I wasn’t sure what to do with this. He had told me she was an alcoholic. He’d told me she went off on three-day toots. He’d told me she attacked him with a pair of scissors and had possibly murdered her sister in revenge for an affair he was having with her. Now here she sat, sobbing her tiny heart out, claiming that he was the perpetrator of this weird pathological stuff. Which of them was I to believe? She composed herself, giving her nose the old silent squeeze. She looked at me, the whites of her eyes now tinted with pink.
“Didn’t he tell you something like that?” she asked.
“I think he was just concerned about Elaine,” I said, trying to hedge until I could decide what to do. “We really didn’t discuss anything personal so don’t worry about that. How did you find out he’d been up here?”
“Something came up in conversation,” she said. “I don’t even remember what. That’s how he handles these things. He gives me these clues. He leaves the evidence around and waits for me to discover it. And if I don’t stumble across it accidentally, he points me right to it and then sits back and pretends to be contrite and amazed.”
I was just about to say, “Like his affair with Elaine,” but it suddenly occurred to me that it might not even be true, or if true, that she might not actually know about it. “Like what, for example?” I said.
“He had an affair with Elaine. He was fucking around with my only sister. God, I can’t believe he did that to me. I didn’t doubt she’d do it. She was always jealous. She’d take anything she could. But him. I felt like such a fool. He was off balling her the minute Max died and I was such a dunce I didn’t figure it out for years! It took me years.”
She did one of those bubbling laughs, filled more with hysteria than mirth. “Poor Aubrey. He must have been at his wit’s end trying to get me to pick up on that. He finally cooked up this absurd tale about the IRS auditing his taxes. I told him the accountant could take care of it, but he said
Harvey wanted us to go through the canceled checks and credit-card receipts. So like a dodo I did it and there it was.”
“Why don’t you leave?” I asked. “I don’t understand why you stay in a relationship like that.” I always say the same thing. Every time I hear a tale like this. Drunkenness, beatings, infidelity, and verbal abuse. I just don’t get it. Why do people put up with it? I had said it to Aubrey so I figured I might as well say it to her too. The marriage was a mess and regardless of where the truth lay, these two people were miserable. Was misery the point?
“Oh, I don’t know. Part of it’s the money, I guess.” she said.
“Screw the money. This is a community-property state.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “He’ll walk away with half of everything I have and it just seems so unfair.”
I looked at her blankly. “The money’s yours?”
“Well of course it’s mine, ” she said, and then her expression changed. “He told you it was his, didn’t he?”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “More or less. He told me he put together real-estate syndicates.”
She was startled for an instant and then she laughed.
She started to cough, patting her chest. She stubbed out her cigarette, pecking it in the bottom of the ashtray. Smoke was streaming out of her nostrils as though her brain had caught fire. She was shaking her head, smile fading. “Sorry, but that’s a new one on me. I should have guessed. What else did he say?”
I held a hand up in protest. “Hey,” I said. “Enough. I don’t want to play this game. I don’t know what your problems are and I don’t care… .”
“You’re right, you’re right. God, we must seem like lunatics to you. I’m sorry you got sucked in. It’s not your concern. It’s mine. How much do I owe you for your time?” She was rooting through her handbag for her checkbook and her famous rosewood pen-and-pencil set.
I could feel my temper on the rise again.
“I don’t want any money from you. Don’t be absurd. Why don’t you give me some straight answers for a change?”
She blinked at me, the china blue eyes glazing over like ice on a pond. “About what?”
“Elaine’s neighbor claims you were up here at Christmas and the two of you had a big fight. You told me you hadn’t seen her for vears. Now which is it?”
She stalled, reaching for another cigarette so she’d have time to frame a reply.
I headed her off. “Come on, Beverly. Just tell me the truth. Were you up here or not?”
She took out a packet of matches and removed a match, scratching it repeatedly across the packet without effect. She tossed that one, a dud apparently, into the ashtray and took out a second match. This time, she managed to light her cigarette. “I did come up,” she said carefully. She tapped the lighted cigarette on the lip of the ashtray as though to remove an ash when there was none yet.
I was going to scream if she did any more shit with that cigarette. “Did you quarrel with her or didn’t you?”
She switched to her officious tone, mouth going all prim. “Kinsey, I had just found out about the affair. Of course we quarreled. That’s exactly what Aubrey had in mind, I’m sure. What would you have done?”
“What difference does it make? I’m not married to him so who gives a damn what I’d have done! I want to know why you lied to me.”
She stared at the desk, her face taking on a stubborn look.
I tried another tack. “Why’d you call me off? Why wouldn’t you let me contact the police?”
She smoked for a moment and I thought at first she didn’t intend to answer that question either. “I was worried he’d done something.”
I stared a her.
She caught my look and leaned forward earnestly.
“He’s crazy. He is a truly crazy man and I was worried that he’d… I don’t know… I suppose I was worried he’d killed her.”
“All the more reason to call the police. Isn’t it?”
“You don’t understand. I couldn’t turn the police loose on this. That’s why I hired you in the first place. When this whole business came up about the will, I didn’t think anything of it. It was such a minor matter. I just assumed she’d signed the paper and sent it to the attorney. And then when I realized no one had heard from her, it occurred to me that something might be wrong. I don’t even know what I thought it was.”
“But when I mentioned she might be dead, the penny dropped, right?” I sounded bored. I sounded contemptuous too.
She shifted uncomfortably. “Before that. I guess I’d just never really put it in words until you said it and then I realized I better reassess the situation before I agreed to anything.”
“What makes you think Aubrey’s involved?”
“That day… when I drove up here and Elaine and I had words… she told me that the affair had been going on for years. She’d finally figured out that Aubrey was a psychopath and she was trying to break it off.” She paused and the blue eyes came up to mine. “You don’t understand about Aubrey yet. You don’t know what he’s like. You just don’t leave him. You just don’t break it off. I’ve threatened to do that myself. Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me. But I’d never make it. I don’t know what he’d do, but I’d never get away from him. Never. He’d follow me to the ends of the earth and bring me back, only then he’d really make me pay.”
“Bev, I’ve got to tell you I’m having trouble with this,” I said.
“That’s because you fell for it. He came waltzing up here and he laid a number on you. He conned you good and now you can’t bear to admit you’ve been had. He’s done it before. He does it to everyone. The man is certifiably insane. He was in Camarillo for years until Reagan became governor. Remember that? He cut the state budget and turned them all out in the streets. Aubrey Danziger came home at that point and my life has been hell ever since.”
I picked up a pencil and tapped on the edge of the desk, then tossed it aside. “I’ll tell you the truth. I want to find Elaine. That’s all I want to do. I’m like a terrier pup. Somebody tells me to do something and it gets done. I’ll worry the damn thing to death. I’m going to find out what happened to her and where she’s been all these months. And you better hope it doesn’t lead back to you.”