Valley of Shadows Page 4

  “Jimmy or Jim,” Keegan said. “Suit yourself. Anything but James.”

  “Jim, then,” Frank the Boxer said. He held the gate and stood to one side so Keegan could pass through. Keegan slipped the cards into his jacket’s inner pocket. The other man crossed the patio and rapped twice on the bungalow’s door. He swung it open and again stood aside so Keegan could enter.

  Inside, the bungalow was dimly lit. Keegan paused in the kitchenette. None of the lamps around the living room were on, and the curtain was drawn across the sliding glass door. The only light came through the frosted windows on either side of the front door. Keegan looked around the shadowy front room.

  Despite the top dollar Ida Fletcher must have been paying for a private bungalow, this could have been a blue-collar living room in San Pedro. A battered sofa and armchair were rearranged to face a large console television. The carpet, olive shag, looked worn and in need of a steaming. The living room’s one landscape painting hung askew on its nail. The kitchen’s furnishings—stove and refrigerator, round kitchen table—looked more Sears than Sotheby’s.

  A pretty woman who looked to be in her forties sat glumly at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. Her hair was piled up in a gravity-defying bouffant, and she barely glanced up from her thick Michener paperback when Keegan came in. The air in here smelled of toast and Aqua Net—and there was another scent Keegan couldn’t quite place. Was it the tang of marijuana? Keegan raised an eyebrow. Everyone minded their own business at the Chateau Marmont.

  Frank the Boxer gestured to the living room sofa, so Keegan went over and took a seat. Frank plopped down at the sofa’s far end, exerting a kind of gravitational pull when his weight sank in.

  The old woman herself sat in a big easy chair with her back to the sliding glass door. Even with the curtains drawn, the light coming from behind her made it difficult to see her features clearly. She looked small and frail in the big chair. She might have been sixty or ninety from all Keegan could tell, but he could make out a striking widow’s peak in her silver hair and a pair of deep-set, knowing eyes.

  “So good of you to come, Mr. Keegan,” she said. Her voice was spindly but sure. “Sorry about the formalities, but one can’t be too careful, can one?”

  Keegan nodded. “One cannot,” he said.

  “You’ve already met Frank,” the woman said, brushing a gaunt hand in the boxer’s direction. “I suppose you’d call him my factotum.”

  Big Frank nodded from the far end of the sofa, still with the air of playing along. Keegan nodded back. Was factotum French for bone crusher?

  “And that over there is Mildred Zinnia, my companion and personal assistant.”

  Keegan leaned forward to see past Frank’s bulk at the other end of the sofa. The woman in the kitchenette set her paperback face down on the table to mark her place. She nodded to Keegan demurely, her cigarette tucked between two fingers.

  “Like the flower,” Keegan said. “Your name, I mean.”

  Mildred Zinnia acknowledged his comment with a silent nod and then picked up her paperback again.

  Keegan leaned back on the sofa. An old lady, a bodyguard, and a wallflower; what grand times these three must have.

  For the next few minutes, Ida Fletcher explained what she expected of Keegan, and he did his best to look interested. Her voice was clipped and imperious, and, though the lighting made it difficult to see her face, her head bobbed in a way that emphasized that her notions were not to be taken lightly. How had someone as careless and sloppy as Donovan managed to stay in this woman’s good graces?

  Her monologue continued: Though she currently lived at the Chateau Marmont, she did own a house in Bel Air and another in Newport Beach. She was spare with the details, but certain parties persisted in plotting against her. An extensive cabal of them had been conspiring for years, hence she required the services of a discreet and dependable investigator to ensure her safety.

  Keegan had come highly recommended, she assured him. If this job interested him, he would be supplied with a strongbox that was to be kept in his office safe. Keegan’s first duty as her employee would be simple but essential: he was to visit her two properties at least once each week to make sure nothing was amiss. The keys to both those houses were in the strongbox and should be kept in Keegan’s safe when they were not in use.

  Her instructions were well spoken and clear—and deceptively rational. With all her talk about secret machinations and schemes against her, she was no doubt as mentally afflicted as Donovan had promised. But her illness did nothing to cloud her precise and formal diction. She wore her paranoia like a designer gown: with poise and with her chin held high.

  It took her about fifteen minutes to outline her expectations for Keegan, and then, abruptly, she was done.

  “I expect you to keep my best interests always in mind, Mr. Keegan,” she said. “And for that, I will pay you handsomely.” She shifted aslant in her chair then, so she was no longer quite facing Keegan. “If you should see Mr. Donovan,” she said, “do give him my best.”

  It took Keegan a beat to realize it, but he was being dismissed.

  Frank the Boxer stood, so Keegan did as well. Keegan took a step toward the old woman and held out his hand. “It was nice to have met you,” he said, but the old woman glanced at his extended hand and then looked away. Perhaps she was a germaphobe as well. Frank the Boxer laid a consoling hand on Keegan’s shoulder and subtly steered him back through the kitchenette to the front door.

  Zinnia had left her spot at the kitchen table and stood beside the doorway now. She held a strongbox in front of her with both hands as if making a formal presentation. Like a bashful teen, she didn’t seem capable of looking at Keegan as he took the box by the brass handle on top. Her mission accomplished, she slipped back in the direction of the paperback novel that waited for her, face down on the kitchen table.

  Frank the Boxer opened the door, and Keegan went out through it, carrying the strongbox by its handle.

  Outside in the courtyard, with the gate closed behind them, the big man glanced over his shoulder at the bungalow and then offered Keegan a shrug and a grin, like the two of them were in on a joke.

  “She’s got her ways,” he said, “but she’ll grow on you. It takes her a while to warm up to a stranger.” He held up a key—presumably it opened the strongbox. “The box goes in the safe,” Frank reminded him. “The key stays with you at all times.” He grinned again, as if to say he was only the messenger.

  Keegan nodded and took the key with his free hand. He slipped it into his trouser pocket. The two of them headed back across the courtyard. In the small lobby, the bow-tied concierge was still behind his desk. He fussed with some papers and ignored them both elaborately.

  Frank the Boxer reached inside his trouser pocket and pulled out an envelope, which he held discreetly in the narrow space between them. “This is your retainer,” he said. He pressed it into Keegan’s free hand, and Keegan slipped it into the inner pocket of his blazer.

  OUT ON SUNSET Boulevard, the traffic, the billboards, the shabby strip malls had all persisted during Keegan’s respite in the Chateau Marmont. Outside that shadowy oasis, the light seemed implausibly bright, the air acrid with smog. Keegan paused again on the sidewalk, watching for a lull in traffic.

  He could see himself reflected in Schwab’s big front window across the street, a run-of-the-mill Angeleno, notable only because he was holding a strongbox by the handle. When he saw a lull in traffic, he jogged across the street, pausing in the middle to let a red open-aired sightseeing bus pass by. He unlocked his car on the driver’s side, bent to set the strongbox in the passenger seat, and climbed in behind the wheel.

  Keegan put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the engine. He slipped the envelope from inside his jacket pocket. It was unsealed, the flap tucked in. He took out the cash. It was all in hundred-dollar bills—how many of them, Keegan couldn’t guess—but it was enough that he reflexively glanced around at the passersb
y on the sidewalk and reached back to push down the door’s lock.

  “Richer than Jesus,” he said out loud.

  He glanced across the street at the high walls of the Chateau Marmont and then back down at the fan of banknotes in his hands. The old lady was the golden goose old Donovan had promised she would be. Why did the situation only make Keegan feel uneasy?

  He put the money back in the envelope and set it on the passenger seat next to the strongbox. He started up the car and pulled out onto Sunset. The last innings of today’s World Series game were on the radio—another Dodgers’ win. His heart wasn’t in it, though. He kept glancing down at the envelope in the seat beside him.

  BACK IN THE office, Mrs. Dodd sat behind her desk with her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. Keegan, who’d been pacing while she counted, watched her lean back in her swivel chair and frown down at the stacks of cash she’d taken from Ida Fletcher’s envelope. Five stacks of ten bills, each one a hundred-dollar note. Five thousand dollars was more than Keegan had brought in so far that year, and it was already October. Mrs. Dodd took off her glasses, looking a bit pale, and set them on the desk blotter in front of her.

  It made no sense to either of them, this kind of windfall. It was obscene, and there was no record that this money even existed—no voucher, no invoice, no itemized receipt. They’d scrimped throughout the summer, saving pennies here and there, taking whatever piecemeal divorce or insurance cases came their way. More than once in the last few months, Keegan had had to ask Mrs. Dodd to wait a day or two before she cashed her paycheck. Twice he’d been so late to pay the phone bill he’d received the envelope stamped FINAL NOTICE.

  Now, suddenly flush, he didn’t feel the surge of relief he would have expected. He felt—well, he wasn’t sure what he felt. Apprehensive was the word that came most readily to mind. None of this felt right. Old Donovan might have been able to turn a blithe blind eye in this situation, but Keegan had too many questions. He looked down at the stacks of cash and then at Mrs. Dodd. “Well?” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Would it be too soon to ask for a raise?”

  Keegan dug his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I’m serious,” he said. “You think we should keep it?”

  Mrs. Dodd looked up at him, eyebrows raised, her forehead a stave of nearly parallel lines. “Why wouldn’t we?” she asked wryly. “We need money”—she hovered a palm over the stacks of cash on her desk—“and this is what people actually meant when they invented that word.”

  Keegan sighed. It was hard to put into words the reservations he was feeling. He just had a sense of foreboding, a sense that something wasn’t kosher. “You don’t think this counts as fleecing an old lady who doesn’t know any better?”

  Mrs. Dodd shrugged, as if maybe, in some circumstances, swindling the elderly might not be as unsavory as he was making it sound. “You met her,” Mrs. Dodd said. “Did she seem crazy?”

  Maybe that was where the problem lay. The old lady’s manner—her precise diction, her imperious demeanor, her exacting directions—undercut what seemed to be a clear case of delusion. But who was to say she didn’t have good reason to act paranoid? When you were richer than Croesus and Jesus put together, wouldn’t there be plenty of schemers angling for your fortune? Her suspicions might be perfectly rational.

  But then again, maybe Keegan was rationalizing. Maybe he was trying to shine the best light on something a better man would see as a clear ethical breech. It was a quandary to be sure. He thought of Donovan that night at the Ambassador’s pool. She won’t even let you write her out a receipt, he’d bragged. The IRS don’t need to know a thing. Donovan had probably never entertained an ethical concern in his life. Shaking down an old lady. Hiding funds from the IRS. That kind of thing was par for Donovan’s course.

  Keegan again looked down at the cash on Mrs. Dodd’s desk. There the dilemma lay, in neat piles, under harsh fluorescent lights. Much as he needed money, there was no way Keegan could ignore all its messy implications. It made his head ache.

  But did she seem crazy? That had been Mrs. Dodd’s question.

  “Remember Dottie Gordon?” Keegan said. She’d been a client from a few years back, an old divorcee out in Redondo Beach.

  “The one that wanted you to check out her daughter’s fiancé?”

  “Yeah,” Keegan said. “Her. Did I tell you she thought her father-in-law was involved in the Lindbergh Case?”

  “Really?”

  Keegan nodded. He dug his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “And my own mother used to ward off bad luck with a pinch of salt.”

  Mrs. Dodd nodded and made a rolling motion with one of her hands, goading Keegan to keep going. She seemed to like this line of reasoning. “I think I see where you’re headed with this,” she said. “Continue.”

  Keegan shrugged. “I guess Ida Fletcher didn’t seem any more irrational than some other old women I’ve known.” He could, of course, have mentioned Mrs. Dodd herself. She carried a rabbit’s foot on her keychain and consulted her horoscope every morning before she’d take the cover off her typewriter. And, of course, there were her theories about ghosts and dogs and elevators. “So maybe ‘crazy’ is too strong a word.”

  Mrs. Dodd nodded, like she’d been waiting for him to arrive at the conclusion she’d known all along. “I think you’re absolutely right there, boss,” she said. “She’s a grown adult. She can spend her money how she likes.”

  Keegan nodded. “It just feels wrong,” he said.

  Mrs. Dodd circled a hand over the desktop again. “For this kind of money, I think we can put up with a little discomfort,” she said. “So, what’s with the strongbox?”

  Until she’d mentioned it, Keegan had more or less forgotten the steel box he’d set on the corner of Mrs. Dodd’s desk when he’d first come in through the door. The cash had mesmerized him, and he scolded himself for letting it distract him from the actual job he was hired to do. “We’re supposed to put it in the safe,” he said. “I’m not sure what’s in it.”

  “Well, let’s take a look,” Mrs. Dodd said. “Did she give you a key?”

  Keegan fished the key from his trouser pocket. He looked down at it in his palm, a thumb-worn brass thing no longer than a paperclip. He wasn’t sure about this.

  Mrs. Dodd held out her palm. “If this thing is being kept in our office,” she said, “we need to know what’s inside it.”

  “I don’t know,” Keegan said. “What if we don’t end up taking the job?”

  Mrs. Dodd gave him a look like he was being impossibly contrary. She looked down at the money and back up again. “Looks to me like you’ve already taken the job,” she said. She held out her open hand and waved her fingers impatiently. “Come on, boss. What if it’s full of drugs?” she said. “What if there’s a human head in there? If it’s going to be kept in the office, we need to know what’s inside.”

  “A human head wouldn’t fit,” Keegan told her.

  “It would if you tried hard enough,” she corrected him. “Just give me the key already.”

  She was right, Keegan knew. Money had changed hands. At least until he could talk to Ida Fletcher again, he was in her employ. And Mrs. Dodd was also right about opening the box. This was a PI’s office, not a safe deposit vault. If there was anything iffy in the box, he’d be taking the fall if it came to light. He dropped the key into Mrs. Dodd’s hand.

  She pulled the box in front of her and slipped the key into the lock. She turned it and then glanced up at Keegan, clearly enjoying the drama of the moment. With an odd flourish, she lifted the lid.

  A brass key ring with a dozen or so keys on it lay on top of a stack of papers—sheets and receipts and envelopes of various sizes. Mrs. Dodd dug through to the bottom, but all she found was paper. She seemed a little put out that there wasn’t a drawstring pouch of emeralds or a cache of Spanish doubloons, but her disappointment was short-lived. She picked up the top envelope and pu
lled out the document it contained. She put her reading glasses back on and started to skim. After a few seconds, she smiled and turned the pages to face Keegan, marking a certain passage with her index finger.

  “Right here, boss,” she said. “‘…of sound mind and body…’” It was a will she was holding. “If the old lady’s sane enough for the State of California, she’s sane enough for us.” Her case closed, she went back to skimming the will, flipping through the pages one by one. She got to the final page, the one with all the formal signatures. “Say,” she said, glancing back at the first page, “this thing’s brand new.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “August thirtieth,” she said, again turning it so he could see. “The ink’s barely dry.”

  Keegan took the will from her and looked it over. It had been drawn up by a Santa Monica law firm and signed as witness by old Donovan himself, in his big, blocky ballpoint cursive.

  Keegan flipped back through the pages. He was no lawyer, but it looked like the bulk of Ida Fletcher’s estate would go to a nephew by the name of Daniel Church, who lived in Paris.

  Smaller shares were parceled out to a few others, including Frank the Boxer and Mildred Zinnia, the old lady’s assistant. There was another name that Keegan didn’t recognize: Lillian Cole. Donovan, himself, was included at the very end. He’d be getting ten thousand dollars when Ida Fletcher cashed in her chips—enough for a lifetime membership in Tempe’s swankiest country club, if he ever wanted to try out his new putter. Keegan again thought of old Donovan, poolside at the Ambassador, cigar in hand, scarlet-faced from all that coughing. All he had to do was manage to outlive the old lady, and he’d get the cash. Keegan wouldn’t bet on it, though.

  Keegan folded the will and put it back in its envelope and then he and Mrs. Dodd dug through the rest of the box’s contents. They opened the envelopes and reported the contents—deeds and leases, stock certificates and tax returns, the pink slips to a Cadillac, a Daimler, and a Jaguar. There was a deed to another house the old girl hadn’t mentioned in her instructions, this one in Avalon, over on Catalina Island. It hadn’t been put on Keegan’s weekly rounds, thank God. The ferry ride out there and back would have taken up most of a day.