False Conception Read online

  Among the other activities that filled my time in the interim—in addition to renting bad movies and reading bad books—was contemplating my night with Greta Hammond. What I was wondering, quite frankly, was whether there was a way to start seeing her on a personal basis now that my professional task was completed. To that end, I spent several hours trying to calculate a way to reorient myself in her mind—to exit the guise of warehouseman and father and enter the person of bachelor and private investigator—without her resenting my initial duplicity and without my disclosing the nature of the job I’d been doing. Somehow I knew that pretending to be a parent would be the most serious of my sins in her mind and it was likely she would never forgive me.

  I still hadn’t come up with a plan when the phone rang one morning, even before I’d put on the coffee.

  “Goddammit, Marsh,” he said without preamble.

  “God damn what, Russell? The Giants?”

  “Fuck the Giants. You told me she was okay.”

  My stomach performed a tricky calisthenic. “No, I didn’t. I told you I couldn’t find anything wrong with her.”

  “Well, you must not have looked very hard.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s gone. That’s why.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I mean disappeared. Flown the coop. Vanished. All of the above.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the doctor she was supposed to see every other week for a prenatal examination, for starters. She missed the last two appointments, so he called Stuart and told him about it. So Stuart called me and told me about it. So last night I went out to Kirkham Street to see what the hell the deal was.”

  “And?”

  “She’s gone, sure enough. Landlady hasn’t seen her in almost a month. Mail’s been piling up, rent hasn’t been paid, nothing. She was about to call in the cops till I paid the rent to put a stop to it. The personnel office at the med center doesn’t know where she is, either … They’ve got her down as AWOL.”

  Russell paused for breath. “Goddammit, Marsh. I thought this thing was under control. I thought the woman was solid.”

  Despite the implicit slur on my judgment, I held my disputatious tongue and stuck to the business at hand. “Did you look inside the apartment?”

  “Landlady wouldn’t let me. I’m thinking about getting a court order, if I can do it on the Q.T. The Colberts don’t want this thing to go public. Especially not now.”

  “Let me take a shot at Mrs. Hapwood before you go to court. I talked with her before—maybe I can persuade her to let me inside.”

  “Sure. I’ll let you take a shot. In fact, I insist that you take a shot. But not till you’ve talked with the Colberts.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re going crazy, that’s why. The very thing they didn’t want to happen—the thing they hired the two of us to keep from happening—has happened anyway. And they want some answers.”

  “I’m not sure I have any, Russell.”

  “Then at least let them ask their questions. I think the money they’ve paid us to handle this thing gives them that right, don’t you?”

  I told him I did, even though it wasn’t quite that simple. Russell was right—a disappointed client has the right to ask questions—except the Colberts weren’t my clients, they were Russell’s. But out of respect for him and in furtherance of my personal repute and that of my profession, I was willing to accept a tangential obligation and submit to an interrogation. But only once.

  “Meet me at Colbert for Women at four,” Russell was saying. “Eighth floor. Tell the elevator woman who you are, so she’ll take you up there. And don’t talk back, Marsh; don’t get self-righteous. Take your medicine like a man, then we’ll figure out how to salvage this thing.”

  There were several points I wanted to make in my defense, but I only made one of them. “I’ll try, Russell.”

  I hadn’t been in Colbert for Women since I’d been shopping for a present for Betty last Christmas. I hadn’t found anything suitable at Colbert; I’d found it at Eddie Bauer, but the current excursion reminded me of Betty, which reminded me of how hollow my life was without her, which explained why my mood was edgy and irritable even before I shoved my way through the revolving door on the main floor of Colbert for Women at four on the dot on a sunny Friday in July, when I should have been out having fun.

  Long a lone holdout among the deteriorating denizens of Market Street, Colbert for Women now found itself at the core of an urban revival, with Nordstrom and the Emporium across the street and the remodeled terminus of the main cable car route right out front on Powell Street. The new mayor had vowed to clean up the sleaze that had usurped the area over the years, and now the predominant presence wasn’t panhandlers it was chess players, a dozen tables of them stretched along the sidewalk toward Justin Herman Plaza, all races and colors squaring off in good humor above a bevy of knights and bishops. The street vendors and musicians gave the area a festive air, and beneath the newly paved road and the elaborately bricked walkway were streetcars on one level and BART on the level below that, one train or another rumbling by every ten minutes or so, bringing a host of suburban shoppers back to the heart of downtown to join the tourists and participate in the frolic.

  Inside the triangular store, the ceiling was impossibly high as befitted the age and neo-classicism of the building, which dated to the years before the Second World War when money and materials were plentiful and architects had the guts and the budgets to use them voluptuously. The stained-glass dome in the center of the high rotunda softened and tinted the light so that the wrinkles in the faces of the matrons would magically vanish and the color in their hair would seem real. I wondered if it was doing anything special for me.

  In keeping with more current fashion, the plaster walls were draped with diaphanous silks that provided a festive backdrop to the cherubs and angels that peered at me from the corners of the room, wearing red lips and gilt hair and jewelry that sparked in the light. The music in the air was Vivaldi; the smells were close to overwhelming. It took a while to get my bearings.

  There were perfumes and colognes down the aisle to the right, along with a sapper squad of women assigned to inflict you with a fragrance if you showed any interest or even slowed down. I looked left. Costume jewels were the sirens that beckoned in that direction, mounds of cut glass and gold plate piled on counters that were staffed by overdressed women wearing puzzling clothes and peculiar makeup. Since my tweeds and corduroys made it obvious I wasn’t a candidate for a scent or a bauble, no one wasted more than an upbraiding glance at my distance from style and flash. After a moment of reconnoitering, I braved the gauntlet of perfume girls, crossed to the rear of the store, and punched the button marked UP.

  The elevator was as old as the building, which meant that, like many elderly ladies, it needed help to get where it was going. The woman perched like a gargoyle on the stool next to the brass lever that started and stopped the cage looked to be jeopardizing her Social Security by holding down a paying job; the hangdog look on her face suggested she wasn’t happy with the regulations or with anything else. When I told her who I was, and asked to be lifted to eight, she consulted a list of names that was taped to the left of the emergency button. She seemed insulted to find me on it.

  The directory above the door only went to seven—furs and the bridal boutique: the powers that be evidently didn’t want the hoi polloi blundering into their executive domain in pursuit of a white sale. As we ascended, various clumps of customers, exclusively female, got on and off the elevator bearing bags and babies and briefcases—women are always carrying something without even noticing, while men feel slightly enslaved when forced to do the same.

  After six, I was alone in the car with the grumpy operator and the dregs of too many perfumes. A needle couldn’t have slipped between her lips—conversation was out of the question. Based on the sounds that echoed through the shaft as we approached its peak, so was t
he reliability of the mechanism we were utilizing. When the doors squeaked open at eight, the operator bid me a terse good-bye, which seemed a minimal courtesy to someone who could conceivably be launching a takeover.

  In contrast to the rest of the building, the eighth floor was subdued and reclusive. With its walnut panels and Persian carpets, it looked more like a law office than a dress shop; at least it looked the way law offices looked back when the managing partners were raised on Marquand and Auchincloss instead of Grisham and Turow. A more compelling exception was the parade of women that moved across the parquet floor, gliding like seraphs from one room to another, modeling outerwear for management in preview of next season’s winners. It was a while before I could absorb anything more relevant than arrogant and anorexic loveliness.

  A small waiting area was arrayed in front of the reception desk; two chairs and a couch and a potted plant. Russell Jorgensen had obviously been posted there to greet my arrival, so the Colberts wouldn’t have to contend with me alone. As I walked his way, he looked even less happy than he’d sounded on the telephone; he was so disconcerted, he didn’t even shake my hand.

  “You’re going to take some heat in there, Marsh,” he muttered as I sat in the chair beside him. “Stuart isn’t happy with either of us.”

  “I can take heat when I need to take heat but I’m not sure it’s deserved in this case.”

  “Whether it is or isn’t, I want you to let Stuart rant and rave for a while. Eventually he’ll calm down and then we can decide how to clean this up.”

  “I’ll do what I can, but you’d better keep him in check. I’m not in the mood for misplaced criticism.”

  “I can’t afford to lose the Colberts as clients,” Russell said simply.

  “Which makes me the sacrificial lamb.”

  “If you want to see it that way.”

  “My rate’s going to double if we get into this any deeper, Russell. I don’t know what happened to the Hammond woman but I know it didn’t have anything to do with me.”

  Russell leaned toward me and whispered. “Stuart thinks she stole it.”

  “The fetus?”

  He nodded.

  “To keep or as a kidnaping?”

  “Kidnaping. He thinks sooner or later she’s going to ask for more money.”

  “I don’t think a pregnant woman can kidnap her own child, Russell.”

  “But that’s just the point. It’s not her child. It never was. And I have a contract that says so.”

  CHAPTER 13

  They were side by side and hand in hand, an au courant American Gothic garbed by Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley instead of Penney’s and OshKosh B’gosh, smack in the center of a creamy leather couch at the west end of a long and lavish office on the top floor of their very own building. The furnishings that surrounded them were on the cutting edge of European design and the photos on the walls featured the facades of various Colbert stores and a bevy of beautiful women posed in dramatic settings and modeling couturier fashions. The only window looked down on Powell and west toward Upper Market but the cerise gauze curtain drawn across its bright expanse indicated the boulevard and buildings outside couldn’t compete with the human architecture on display within the store.

  Because it was his office, Stuart Colbert looked comfortable and self-possessed and bursting with something to say. From the heat in his eyes and the flush to his face, I guessed it wouldn’t be pleasant. He was wiry and small, with an aesthete’s high forehead, a lizard’s bulbous eyes, and a languid smirk that declared he was master of all he surveyed. He struck me as a cold fish—judgmental, sanctimonious, arrogant, didactic—and a trifle jejune underneath. All to be expected, I suppose, given that his only source of early nourishment had come from a silver spoon.

  As Russell and I entered the room, Millicent Colbert squeezed her husband’s hand, then hauled it to her lap for comfort. The movements of her eyes and hands made her seem flighty and abstracted and a bit on the manic side, which might have masked a vat of insecurity or have been merely symptomatic of a frantic mom.

  She was pretty in a vague and brittle way, with wispy blond hair and a long slim body that lacked noticeable curvature beneath the many blooms of her Laura Ashley. Her fingers flew about her person like pixies, adjusting her hair and her clothes and her nose, making sure they were suitably displayed. She was so worried that her dress would wrinkle, she plucked at it the way a chef would pluck a squab, redraping it in ever-changing folds about her thighs. My guess was that she’d grown up with major money around the house and that she fell far too easily in love and had been hurt too frequently by men. I also guessed that she was less ardent than dutiful toward her mate and more needful than was healthy to possess a child.

  When Russell introduced me, Stuart only nodded and Millicent only blinked: it was going to be a long meeting. When Russell offered a speech in the nature of an opening statement, Stuart held up a hand to preempt him.

  “We are not pleased, Mr. Tanner,” he began forcefully, his eyes on the bridge of my nose.

  “I don’t blame you,” I said, then opted to anticipate. “But I don’t blame me, either.”

  Neither Colbert nor his lawyer liked what they regarded as flippancy. “Nevertheless, we feel we have been poorly served,” Colbert countered.

  My eye was on Russell as I answered. “As I said, I don’t happen to see it that way. But if you have been, I apologize.”

  Colbert squeezed his wife’s hand and looked at her from an autocratic loftiness. “Apologies won’t get our baby back.”

  “No, they won’t,” I agreed. “Neither will recriminations or aspersions.”

  “But they might make me feel better,” Colbert responded, through clenched teeth and a tight half-smile that must have been his concept of levity.

  I should have let it go but I didn’t. “The balm would only be temporary,” I pointed out, “unless the problem itself gets solved.”

  Colbert started to take his next turn, but then thought better of it. He leaned back and looked down his nose at his wife, granting her permission to speak. “Do you have any idea where Miss Hammond might have gone, Mr. Tanner?” Millicent asked breathily.

  I shook my head. “And even if I did, it might not be helpful.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she might not have had any choice in the matter.”

  Millicent frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean she might have been abducted.”

  “You mean kidnapped,” Stuart interjected.

  “It’s certainly possible.”

  “It’s also possible it was our child that was kidnaped, and that Greta Hammond was the kidnaper.”

  “Have you had a ransom note? Or any other communication to that end?”

  He shook his head. “But I’m sure we’ll hear from her soon.”

  I shrugged. “Or from someone. But it’s also possible that she wants to keep the child herself.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because apparently her only other child is dead. As I told Russell in my first report, that sort of past personal tragedy goes against the prevailing wisdom in these things. It gives the surrogate a motive to renege.”

  Colbert shook his head stubbornly. “I’m sure she just wants money.”

  “She was already going to get a lot of money. All she had to do was follow the contract.”

  “In my experience, the more money people have, the more they want. Especially poor people.” His contempt was as unalloyed as only those born to the purple can render it.

  I looked at him with what I hoped was insolence. “I have to tell you that based on my contacts with her, I don’t think this is something she did voluntarily.”

  Colbert curled his lip. “Well, I think you’re wrong. I think she’s a conniving little bitch. I think she planned this thing all the way, from the first day Russell got in touch with her.”

  I was stubborn in the storm of his vituperation. “If she
’s that corrupt, why did you pick her to begin with?”

  The question and its implications put a stop to things for a while, long enough for tempers to cool and a semblance of reason to return to the room. When a secretary came in to offer refreshment, we placed our orders as gratefully as if we’d been lost in the desert for days.

  After the secretary had served us, Russell Jorgensen took charge. “We need to decide what we do now.”

  “We find her, don’t we?” Millicent blurted, her voice splinted and reinforced, her determination virile.

  Russell looked left. “Do you agree, Stuart?”

  “Absolutely. Provided we proceed confidentially.”

  “With or without the aid of the police?” I asked.

  Russell twisted my way. “What do you recommend?”

  “If she left voluntarily, the police could be a help—missing persons procedures and all that. If it’s a kidnaping, the FBI is usually a better choice than local law enforcement, although the S.F.P.D. has lots of experience in these things. More than makes it into the papers,” I added truthfully.

  Stuart Colbert shook his head. “No cops. Not yet. Not till we know what we’re dealing with.”

  I nodded. “That’s probably wise.”

  Millicent spoke again. “If the police aren’t going to look for her, who will?”

  Russell looked at me. “Marsh?”

  I shrugged. “I could try my luck.”

  Stuart squinted. “Immediately?”

  “Yes.”

  “Full time?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you ever done this type of thing before?”

  “Several times, if you mean a skip. Once, if you mean a kidnaping.”

  “And?”

  “Sometimes I found them; a few times I didn’t. With the kidnap, the victim was dead before I got called in on the case. Of course we didn’t know it at the time.”

  Millicent Colbert started to cry. Her husband murmured something I didn’t catch, which made her try to pull herself together but for the moment it was a losing battle.