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UGLY MONEY
Philip Loraine
COPYRIGHT
Harper
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First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Collins Crime
© Philip Loraine 1996
Philip Loraine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780002326032
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2017 ISBN: 9780008258023
Version: 2017-04-24
UGLY MONEY
Writer Will Adams’ peaceful life is interrupted by the sudden and not entirely welcome arrival on his doorstep of his young niece, Marisa, and her best friend Nick. Marisa has learned from her parents, film director Jack Adams and his actress wife, Ruth, that Jack is not her real father and she is determined to find the man who is. Reluctantly Will agrees to help her but a shock awaits him: it looks as if Marisa’s biological father is Scott Hartman, a fabulously wealthy recluse who has not been seen for years.
A near fatal accident, a false arrest, hostility from Hartman’s associate … it is becoming clear that someone wants to prevent Marisa from meeting her father. The stakes are raised still further when, through her mother, Hartman is actually tracked down and is confronted with his daughter. A bitter man, with a life of regret behind him, he decides to change his will in Marisa’s favour – a move that is to unleash a wave of violence that threatens to engulf not just Marisa, but her family.
Ugly Money is an unputdownable story of intrigue, jealousy and murder which will have the reader gripped from beginning to end.
DEDICATION
Take note, take note, O World,
To be direct and honest is not safe.
Othello
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One: Marisa
Chapter Two: Ruth
Chapter Three: Scott
Chapter Four: Hawk Rock
Chapter Five: Cross-Eye
Keep Reading
Other Books By
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
Marisa
1
I heard the other day about a man who was having breakfast, reading the paper and minding his own business, when a bulldozer came crashing through the wall of his house. Imagine it: as the plaster dust clears, there you are looking at this gigantic piece of machinery where your nice new kitchen used to be. Presently the driver will explain that he put the thing into Reverse when he meant Drive. It’s known as Chance.
Chance pitched me headlong into this story. In my case the bulldozer was my seventeen-year-old niece, Marisa, but that makes no difference at all; an attractive and determined teenage girl can cause as much damage as any mere bulldozer. I had just reached chapter nine, which means the book was half written, and research had taken a whole year. I’m a writer, yes. My name is Will Adams, though I don’t always write under it. I’m forty-three years old. I have survived marriage and the growing up of a son and daughter; I’ve survived divorce, which is only painful when enmity is involved – my ex-wife and I are the best of friends as long as we’re not cohabiting – and, in the past week, I’ve also survived death by murder.
I am … I was, until the arrival of my niece, writing a novel set in and around the small town of Astoria, Oregon, a dozen miles from the mouth of the Columbia River, and that’s why I was living there at the time in question. It’s a quiet and pleasant place, its hills decorated with wonderful, sometimes comical, wooden houses built during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and now fashionable in our age of ‘nostalgia’: anything to escape from the mess we’ve made of the present day.
Astoria has never been very important, despite the wishes of successive city fathers; its wealth lay in timber and salmon, two commodities once believed to be in endless supply – we’ve learned otherwise. As ‘the oldest settlement west of the Rockies’, it was a lure for Scandinavian and Finnish fisher-folk; the wives worked in the canneries, and most of their names live on: Astorians don’t rush to and fro very much. Their town has been dwindling since the 1890s, and its heyday, nothing to do with timber or salmon, was in World War Two when a naval base sent the population soaring. The marvelous beauty of its setting, wooded hills, distant mountains, mighty river, savage Pacific, has remained fairly constant in spite of creeping real estate and brutal logging: a pleasant if unexciting place to live. Into this Eden, and smack into chapter nine, came Eve with a whole basketful of serpents. It started on a stormy Monday afternoon at the beginning of September, and when we get storms up here they don’t mess around: perfect weather for writing. Indeed, when the doorbell rang I had just written, ‘Chapter Nine. Lewis returned to the mouth of the Columbia in November 1927. He said he was tired of traveling and had come home for a rest, but nobody in Astoria or Ilwaco believed him; they knew he’d come back because of the gold …’
Cursing, I abandoned my desk and opened the door on this stunning blonde with dark blue eyes. She appeared to be in her early twenties, and it took me a moment or two to realize I was looking at my brother’s child Marisa, aged seventeen. I said, ‘Hi, Marisa, come on in.’ Quite a smooth reaction, all things considered, you might even say cool. If you’re not cool they have this habit of walking right over your fallen body and writing you off, politely but decisively.
I’m not being wise after the event; right there and then a small stinging shock jumped from this girl to me: nervousness, even fear, sparked around her like an electrical field. She was hiding it pretty well but it was unmistakable, and it set me tingling, ready for anything. Anything? Well, that’s what I thought. She had grown since I’d last seen her, hardly surprising at that age; she now had her mother’s height, and with it that negligent grace tall women have to cultivate if they’re not going to appear gawky. As yet she was too young to get the negligent grace quite right, so there was still a touch of gawkiness which was touching. I said, ‘What brings you to the Great Pacific Northwest?’
She shrugged. ‘I guess the Great Pacific Southwest finally got me down.’ Yes, she was all nervous tension, thrumming with it. I indicated the sofa, and sat in an armchair facing her. I was thinking that Labor Day had just passed; at any minute, if not right now, girls of this age should be going back to school for those all-important final semesters. After Labor Day the beaches and forests fall silent again; no sound but the sigh of plastic waste, indestructible tons of it, blown by the winds of autumn.
She was looking around my apartment. ‘Nice.’
It’s the top floor of one of those Victorian houses, expertly updated and pleasantly furnished with comfortable and not incongruous things; it has a wondrous view across the Columbia to the hills of Washington State on the far side: four miles away, it’s a big river. But when youngsters say ‘nice’ you can be pretty sure it’s not just politeness; she probably meant ‘big’ – it does have three bedrooms. So I was ready when she added, ‘We stopped over in Medford last night – why can’t I ever fall asleep in motels?’
Obviously this was my cue to say, ‘Do you want to stay here? Who’s we?’
‘He’s a darling, you’ll love him.’
‘I only have one spare bed, the other room’s strictly junk.’
‘We can share a bed.’
‘Not in my house, you can’t, your parents would kill me.’
She laughed. ‘Nick’s gay, we often share beds.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Parking the car.’ This was some kind of evasion – it doesn’t take that long to park in Astoria: an evasion and part of her nervousness.
‘He’s A-OK. Really. HIV negative, everything.’ And then, a schoolgirl: ‘Actually he’s my best friend.’ There are times when you can’t help loving them, even when they’re conning you. And I must say it was nice just looking at her; she wore her naturally fair hair in a longish bob, so that it fell over one eye and had to be removed from time to time; I also noticed that she’d taken the trouble to use a little cologne, a little lipstick and powder, before bearding uncle in his den.
It seemed high time I asked after her parents.
‘They’re OK, I guess. He’s going to direct that Revisions thing.’ She was talking about Revisions of Life, bestseller, bad like most of them, much admired, much touted as the movie of next year. I said, ‘Good for him. Probably get himself another Oscar.’
‘Rob Railton’s playing the lead. They went to this dinner party and it threw them ass-wise, everybody screaming about the Railtons and their adopted baby – hear about that?’
‘Kind of.’ Robert Railton was the current hunk actor, drooled over by women and teenagers. His wife couldn’t conceive, or so they said; others were of the opinion that he couldn’t sire, but you don’t air that kind of opinion about the current hunk.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘this dinner party went berserk because they’d been on some talk show, Robert and Grace, and the guy asked when were they going to tell the boy he was adopted. I mean, Jeeze! He’s only like eighteen months old.’
‘Talk-show hosts aren’t paid to think.’
‘They both said never, and that’s what started the big argument over dinner. People saying the kid had to be told some time, others saying of course not. And then a lot of crap about what age do you tell him – like sixteen with the driver’s license or is that too late?’ The deep blue eyes found mine. ‘Well, the fat was in the fire, know what I mean?’
I didn’t, but kept quiet.
‘They took me out next night. Vince’s. It’s my favorite place – they hate it, so I … kind of wondered.’ She put both elbows on her knees and both fists under her jaw, and the hair fell forward, hiding her face. ‘Did you know?’
‘Did I know what?’
‘He isn’t my father.’
‘Say that again.’
She sighed. ‘Your brother isn’t my father. They took me to Vince’s to tell me. I guess they thought it would be easier than just the three of us sitting around a table at home. It’s been worrying them for years.’ A woeful grimace. ‘Seventeen years, wouldn’t you know.’
I said, ‘Jesus Christ! Marisa, are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure, they told me right there over the eggs Benedict.’ She jumped up from the sofa and went to the window. ‘Why couldn’t they keep quiet? Why did they have to go to that stupid dinner party?’
Myself, I felt it made no difference whether she was my brother’s child or not: he loved her, he’d loved her all her life. But I wasn’t seventeen years old, and I wasn’t the child in question. Naturally I imagined that this revelation was the cause of her desperate uneasiness. I’m afraid I was being simplistic; we were in what you might call a multi-layered situation. She said, ‘It’s OK, I’m not going to bawl. I did all that.’
‘When did they tell you, Marisa?’
‘Thursday.’
Thursday, four days ago. ‘Have you been away from home five days?’
She was staring out at where the view would have been if it hadn’t been obscured by driving rain and an early cloud-sodden twilight. She shook her head. ‘No. I stuck around till yesterday morning; I guess I was in shock. And Dad … Jack was so sweet, like he always is. He tried … tried to explain how they felt, but who wants explanations?’ She swung around to face me again, and even if she’d already done the bawling, tears weren’t far away. ‘Oh God, I know he loves me, I know they both do, so why the hell couldn’t they both keep their mouths shut?’
I understood her anger and her emotion, but plain old adult practicality made me ask, ‘Marisa, do they know where you are?’
‘No. And you mustn’t tell them. Don’t look like that, Will – please, please don’t tell them I’m here.’
‘They’ll be worried sick.’
‘That makes three of us.’ A flash of rebellion. Obviously prevarication was called for: ‘OK, I won’t tell them right now – which is what I ought to do.’
‘Not ever.’ She sounded like herself at eleven. It’s a strange age, seventeen, balanced on the seesaw of growing up.
I said, ‘You know that’s not fair.’
‘Was telling me fair?’
‘I don’t know. It was honest.’
‘Oh, honest … shit! Anyone can be honest, it’s so damn easy, and it’s a killer.’
Back went the seesaw. Where did she get that kind of knowledge? Honesty as killer – and in my experience it often is.
She turned away from the window which the wind was trying to turn inside out. ‘When they told me … it was kind of weird. My mind stopped, I mean it actually wouldn’t go forward and it wouldn’t go back.’
‘Like a clogged drain.’
‘Exactly. And then … I guess somebody poured in the Drano, and I began to think again, I saw what I had to do. I must know, Will, I must find out.’
That was understandable. Knowing probably wouldn’t matter much in the end, could be dismissed; not knowing mattered like hell and could never be dismissed. So that was why she had appeared out of the storm on my doorstep, and in a jangling state of nerves.
‘Just … Oh, just meet him. Once. Kind of … feel his genes in me, know what I mean?’
Yes. Difficult enough when you’re young to discover who and what you are without a great mystery, a black hole, hanging over your head. ‘And you think you’ll find him up here?’
‘I know it. I haven’t just sat around since Thursday, I’ve been Sherlocking.’
The doorbell rang. ‘Nick. I’ll get it.’ I thought she’d reacted a little too quickly, but put it down to her taut nerves; so I wasn’t prepared for her to step outside and close the door on me. I could hear the murmur of voices from the hall and wondered just what they were up to.
Suddenly I was feeling very sorry for my brother Jack. Sorry for Ruth too, of course, but somehow it seemed worse for him. We’re not close, we never have been: not even when we first came to the US together some twenty years ago, aged twenty-six and twenty-three respectively: the Adams brothers. It sounds like a singing duo or an ancient vaudeville act; actually we were a British director/writer team; we’d done pretty well in Europe but, like most young men, had our eyes fixed on the big time, i.e. Hollywood …
The front door opened again, the conference was over. Ushering him in she said, ‘This is Nick Deering. Nick, my … my not-uncle, Will Adams.’ And, quickly: ‘He says we can stay here.’
We all grew out of the stereotyped image long ago; well, not all now I come to think of it; there are still a lot of brutish old dinosaurs clumping around. Her best, and gay, friend was a big burly boy, your Sixth Grade, high-school football boy, with a dry, strong handshake. He wasn’t handsome, but there’s a clean young American look which does almost as well: benign brown eyes, neatly cut brown hair falling over the wide forehead in a fringe. And when he smiled the eyes smiled too, and that’s rare. But, I realized at once, he too was in a state of extreme nervous tension. Trying to rise above it he said, ‘Hi. Get the story?’
‘Some of it.’
‘Ballbreaker, ain’t it? You’re not going to call your brother?’
‘Not yet anyway.’ Carefully, I added, ‘Look, it may be none of my business, in which case you’ll tell me so – but why are you both jumping like junkies in need of a fix?’
They glanced at each other. Marisa said, ‘No reason really. I mean … it’s no big deal.’
Her best friend shook his head. ‘For Pete’s sake, we need help, why mess around? And what do you mean, no big deal? Someone tried to run us off the road, could’ve killed us.’
‘He was just smashed, he was nothing to do with it.’
Nick sighed. ‘Like I know I’m seventeen and you don’t, that’s the problem.’
She gave him a sweet smile. I could see she’d been telling the exact truth – her best friend; she could certainly have done worse. ‘You’re probably right, you usually are.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘is this where I ask, “What do you mean, ran you off the road, could have killed you?” Or do I just wait?’
Nick spread large hands. ‘We goofed.’
‘No,’ said Marisa, ‘I goofed.’ And to me, ‘It’s a long story, and it won’t make sense unless you hear it from the beginning.’
‘Then tell it from the beginning.’
‘Really?’
‘The night is young. When did you two last eat?’
‘Around noon.’
‘Right. You can talk while I cook. Fettucini OK?’
‘Marinara?’ Sophisticated Hollywood brat!
‘Sure. Clams, mussels, squid.’
‘Super!’
‘So come in the kitchen. Fix drinks. Mine’s a gin and French, and I don’t mean a Martini – half gin, half Noilly Prat, on the rocks.’
Why am I writing this story instead of going back to chapter nine as I ought? Because I resent people who try to kill me, and because it’s there – same for writers as it is for mountaineers.
Chance, the same implacable joker that motivated the bulldozer, led me by the nose off the highway and into the American wilderness. And for the benefit of my fellow-Europeans, let me add that leaving the highway in this neck of the woods doesn’t mean a stroll through the bluebells; the underbrush is full of nasty surprises like poison oak and poison ivy, a person can get hurt. Semi-human creatures also dwell there; they can cause you irreparable harm and won’t hesitate to do so if your interests, or those of your beautiful niece, conflict with theirs. They have no moral sense, money is their only morality, and you don’t beat them because they’re ten thousand times richer than you are. The law doesn’t beat them because it doesn’t want to – they can afford the best attorneys, and they give so generously to the policemen’s ball and the President’s ball and all the balls in between.
2
So while I cooked, my favorite pastime after writing and messing around in boats, and while Nick chopped garlic – an irritating job, it always sticks to the knife – Marisa perched herself on a stool at the counter and began to tell me from the beginning.
When her mind began to operate again after the initial shock and the anger that went with it, certainty swept over her like a cold Pacific wave, and she was amazed it had taken so long to come rolling in. Of course she wouldn’t be able to rest until she knew who her father was; met him, if he was still alive; rearranged her life along the guidelines which, trustingly, she felt he would show her, perhaps without knowing he was doing so. Only then, only with the peace of mind and the knowledge such a meeting would give, could she turn back to the two people she loved best in the world. It seems to me very wise of her, at seventeen, to realize that this was the way to finding and trusting them again; and she seems to have known it from the beginning: almost from the beginning, certainly from the moment the Drano had been poured into her mind, unblocking it.
As soon as she knew her mother was alone she went and asked her point-blank who her father really was. I can imagine the exact look in Ruth’s gentle greenish eyes, almost a jade green: a cool and considering look; it was turned on me often enough at the time of my divorce. Marisa has inherited her beauty from her mother and her blue eyes from her maternal grandmother, Corinne: also some of her more sassy characteristics. It’s a funny thing – this difference in eye color makes the two of them quite dissimilar; yet when you look carefully you can see Ruth’s bone structure in her daughter; and these fine bones have enabled her to keep her looks past the witching age of forty: good news for Marisa. There are lines of course, but because there’s been no surgical snipping and stretching they’re virtually unnoticeable; and a touch of gray in fair hair is always attractive; some women pay the earth to have it put there.
She said, ‘Marisa, I’m not telling you who he is.’
‘Then he’s alive.’
‘Yes. And he’s a nice person, a good person. I didn’t fall for a ski bum or a beach boy.’
‘Can’t they be nice good people too?’
‘Of course. You know what I mean.’ Was she touched by the glint of social conscience, a glint of rebellion in her child who had never given her any of the fashionable headaches, who thought drugs were strictly for dimwitted dropouts?
‘So you fell for him and you had his baby, where did … where did Jack come in?’
‘I already knew Jack. He … saved me from a very awkward situation, but that’s the kind of person he is. As you know.’
‘Why didn’t the man marry you?’
‘He was already married.’
‘You could have got rid of me.’
When Ruth gives you her straightest look you don’t doubt her word: ‘I never, never for one moment thought of abortion, I promise you that. I wanted a child.’
‘His child.’
‘My child.’
‘Darn lucky you had Dad around.’
Ruth was relieved to hear the ‘Dad’ and ignored the puerile sarcasm. Marisa knew better than to say outright, ‘I want to see him.’ In that respect, only apparent indifference could protect her, but she didn’t find indifference easy to fake. She tried, ‘Haven’t you got a picture of him?’
‘No. How would your father like that?’
‘He isn’t my father; I wish he was. I wish you hadn’t told me.’
Ruth sighed and shook her head. ‘If you knew how we’ve argued. Argued, discussed, agreed, disagreed – around and around, never-ending.’
‘But you’re glad you did it.’
‘It’s a weight off my mind; I can’t pretend it isn’t.’
‘Off your mind and onto mine. You must have thought how it would be for me.’
‘Of course we did. But isn’t the truth always better if … if it can be told?’
‘No, lies are better.’
‘Oh my dear …’ She held out her arms and Marisa let them enfold her. She intended to play this right. At the feel of those arms, which had always been there when she needed them, she felt the press of tears, but she was damned if she was going to cry in front of either of them. Tears were a form of acceptance, and she was accepting nothing.
Jack, home from another preproduction meeting, found her staring blankly out of her bedroom window. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, my dear, please try to see it that way. We’ve always loved you and we always will. It’s just … we couldn’t bear cheating on you.’
She looked at his handsome square face, tanned and healthy, curly hair graying at forty-seven, and said it again: ‘I’d rather be cheated. Maybe it’s easier for you, it sure as hell isn’t easier for me.’
‘But it was right. In the end you’ll see that, and we’ll all be … We’ll be closer because of it.’
‘I hope so. What do I call you?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Marisa, don’t overplay it. You call me Dad, Father, just as you always have.’ She accepted the flash of impatient anger – he didn’t suffer fools gladly; she admired that, it kept you on your toes; kept cameramen and actors, and more particularly wayward actresses, on their toes too. She could feel her love for him trapped inside her. OK, how was she going to let it out of the trap?
When he’d gone she raised her eyes and stared at the famous ‘Hollywood’ sign, deep in thought. As usual, a small group of the faithful were toiling up Griffith Park towards it, and as usual a small group of guards had gathered to send them packing – in case any of them had fire, explosives, or even suicide in mind.
Like many other younger movie people touched by success, Jack and Ruth Adams had never even considered living in Beverly Hills, but had taken to the real hills of old Hollywood where so many of the old and great names had once lived. After them came the realtors and ‘Hollywoodland’. How many of the devotees who regularly photographed one another with the sign in the background knew that this modern Mecca had been erected to advertise a housing development? And what did it matter in a town where fairy tales are all and the truth less than nothing? Lop off a last syllable and you have a myth.
So, gazing at ‘Hollywood’, Marisa wondered who would remember her mother’s past, who would know? Well, for a start there was Ruth’s own mother, Corinne. She would certainly know but, as certainly, would refuse to say; and would at once report to her daughter: ‘You’ve told her, haven’t you? Nothing else could make her ask questions like that. What a mistake – why do you never listen to me?’ Or something along those lines. Anyway she no longer lived in Los Angeles but had gone back to New York: ‘I know it may be dangerous but no more dangerous than LA, and at least it’s alive.’ She was a jaunty old girl. When you’re seventeen, sixty-six is a great age. No, Grandmother was out. Who then?
Seventeen years ago, or around then, her mother had been an actress, not, she often said, a very good one. Jack disagreed: she was good all right, but she’d never had the essential overriding ambition, and no chutzpah. Ruth invariably replied that in any case it was a matter of simple arithmetic: two show-biz careers into one family don’t go. As for ambition and chutzpah, yes she must have lacked both because she was a happy woman.
Who would have known her in those days? Adult faces flitted through Marisa’s mind, parental friends who had come and gone while she played house with Joanne under the bougainvillea on the other side of the pool – while she stood before the bedroom mirror wondering if she would ever reach sixteen. She hadn’t even been interested in the ones who had since become famous.
But wait a minute! There was a couple who came to dinner every now and again. Hadn’t they once been agents? Hadn’t names flickered around the table? ‘Whatever happened to … ?’ ‘Didn’t you handle … ?’ The kind of show-biz gossip which makes the young, if present, tune out. Sagging old faces, she could almost see them now. They must have been agents, they must have ‘handled’ Ruth Shallon, as she then was, or they wouldn’t be friends, people who came to dinner as opposed to the rabble which attended the twice-yearly free-for-all around the pool. They had a Dutch name – Van-Something. Van-What? There couldn’t be many Vs in the red book which lay beside the phone in the hall. There weren’t, and there were only two Van-Anythings. The first lived in Amsterdam, the second was VanBuren, Henry and Barbara, Sunset Palisades. Marisa knew Sunset Palisades, one of her school friends lived out there in summer: nothing to do with the Boulevard, a new development way north of Malibu, north of Zuma: big houses on ledges, cleverly concealed one from the other by means of earth moving and skillful planting. Sounded kind of retired, but you could never be sure.
Was there still a VanBuren Agency? Yes there was, but a call confirmed that Henry and Barbara had sold out long ago, to the mega-operation Dermott-MacNally; they had probably been unable or perhaps unwilling to cope with the new Hollywood, which was really the old Hollywood wearing a different hat and a funny nose. OK, definitely retired. Now, how do you approach mother’s old retired friends, almost certainly old agents, without setting off the jungle drums? You make up a story; doesn’t have to be a good one, not in Southern California where anyone will believe anything, in fact crazy is better.
She found Henry and Barbara VanBuren next day, Friday, living in a splendid modern house with its feet, or anyway its private steps, in the ocean. Like many elderly people who have led active and interesting lives at the center of the whirlpool, they were bored to find themselves placidly rotating at its lazy outer edge. They had their golf, he had his fishing, she had her weaving (beautiful things), they both had their old friends, a few of whom like Ruth Adams had once been clients. Having met them, Marisa couldn’t wait to get away from them, they depressed the hell out of her, and it was their careful politeness, eagerness to please the young in their old age, which depressed her most. Handsome, healthy, well-to-do old Californians, into their seventies with nowhere to go.
‘You see,’ she heard herself saying, ‘I had this great idea. I should have done it on her fortieth but I guess her forty-second will be just as good.’ She intended to give her mother a surprise, a real This is Your Life, wasn’t that a fabulous idea?
The VanBurens exchanged a quick glance which told her that they thought the idea less than fabulous, but they weren’t about to hurt her feelings.
‘And I wanted somebody who knew her way back when she was acting.’
Gently they explained that of course they’d known Ruth in those ancient far-off days, she’d been their client and they adored her, but they were sure Marisa wouldn’t mind if they, personally, opted out of this absolutely fantastic plan, This is Your Life, Ruth Adams. Too old, they hated to admit it – but of course they’d keep the secret, it sounded such a fun project.
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