False Conception Read online

  “How about the old man? I hear he’s lost it, pretty much.”

  “His mind, you mean? No one knows. He’s like that Mafia guy who wanders around Brooklyn in his pajamas—no one knows if he’s nuts or if he’s just setting the stage for an incompetency plea for when the Feds decide to lock him up.”

  “You saying Rutherford’s committed a crime?”

  Clay laughed. “Not that I know of. Although some of the things I see on those manikins probably violate an ordinance or two.”

  “Who takes over the stores after the kids are gone? Neither of them has children, as I understand it.”

  “That’s up in the air, I guess. Supposedly, Rutherford will decide by his birthday in ’95 which of the kids will take over. After that, it’s pretty much up to how that person wants to handle it, I imagine. If no one has an heir, they’ll probably go public and bring someone in from outside to run things.”

  “There’s no heir apparent in the company now?”

  “From outside the family? No. A guy named Gallatin handles the financial end, but no way he can head it up—even you’ve got more fashion sense than he does. The only cream that can rise to the top in that bottle has Colbert blood in it.”

  “What happens if Rutherford drops dead before he chooses between the kids?”

  “Beats me. You’d have to ask whoever drew up his will.”

  In other words, I’d have to ask Russell Jorgensen. “How about Ethan Brennan? What kind of role did he play?”

  “In the business? Crucial. Rutherford has the charm of Pat Buchanan on a bad day, and Ethan put a human face on the operation—charmed the staff, cultivated the rag manufacturers, that kind of thing. His main contribution was getting the stores into high-end women’s fashion, where the big margins are, then doing what it took to make it work.”

  “Such as.”

  “Seducing the well-heeled customer, is what it came down to. Stocking the hot lines, training the sales staff to talk the talk and walk the walk so the locals will think they’re as chic as New Yorkers. Plus the accessories—tea room for the ladies who lunch; private showings in the store or at home for the women who are busy, busy; day care for their kids; lingerie boutique where ladies can try on teddies and peignoirs without worrying about men popping in; no-questions-asked returns policy; personal shoppers who know their principals well enough to take care of the small stuff by phone. Plus Ethan was the spokesman for Colberts in their first TV ads—everyone assumed he was a Colbert himself. Nice guy, they say.”

  “Why did he kill himself?”

  Clay hesitated. “He tapped the till and they caught him was the story most people heard.”

  “You sound like there was more than one version.”

  “Let me put it this way—they say that if you worked for Rutherford Colbert, the only thing you’d have more of than reasons to kill yourself would be reasons to kill him.”

  “Hear anything specific along those lines?”

  “You know how people talk. I heard because Ethan got so much press for his work at the company, Rutherford got jealous and decided to rub him out. I heard Ethan was mad at Rutherford for sleeping with his wife and I heard vice versa; I heard Ethan did something even worse than embezzlement though I never heard what it was; I heard Opal Brennan really pulled the trigger because she was crazy or because she was in love with Rutherford, take your pick; and I heard Stuart was really the one who did it because he was afraid Ethan would take over the company before Stuart could claim it for himself. I probably heard half a dozen other things, too, but I don’t remember them.”

  “Which one of them do you credit?”

  “None, particularly. Except Rutherford was a swordsman in his day. Cut a wide swath through the salesgirls down at the store.”

  “So Mrs. Brennan might have been a conquest?”

  “Any woman in town might have been a conquest.”

  “Any rumors about him and young women?”

  “How young?”

  “Teens.”

  Clay laughed uneasily. “Jesus, Marsh. What kind of case are you into?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I admitted, then thanked Clay for his trouble.

  An hour later, Charley Sleet was on the phone. “Colbert the Younger was booked in May of ’84 for domestic assault.”

  “Who was the complainant? Millicent?”

  “Louise.”

  “What happened?”

  “Charges dropped. Physical evidence inconclusive; complainant opted not to testify. Just another smear on the blotter.”

  “You don’t happen to have Louise Colbert’s maiden name there, do you?”

  “Frankel.”

  “Address?”

  “Santa Ana Way.”

  “Not anymore,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 23

  I found Louise Frankel where Stuart Colbert had told me I’d find her, on a houseboat chained to a dock that ran the rim of what was left of Mission Creek at the point where it poked its way into China Basin. I thought I knew San Francisco pretty well after being a resident for almost a third of a century, but the existence of a houseboat community smack in the heart of the city—all legal and proper and authorized—was news to me.

  I parked next to the Mission Bay Golf Center—a driving range for Yuppies to while away their noon hours hitting shag balls and for Japanese businessmen to keep their swings well grooved while doing their deals on the road—then passed through a gate labeled Mission Creek Harbor and made my way down the narrow dock to the third boat from the end. As I stepped onto the deck of Frankel’s Folly, the entire structure sagged beneath my weight and a gentle splash of displaced water slapped the hull of the next boat down. I took two steps to the door and knocked, but not before I paused to admire the variety of storybook architecture that seemed an island of uncommon gaiety and good sense in the midst of a world filled with landlubbered nonsense, and to imagine the sort of people who would occupy a neighborhood that as far as I knew was unique to the city.

  I knocked twice, then twice more. A man watering his petunias two boats down looked at me without any sign of friendliness. A woman on the sun deck above him raised up, pressed a bikini top against her previously unwrapped breasts, then lay back on her padded chair after assessing my place in her universe. Strangers were either irritants or intruders, apparently; my mental picture darkened a couple of shades.

  I was still gazing up at the last-known address of the bikini when the door opened. The woman who opened it was sultry in countenance and demeanor, by design more than by accident. She wore cut-off Levi’s, a red tube top, glossy red lipstick, and not much else except a wall-eyed interest in my business. Her legs were long, her breasts full despite the constrictions of her top. Her hair was gathered behind her head with a blue ribbon except for the wisps that danced like charred confetti across the expanse of her well-tanned forehead. Her hands were dirty with what looked like potting soil and her face was smeared with a stripe of black above the bridge of its narrow nose. The grime only added to the sense of abandonment she projected, a bucolic eroticism I found to my liking.

  “Are you Ms. Frankel?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  In contrast to the neighbors down the dock, she seemed happy to have company. She tugged her top an inch higher on her torso, then looked at her hands to see if they were clean enough to extend my way. She decided they weren’t and made do with a smile instead of a handshake.

  “My name’s Tanner,” I said.

  “First or last?”

  “Last. The first is Marsh.”

  “For?”

  “What?”

  “Marsh. It must be short for something.”

  “Marshall. And it’s not my first name, actually; it’s my middle. The first is John. But I haven’t used it since third grade.”

  “What happened in third grade?”

  “The other John in the class beat the crap out of me one night after play practice.”

  “Why?” />
  “Because I was a Knight of the Round Table and he wasn’t.”

  She gave the contretemps some thought. “So show business changed your life, basically.”

  “That’s one way to look at it. Another is that I’ve been beaten up so many times since, it was sort of an apprenticeship.”

  She frowned. “Why are you assaulted so often?”

  “Because I get on people’s nerves.”

  “Are you going to get on mine?”

  “Probably.”

  The prospect seemed to excite her. “How about the play? Did you win the hand of the fair maiden?”

  I shook my head. “It’s probably just as well.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I seem to make a mess of things as far as fair maidens are concerned.”

  “Well, lucky for you there’s always a woman ready to give a man a second chance.”

  After issuing the interesting aphorism, she asked me what she could do for me. The smoky look in her eye made me remember Stuart’s slur about the tranquilizers, but on her they looked good.

  It’s like that sometimes—with some people you never strike a spark and conversation never moves beyond toil; with others, it makes a blaze right off. Three minutes after I laid eyes on her, I liked Louise Frankel a lot—enough so that I hoped my business wasn’t going to amount to anything worse than a nuisance.

  I asked if I could ask her some questions. She asked me what about.

  “Stuart Colbert.”

  The smile fell off her face the way a picture falls off a wall. “Do I have to?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not a policeman?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then what are you?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “What are you investigating?”

  “I can’t tell you. Other than to say that it involves your ex-husband.”

  The possibilities seemed sufficiently extensive to cheer her. “Has Millicent finally wised up? Has she hired you to get the goods on him, dissolution-wise?”

  I smiled a smile that let her guess be as true as she wanted it to be. “No comment.”

  “In that case, please come in. If what you’re looking for is dirt on Stuart Colbert, you’ve come to the filthiest place in town.” She looked at her grimy palms, then displayed them as proof of the point.

  She made room for me inside the superstructure of the houseboat, which in layout and design was more like a greenhouse than a cruiser. Three of its sides were glass—sliding doors that opened onto the narrow deck that surrounded the living area and to the larger patio out the back. A circular staircase climbed to what was presumably a sleeping area above, and a series of shoji screens divided the first floor into nooks for reading and eating and watching TV. There was a small bathroom in one corner and the kitchen crossed a part of the rear and opened onto the back deck as well. The breeze that moved without opposition through the room had its origins in fish and salt and fresh flowers and maybe the sweat off the naked breasts upwind.

  “You want to sit outside?” she asked as I looked around. “Or do we need to be clandestine?”

  “Clandestine, I think. Especially if you’re going to dish dirt.”

  “If it’s about Stuart, you’ll need a bulldozer.” She pointed toward a club chair next to a potted cactus that was as pert and prickly as its owner.

  Louise Frankel sat on a pillow across from me, tucked her legs beneath her, and regarded me as if I were a long-lost relative with news of a family fortune. “What exactly do you want to know?” she asked. It was increasingly obvious that regardless of what had happened in the years since the divorce, Stuart Colbert remained a fixation.

  “Let’s start with the old days. Were you one of the crowd that lived out in St. Francis Wood?”

  She laughed. “The Santa Ana Saints? No, thank God. I never laid eyes on Stuart till I was twenty-five. I grew up in Morgan Hill.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “At the store. I was a lingerie model. We were doing the fall showing and I was wearing a body suit that ripped down the front and all my goodies fell out. Stuart was very chivalrous—gave me his sport coat and escorted me off the runway as though things like that happened every day. It seemed cute at the time.” She made a face that suggested that the words cute and Stuart Colbert hadn’t been paired since.

  “Did he talk much about his youth? Particularly his teenage years?”

  “He talked about the old man, if that’s what you mean; him being such a tyrant and all. Stuart was working in shipping and receiving when he was ten years old, if you can believe it—the whole thing was Dickensian. And he complained about Cyn, of course. She rattled his cage and still does. They were the only kids I ever heard of who, when they played house, the little girl was the doctor, not the patient. Anyway, Stuart hates both of them with a passion; with good reason as far as I can tell. I used to feel sorry for him till I had more reason to be sorry for me.”

  “Why so?”

  “He wasn’t happy and he blamed me for it. Sure, I gave him some grief, but I was way down the list of contributors.”

  “His father was the worst?”

  “Big time.”

  “Why didn’t they get along?”

  “Stuart wasn’t what Rutherford wanted him to be.”

  “Which was?”

  She shrugged. “Anything except Stuart, as far as I could tell.”

  “Did you get the impression Stuart had done something wrong in those days?”

  “Like illegal? No. Something dumb, maybe. But we all did something dumb in those years, didn’t we? Or maybe you’re the exception that proves the rule.”

  “Dumb and I have always been intimate.”

  Her eyes made mischief and tossed some at me. “My IQ would double if I didn’t need a big hug first thing in the morning.”

  There was a place to go with that and it was probably a nice warm place once you got there, but I decided not to make the trip quite yet. “I was wondering if Stuart ever mentioned a woman named Clara Brennan.”

  “Sure he did.”

  “What did he say about her?”

  “He said she was the most—”

  She cut off the sentence, then stood and strolled about the room as though visiting for the first time and wondering if the vessel would stay afloat if the breeze picked up or an earthquake hit.

  When she stopped pacing, she put her hands on her hips and gave a speech. “It’s Monday morning. I’m not at work, I’m home repotting plants. I live in this weird little place, I’ve got a new blue Beemer parked in the lot, a diamond on my finger that would choke a horse, and a wardrobe Cindy Crawford would kill for. And I’ve got no visible means of support. How do you think I manage it?”

  “I give up.”

  “I got one hell of a divorce settlement, that’s how. Know why?”

  “Why?”

  “There were things about Stuart he didn’t want known. Not big things, necessarily, but things. We were heating up for the biggest cat fight the superior court’s ever seen and he knew if we went to trial it would all come out and then some. So he said if I’d promise to keep quiet, no matter who asked what, he’d pay me handsomely for my silence. When he named the figure he had in mind, I put my hand over my broken heart and swore to zip my lip.”

  “Stuart Colbert and Clara Brennan are part of what you’re keeping quiet about?”

  “Everything about the Colberts is part of it.”

  “And you’re being a good scout?”

  She lowered herself to the pillow and extended her legs in front of her. They seemed far more naked than when I’d boarded the boat. “Can’t you tell?”

  “And I thought you were going to dish dirt.”

  “Oh, that’s just my reaction whenever Stuart’s name comes up. Then I remember the deal and do my duty.”

  Although the words were blithe and even selfmocking, she seemed to take her pledge seriously, so I approached from a di
fferent direction. “What happened to your marriage?”

  She shrugged. “Lots of things. Mostly kids.”

  “I didn’t know you and Stuart had kids.”

  “We didn’t. Stuart wanted them. Insisted on them would be more accurate. When it didn’t happen even when we did the wild thing every time the sun set, he tried to get me to go through some rigmarole.”

  “In vitro fertilization?”

  She blinked. “Is that the flavor of the month, or something? What the hell do you know about it?”

  “Not much. Did you do it?”

  “Hell no. I told him it was God’s way or the highway. I guess he finally found a woman who would let some guy in a white coat stick a turkey baster up her twat. Me, I prefer something with a little more blood in it.”

  She tossed me a smoky look but I ignored it. “Did you ever have tests to see why you weren’t getting pregnant?”

  She started to say something, then stopped. “I can’t talk about this. I’m sorry. If you weren’t so damned rumpled, I wouldn’t have said that much. Maybe it’s a delayed reaction to my years in the fashion game, but lately I get all creamy for rumpled.”

  “Then I must be the man of your dreams.”

  After we shared facetious smiles, I looked at a container ship steaming south down the bay. I remembered the afternoon with Russell Jorgensen and was happy to be tied to dry land, even though I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  “You said your divorce was getting nasty before Stuart offered the settlement,” I reminded her.

  “Nasty isn’t the word for it—brutal is the word for it. Mostly because of the lawyers.”

  “Did you go through discovery—depositions, interrogatories, production of documents, and all that?”

  “That was the fun part. We were in court every day, it seemed like, fighting over every piece of property we ever owned and every dime we’d ever spent. He told the judge I abused the cat and sold his paintings; I claimed he was stealing my jewelry and killing the plants. It was like a kung fu film there for a while. Why?”

  “I’m wondering if you still have any of those documents lying around. I’m especially interested in your husband’s financial records.”