Bill Pronzini - Savages

Emily and I cleaned up the kitchen, after which she went into her room to commune with her iPod and I shut myself inside Kerry’s office to find out if Celeste Ogden was available. After Tamara’s call last night, and her report on what she’d found in Nancy Mathias’s diary, I agreed that we were justified in pursuing an investigation. Up to a point. Cases like this, as I’d tried to tell Mrs. Ogden on Friday, are tricky. Unless you turn up incontrovertible evidence that a crime has been committed, there’s only so much you can do. We’d take it one step at a time, see what developed. If nothing did, we’d bow out whether the client liked it or not.

Might as well notify her right away. Sundays are quiet days, family days, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule that says you can’t sneak in a little business now and then.

Celeste Ogden answered the phone herself. She wasn’t surprised to hear from me on a Sunday morning, and all she said when I told her we were going ahead was, “Now you understand what kind of man he is, why I believe he was responsible for Nancy’s death.” She hadn’t expected anything less from me.

“I understand why you have suspicions, yes.”

“He killed her,” she said. “Whether it was his hand that pushed her down those stairs or not.”

“If he did it may or may not be provable, no matter what our investigation turns up. There’s nothing specific among her effects or in her diary to suggest foul play, or even a motive for foul play.”

“You’re capable of reading between the lines, just as I am.”

I didn’t see any purpose in telling her that I hadn’t gone through the diary discs myself. I said, “A few questions, Mrs. Ogden.”

“Of course.”

I consulted the notes I’d made during Tamara’s call. “The diary entry dated August 23. Your sister was so upset about something she couldn’t write about it. Any idea what it was?”

“No. Something to do with him, no doubt.”

“Two days later she wrote that she told her husband about it. An affair or brief sexual encounter, possibly?”

“Nancy? Lord, no. Never.”

“Why so positive?”

“Her morals would never have allowed an extramarital affair. My sister was the most moral person I’ve ever known. She was still a virgin, and proud of the fact, when she married John Ring at age twenty-four.”

I took the opinion with a few grains of salt. People change as they get older; so do their morals. If Nancy Mathias’s closed-off life and coldly controlling husband had become intolerable enough, it was entirely possible that she’d turned to another man for comfort and understanding.

“What do you think she was afraid to go through alone at D’s?”

“I don’t know. Some sort of crisis, obviously. Nancy was very dependent-I believe I told you that. She couldn’t bear to be alone, particularly during any sort of crisis. When John, her first husband, died she surrounded herself with people for weeks afterward.”

“Do you know her husband’s assistant, the man named Drax?”

“Anthony Drax. I met him at the funeral.”

“What do you think of him?”

“He’s a perfect complement to his employer. Brilliant, charming, ambitious, and bereft of any decent human feelings. No doubt that’s why he was hired.”

“ ‘D’ might stand for Drax,” I said.

“I don’t see how it could. Nancy didn’t care for the man any more than I did. She made that plain enough.”

“Do any of her friends or acquaintances have names that start with ‘D’?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Her reference to doing something drastic,” I said. “Was she capable of divorcing Mathias?”

“If she were driven to it. Divorce or legal separation-yes, that’s possible. She made an appointment with her attorney three days before her death, but she didn’t keep it. I know because I called him.”

“She didn’t tell him what she wanted to see him about?”

“Apparently not. He said she sounded upset on the phone.”

“You told me there was no prenuptial agreement. Did Nancy keep any assets in her own name when she and Mathias were married, assets he would’ve lost out on in a community property divorce?”

“John’s stocks and bonds. She felt that the portfolio should remain in her name, in honor of his memory.”

“Did Mathias object?”

“She said he didn’t.”

“How much does the portfolio amount to?”

“I don’t know exactly. Several hundred thousand dollars.”

“Are any of the bonds the bearer type?”

“Yes. I thought of that, too.”

Motive there, if Mathias needed a large sum of money in a hurry and had access to those bearer bonds and had been cashing them on the sly.

She said, “There are other possibilities besides financial gain, you know. A divorce or separation would have been an embarrassment to him, a blow to his ego. And a professional distraction.”

“People don’t commit murder because they’re embarrassed or distracted.”

“Don’t they? You don’t know him as I do. That man is capable of anything to further his own ends.”

I let that pass. “One of the things that stands out among your sister’s records is the ten-thousand-dollar check to T. R. Quentin. Do you know who that is?”

“An artist she admired, evidently. Someone I’ve never met.”

“So the check could be for the purchase of some of his paintings.”

“It could be, I suppose.”

“Was your sister in the habit of spending large sums on artworks?”

“She bought paintings now and then-she loved art, even though she had little enough talent herself-but not at inflated prices.”

“Ten thousand is a lot of money for a woman in distress to spend on paintings.”

“Not necessarily. Nancy was capable of extravagance when she was upset or depressed. After John died, she spent thousands on new furniture-an attempt to deflect her grief.”

“Have you talked to T. R. Quentin?”

“No. Nor should you bother. He’s not the person you need to concern yourself with.”

Don’t tell me how to conduct an investigation, lady, I thought. But I didn’t say it. She wasn’t somebody you could argue with, and she was hurting underneath all that quiet rage and hatred; why make the professional relationship any more difficult for either of us?

Before I ended the call I asked her for the name and address of her sister’s attorney and for the address of the cleaning woman, Philomena Ruiz.

When I opened the office door, Kerry was just coming out of the bedroom in her robe and slippers, a page from the pink section of the Sunday paper in one hand. “There you are,” she said. “What do you think I found in the Events listing?”

“What?”

“The Brookline Gallery downtown is sponsoring a show by a local artist that just opened yesterday. Guess who the artist is.”

“T. R. Quentin?”

“None other.”

“Brookline’s one of the better galleries, isn’t it? He must be pretty well-known.”

“She,” Kerry said. “T.R. stands for Theodora Rose, it says here.”

“Well, there goes an idea.”

“That Nancy Mathias and T. R. Quentin were having an affair and the ten-thousand-dollar check was a loan or a blackmail payoff?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been hanging around me too long. Your mind is getting to be as devious as mine.”

“It’s still a possibility, if Theodora Rose is a lesbian and Nancy was bisexual.”

“Even more devious than mine. I doubt it. But then you never know.”

“I wonder,” Kerry said, “if artists spend their Sundays at galleries where their show has just opened.”

“What, you think I should I go down to the Brookline today?”