False Conception Read online

  “Did he hurt you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Badly?”

  “I look worse than I am. But I look awful,” I added with a laugh that wrecked my ribs. “Where are you?” I went on, keeping the ball in my court for as long as I could.

  “Where I am is no concern of yours.”

  “It’s a primary concern of mine.”

  “You may wish it was, but it’s not. And I’m in a phone booth, so there’s no use trying to trace this. The reason I’m calling is to ask you to stop looking for me.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can. And you have to.”

  “You made a deal, Ms. Brennan. You agreed to all kinds of penalties if you reneged on your promise to be a surrogate. It’ll be best if you come in from the cold and settle it. Otherwise you could face a kidnaping charge.”

  “Who am I supposed to have kidnaped?”

  “The Colberts’ unborn child.”

  Her laugh was borderline hysterical. Then she was silent so long I thought she’d dropped the phone.

  “When I signed that contract, I didn’t know who the father of the child was going to be,” she said finally.

  “But you do now.”

  “Yes.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes all kinds of difference.”

  “It would help if I knew why.”

  She paused to consider what to tell me. “Let’s just say certain people don’t want this child to be. If I come back where they can get at me, I could be risking the baby’s life. Both our lives.”

  “Then how do you want to handle it?”

  “I just want to vanish for a while.”

  “Like you did the last time you were pregnant.”

  She hesitated. “You know about that?”

  “I talked to your mother yesterday. And her buddy, Mrs. Colbert.”

  Her lungs made a sizzling grasp at air. “My God. What are you, some sort of incubus? First we have meaningless sex and now you try to suck secrets out of the past and parade them in front of the whole world. Why are you doing it?”

  “Because you made it necessary.”

  “How did I do that?”

  “By not living up to the terms of the contract.”

  Her scoff occupied the phone line like a clot. “You sound like every lawyer I’ve ever known. Which means you sound like slime with lips. How’s Opal?” she asked before I could rebut her accusation.

  “Okay, I think. It would probably help if she heard from you more often.”

  “Yes, well, it didn’t seem like a good idea while I’m on the lam, as it were; Rutherford probably has the phones tapped. Lucky for me, she understands why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

  “What are you doing, Ms. Brennan?”

  She laughed and cursed me.

  “Who’s Nathaniel?” I asked abruptly.

  Her voice solidified and became repellant. “No one. You leave him out of this. I mean it.”

  “He’s the child you had by Luke, isn’t he?”

  “That’s nothing to do with this.” She swore again. “I’m going to hang up. It’s been nice talking to you. You’re not a bad guy, actually, even though you’re as crooked as Lombard Street. Maybe when this is over we can meet for champagne cocktails and make wry observations about life and death and be thrillingly sophisticated about the whole thing. Take care of yourself, Mr. Tanner.”

  “I need to be clear about one thing,” I said quickly.

  “What?”

  “Are you still carrying the child?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am, a little.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought part of this might be to give you a chance to abort it.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I thought maybe Stuart did something that made you want to … but it doesn’t matter now, I guess. Are you getting medical attention? Healthy baby stuff, or whatever they call it?”

  “Of course. I’m just not using the Colberts’ in-house obstetrician.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it. What’s the name of the doctor who did the implant, by the way?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “For my files.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your files.”

  “Humor me, Ms. Brennan. You weren’t exactly aboveboard with me either, you know.”

  “Bradshaw,” she muttered. “He’s at the fertility clinic.”

  “So what now? Are you planning to materialize before the baby’s born?”

  “I’ll make the baby available to the Colberts two days after it’s delivered. That’s all that matters.”

  “I’m not sure Millicent will see it that way. It would help if I could give her a guarantee.”

  “The guarantee is that if I don’t show up in six months with a brandnew bambino, you’ll track me down and do whatever you do to people who break their word.”

  “If the Colberts decide they don’t want to wait that long, they’ll just hire someone else to hunt you down.”

  “Not if you persuade them to stop.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “Tell them just what I said—I’ll deliver the baby when the time comes. Until then, they need to leave me alone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if they don’t, there won’t be a baby.”

  I hoped the threat was idle. “That’s extortion. On top of which, I don’t think you’d do something like that.”

  “You don’t want to try me, Mr. Detective.”

  There was enough raw and eager menace in her voice to convince me to relent. “These people who don’t want this child to happen.”

  “What about them?”

  “Who are they?”

  “You’re the snoop. You figure it out.”

  “Are Cynthia Colbert and Russell Jorgensen trying to sabotage the pregnancy?”

  She laughed bitterly. “That’s the last thing in the world they want.”

  “Then what do they want?”

  “What they want is for history to repeat itself.”

  CHAPTER 27

  I spent a fitful night, wrestling with sheets, dueling with blankets, fending off waves of pain with the aid of prescription pharmaceuticals and a secret vice—my videotapes of Amos & Andy. The healing ritual was only partially successful, however, and I was still teetering like a gimpy octogenarian when I entered Colbert for Women at 10 A.M. to do Clara Brennan’s bidding for reasons I was too damaged to decipher.

  When I asked the operator to take me to eight, she mimicked a bulldog sucking a lemon. “I don’t have my list yet.”

  “I was here before, remember?”

  Now she looked like a ferret with the flu. “i’m not sure.”

  “Sure you’re sure.”

  “Even if I am, I can’t take anyone to eight unless they’re on the list.”

  “You don’t have the list.”

  “I know.”

  “So how do you know I’m not on it?”

  “But how do I know you are?”

  I got out a business card and stuck it under the inspection certificate. “There’s a list. My name’s on it. Now take me to your leader.”

  She looked at my scabs and bruises, she looked at the people who were clamoring to get into the elevator car but couldn’t because I was blocking the way, and she looked at my card, which was stuck to the wall like a leaf on a wet window.

  After her microprocessor had worked through all that, she shrugged. “It’s none of my business who comes and goes,” she said, nullifying her raison d’être. “People want privacy, they should stay home.”

  Stuart Colbert’s secretary was straight out of Mickey Spillane but she wasn’t only an ornament, she was an obstacle. “He can’t be disturbed,” she told me with her nose at half-mast.

  “If he knew I was her
e, he’d want to be.”

  “My instructions are, ‘no calls; no visitors.”

  “If he knew I was coming, he’d have made an exception.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “I’m a detective,” I tacked, assuming my most daunting mien, which was a pale imitation of the elevator woman’s.

  “What kind of detective?”

  “The kind that knows things other people don’t want them to know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how you got your job.”

  The heat in her cheeks told me my hunch had paid off.*

  “You can sound skeptical,” I instructed, “as though you’re sure he’s too busy to see a lowlife like me but you thought you’d better check. Or you can say I threatened to spit on the carpet. But pick one and get moving.”

  Two minutes later I was sitting across a barren desk from Stuart Colbert, who was as nervous as he was natty. “What happened to you?” he began.

  “I ran into a door.”

  “It must have been revolving.” He looked beyond me. “Is Russell coming?”

  “I thought we’d keep this between ourselves.”

  “Why?”

  “Because at last count Russell was serving at least four people named Colbert; it could get tricky if interests start to diverge. Which they did forty years ago.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you and your sister have been on a collision course since the day you were born and you both knew it by the time you were adolescents.”

  “What does that have to do with you?”

  “The latest battle in that war is being fought inside Greta Hammond’s body. You and your lawyer made me a part of it. I have a feeling you’re going to wish you hadn’t, but you did.”

  Colbert considered what I’d said. “I’ve been thinking about getting separate counsel, as a matter of fact. Everything always seems to go Cynthia’s way these days and I’m tired of it. I think Russell has chosen sides.”

  As though to remind himself of the stakes in the game, Stuart swiveled to look at the photographic array of storefronts that enlivened his office wall. “Why are you here? Have you found the Hammond woman?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you close? Do you have any leads? Surely you’ve come up with something.”

  “I’ve come up with lots of things.”

  “For instance?”

  “I’ve come up with the fact that Greta Hammond wasn’t kidnaped.”

  He swiveled my way and frowned. “How do you know?”

  “She told me so. I also came up with the fact that Greta Hammond isn’t Greta Hammond.”

  He did a good job of looking bewildered. “Then who is she?”

  “Greta Hammond is Clara Brennan and she grew up next door to you on Santa Ana Way. And you’ve known it all along.”

  He started to protest, or exonerate himself, but the look on my face announced that both were useless. To avoid my look, he put his elbows on the desk and lowered his head to his hands. “How did you find out?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, Clara is fine, but she seems to be running from everyone who ever lived in St. Francis Wood. Mostly the person she’s running from is you. I want to know why.”

  He closed his eyes. “She found out; she must have.”

  “Found out what?”

  “That I was the contractor—that I hired her to carry the child.”

  “You did more than hire her—you tracked her down and had Russell recruit her as your surrogate.”

  He lifted his head off his hands and looked at me. “You’re implying I did something wrong.”

  “I’m not saying you did something wrong, I’m saying you did something fishy. Which probably means it’s wrong as well—why else would she have absconded, if there wasn’t something illicit about all this?”

  “But there wasn’t. The only thing fishy was that I didn’t tell her who I was.”

  “Why did you want her for your surrogate? Why not use a stranger?”

  “I told you before—we heard horror stories about women reneging on the deal and Clara was someone we trusted.”

  “You trusted. Millicent didn’t know anything about Clara Brennan being the surrogate, did she?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “I thought it was better not to tell her.”

  “You trusted Clara Brennan to carry your child even though you hadn’t seen her for twenty years?”

  He nodded. “People don’t change. Not that much.”

  “Nonsense. Angelic little kids become insider traders overnight. I don’t think it had anything to do with trust; I think it had to do with what happened in the old days.”

  He dared a peek at me. “What old days?”

  “The St. Francis Wood days. I think the reason you used Clara Brennan is because you’re in love with her and have been since she was in high school and you were in college.”

  I waited for him to deny it but he just looked the way a schoolboy in love often looks—disconsolate and forlorn and powerless to do anything about it but mope.

  “I think another reason you used her is because of what happened the first time she got pregnant.”

  His eyes bulged and his neck swelled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Nathaniel.”

  “Who?”

  “Nathaniel.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  His confusion seemed genuine. “That’s rather odd, since I think he’s your son.”

  Stuart Colbert looked the way people look when they’ve just been shot. “I don’t have a son,” he said softly. “Except the one Clara is carrying.”

  “I’m talking about the baby Clara Brennan gave birth to twenty years ago.”

  He got up and walked to the window that looked down on the scruffy hubbub of Market Street. “I never saw that child. I never even knew for sure it existed.”

  “It existed. It still does.”

  His voice was dazed and abstracted. “Where is he? Have you seen him?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve only heard his name.”

  “From whom?”

  “Your mother.”

  He twirled toward me so awkwardly he almost fell over. “My mother knows where he is?”

  “Apparently.”

  “But why? How? Why didn’t she ever …” The quantity of conceivable questions made enumeration impossible: He didn’t know what he needed to know. “I want to see him,” he announced with sudden strength. “I want you to find him for me.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can do something. Say something. Be a father to him in some way. Will you do it? I’ll double your rate.”

  He’d already doubled my rate. “I’m not sure if I will or not,” I said, uneasy that the conversation was centered on the wrong child.

  “What reason would you have to refuse me?”

  I scrambled to assemble my thoughts. “I’m not sure it would be good for the boy or your wife, either one. Things are precarious enough in your family. The existence of another child, an adult by this time, one you’ve never met and your wife’s never heard of, might cause some sort of collapse.”

  I was thinking of Millicent, of course, but from his look, the infirmities I spoke of could apply equally to Stuart.

  “Collapse?” he echoed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. How could meeting his long-lost father make more problems for the boy? Nathaniel, is it? Nathaniel. It’s a nice name.” He looked eagerly toward the door, as though the boy had just walked into the room.

  He wasn’t thinking straight and I told him so. He was upset at my comment but didn’t say so. I watched him work with it for a minute, watched fact and fancy play with his face the way kids play with putty.

  “Why was having a child with Clara Brennan so important that you had to go through this subterfuge?” I asked when he seemed back within his senses.

  His voi
ce fell to a miserable hum. “I loved her. I still do. I love Millicent, too, of course, but I’ve never gotten over Clara. She was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. My father and sister were such monsters. I’d spend all day hearing them criticize and taunt and demean me, but all of a sudden it didn’t matter because Clara would be so loving and accepting, it was like she was my therapist or something. And then she did something like that.”

  “You mean get pregnant?”

  “I mean run away. It wasn’t her fault she got pregnant; it was mine.”

  “So you’re admitting you’re the child’s father.”

  He nodded. “I just didn’t know he existed. I thought she, you know, got rid of him.”

  “And you’re certain you’re the father.”

  He thrust out his chest. “Of course. Who else would it be?”

  “Luke Drummond, for one.”

  He shook his head. “Clara and I were going steady. She wouldn’t have been with Luke as well; she wasn’t that kind of girl.”

  I was tempted to check the calendar to see if we’d slipped back to the fifties. “Then why did she run off with him?”

  “Because of what happened to her father. Because after that she thought all the Colberts were murderers.”

  “Was one of them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did your father murder Ethan Brennan?”

  “Of course not. That was just a figure of speech.”

  “That’s the way Clara thought it happened.”

  “She was crazy. She loved her father very much; she lost her mind for a while.”

  “Is there any chance her father was Nathaniel’s father?”

  Clearly the idea had never occurred to him. As my suggestion took form in his mind, his eyes seemed short-circuited by its implications. “What do you think we are?” he exclaimed. “My God. It wasn’t Tobacco Road.”

  I didn’t bother to mention that incest had moved uptown a long time ago. “Did Clara run off because you refused to marry her?”

  He shook his head violently. “I wanted to marry her. I begged to marry her. And she was willing, I thought—we were talking about eloping to Las Vegas, then taking a honeymoon in Europe before she got too big to travel. The next thing I knew, she was gone.”

  “If you loved her so much, why didn’t you go after her?”