Judith Krantz (69 page)

She finished her presentation and stood behind the desk, trying to repress a cocky grin. Jimmy Rosemont
and Sir John Maddox exchanged a glance, the meaning of which Jazz couldn’t read. The first person to break the silence was Sir John.

“This is indeed fascinating, Miss Kilkullen, I congratulate you on your detective work.” His manner was as mellow as ever.

“Clever and neat,” Jimmy Rosemont agreed. “You can have a job working for me anytime.”

“A most interesting curiosity of history,” Sir John added, “and a charming one at that, romantic, generous and certainly, one may safely say, deeply pious. I’m grateful to you for allowing me to hear all this.”

“Sir John, don’t you realize
yet
what it means?” Jazz had been prepared for anything but complacency. She knew these men would not be good losers. Why weren’t they more upset? A snake of fear wriggled into Jazz’s heart.

“Could mean
, my dear Miss Kilkullen, could mean, if it were not for this.” Sir John Maddox leaned forward and fished out a piece of paper from the pile. “This title deed to the ranch, registered at the County Recorder’s office in Santa Ana, is the only
enforceable
item on this desk.”

“What are you talking about?” Jazz’s voice rose. “The Mexican land grant is enforceable, for God’s sake,
it’s the key!
It’s the culmination of years and years of proof that the ranch belonged to the Valencias from 1788 until they sold it to the Kilkullens. Don’t try to tell me that it’s not
enforceable!”

“That’s exactly what we’re telling you,” Jimmy Rosemont said, his entire well-groomed face, from his jowls to his hairline, carelessly affable. “That piece of old paper has no legal validity.
It was never recorded in Santa Ana
. Now if it had been—we’d be bound by it—but that’s speculation, mere speculation. Fact is, it wasn’t.”

“You’re crazy! It can’t be possible! That’s just a technicality, and I won’t—”

“Miss Kilkullen, I appreciate your distress, I sympathize fully.” Sir John leaned forward to emphasize
his words. “There is no way to stop the sale of this land because of a purely
verbal
agreement that may have been made between two men, Antonio Valencia and Michael Kilkullen, both long dead, to respect the wishes of Teodosio Maria Valencia, long dead, and reported in a letter from one woman to another, again both long dead. Even the seal of Millard Fillmore is utterly irrelevant.”

“Sir John’s right,” Jimmy Rosemont said, almost lazily. “Your father had a perfect right to leave all the land, free and clear, to you and your sisters. Nothing in the Recorder’s Office says otherwise, and that’s the only thing we have to be concerned with.”

“That can’t be possible.” Even as she fought them, the snake of fear grew into a serpent that tightened its grip around Jazz’s heart. She felt cold all over as she began to comprehend the flaw, the hideously unjust flaw in the documents.

“We don’t expect you to take it on faith,” Jimmy Rosemont interrupted, clearly impatient now. “We’re wasting time arguing about something only your own lawyers can convince you of. Call them and ask them if we’re right or not.”

“I will, Mr. Rosemont, don’t worry about that! One thing they did tell me was that there are dozens of different ways I can drag my heels and keep this land from being sold, even if it turns out that the covenant isn’t enforceable, which I don’t believe for one minute.”

“Now there you’re quite right,” Sir John said. “I estimate that with clever lawyers you could drag this thing out for twenty or thirty years. But you’d lose in the end, you know. You’d have wasted your life in a hopeless battle. And how would you pay your lawyers for such a long fight?”

“That’s my problem!” Jazz shrugged the question off as her panic mounted until it felt as if her chest would explode.

“Indeed it would be a problem, Miss Kilkullen, even for a very rich woman. My Hong Kong friends, however, have inexhaustible resources, they can litigate
forever, they will never give up, for they take a long view of history, as I explained when we first met but your life … well, I should hate to see such a charming young lady ruin her life.”

“I’ll mortgage my share of the land to pay,” Jazz said defiantly. “God knows, it’s worth plenty.”

“Then you won’t just lose the fight,” Jimmy Rosemont said scornfully, “you’ll lose your inheritance too.”

“Don’t think you only have me to deal with,” Jazz cried ferociously. “California’s full of well-organized groups who’ll fight you into the ground; environmentalists, no-growth, slow-growth, wetlands conservation, wildlife conservation—”

“We’ll deal with them,” Sir John said, with the serene confidence that came from knowing that Liddy Kilkullen had the Governor in her back pocket. How wise Jimmy had been to make that arrangement. “And when necessary, we’ll give them something. A few hundred acres here, a few hundred acres there. You’d be amazed how they—‘tree huggers,’ I believe you call them—will listen to reason when they get even a small slice of the pie.”

And no help, Sir John thought smugly, from the government of a state that had already, in another administration, reduced the once-powerful Coastal Commission to relative toothlessness.

“We’d better get back, John, I’m expecting a phone call.” The two men got up to leave. With one glance at Jazz’s face, contorted with intractable determination, they wordlessly agreed not to try to shake hands with her. They turned and walked toward the front door.

Stunned, Jazz sagged back in the desk chair. There was a ripping in her heart, a feeling of things being torn apart by a force she couldn’t control, vital parts being severed one from the other and the juices squeezed out of them. Seized by a last, desperate idea, she jumped up and ran to the front door.

“Sir John! When the Chinese hear about the covenant, what will they think? I know that they’re incredibly
superstitious. It would be the worst possible kind of bad luck to build on the land that’s protected by that covenant.”

“Nice try,” Jimmy Rosemont said, in a voice between a laugh and a sneer.

“You’re right, Miss Kilkullen,” Sir John said courteously. “But my friends are more superstitious about losing their fortunes than they are about bad luck. They’ll be willing to risk it, oh, yes, more than willing—delighted. There’s no cure for superstitions as effective as a billion and a half Communists pushing in your front door.”

“F
or the tenth time, Fernie,” Valerie said as she drove toward the Hacienda Valencia, “I don’t know why Jazz wants us to come today, but I didn’t see how we could refuse when she insisted that it was important. Jimmy said there’s no question that she’s going to have to sell, but he also said she could hold things up if she wanted to be difficult.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Fernanda grumbled, “but why couldn’t you have asked her to come to the hotel at our convenience, instead of agreeing to go see her? Georgina and I were planning to drive up to Beverly Hills today and do some shopping.”

“Don’t you two ever do anything but shop?”

“What else is there to do around here?” Fernanda murmured.

Thank heaven for shopping. No one would ever suspect, when two women set off to do some shopping, that they had a room reserved at a hotel where they could be together all afternoon long. And no one would ever be the wiser, even if they didn’t come back
laden with packages. She was so rich now that it would surprise no one if she shopped for weeks and never found anything that was fine enough to buy. It was going to be fun, being so difficult to please that nothing would ever be quite good enough.

Once they all got back to New York, after Jimmy had the sale in hand to his satisfaction, she and Georgina could be together as often as they wished. They would buy a small apartment in an impersonal, modern building without elevator men, midway between their two places, where they could meet in perfect freedom, without ever having to worry about servants or husbands or phone calls.

Fernanda’s whole body shivered as she thought of how perfectly she and Georgina were mated.

“Are you catching cold?” Valerie asked.

“There must be pollen in the air.”

“Hmmm.” Valerie neither agreed nor disagreed nor listened to her sister’s answer. She felt so agreeably smoothed out inside, as if some chronic, low-level, irritating physical problem had disappeared.

This enforced stay in Southern California, tedious though it was, had been the slow stretching and final snapping of a frayed cord. New York life, she thought, seen from a distance, was like riding an enormous carousel, a gaudy, brilliantly painted carousel with garish, larger-than-life horses, flaunting spangled headdresses of multi-colored plumes and draped in yards of glittering tinsel. The carousel spun so quickly that she hadn’t seen the spectators except as a blur; her world had been reduced to the other riders, rising and falling on the poles that held their horses, laughing and waving to each other in savage glee.

Then it had stopped for her, she had stepped off. Valerie felt astonished by the depth of her feeling of release. Although she still heard the shrieks of the riders above the cheap, intoxicating calliope music, each day the carousel receded further, each day the brassy music grew fainter, the riders had turned into a band of strangers.

She had finally understood that she had only to
raise the tip of one finger and the carousel would stop again for her. She could climb back on anytime she wanted to. But did she? Was it a ride worth taking? Being very, very rich, aside from what it could buy, allowed you not to give a damn about anybody else, it allowed you never to wonder what anyone thought, because you knew everybody was too busy envying you to judge you. Perhaps that was the ultimate luxury.

“Did Mother call you today?” Fernanda asked.

“Just to say hello. She was going out looking for a house with a real-estate lady and didn’t expect to be back till much later. Thank heaven she’s staying with the Whites in San Clemente. If she were at the hotel, I’d strangle her.”

“You’d think we were absolute children,” Fernanda agreed, “the way she keeps telling us to tie up the sale of the ranch before the permanent administrator is appointed. Does she imagine that it’s not on our minds? It reminds me of nothing so much as how she used to nag me to stand up straight when I was a little girl. She’d appear out of the woodwork and catch me slumping, or reading with round shoulders, and she’d snap, ‘Posture, Fernanda, posture.’ ”

“Has she said anything to you about Father?” Valerie asked.

“Not a single word. You’d think that with Father murdered and the beasts who did it caught and waiting for trial, Mother might at least have said something about it, even though she couldn’t stand him.”

“She’s still too bitter. She’ll always be too bitter,” Valerie said reflectively. “It shows you to what point she must have hated him. I’ve been wondering what it would have been like if they’d stayed minimally friendly after the divorce … been like for us, I mean.”

“I think he must have loved us,” Fernanda said slowly, “in his own way. I always had a feeling that he just
had
to, in that bossy, demanding, gruff manner of his. How could a man not love his children? But we’d have felt … oh,
easier
around him … less
 … frozen. We could have tried to get closer to him without being disloyal to Mother.”

“Even when I resented him the most,” Valerie said, “I always had to admit that he was a … force. You knew he was there. It seemed he would always be there. But Mother made him seem so unkind,
so
inaccessible … she made us afraid of him.”

“That wasn’t fair of her.” Fernanda’s voice was astonished.

“Don’t try to tell her that,” Valerie said dryly.

“What point would there be? It’s too late now, so why look for trouble?”

“Precisely,” Valerie agreed, thinking that this was the first time she and Fernie had talked about their father since he’d been killed. There had been the shock of the news and the confusion of the funeral, followed so quickly by the news of the will and the arrival of the Rosemonts and Sir John, that they had rarely been alone together long enough to have any sort of conversation. They hadn’t had any real time to mourn. And how could you not mourn your father? It felt good to exchange opinions with Fernie again. She’d missed the familiar way in which they understood each other with so few words. Fernie might be dizzy, but no one could say she was stupid.

Valerie turned the car into the driveway of the Hacienda Valencia and drove slowly through the splendid welcome of the giant trees. As she pulled up to the entrance to the hacienda, Jazz ran out to greet them, covering the awkwardness they all felt on entering the family home that now belonged to her. She offered them a variety of things to eat and drink.

“No, thanks, we’ve just finished lunch,” Valerie said. “What is it you wanted to talk to us about?” She was deliberately abrupt.

“Actually, it’s more show-and-tell than a formal talk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Fernanda was immediately suspicious. She would put nothing past Jazz, she thought, remembering how she had waltzed
off with Casey Nelson, waltzed off with the hacienda. Although Fernanda couldn’t lay claim to the man nor the house, she didn’t like having them snatched away from her.

“Here’s my proposition,” Jazz said. “You both come riding with me and listen to what I have to tell you, and then, if it doesn’t mean anything to you, I’ll sign everything that you want me to sign and everybody can go home. Your riding stuff is still here, in your old rooms.”

“Riding! Jazz, what kind of crazy ploy is this?” Valerie asked severely. She was wary of Jazz when she looked reckless and brave, as she did now, in spite of the fatigue betrayed by her eyes.

“Nothing more than what I said. A ride, and a show-and-tell. Look, I’m in a position where I have to go along with the two of you. I have no real choice, you know that. Just do me this one favor and I won’t ask for another.”

Valerie thought rapidly. Jimmy Rosemont had assured her that nothing important had been said when he and Sir John had seen Jazz a few days ago, a mere “blip on the radar screen,” he’d called it. But somehow she felt that there might be something to be gained by humoring Jazz in this typically off-the-wall scheme of hers. They were, after all, in this sale together. And she could use some exercise. It wasn’t safe to ride in Central Park anymore, it hadn’t been for years.