The Best of Sisters in Crime (7 page)

“A bit. Remember
how it could be invalidated by anything pre-printed on it? Like in that case
where there was a date stamped on the paper the woman used, and the whole thing
was thrown out?”

“Yeah. I
remember someone asked whether you could use your own letterhead.”

“That was you,
Gary.”

“Probably. And
you couldn’t, it seems to me.”

“But you
probably could now. Now only the ‘materially relevant’ part has to be
handwritten. And you don’t have to date it.”

“No? That seems
odd.”

“Well, you would
if there were a previous dated will. Otherwise just write it out, sign it, and
it’s legal.”

Something about
the call, maybe just the melancholy of hearing a voice from the past, put me in
a gray and restless mood. It was mid-December and pouring outside—perfect
weather for doleful ruminations on a man I hardly knew anymore. I couldn’t help
worrying that if Laurie was Gary’s whole life, that didn’t speak well for his
marriage. Shouldn’t Stephanie at least have gotten a small mention? But she
hadn’t, and the Gary I knew could easily have fallen out of love with her. He
was one of life’s stationary drifters—staying in the same place but drifting
from one mild interest to another, none of them very consuming and none very
durable. I hoped it would be different with Laurie; it wouldn’t be easy to
watch your dad wimp out on you.

But I sensed it
was already happening. I suspected that phone call meant little Laurie, who was
his life, was making him feel tied down and he was sending out feelers to
former and future lady friends.

The weather made
me think of a line from a poem Gary used to quote:

II pleure dans mon coeur

Comme il pleut sur la ville.

He was the sort
to quote Paul Verlaine. He read everything, retained everything, and didn’t do
much. He had never finished law school, had sold insurance for a while and was
now dabbling in real estate, I’d heard, though I didn’t know what that meant,
exactly. Probably trying to figure out a way to speculate with Stephanie’s
money, which, out of affection for Gary, I thanked heaven she had. If you can’t
make up your mind what to do with your life, you should at least marry well and
waffle in comfort.

Gary died that
night. Reading about it in the morning
Chronicle
, I shivered, thinking the phone call was one of those grisly
coincidences. But the will came the next day.

The
Chronicle
story said Gary and Stephanie were
both killed instantly when their car went over a cliff on a twisty road in a
blinding rainstorm. The rains were hellish that year. It was the third day of a
five-day flood.

Madeline Bell a
witness to the accident, said Gary had swerved to avoid hitting her Mercedes as
she came around a curve. The car had exploded and burned as Bell watched it
roll off a hill near San Anselmo, where Stephanie and Gary lived.

Even in that
moment of shock I think I felt more grief for Laurie than I did for Gary, who
had half lived his life at best. Only a day before, when I’d talked to Gary,
Laurie had had it made—her mama was rich and her daddy good-looking. Now she
was an orphan.

I wondered where
Gary and Stephanie were going in such an awful storm. To a party, probably, or
home from one. It was the height of the holiday season.

I knew Gary’s
mother, of course. Would she already be at the Wilder house, for Hanukkah,
perhaps? If not, she’d be coming soon; I’d call in a day or two.

In the meantime
I called Rob Burns, who had long since replaced Gary in my affections, and
asked to see him that night. I hadn’t thought twice of Gary in the past five
years, but something was gone from my life and I needed comfort. It would be
good to sleep with Rob by my side and the sound of rain on the
roof—life-affirming, as we say in California. I’d read somewhere that Mark
Twain, when he built his mansion in Hartford, installed a section of tin roof
so as to get the best rain sounds. I could understand the impulse.

It was still
pouring by mid-morning the next day, and my throat was feeling slightly
scratchy, the way it does when a cold’s coming on. I was rummaging for vitamin
C when Kruzick brought the mail in—Alan Kruzick, incredibly inept but
inextricably installed secretary for the law firm of Nicholson and Schwartz, of
which I was a protesting partner. The other partner, Chris Nicholson, liked his
smart-ass style, my sister Mickey was his girlfriend, and my mother had simply
laid down the law—hire him and keep him.

“Any checks?” I
asked.

“Nope. Nothing
interesting but a letter from a dead man.”

“What?”

He held up an
envelope with Gary Wilder’s name and address in the upper left corner. “Maybe
he wants you to channel him.”

The tears that
popped into my eyes quelled even Kruzick.

The will was in
Gary’s own handwriting, signed, written on plain paper, and dated December 17,
the day of Gary’s death. It said: “This is my last will and testament,
superseding all others. I leave everything I own to my daughter, Laurie Wilder.
If my wife and I die before her 21st birthday, I appoint my brother, Michael
Wilder, as her legal guardian. I also appoint my brother as executor of this
will.”

My stomach
clutched as I realized that Gary had known when we talked that he and Stephanie
were in danger. He’d managed to seem his usual happy-go-lucky self, using the
trick he had of hiding his feelings that had made him hard to live with.

But if he knew
he was going to be killed, why hadn’t he given the murderer’s identity? Perhaps
he had, I realized. I was a lawyer, so I’d gotten the will. Someone else might
have gotten a letter about what was happening. I wondered if my old boyfriend
had gotten involved with the dope trade. After all, he lived in Marin County,
which had the highest population of coke dealers outside the greater Miami
area.

I phoned Gary’s
brother at his home in Seattle but was told he’d gone to San Anselmo. I had a
client coming in five minutes, but after that, nothing pressing. And so, by two
o’clock I was on the Golden Gate Bridge, enjoying a rare moment of foggy
overcast, the rain having relented for a while.

It was odd about
Gary’s choosing Michael for Laurie’s guardian. When I’d known him well he’d had
nothing but contempt for his brother. Michael was a stockbroker and a
go-getter; Gary was a mooner-about, a romantic, and a rebel. He considered his
brother boring, stuffy, a bit crass, and utterly worthless. On the other hand,
he adored his sister, Jeri, a free-spirited dental hygienist married to a
good-natured sometime carpenter.

Was Michael
married? Yes, I thought. At least he had been. Maybe fatherhood had changed
Gary’s opinions on what was important—Michael’s money and stability might have
looked good to him when he thought of sending Laurie to college.

I pulled up in
front of the Wilder-Cooper house, a modest redwood one that had probably cost
nearly half a million. Such were real-estate values in Marin County—and such
was Stephanie’s bank account.

At home were
Michael Wilder—wearing a suit—and Stephanie’s parents, Mary and Jack Cooper.
Mary was a big woman, comfortable and talkative; Jack was skinny and withdrawn.
He stared into space, almost sad, but mostly just faraway, and I got the
feeling watching TV was his great passion in life, though perhaps he drank as
well. The idea, it appeared, was simply to leave the room without anyone
noticing, the means of transportation being entirely insignificant.

It was a bit
awkward, my being the ex-girlfriend and showing up unexpectedly. Michael didn’t
seem to know how to introduce me, and I could take a hint. It was no time to
ask to see him privately.

“I’d hoped to
see your mother,” I said.

“She’s at the
hospital,” said Mary. “We’re taking turns now that—” She started to cry.

“The hospital!”

“You don’t know
about Laurie?”

“She was in the
accident?”

“No. She’s been
very ill for the last two months.”

“Near death,”
said Mary. “What that child has been through shouldn’t happen to an animal.
Tiny little face just contorts itself like a poor little monkey’s. Screams and
screams and screams; and
rivers
flow out of her little bottom.
Rivers,
Miss Schwartz!”

Her shoulders
hunched and began to shake. Michael looked helpless. Mechanically Jack put an
arm around her.

“What’s wrong?”
I asked Michael.

He shrugged. “They
don’t know. Can’t diagnose it.”

“Now, Mary,”
said Jack. “She’s better. The doctor said so last night.”

“What hospital
is she in?”

“Marin General.”

I said to
Michael: “I think I’ll pop by and see your mother—would you mind pointing me in
the right direction? I’ve got a map in the car.”

When we arrived
at the curb, I said, “I can find the hospital. I wanted to give you something.”

I handed him the
will. “This came in today’s mail. It’ll be up to you as executor to petition
the court for probate.” As he read, a look of utter incredulity came over his
face.
“But . . .
I’m divorced. I can’t take care of a baby.”

“Gary didn’t ask
in advance if you’d be willing?”

“Yes,
but . . .
I didn’t think he
was going to die!” His voice got higher as reality caught up with him. “He
called the day of the accident. But I thought he was just depressed. You know
how people get around the holidays.”

“What did he say
exactly?”

“He said he had
this weird feeling, that’s all—like something bad might happen to him. And
would I take care of Laurie if anything did.”

“He didn’t say
he was scared? In any kind of trouble?”

“No—just feeling
weird.”

“Michael, he
wasn’t dealing, was he?”

“Are you kidding?
I’d be the last to know.” He looked at the ground a minute. “I guess he could
have been.”

Ellen Wilder was
cooing to Laurie when I got to the hospital. “Ohhhh, she’s much better now. She
just needed her grandma’s touch, that’s all it was.”

She spoke to the
baby in the third person, unaware I was there until I announced myself,
whereupon she almost dropped the precious angel-wangel and dislodged her IV. We
had a tearful reunion, Gary’s mother and I. We both missed Gary, and we both
felt for poor Laurie.

Ellen adored the
baby more than breath, to listen to her, and not only that, she possessed the
healing power of a witch. She had spent the night Gary and Stephanie were
killed with Laurie, and all day the next day, never even going home for a
shower. And gradually the fever had broken, metaphorically speaking. With
Grandma’s loving attention, the baby’s debilitating diarrhea had begun to ease
off, and little Laurie had seemed to come back to life.

“Look, Rebecca.”
She tiptoed to the sleeping baby. “See those cheeks? Roses in them. She’s
getting her pretty color back, widdle Waurie is, yes, her is.” She seemed not
to realize she’d lapsed into baby talk.

She came back
and sat down beside me. “Stephanie stayed with her nearly around the clock, you
know. She was the best mother anyone ever—” Ellen teared up for a second and
glanced around the room, embarrassed.

“Look. She left
her clothes here. I’ll have to remember to take them home. The
best
mother . . . she and Gary were invited to a
party that night. It was a horrible, rainy, rainy night, but poor Stephanie
hadn’t been anywhere but the hospital in weeks—”

“How long had
you been here?”

“Oh, just a few
days. I came for Hanukkah—and to help out if I could. I knew Stephanie had to
get out, so I offered to stay with Laurie. I was just dying to have some time
with the widdle fweet fing, anyhow—” This last was spoken more or less in
Laurie’s direction. Ellen seemed to have developed a habit of talking to the
child while carrying on other conversations.

“What happened was
Gary had quite a few drinks before he brought me over. Oh, God, I never should
have let him drive! We nearly had a wreck on the way over—you know how stormy
it was. I kept telling him he was too drunk to drive, and he said I wanted it
that way, just like I always wanted him to have strep throat when he was a kid.
He said he felt fine then and he felt fine now.”

I was getting
lost. “You
wanted
him to have
strep throat?”

She shrugged. “I
don’t know what he meant. He was just drunk, that’s all. Oh, God, my poor baby!”
She sniffed, fumbled in her purse, and blew her nose into a tissue.

“Did he seem
okay that day—except for being drunk?”

“Fine. Why?”

“He called me
that afternoon—about his will. And he called Michael to say he—well, I guess to
say he had a premonition about his death.”