At eight the next morning I was on the phone to my broker. What Clay Oerter brokers for me aren’t the stocks and bonds he buys for his regular clients; what he brokers for me is information. What I give him in trade is a vicarious walk on the wild side, plus a regular income stream that flows across the Friday night poker table we share with four of our friends, Charley Sleet included.

  Charley usually breaks even; I’m usually a loser and Clay Oerter invariably quits winners. I really hope he cheats—it would v
iolate my sense of the universe for anyone to be that lucky that often.

  “Clay.”

  “Hey, Marsh. That was fun last week.”

  “Not for me, it wasn’t.”

  “How much were you down?”

  “Sixty.”

  “Could have been worse.”

  “It was worse, till the last hand.”

  “Bad cards wouldn’t matter if you’d let me put you into a stock once in a while. If you’d gone into Starbucks when I told you to, you’d have doubled your money by now.”

  “Two times zero is zero, Clay. Tell me about the Colberts.”

  “The stores?”

  “The people.”

  “Rutherford Colbert opened the store on Market Street after he got back from the war. Mens wear first; now both genders. Rumor was, he made his money running a whorehouse in Rome, but who knows?”

  “I’m more interested in the current picture—who owns what.”

  “Three years ago, the old man came down with emphysema. Saw the writing on the wall, naturally enough—someone was going to inherit his baby. To figure out who, he split the stores between his kids and told them to have at it. He claimed it was just an efficiency shuffle, but everyone knew it was a grudge match for the big prize.”

  “Who’s winning?”

  “Cynthia, I hear. Of course any bottom line data on the Colberts is soft—they’re not public companies, so no one sees their financials outside the boardroom. And probably not even there, the old man plays it so close to his vest. But if Cynthia really is on top, it would be a surprise.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the men’s side was a mess before she took charge: obsolete inventory, overstocked warehouse, lousy store layouts, grumpy sales staff. If she comes out on top in this thing, it’s going to make her a retailing legend in this town. Everyone thought Stuart would win going away, since the women’s side had been the cash cow ever since Ethan Brennan came on board.”

  “So why isn’t Stuart on top?”

  “Because he spends more time complaining about the old man’s interference than tending to business, is what I hear. A big whiner, Stuart. Poster boy for the Peter Principle as well. But whatever the reason, he’s let Nordstrom and Saks and Neiman’s, plus the boutiques like Wilkes Bashford, run off with most of the couture trade in this town.”