Crazybone (2 page)

I managed to maintain an even tone when I asked, “What can you tell me about Mrs. Hunter’s background?”

“From Pennsylvania, same as Jack. Harrisburg. Married back there, moved out here when he got a job with Raytec in the Valley. I don’t know anything about her family. Or his.”

“They sound like private people.”

“More so than most. Didn’t talk much about themselves, and you couldn’t draw them out.”

“How long have they lived in Greenwood?”

“About ten years. Little girl, Emily, was born right after they settled here.”

“Ever in trouble of any kind?”

“Model citizens,” Twining said. “Kept to themselves, never bothered anybody.” Elaborate sigh, followed by a broad wink. “I sure wish she’d let me bother her a time or two. Man, she—”

“Suppose we stick to the issue, Mr. Twining. I really don’t care about your lust for Jack Hunter’s widow.”

He didn’t like that. He opened his mouth, snapped it shut, glared at me for three or four seconds. I could almost read his thoughts: Tight-assed old fart. Maybe you’re a fag, huh, buddy? It was a good thing for both of us that he kept them to himself.

There was no open declaration of hostility. Twining was first and foremost a salesman, whether it was insurance or himself he was peddling. And like it or not, I was a representative of one of the companies he worked for. His expression shape-changed until he was once again wearing his easygoing professional smile, a little more crooked now but otherwise firmly in place. It took about five seconds and it was like watching time-lapse photography of new skin knitting to erase a wound.

He said as if I hadn’t interrupted him. “Two nice people, no question about that.” His tone was cheerful: you had to listen close to hear the underlying anger.

“They have any close friends?”

“Not that I know about. Except maybe Doc Lukash. Jack played a lot of golf with him and I guess they were pretty friendly, at least at the club.”

“Doc. Medical doctor?”

“Dentist. Lukash Dental Clinic, one of the largest in the county.”

“Here in Greenwood?”

“Redwood City. Downtown, off El Camino.”

I had him spell the name Lukash and then wrote it down in my notebook. “How about Mrs. Hunter? Anyone she sees fairly often — shopping, lunch? Or who shares her interest in potting?”

“Anita Purcell. Only one I know.”

“Personal as well as business relationship?”

He dipped one shoulder: he didn’t want to talk about Mrs. Hunter anymore. “You’d have to ask her.”

“All right. Tell me about the accident.”

“Not much to tell. One of those things. Jack went over to the coast on business, was driving home on Highway 84 about eight P.M. That’s a mountain road, lots of twists and turns—”

“I know, I’ve driven it.”

“Sure you have,” Twining said. “Dark night, foggy, and he was heading up the grade out of La Honda. Damn drunk decided to pass a truck on the downhill side, misjudged the distance, hit Jack’s car head on. Both of them killed instantly.”

“No doubt that it was the drunk’s fault?”

“None. Goddamn wetback off one of the farms out there. Booze-hounds, all those
braceros,
and menaces when they get behind the wheel.”

Philanderer, chauvinist, and a bigot, too. I said thinly, “Drunk drivers come in all races, colors, and creeds.”

“Yeah,” he said. “What were you thinking? That maybe Jack committed suicide?”

“Always a possibility.”

“He had no reason to kill himself.”

“So you’ve indicated. How soon after the accident did you talk to Mrs. Hunter about the policy?”

“Couple of days.”

“You called her?”

“Called and then went to see her. Offer my condolences, get the paperwork started on the claim.”

“And she didn’t know anything about the policy.”

“She did by then,” Twining said. “Found it among Jack’s papers. I asked her why she hadn’t contacted me, and that was when she said she didn’t want to file a claim, didn’t want the fifty thousand.”

“Do you remember her exact words?”

“ ‘I don’t need the money, I don’t want it. Jack should never have taken out an insurance policy.’ She just wanted to forget the whole thing.”

“ ‘Jack should never have taken out an insurance policy.’ That’s a funny way to phrase it.”

“Funny?”

“As if he’d done something wrong.”

“I guess she figured he had. She seemed pretty upset about it.”

“Upset over a life insurance policy that would pay her and her daughter fifty thousand dollars. That just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

Twining made a Who-knows? gesture with one hand. “She’s one of those people who think insurance is a ghoul’s game.” He looked at me squarely and added, “Even stone-fox widows can be a little nuts.”

I ignored it; there was nothing to be gained in challenging him again. “Did you talk to her after that?”

“Once. To see if maybe she’d changed her mind. She wouldn’t even let me in the house.”

“So you haven’t told her about Intercoastal bringing in an investigator.”

“Not my place. Besides, Fujita said I should keep it confidential. You going to see her?”

“As soon as I can.”

“How about if I go out there with you, pave the way—”

“Not necessary. All I need is directions to her home.”

He provided them, and we both came up out of our chairs as if some kind of bell had gone off. No handshake this time, no parting words — both of us anxious for me to be gone. At the door I glanced back and he gave a little dismissive wave; his smile had slipped halfway into a sneer. What an asshole, his eyes said.

I went out thinking the same about him.

One of the good things about living in Greenwood was that no matter where you were located, even along the main road through the village, you felt you were in the country. Trees and ground cover grew in dense profusion: half the streets and side roads were shade tunnels created by the interlocking branches of oak, manzanita, eucalpytus, plum and wild cherry, other trees I couldn’t name. Busy six-and eight-lane Highway 280 was only a couple of miles away, but here the effect of quiet rusticity was so complete you might have been tucked away in a High Sierra backwater. To my mind, the best part was that it was still a natural habitat, not an architect’s wet dream like so many ritzy planned communities these days. The builders had taken advantage of the environment without any sort of destructive tampering. Peaceful coexistence between man and nature. Even developer in California, particularly the perpetrators of tracts thrown up on indiscriminately clear-cut and bulldozed land, in which every house looks the same and the overall effect is of a gigantic penal colony, ought to be force-fed the principles of the Greenwood method.

But even then, I thought in my cynical fashion, the greedy bastards still wouldn’t get it or give a damn if they did. They didn’t care where or how other people lived, as long as they didn’t have to be there among them. Half of the land-raping, build-’em-fast-and-loose developers in the Bay Area probably resided right here in woodsy, horsey, affluent Greenwood.

Whiskey Flat Road, along which I was driving as I indulged in these gloomy speculations, was a narrow lane about a third of a mile west of the village center, where the rolling land began to rise into steeper hills. There were homes on large parcels along both sides, a picture-postcard brook that kept meandering from one side of the road to the other through carefully constructed culverts. I passed gated drives, pastured horses, fences of wood and chainlink and stone and mossy brick, most of them overgrown with ivy or oleander shrubs. About half the houses were hidden, the rest partially so. Number 769 was more or less in the second category, set up on a little knoll on the west side and surrounded by trees and shrubbery so that you had a kind of filtered look at it even when you turned into the driveway. I couldn’t even be sure of its architectural style from down below, though most of the Whiskey Flat homes were variations of the sprawling, single-story ranch type.

The drive was gated, but the gate was open; I went on through, uphill past the first screen of trees. Ranch-style, all right, off-white with dark-green trim, tinted glass and brickwork, solar panels, a redwood side deck that wrapped around to the rear; the whole cradled by two huge heritage oaks. The garage was detached, off on the right. On the far side stood a smaller outbuilding with a slanted glass roof, its near wall two-thirds glass. Sheila Hunter’s potting studio.

I parked in a paved semicircle fronting the house. There were no other cars in sight, and when I rang the bell its chimes didn’t bring anybody. I wandered over to the outbuilding. The afternoon sun threw flamelight off the glass surfaces, lit up the interior in a glaring way. The effect, as I approached, was of a building on fire. The woman in white sitting in the glass-walled section, motionless with her head bowed, might have been a penitent in some weird religious ceremony — or a corpse prepared for cremation in a glass oven.

The illusion vanished as I reached an open door in the wood-walled section. Unpleasant image, given the circumstances, and I was glad to be rid of it. I had a clearer look at the woman now: she was seated on a stool before a potter’s wheel, her hands clasped between her knees, her back sharply bent forward and her head so far down I couldn’t see her face behind a hanging screen of dark hair. The white outfit was a man’s shirt and a pair of tailored jeans. No widow’s weeds for Sheila Hunter, if that was who she was. Not that clothes make a grieving spouse: you can mourn just as deeply naked or in the raiments of royalty.

I poked my head through the doorway. “Mrs. Hunter?”

No answer. She didn’t move, didn’t seem to have heard me. I thought: Why not just go and leave her alone? But it was reflexive and without conviction. Like it or not, the nature of my job is to bother people, too often at the worst of times. If I started giving in to my overload of empathy, I might as well get out of the investigation business.

I stepped inside. Storage shelves of pots, bowls, urns in odd, twisted shapes, some wearing bright green and blue glazes overlain with geometric black designs, others unglazed. Tubs of wet clay. Miscellaneous clutter. A doorway without a door gave access to the glass-walled section where the woman sat. In there I could see a kiln, squatty and much tinier than I’d imagined kilns to be, and the potter’s wheel and a long bench and not much else. I framed myself in the opening and said her name again. Still no response: she might’ve been in some kind of trance.

“Mrs. Hunter?” Louder, and a rap on the inner wall to go with it.

She came alive in a convulsive spasm, sitting bolt upright, the dark hair flying silkily as her head whipped around my way. For three or four seconds she gawped at me out of wide, bulging eyes — a look that made me recoil a little. It contained as much raw terror as I’ve ever seen in anyone’s face. Then she was on her feet, in a movement so sudden it toppled the stool: backing away, one hand up in front of her as if she were trying to ward off an attacker. The edge of the workbench stopped her. She reached down to grab it with both hands, steadying herself, still radiating fear at me. Her eyes had an unfocused sheen. She was breathing so rapidly I thought she might start to hyperventilate.

“Crazybone,” she said.

The word popped out in a thin, choked whisper. There was dread in it, and something else, a visceral emotion from deep within her. She seemed unaware of having spoken; it was a sleepwalker’s word, a nightmare word.

I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hunter, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Oh, God.” Eyeblinks, several of them. A palpable shudder. And then she was herself again, the eyes focusing, some of the terror retreating. “Who are you?” she said in a stronger voice. “What do you want?”

“I called to you twice from outside, but you—”

“Who
are
you?”

I told her my name, that I represented Intercoastal Insurance. I had one of my cards in hand, but I was afraid of setting her off again by approaching her with it. Instead I reached over and laid it on the clay-stained bench.

“Jesus,” she said, “that fucking insurance policy.” Then she said, “You scared the hell out of me, coming in here like that. You’re trespassing.”

“I’m sorry.” I was tired of apologizing, but she was right on both counts. “Would you like me to come back at some other time?”

“Why? Why are you bothering me? I told Rich Twining I don’t want to file a claim.”

“Why not, Mrs. Hunter?”

“That’s my business. Who sent you here? What do you do for Intercoastal Insurance?”

“I’m an independent investigator. I was hired to—”

“For God’s sake!” The fear was back, a lurking presence that made her pale gray-green eyes almost luminous. She raised her hands to cup both elbows, pulling in tight against herself as if she were cold. “Investigating what? Me?”

“Not exactly. If you’ll just let me explain—”

“I’m not going to file a damn claim. How much clearer do I have to make it to you people?”

“Would you turn down the fifty thousand dollars if it was given to you?”

“Given? What’re you talking about?”

“Intercoastal deeply regrets your loss.” Company line; I didn’t believe it any more than she did. “As a gesture of goodwill to you and your daughter, they’re willing to honor your husband’s policy without the usual paperwork.”

Incredulity crowded the fear aside. Twining had called her “drop-dead gorgeous,” and there was justification for that assessment. Flawless complexion as luminous as her eyes, perfect features, that dark silken hair, a long-legged, high-breasted figure. But there was also a worn, haggard quality that diminished and roughened the edges of her beauty. Part of it was grief, no doubt, but it seemed more ingrained than that. The fear, maybe, a physical corrosive if you live with it long enough.