False Conception Read online

  “I did. Or started to. But my mother told me to stop.”

  “Why?”

  His expression was confused and uncertain, as though the subject had switched to biophysics. “She didn’t say, but she was adamant about it. She said if I found her and married her it would haunt me the rest of my life. She was very firm. For some reason, I believed her.” He shook his head. “Poor Clara. I think mostly she was ashamed and afraid.”

  “Of what? Of who?”

  “Ashamed of what we did. Afraid of what else he might do.”

  “Luke?”

  “Rutherford.”

  It wasn’t the name I expected and I blurted an idea that had been percolating all morning. “What did he do, rape her?”

  Stuart’s misery was rampant. His breaths were labored and convulsive; I was afraid he was going to collapse. “He didn’t need to rape her. I took care of that for him.”

  “You raped Clara Brennan?”

  “I might as well have,” he said miserably. “Daddy kept saying that if I was really going to marry her, then we needed to be sure she could produce an heir. He promised that if it happened, and the next heir to the Colbert line was established, the stores would be mine when he died. So I did what he asked. Or what I thought he was asking.”

  “Rutherford urged you to impregnate her. Is that it?”

  “Not exactly. At first he didn’t even want me to date her, but when he found out I was and saw that I truly loved her, he told me I’d made a wonderful choice, that she was an exceptional woman. All he asked was that I be discreet.”

  “But you weren’t, were you?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I wanted to show off, I admit it. Daddy got mad when he saw us in public. I was afraid he might make me stop seeing her.”

  “So you decided to curry favor by getting her pregnant.”

  He nodded. “Daddy was obsessed with the stores staying in the family after he passed on. He even made me put sperm in a sperm bank, just to make sure I would be potent when the time came. He wanted to test Clara as well, to make sure she was fertile; it was like we were royalty or something. Since I wanted to make love to Clara anyway, it was easy to believe that was what I should do.”

  He paused to reflect on his escapades. It didn’t seem to produce a pleasant memory.

  “I told myself I was doing the right thing,” he went on softly. “I try to do that, you know. I don’t get credit for it, but I try. It’s just that the right thing always comes out wrong, somehow. I wanted it to be the best time there ever was for her but it was just a quick fix in the back of a car, and a month later she left me. Now she’s left a second time. It took me twenty years to find her and now she’s gone again.”

  The final phrase was desolate. He shook his head as though it had stopped working in mid-thought. “I should have walked away from it all a long time ago. Let Cynthia have the stores; she can wallow in them with my blessing. What do I care what happens to the fucking business?” He swept his hand across the desk as if to dispatch his life to the shag in the carpet. But there was nothing on the desk to dispatch.

  “What happened to Luke Drummond?” I asked as he muttered something I couldn’t hear.

  “How should I know?”

  “Didn’t you track him down, too? In the process of finding Clara?”

  He shook his head again, then grasped it with his hands and squeezed, as though to pinch off its output.

  “How about his mother?” I asked.

  He frowned. “Fern? What about her?”

  “Why are you sending her three thousand dollars a month? Isn’t it because she’s raising your child?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know about the child, I told you.”

  “Then why the payments?”

  “Because Rutherford told me to make them.”

  “You don’t know why?”

  “She used to work for him. I figured it was some sort of pension.”

  “Then why didn’t he pay it himself?”

  “Father’s always been weird about money. He schemes and plans for months to cheat the IRS out of a nickel. I gave up trying to understand him a long time ago.”

  “Then why did you stop making the payments?”

  He frowned. “How did you know about that?”

  “Why?” I repeated. “Because you thought Clara had run off with Luke again? Because you figured Luke was living off his mother’s stipend and that cutting it off was the only way you could hurt him?”

  He sighed and nodded and sat back at his desk.

  “She didn’t run off with Luke, I know that much. So you need to start paying Mrs. Drummond again.”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure Luke doesn’t do something that will interfere with the new baby.”

  “But why would he—” He cut himself off, then slumped in his chair. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m calling the whole thing off. I’m not looking for Clara Brennan and neither are you. I’ll call Russell and tell him to pay your fees to date but, from now on, you’re off the case.”

  “It’s not that simple, Mr. Colbert.”

  “You say she hasn’t been kidnaped, which means she wants to be gone. So be it. I tried to do right and I fucked up. I always fuck up. So I’m going to take poor Millicent and move to Maui and live on the beach and forget all about retail clothing. Cynthia can have it all; I hope she drowns in it.”

  Steeled by fresh resolve, he got to his feet and marched to the door and waited for me to leave.

  I held my ground. “What about the child?”

  “Let Clara keep it.”

  “What if she doesn’t want it?”

  “That’s her problem.”

  “That’s not what the contract says. Under the contract, when she has a child, it’s yours. Maybe you’d better be a man and do your duty.”

  “I can’t,” he said miserably.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s tainted like the other one.”

  “What do you mean, ‘tainted?’”

  He shook his head. “I’m not talking about it anymore.”

  “What about Millicent?” I went on cruelly. “She’s going to be devastated if this pregnancy doesn’t work out.”

  “We’ve got other embryos on ice. We’ll find another surrogate and do it again.”

  “You weren’t willing to do that last week.”

  “It’s different now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t give a damn, that’s why.”

  “About the stores?”

  “About anything.”

  He was as suicidal as anyone I’d ever seen. “How about the other person involved in this?”

  “What other person?”

  “None of this makes sense if it was Millicent’s egg that got fertilized. The egg had to be Clara’s. The question is, why?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When you said the child was tainted, you meant it was just like the first time, didn’t you? You meant that both times Clara Brennan got pregnant, it wasn’t what you wanted to happen, it was what he wanted.”

  Stuart Colbert walked to the door and waited for me. “You’re not to look for any more answers,” he said heavily, manslaughter marbling his voice. “Do you understand? I order you to cease and desist.”

  I shook my head. “Six months from now, Clara Brennan is going to march in here and present you with a baby, precisely as the contract calls for. I don’t care who or what was behind the surrogacy idea in the first place, but you’re the responsible party and I suggest you be here to accept it. There’s already one child out there you haven’t been a father to; it’s time for you to do what’s right. If not for your sake, for your wife’s.”

  I thought he was going to hit me. Instead, he went to the desk and pushed a button to summon security. I let him throw me out, not with mus
cle, but with misery.

  When I got to the door, I turned back. “One more thing. Did your wife tell your mother about the surrogate arrangement early on? That the two of you were going to try to have a child in that way?”

  Stuart Colbert bowed his head but I wasn’t sure he was answering my question.

  CHAPTER 28

  Everything should have been fine—I’d found Greta Hammond, or rather she had found me; the baby was alive and well despite my fears to the contrary; and Greta had declared herself willing and able to perform in accordance with the surrogacy contract: the child would be delivered in six months. The problem was that in the meantime, the world had turned upside down—Stuart Colbert didn’t want the child and I was forbidden to find out why he’d had a change of heart. Which put Stuart in breach, and me in a quandary.

  All I knew was that I couldn’t leave it there. I’d decided that my principal in the case was Millicent Colbert, not her husband, and until she closed me down, I was going to see it through. Which meant among other things that I was going to have to find out why Rutherford Colbert had been so insistent that his son father a child by the last woman in the world he should have chosen as his partner. But before I did that, I had to protect my left flank.

  On my way back to the office, I ducked into the St. Francis Hotel and used a pay phone to call Andy Potter. Andy is a society lawyer who uses me from time to time when his stable of blue bloods stumbles over a crack in the fast lane. We exchanged pleasantries, then made the ritual vow to do lunch. As soon as I could, I announced the subject for discussion. “Russell Jorgensen.”

  Andy paused to weigh the variables. “What about him?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” I said.

  “I thought you worked for him from time to time.”

  “I do.”

  “So?”

  “So what’s the lowdown?”

  Andy paused again. The closer you get to truth, the more lawyers weigh variables. “I assume it’s important,” he evaded.

  “Not really; I’m just killing time till the lottery numbers are posted.”

  “Sorry, Marsh. It’s just that I don’t like gossip. Especially about people on intimate terms with a courtroom.” Another pause. “I assume my name won’t surface in any way, shape, or form in whatever this is.”

  “No chance.”

  “I like Russell,” he said after another pause.

  “So do I.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “I don’t think so. But I’ll know more after you talk to me.”

  “Russell’s had a tough time, what with his kids, and his wife dying and all.”

  “I know.”

  “So what I’m saying is, there were reasons he did what he did.”

  There always are, even when what they do is murder. “What exactly did he do?”

  When it came, it came quickly. “You know he’s a nut about sailing.”

  My stomach did a responsive flip.

  “Well, a few years back, some local swells were trying to mount syndicates to make a run for the America’s Cup down in San Diego. The most prominent one was the Blackaller group, but one of the others was going to be skippered by a guy named Liggett. Well, this Liggett was a big talker and a good sailor but when he went trolling for money he didn’t come up with enough to fund even one boat. So he put a move on Russell. And because Russell’s wife had just gone through the cancer dance and he and his kids were a mess as a result, Russell was pretty vulnerable to anyone peddling a diversion and a good time.”

  “How much was he in for?” I asked.

  “The name of the boat was going to be American Enterprise. Russell Jorgensen contributed a million five to put it in the water.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And then some. It was a pipe dream, of course. Hobnobbing with the international yachting crowd; hoping for a big return out of merchandise and licensing spin-offs if they were the winning boat; Russell learning enough and making enough contacts to get a shot at skippering a boat himself in the next cup series. It was Walter Mitty meets Alice in Wonderland.”

  “What happened?”

  “About what you’d expect. The boat had some design flaws, mostly with the keel as I remember—damn thing wouldn’t go in a straight line. And the financing started to unravel almost immediately—some grass farmer up in Willits had second thoughts about donating half his net worth to an enterprise that took place on saltwater instead of dry land. Liggett didn’t even make it into the first round of qualifying—the whole thing went belly-up.”

  “Any return on investment?”

  “The loss was one hundred cents on the dollar. And Russell’s net worth suddenly turned negative.”

  “That seems dumb enough all by itself,” I said. “Hard to believe there was another one.”

  Andy’s laugh was curt and maybe a tad contemptuous. “Russell was like a guy at the craps table—doubled his bets to recoup his losses.”

  I sighed. “I don’t really want to know, but what did he bet, exactly?”

  “Remember back when the drought was at its peak and the reservoirs were at 10 percent of capacity and the whole Bay Area was on water rationing?”

  “Sure. I took a bath in a thimble for a while.”

  “Right. Well, along came some guy with a new desalinization process—making seawater salt-free. The guy claimed he’d sold five units to the Saudis and that Montecito had paid millions for a process not nearly as good as his. All he needed was backing to sell his system to the coastal communities and the start-up investors would be making millions in two years’ time.”

  “What happened?”

  “Two things. Russell sighed on for a million, and the next year it started to rain. Interest in desalinization pretty much evaporated and the general partner took off with all the money. Turned out the Saudis bought some desalinization plants all right, but not anything this guy was connected with.”

  “The bottom line seems to be that Russell is in big trouble.”

  “On top of losing the money, he got sued for fraud by the investors. Seems Russell went around touting this saltwater thing as a bonanza and the people who believed him are pissed.”

  “People who believe in bonanzas don’t have the right to be pissed.”

  “This is America. We’ve got a God-given right to fuck up and blame someone else for it.”

  I laughed at Andy’s uncustomary cynicism. “So what happened to the lawsuits?”

  “Still pending.”

  “So Russell needs cash.”

  “Cash. Checks. Gold. Whatever.”

  I raised a new subject. “What about him and Cynthia Colbert?”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they an item?”

  There came that pause again. “It’s difficult to see how that could be relevant to anything.”

  “Come on, Andy. I can get it somewhere else.”

  “Okay, okay. It’s no big deal anyway. He sees her on the Q.T., so the father and brother won’t get bent out of shape by the situation. I know the guy who lends them his condo—they make quite a mess, he says; makes them pay for maid service. I hope you don’t want to know where it is, because I’m not going to tell you.”

  It took fifteen minutes to walk from the St. Francis down Post Street and over to Embarcadero Four. Russell wasn’t happy to see me but I wasn’t happy to be seeing him, either.

  The frown on his face looked as if it had been there since breakfast. “What’s happening? Stuart just called—he said he’d fired you from the surrogate case.”

  “He tried.”

  “You shouldn’t have seen him without me. I could have kept it from happening.”

  “You could have kept it from happening by telling the truth.”

  His frown darkened to the color of aged beef. “About what?”

  “You and Cynthia, among other things.”

  “What about her? She’s a client.”

  “She’s a lot more than a clien
t and you know it. If I were you, I’d get out of this thing while you’ve still got a shot at disputing a conflict of interest.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “You’ve got a personal interest contrary to the surrogate thing and you should have disclosed it at the outset, and then bowed out and let someone else hold Stuart’s hand for nine months.”

  Russell’s chest swelled like the jib on his boat. “I have no conflict in this at all. Even if my interest in Cynthia does have a personal dimension, that doesn’t mean I’m adverse to Stuart.”

  “Cynthia and Stuart have always been adverse. As soon as they got their own stores, it was time for you to choose sides.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean one or the other was going to be heir to a fortune. You’ve taken quite a financial bath in recent years, Russell—someone could make an argument that you’re trying to make certain Cynthia ends up with all the marbles so you could get well at the altar.”

  The pain in his face was concentrated in the eyes and mouth and was framed by the scarlet of outrage. “I’m an honorable man. The idea that I’m trying to usurp Cyn’s assets is insulting.”

  “Not as insulting as your behavior in this case.”

  “Now just a minute, I—”

  “Come on, Russell. You even had her hit her mother up for money to lend you. Just tell me one thing. Did you tell Cynthia the name of the surrogate?”

  When he didn’t say anything, I had my answer.

  “Did you also tell her that Stuart had selected the surrogate himself?”

  “I… may have. But only because it was unusual behavior and I wondered if Cynthia had ever heard of the Hammond woman, which she hadn’t. Why is any of this important?”

  “I’m not interested in your retirement plan or your love life, I’m just trying to make sure that the surrogate arrangement isn’t one of the chips in a game you’re playing.”

  “What game? Name a single breach of fiduciary duty I’ve committed. Name a single thing I’ve done to obstruct the surrogacy.”

  I met his eye. “I just did. When Cynthia learned the name of the surrogate, she looked her up to try to buy her off. When she saw who it was, she informed the woman that Stuart Colbert was the contracting party. For some reason, that made the woman head for the hills.” This time I was the one who issued the warning. “I’m getting close to learning why, Russell. Closer than you imagine.”