Ten minutes later, we pulled into old streets lined with big trees and what used to be considered substantial houses. Used to be – because the teardown phenomenon was now changing the definition of substantial in Deer Run, her father’s town. On every block, at least one huge new house hulked across an entire lot, dwarfing its neighbors.
‘Teardowns are big here,’ she said, braking as a flatbed truck ahead stopped to unload a bulldozer. ‘Any property worth less than five hundred thousand gets pushed over to build something for a couple million or more.’
‘That would buy an entire block of houses where I live,’ I said.
She backed into a drive and turned the Taurus around. ‘People want to live here, for the charm of an old town, but they don’t want the modesty of an old house. Better to knock it down, they think, and put up something flashier and bigger in the middle of all that old charm.’ She shook her head. ‘You should see these new places at night. They’ve got lights everywhere – under the eaves, on the railings, beneath the shrubs. After dark, some of these streets look to have a whole bunch of starships landing.’ She shot me a sly grin. ‘All that need for showiness makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with their personal parts.’
She stopped in front of a Spanish-style stucco two-story home with a red tile roof, across the street from the Deer Run Country Club. It was a nice enough house, but not the kind of place I’d been expecting for a multi-millionaire. My respect for Jim Whitman went up a level.
I looked at her.
‘Sure to fetch a half-million as a teardown, if Mrs Johnson sells,’ she said, getting out.
‘The housekeeper inherited his house?’
‘While his grandchildren got nothing.’
We walked up to the front door and she rang the bell. A minute later the door was opened by a trim older woman in gray pants and a black sweater. The woman smiled.
‘Hello, Mrs Johnson.’ Debbie’s voice had turned soft and I wondered if the butch rasp she’d been using, talking to me, was an act for when she felt threatened. She introduced me to the housekeeper and we walked into a cool central hall.
The living room had a brown glazed tile floor and mission-style, black metal windows. Lighter rectangles on the beige stucco walls showed where pictures had recently been removed. Several cartons were stacked in the corner. We sat on wide, well-worn, nubby fabric chairs.
‘Forgive the mess,’ Mrs Johnson said to Debbie. ‘I’m boxing up the last of the bequests he left to the museums.’ She said it almost apologetically.
‘Thank you for seeing us,’ Debbie said.
Mrs Johnson reached to squeeze Debbie’s wrist, and turned to me. ‘I understand you’re going to help with the insurance.’
I nodded. It saved me from explaining I had another client who was seeing murder. ‘The day Mr Whitman died, he came home in the middle of the afternoon, took a nap, then watched the evening news as he dressed to go out?’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Johnson said.
‘How were his spirits?’
‘The usual, no worse. Mr Whitman tried not to let his troubles show.’
‘Did he appear to be in pain?’
She pursed her lips, thinking back. ‘No. His pills seemed to be working as always.’
‘What time did he go out?’
‘At seven. Mr McClain, his driver, came by early and we had coffee in the kitchen while Mr Whitman finished getting ready.’
‘Do you remember where Mr Whitman went that night?’
‘I’m sure it’s written in his appointment book. Is it important?’
‘I like to get all the details.’
‘Let’s find out, then.’ She stood up and Debbie and I followed her down the narrow stucco hall to a small study lined with bookshelves. The Spanish motif of the rest of the house had been continued in the carved mahogany desk and the tooled red leather reading chair.
‘I’ve thrown nothing of your father’s away,’ Mrs Johnson said to Debbie as she picked up a blue leather planner from the desk. She opened the book, flipped the pages to the back. She stopped at December thirteenth. It had been a Tuesday.
I looked over her shoulder. ‘What is “C”?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Mr Whitman abbreviated everything,’ she said, slowly fanning a few more pages so I could see.
The pages were filled in with one- and two-letter abbreviations. For someone dying, James Whitman was a busy man.
‘Most of them I can decipher,’ she said, looking down at the book, ‘but “C” has me puzzled.’
‘His driver would know where he took him.’
‘Of course, especially since that was the night Mr Whitman died,’ Mrs Johnson said.
We went back to sit in the living room.
‘How did Mr Whitman seem when he came home later that evening?’
‘Very fatigued, but he tired easily, the last few weeks. I was putting away some things in the hall closet when I heard the car pull up. I’d been listening for him because he was out later than usual. I looked out, saw him get out of a different car-’
‘A different car?’
‘Mr McClain usually drove a black Cadillac, but that night he brought Mr Whitman home in a tan-colored car,’ she said. ‘When Mr Whitman came in, I asked him if he needed anything. He said he was tired and was going to get something in his study and then go to bed. I said goodnight and went upstairs.’ She pulled a tissue from the pocket in her pants.
‘Do you have a card for Mr McClain?’
‘I have his telephone number memorized,’ she said, reciting it.
I wrote it down and asked, ‘You were the one who found him?’
‘The next morning. He was always an early riser, even at the end. I made coffee, and brought a cup for him to the study. It was then…’ Her voice trailed off as she touched the tissue to her eye.
It was all so eerily similar. Anne Barberi had also found her husband dead in his study the morning following a night out.
‘What medication, exactly, was Mr Whitman taking?’ I asked.
She glanced at Debbie, then back at me. ‘You mean, what did he use to end his life?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gendarin. I’ll get it for you.’ She got up and left the room.
Debbie turned to me. ‘Why is the kind of pills important?’
‘It’s only a detail for now, nothing more.’
The sound of a cabinet door opening and closing came from upstairs, and then Mrs Johnson came back into the room and handed me an orange vial. ‘Gendarin, as I said.’
The vial was full. The label said it contained twenty-eight pills, to be taken one every twelve hours. It was a fourteen-day supply.
‘These haven’t been touched.’ According to the label, the prescription bottle had been filled a little less than two weeks before Whitman died.
‘This wasn’t the vial they found in his pocket,’ Mrs Johnson said. ‘This was to be the new supply. He always reordered when he opened a new vial. That way, he always had a full two weeks in reserve, which I kept upstairs.’
‘This was the only Gendarin he kept in reserve?’
‘It’s a controlled narcotic. They won’t let you buy too much. I was to pick up a new refill when he began taking pills from this one.’
Something about what she’d just said flickered in the dark attic of my mind and disappeared.
‘He carried the current vial he was using?’ I asked instead.
‘Always. The police made much of the vial they found in his pocket, but I told them he didn’t want to risk being someplace without his pills.’
‘He occasionally took extras, when the pain got severe?’
‘Not that I know of. Carrying the pills was mostly a precaution.’
‘Do you know where that vial is now?’
‘I imagine the ambulance people took it.’
Debbie leaned forward in her chair. ‘My father would not have left me without insurance.’
‘Of course not,’ Mrs Johnson said, shifting to look right at me. ‘Mr Whitman was a meticulous person. He had his insurance man over here several times in the last year, going over this and that. He wanted to make sure everything was in order.’