I sat on the corner of the picnic table glowering over at where Fido was shaking the shrubbery, and marveling at the chronic incompleteness of the investigations and the reports filed. And I marveled at my own gullibility in believing yet another set of misleading, incomplete reports.
She nudged me in the small of the back with her bare heel and said, “Hey! You!”
“He just left,” I said.
“Let me know when he gets back.”
She was a little bit of a woman, somewhere on the windward side of sixty, living alone in a high-ceilinged apartment full of mahogany, silver, lace, and old portraits. Her cropped hair was dyed fudge brown, and her face was weathered to a red-brown. She wore jeans and an embroidered cotton blouse. She was slim and moved well. She let me in at a little past nine in the evening.
“It’s good of you to see me so late, Mrs. Culver.”
“Late, hell, Mr. Rhoades. I’m a night person, and you better call me Mim because everybody else in the world does.”
“I’m Duke.”
“There’s ice and water and bourbon over there, if you’d fix us both one, Duke. I spent four hours on the practice range today. I had to stop when I started to get this blister. They won’t let women play at the club on Saturday, the chauvinist rats. But I think I found my trouble. I was coming off the ball too soon. On Monday I am going to see just how much of Doris Jane Cupper’s money I can take away from her. Thank you, dear. No, sit there, on the side where I hear better. You said on the telephone you had talked to Tammy Rice? Yes, she was right. I was Betty Wescott Boland Laneer’s best friend in all the world, all through school and Briarcliffe; but who sent you to Tammy Rice?”
I explained that I had got access to the back file of clippings on the Wescott family at the newspaper and had weeded out some people who might have been lifelong friends and then tried to find them. “I’m a hired snoop,” I said.
She studied me pertly. “I would say you are probably brighter than you look, young man. And I am not as rattlebrained as I might seem to some. So I will have to know why you are snooping around.”
I smiled my best smile and said, “I am presently representing a company that paid out over half a million dollars to J. Trevor Laneer, and we want to be sure he deserves it. And needs it.”
“Oh, Anne Farley! You know, that used to be a very good family name in Atlanta. Every bit as good as Culver or Boland. Wescott wasn’t quite as good a name because, you see, they were in trade, but really they made most of their money in land way out north of town. I knew Roger Farley, her father, quite well. Nearly married him, in fact. Oh dear, all my... values mean so little nowadays. Atlanta has turned into a monstrous place, really. We are all swallowed up by this terrible energy of growth. Every time you look around, there is a new bank or a new hotel or a lot of yellow machines tearing up lovely old buildings. Trevor Laneer was what my father would call a counter jumper. My departed husband couldn’t stand him. Betty and I used to see each other for lunch often. It makes me feel guilty to think about the poor dear. But I just can’t go see her. It’s too horribly depressing. And what good does it do? Those blank, dead eyes. And she has to be waited on hand and foot. He talks to her as though she could understand every word. There’s something very strange about that, somehow. Does Trevor Laneer need the money? Well, I would hardly think so. I have to say that one must credit the man with compassion. I would think it has been a very long eight years for him. But he does seem unwaveringly faithful and constant. I went to see her — would it be six months ago or longer? Longer, God help me. It could be a year. That lovely rock garden. On a slope, you know, below the bedroom window. He turned a downstairs study into her bedroom because it is so much easier that way for the nurses. Her grandfather built that house. Except for the sound of traffic — not very loud because of all the trees — you would think you were in the country. It is very private, really. There must be at least three acres there, and heaven only knows what that land might be worth now.”
“I suppose the house and land are in a trust arrangement too.”
“Too?”
“The store is.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. I do know that her affairs are handled by Mid-Georgia Fidelity. And mine and Tammy’s. We all have the same trust officer. Tammy’s grandfather founded that bank. Bunny Gearhart takes care of us old ladies. He’s a dear young man. Well, not so young, I guess. Young to me. He must be getting on toward fifty. I could call him if you want to talk to him, but I have to ask you something first.”
“Anything. Almost.”
“Could this all wind up in such a way people find out that Anne Farley was innocent?”
“It could,” I said, and, smiling, she reached for the phone.
Those determined ladies, Mim Culver and Tammy Rice, put so much pressure on Bunny Gearhart I was able to see him at his tennis club on Sunday morning. He was a big, pink, rubbery fellow with all the social graces and a very correct tennis outfit. As a senior trust officer, he felt that he should not disclose any information at all without a court order. After I told him all my reasons he looked slightly ill. But he wouldn’t talk until I threatened to call Mim Culver and tell her that her favorite banker was being uncooperative. And then he sighed, shrugged, and talked. I have discovered one thing about the professions. Get a banker, lawyer, doctor, politician away from his familiar office and he is much more likely to tell secrets. One of the interesting things Bunny told me was that the doctors did not believe Betty Laneer could last much longer. Eight years of inactivity had caused a fatty degeneration of the heart muscle structures and decreasing circulation was beginning to affect the other major organs. And, of course, Trevor Laneer knew this.
“The Wescott estate used to be much larger, of course,” Trevor Laneer told me.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your Sunday afternoon, Mr. Laneer.”
He smiled. We were walking from the iron gates up the gentle slope toward the house. “You said on the phone it was important, Rhoades. I have to hope you’ve located Anne. If you can recover the diamonds, you won’t have to prosecute, will you?”
I admired die rock garden. He took me over for a closer look. It seemed to cover a half-acre slope at least, where probably it had once been lawn. There were paths, raked gravel, river stones, huge boulders, pools, fountains, rivulets of water over stone. The plantings were not overdone. The whole area had a sparse, Japanese flavor. The back of his work shirt was dark with sweat in a pyramidal pattern. His bare arms were sinewy. I could see the place where he had been working with a shovel. He said he was preparing a place for another boulder, a very interesting one he had picked out at the stone yard. They brought them in by flatbed and crane to place them in the prepared spot.
I looked up at the house and saw a pale oval beyond the glass, a motionless face, a motionless woman apparently on a chaise longue or uptilted hospital bed. Two dark circles and a slit for a mouth. A child’s drawing of a face.
“It gives her something beautiful to look at,” he said.
We talked inside a garden house, an octagonal, screened structure with a Japanese roof. It was in heavy shade and smelled of wood rot. I moved a little way from him so I could face him more directly.