“That’s nice.”
“We’ve been out of balance here. When we’re full, we have more bar and dining room and kitchen capacity than we’re using. I hate to encourage a lot of outside business coming in, just to eat and drink. Sooner or later that creates problems. If we make it with our guests, it’s more like a club. If it could possibly be done by December, I can really show them one hell of a season next year. Already we are reserved almost full for the first quarter. Are you interested at all in this kind of stuff? I have nobody else to brag to.”
“Of course I’m interested, Annie.”
“I bet. It’s exciting to me. It is kind of like farming. I mean you have a nice harvest of tourists coming up, and all of a sudden you get a tornado, or a red tide, or a big oil spill, or the country goes on gas rationing. So it’s always a little bit nervous. Or a hurricane will come and wash us away. We’re pretty exposed here.”
“Sooner or later one will. Just hope it’s later.”
“Very cheery.”
“Any chance of you ever getting away, Annie? Like for a week or two. A little boat ride to no place in particular?”
“Not anytime real soon. I fired my assistant manager. He kept telling me how wonderful I am and slicing me up whenever I turned my back. Caught him at it. I’ve got a new guy now. And I think he is going to work out. He hasn’t had a lot of experience, but he knows food and liquor service and he gets along with the guests and the employees. It looks as if by maybe sometime in July I could give him a trial run, by going where he can’t ask me questions. Is July okay?”
“Great. Maybe I’ll bring the Flush around and pick you up over there and we’ll flip a coin for which direction we go. North or south.”
“Beautiful. I wouldn’t want to stay on a boat too long. I spent too much time on the Caper with Ellis. There’s no place to put anything, and no real privacy. It was like the walls were closing in.”
“The bulkheads.”
“The walls, honey. Walls and floors. Kitchen and bathroom. Upstairs, downstairs. Inside and outside. Ellis was so damn picky about being seamanlike, I decided after he died that the whole thing is a crock. I lived aboard until it got sold, and I called everything by the civilian name for it, and it made me sort of happy.”
“I want to ask you something else. You told me Josie called Ellis a couple of times. Several times, I believe you said. Early in July. At that time she must have been terribly concerned and depressed about the condition of her daughter, Romola.”
“Oh, she was. Of course.”
“You said that the phone calls from her made him cross.”
“I see what you mean. I knew that they weren’t about Romola or any change in her condition, because he always told me things like that. And news of his daughter would make him either very depressed or very jubilant. Not cross. That’s why I think she must have been urging him to buy something for pain, the way Prescott had asked her to do.”
“Josie was willing to do that in spite of her major worry?”
“Look, she couldn’t do anything about her major worry. There was Romola all hooked up to a lifesupport system that was even breathing for her, all tubes and wires and things, and nothing to do but wait. She didn’t die, legally, until August tenth. I would guess that Josie was very restless. She’d welcome anything that diverted her from her worry. I would guess that she wanted Ellis to come back to her and stay with her. Maybe she brought that up too. And that was what made him cross. He always told me she was a very nice woman, and absolutely impossible to live with.”
“I might be going out there.”
“What for?”
“Josie Laurant has been financing a motion picture project for Peter Kesner. She’s acting in it, I think.”
“Oh, God, that’s terrible!”
It was a lot more reaction than I had expected. “Terrible?”
“I should have told you. Ellis, through his banking connections, arranged a personal report on Peter Kesner. An absolutely, totally unreliable person. A disaster area. He had the discipline to make those two little films that got rave reviews and made a lot of money, but it went to his head and he blew the whole thing. They gave him a big-budget film to produce and direct, and he went way over budget and it turned out to be a dog. They gave him a chance to do a little picture, like his early two, and it was so completely bad they never released it at all. By then his money was gone, of course. Tax judgments, the whole thing. It was clear that Josie was supporting him. I remember when Ellis dictated a three-page single-spaced letter to her, telling her to have as little to do with Peter as possible and saying why. Knowing Josie, I knew she’d turn it over to Kesner. I told Ellis I thought that would happen, and he said he wouldn’t mind if she did. There was nothing actionable in the letter. It was all fact. He said maybe it would give Kesner a better look at himself. When I typed it I softened it a little bit, but he caught it and marked up the original and had me type it all over again. What this really means, I guess, is that the money Josie got from Romola’s estate is down the drain, or soon will be.”
“Ellis didn’t put any strings on it?”
“He talked about it, but he never got around to doing it. He talked about setting it up as an annuity for Romola, but then when we were both certain Romola was going to die before he did, he put all his attention into refining that foundation concept of his. Which never got used.”
“Important question: Would Kesner know the terms of the will?”
She thought for a moment. “I would certainly think so. Josie knew, long before we moved down here from Stamford, that Romola would get the bulk of it, and if Romola died first it would go to a foundation. Yes, she asked me and I told her about it. I think she was wondering what would happen to her support, to that fifty thousand a year, and I didn’t blame her for wondering. I told her I thought she would get a hundred thousand and that would be the end of it. Yes, I told her that’s what she would get. And anything Josie knows, Josie tells anybody she happens to find sitting next to her at the table.”
“And so Kesner was vitally interested.” There was a long long silence. “You still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. I had a kind of an ugly thought.”
“Such as?”
“You remember how Romola got hurt?”
“Nobody ever told me. I assumed it was a highway accident.”
“It was a bicycle accident, yes. She was way over by Thousand Oaks, twenty tough miles from home. There were witnesses. She was going along pretty fast on a ten-speed. A dog rushed her and she tried to dodge, but she hit the dog and went over the handlebars and fractured her skull on some curbing. What she was doing out there was a big mystery. Josie thought she was in class in UCLA. It turned out-I don’t really know how they discovered it-she was using a little house out there owned by a woman who was temporarily in London, doing a screenplay over there for a British company. The neighbors had seen Romola coming and going for a couple of months. They said she rode the bike a lot. Oh, I remember how they found the house. Romola’s little car was there, some kind of an MG. And with her car keys in her pocket she had a key to the little house. There was evidence she had been staying there for some time. She had moved some of her things from the Beverly Hills house to the little house, without Josie noticing. She had not been in classes since early February. She was an exceptionally beautiful girl. I saw her just once, when she was fourteen, and she was breathtaking. The extraordinary secrecy was very strange. It was a place of assignation, apparently. But there wasn’t any real urge to find out who because she was in such critical condition.”
“And the ugly idea?”
“Maybe it’s too ugly. Peter Kesner knew that Ellis had terminal cancer. And he knew that Josie would get a lump-sum settlement that wouldn’t be enough to support him for very long. And he knew Romola would inherit. He was perfectly capable of seducing Romola. And that would have made her very very careful to keep it a secret from her mother. I’ll bet you a dime that lady screenwriter is an old pal of Peter’s. It was the screenwriter’s bike, by the way.”