The Bookwoman's Last Fling (20 page)

“Well,” I said after a while, “unless he had a printing press, he was getting whatever he had from somebody. Did he ever mention owing anyone big sums of cash?”

“He wouldn't tell me something like that. He owed me some.”

“Could I ask how much?”

“Ten grand.”

“That's a fair sum.”

“It adds up over the years.”

“And he never paid you any of it back?”

“After a while you just knew. If you loaned it to Cameron, you could kiss it good-bye.”

“And I imagine after some years of that, sources dry up.”

“You got it. When your own brothers won't loan you a dime, where the hell
can
you go?”

“He was tapped with Damon too?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Damon's got a lot more brains than I have.” He lit another cigar. “You ever known anybody who's broke one day, flush the next?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah.” I told him about a bookseller whose shop was just up the block from mine. “Somehow he always had the money to score some books, but then he couldn't get Public Service paid so he could turn on his lights.”

“That would be Cameron, if he'd been into books.”

I asked him again what he remembered about Candice and he said, almost in the same breath, “Finest woman I ever knew. I think my dad was one lucky old bastard. Always did think so.”

“What was she like?”

“Well, hell.” He scratched his chin. “She was honest, pretty, I always thought a straight-shooter. What else can I say?”

“You never had a disagreement with her? Never any cross words?”

“I wouldn't do that, and you know what? Neither would she. She was incredibly easy-tempered. Just a nice woman all around. It would be like picking a fight with one of God's angels. I know that sounds corny.”

“Damon said she slept around. You know anything about that?”

“She never slept around with me, if that's what you're asking. Look, I made it a point not to talk about her.”

“And you've got no idea why anyone would've harmed her.”

“Oh hell, no. I don't know where you got that idea, but you can forget it. It was an accident, pure and simple.”

“What about her relationship with your dad?”

“They lived for each other, as far as I could see.”

“Did you see them much?”

“Not at all the last ten years. They were in Idaho a lot; and even when they were out here I didn't see 'em. I did a lot of meets in the Midwest then, and up in Washington.”

“What about Sharon?”

“What about her?”

“Do you like her?”

“That's a funny question. Why would I not like her?”

“No reason. Just a question.”

“I think she's a little weird, since you ask. I mean, why would anybody with all her money lock herself away on a two-bit horse farm like that? But yeah, I like her fine.”

The announcer called the horses for the first race.

“You got anything running today?”

He shook his head. “Two tomorrow, though. But I'm just about done here—gonna break camp this week and take my horses south.”

“I didn't know you ever raced down there.”

“Somebody's got to ride herd on Junior and Damon when they bring our good ones out.”

We stood quietly for a few moments, watching the crowd now building quickly across the way. “I imagine I'll want to talk to you again,” I said.

“You know where I'm at.”

“I'm on a pretty short leash. Sandy wants me to wind it up.”

“Tell him where to stick it. Hell, if he fires you, you can come down to Santa Anita and walk horses for me.”

In my tack room I lay on the bunk and thought about my shifting fortunes. Baxter had become a pleasant surprise. Sandy was turning unpleasant. Junior would soon be here. I thought about the strangeness of the human animal, about his quirks and phobias and manias. I thought about the many faces of bibliomania and I dozed lightly until the call for the third race.

 

I spent all afternoon asking questions. Suddenly I felt free of Sandy's heavy boot on my back, and by the time I struck out across the stable area I had recaptured the attitude and swagger of a young cop. This might be an illusion, but for now Bax had given me a breath of fresh air. I drifted through the barns talking to grizzled old horsemen, ginneys, anyone of a certain age who might remember old Geiger and his glamorous young wife. I put a note on the office bulletin board, “Seeking information on Candice and H. R. Geiger, contact Janeway, Barn 26.” A risky tactic, I thought, but I went with Erin's words echoing in my head:
Take a chance and shake things up.
That's what I did, and in no time I was back in my natural frame of mind.

I found surprising numbers of people who remembered Candice. I talked to two old trainers who claimed their memories were as vivid as yesterday. They could still see old Geiger sitting with his pretty wife in the shedrow of Barn 28. “He had that barn every year for a while, and he'd sit in the shade for an hour or two almost every afternoon and talk with just about anybody who came by,” said Woody Benton. “I remember when I was a young upstart just getting my act together; I remember taking a gimpy horse past his shedrow and saying, ‘Hey, Mr. Geiger, can you tell me what's wrong with this horse?' And he looked up and said, ‘Trot him down the shedrow,' and I did. Then he got up and felt the horse's legs and said, ‘He's just burnt out, needs to be rested a while. Find a place where you can pull off his shoes and just let him find himself.' But of course we couldn't do that. I was working for old man Sapper then, and we ran them claiming horses back every week, stood 'em in ice and just ran the bejesus out of 'em. That horse still had no end of heart, man—he'd just run and run till he broke down, and that's what he did. He run his heart out for us and Sapper sold him to the killers.”

“What about Mrs. Geiger?”

“A real sweetie. She came out of the tack room while the old man and I were having that very conversation, and said, ‘Afternoon, Woody.' Hell, I didn't even think she knew my name, and I stammered something stupid and got out of their way. But I always remember her, every time I pass that shedrow I think of those days and what she was like. A lovely, classy, kindhearted woman.”

“She knew everybody's name, from the ginneys across the way to the jockeys who rode for them,” said a trainer in the next barn.
Class
was the word that came up most often. “She had buckets of class and that's something you can't ever fake. Class never lords it over the common man, and she treated everybody alike. Insisted on us all calling her Candice, never Mrs. G. I never got used to that, but that's what she wanted and that's what we all did.”

“Candice,” said an old man I found up near the clocker's stand. “She'd scold you if you forgot to use her first name, but always in a good-natured laughing way.”

None of them had any idea about her interest in books. They knew nothing about her life as heiress to the Ritchey fortune. They knew her as Geiger's pretty, young wife who died young.

Candice. The woman in white.

I took detailed notes: names, recollections, barn numbers.

She would've been in her thirties then, just a damn striking figure in that white dress. Young enough to shine, old enough to have that edge of authority. You don't ever forget someone like Candice. Not ever.

Jerry Bryce, Barn 9, stared off into space and remembered the days of Candice.

I never did get my own stable. Still rubbing horses for other guys after forty years. Seems like I worked for most every trainer who ever raced in Northern California since the fifties.

I worked for Geiger in the mid-sixties, I was his head ginney, which means I was in charge of that barn when he wasn't there. We were all in love with Candice; the whole goddam shedrow came to a dead stop when they arrived. You'd see her out of the corner of your eye; that's all you dared to do, you never wanted to be caught gawking. Geiger had eyes like a hawk, he didn't miss anything when she was around. He watched her like he'd watch a prize filly.

We all loved her. Me more than most, with good reason.

In 1966 she paid for my son's funeral. Nobody was to know, and nobody
did
know till now. Guess she's beyond caring. My son Jason got kicked in the head by a horse and she gave me a check to cover the expenses. It was signed Candice Ritchey, I remember that. Candice Ritchey, not Geiger, but it went right through without a hitch. I never knew anything about the name Ritchey. But long before that, I always thought she was something special.

I even tried to read that book about the woman in white, but I couldn't get past first base. Too much flowery bullshit for my taste. Then somebody gave me the Classics comic book and I read that. Tried to imagine her in that part and I just couldn't put her there. She was way bigger than that ghost story. But I've still got the comic book. Go figure.

I asked them all if they remembered ever hearing her use the nicknames Tricky Dicky or the Mad Hatter for friends, but none of them did. At the end of the day I stopped at the office to check the bulletin board. Someone had ripped my note down. I wrote another and this time I added the word REWARD in large red letters. Baxter's offer was a nice hole card in case Sandy became impossible, but I had a feeling of growing urgency. If there was any shaking to be done, this was the time.

I felt better. I was moving again. I hurried into the gathering dusk to meet Erin.

She was late. I sat at the restaurant's bar and cooled my heels for almost thirty minutes before she came in. I raised my hand and she saw me, changed her course on a dime, and drifted over to plop on the open stool next to mine. “You look frazzled,” I said.

She ordered a gin and tonic and smiled sweetly. “I should be, I've been working like a dog all day on your case.”

“Did you wrap it up yet?”

“Not quite, wise guy. But speaking of dubious accomplishment, how did
you
do today?”

I told her and she nodded her approval. “Now you seem to be getting somewhere; I must atone for my snide remark. And you didn't even need to refer to your notes to tell me about it.”

“Notes are for sissies. You may not know this but I have full recall of every interview I've ever done.”

“Wow, how impressive, I
didn't
know. They must run into hundreds.”

“In fact, thousands. But tell us, doll, how did you really waste your time today?”

“Doll?” She gave me that bitter little smile she has when there's a cat about to come out of a bag. “I want you to remember you said that when I tell you what I really did today.”

Suddenly I sat up and paid attention. I always pay attention when she takes on that tone.

“I want you to remember the dismissal and derision I've had to put up with. The snide attitude, the innuendo of your silence.”

“My silence has innuendo?”

“
Oh,
does it ever.”

“That was a completely respectful silence. I'd even call it reverent.”

“Well, try your reverence on this. I went down to the farm today.”

I stared at her.

“Not a disparaging word from you, Cliff, I'm warning you,” she said. “Not…one…word.”

“May I at least ask why? Did you do this to teach me a lesson?”

“That must have been it. I guess I wanted you to know how it feels to be pushed aside and left behind and told nothing. To fly all the way out here and not even be told where you're going.”

We stared at each other in the mirror. She sipped her drink and continued to look frazzled. Then she broke into that lovely smile and I waited tensely for the punch line.

“Actually I had a hunch,” she said. “You know, one of those things you're always getting between the snide attitude and the silent innuendo.”

I nodded silently, warily.

“It occurred to me, while you were giving me all the safe tours of duty, that you might not be finished with that farm yet. So I drove down there to take a look at it.”

I closed my weary eyes and lapsed into silent innuendo. Unfazed, she said, “I also stopped in to see the coroner.”

That had been on my list of things to do before I'd had my brains scrambled.

“I've got a copy of his report for you,” she said, drawing me along.

I thanked her politely, still waiting for her punch line.

“It doesn't say much anyway, so I wasted some time.”

“Kinda what you're doing now.”

“Eventually I went on out to the farm. At first I thought I'd drive up to the gate and look at it. You know, just to rattle your cage. It was obvious there was no one home, but this hunch of mine kept nagging away.”

“Please tell me you didn't climb over the gate.”

“I just watched it and all the time I could feel that hunch growing, like
there's something else here,
like
he didn't get it all yet.
”

“You're really enjoying the hell out of this, aren't you?”

“Yes, I am. And I should warn you before we proceed, you are going to have a huge pile of egg on your face. Now, knowing all that, do you wish to continue anyway?”

I sighed loudly but my heart was going like a trip-hammer. She said, “Was that a yes?” and I nodded wildly with my eyes rolling back in my head.

“That's when it occurred to me to check out the neighbors.”

“What neighbors?”

“Why, whoever's there,
doll.
And it turns out there
is
another farm about half a mile on down the road. It's smaller, more like a country estate than a farm. You can't see it from the Geiger place; you've got to go back out to the main road, drive till you see the mailbox, and turn in there. The road doubles back until that place backs right up to Geiger's. If you had gone to the end of that field, you'd be right on the edge of it. Then you'd walk up a short path through the trees and presto, you're there, right in their backyard.”

I made a
go on
gesture with my hands.

“It was owned by a man named Medill Ronda. He died and his daughter has it now. She's what people in less sensitive times used to call a spinster. Sixty but doesn't look it. I know she's sixty because she told me she and Candice were born in the same year.”

“She told you about Candice?”

“They became close friends.”

For once I was speechless.

“She was the first real friend Candice ever had her own age.”

“How'd she know that?”

“Candice told her, silly. Do you want to hear this or not?”

I nodded lamely in her direction.

“They became friends very quickly and were soon chums, walk-across-the-field-and-share-your-most-intimate-thoughts-type friends. You ever had a friend like that?”

“Only you, you lovely warm and cuddly woman.”

“Now you're getting back in my good graces.”

“Damn, I'm trying.”

“Candice was unhappy in her marriage.”

“And this woman told you that.”

“Among other things. It wasn't quite the idyllic love nest we've heard it was.”

She sipped her drink and looked at me in the mirror. “Her name is Gail.”

My eyes opened wide in disbelief. The woman Louie had remembered was named Gail. Candice and Gail had become tight friends.

“She came all the way up here with me just to talk to you,” Erin said. She covered my hand with both of hers. “Let's go, I'm starving.”

 

She had put Gail Ronda in a good hotel overlooking the bay: the least we could do, she said. “Once I told her you're looking into Candice's death, she wanted to come; in fact she got fairly insistent. I think she's been bothered by this for years.”

She was a tiny, fit-looking woman with straw-colored hair and pale blue eyes. I shook her hand warmly and we booked a table at the best restaurant we could find, a place in Berkeley that came highly recommended by both the hotel desk clerk and the concierge. In the car, she said, “Erin tells me you were a police detective and can find out about anything.”

“I like to tell people that. But it took Erin to find you.”

“Oh, he'd have found you eventually,” Erin said wearily. “He was just getting started when they discovered Cameron. Then the place was full of cops and off limits for a while.”

I looked at Gail in the rearview mirror. “Did the police talk to you yet?”

“Yes, they came out that same day, but there was nothing I could tell them. I didn't hear or see anything. I have no idea what happened to him.”

“Did you tell them about Candice?”

“Yes, but they didn't see the connection. Candice had very little to do with any of them, especially Cameron. And the police have always accepted her death as an accident.”

“But you don't believe that.”

“
I
don't know,” she said. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to be short, but how can I know that? Obviously it still bothers me even after all these years. Candice was much too careful to eat anything without knowing exactly what it was, and she always had her antidote within reach.”

“Do you know if she had it that day?”

“They said it was there on the table beside her, but she never used it.”

“Maybe she was overwhelmed, maybe the allergic reaction was so sudden she never had a chance.”

“That's what they all thought. And I suppose that's possible.”

“But you didn't believe it,” I said again, and this time she only shook her head.

I turned into Berkeley and a few minutes later we reached the restaurant. She didn't drink and we didn't need to, so I had them seat us at a corner table well away from the noise of the bar. We chatted about the weather, the sorry mess in Washington, the 49ers. She was a news hawk and an avid football fan and I liked her, more as time went on. She had a reluctant smile that I soon discovered was a symptom of shyness. We put in a dinner order and at last we got back on point. “Did Candice ever mention her books?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not in any detail. She was always too polite to bring it up.”

“Embarrassed by her wealth, maybe?”

“And by the fact that I had nothing even remotely like that in my own life.”

“Do you remember how the subject came up?”

“No, but I do remember her looking at my bookshelves one day. I've a few common books; they're well read and tattered.
Little House on the Prairie. Bobbsey Twins. Five Little Peppers.
Things from my own childhood. She asked what I liked, what I'd read. Later she said she had always loved books and had a few things as well.”

“Wow, she
was
modest,” Erin said.

I made some notes and moved her back to Candice and Geiger. “Most of the people I've talked to would be surprised at what you told Erin about Candice and old Geiger,” I said. “I hear everywhere how happy she was.”

“She could make you believe that. But how many of us really know what goes on between two people?”

“So what did go on?”

“As time went on, he became quite controlling. And Candice, who had been such a happy person, began to have times of moody despair.”

“Do you know what happened to cause such a change?”

“I had my suspicions, but it's not something I like to talk about.”

I raised my eyebrows and blundered onward. “Are we talking about sexual problems?”

Her cheeks reddened.

“I only ask because that happens to a lot of guys, some even younger than he was. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but some men still can't face it.”

“Well, for whatever reason, he became much more possessive. He wanted her with him all the time. They had a private box high in the grandstand, and afterward she would go to the barn and sit with him while the horses cooled out. She always wore that white dress he had bought her and they went through the strange ritual of having her in the pictures.”

“What did she think of that?”

“She did it because he wanted her to. She tolerated it; then she endured it. He tried to make her go racing with him as often as he could. That became less and less. Whenever one of his stablehands spoke to her, she felt his eyes watching them.”

“Why didn't she leave him?”

“She didn't think that way. What good does it do to have all the options in the world when you don't believe you have any? She was always terrified of being alone after her dad died.”

“She should've known better. Even without the money, she'd be a prize catch.”

“But what difference would that make if she didn't believe it?”

“Yeah, it's easy for me to say.”

“For me as well. I used to tell her what an exceptional woman she was, but I think it only embarrassed her to hear things like that.”

“She didn't believe it.”

“No. I remember once she said, ‘There are days when I wish I had been born without a dime.' But then almost in the same breath she'd say, ‘But my God, what would I do without Daddy's millions?' She hated the thought of becoming a whiner. Little Miss Rich Girl feeling sorry for herself, that kind of thing.”

“Doesn't sound like her dad did her any favors in life.”

“You're probably right. If he were alive and heard this I'm sure he'd die all over again. My own father was a lot like that, so I know. That may be part of why Candice and I became such friends so quickly. Our fathers wanted the best for us, they absolutely did, but they looked at the world differently after we were born. They saw threats everywhere. A man like that can cripple a girl's growth.”

Our dinners arrived and we began to eat. “This salmon is wonderful,” Erin said, but I had barely tasted it. “C'mon, Cliff, relax and eat something.”

Suddenly I said, “Do you think Geiger might have killed her?”

I thought she'd be shocked but she wasn't. “No,” she said without hesitating. “No way.”