False Conception Read online

  He looked at me for several seconds, then lifted his hand off the chair and waved it once. After a hostile glance at me, Deborah left the room without a word. Even on the edge of pulmonary crisis, Rutherford was lord of the manor.

  “Here’s what I know,” I said. “And what I know I take to the cops and the business press and the financial community if you don’t stop messing up your offsprings’ lives.”

  He was too intent on breathing to obstruct me, so I started my trip through his past. “Forty years ago, your wife had an affair with your right-hand man, Ethan Brennan. Stuart was the product of that affair, which makes Stuart and Clara Brennan half-siblings. You didn’t find out for almost twenty years, not until Fern Drummond told you about it in order to get you to make Stuart stop courting Clara so her son could have a chance at romancing Clara himself.”

  His eyes closed and his lungs made noises. I couldn’t interpret their significance but it didn’t look like he needed the nurse.

  “When you found out your wife had been unfaithful, one of the methods of retribution you concocted, other than to frame Ethan Brennan for embezzlement, was to do the opposite of what Fern wanted—far from urging him to break it off, you encouraged Stuart to court Clara ardently, which, like the dutiful son he was, he did. You told Stuart to keep the relationship secret, because you knew Ethan Brennan would stop it if he knew, but kids get reckless when they’re in love, and Brennan got wind of the romance. When he found out you were the instigator of the relationship, he came gunning for you, whereupon you shot him down.”

  I looked for a reaction. What I saw was a mind struggling for memory and laboring at denial and revision.

  “I think Luke learned what Brennan planned to do and he warned his mother and she warned you. Fern Drummond knew you could have defused the situation if you’d wanted to, but you didn’t; you preferred to see Ethan Brennan die. Fern saw you shoot him in cold blood and you’ve been paying her hush money ever since.”

  His poisonous glare transmitted far more conceit than contrition. “That last part I probably can’t prove,” I admitted. “Not unless Fern talks, which she won’t as long as you keep buying her off, which I don’t have a problem with provided you follow instructions,”

  Colbert knew that if he got too excited it could kill him; I felt the heat off his bottled rage. I laughed and made it worse for him. “I gave you more credit than you deserved, actually. I assumed the money for Fern was to support Nathaniel, since you were responsible for the genetic collision that caused his problems. But you didn’t give a damn about Nathaniel once he’d served his purpose, which was to inject a hot shot of guilt and grief into the veins of the Brennan family. You were just trying to save yourself.”

  This time the reaction was more vigorous—a hiss of borrowed breath and a squint to his eye that forecast vengeance.

  “The one thing I couldn’t figure,” I continued nonetheless, “was that if Stuart and Clara produced a retarded child the first time, why would you want them to risk it again? Ethan Brennan is dead, your wife and his wife live like Carmelites, so you haven’t had to deal with them in decades, and you made Stuart’s life as miserable as you could after you learned who had sired him. So why repeat the pass at incest?”

  His smile told me I wasn’t going to get an answer. Mine told him I didn’t need one.

  “There are at least two answers to that,” I said. “One is that Nathaniel’s not part of your gene pool after all. Everyone thinks Stuart is Nathaniel’s father, even Clara, because he’d been trying so hard to impregnate her, but my bet is that Stuart is sterile. I don’t think he knows it, but even if he does, I doubt that he told you because that would be just one more way he didn’t measure up. The fertility people must know—they must have found out when Stuart went down to donate sperm twenty years ago. They even faked a vasectomy to help you cover it up when Stuart began to suspect he had a problem. That was the germ of your plan, the knowledge that your son couldn’t have children. The rest of it was hatched when you came down with emphysema and were face to face with your own mortality.”

  I looked for an admission or an objection but didn’t get either. “If Luke Drummond is Nathaniel’s father,” I went on, “then Nathaniel isn’t the product of incest, like everyone thought, but of some genetic tic in the Drummond or Brennan lines. It can be proved one way or another if it has to be, but at this point the only one who gives a damn is Luke—he still thinks he’s going to inherit the Colbert stores as some sort of guardian for Nathaniel.”

  I paused to make sure he was with me. “So much for grandchild number one, who probably isn’t your grandchild after all. Now for grandchild number two: the baby in the basket. Except she isn’t your grandchild, either.”

  Colbert paused to adjust his tubes but the additional air didn’t cheer him. When he was finished tinkering, I spoke with an arrogance that matched his own. “What you need to understand is that I know the baby in that basket wasn’t your grandchild, Mr. Colbert; I know that baby is your child.”

  I waited for him to absorb my deduction. When he had, he mumbled something guttural and disparaging, then reached in a drawer in his desk and pulled out a gun.

  It was an Army-issue .45, a war souvenir no doubt, as lethal-looking as anything Colt ever made. Despite his frailty, Rutherford jacked a round into the chamber as easily as I can comb my hair, then leveled the weapon at my chest. I was afraid and he knew it, but the tremor in his hand told me he was afraid as well.

  “What’s that going to solve?” I said as blithely as I could manage. “How many people do you think you can shoot in cold blood and get away with it? It’s not like the old days, Mr. Colbert. Titans of commerce don’t get cut any slack by the cops: titans of commerce get spread all over ‘Hard Copy’ and The National Enquirer.”

  I gave him time to test my prediction. “They don’t have pretty blond nurses in San Quentin, Mr. Colbert. They’ve got burly black orderlies who’ll wheel you into a corner and ignore you the rest of the day unless you fall out of your chair and maybe even then. Is that the way you want it to end? If it is, pull the trigger. Because it would be what you deserve.”

  After two heaving breaths, he lowered the gun and put it where it came from. When his hand emerged from the drawer, it crawled like a tortoise to the edge of the desk and pressed a button. I hurried to finish before Deborah came back and threw me out.

  “It wasn’t Stuart’s sperm in that petri dish; it was yours. In fact, there wasn’t a dish at all. When you got sick you decided the only way to ensure that your name and your business would live forever was to leave your empire to a person who combined the genes that had made it successful in the first place—yours and Ethan Brennan’s. Brennan wasn’t around but his daughter was, so you arranged the surrogate charade to concoct the perfect heir. You’ve put enough money into the fertility clinic over the years to persuade your buddy Bradshaw to abandon his ethics—he performed an artificial insemination instead of the in vitro fertilization Stuart and Millicent planned. Stuart thinks the sperm was his, and Millicent thinks it was her egg, and both of them are wrong: all three of their little embryos are still on ice.” I looked into his jaundiced eye. “But if you do the right thing, they won’t be the wiser. And neither will the cops.”

  Nurse Deborah came in and stood behind her charge, ready to do battle with his lungs or with me, whichever seemed more hazardous. But Rutherford didn’t issue instructions.

  “You set this surrogate thing in motion from the beginning,” I went on. “Stuart is so used to doing your bidding he doesn’t realize he’s doing it anymore—he still thinks it was his idea. But using Clara as the surrogate had to come from you because she’s the only one who could give you what you needed, which was a set of genes with Brennan imprinting to mate with your own.”

  “How much do you want?” he said, as insultingly as his monotone could manage it.

  “All I want is for you to leave well enough alone and make the Drummonds do likewise. Don’
t try to find Clara; don’t tell Stuart or Millicent about their baby’s true biology; don’t disown the child either emotionally or physically. Be a doting grandpa; no more, no less.”

  He sighed heavily and his head sank toward his chest as if the tubes were suddenly transmitting lead. I added some final instructions.

  “Buy her dolls or computers or chemistry sets or whatever little girls play with these days. Fund a fancy birthday party; put her on your knee and bounce her; carry her picture in your wallet and show it to friends if you have any; and cut Stuart enough physical and emotional slack so he can become a good father. You do all that, Mr. Colbert, and you won’t hear from me again and you can suck on that pipe in peace.”

  It took a while but he finally nodded; at least that’s what I interpreted the movement to be. After some invisible prompt, Nurse Deborah wheeled him out of the room. As I let myself out, I wondered if the old man would ever know that the revelation I’d experienced in his home some four hours earlier suggested that the story I’d just told him had been true at one time, but had recently become a lie.

  Two days later, I got a message. “Palace Hotel,” it said in the terse voice of Linda Webber. “Garden Court; tomorrow noon. Be alone.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The Palace Hotel—now the Sheraton Palace—is one of San Francisco’s oldest landmarks. The largest hotel in the world when it opened in 1875, it was destroyed in the fires following the 1906 earthquake, rebuilt in 1909, and remained one of the West Coast’s major hostelries until the middle of the century, when a combination of competition and recession deficits resulted in a deterioration of its amenities. On the brink of closure, the Palace was rescued in the mid-eighties by a foreign consortium that purchased the hotel and then spent 150 million dollars to refurbish it. All to the good, as far as I could tell, especially since the heart of the restoration campaign was the jewel at the center of the hotel, the Garden Court, which the new owners had returned to its former elegance and beyond.

  The surfaces of the fabled restaurant were bright with coats of fresh enamel. The gold leaf sconces above the polished marble columns that supported the dramatic arc of the domed glass ceiling gave the place the stamp of royalty. Augmented and accented by a series of chandeliers and mirrored doors, even the light itself made the atmosphere magical and otherworldly.

  Clara Brennan was already at a table when I arrived, a solitary island in the center of the busy room, sipping a glass of wine and looking far too composed for someone who had just delivered and then surrendered a child. Her cheeks seemed fuller than before, and her hair less lustrous, but those were the only traces of motherhood I could spot, although I guessed a more lasting imprint was invisible.

  I pulled out a chair and sat down. She raised a brow and toasted me with her goblet. “Mr. Tanner.”

  “Ms. Brennan.”

  She shook her head. “I’m still Hammond to everyone but my mother.”

  “Good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s who you were the night we made love.”

  She sighed with a mix of pain and anger, regret hanging between us like a drape. At a loss for words, she fiddled with a button on her denim dress. When a waiter scurried by, I ordered a beer.

  After he left, we exchanged awkward smiles, then looked quickly away, the way you do after a peek at the sun. I asked how she was feeling.

  “I’m fine. All things considered.”

  “It was an easy birth?”

  She shrugged. “Comparatively, I suppose.”

  “Compared to Nathaniel, you mean?”

  A streak of anguish through her eyes made me sorry I’d made the reference. “Compared to most women.”

  “Are you living on Kirkham Street again?”

  “Not yet.” She paused to provoke me. “But when and if I do, you aren’t going to know about it.”

  I nodded in surrender to her terms. “Do you need anything?”

  Her chuckle was less a laugh than an editorial. “I need just about everything. But I don’t expect you to provide it.”

  “I could help.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  In the middle of our face-off, the waiter brought my beer. I raised my glass. “To the baby.”

  She lifted her goblet and smiled crookedly. “To the baby.”

  I rubbed at a sting in my eye. “It’s odd that we don’t even know her name.”

  “It’s odd that we won’t know anything else about her, either. Not one thing. Not ever.” She sipped her wine and raised the menu, less to read than to hide behind.

  “It’s mine, isn’t it?” I asked softly, my body tensed against the answer.

  “What makes you think so?” The question floated from behind her shield, innocent, innocuous, insidious.

  “The circle on your calendar got me thinking. I thought at first you were highlighting our night together, but what you were really doing was calculating menstruation and ovulation. Right?”

  The menu didn’t move.

  “Then, when the baby got changed at the mansion, something about the way Millicent was holding the dirty diaper suggested what you’d done.”

  “What did that have to … oh. The condom.”

  “What did you use, a turkey baster?”

  She lowered the menu and looked at me. Tears climbed her eyes; her cheeks were mottled with crimson. “Do you really want to know?”

  “About the turkey baster?”

  “About the baby,” she corrected fiercely.

  I started to nod my head, then didn’t. I thought I already knew the truth. I thought I’d come to terms with it. I thought I’d constructed the necessary rationales and provided myself with sufficient defenses. But Greta was offering an out, in the form of ignorance and ambiguity, and I’d made use of such aids before.

  “It’s a serious question,” she said as I ran my options through my mind yet again. “It’s not a pleasant thing, knowing you have a child being raised in someone else’s home. Even if there are reasons. Even if there isn’t any choice. It’s still not fun. It’s still something you think about every day of your life. It’s still something that makes you wonder if you deserve to be called a human being.” She blinked at a globe of tears and made it shatter. “Does that make any sense?”

  I nodded.

  She swiped at the side of her nose. “You must have considered whether to have kids at some point. Right? There must have been a time in your life when that was an issue.”

  “Once or twice.” And more recently than you know, I thought but didn’t say.

  “And you obviously decided against it. So why decide differently now? It’s not like you did anything wrong. You did what you were supposed to do to keep it from happening and the only reason it did if it did was because I tricked you. If it did happen, you didn’t know about it. If it did happen, it was with a woman who was living a lie and who did it for reasons you had no knowledge of. So why buy into something that came out of that? Think about it. Because I’m here to tell you that once you buy in, you buy in for life.”

  “I believe you,” I said, because I did and because she needed me to.

  “You’re looking at me like I’m some sort of monster.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not looking at you, I’m looking at me.”

  When I didn’t say more, she turned mean. “You could have stopped it, or tried to, at least. You used to be a lawyer; you could have gone to court and tried to void the contract and asked for a determination of paternity and claimed parental rights of your own. You could have kept me from handing her over and cut the Colberts out of it. You could have, but you didn’t. You didn’t even try.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “I think that says something.”

  “Maybe so.”

  She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, her smile both triumphant and disparaging. “Millicent will make a good mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Stuart will be okay too, pr
obably, once the old man’s out of the picture. He may even become a decent human being.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “She’ll have a lot of advantages you can’t afford to give her.”

  “True.”

  “The whole arrangement might collapse if they find out what you think is true is true.”

  “It’s possible,” I agreed.

  She finished her wine. “So what’s the verdict? I’ll do whatever you want. You want the truth, I’ll tell you.”

  I found myself trying to do damage. “You were wrong about almost everything,” I said without knowing why.

  “How so?”

  “The baby wasn’t Stuart’s. Neither baby was Stuart’s.”

  Her eyes became jade stones, hard and inscrutable. “Bullshit.”

  “Truth.”

  “How the fuck do you know?”

  “Stuart was sterile.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says his father; says his first wife,” I extrapolated.

  “Then who … ?” Her mind couldn’t travel in time or grip the contingencies.

  “Luke the first time; Rutherford the second.”

  I might as well have punched her. “Rutherford?”

  I nodded. “His sperm; not Stuart’s. Your egg; not Millicent’s. He set it up with the clinic people. Stuart doesn’t know, by the way. Stuart doesn’t know lots of things.”

  Greta Hammond closed her eyes and hugged herself, as though we were deep in a bone-cold cave and the ceiling overhead was ice. “Rutherford won’t quit till he destroys us all, will he? First Daddy, now me. And sooner or later Stuart, too.”

  “He’ll quit now,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “I told him what I knew and read him the riot act. He might have stood up to me ten years ago, but now he’s too sick and he knows it. So no one will know about all this unless you tell them.”

  Her breaths were as labored as Rutherford’s when I ordered him to abandon his plan. “I hope to God you’re right,” she said, then tried to lighten her psychic weight. “Not that it matters at this point, I suppose.”