I nodded. Jane led me through the house and out to a shaded veranda overlooking a large bent grass yard more than half dug up into furrows. I sat down in a lounge chair; she poured iced tea. “I’ve done all that garden work since Sunday. I think it’s helped more than all the sympathy calls I’ve gotten.”
“You’re taking it well.”
Jane sat down beside me. “Eldridge had cancer, so I half expected it. I didn’t expect a shotgun in our own home, though.”
“Were you close?”
“No, not anymore. With the girls grown up, we would have divorced sooner or later. Are you married?”
“Yes. Almost two years.”
Jane sipped tea. “God, a newlywed. There’s nothing better, is there?”
My face must have betrayed me. Jane said, “Sorry,” then changed the subject. “How do you know the Spragues?”
“I was involved with Madeleine before I met my wife. How well do you know them?”
Jane considered my question, staring out at the uprooted yard. “Eldridge and Emmett went way back,” she said finally. “They both made a lot of money in real estate and served on the Southern California board together. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, since you’re a policeman, but Emmett was a bit of a crook. A lot of his houses went down during the big quake in 33, and Eldridge said that he has lots of other property that has to go bad sooner or later–houses made out of the worst possible material. Eldridge got Emmett booted off the board when he found out that phony corporations controlled the rentals and sales–he was enraged that Emmett would never be held responsible if more lives were lost.”
I remembered talking with Madeleine about the same thing. “Your husband sounded like a good man.”
Jane’s lips curled into a smile–it looked like against her will. “He had his moments.”
“He never went to the police about Emmett?”
“No. He was afraid of his gangster friends. He just did what he could, a little nuisance to Emmett. Being removed from the board probably cost him some business.”
“‘He did what he could’ isn’t a bad epitaph.”
Now Jane’s lips curled into a sneer. “It was out of guilt. Eldridge owned slum blocks in San Pedro. When he learned he had cancer, he really started feeling guilty. He voted Democratic last year, and when they got in he had meetings with some of the new City Council members. I’m sure he gave them his dirt on Emmett.”
I thought of the Grand Jury probe the scandal sheets were predicting. “Maybe Emmett’s heading for a fall. Your husband could have been–”
Jane rapped her ring finger on the tabletop. “My husband was rich and handsome and did a mean Charleston. I loved him until I found out he was cheating on me, and now I’m starting to love him again. It is so strange.”
“It’s not so strange,” I said.
Jane smiled very softly. “How old are you, Bucky?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Well, I’m fifty-one, and I think it’s strange, so it is strange. You shouldn’t be so all-accepting of the human heart at your age. You should have illusions.”
“You’re teasing me, Jane. I’m a cop. Cops don’t have illusions.”
Jane laughed–heartily. “Touché. Now _I’m_ curious. How did an ex-boxer cop get involved with Madeleine Sprague?”
Now I lied. “I stopped her for a red light and one thing led to another.” My gut clenching, I asked casually, “What do you know about her?”
Jane stomped her foot at a crow eyeing the rose bushes just off the veranda. “What I know about the distaff Spragues is at least ten years old and quite strange. Baroque, almost.”
“I’m all ears.”
Jane said, “Some might say all teeth.” When I didn’t laugh, she looked across the dug-up yard to Muirfield Road and the boom baron’s estate. “When my girls and Maddy and Martha were little, Ramona directed pageants and ceremonies on that huge front lawn of theirs. Little enactments with the girls dressed up in pinafores and animal costumes. I let Linda and Carol participate, even though I knew Ramona was a disturbed woman. When the girls all got a bit older–in their teens–the pageants got stranger. Ramona and Maddy were very good at makeup, and Ramona staged these . . . epics, reenacting the things that happened to Emmett and his friend Georgie Tilden during World War I.