Runyon didn’t trust himself to respond.
He stood watching Kelso back his cruiser around, Sandra maneuver her Chrysler into position behind it. She glanced over at him again just before they pulled out, her face pale and sweat beaded. He gave her a thumbs-up gesture that she didn’t acknowledge. She had the fearful look of a prisoner awaiting sentence by a hanging judge.
10
Sunday mornings are quiet times in my household. We’re not churchgoers, but that doesn’t mean, no matter what the hard-core religious right would have you believe, that we lack spirituality or traditional family values. Organized religion is fine for some people; for others it’s restrictive and unnecessary. There’s a wryly funny and sage comment in an Agatha Christie film I saw once that pretty much sums up my position, and Kerry’s. One of the characters in the film tells Miss Marple that an odd young man of her acquaintance was once arrested for exposing himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral. After a thoughtful moment, Miss Marple replies, “Well, we all worship in our own way.”
I got up first and cooked breakfast, and Emily and I spent some quality time together, talking about this and that, things that matter to eleven-year-old girls and their doting adoptive fathers, while Kerry had her breakfast in bed and read everything in the Sunday paper except the ads. She doesn’t share my anti-news philosophy. Her attitude is the generally accepted one that the better informed you are, the better able you are to cope. We’ve had any number of discussions on the subject, my stance being the generally unaccepted one that the better informed you are, the more frustrated and crazy you’re liable to become. Unless you’re a dedicated activist, there’s damn little you can do about such matters as global terrorism, indefensible wars on foreign soil and escalating body counts, widespread political corruption, drug-related gang violence, and all the other insanities that make up the daily news. Cast your vote, contribute to appropriate causes, raise your public voice now and then, try to make a difference in small, work-related ways, and hope for the best-that’s about it. You don’t need daily details of barbarism and polarized op-ed columns and strings of depressing statistics to do any of those things. One man’s opinion. We all worship in our own way and we all get through the best way we can.
Emily and I cleaned up the kitchen, after which she went into her room to commune with her iPod and I shut myself inside Kerry’s office to find out if Celeste Ogden was available. After Tamara’s call last night, and her report on what she’d found in Nancy Mathias’s diary, I agreed that we were justified in pursuing an investigation. Up to a point. Cases like this, as I’d tried to tell Mrs. Ogden on Friday, are tricky. Unless you turn up incontrovertible evidence that a crime has been committed, there’s only so much you can do. We’d take it one step at a time, see what developed. If nothing did, we’d bow out whether the client liked it or not.
Might as well notify her right away. Sundays are quiet days, family days, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule that says you can’t sneak in a little business now and then.
Celeste Ogden answered the phone herself. She wasn’t surprised to hear from me on a Sunday morning, and all she said when I told her we were going ahead was, “Now you understand what kind of man he is, why I believe he was responsible for Nancy’s death.” She hadn’t expected anything less from me.
“I understand why you have suspicions, yes.”
“He killed her,” she said. “Whether it was his hand that pushed her down those stairs or not.”
“If he did it may or may not be provable, no matter what our investigation turns up. There’s nothing specific among her effects or in her diary to suggest foul play, or even a motive for foul play.”
“You’re capable of reading between the lines, just as I am.”
I didn’t see any purpose in telling her that I hadn’t gone through the diary discs myself. I said, “A few questions, Mrs. Ogden.”
“Of course.”
I consulted the notes I’d made during Tamara’s call. “The diary entry dated August 23. Your sister was so upset about something she couldn’t write about it. Any idea what it was?”
“No. Something to do with him, no doubt.”
“Two days later she wrote that she told her husband about it. An affair or brief sexual encounter, possibly?”
“Nancy? Lord, no. Never.”
“Why so positive?”
“Her morals would never have allowed an extramarital affair. My sister was the most moral person I’ve ever known. She was still a virgin, and proud of the fact, when she married John Ring at age twenty-four.”
I took the opinion with a few grains of salt. People change as they get older; so do their morals. If Nancy Mathias’s closed-off life and coldly controlling husband had become intolerable enough, it was entirely possible that she’d turned to another man for comfort and understanding.
“What do you think she was afraid to go through alone at D’s?”
“I don’t know. Some sort of crisis, obviously. Nancy was very dependent-I believe I told you that. She couldn’t bear to be alone, particularly during any sort of crisis. When John, her first husband, died she surrounded herself with people for weeks afterward.”
“Do you know her husband’s assistant, the man named Drax?”
“Anthony Drax. I met him at the funeral.”
“What do you think of him?”
“He’s a perfect complement to his employer. Brilliant, charming, ambitious, and bereft of any decent human feelings. No doubt that’s why he was hired.”
“ ‘D’ might stand for Drax,” I said.
“I don’t see how it could. Nancy didn’t care for the man any more than I did. She made that plain enough.”
“Do any of her friends or acquaintances have names that start with ‘D’?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Her reference to doing something drastic,” I said. “Was she capable of divorcing Mathias?”
“If she were driven to it. Divorce or legal separation-yes, that’s possible. She made an appointment with her attorney three days before her death, but she didn’t keep it. I know because I called him.”
“She didn’t tell him what she wanted to see him about?”
“Apparently not. He said she sounded upset on the phone.”
“You told me there was no prenuptial agreement. Did Nancy keep any assets in her own name when she and Mathias were married, assets he would’ve lost out on in a community property divorce?”
“John’s stocks and bonds. She felt that the portfolio should remain in her name, in honor of his memory.”
“Did Mathias object?”
“She said he didn’t.”
“How much does the portfolio amount to?”
“I don’t know exactly. Several hundred thousand dollars.”
“Are any of the bonds the bearer type?”
“Yes. I thought of that, too.”
Motive there, if Mathias needed a large sum of money in a hurry and had access to those bearer bonds and had been cashing them on the sly.
She said, “There are other possibilities besides financial gain, you know. A divorce or separation would have been an embarrassment to him, a blow to his ego. And a professional distraction.”
“People don’t commit murder because they’re embarrassed or distracted.”
“Don’t they? You don’t know him as I do. That man is capable of anything to further his own ends.”
I let that pass. “One of the things that stands out among your sister’s records is the ten-thousand-dollar check to T. R. Quentin. Do you know who that is?”
“An artist she admired, evidently. Someone I’ve never met.”
“So the check could be for the purchase of some of his paintings.”
