False Conception Read online

  Stuart had something other than color on his mind. “Where’s Clara?” he demanded of me.

  “She’s not coming.”

  He leaped to his feet and made fists. “I suspected as much. This is nothing but a charade. She’s an extortionist. She never intended to—”

  Millicent stood up and put her hand over her husband’s mouth. Stuart reacted as if his spine had been severed. I gave his wife a silent ovation.

  “We have the baby,” I said quickly, pointing to the basket at Linda Webber’s feet. “And we have documentation.” I recited the details except for the videotape. “There’s further proof if necessary.”

  Stuart and Russell exchanged glances. “It won’t be necessary,” Millicent Colbert said before either of them could voice objection.

  Russell only shrugged. Stuart regarded his wife as though she had just floated down from Venus.

  I looked at Linda Webber. “I guess you can hand it over.”

  She shook her head. “Not till he’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Colbert. Greta said to be sure Rutherford Colbert was here when I made delivery.”

  I looked at Russell. He scowled and shrugged and went into the hall and disappeared. Two elongated minutes later, he returned, followed by a man piloting a motorized chair and trailed by a private nurse.

  The nurse was so lovely it seemed unlikely she possessed any practical skill at all. The man was her cadaverous opposite, withered and wizened and bleached, the hairless Hmbs extending from his blue pajamas as thin and tenuous as plastic straws. His cheeks were sunken, as though gouged out of his face by a chisel; the bones above them were as sharp as shelves. His hair was white and sparse, his eyes as blue and piercing as if they’d been repainted that morning. His bare feet occupied a pair of slippers incongruously, the way fish would occupy a nest.

  A yellow canister was strapped to the back of his chair. A clear plastic tube led from its nozzle up the back of his head where it divided, the twin tendrils circling his skull and disappearing into his nostrils, feeding a continuous diet of oxygen to his ravaged lungs. As I inhaled a fresh batch of air myself, I could smell the cigars and cigarettes that had put him where he was.

  Except for myself and Linda Webber, his audience was rapt and reverent. When he spoke, the words seemed to be formed not by tongue and tooth but by bellows and sponges and leaky balloons. “Where is she?” he wheezed.

  “Clara’s not here, Mr. Colbert,” Russell Jorgensen said quickly. “But the child is. That’s all that matters, when you get down to it.”

  Rutherford’s eyes darted on and off each one of us, leaving as quickly as they came, as though our vitality offended him. His glance lingered only when it landed last on Linda Webber and her basket.

  “She has documentation,” Russell added, and extended his hand for Linda to hand it over.

  She dug a paper from her purse and handed it to me. “The money first,” she said.

  Russell got the check and handed it to me in turn. I exchanged it for the birth certificate, then passed the check to Linda. She read it and looked at Russell. After he explained about the postdating and the medical exam, she frowned and shrugged. “Whatever.”

  When Linda Webber made no move to surrender the baby, I grasped the basket and carried it toward Millicent. She reached to receive it with both hands, as eagerly as she would embrace absolution.

  “Him,” Linda Webber said at my back.

  I turned to see a finger pointed at Rutherford Colbert’s pigeon breast. “You’re supposed to give it to him,” she elaborated.

  Millicent started to say something but Stuart hushed her audibly. I took the basket to Rutherford and placed it in his bony lap. The nurse hovered close enough to intervene if he declined or dropped it, either of which seemed likely. When I turned back to Linda Webber, she was gone.

  I looked at Stuart and Millicent and then at Russell Jorgensen. “I guess that’s it,” I said.

  Russell nodded absently, his eyes roaming the birth certificate. “I guess so.”

  “It’s been nice knowing you,” I said to Stuart and Millicent, mostly to Millicent.

  “Thank you very much for your time and trouble, Mr. Tanner,” Millicent said warmly. “I have to admit I was worried there for a while.”

  I smiled. “Me, too.”

  “Oh, I can’t just sit here,” she blurted, and hurried to the wheelchair and gazed down into the tidy basket that perched on her father-in-law’s lap like a new fedora. “Can I hold you?” she asked the baby. “I know he’s your granddaddy, but I’m your mom.”

  She reached in the basket and extracted its fuzzy contents and cradled it in her arms the way women know to do from birth, then began to bill and coo. The nurse and I were the only others who were smiling.

  Suddenly Millicent sniffed and giggled. “You need changing, don’t you, little man? Yes, you do. Well, I have some diapers right here.” She went to her bag and fished for a Pamper.

  “Let me do it,” Russell said.

  “What?” said Millicent and I in unison.

  “Let me change it.”

  Russell went to her side and reached for the baby. “But …” Millicent sputtered.

  “I’ve got two kids; I’ve changed more diapers than you have freckles. Here.”

  He grabbed the diaper from her hand, then took the baby from its mystified mother and cradled it with one hand and spread its blanket on the floor with the other. With an easy flourish he laid the baby on its back in the middle of the precise pink square that was bordered by a satin ribbon. He did seem practiced in the procedure and a moment later he was tugging a dirty diaper free from the baby’s upraised bottom and handing it to Millicent to dispose of.

  “Just as I thought,” he said.

  I frowned; Stuart Colbert looked down at the baby; Millicent peered over Russell’s shoulder. Rutherford’s chair rolled forward, to the accompaniment of his labored gasps and the rustle of the nurse’s skirt as she hurried to follow his progress.

  “God fucking damn,” Stuart said, then looked fearfully at his ailing father. “Someone messed up, Daddy.”

  Millicent searched out her husband, then bent this way and that to see what they were talking about, for fear there were suddenly grounds for horror. “What’s wrong? Stuart? Russell? What’s wrong with my baby?” Millicent was near hysteria and I was pretty jarred myself.

  Stuart swore again. “It’s a girl. That’s what’s wrong. It’s a fucking female.”

  “Bitch.”

  Rutherford Colbert coughed twice, then swore again, then spun his chair around and rolled out of the room in a hurry, the nurse a supernumerary in his wake.

  I looked at the baby, naked and squirming and soiled, then looked at its contractual mother. She was standing motionless in the center of the room, stunned and terrified, holding a dirty diaper by the tips of two fingers without even realizing she was doing so. The image hit me like a club. I backed out of the room and ran to my car and drove as fast as I could to the sea, empty of all but panic.

  I walked Ocean Beach for over an hour, then drove to Golden Gate Park and wandered its grounds for an hour more. My thoughts careening from the invasion of likelihoods, my needs and desires at civil war, I was confronted with questions I had dodged for years. Without warning, I was forced to act and not react, required to define myself and my future in the space of the next few hours. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I went to the car and placed a call.

  After three secretaries and two nurses had filtered out my purposes, he came on the line.

  “Dr. Bradshaw?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Tanner. I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Colbert.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Rutherford Colbert, that is.”

  He audibly relaxed. “How may I help you, Mr. Tanner? And please convey my appreciation once again to Mr. Colbert for his most recent gift to the clinic. As usual, we do appreciate it. Truly.”

 
I told him I’d be happy to convey the message. “I’m calling about the procedure you performed some nine months ago. I’m sure you know to what I’m referring—the insemination of the Hammond woman.”

  “Of course. What about it?”

  “The child has been born and is about to be delivered to the intended parents. Mr. Colbert believes it likely that questions may arise as to its genetic origins. He wants me to confirm that the confidentiality in place originally will remain in full force and effect.”

  “Of course. But I must warn you as I did the last time, that the barrier may not hold up in the face of a court order.”

  “There’s a physician/patient privilege in this state, is there not?”

  “Indeed there is. But who is the patient in this instance, Mr. Tanner? If you ponder that question for a moment, I believe you will see the difficulty.”

  I saw more difficulties than he could possibly imagine. “I want also to confirm that Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Colbert’s embryos are still being preserved intact.”

  “Yes, they are. Three of them, as ordered.”

  I thanked the doctor for his time. Still dazed by developments, unclear of my desires and suspicious of my motives, I drove back to Santa Ana Way and parked the car in the middle of the block and stewed for yet another hour as darkness made its daily claim on the city.

  Kids came home from school, maids trudged to the bus stop, mothers whizzed by on their way to the market, all without regard for me. I got out of the car twice, then got back in. I started the engine, then turned it off. I pounded the steering wheel, I slumped in the seat and closed my eyes and tried to ward off the world, I swore and prayed and begged and bargained with entities toward which I was generally agnostic. Head throbbing, heart pounding, alternately awash in sweat and sentimentality, I picked up the car phone and dialed once again.

  “Ms. Webber? This is Marsh Tanner. I need to see her.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I want to see Greta. Face to face; just the two of us. Some time within the next week. If she doesn’t agree, I’m going to come looking for her. And she’s not going to be happy when I find her.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t care what she wants.”

  My voice must have mirrored my state of mind. “I’ll see what I can do,” she relented.

  I tossed the phone on the seat and got out of the car and walked to the Colbert house and pressed the bell. As I waited for a response to my summons, I remembered that the last man who had rung that bell to challenge Rutherford Colbert about the subjects I was about to vent myself had been gunned down before he could do so.

  CHAPTER 33

  The nurse who had been on duty some four hours earlier opened the door to confront me. She was still lovely and her uniform was still immaculate, but both her allure and her coiffeur had wilted in the interim. I was the worse for wear myself.

  The arch to her brow and the purse to her lips suggested she brought her employer as much competence as comeliness, so I marshaled my best moves. I told her my name and reminded her that I had been there earlier, then asked to see Mr. Colbert. Without so much as a blink, she told me he was indisposed.

  “I think he’d better dispose himself.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sure you have a compelling reason to visit, Mr. Tanner, but the events of the day have been taxing, as I’m sure you can appreciate. An audience is out of the question.”

  “He’s going to be taxed a lot more than he is now if he doesn’t see me. And stop pretending he’s the pope—he’s just a rag salesman who got lucky.”

  She sniffed and started to close the door—that had been happening a lot lately.

  “I don’t know what that business with the infant was about this afternoon,” she said officiously, “and I don’t want to know. But the experience put Mr. Colbert temporarily in extremis and he needs time to regain his equilibrium.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Deborah.”

  “Is Mr. Colbert on medication, Deborah?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Can he understand what’s said to him? Can he process information?”

  “Certainly he can. Why?”

  “I’ve got more medicine to administer to him and he might as well take it now. That way when he does regain his equilibrium, he can keep it for a while.”

  She crossed her arms beneath her sprightly breasts. “Even if it was medically appropriate, which it isn’t, I’m not at all sure he would be willing to see you.” There was enough hauteur in her voice to let me press her without compunction.

  “Try him. Tell him I’m here to talk about his grandchild. On second thought, make that plural. Tell him I’m here about his grandchildren.”

  She checked the symptoms of my determination—wild eyes, bared teeth, bulging jaw—and compared them with her patient’s vigor. “I’ll speak with him,” she concluded. “Please come in.”

  She admitted me to the foyer, directed me toward an antique church pew along one wall, then went down the hall to consult her superior. While I waited, I noticed details I hadn’t appreciated the first time I’d been there.

  The house was even more opulent than I’d sensed that afternoon, but it was a faded and outmoded grandeur, not an active one, as though the furnishings and appointments had been assembled during a madcap weekend some fifty years before and neglected ever since. But the tapestries and landscapes and stained glass that occupied eye level, the burly chandelier overhead and the thick and burnished balusters of the sweeping staircase, gave the house an air of gravity that suggested history and consequence. The exquisite detailing of the coat rack and commode and church pew that shared the foyer, as well as the wainscoting that enclosed them, emitted an air of eminence that had clearly been the owner’s intent. His current inclinations were far less laudable.

  Deborah came to fetch me five minutes later. “I’m sorry for the delay—he wanted to get dressed before he received you.”

  “Understandable for someone who made his millions in the fashion business.”

  She blinked. “Of course. I never thought of it that way.” She was glad to have an uncertainty crossed off her list. “Please come this way.”

  She led me toward a room in the center of the house that had once served as a den and now seemed more like a mausoleum. The walls were lined with books and maps, the floors were polished broadgauge fir, the furnishings were out of Washington Irving and Edith Wharton. It was perfect down to the Tiffany lamps and brass spittoon, which meant it was as artificial as the breathing mechanism being employed by the man seated in his wheelchair behind the leather and gilt of a Queen Anne desk, wearing a pinstripe suit and a gaudy silk tie and looking as though he wanted to dispatch me the way he had dispatched his colleague some twenty years before.

  “You’re nothing,” he said as I sat in an opposing wing chair. “I hired and fired a dozen guys like you in my day.” His words remained a soggy rasp that transported us back in time to a scene out of Chandler or James M. Cain. I thought of General Sternwood and had to suppress a smile, then took a deep breath and launched my opening statement.

  “I assume you know that I got involved in Colbert business when Russell Jorgensen hired me to evaluate a woman named Greta Hammond, who had agreed to serve as a surrogate mother for your son and his wife.”

  He didn’t move or speak or breathe. I wondered if the oxygen tank made it unnecessary to do any of those things at normal intervals.

  “So?” he grunted in a wooly monotone.

  “Your daughter told me that you know everything that happens out here, so I also assume you know that Greta Hammond was really Clara Brennan and that Stuart didn’t choose her as his surrogate at random; he hunted her up and picked her on purpose.”

  “So?” he whistled again.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I know what you know, Mr. Colbert, but you don’t know what I know. So that’s what I’ve come
to tell you.”

  “Why would I care?”

  “Because I know enough to cause trouble. I know enough to wreck your family and your business, both.”

  “How?”

  “By making your private life public.”

  What he saw in my face made him decide not to quibble. “What will stop you?”

  “Your promise to leave the status quo. I know you were expecting the baby to be a boy and I know you’re upset that it wasn’t. I don’t know how that happened or why, and neither do you, but I’m telling you to accept the situation as it is and let Stuart and Millicent raise the girl the way they planned. Whether she succeeds to a part of your empire isn’t important—it’s your estate and you can do what you want with it. What matters is that she has a normal happy life. I need you to promise not to fuck it up.”

  His hands made lumpy fists on the arms of his chair and his lungs sucked for more air than the plastic tubes had been engineered to transmit. “Who are you to tell me how to treat my family?”

  The utterance of an entire sentence seemed to expend the energy of a mile run. He slumped in his chair, eyes closed, chest heaving, gasping like a fighter between rounds. Moving briskly and impassively, the nurse took his pulse at his neck.

  When his eyes were open I answered his question. “I’m someone who’s been hip-deep in your family history for nine months. I’ve learned things I didn’t want to learn and I’ve been obstructed to the point of assault by people who didn’t want me to do my job.” I smiled in a way that would aggravate him. “When that happens, I get real intent on results, Mr. Colbert; I get eager to earn a gold star. I was hired to make sure this surrogate thing works out and I’m going to do just that. Part of the way I’m going to do it is to convince you to quit trying to rearrange reality to suit your private purposes.”

  “Nuts,” he said, but he was still searching for air, not passively accepting it, and his pigmentless flesh had colored to the pink of his gums.

  “Now I’m going to tell you what’s going to become public knowledge if you don’t do as I say.” I looked at the nurse, then back at Colbert. “You may want her to leave the room for this part.”