Ellie, it’s Cece Caruso, I’m calling from my car. How are you?”
“Oh, god. I can’t talk to you now. My daughter’s here, and she doesn’t know anything about what went on back then, and that’s the way I want to keep it.”
“You were a kid, Ellie. He took advantage of you.”
“It was a little more complicated than that. Ever read Lolita?”
“Listen, I don’t care about your relationship with Bill Winters—I really don’t. That’s your business. But I need to know about something else. Please. It’ll only take a second.”
“One second. That’s it. Hold on, I’m closing the door.”
“You said something about Bill’s family, about how they helped get the oil industry going in Ventura.”
“And?”
“And there’s this letter Jean had, from someone I think may have been Bill’s father, Oliver Winters?”
“Oliver was his grandfather.”
“The letter was written to Morgan Allan, advising him to sell some property he owned.”
“So you found it.”
“You knew about the letter?”
“That’s one very valuable piece of paper.”
“Wait, I can’t hear you. Shit.”
“Is that better?”
“Yes. So how did Jean get that letter?”
“Cece, I don’t have time, my grandkids—”
“Ellie, please. I’m asking you, I’m begging you, to tell me what you know.”
“I’ve got to hang up.”
“Have you ever visited a jail cell? Do you realize Joe is an old man now? I want to help him. I know he didn’t kill Jean.”
“I’m hanging up. My daughter just walked into the room.”
“My daughter is having trouble in her marriage,” I blurted out. Was I really pimping my family to gain this woman’s sympathy? Hell, I’d kissed Burnett Fowlkes to find out more about his family. Well, not that first day in the car. I was making myself sick. Perry Mason had never gone this far. Actually, he had. The TV Perry was a choirboy compared to the pulp Perry. In the early books, he’d punched people out, tampered with witnesses, broke the law whenever it suited him. But, somehow, he’d always maintained his dignity. Not me. Oh, well.
There was a pause, then Ellie let out a breath. “You can call me back in two hours. I’ll be alone then. Good-bye.”
She hung up just as I pulled into my driveway. My house. My velvety front lawn. It felt like I had been gone for months. It was hard to believe it was only yesterday that Joe had called me from jail and sent me scurrying off to Ventura and careening through thin air. My brain felt like it was going to explode. I needed sleep. Food and sleep. And that was the end of my favorite black pants. Why was it that every time I came home from Ventura I had to throw away what I’d been wearing?
It was quiet and dark on the porch, and I almost tripped over a large wicker basket stuffed with little cakes. I peered through the green cellophane. Brownies, too. I picked it up and tucked the mail under my other arm. I could hear my babies mobilizing by the door. As soon as the key turned in the lock, they were all over me. I dropped to my knees, scooped them up in my bruised arms, and reciprocated with slobbery kisses of my own. There’s nothing like family.
The light on the phone machine was blinking insanely, trying to catch my eye. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? I had thirty-three messages. Let me guess: thirty-two from my mother, one from Lael, and none from Annie. I’d play them later.
I opened the card. Burnett. “Hope you’re better. See you Sunday.” Hope you’re better, see you Sunday? It was insulting. You’d write that to a maiden aunt who’d just had an appendectomy. Where were the flowers and the champagne truffles? I guess I was supposed to be convalescing. That was me, a convalescing jewel thief.
I changed into sweatpants and a tank top, downed two glasses of milk and a mini–lemon poppyseed loaf, opened the mail, tossed all the catalogs except for American Girl, which I saved because Lael’s daughter Nina’s birthday was coming up, and watched a documentary on the History Channel about Madame de Pompadour. It was nine P.M. Two hours had passed. It was time to call Ellie back.
The first thing she said was how sorry she was about my daughter. I felt like a heel.
“My daughter’s been divorced for three years,” she continued. “She’s raising two kids on her own. It’s really hard on her. Does your daughter have children?”
Did Vincent’s son, Alexander, count, even a little?
“No.”
“It’s a good thing, really.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure I see myself as the grandma type.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised, Cece.”
“I know you’re busy, so let’s finish this.”
“Sorry,” she said frostily.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s fine. It’s just that I don’t exactly feel like strolling down memory lane, you know? So the letter.”
“The letter.”
“Don’t interrupt me, Cece.”
“I’m not saying another word.”
“Bill’s dad was a big guy. Bill was not. He was short. Handsome, but short. And he had the hard luck of having a dad who was big and tall and great at everything, especially getting his loser son out of trouble. The dad had fantasies that Bill would go into politics, like his granddad. I told you that part the other day. So when Jean went too far, threatening to ruin Bill over our affair, wanting more and more money, Bill went to his dad, like he always had. His dad said not to worry, that he’d fix everything up. He said he had something in his safe that would make Jean a happy girl.”
“The letter.”
“That’s right. It was a copy of a letter his own father, Oliver, had written to Morgan Allan decades earlier. You see, Morgan and Jean, they were two peas in a pod. Morgan was a blackmailer, too. Oliver had been cheating on his wife and Morgan knew it. He’d made it his business to know everything that happened in every sleazy bar and motel in town. What he wanted in exchange for keeping quiet was information about oil legislation, before it was made public. Oliver didn’t think he had a choice. So he did what Morgan asked. But before he died, he gave a copy of the letter you found to his son, Bill’s father, saying he might need it someday. And he turned out to be right.”
“So Bill gave the letter to Jean?”
“Yes. He told her there were bigger fish to fry. And she agreed.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, when we were sophomores in high school, I guess.”
Why had Jean waited so long before using the letter against Morgan? According to her bankbook, she hadn’t started blackmailing him until well after she’d married Joe. It was odd. She didn’t seem like the patient type.
I thanked Ellie profusely and wished her well. She was a good egg.
I crawled into bed after that, but I was too exhausted to sleep. Curling into a ball seemed like an impossible expenditure of effort, so I stared at a water spot on my ceiling instead. It was shaped like a jack-o’-lantern, with a triangle nose and pointy teeth. I loved carving jack-o’-lanterns. I think it was because I was born on Halloween. Annie had always insisted to all her little friends that I was a witch. Some of them believed her. Their parents, too. Maybe Meredith Allan and I had something in common after all.
So where was my magic now? How was I going to make the bits and pieces of information fit together? One of the things ESG had been best at was teasing out relationships between the most disparate characters. I’d read enough of his books. Now I had to do it for real.
I sat up.
One last time: Joseph Albacco and Morgan Allan are partners. They have two assets between them, Asset A and Asset B. Morgan finds out Asset A will soon be worthless. And all of a sudden, according to the title report, he no longer owns it. It is owned 100 percent by his partner. Well, of course. Why hadn’t I seen it before? The whole thing was exactly like a divorce.
The two of them dissolved their partnership—I don’t know why, maybe because Joseph Sr. discovered what a prick Morgan was. Or maybe Morgan started something to precipitate a breakup, who knows. They wanted to go their separate ways. And Morgan came up with the solution. What good ideas old Morgan always had. How logical it must have seemed at the time. Joseph Sr. would get Asset A, and Morgan would get Asset B. What could be more equitable? Oh, I knew that song and dance so well.
It’s all about splitting the assets. I got full custody of Annie and my ex got our savings account. So who got the better deal? He thought he did, but I knew better. Morgan got the Ventura Avenue field and became richer than God, and Joe’s father got the tidelands and a fat lot of nothing. No wonder the man killed himself. But what he didn’t know was that Morgan withheld the information Oliver Winters had so kindly provided. Morgan misrepresented the facts. And that, as I recently learned courtesy of Mr. Grandy’s files, spells fraud, a felony offense in every state in the Union.
I may not know my torts from my tarts, but you didn’t have to be a lawyer to understand that the Allan family was going to owe the Albacco family a shitload of smackeroos.