"Too bad. It was a long shot, but too bad."
We cut through the southern end of the business district, turned west, and drove into a part of town I had never seen before. Uptilting blocks lined with peeling frame houses dropped away toward an overgrown baseball diamond and rotting bleachers. Beyond the next rise, a few women trudged along dusty paths in a trailer park. A bare-chested kid aimed a BB gun at us from beneath a limp Confederate flag.
"You liked this car, didn't you?" Hatch asked.
“It handles beautifully."
"And what about my wife?" He grinned. This time, the light in his eyes was still humorous, but not at all comfortable. "Would you say she handles beautifully? Accelerates smoothly? Did you find her well engineered?"
"Forget it, Stewart," I said. "Your marriage has nothing to do with me."
"You would admit, wouldn't you, that my wife is an extremely good-looking woman? Even a beautiful woman? What you might call an attractive bit of horseflesh?"
"She's attractive, yes," I said. "But if you're having someone follow her around with a camera, I feel sorry for you."
"Bear with me," he said. “I bet you wondered why a woman like that would marry me. After all, I'm rich, but not superrich, I'm twelve years older than she is, and I live in a nowhere Midwestern town. Am I right?"
“I wondered about some of that," I said.
"Sure you did. If you hadn't, she would have done it for you. Now, between us, she isn't so great in bed, is she? When it comes to performance, this car is a lot more satisfying. My wife is too selfish to be a good lay."
"Stop it. You're embarrassing yourself."
"You ought to know who you're dealing with. Laurie is nothing like what you think she is. For her, you're only a convenient way to make more trouble for me. She's a soulless bitch."
“If she's that terrible, divorce her."
"Jesus, I don't care about her personality." He laughed at me. "This isn't the fucking Boy Scouts. I just want her to do what I say."
"You should be wearing a loincloth and carrying a club."
"Good Lord," he said. "A feminist. Did my dear wife tell you anything about the trust?"
"What trust?"
"Let's find out what she said about herself. Did she tell you about her background, her family, anything like that?"
"A little," I said.
"Wonderful story, isn't it? I'm crazy about it."
An empty, brown hillside sloped down to the right side of the road. Far away on our left, little ranch houses stood on quarter-acre lots. Every other one looked unoccupied. Stewart pulled to the side of the road and switched off the engine. He drew up one knee and twisted on his seat to face me.
“I take it you heard about Yves D'Lency, the poet and art dealer who ran away from his noble family and palled around with artists and so forth before he came to America. The poor guy's plane went down outside Santa Barbara, right?"
"What's your point?" I said.
"Laurie's father's real name was Evan Delaney, a product of Trenton, New Jersey. He was a part-time bricklayer with a big appetite for booze. When he couldn't get work in Trenton anymore, he packed up the family and drove to Los Angeles, where he branched out into the stickup business. One day a tough old bird who owned a liquor store blew him away. Bye-bye, Dad. Mom traded her ass for favors from her boyfriends until she married a cameraman at Warner Brothers. This is the guy my wife refers to as a movie producer."
"You want me to believe this," I said.
"Believe it, don't believe it, but this information cost me more money than I just gave Earl Sawyer. Mom married the cameraman. Guess what? He's another drunk. After the studio fired him, he took out his frustrations by beating up his wife and stepdaughter. Laurie dropped out of high school and did so many drugs she wound up in a mental hospital. When she was straight enough to figure out how to act, she got acquainted with a nice old doctor named Deering. Deering thought she was a poor, misguided orphan who deserved a break. He and his wife took her in. They bought her good clothes and sent her to private school, which is where she learned about table manners and grammar. After she graduated from the private school, she ran away to San Francisco. Pretty soon, she was living with Teddy Wainwright. Remember him?"
I knew that Teddy Wainwright had played the leading man's best friend in a lot of romantic comedies made in the fifties. Later on, he had starred in two television series.
What I had not known was that in the early seventies, no longer able to find roles in Hollywood but grown rich from real estate investments, Wainwright had decked himself in beads and Nehru jackets and moved to San Francisco to enjoy a second youth. Laurie Delancy had moved in with him when he was seventy-one, she twenty-one. Through multiple infidelities and other tempests on her part, including the refusal to marry him, they stayed together until his death four years later. Wainwright had rewritten his will to give her two paintings from his extensive art collection, a Frida Kahlo and a Tamara de Lempicka, plus $250,000 and the use of his apartment until she married, when the apartment reverted to his only child, a daughter. The daughter inherited the majority of his estate, including the rest of his collection, at the time appraised at $5 million.
"Turns out, back in the twenties old Teddy bought two Picassos, a Cezanne, and a Miro, and sometime in the fifties, he squirreled them away in a vault. His collection wound up being worth seventy, eighty million. You can bet Laurie's still kicking herself for not marrying the old guy. She landed a job at KRON, where she wanted to end up doing the local news, but oops, no experience. No journalism background, no degree, nothing. She was a production assistant—a gofer. A year later, when I met her, she was a PR girl. Laurie acted like she fell in love with me, and I do mean acted. It could have worked out, except she was a phony."
"How soon after you were married did you hire the private detective?"
“I hired a detective as soon as I got interested in her. I didn't tell her until we were on our honeymoon. A bungalow at a great resort in theCaribbean. Champagne on the balcony. Moonlight on the water. 'Listen to this,' I said. 'You won't believe it.' She cried real tears. An amazing woman."
"And she gave you a son and heir."
Hatch smiled. "Cobbie's going to be a fine young man after I knock that music crap out of him and get him involved in sports."
"And your son is the reason you can't divorce Laurie."
His smile shrank. “It seems she mentioned my family's financial arrangements after all. What kind of spin did she put on it?"
I described what I could remember.
"Not bad, as far as it goes," Hatch said. "At thirty-five, Cobbie will come into a great deal of money. I want to make sure he knows how to handle it." His eyes charged with amusement. "Do you know why my father wrote in the condition about criminal charges?"
"Laurie said something about his brother."
“It had nothing to do with that." The amusement came back into his eyes. He was trying to charm me, I realized, and he was doing a good job. "When were you born?"
“In 1958."
"You were too young for the sixties. I turned eighteen in 1968." He laughed. "My senior year atEdgerton Academy, my hair came downto my shoulders. I used to lock my door and crank up the stereo until I couldn't hear the old man bitching at me. The Stones, the Doors, Iron Butterfly. Cream. Paul Butterfield. I played rhythm guitar with this hand, Delta Mud. You can imagine how terrible we were."