Natural Causes (22 page)

"Since he was a boy. I used to be a friend of
his father's."

"The mansion house belonged to his father?"
Murdock smiled. "Christ, no. Jim Dover was a chemical engineer.
They lived in Mariemont. Quentin bought the house after he began to
work in television. It was Connie's idea, I think. Few of Quentin's
excesses were his own."

"He was run by his mother?"

"Not run," Murdock said. "But heavily
influenced. And also influenced by his wife. That's not unusual in
men who have grown up without a father."

"His father died when he was a boy?"

"Of heart disease. When Quentin was ten. It was
a tragic thing and I'm sure it left its scar on Quentin. He was
always haunted by a fear of premature death." Murdock stubbed
his cigarette out in a glass ashtray. "It appears his fears were
justified," he said.

"He seemed to be a very insecure man."

"That was his mother," Murdock said. "She's
distantly related to the Swifts and she filled him full of stupid
ideas--about who he should be and how he should live. It was a bad
game plan for a kid of ten. He just couldn't ever live up to her
ambitions for him."

"He had the house and the money," I said.

"Yes, but he wasn't the real thing. And he knew
it. He'd had to work too hard to get what he wanted. He'd had to make
too many compromises. It tainted everything. He told me that once,
that by the time he'd gotten what he wanted, he didn't want it
anymore. If he could have had it all at once--if he'd been born to
it--maybe it would have been different. But. .." Murdock waved
his hand in the air.

I thought of Walt Mack, who had said virtually the
same thing about his job.

"Quentin seemed to have told a lot of stories."

"You mean lies, don't you?" Murdock said.

"I guess I do."

"It was an affliction with him. It was also part
of his charm. You know the story of the boy who cried 'Wolf!'."
That was Quentin. Only in his case nobody ever disbelieved him. He
kept crying and people kept paying attention. And before you knew it,
it had become a mainstay of his personality. When in doubt, he
lied. When not in doubt, he lied. He did it the way some people eat
obsessively. To comfort himself for whatever he lacked in natural
charm or grace or breeding. One got used to it, after a time. I
actually grew rather fond of it myself, but then I could generally
tell when he was lying."

That was what his mother had thought, too. And
Murdock sounded like an adoptive father--one of the many, from Harris
Sugarman to Frank Glendora, that Quentin had cultivated.

"Was he lying about the new project?" I
asked him.

"I don't think so. When it came down to it,
Quentin could be pretty shrewd and pretty hard about money. All those
years hustling a dollar on the West Coast hadn't been wasted. He
needed money and I'm fairly sure he would have found a way to get it.
He was ten thousand in the hole over the condo. And a hundred
thousand in the hole over that damn house in New Mexico."

"A hundred grand?" I said.

"The last flood almost wiped it out. He had to
sell off most of his stocks and bonds to get the cash. Of course, it
was just like throwing it into a dry well. But I couldn't talk him
out of it."

"This was recently?"

"Over the last couple of months," Murdock
said. "Then he really needed to score?"

"What he really needed was a few months of
solitude. A few untroubled months to do his work. That would have
been sufficient, at the salary he was making."

"If he could have kept making it," I said.
Murdock nodded.

I got up to go. Murdock stood up, too. "One last
question," I said from the door.

"Yes?"

"You knew him. Do you think he might have taken
his own life?"

Murdock didn't say anything for a time. "What
makes you ask that?" he finally said.

I told him the story that Frank Glendora had told
me--about Quentin's odyssey through the past.
Murdock
thought about it.

"Yes," he said. "It's possible. If he
saw no other way out."
 

25

It was close to five when I got to the big house on
Camargo. I drove through a confetti of sunlight and shade, up the
oak-lined drive to the garages. There was nobody mowing the lawn this
time. No farrago of sounds. Just the squawking of cardinals hidden in
the oaks and that green, placid, sunlit lawn, and that great house,
half-hidden in its own shadow. I walked up to the door and knocked. A
few minutes passed and Marsha Dover answered. She looked as if she'd
been running from someone--someone she hoped would catch her. Her
beautiful face was ruddy and full of laughter. Her blonde hair was
tangled about her forehead and cheeks, jeweled at the hairline with
beads of sweat. She brushed the damp hair back and eyed me
breathlessly.

"Hi, there," she said.

"Hi."

She was wearing a loose cotton blouse, unbuttoned at
the top. I could see her beautiful breasts when she leaned over to
roll up the cuffs on her shorts. Her breasts were beaded with sweat,
too. She smelled strongly of sweat, alcohol, and musk. For the second
time since I'd met her, I had trouble concentrating on anything but
that face and body. She was that stunning.

She looked up at me, still bent over her shorts, and
smiled. "I know you, don't I?"

"Stoner. Harry Stoner."

She straightened up. "Wanna play, Harry Stoner?"

I almost said yes. Instead, I asked, "What's the
game?"

"Hide and seek."

Just as she said it, a tall shirtless kid with a
brown, muscular chest sprang out from somewhere behind the door and
grabbed Marsha around the waist. The girl shrieked with laughter and
struggled wildly in his arms.

"I win," the boy said.

The girl stopped struggling and twisted her head
around to face him. "What do you win?" she said huskily. I
could almost see the kid weaken at the knees. I felt my own knees
give a little. She couldn't have been more inviting if she'd been
lying naked on the floor.

The boy stared at her a long moment. "Christ,"
he said heavily and rubbed her breasts through the shirt.

"Excuse me," I said.

He looked up. "Where the hell did you come
from?"

"The name is Stoner."

"Fine," he said. "We don't want any."

The girl laughed and her boyfriend started to close
the door in my face. I pushed it back at him, a little harder than I
should have.

"Hey!" he said, catching the door in one
palm. "What's the idea?"

"I want to talk to Marsha."

"Well, suppose she don't want to talk to you?"

"Why don't we ask her and see?"

"Marsha, what is this shit?" the boy said,
turning to her. She shrugged. "I dunno. He was there when I
opened the door."

The boy turned back to me and flexed his arm
menacingly. "Beat it."

Maybe it was the girl. Maybe it was Quentin Dover.
Maybe it was the heat and the jet lag. But I wasn't in the mood to
play. I stepped through the doorway and jabbed the kid in the chest
with my right hand.

"You beat it," I said. "Go on out to
the pool and cool off."

The girl laughed again and the boy rubbed his chest
where I had poked him. I was a lot bigger than he was, and he was
smart enough to know that I meant business.

"I'm gonna go out to the pool," he said to
Marsha. "Call me if you need me."

The girl gave him a disappointed look as he walked
away.

"You wanted to see a fight, didn't you?" I
said to Marsha. The girl nodded stupidly and giggled. I felt like
slapping her. I wondered how Dover had resisted the same impulse. I
wondered how he'd dealt with her at all.

I stared at her for a moment, and she seemed to sober
up a little. She fidgeted with a button on her shirt and dropped her
eyes nervously to the floor. "What do you want?" she said.

"We met before, remember?"

"I remember," she said, although I wasn't
sure she did.

"I'm the guy that's looking into your husband's
death. Remember him? Quentin Dover?"

She made a sulky face. "Yeah, I remember
Quentin."

"What's it been--six days now since he died?"

"And you figure I oughta be wearing crepe,
right?" She stared at me with defiance. "What the fuck do
you know about it, anyway? What do you know about anything?"

"I know that he's dead," I said. "I'd
like to know why."

"Why don't you ask Connie why?" the girl
said. "She's the big cheese, isn't she? The one with all the
class? I'm just the slot that Quentin parked in at night."

"Quit feeling sorry for yourself," I said.

She sucked her breath in sharply, as if I'd slapped
her.

"You think I'm feeling sorry for myself? O.K.,
Buster Brown. You wanna hear about ol' Quentin. I'll tell you. C'mon.
"

She led me down the hall to the back of the house. It
was the first time I'd seen Quentin's home by daylight, and I was a
little disappointed in what I saw. The house itself was
beautiful--big, high-ceilinged rooms, with hardwood floors and
Rookwood mantles and glossy mahogany trim around doors and windows.
It was what was inside the rooms that was disappointing. All the
furniture was new, and I mean brand new. The place looked as if
Marsha or someone had gone on a shopping spree in Closson's or
Pogue's, had them box up an entire floor of display items, and had
the stuff delivered to the house. Individually the pieces were
handsome but they were stacked in the rooms without rhyme or reason.
Or if there was a reason, it was simply that all the junk was
expensive.

We ended up in the same study that I'd taken Marsha
to when she'd tried to drown herself on Tuesday, if she had tried to
drown herself, if it hadn't been an ostentatious display like the
furniture. Through the sliding glass doors I could see the sunlit
terrace, the umbrella table, and the chaise beside the pool. The kid
I'd chased off was lying on the chaise, holding the sun-reflector
under his chin. There was a sideboard on the wall by the door, with
whiskey decanters on it. Marsha went straight to it, as if she were
being drawn on a string.

"Buster Brown," she said with a laugh. She
pulled the crystal stopper out of one of the decanters, dropped the
stopper on the sideboard, and splashed two fingers of bourbon into a
cut-glass tumbler. She turned to me--the glass in her hand. "Well,
Buster, what do you wanna know?"

"You have one of those for me?" I said,
pointing to the glass.

"Help yourself."

I got up, walked over to the sideboard, and poured
myself a Scotch. The girl brushed against me as I stood beside her. I
could feel her nipples through the thin fabric of her blouse, like
pebbles in her shirtpockets.

"I got one of everything," she said,
pivoting on a foot. I looked at her, as she leaned against my arm.

"Why the hell did you marry him, Marsha?" I
said. She leaned back against the sideboard and took a long drink of
whiskey.

"For his money, why do you think?"

"You said something about love the last time I
saw you."

"I always say something about love when I'm
crocked." I walked over to the couch and sat down. Marsha braced
one arm on the sideboard and stared at me knowingly. "You think
I'm a real cunt, don't you?"

I said, "Yeah."

Her face fell. "You're kind of nasty, aren't
you, Buster? Are you that way in bed, too? Quentin wasn't." She
took another long pull of bourbon. "I got news for you, friend.
Cunts are made, not born. If I'm a tramp, Quentin made me that way. I
was just a dumbass kid when I met him.
Just a
dumbass kid-."

"I've heard it, Marsha. I heard the part about
your family, too."

She gave me a hurt look. "You think I was
lying?"

"I think it takes two to tango."

"Sometimes it takes three," the girl said
with a bitter laugh. "With Quentin, it took three."

"And what does that mean?"

"Put on your thinking cap, Buster. It'll come to
you."

"Why don't you spell it out, instead?"

"He couldn't get it up. Is that plain enough for
you?"

"After the heart surgery?"

"Before, during, and after," she said
coldly. "Let's see if I can explain it so even an asshole like
you will understand. See there was this dumb cunt ... oh, but you
heard  that part, didn't you?"

"I'll hear it again."

"No. I'll skip over that crap and get to the
hard-core. She meets this guy one day, see? And he's really sweet. He
doesn't even try to get into her pants, which she wouldn't mind, you
know? But this one's different. He's smart. He knows things. He
really makes this dumb little cunt feel like she's something. And he
ain't even good-looking. He's just the best thing the cunt ever met.
And he's loaded, to boot. Which doesn't hurt. And he treats her like
a goddamn princess, like she's too good to fuck. He tells her
that she's what he's always wanted. And the dumb cunt believes him,
because that's what she's always wanted to hear from someone like
that." The girl splashed some more whiskey into the tumbler. "So
they live happily ever after. The end. Right?"