“So you’d rather let me hear it from him?”
Fred grinned; it wasn’t pretty. “You are a detective.”
In the inner office, Overell stood as Fred pulled up a chair for me next to the client’s. As the financier and I shook hands, Fred said, “Mr. Overell, this is Nathan Heller, the president of this agency, and my most trusted associate.”
He left out that I wasn’t local. Which I didn’t disagree with him for doing-it was good tactically.
“Of course, Mr. Heller commands our top rate, Mr. Overell-one hundred a day.”
“No problem.”
“We get expenses, and require a two-hundred dollar retainer, non-refundable.”
“Fine.”
Fred and I made sure not to look at each other throughout my partner’s highway robbery of this obviously well-off client.
Soon we got down to it. Overell slumped forward as he sat, hands locked, his brow deeply furrowed, his gray eyes pools of worry.
“It’s my daughter, Mr. Heller. She wants to get married.”
“A lot of young girls do, Mr. Overell.”
“Not this young. Louise is only seventeen-and won’t be eighteen for another nine months. She can’t get married at her age without my consent-and I’m not likely to give it.”
“She could run away, sir. There are states where seventeen is plenty old enough-”
“I would disinherit her.” He sighed, hung his head. “Much as it would kill me…I would disown and disinherit her.”
Fred put in, “This is his only child, Nate.”
I nodded. “Where do things stand, currently?”
Overell swallowed thickly. “She says she’s made up her mind to marry her ‘Bud’ on her eighteenth birthday.”
“Bud?”
“George Gollum-he’s called Bud. He’s twenty-one. What is the male term for a golddigger, anyway?”
I shrugged. “Greedy bastard?”
“That will do fine. I believe he and she have…” Again, he swallowed and his clenched hands were trembling, his eyes moist. “…known each other, since she was fourteen.”
“Pardon me, sir, but you use the term ‘known’ as if you mean in the…Biblical sense?”
He nodded curtly, turned his gaze away; but his words were clipped: “That’s right.”
An idea was hatching; I didn’t care for it much, but the idea wasn’t distasteful enough to override my liking of a hundred bucks a day.
Overell was saying, “I believe he met my daughter when he was on leave from the Navy.”
“He’s in the Navy?”
“No! He’s studying at the Los Angeles campus of U.C., now-pre-med, supposedly, but I doubt he has the brains for it. They exchanged letters when he was serving overseas, as a radioman. My wife, Beulah, discovered some of these letters…. They were…filth.”
His head dropped forward, and his hands covered his face.
Fred glanced at me, eyebrows raised, but I just said to Overell, “Sir, kids are wilder today than when we were young.”
He had twenty, twenty-five years on me, but it seemed the thing to say.
“I’ve threatened to disinherit her, even if she waits till she’s of legal age-but she won’t listen, Louise simply won’t listen.”
Overell went on, at some length, to tell me of Louise’s pampered childhood, her bedroom of dolls and Teddy bears in their “estate,” the private lessons (tennis, riding, swimming), her French governess who had taught her a second language as well as the niceties of proper etiquette.
“Right now,” the disturbed father said, “she’s waging a campaign to win us over to this twenty-one-year-old ‘boy friend’ of hers.”
“You haven’t met him?”
“Oh, I’ve met him-chased him off my property. But she insists if we get to know Bud, we’ll change our minds-I’ve consented to meet with them, let them make their case for marriage.”
“Excuse me, but is she pregnant?”
“If she were, that would carry no weight whatsoever.”
I let the absurdity of that statement stand.
Overell went on: “I’ve already spoken to Mr. Rubinski about making certain…arrangements…if that is what Louise and her Bud reveal to us tomorrow evening.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, we have a yacht-the
Little?
“Louise asked me to invite her and her ‘boy friend’ aboard for the evening, with her mother and myself, so we can all get to know each other better, and talk, ‘as adults.’”
“And you’re going along with this?”
“Yes-but only to humor her, and as a…subterfuge for my own feelings, my own desires, my own designs. I want you to explore this boy’s background-I don’t know anything about him, except that he’s local.”
“And you think if I turn up something improper in this boy’s past, it would matter to your daughter?”
His eyes were so tight, it must have hurt. “If he’s the male equivalent of a golddigger, won’t he have other girls, other women? That would show Louise the light.”
“Mr. Overell, is your daughter attractive?”
“Lovely. I…I have a picture in my wallet, but I’m afraid she’s only twelve in it.”
“Never mind that right now-but you should know there’s every possibility that these two young people…and twenty-one seems younger to me, every day…really
“But you can find out!”
“Sure, but…aren’t you overlooking something?”
“Am I?”
“Your daughter is underage. Iyou tch ’em in the backseat of this boy’s jalopy, we can put him away-or at least threaten to.”
“…Statutory rape?”
I held up two palms, pushed the air. “I know, I know, it would embarrass your daughter…but even the threat of it oughta to send this rat scurrying.”
Overell looked at Fred for an opinion. Fred was nodding.
“Makes sense, Mr. Overell,” he said.
Overell’s eyes tensed, but his brow unfurrowed some; another sigh seemed to deflate his entire body, but I could sense relief on his part, and resignation, as he said, “All right…all right. Do what you think is best.”
We got him a contract, and he gave us a check.
“Can I speak with your wife about this matter?” I asked him.
He nodded. “I’m here with Beulah’s blessing. You have our address-you can catch her at home this afternoon, if you like.”
I explained to him that what I could do today would be limited, because Overell understood that his son and daughter were (and he reported this with considerable distaste) spending the day “picnicking in the desert.” But I could go out to the Los Angeles campus of the University of California and ask around about Bud.
“You can inquire out there about my daughter as well,” he said.
“Isn’t she still in high school?”
“Unfortunately, no-she’s a bright girl, skipped a grade. She’s already in college.”
Sounded like Louise was precocious in a lot of ways.
