THE FOURTH WATCH (23 page)

"Can I get you another drink?" Ted Whorley
asked me, going to the bar next to his wife.

"Thanks," I said, "but use the same glass." It
was a weak effort at humor. Only Ellen Whorley laughed.

As I watched husband and wife
standing next to each other I was thinking that there was something
wrong with the picture. She was everything a guy like him could
ever want: tall, shapely, pretty – smokin' hot actually, if I was
honest with myself about it - but why'd
she
do it? Jack would admonish me
for such thoughts, and he'd be right. Ted Whorley seemed like a
stand up guy. I wasn't getting any bad vibes from him. His wife was
absolutely beautiful though, and he was kind of a tired farm horse.
On the other hand Teddy was filthy rich. Jack would tell me that
beauty is only skin deep and that money was not happiness. I was
trying to think of a clever retort to such philosophy when Teddy's
wife leaned over, extended her hand and, as if I hadn't guessed
said, ''I'm Ellen Whorley. I'll introduce myself seeing how no else
is going to."

"Nice to meet you," I said, taking her
hand.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Carolyn said. ''I guess I'm
just a little ... and I'm sorry about all that with Sam, Mike. She
is ... infuriating at times." She had small tears in her eyes. "She
is still beside herself over Daddy's death. But there is no reason
for her to take it out on you!"

I didn't say anything. I had no read on Sam
Whorley. In my opinion lawyers had earned a great measure of the
distrust they got from the public. On the other hand there was
something callous and shallow...and maybe suspicious, about a
person who attacked unprovoked. Carolyn had hired me, Teddy had
invited me and I'd come to ask - and answer - questions. Maybe her
grief was still controlling her actions. Grief can wrench and twist
a person, find pockets of self-pity and black anger in a person
that they never knew existed. Maybe it was that. Or maybe, she
didn't like the idea that someone was digging where she didn't want
them to.

Ellen Whorley said: ''I have to tell you Mr.
Knight, I guess I was wondering about what Sam tastelessly put into
words." She took a sip of her drink and watched me over the rim of
her glass. Her eyes were mesmerizing. ''I'm not making accusations
mind you," she purred with amusement.

"What are you wondering about, Mrs.
Whorley?"

"Lets first get my name right, its Ellen ...
Ellie if you like. This Mrs. Whorley stuff is going to get
confusing with all of us Whorley girls around."

I smiled at her, "Okay."

"Maybe you can clear something up for me. The
police come to the house and find my father-in-law in his pool.
They do their police things ... whatever they do ... and they
decide that he was drunk, that he fell, that he hit his head and
got knocked out or whatever, and that he drowned. Is that about
right?"

"Yes," I said.

"Okay." She had finished her second drink and
was making a third as she spoke. They were dark ones. Two parts
whiskey, one part ginger ale. "Now the cops ... police, they know
about this algae thing. Teddy told us about that last night. So
they know about this algae thing, and the pants on backward thing,
right?"

"Right again," I told her.

She stirred her drink with a long index finger,
picked it up sampled it with a small nip at the rim of the glass
nodded and took a deeper drink. "And yet they don't do anything.
The autopsy people say that he drowned accidentally. Nothing all
that strange about algae in a pool, or a drunken man that didn't
dress himself properly, right?"

"I'm not so sure ... "

"So you come along," she interrupted, "and you
find out what the cops already know, is that it? And you decide
that it was no accident." She wagged a finger at me. "Can you see
how come we get a little curious about motives here, Mr.
Knight?"

"If that's all there was, sure, I could see
that. But there is more to it than that. First let me tell you a
little about this algae thing. I told Teddy this yesterday, but let
me just go through it quickly again. Diatoms- algae- are found in
pools, that's true. But, lets be realistic about it, that pool
right there," I gestured with my glass at the sparkling blue
rectangle of water on the other side of the gardens, "is maybe the
best taken care of pool in the city. Fernando, is that his name,
probably cleans it daily. Part of his routine. If there is any
algae in there I'll eat this glass. No one came out here and took
samples did they? No one checked to see if this pool could yield a
concentration of diatoms consistent with the level found in Mr.
Whorley's lungs, did they? No. How come?"

I was halfway through my second martini but the
nice pine taste of the gin had been cut to deeply with vermouth and
I'd had enough of the sickly-sweet taste of it. I put it down on
the bar and went on. ''Now the coroners office didn't say that the
diatom concentration was consistent with a clean pool. What they
said was that it was possible that diatoms could get into the lungs
in a pool drowning. They could not say, in other words, that it
wasn't an accidental drowning. Hey the police are happy with it as
an accidental drowning? Why should the coroner's office make waves?
Just more work for them. You see? Cops say accidental drowning,
coroner can't prove otherwise, accidental drowning it is, end of
story."

Ellen Whorley had a funny look on her face. Was
it skepticism? Or cynicism? Or revelation? These Whorley girls were
all hard to read.

''I couldn't tell you about the pants thing," I
said. "Can a drunk put a pair of those kind of shorts on backwards
in the dark of night? Sure. But we have another problem. No one
heard Mr. Whorley come in the house that night, right? No one woke
up and heard him stumbling around getting ready for a midnight
swim? Carolyn tells me that, number one, he doesn't get stumbling
drunk ... "

"Have you ever seen Daddy so drunk that he
couldn't dress himself: Ellie?" Carolyn blurted out at her
sister-in-law. She was on the edge of tears. This talk of her
father's death was not easy for her, but I was glad she was hearing
it with her family around her. "Have you?" She hissed when Ellen
didn't answer her.

"No, honey," Ellen said softly, "no I
haven't."

" ... And number two he doesn't go for midnight
swims," I said.

"Then how did he end up with his bed clothes
on?" Ted Whorley asked.

"I don't know, Teddy. That's the sixty four
thousand dollar question, isn't it?"

Ellen Whorley laughed. The booze was taking
hold. "That's a ten cent question and here's the ten cent answer.
He put them on before he went out for his swim." She turned to
Carolyn, as if she'd almost forgotten she was there. ''I'm sorry,
honey, we didn't hear him because we were all asleep. Maybe he
wasn't real drunk. It was dark, he put them on backward, that's all
... "

"What was he going to sleep in?" Carolyn said
in a low distant voice.

"What?" Ellen asked.

"Sleep in," Carolyn said again. Then she looked
up and gathered her brother up in her eyes. "Daddy always slept in
those clothes. If he swam in them, what was he going to sleep
in?"

Teddy smiled sadly. ''I think he had a few
different pairs, you know."

"Well let's go on,” I said. "There's another
factor to consider. Mr. Whorley was engaged in some kind of
investigation at the Loading Dock. Carolyn says it was driving him
crazy. There's a possibility that someone, maybe an employee, was
using the company's import system to bring something illegal into
the country. I'm looking into it. There could be a motive there.
Maybe he got too close to something." I said nothing of my plans to
travel to the Loading Dock offices or Seattle. I planned to tell
Carolyn about it, but that was all. I'd tell her later.

"What kind of something?" Carolyn
said.

"I don't know."

Ellen Whorley had that look again. She went to
the bar and mixed herself another drink. She apparently had her
father-in-laws hollow leg.

"But when you said your Father was on edge
those last few weeks, Carolyn, you were right. His purchasing folks
were seeing it more than any. He wouldn't say what it was that he
was looking for, but he was making progress. Jed Archer told me he
may even have found something."

"We all noticed that, Mike," Ted Whorley told
me. ''But Dad could be moody, you know? I don't know what it
means."

"Me either," I said, "but its another question,
and its one that the police didn't look into."

Everyone stood quietly for a minute, thinking.
Ellen was drinking and thinking, at times a dangerous
combination..

"And there is one more thing you should know,"
I said. "On the night your father died, Carolyn, your date saw cars
coming up the driveway when he was leaving."

Ellen Whorley slammed her empty glass down on
the bar. She was drunk. The sun, the tennis and the booze had a
sudden transforming effect on her. She staggered slightly and
almost fell when she bent to pick up her bag. "You know, Mr. Mike,"
she said, her voice slurring a little, "I hope you know what you're
doing. I think if you look at something, hoping to find something
else, you can make anything look bad." Her eyes were swimming.
''Maybe Sam's right about you." She giggled. "She's right about one
thing, you're damn cute!"

''Ellen!'' Teddy said.

"Whoops," Ellie smiled drunkenly and covered
her mouth. "I think its time for me to take a shower. Mr. Mike,
nice to meet you." She waved at me absently and went unsteadily
into the house.

Carolyn had her hand over her mouth. She hadn't
heard a word since I'd told them what Adam Lynch had seen after
dropping her off. Now she said: "Oh my God."

“Again we find ourselves apologizing to you,
Mike," Ted Whorley said. "My wife is a bit of a free spirit I'm
afraid."

“No, no, it's alright," I said smiling and
waving it off.

“She shouldn't be drinking like that on an
empty stomach. Now what was this about Carolyn's date?"

''It was after he dropped her off," I said.
"Carolyn had mentioned to me that she had a date that night. I went
to talk to the guy, yesterday in fact, after our lunch. He told me
that on the night your father died, he dropped Carolyn off at about
twelve-thirty. He shut off the car, and they talked, and then when
he went to leave he forgot to put the headlights back on. Said he
would have forgotten all together, but for the headlights of a car
coming in. Said the car went off at an angle into the trees and
that he only saw the headlights for a moment. Thought there may
have been two cars, actually, but he couldn't be sure."

Carolyn whispered something.

“I'm sorry, Carolyn, what did you
say?"

"The service road," Teddy answered for her. “It
runs out to the back of the property, to the barn and the paddock.
That's where that car ... those cars ... must have been
going."

''I think its time you gave me that tour, Ted,"
I suggested.

"Of course," he said, ''I'll just get the
keys."

When he was gone Carolyn came over close to me.
"She had her arms folded across her breasts as if she was cold.
"Take me to dinner tonight, Mike. I have to get out of here
tonight, please."

I started to formulate an excuse. Not that I
wouldn't enjoy the company, but law school instincts were taking
over. Client lawyer relationships and all that. More than that was
the tug I was feeling toward her. But then I saw the pleading in
her eyes. I smiled at her, her eyes tracking back and forth across
my face. "I'd love to go to dinner with you, Carolyn," I said,
meaning it.

"Great! Thanks, Mike," she said. ''I'll get
ready then, while Teddy shows you

around. Just take me a minute."

"Alright, where should we go?"

She sighed. "I don't know, somewhere where
there's music and good food."

I smiled and said, "I think I know a place
you'll like."

15

TED WHORLEY LED ME
around the gardens to a brick walk that went
south across the lawns. Through the trees to our left I could see a
driveway, a large parking area and the front of a garage building.
There were four overhead double sized doors on the face of the
building, two on either side of an entrance door at ground level.
The building had a second floor. The brick pathway split and we
went left, toward the garage. A sleek, black two-seat 500 series
Mercedes sports coupe sat next to a gray Lincoln Town Car in the
driveway in front of the overhead door on the far left. A forest
green Audi A8 sat in front of the door on the right. Whorley
fumbled through a set of keys and let us in through the center
door. Inside it was cool and full of shadows. It smelled of motor
oil and car wax. On the left a pewter Jaguar convertible sat with
the top down. The far-left bay was empty. I started doing the math.
On the right there were four more vehicles. The two in the far bay
were covered with thick tarps. In the near bay were two SUV's. A
Mercedes and a Ford Explorer.