I woke up before eight, but lay in bed for a while thinking.
At nine I called the Belters. Douglas Belter answered and when I identified myself he said, ‘Oh.’
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I should have contacted you. But life here is still rather confused.’
‘I can understand that,’ I said.
‘You have things you want to talk about.’ It was a statement.
‘I think I have identified your wife’s biological mother.’
‘Daisy Wines?’ he said, as if it were already known.
‘That turns out to have been a stage name.’
‘Oh.’
‘I think I know her real name and some of her background. I can also make a guess why she left Paula with Mrs Murchison.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘However, some of the information is not very pleasant and in the circumstances maybe it’s not the right time for me to go through it. I am continuing to follow the leads which have been thrown up and, as much as anything, I’m calling to let you know that I am making a little progress.’
Belter thought for a few moments. He said, ‘Come out, Mr Samson. Paula is taking everything pretty well and there will be no real advantage to spinning the shocks out, if shocks are what you have. Tamae has been a source of strength for her, as usual, and I am staying at home today. Frankly the thing that is upsetting her most is that the police have requested an autopsy. We hadn’t expected that and it is delaying the funeral.’
‘An autopsy doesn’t usually take very long,’ I said.
‘The police have said that we will have to put a cremation off until their lab test results have come back. It may be as much as a week. Until that’s all over, there will be no chance of an even keel here.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, ‘but it’s probably just routine.’
When I arrived the door was opened for me by Paula Belter. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello.’
She smiled, formally. ‘Doug says you have some things to tell us.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come in. Come in.’
She led me to the kitchen. She said, ‘The kitchen seems to be the centre of action during the morning in this house. I don’t quite know why, now that the boys are away so much.’
Douglas Belter came in from another part of the house as I sat on a comfortable, padded, straight-backed chair. ‘Ah, Mr Samson. Would you care for a drink, or is this a little too early for you?’
‘It’s a lot too early for me,’ I said. ‘Unless we’re talking about something like coffee.’
‘Don’t be disappointed, Douggy,’ Paula Belter said playfully.
Douglas Belter frowned. I felt he was struggling to contain an explanation that if one of them were likely to hit the bottle at ten in the morning it was her and not him. Loyalty beat self-defence. He said nothing.
‘So, coffee it is.’ Paula Belter went behind a kitchen bar to a U-shaped surface littered with appliances. After a moment standing still, she came out again. ‘Tamae will do it. I’d like her to be here anyway.’ She left the room. Belter sat at the table.
‘You see how she is,’ he said.
Something must have been clearer to him than to me, but I said, ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘Mrs Murchison’s death must have come as quite a shock.’
‘Paula and Tamae went in to see her in the morning. Then by evening she was gone.’
‘Did they ask her any of the difficult questions, about Daisy Wines?’
‘Paula says not. But that doesn’t exclude the possibility that she said something like, “We’ve hired a private detective to track down my real mother,” as if in passing. Realistically speaking, I don’t know whether the subject was raised or not.’
‘We could ask Tamae, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps.’
Paula Belter and Tamae returned to the room and Mrs Belter was saying, ‘. . . and I completely forgot where the coffee was. Would you mind terribly making it?’
‘No, of course not.’
Paula Belter came back and started to sit at the table. But before she landed she rose again and went to a sideboard and took out four woven mats. ‘Will we need utensils?’ she asked, but as if to herself Then to me she said, ‘How about something to eat? Bacon and eggs? A croissant?’
‘Nothing, thanks.’
‘You’re no fun at all, are you, Mr Samson?’ She exchanged the mats for four coasters which she put on the table. Then, from a cupboard, she took four large mugs and put them on the coasters.
‘Well, I’ve done my bit,’ she said, ‘and I’m absolutely exhausted.’ She exaggerated a fatigued drop into the chair she had almost used a few moments before. Then she straightened and said to me, ‘Not really. I’m just joking.’
I nodded. I said, ‘I was very sorry to hear about Mrs Murchison.’
‘Mmmm. So was I. She was like a mother to me, you know.’
‘I think you’re going too far, Paula,’ Belter snapped.
‘Oh, do you?’ she asked lightly. To me she said, ‘You know the police have delayed the funeral?’
‘Your husband told me. I’m sure it’s just routine.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Since she died unexpectedly.’
‘I thought that it might be because they thought she committed suicide.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘It might be what they think.’ She wagged her head. ‘I don’t know what I think.’
‘Did she ever talk about taking her own life?’
‘No,’ Paula Belter said.
Tamae Mitsuki brought a pot of coffee to the table and filled the four mugs. ‘Do you like cream or sugar, Mr Samson?’ she asked.
‘No, thank you.’
‘I’ll have both today,’ Paula Belter said.
We all watched while cream and sugar were brought to the table and Paula Belter put a lot of each into her coffee. She sipped from her mug without stirring.
Tamae sat down, and Mrs Belter said, ‘Well, Mr Samson, the floor is yours. Or should I say table?’
I was tiring of Paula Belter’s self-indulgent stranglehold on group attention as a means of making sure no one forgot her suffering. There was no way to go in but hard.
‘When I saw you last I had found a birth certificate which strongly suggested that your biological mother was named Daisy Wines. Later you remembered a woman called Auntie Vee who visited you at Mrs Murchison’s.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I have learned that Daisy Wines was the stage name of a nightclub singer named Vera Wert who married a man named George Bennett Raymond Edwards. After less than two years she shot him dead in some sort of domestic fight. She was tried for his murder, but was acquitted in 1940. Immediately after her acquittal she left Indianapolis and . . .’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Douglas Belter said. ‘You’re saying this woman was Paula’s mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘For everyone’s sake, let’s take things a little more slowly.’
Paula Belter said nothing. She just sat with her jaw loose, as if the puppeteer were out to lunch.
I took them through what I had been doing and what I had found and I went on to a tentative reconstruction. ‘She came to Indianapolis from Logansport in late 1935 or early 1936 when she was fifteen or sixteen. I don’t know whether Vera Wert was pregnant when she came to town or whether she became so soon after. Either way, before the birth she found a singing job and obtained her new name. One could speculate that she was pregnant when she came to Indianapolis. That might be a reason for her to leave home.’
‘The pregnancy?’ Douglas Belter asked rigidly.
‘Produced Mrs Belter.’
We all looked at Paula Belter, but she sat, quiet and grave.
I said, ‘Vera, as Daisy Wines, was considered to be an innocent. Her singing style projected it, and while she was being courted by the man she later married, she took no gifts from him and, it seems, gave none either. It may well be that around the club nobody knew that she had a child. One woman, who knew her slightly, wondered whether she would know how.’
‘It’s not something that takes a lot of knowledge,’ Tamae suggested, suddenly breaking her silence when no one else spoke as I paused.
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Eventually, in 1938, she married Edwards. I don’t know what she felt for him, but there is little question that his people presumed that her motives were mercenary. He was the wild scion of a significant family in this city. It could not have been easy for her, whatever it was for him. His sister remains convinced that Vera murdered him for the money and still manages to take pleasure in the fact that she didn’t inherit as much as she might have. Nevertheless, as Mrs Edwards Vera came into a substantial amount. And my guess is that from that money she funded your upbringing, Mrs Belter. Her husband bought the New York Street property which the Murchisons ran as a boarding house the same year he married her, surely no coincidence. And I assume she was the source of the money to buy the house you lived in on 42nd Street and to pay for things like your piano lessons. I don’t see where Ella Murchison came by it otherwise. Vera Wert may not have been around Indianapolis to visit you after the trial finished in 1940, but I strongly suspect that her influence and interest in your life remained for a long time.’
Paula Belter sat cupping the mug of sweet white coffee in her hands. Her glossy defences were gone. She looked sober and introspective and haunted and needful.
Having lost one mother so abruptly and finally, I felt that she would have given a lot to meet her other mother at that moment.