The Hanging Page 12

  “I’ll check them out. And I’ll see what I can find out about the rumor mill.” He was smiling at me like a fond parent with a clever child. “Anything else I should look into, Nancy Drew?”

  I laughed. “If I think of anything, Chief, I’ll call you.”

  His smile faded. “I don’t want to undercut Thornbury and Weber, Mags, but if you do run into anything, I would appreciate it if you ran it by me first.”

  “Didn’t I just say that?” I got up from his big desk chair.

  “We should get back to the others,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be starting a barbecue?”

  As we walked from his home office through the house out toward the patio, he asked, “How did it go with Sly’s mother yesterday?”

  “She’s a mess, Roger. I believed her when she said she had no memory of the son she named Ronald Miller. She thought Ronald Miller was some tweaker who died.”

  “Waste of time?”

  “The visit? Definitely not. Meeting her makes me appreciate Sly even more. He is something of a miracle.”

  “Speaking of miracles,” he said, giving me a little wink. “You really like this new guy of yours.”

  “He’s growing on me.”

  “Like a wart,” Roger said, nudging me with his shoulder. “He seems to stick pretty close to you.”

  “We’re new, Roger. We’ve both been on the shelf for a while, and we’re enjoying being with another nice, warm body again. And as someones go, you have to admit, he’s interesting.”

  “I don’t like him,” Roger said with that wicked gleam in his eye that I knew was good-natured, brotherly teasing. “He speaks in complete sentences.”

  “English isn’t his first language. Give him time and his usage will be as crappy and profane as yours.”

  “We can only hope.”

  My daughter, Casey, and her roommate, Zia, had arrived while I was with Roger. On our way through, we found the two of them huddled with Kate at a kitchen counter, three heads bent over a typed paper. Ever since she was in high school, from time to time, Casey had called upon Kate, her godmother, for help with written assignments. This time, it seemed, it was Zia who had asked for counsel.

  When I walked in I got little waves from the girls, who, with Kate, seemed intent on a knotty problem. Kate looked up from the paper and called to her mother-in-law, Linda, who was stirring something magic-smelling in a big pot on the stove.

  “Mom,” Kate said to Linda, “can we borrow you for a minute?”

  “Sí, m’ija.” Linda, a retired high-school English teacher, put the lid on her pot, wiped her hands on the tea towel tied around her middle, came over and bent her head next to Casey’s and began to read the paper on the counter.

  Linda looked up when Roger went to the refrigerator for a beer.

  “Rigo, I don’t smell any smoke coming from outside.”

  “I’m on it, Mom,” Roger said, popping his beer open and heading for the patio door.

  “Maggie, honey,” she said to me, “Ricardo took your mom, your uncle, and that handsome man of yours out to his studio. You might go rescue your boyfriend—you know how Ricardo can be.”

  As the door closed behind us, Roger said, “My dad is probably grilling the poor boy about his intentions.”

  “Actually, your dad said he wanted to show everyone the didgeridoo he brought back from Australia.”

  “That’s as flimsy a pretext as an invitation to look at etchings.”

  Laughing, I left him to fire up the big barbecue and walked across the patio to the second house of the three houses on the property.

  Roger’s father, Ricardo, had been a high-school band teacher before he retired. When Kate and Roger built the casita—the little house—for his parents, in self-defense they added a sound-proofed music studio on the back side. Forty years of standing in front of tubas and drums had left Ricardo a bit hard of hearing, though Linda insisted that his hearing was fine when he wanted it to be; he just liked things loud.

  Ricardo was indeed showing Mom, Max and Jean-Paul his didgeridoo, a flute-like instrument played by Aboriginal Australians. There was a lot of laughter going on, so I could only guess at what else they were talking about because when I walked in they paused the conversation to see who was interrupting.

  Jean-Paul rose and came over to me.

  “I promised you a home tour,” I said. “Still interested?”

  “Of course.”

  We said good-bye to the others and I led him outside.

  “Ricardo was explaining his retirement plan,” he said, still smiling.

  “What? Move in with the kids?”

  “Exactly. He was trying to persuade your mother to follow suit.”

  “She wasn’t buying it, though, was she?”

  “She said maybe she should move in with Ricardo’s kids. You haven’t offered to build her a house of her own, and you don’t have a pool.”

  “I keep hoping they’ll invite me to move in,” I said.

  He nodded, looking around.

  “In the three years I have been in Los Angeles,” he said, “I have seen many grand homes: mansions in the foothills, mansions on the shore, penthouse mansions. But this is the first home I have visited that I would want to live in.”

  He smiled at me. “I wouldn’t turn down an invitation to move in, either.”

  I took him out through the big wooden gate at the side of the adobe wall that surrounded the Tejedas’ three-house compound to show him the front of the original Mexican-era adobe structure.

  The buildings were just above the flood plain of a year-round creek—a trickle in the summer, a torrent during the winter rainy season—and seemed to be as much a part of the natural landscape as the ancient live oak trees that gave the ranch its name, El Rancho de las Encinas Viejas—Old Oaks Ranch—almost two hundred years ago.

  When Kate and Roger happened upon the place during a Sunday drive, no one had lived there for decades. The roof of the main house was long gone and its five-foot-thick adobe walls had been eroded by many years of rain and neglect. But they could see in the ruins the outlines of what had once been a gracious hacienda. And they fell in love with it.

  They were at one of those transitional junctures in life. Roger was ready to retire from his first police career. Marisol, their daughter, would enter kindergarten that fall. And Kate, ready to resume her career after a five-year hiatus to stay home with Mari, had managed to land a scarce college teaching position at Anacapa, sixty freeway miles from their home. So, the day they first saw the crumbling rancho, they searched out the owner and made an offer, even though the property had not been listed for sale. And then they began planning their new home, using the original architecture as their guide.

  On his first visit to the site, Ricardo announced that they had better build him and Linda a house there, too, because there was no way he could be expected to battle the 405 every time he wanted to see his youngest grandbaby. So they had. And then a third one for visits by Roger’s two grown children from his first marriage and their young families.

  Jean-Paul thought that it was completely natural for several generations of a family to live in such close proximity. When I thought about it, it wasn’t all that unusual in the U.S., either.

  Though the Tejeda home wasn’t opulent by any measure except comfort and setting, clearly the costs involved in its acquisition and building had been significant.

  “Policemen must be better paid in America than they are in France,” Jean-Paul said, with a tilt of the head that posed the statement as a question.

  “Kate is an heiress,” I said.

  “Quiet money?”

  “Very quiet.”

  That night, dinner conversation naturally turned to the murder.

  Kate sighed, “Hiram Chin is pressing for a memorial service for Holloway ASAP. Roger told me the coroner won’t even get to the autopsy until tomorrow, but Hiram thinks we can schedule the service for Wednesday. I find the hurry to be unseemly.”r />
  “Why the rush?” Linda asked.

  “Hiram says the memorial will start the healing process for the campus, whatever that means. But I think that what he wants is to put the tenure of Park Holloway in his rearview mirror just as soon as he can.”

  “What does it mean, ‘interim’ academic vice president?” Jean-Paul asked, passing the platter of tamales to Mom, who sat at his right. He had met Hiram Chin the day before, at the Malibu party.

  “It means he’s a temp on campus, like me,” I told him. “It also means that he was hired without having to go through any rigorous vetting process, and he can be fired as easily as he was hired.”

  Max and Roger exchanged significant looks.

  I caught Roger’s eye. “What?”

  “Max needs more wine,” he said. “Is there any left in the bottle in front of you?”

  I tried again. “Uncle Max?”

  But instead of answering me, Max turned to Kate. “Where’s your daughter tonight?”

  “Baby-sitting for Teresa,” she told him, referring to Roger’s daughter from his first marriage. “She should be here pretty soon. Now, quit screwing around, both of you, and answer Maggie’s question.”

  Max cocked his head to the side, narrowed his eyes as if challenging me.

  “His name doesn’t ring a bell?” he asked.

  “No. Should it?”

  “Kate?” Roger said, “Who hired Chin?”

  “Park Holloway,” she said. “He ran the appointment by the Board of Trustees and got his usual rubber-stamp approval. The Academic Senate had Human Resources launch a call for applications to fill the position permanently, but twice now, after we’ve appointed campus-wide selection committees and gone through the whole interview rigmarole, Park has set aside the candidate list and hung onto Hiram.”

  “That can’t be legal,” Mom said, the veteran faculty wife. “It flies in the face of all that shared governance requires.”

  “Absolutely,” Kate said. “But if the trustees approve, apparently he can get away with it. The Academic Senate filed a complaint with the chancellor, but we’ve gotten nowhere, so far.”

  “Ricardo.” Linda waggled some fingers to catch her husband’s attention. “Where have we heard that name?”

  “From Kate,” Ricardo said. “But listening to her I thought Chin’s first name was Goddamn.”

  Mom turned toward Linda. “Wasn’t there a Hiram Chin, some college up my way, falsified his C.V. or padded his C.V.?”

  Jean-Paul turned to me for translation.

  “Curriculum vitae,” I told him. “An academic résumé.”

  I caught my uncle’s eye. “Is that it, Max? He lied?”

  “When I met him Friday his name seemed familiar, so I made some calls,” Max said. “As I told Roger, until maybe six or seven years ago, Hiram Chin was a professor of art history.” He named a university in the Bay Area. “He was—still is, I suppose—an expert on the Renaissance. When his name was sent forward for the provost position at his university he had to submit an updated C.V. He had an impressive list of academic accomplishments that were well documented, but his claims to have been the curator for the private collection of a deposed Asian dictator and an acquisitions advisor for a Middle Eastern museum were challenged because he couldn’t verify them. The dictator was dead, and the museum had been looted and closed during a regime change.”

  “He lied?” Linda asked.

  “Moot issue.” Max held up his hands. “Chin withdrew his name from nomination, retired from the university, and rode off into the sunset. Probably in the interest of saving face, the university did not inquire further.”

  “In cases like those,” Jean-Paul said, “I might not question Mr. Chin’s claim to have been an advisor, but I would certainly wonder about the provenance of the acquisitions. Potentates are a primary market for stolen and counterfeit works of art.”

  I remembered that at the Friday meeting Holloway mentioned that he had been on a Smithsonian committee and that there had been a question about a Rembrandt’s authenticity; I wondered how far back the relationship between Holloway and Chin went.

  Casey leaned forward a bit to see Kate better. “What is all this mess going to do to Sly’s installation ceremony? He was all set for this Friday, but...” She screwed up her face. “I mean, it’s really gross, if you think about it. A man died where his sculpture is supposed to—excuse me—hang.”

  “Maggie suggested that we hold the celebration somewhere else and have people go over to see the sculpture afterward,” Kate said. “Quietly.”

  Roger shook his head. “You won’t be hanging anything from that apparatus until Scientific Services is finished with it. Who knows when that will be?”

  “Poor Sly,” Mom said. “He was so excited. He came by to show me his new suit the other day. I hate to think of the disappointment; he has been working so hard.”

  “Exactly,” Casey said. “That’s why I know for sure that Sly didn’t kill that man, no matter what the gossip is. He is so proud of that sculpture and his award that he would never pollute the place where it’s going to hang.”

  “Pollute?” I asked her. “Casey, where did you hear the gossip?”

  “From Sly,” she said. “I called him to see how things were going and he told me what people are saying.”

  “Dear God,” Linda said, appalled. “Was he terribly upset?”

  “Hard to tell with Sly,” Casey said. “I thought he was posturing when he said he was lucky someone got to Holloway before he did. You know, just covering his feelings with bravado the way he does.”

  Max tapped the side of his wineglass with the edge of his knife to get everyone’s attention.

  “I have a request,” he said when all eyes were on him. “As legal counsel for Sly, I ask that you, Sly’s friends, repeat nothing that was said at this table tonight. Things are tough enough for Sly right now. Let’s not have gross rumor put ideas into some idiot’s head.”

  Chapter 13

  On Mondays, I didn’t have classes. Jean-Paul left early to drive to his office and I pulled out right behind him. I caught the first commuter flight out of Burbank Airport headed for Sacramento. As soon as the plane crossed the coastal mountain range, we left the clouds behind. I landed in bright spring sunshine, rented a car, and drove east through lush San Joaquin Valley farmland to Gilstrap, Park Holloway’s home town. It was time to get a closer look at the man.

  Gilstrap was a typical little farm town, not unlike Anacapa had been before its gentrification. A few shops, a city hall, and a library, all built around a small, leafy town square with a bandstand in the middle. The town was surrounded by dairies, raisin grape vineyards, and almond and peach orchards, some of them in full spring bloom. I looked for a diner, information central in any small town, and found one next to City Hall.

  It was late for breakfast so the place was nearly empty when I went in. I took a seat at the counter, ordered coffee and eggs, and struck up a conversation with the waitress, a motherly woman named Viv.

  “Awful about Park Holloway,” I said, folding my copy of the local newspaper on the counter beside me as she filled a thick ceramic mug for me from her pot. “Did you know him at all?”

  “Oh sure, everyone around here knows the Holloways,” Viv said. “My brother Bob was in the same graduating class at Central High as Park. His wife and me were in Sunday School together over at the Lutheran church.”

  She leaned in closer to share a confidence, something that needed to be whispered. “The Holloways are Methodist.”

  “I knew Park,” I said, keeping the perhaps unsavory fact that I grew up Catholic to myself. “But I never met her.”

  She studied me for a moment before she asked, “You from D.C., then?”

  “Los Angeles,” I said. “I understand his wife moved back here after the divorce.”

  “Karen? Pretty much, she never left. She didn’t like living in Washington. She was okay with Boston when Park was in school over there,
and she really liked when they lived in China for a while, but Washington didn’t agree with her. She didn’t want to raise her boys there.”

  “Where are the boys now?”

  “Trey, that’s Parker Holloway the Third, he’s coaching the baseball team at Central and teaching social studies or something like that.”

  Viv leaned close again to say, “But Harlan, well, he’s out of rehab again. I saw him over at his mother’s place when I took a casserole by after church yesterday. Either he’s real broke up over his dad, or he needs a drink real bad.”

  “Or both?” I ventured.

  “Or that.” She winked at me and took her coffeepot down the counter to refill the cups of the two men sitting together at the far end.

  “You talking about Park, Viv?” A well-weathered older man, wearing a billed cap and starched and ironed Carhartt overalls, held out his cup for her.

  “Is there anything else this town is talking about, Chet?” she asked, topping off his mug as she scooped up his companion’s empty plate. “Dutch, you need anything else there, hon? Cookie made a nice-looking pie out of the early berries. Might be a bit on the tart side.”

  “No, thanks, Viv.” Dutch patted his plaid-covered belly. “I’ve had a sufficiency.”

  Chet picked up the conversational thread. “The paper didn’t say, but I heard he was shot in the back of the head.”

  “I never heard that,” Dutch countered. “Tom at the mill said he heard he was choked.”

  That thread was interrupted when my eggs appeared in the service window. Viv set them in front of me; a farmhand-size portion.

  “Do you think Mrs. Holloway is at home this morning?” I asked her. “I would like to pay my respects.”

  “Oh no, honey,” Dutch volunteered. “She opened up the library as usual. It’s Monday morning, you know, story time for the kids from the elementary school. She’ll be over there by now.”

  I thanked him, did my best by Cookie’s eggs, paid my check and left.