“According to the newspaper report, Iris Young was alone in the house the night she died.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She wanted to be.”
“I understand she was crippled.”
“She wasn’t helpless. She could walk with the aid of a cane, and God knows she could talk, or rather scream. When she got mad you could hear her for miles. Believe me, whatever happened in the house happened because she wanted it to, whether it was being left alone or being waited on hand and foot.”
“What was her state of mind that night?”
“The same as it always was — selfish, mean, arrogant.”
He hoped, for her sake, that this wasn’t an example of her conversations with the police. “Did she seem depressed?”
“Why should she be depressed, with all that money and power? I’m the one who should be depressed.”
“And are you?”
She gazed at him somberly for a minute, then one corner of her mouth twitched in a demure smile. “What do you think? How do I look?”
“You look very pretty.” And a little wacky.
“I’m deliriously happy, if you want the truth. Everything’s working out the way I planned. May I tell you something in confidence?”
“Yes, but I’d prefer—”
“Absolute confidence, like between lawyer and client, I forget the legal term for it.”
“Privileged information.”
“Let’s call this privileged information.”
She was smiling fully now, as if something was turning out to be a great joke. He hoped he wasn’t it.
“I’d ask you to cross your heart,” she said, “except I’ve always been told lawyers don’t have one.”
“I hear beating inside my chest. Maybe I’m an exception.”
“Then cross your heart.”
He did. Miranda liked games and he didn’t mind as long as they were as innocent as this one.
It didn’t remain innocent very long. She said, “I’m going to be married within two or three months. Surprised?”
“Yes. I didn’t peg Grady as the marrying type.”
“I’m not marrying Grady, I’m marrying Cooper.”
“Cooper?”
“The Admiral. I expect him to set the date when this business about his wife is all settled. Oh, it will be nice having money again, being able to afford things. “Things like what?”
“Like Grady.”
He knew then why she looked a little wacky. She was.
He said, “You can’t buy people, Mrs. Shaw.”
“Most people you can’t, some you can. Grady’s one of the some. Of course, it will take a lot of money and I could never manage it on my own. Cooper is going to help me.”
“Is he aware of this?”
“No.”
“Is Grady?”
“No. Just you and I. And you can’t tell because it’s privileged information and you crossed your heart.”
Behind the boiler room, which contained the heating and filtering tanks for the pool, there was a small tool shed with a padlock on the door. The lock had been broken so often that no one bothered replacing it anymore and employees had access to the shed for whatever purpose they had in mind. Grady’s purpose was lunch. He’d purchased it at a taco stand a couple of blocks up the street, and he sat now on a wooden chest among the rakes and shovels and hedge clippers, the ants and pill bugs, the lengths of piping and coils of rope.
The shed smelled of paint thinner and fertilizer and the cooking fumes from the snack-bar grill, but it was peaceful and quiet except for the sound of the waves. Grady liked to listen to them, trying to estimate their size and shape and whether the tide was coming in or going out. Usually he checked his tide book as soon as he reported to work and then chalked the numbers up on the blackboard beside the pool. High 10:25 p.m. 5.7 Low 5:41 p.m. - 0.5. He hadn’t done this yet today because he’d seen Miranda arriving with the girls and he wanted to stay out of sight until she went up to the cabana. Avoiding Miranda was easy. Avoiding certain other people wasn’t.
“So there you are,” little Frederic said. He carried a skateboard and was wearing protective equipment — knee and elbow pads and a red plastic helmet. In spite of these precautions he was plastered with an assortment of grimy bandages on his hands, nose and legs. “I’ve been looking all over the place for you.”
“Now you found me,” Grady said. “Bug off.”
“What are you hiding in here for?”
“Who says I’m hiding?”
Frederic fitted his skinny little rump snugly into the center of a coil of rope. Then he removed his lunch, a package of bologna, from underneath his helmet. “What’s it worth to you if I don’t tell?”
“Nothing.”
“Take your time. Think it over.”
“There’s no one to tell.”
“Sure there is. You don’t happen to have a dill pickle on you, do you? There’s this kid at school who wraps a piece of bologna around a dill pickle and he calls it—”
“I don’t give a goddamn if he calls it mother. Who is there to tell?”
“The chick you went to Mexico with.” Since no dill pickle was available, Frederic didn’t bother separating the slices of bologna. He took a bite out of all eight at once. “She’s always asking people where you are — the porters, Henderson, Ellen, even me. How come you don’t want her to find you?”
“Listen, Frederic. Let’s talk this over man to man.”
“Hell no. That palsy-walsy stuff just means you’re not going to pay me.”
“I can’t, I don’t have the money. Anyway, you’re my friend. Aren’t you?”
“What gives you a dumb idea like that? I don’t have friends. I get shut up in some crazy school that teaches Greek — and who rescues me? Nobody. And where am I going to spend the rest of the summer? A prison camp in the boonies, only they call it an outdoor learning experience in the Sierra wilderness.”
“Stop it, kid. I cry easy.”
“You might.”
“What does that mean?”
Frederic ate the last chunk of bologna, then he tucked the empty container under one of his knee pads beside a gum wrapper and a soggy piece of Kleenex. He disapproved of littering. “You want to know what she’s doing up in the cabana right this minute? Wow, you’ll throw a fit when I tell you.”
“Try me.”
“She’s talking to her lawyer. His name’s Aragon. The reason I’m sure is he’s my lawyer, too. Him and me, we’re going to sue people together when I grow up, maybe sooner. I’m keeping a list.”
Grady didn’t throw a fit but he drew in a quick breath and held it as though he’d been knocked over by a wave he didn’t see coming. “What are they talking about?”
“Search me.”
“I’m searching you.”
“I don’t know what they’re talking about, man. I stood in the hall and listened but I couldn’t hear a thing.”
“Suppose you got in the cabana next door,” Grady said. “You might be able to hear something from there.”
“Might. How do I get in?”
“Ellen has a set of master keys.”
“She wouldn’t give them to me for a million dollars.”
“She might give them to me.”
Frederic’s eyes widened. “Oh, now you’re going to turn on the old macho, right? Can I come along and watch?”
“No.”
“I haven’t seen you in action since—”
“No. Stay here and I’ll be back soon.”
“If you change your mind, send me some kind of signal, like whistling three times.”