Kerry stirred beside me. I looked over at her, and she muttered a good morning without making eye contact. “You feel as bad as I do?” I asked her.
“Worse. And don’t you dare say you’re glad.”
“I want a divorce.”
“What?”
“I thought you should know what the words sound like. You’ll hear them again if you ever try talking me into another evening like the last one.”
“I wouldn’t try to talk myself into another evening like the last one.”
I got up, drank an Alka-Seltzer, brushed my teeth, took a shower, swallowed another Alka-Seltzer, brushed my teeth again, and put clothes on. When I came back into the bedroom, Kerry was still lying in bed looking miserable.
“Rise and shine,” I said. “Lunch with Cybil at noon.”
“Oh, Lord, that’s right.”
“Maybe she’ll fix us something with Italian sausage.”
Kerry groaned and pulled the covers over her head.
After I made coffee I checked the answering machine again. There hadn’t been a message from anybody in Greenwood last night and none had magically appeared this morning. I called the office and accessed the machine there. No message. An e-mail, maybe? My business cards now had the office e-mail address, the result of Tamara’s urging. I thought about calling her, decided it was too early on a Saturday morning, and that in my condition I couldn’t stand being yelled at for interrupting the rising of Mr. Sun, and waited for Kerry to get up. She keeps a pc in her study and she had the good sense not to chide me, as she sometimes does, about being too stubborn to learn even rudimentary computer skills. She accessed the office e-mail for me. And that was a bust, too.
One more day, I thought bleakly. If I don’t hear from somebody by this time tomorrow. I’ll go down there and shake a few trees until something falls out.
Cybil said, “You smell like garlic and stale wine. Both of you.”
“Oh, God,” Kerry said, “and I gargled three times and brushed my teeth twice this morning.”
“It gets into the pores, dear.”
“You have any Alka-Seltzer?” I asked her.
“No. Out carousing last night, were you?”
“Carousing isn’t the word for it.”
“A business dinner that didn’t turn out well,” Kerry explained briefly. “Is that chicken pot pie I smell?”
“It is. Very soothing to an alcohol-ravaged stomach.”
“Hah,” I said. “As if you didn’t take a drink yourself now and then.”
“Always in moderation.”
“Sure, moderation. I know all about those drunken orgies you and Russ Dancer and your other pulp-writer pals used to indulge in.”
“Scurrilous lies. I have never been to an orgy in my life.”
“That you can remember.”
“Oh, I remember all of my escapades.”
“And there’ve been some doozies, I’ll bet.”
“You’ll never know.”
Cybil wasn’t ready yet to talk about Archie Todd; she bustled around her tiny kitchen getting lunch ready, while Kerry and I took up space in the living room. The bungalow was a small two-bedroom, one half of a duplex with a shared back patio; she used the second bedroom as her office. This and Redwood Village’s other duplex cottages were surrounded by well-tended lawns and flower beds and shaded by redwoods. Among other amenities on the five acres were rec room, dining hall, swimming pool, and putting green. Nice, quiet little enclave in the nice, quiet little town of Larkspur. And Cybil had thrived in it. When Kerry’s father. Ivan, died a couple of years back, and Cybil sold their L.A. house and moved in with Kerry, she had been lost and dying by degrees herself. The move to Redwood Village had literally saved her life. Not only had it allowed her to regain her independence, it had given her back her zest for living and her desire to write fiction.
A copy of her recently published first novel. Dead Eye, was prominently displayed on the end table next to where I was sitting. Her brag copy, she called it. I’d already read the book, but I picked up the copy and glanced through it again. A remarkably smooth and polished period piece, set in L.A. during the Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s. It was as though there had been no more of a gap than a few months between Samuel Leatherman’s last pulp-magazine adventure, published in those same early fifties, and his first full-length ease. She was something, Cybil was. No woman who bad produced both a tough-as-nails hero like I weatherman and a daughter like Kerry, and put up with a contentious anal retentive like Ivan Wade for fifty years, could be anything but special.
She was troubled now, though. The sharp wit and cheerful demeanor were like the clothes she’d donned for the occasion: dress-up facade. There were gloomy depths in her tawny eyes. Kerry noticed it, too: I could tell by the concerned look she gave me when Cybil left us alone.
Over lunch the talk was superficial dead-air filler. I kept waiting for Cybil to bring up Archie Todd’s name and it kept not happening. Kerry toed me under the table once and I toed her back and went on eating. The pot pie was very good. Soothing, too, as Cybil had said. And I deal better with family and professional matters on a full stomach.
Kerry delivered another not-so-gentle nudge as I finished my second helping. Okay, time for me to prime the pump. I said to Cybil, “Kerry tells me Captain Archie passed away recently. I was sorry to hear it.”
“Passed away,” she said. “Such a silly euphemism.”
“What would you prefer? Croaked?”
That earned me another poke, but Cybil said, “Rubbed out would do better. It’s old-fashioned but accurate.”
“You’re not saying he was murdered?”
“No, I’m not, because I have no proof he was. But it’s what I suspect.”
“You’re serious,” I said.
“Of course I’m serious. Would I make a joke about a thing like that?”
“What makes you suspect foul play?”
She pressed her lips together and stared out through the window. From where she was sitting she could look across tree-shadowed lawn and the street out front to where other cottages were spaced at intervals. Looking at the one Captain Archie had occupied, maybe.
“Cybil, how did he die?”
“Congestive heart failure,” she said. “He died in his bed sometime during the night.”
“Well, if that’s the case, it’s the best way any of us can go.”
“It would be if that was all there was to it. Dr. Lengel thinks so, because Archie had CHF disease — that’s a reduction in the ability of the heart to pump blood. CHF patients often die from ventricular fibrillation, a sudden heart attack.”
“Lengel’s the resident physician here?” Redwood Village had a small clinic with a doctor and nurse on call twenty-four hours.
“Yes. He signed the death certificate.”
“So if Captain Archie had a bad heart and there’s no question of how he died...?”
“Congestive heart failure can be induced by an overdose of digitoxin, the medication he was taking to regulate his heartbeat. His maintainence dose was 0.05 milligrams per day. His prescription — from his own physician, Dr. Johannsen — was for pills of exactly that dosage, to be taken one every evening at bedtime. But the night he died he was given or forced to swallow a larger dosage.”