Not Exactly a Brahmin Read online

  “Mrs. Palmerston, I’m Detective Smith, Berkeley Police Department. May I come in?”

  “Yes,” she said with the normal questioning hesitancy. She led me from the foyer into a large Spanish-style living room. She sat on one of the three sofas that, with the open hearth, formed the four sides of a square. Beyond one was a grand piano and several chairs, and beyond them a picture window, which I guessed would give the Palmerstons a view over the descending Berkeley hills into the flatlands, San Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Tonight it showed only rain.

  It would be no kindness to draw out what I had to tell her. Sitting beside her, I said, “I’m afraid I have bad news. Your husband has been in an accident. He’s been killed.”

  Her reaction—surprise, disbelief, tears—was completely normal. Her questions—when had the accident happened, where—were what one expected.

  “I understand he picked up his Cadillac at the dealer’s around one-thirty and drove it straight home,” I said.

  “Yes. He got here just before two.”

  “Why did he pick up the car himself? I gather he didn’t drive much of late.”

  She nodded. “Ralph had a degenerating eye condition. It’s rare and the doctors weren’t sure if even surgery could stop the progression. He was basically going blind. They thought perhaps an operation could help, but they didn’t know and they didn’t want to do anything at this stage. They planned to wait till after the new year. Ralph and I were leaving Saturday.” A tear hung from her eye. “We were going to the Far East. Saturday we were flying to Tokyo. Ralph didn’t want to sit at home and worry about going blind. He said if he was going to be blind, there was nothing he could do about it. He wanted to go and see things while he could. He said if worse came to worst, at least he’d have something to remember. We were going Saturday.” Her voice broke. She grabbed for her purse and extricated a handkerchief.

  I remembered Ralph Palmerston’s expression. No wonder he had been terrified when his brakes failed. He probably couldn’t even see the street in front of him.

  “I’m all right now, Officer,” she said, replacing the handkerchief and pulling out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Why did your husband have his car serviced today? And why did he pick it up himself? Surely, if you couldn’t get it, someone from the shop would have delivered it.”

  She lit a cigarette. “Why? Ralph’s a very orderly man. He’d be uncomfortable leaving on a trip without everything being in order. I made plans to see a friend today because I knew Ralph was getting the car. He wouldn’t mind my being gone.” Her voice now was dispassionate, as if she were willing herself to look at Ralph and his death from a distance.

  “But why did he pick it up?”

  “He always took his car to be serviced. He always picked it up. It was what he did.” She took a breath. “I doubt it even occurred to him not to pick it up. If he’d been asked to drive somewhere else, somewhere new, he would have decided it was unwise, but this, because it was something he had always done …”

  “Is there no place else he would have driven?”

  She considered the question, lightly tapping her teeth together. “I don’t think he would. Ralph was a very responsible man.” She looked directly at me. “But he did, didn’t he? Where was he going?”

  It was a rhetorical question. She didn’t assume I would know the answer. The person who had called Ralph Palmerston and told him Lois was at the Albany Police Station wouldn’t have expected him to tell anyone where he was going. They wouldn’t have known he would nearly hit Billy Kershon and then stop to talk to him. I said, “Tell me what you did from the time he came home with the car.”

  She took a drag of the cigarette. “Well, I showered and dressed. Then Ralph and I had a glass of hot sake—it seemed so appropriate for such a rainy day—and we practiced our Japanese lessons for a while, probably forty-five minutes. Ralph wanted to be able to speak decently when we got to Japan. We realized early on that that was going to be an impossibility, but we kept trying. He said at least it would be fun to be able to say a few things in Japanese.” That remembrance seemed to cut through her control; she took a final drag of the cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. “After that I had dinner plans with a friend.”

  “Can you give me her name and address?”

  She hesitated a minute before saying, “Yes, of course. It’s Carol Grogan. She lives on Ordway.” But she didn’t ask why I wanted to know.

  “What time did you leave?”

  “Ten to four. I remember, I looked.”

  Ordway was in Berkeley, a ten-minute drive from here. “Were you planning an early dinner?”

  “Oh, the time, you mean? Well, she’s a librarian and this is her day off. Her children are in day care till five-thirty, so she asked me to come early and have a quiet drink before she had to go and pick them up. Dinner with two small boys is anything but calm.”

  I glanced down at her beige raw silk slacks. I was surprised they’d survived so well. She looked, in the pants and loose silk sweater, as if she’d been going to a cocktail party, hardly for a meal with children. “What did you do there?”

  She looked at me questioningly. “We had a drink and talked. Then she picked up the boys.”

  “Didn’t you go with her?”

  “No.”

  “And then?”

  “She came back with the boys and we had dinner.”

  “And?”

  “She put the boys to bed and we talked a bit more and then I drove home. Look, why are you asking me this?”

  “Because someone called your husband and told him you were being held at the Albany Police Station and he needed to come to get you.”

  “What?”

  I repeated what I had told her.

  “But why would anyone do that?”

  I didn’t mention the perforations in the brake lines. I wouldn’t until Misco’s report was in. “Somebody wanted your husband driving down Marin Avenue this afternoon in the rain.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know yet. Tell me about him.”

  She lit another cigarette. It was clear that the full implications of what I had told her hadn’t sunk in yet. “We’ve been married four years.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “At opening night at the opera. One of the parties. That was almost five years ago.” She spoke quickly, nervously. “What do you want to know about him?”

  “Did he have any business associates who would benefit from his death?”

  “No. His money came from the Palmieri Winery. He was an heir, but he had no control; he just got the money.”

  I recalled Pereira explaining that. “What happens to his money now?”

  “It comes to me.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it.” There was at once a defiant hardness and a rush of fear in her voice.

  “I do need to see his will.”

  “Of course,” she said more calmly. “I’ll call Mr. Farrell, Ralph’s lawyer, in the morning.”

  “Can you think of any enemies your husband had, or people who might have had something against him?”

  She took a drag of the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly, her eyes half closed, as if in thought. “I really can’t, Officer. Ralph had no enemies. His business connections were superficial—Chamber of Commerce, things like that.”

  “Chamber of Commerce?”

  “The winery has a tasting room in Berkeley. The people who run the winery asked Ralph to represent them at the Chamber. It was just for form’s sake. And for Ralph to keep in touch with some of the men he’s met over the years.”

  “Did he have any bad habits—drinking, or perhaps gambling?”

  “He drank socially, no more. Coming from a winery family, he knew more about the dangers of alcohol than most. He had an uncle who killed a woman driving drunk. No, Ralph was very careful. As for gambling, our money wasn’t in stocks.”

  I couldn’t help but t
hink that the rich viewed gambling rather differently than the police. “Could he have gambled elsewhere? Reno? Vegas? The local racetracks? Football?”

  Again she drew on the cigarette, pulling so deeply and intently that it looked as if she were about to suck the tobacco in through the filter. “I can’t imagine that. We never went to the races, or watched sports. Ralph wouldn’t have known enough about sports to make a bet. As for Reno, we’ve been there two or three times, but only to see the shows. Ralph never even played a slot machine.”

  “But he could have gambled without your knowing it,” I insisted.

  “Obviously,” she snapped. “If you’re going to ask me what I don’t know, anything’s possible.”

  “I mean,” I said, making an effort to keep my voice neutral, “did he get calls that he didn’t explain, or go off regularly, or transfer money frequently?”

  “No. None of that.”

  “What about charities? He used to be known for his work with them.”

  “They wouldn’t profit from his death. I won’t be making a memorial bequest, if that’s what you’re thinking. Ralph gave them a lot of time and a lot of money.”

  “And then he stopped,” I prompted.

  “He became disillusioned with giving to people who don’t appreciate it. You know, Officer, things need to be reciprocal to work. When you give a lot, you expect something back, not money, but appreciation, gratitude, something that says your effort wasn’t just tossed down the hole. Ralph got tired of tossing himself away.”

  “Well, what did he do? With his time, I mean.” That had come out sharper than I’d intended.

  But Mrs. Palmerston didn’t seem to notice my tone. She shrugged. “He didn’t give up all charities. We still attended a number of functions—openings, dinners. We played bridge, traveled, he enjoyed the symphony, the ballet, the theater before his eyes got so bad. He gardened. There’s a greenhouse out back. And then there was his photography, his darkroom downstairs, but of course, he hadn’t done that lately.”

  “What about Shareholders Five?”

  She crushed out the cigarette, then searched for the pack, extricated another, and lit it. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Shareholders Five was a notation your husband had written down and put in his glove compartment. It was the only unusual thing there. It must have been important.”

  She took a long drag of the cigarette. “I don’t have any idea.” She started to take another drag, then said, “Ralph wanted to get everything in order before we left. He had the car serviced. He cataloged all the negatives he’d had in envelopes while he could still see to do it. And he was such a little boy in some ways. He got all caught up in Halloween. We must have ten pounds of chocolate in the kitchen. He said he wanted to see the children this year when they came to the door. He said he had some big surprise planned for Halloween, not just the chocolate, not just for the children.”

  “What did he mean?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. He just said I’d be surprised.”

  Halloween was the day after tomorrow. I wondered if the surprise he had planned had led to his murder today.

  CHAPTER 5

  I TOOK LOIS PALMERSTON to the morgue to identify the body. She was virtually silent on the drive there. I didn’t say much either. My mind was on Ralph Palmerston as I had seen him lying by the roadside. It would be difficult enough for Lois to see him rolled out on the slab without having to see his face bloodied and horrified.

  Perhaps she was thinking the same thing. She was under tight control when she walked into the viewing room. The room itself was enough to unnerve anyone. It was stainless steel, top to bottom, so that it could be hosed down. Ralph Palmerston’s body, lying on a stainless-steel gurney, was covered with a plastic sheet that only made him look colder, grayer.

  Lois kept her gaze on the floor until she was right next to the gurney. Then she looked up quickly, gasped, and turned away.

  We walked slowly back to the car. I opened the passenger door for her and had to tell her to get in. But as soon as the car moved, she looked around nervously and started to talk. She seemed willing to discuss anything, to cover the remembrance of Ralph’s body with a blanket of words. As I started up the hill, she said, “It’ll be easier if you go up Spruce.”

  I smiled. “Not in this car. I tried a couple years ago.” Spruce, though not so steep as Marin, was a long incline. On it, it would just take longer for my car to die.

  Lois looked puzzled. “Don’t they give you cars?”

  “There are a limited number. And with the rain, they’ll all be in use.”

  She held the handle above the glove compartment; her feet were braced against the front. Friends who were used to other cars had been unnerved riding with me. It wasn’t the smallness of the Volkswagen, but the slope of the hood that undid them. They looked through the windshield and saw not the protective hoods of their own cars, not a different hood, but nothing at all. “As if I’m about to drop off the end of the world,” one had said.

  “If I’d been thinking right,” Lois said, “I would have driven. My car is in the garage.”

  Her Mercedes convertible; I remembered Billy Kershon mentioning that.

  “Did your husband give it to you?” That sounded like the Ralph Palmerston that Ellen Kershon had told me about—the man who gave the perfect presents.

  Lois’s hand tightened on the grip above the glove compartment. “It was mine before we were married.”

  I turned right. “You must have had a good job, then.”

  “I was with Hammonds, in San Francisco.”

  “Oh, downtown?”

  “Yes.”

  I tried to recall exactly what Hammonds did. The name was familiar. Dammit, Pereira would know. “Hammonds, are they a law firm?”

  She almost laughed. There was a note of hysteria in that sound. “No. They’re architects. They’d be appalled to be confused with lawyers.”

  I made another right-hand loop. “Were you an architect, then?”

  “No, I was in customer relations.” There had been a pause before she spoke. “Customer relations” sounded like a forced phrase.

  We were getting close to Grizzly Peak. I let the car slow. “What did you do?”

  She hesitated. Her hand was tighter on the handle. She seemed to be in a battle between avoiding the terrors of silence and talking about something she clearly wanted to keep to herself. “I did the usual things. I made the clients feel welcome. I helped them with their problems, arranged their appointments, took care of the small things that can make the difference in a working arrangement.”

  “Like a receptionist?”

  “More than a receptionist,” she snapped. She took a breath then said more calmly, “I did more than answer the phone.”

  I felt a pang of guilt in having pricked a sore spot right at this time. But she was, I reminded myself, a potential suspect. And she certainly was sensitive about having been a receptionist. Had Ralph Palmerston’s friends remarked on that? Was “gold digger” not an unfamiliar term?

  The house was only a couple of blocks away. I could ask about Ralph’s friends’ reaction to her, or one other question. There wasn’t time for more.

  “I’m sure you had a very responsible position. You’d need to, to afford a Mercedes.” I waved a hand indicating my own car, though I had the feeling that after the trip up the hill, any further allusion to it was unnecessary.

  “It was used.”

  “Even so …”

  “A friend got it for me.”

  I waited.

  “Actually he was the husband of a good friend. A woman I knew in college. She’s really my closest friend.”

  “They must be close friends to get you a Mercedes.”

  “I don’t mean he bought it. He found it for sale. It was going relatively cheaply. He’s good with cars, so he could get the engine back in shape. And he could touch up the finish.”

  “That’s a lot of work.” I couldn’t
imagine what I would have had to do in order to get my ex-husband, much less anyone else’s husband, to revamp a car for me.

  Lois shrugged. In my peripheral vision the movement looked forced. “He likes working with cars, doing things with his hands.”

  I still found this level of altruism hard to believe. “What does he do otherwise?”

  “Computers. He’s started a small company, Munsonalysis. I don’t know what they do, something technical.” Her words were slower now, more controlled. “Jeffrey may have explained what they do. Computers are too abstract for me. He used to talk about them all the time. When they were married, he had computer stuff all over the house. It used to drive Nina crazy. He didn’t want her to touch some of it. He said if she hit the wrong key, whole companies would erase. She could never remember which were the okay keys and which were the off-limits ones. So she never touched any of the machines. She had to watch her step all the time.” Now she sounded more like she was talking to ward off my questions than from nervousness. But I couldn’t be sure. But if she was hiding something, I didn’t know what it was or what questions to ask. And sometimes these spontaneous chatterings of suspects, or potential suspects, were more revealing than their thought-out answers. So I let her go on.

  “Nina’s a poet—you know, Nina Munson?”

  I nodded, though the name wasn’t familiar to me.

  “She’s had some things published locally. She’s really very good. She’s not obsessed with house pride anymore.” Lois smiled. “I guess she had enough of that.”

  “She and Jeffrey are divorced?”

  “Irreconcilable differences. Real irreconcilable differences.” She laughed nervously.

  I waited.

  “The end came when Jeffrey, in all seriousness, tried to teach Nina to use a computer. He’d tried for years, but on this last push he told her that a word processor would be wonderful for writing poetry on, because she could take out words or move them around. He said it was so easy to write with a word processor that he’d considered being a poet himself. But he decided there wasn’t any money in it. Nina left him the next day.”

  I laughed too. We were in front of the house.