Bill Pronzini - Savages

I’d done what I considered to be a thorough check on Mathias, all the way back to his youth in northern Ohio, and I hadn’t found anything to support Celeste Ogden’s suspicions. He came from a well-to-do family; he’d graduated with honors from both high school and Ohio University, the latter with a degree in computer science; he’d landed a position with a Silicon Valley firm during the boom years, made all the right contacts and all the right professional decisions, worked his way up to an executive position at an annual salary in excess of $200,000. No question that he was ambitious, maybe even to the point of ruthlessness, but so are a lot of men and women in this country. As far as his personal life went, there wasn’t so much as a smudge: no previous marriages, no questionable relationships, no brushes with the law, not even a hint of unethical business practices.

I was satisfied, but Celeste Ogden wasn’t. If anyone was pathological, it was her. She was convinced that Mathias was some sort of Hyde in Jekyll guise. She insisted I dig deeper, keep digging until I found something. I don’t much like that kind of excavation; everybody has some unflattering secret buried in his past, and if it’s small enough and irrelevant enough, it should be allowed to remain buried. But in my business you don’t just blow off a client who has plenty of money-her husband was a well-regarded vascular surgeon-and no set time limit for results, even if you don’t particularly like her.

So I dug and kept on digging, and I still didn’t find anything. Brandon Mathias wasn’t a saint, but neither was he much of a sinner. If he had any buried secrets, they were down so deep a team of detectives working round the clock couldn’t locate them. Obsessive-compulsive in his drive for success was about the harshest criticism you could apply to him. Maybe that was why he was marrying Nancy Ring, but even if so, it wasn’t a hanging offense. And he wouldn’t be fooling her, either. She was forty-three years old and had been married to a Silicon Valley mover and shaker for nearly twenty years; she had to be going into the marriage with her eyes wide open.

I’d said all of this to Ogden, verbally and in my report, and in return I’d got a heaping of abuse. She was one of these moneyed types used to giving orders, having things her own way. She didn’t like it when her opinions went unvalidated, and when that happened she blamed the other party, not herself. She claimed I hadn’t done my job properly, hinted that I was incompetent-like that. I wouldn’t take it from her. I don’t take that kind of crap from anybody. As politely as I could under the circumstances, I defended my work ethic and the results of my investigation, suggested she take her suspicions to another agency, and terminated the relationship. I half-expected to have to take her to small-claims court to collect the balance of our fee, but she surprised me by paying the final invoice by return mail.

That was the last I’d heard from or about her. Whether or not she’d hired another investigator, she hadn’t succeeded in stopping the wedding: the “brother-in-law” reference to Tamara proved that. Now after four years Ogden was back knocking on my door again, and not so imperiously this time. Why? I didn’t want to work for her again, but I was curious enough to listen to what she had to say.

I dialed the number on the message slip. A woman with a Spanish accent answered, asked for my name, and went away to deliver it. Ten seconds later Celeste Ogden was on the line, thanking me for returning her call. The voice was familiar, low pitched and aggressive, but the inflection was different. Subdued, tinged with something I couldn’t quite identify.

“I imagine you were surprised to hear from me again,” she said, “after such a long time.”

“Yes, I was.”

“I didn’t know who else to call. The police… they won’t listen to me. I need someone to listen to me.”

“Police, Mrs. Ogden?”

“They say it was an accident, that it couldn’t be anything else. But they’re wrong. I don’t care what anyone says. He did it. He’s responsible.”

“Did what?”

“Nancy’s dead,” she said in a cold, flat voice. “My sister is dead and that bastard killed her.”

Celeste Ogden lived on the upper westward slope of Nob Hill, in the penthouse of an ornate apartment house built in the twenties. I’d been there before, four years ago, so I knew what to expect. The liveried doorman gave me the kind of fish-eyed look his breed reserves for the lower variety of salesman until I dropped the Ogden name and said I was expected; then he shifted into mock deferential and allowed me to enter. A room-sized elevator whisked me up six floors about as fast as a race car accelerating from zero to sixty. The penthouse had a double-door entrance and chimes that rang with a cathedral-like resonance. A Latina maid, probably the same one who’d answered the phone, opened the door and silently conducted me into a massive sunroom, where she left me to wait.

The room, which opened onto a broad terrace strewn with stone statuary, reeked of old money and old-fashioned elegance. Heavy teak and mahogany furniture, Oriental carpets, Tiffany lamps, gilt-framed paintings of what looked to be old Dutch burghers and their families in various stages of a picnic. It should have been bright and cheerful, with golden afternoon sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but it wasn’t. It had an aloof, museum-like aspect enhanced by a hushed silence.

I wandered over to an unused fireplace. On the mantel was a gilt-framed photograph of Celeste Ogden and a white-maned, white-mustached man some twenty years her senior. I’d never met her husband, but the gent in the photo had the distinguished, self-confident look of a successful vascular surgeon. He also had a possessive hand placed firmly on her shoulder. I moved from there to the windows. Hundred-and-eighty-degree view: cityscape, the Bay, Alcatraz and Angel Islands, the Golden Gate Bridge. Add a few thousand a month, minimum, to whatever exorbitant rent the Ogdens were paying. If they were renting; for all I knew, they owned this penthouse.

I’d been there about a minute and a half when Celeste Ogden came in. In one hand she carried a white, shirt-sized gift box. She apologized for keeping me waiting, thanked me again for agreeing to see her. Subdued, all right, but that didn’t affect the imperious, iron-willed air she projected. Or the simmering anger that was evident in her gray eyes. She was past forty now, but she didn’t look it. Slim, trim, her sharp-chinned face unlined and glowing in a way that indicated a recent face-lift; dark hair perfectly coiffed, beige pantsuit that appeared to be silk and was as unwrinkled as her skin, a gold locket at her throat, and rings galore. The diamond wedding rock on her left hand threw off daggers of reflected sunlight as sharp as laser beams.

She invited me to sit down, sat herself on a round-backed couch with tufted velvet upholstery, and laid the box down beside her. I perched on the edge of a matching chair with my hands flat on my knees. I could feel sweat under the collar of my shirt. Surroundings like this, women like her, always made me feel poorly dressed, poorly socialized, and vaguely inadequate. Kerry says it’s low self-esteem and there’s no good reason for it. She’s right about the low self-esteem, anyway.

I said, “As I said on the phone, Mrs. Ogden, I doubt there’s anything I can do for you.”

“Reserve judgment, please, until you’ve heard what I have to say.”

Whatever that was, she’d insisted on saying it in person rather than over the phone. And offered to pay me for my time if I’d come see her, whether I agreed to help her or not. That was as much the reason I was here as curiosity about the circumstances of her sister’s sudden death.