A Short Story by Janet LaPierre
"Poor old bastard not only loses the juicy babe been keeping him warm the past ten years, he's suspected of pushing her off the cliff himself! At age eighty for chrissake, getting around with just one cane on his good days! Dumb cops must have been out of their tiny minds."
"Daph, I don't believe they suspected him for long," Patience said. After three months, the picture from the local newspaper was still in her mind: woebegone black labrador peering up from the rocky outcropping that had saved him, hawk-faced old man on the bluff above, leaning on a policeman's arm and staring bleakly out at the wind-whipped sea. The body of Angie Griffith was never recovered.
"But it's a police axiom that in a suspicious death, you look hard at the surviving spouse," she added. "And David and Angie Griffith were known around town for yelling at each other." Patience Smith Mackellar, good friend of several members of the local police force, leaned back in the desk chair and looked over her half-glasses at Port Silva's best veterinarian, another good friend. Daphne Griffith was endlessly gentle and patient with four-legged animals, but her tolerance for the two-legged variety was limited.
"Shit!" Daphne ran a hand through short auburn-with-gray hair already wildly disordered. "My father yells at everybody, it's his idea of communicating. I guess Angie yelled back. I guess that's how they lasted so long, even though she was young enough to be his granddaughter.
"What Davey said, she loved storms, apparently got up that night and went out even though there were gale warnings from Point Arena to Point St. George and the bluffs were soaked and shifty from earlier rains. Then that ten-month old pup of hers chased something over the edge, she tried to rescue him and fell. Angie was big and strong but not a whole lot smarter than the lab."
"That sounds reasonable." Patience laced her fingers together to keep them from tapping as she waited for Daphne to get around to whatever it was she had in mind. The two women had met after Patience rescued an injured dog, and behind different demeanors — Patience in her mid-fifties, soft-spoken, unabashedly plump and gray-haired, Daphne some years younger, lean and abrupt—they'd discerned a mutual no-nonsense view of life. But Daphne's edgy presence in the client's chair at Patience Smith, Investigations suggested a purpose beyond an invitation to go for coffee.
Daphne shifted uneasily in the chair. "I don't suppose you have an ashtray here, either? No, never mind. You probably know about my father and me? It all came up again when he decided to live year-round at the Gulch."
Patience had moved to this California northcoast town only a few years earlier, following her husband's death; but she'd been an investigator, a listener and watcher, for twenty-five years. David Griffith was a Port Silva legend, a local boy who'd gone into the woods with his logger father and wound up buying and selling big chunks of the county. Griffith had divorced an early wife, lost a later one, Daphne's mother, to cancer, and chased women around Port Silva and elsewhere for years before marrying his Angie. He was loud, autocratic, and bad-tempered. And...
"I'd heard you two were estranged," Patience admitted.
Daph rolled her eyes. "'Estranged' is a classy way of putting it. For the first sixteen years of my life I was Davey's best buddy. We hunted, fished, hiked, sailed. Then I told him I was gay, and that was it, might as well have been dead. He wouldn't even have paid for my education if poor Mom hadn't threatened to divorce him and break up his empire."
Daphne got to her feet, opened the office door, and propped a shoulder against the jamb while she lit a cigarette. "I'll blow the smoke outside, okay?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake. Come in and sit down." Reformed smoker Patience fished an ashtray from a drawer and pushed it across the desk. "I'll enjoy it. Just don't tell my daughter."
Daphne grinned and came back to her seat. "Thing is, I believe the poor guy thought it was his fault—he'd treated me like a boy and now here I was, sexually confused. Anyhow, he disowned me and focused all his energy on my little sister, who was about twelve and up to then had been pretty much left to Mom. Davey turned her into his teen-queen daughter. Which is what she still is at age forty-five."
"Daphne..."
"Right." Daphne stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette, carried the ashtray to the door and set it outside. "Sorry. He's been calling me, in the middle of the night."
"Why?"
"He's scared. Mostly, I think, he's suddenly realized he's old. But in the middle of the night he convinces himself that somebody killed Angie and he's next."
"What somebody?"
The other woman leaned back in her chair and shook her head. "My sister Penelope, her husband or one of her kids—for his money. Or me, to get even. Or all of the above."
"Daph, what does he want of you?"
"God, Patience, I don't know. Just an ear, maybe. If I call him back, he won't talk to me. And he won't have me out there, that would be admitting he might have been wrong thirty years ago."
"Does he live by himself?"
"Not quite," said Daphne with a grimace. "Last year Penny finally ran out of divorce settlement money and child support about the time her third and current husband lost his job. So the whole crew moved in on Davey and Angie."
"Surely not without his permission."
"Shit, Davey wouldn't deny refuge to his blue-eyed baby doll." Daphne pressed her lips tight, shook her head. "Sorry. Penny's just this pretty little woman used to being taken care of by some big strong man. Not her fault, way she was raised. She's silly and helpless, not mean."
"I see." Patience had known such women to discover a promising vein of meanness once the young-and-pretty had run out.
"Besides," Daph added, "except at three in the morning when he's crying in my ear, I think this is all just an old man's sorrow."
"Is anybody there with him besides Penny and her family? Any household staff?" "Nope. There was a cook, but Davey got the idea he was being poisoned, and fired her. My sister called in a panic, woman hasn't set foot in a kitchen in years, asked me to have Jayjay find a cook."
Jayjay, Daphne's partner of many years, ran the Joyce Jerome Employment Agency. The silence lengthened; Patience looked over her glasses again to find her friend sitting forward tensely, ice-blue eyes narrowed.
"Oh. Oh, no. Absolutely not."
"Patience, it would be perfect. You're so low-key, and these people hardly ever come into town or notice anybody here when they do."
"Absolutely not. I gave up cooking when Mike died. Cans, and deli, and fish and chips. Or plain grilled meat, and vegetables from my garden. No."
"So okay, what about that big beautiful daughter of yours? Isn't she part-time sous-chef at Purely Fresh downtown? See, what they had before this last cook was a couple, cook and gardener; and Penny says the grounds need attention. You could be gardener, and Verity could be cook, and between the two of you find out what's going on."
Patience took a deep breath, absently savoring the tobacco-tinged air of her small office. She had plenty of work waiting: background and financial checks on a couple of suitors of local women, a search for a soon-to-be heir, even a missing Arabian brood-mare probably stolen by the owner's ex-husband. "You aren't even sure there's anything amiss. Probably your father should see a good therapist."
"Never happen, not unless I have demonstrable reason to apply to the authorities for some kind of intervention. Which is why I want you out there having a look, for either malice or dementia." "The two of us would be expensive." Patience could feel her resolve weakening, her curiosity beginning to twitch. She had a feeling that Davey Griffith would be—interesting.
"Patience. Please?"
"I'll promise only to think about it. But for the moment, give me the particulars."
"I don't know, Mom. Tourists are out and about early this year; Nina thinks she could use me in the kitchen on Thursdays as well as the weekends."
Patience, seated at the round pine table a safe distance from the stove and the dinner preparations, watched her daughter—her big, beautiful daughter, in Daph's accurate description—stir the pan, then cover it and turn to the counter, where she had earlier broken eggs into a bowl. Now she added milk, and seasonings. And... parmesan cheese, looked like. "Verity, what are you making? An omelet?"
Verity took the lid off the skillet, poured the egg mixture in, shoved the result around with a wooden spoon. "Broccoli frittata, with onions and mushrooms." She put the skillet in the oven and set the timer.
"Sounds wonderful. I bet they'd love it out at Griffith Gulch."
Verity turned and gazed sternly at her mother. Then her lean, rather austere face softened, and the gray-blue eyes warmed. "Mom. You know working for rich folks is volunteering for a pain in the butt. Do we really have to do this job?"
"Sweetie, I could charge five hundred a day for the pair of us. For a week, I wouldn't commit to any longer. And the money would give us a good start on a new counter and new shower-stall for the studio."
"Oh, joy, no more squinting at black spots and wondering whether they're bugs or mildew." Verity brought her glass and the chardonnay bottle to the table and sat down, pulling her long red-gold braid over her shoulder to tug at it as she always did when thinking. "So tell me about what's worrying Daphne."
"Probably nothing more than a grieving old man's imaginings," Patience said, and outlined the problem as Daphne saw it.
"Give me a run-down on the family." Verity, who had left a bad marriage and a powersuit-and-briefcase San Francisco banking job a year earlier, now lived in the studio adjoining the cottage on her mother's north-of-town five acres and did the small-town scramble to make a living, putting in at least half of her time as investigator's assistant, the rest as cook. From the look of her, long tanned legs stretched under the table and wine glass in hand, she was easy with the change.
Patience opened the folder she had brought from downtown. "There's David Griffith, we've covered him. Penelope Griffith is David's younger daughter; Daph says she's silly but harmless.
"Then we have Jack Androvich, Penny's third husband. He's ten years younger than Penny, didn't get tenure at Sonoma State College where he was teaching English—mostly, my friend on the English faculty told me this afternoon, because he ignored stringent new rules against dating students. So he has retired to Griffith Gulch to write his novel."
"Bastard," suggested Verity.
"That's Daphne's view. Then there's Jon-David Williams, called Jon, Penny's son from her first marriage. Jon is 25, a blond California hunk, graduated from Southern Cal."
"Yuk."
"Hush. Not everybody is temperamentally suited to Stanford. Anyway, Jon has worked the stock exchange, and real estate, and is 'thinking about' various MBA programs. Then there are two children from the second marriage, Mark and Tessa Leconte." Patience held out her wine glass and Verity poured.
"Thank you, dear. Mark is nineteen, had a bad freshman year at Humboldt State, and is now a struggling rock guitarist trying to put together a group locally. Daphne says he's skinny, fumble-footed, and not very bright. But not a bad kid."
"Faint praise."
"Perhaps," said Patience. "Tessa is eighteen, was accepted at U.C. but chose to spend the year at the local community college. In Daphne's words, she's the pick of the litter."
"How do the kids get along with poor old grampa?"
"Daphne thinks, from her few talks with her father, that he's fond of Tessa. Penny complains that he's very stingy with the boys; David Griffith apparently believes that any healthy male over the age of twelve should have a job."
"Does Penny work?" asked Verity.
"Only at keeping some man happy and productive." "Sounds like a charming bunch, Ma," said Verity, getting to her feet at the buzz of the timer. "And one of them might be a murderer. Was Angie David Griffith's heir?"
Patience shook her head. "David told Penny, at the time of the marriage, that he'd had Angie sign a pre-nup. She got a given lump sum of money every year, so long as they stayed married, but she was to have no claim on the estate."
"Terrific. I hope it was a big lump and she had fun spending it."
* * *
Griffith Ranch, some ten miles south of Port Silva, occupied a broad, humped headland between Coast Highway One and the Pacific Ocean. Because of the way a small creek had cut the land on its winding way to the ocean, local people called the place Griffith Gulch.
Monday morning Patience slid a coded card into a slot on a post and then piloted the Ford pickup through high iron gates that swung shut behind them. They followed a meandering road through a landscape of wind-carved Monterey pines and cedars with now and then a young redwood. They caught glimpses of the creek, saw paths probably made by deer, passed a wider, manmade trail curling around a hill. And finally reached open grassland and a sprawling structure of cedar and glass perched at ocean's edge, several smaller buildings of similar design huddled around its flanks.
"Impressive," said Verity in flat tones. "But I bet it's always cold, always windy. And seriously lonely."
"It would be the better for a gnome or two," said Patience. She tucked the Ford in among the Jeep wagon, newish Jetta and geriatric Toyota Corolla on the graveled parking apron to the north of the house.
"From the Jerome Agency," said Verity to the small blonde woman who answered her ring. "Verity and Patience Mackellar."
"Penny Androvich," said the woman, peering up at six-feet-tall Verity from eyes that were the same ice-blue as Daphne's. "I was dubious about a woman gardener but you certainly look strong enough. Let's put you to work at once, since this dry spell can't last forever."
"Wait!" said Patience. "I'm the..."
"You'll work up those old flower beds," Penny Androvich went on, stepping out to the edge of the deck and gesturing Verity to follow, "and plan new landscaping for the front of the house; but first I want all those nasty diseased fuchsias pulled out. Perhaps I can get someone — ah, here's my daughter." "Mrs. Androvich, wait," said Patience, but the other woman ignored her.
"Tessa, this is our new gardner, Verity. Would you show her around, please?"
The girl had lank light-brown hair not recently combed and a skinny body draped in a gray sweatshirt, faded jeans and a carpenter's apron. But her narrow face was smooth and tanned, Patience noted, and she'd missed those pale-blue eyes; hers were a nice clear tea-color, fringed with dark lashes. "Hi," she said. "Mom, I thought I'd go up to see Granddad, show him this piece of wood I'm working on."
Her mother shook her head. "I'm afraid he's not feeling well this morning, dear. Maybe later."
Tessa sighed and said, "Okay, c'mon." Verity, with the tiniest shrug for Patience's benefit, set off after the girl. "Now, Mrs. Mackellar is it?" said Penelope Androvich. "Come in and let me show you our wonderful kitchen."
Fate sealed. Patience suppressed a sigh and acknowledged to herself that it was probably for the best. Verity was a good investigator in the field, tireless and inventive. But lurking, prying, and eavesdropping called for Patience's kind of irreverent and bottomless curiosity — what her husband had called plain basic snoopiness. Besides, Verity was in better shape for grubbing out woody old plants.
"Ms. Jerome told me told me we were lucky to get you," Penny chirped. "A mother and daughter team is unusual, isn't it?"
"We enjoy working together," said Patience.
"That's nice. Oh, here are my men, waiting to see their new cook. My husband, Jack Androvich—Mrs. Mackellar."
Jack, tall and vaguely Kennedyesque with thick dark hair and green eyes, gave his wife a sexy smile and the new cook a distant nod. Servant invisibility, Patience noted; probably prove handy.
"My eldest son, Jon," Penny said, touching the beefy shoulder of a crew-cut blond young man who blinked stubby-lashed blue eyes and nodded. "And this is Mark." Taller than his brother, so skinny his Levis hung at hazard on his narrow hips, the boy ducked his head and blushed. "If you boys have any special requests, you just tell Mrs. Mackellar."
She gave each a loving little pat, got a quick peck on each cheek in return, and the two hurried out, Jon herding Mark before him like a border collie with a recalcitrant sheep. "And you can go back to your study, dear," Penny told her husband. "I'll show Mrs. Mackellar the kitchen and explain her duties."
"I don't eat red meat except occasionally very lean pork. And no dairy products," he said to Patience. And then, to his wife, "Have you talked to your father again, about the Merc?"
"Later, love. I promise," she said, and reached out to squeeze his arm. She was a toucher, this fluffy little woman in pink jeans and silky-white shirt. And she was clearly fond of her "men." Patience filed this impression while wondering whose "Merc," presumably Mercedes, was at issue here.
But this touch seemed to infuriate her husband, who snatched his arm away and glared. "Look, my Corolla is falling apart and meanwhile that 500 SL sits in the garage gathering dust as some kind of damned memorial to his slut of a wife, known to have screwed every male in sight including his own grandson for Christ's sake!"
Every male in sight but you, I bet, thought Patience as Penny said "Jack!" in anguished tones and took his arm again to pull him away. The invisible servant turned her back on the pair and surveyed her surroundings.
The slate-floored foyer opened into a vast room with a twenty-foot-high ceiling and a west wall made almost entirely of glass. A stone fireplace and hearth occupied the wall to the left, bookcases climbed that on the right. Furniture varied from country-cottage wicker to mission oak and clubby leather, all of it insignificant against the backdrop of gray and surly ocean.
"Kitchen through here," said Penny, returning pink-cheeked to lead the way into a stainless-steel cave: tall double refrigerator and adjoining freezer, hulking great stove with two ovens and six burners.
"A Wolf range, you'll love it," said Penny.
Right. Patience took note of a central island with what looked like a granite top, pans hanging above. A presumably magnetic strip festooned with knives. Slate floor. More like a morgue than a kitchen.
"I do only plain cooking, for the family. No cocktail parties or dinner parties." "These days we don't entertain," Penny said, "because of my father's..."
There was a rumble, a thump, and a two-note chime from the wall beside Patience: a dumbwaiter.
"Excuse me." Penny slid the door open and reached inside to pick up a tray bearing food-smeared dishes and dirty glasses. Patience caught the acrid brown odor of whiskey and had a good notion why David Griffith wasn't feeling well this morning.
"My father has separate quarters upstairs, the master suite," Penny said over her shoulder as she carried the tray to the sink. "He's old and... sad. His wife died in an accident recently, and he's taking her loss hard. Angie was a nice girl and we all miss her."
Patience found this a fairly graceful cover-up for both husband and father. "I'm sorry," she said, and picked up a piece of notepaper from the floor of the dumbwaiter. "Oh, he's sent down a list of menu suggestions for the new cook: meat loaf, pot roast, green beans with bacon, spaghetti and meatballs none of that 'pasta' crap, chicken-fried steak and biscuits and gravy."
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Penny. "If he stuffed himself on any of that he'd be up sick all night, and me with him."
"I see." She handed the note to Penny. "Does your father ever go out?"
Penny tossed a look upwards, toward David Griffith or perhaps God. "He's frail—arthritis, failing vision, falling-down dizzy spells. In recent years Angie always drove him, because he'd lost his license for too many moving violations, but he just hates to ride with any of us, except sometimes Tessa."
"Doesn't he go out to walk, or just for a breath of fresh air?"
Penny's chin lifted and her eyes narrowed, fluffy little lady suddenly gone sharp-edged. "He has his own deck overlooking the ocean. And he likes to sit in his hot tub with the roof pushed back, to look at the stars and listen to the surf. Not that it's any concern of yours."
Oops. "Of course it's not," Patience said in humble tones. "He's lucky to have a loving family to take care of him."
Penny was mollified. "It's as if he's lost his will to live. He refuses to be consoled even by his grandchildren, who've certainly tried, poor dears. Actually I suspect senility or even Alzheimer's; he turned eighty last month."
"My mother is the same age," said Patience. Hope Smith, she did not add, was at eighty a fire-breathing Baptist preacher who still climbed into the baptismal tank to dunk sinners.
"Then you understand. Don't worry, he'll soon forget what he asked for, and you can go ahead preparing nutritious low-fat meals for all of us with maybe a little melted cheese or something over his."
Steamed fish and broccoli gratinee, that should cheer the poor old guy right up. Never mind, she'd think of something.
* * *
"He didn't come down even for dinner!" Long after the fact, after dinner and the cleanup and her drive home, Patience was still twitchy with exasperation. "'Just put it in the dumbwaiter,' says Penny—exactly what we'd done with his lunch. And so far as I could see, nobody in that house went near him all day."
"Maybe that's his choice, Ma." Verity had called it a day at gardening when the fog rolled in around five, phoning Harley to pick her up instead of waiting for Patience. Now, wrapped in a fleecy robe with a glass of zinfandel at her elbow, she was working on her fingernails with rosewood stick and file.
"Penny did say he was refusing to be consoled by his grandchildren. Anyway, I made a couple of friendly gestures in his direction—skillet cornbread to go along with the fish and rice and broccoli, and an apple pie."
"Apple pie yet." Verity got to her feet to fetch a glass of wine for her mother. "Maybe you should give up this snoop stuff and get born again as a pastry chef at Purely Fresh."
"Hush," Patience advised firmly. "Let's see, small discoveries and plans. One: Jack Androvich sits in his beautiful study playing solitaire on his computer but flips to text when interrupted by a servant. The manual on the desk was for Word for Windows, so I'll to be able to look at his files when chance permits. Two: Penny makes telephone calls and writes checks in a little room off the kitchen that looks interesting; I think there's a file cabinet in the closet."
As Verity nodded, untroubled, Patience gave a moment's guilty thought to her own Baptist upbringing. Her sin was probably less in what she planned to do than in the pleasure she'd take in the doing. But something was cold and wrong in that house.
"Three: David Griffith likes Mozart and Beethoven, played loudly. And that's the sum of my success today. What about you?"
Verity settled back into her chair and put her feet up. "Mark's a pothead, you can smell it six feet away. Tessa, who acts more like his mother than his younger sister, says he's a talented musician; their father was Rick Leconte, a great rock guitarist."
She paused for a sip of wine. "Jon has money; that Jetta is his and I bet even his underwear has names on it. Hard to figure why he's living out there. Also, he's a prick. He had an argument with Tessa and punched her shoulder in a way that looked friendly but wasn't. I wanted to hit him with my shovel, but figured that wouldn't do much for my dumb-gardener role."
"Hank left me a message on the office machine," said Patience. Captain Hank Svoboda of the Port Silva police department was her very good friend. "No one at the Gulch has an alibi for the night of Angie's disappearance. Well, except for Jack—the sister he was supposedly visiting in Santa Rosa. David, Penny and Tessa were in their beds asleep. Mark was in the spare cottage practicing, Jon was upstairs watching whoever's late show. Nobody left, nobody heard anyone else leave.
"However," she added, getting to her feet with a sigh, "it's hard to see why any of them would have killed Angie."
"To make the old man miserable?" suggested Verity.
"Suicidal, you mean? That seems very roundabout. But be cautious, sweetie, and stay in character."
"You too, Ma. I don't like these people."
© Janet LaPierre.