Keep the Baby, Faith Read online

  “Isn’t what?” Louis asked.

  “A joke. Calling her The Waif.”

  He smiled with everything from the neck up. Even his hair seemed to get shinier. “Well, it was sort of funny, Paul’s bringing her home after someone had abandoned her on the church steps, as it were, and her walking around mooning after him like a kid from a Charlie Chaplin movie or something…”

  He paused as if he’d just thought of something. “Oh. I’m Louis Letron, by the way.” He stuck out his hand.

  “Harry Ross,” I said, taking it.

  “Mr. Ross wants to talk to us about Faith, Louis.”

  “Why us? I mean, she was a lovely child, but for all we lived in the same house—I mean all of us, now, the whole family—we never really got to know her.”

  Louis was really pumping out the charm, now. No hard feelings, some people hit it off, some don’t. Nothing to get excited over.

  Like many people who wouldn’t know how to be charming if our lives depended on it, I am frequently suspicious of people who do.

  “Isn’t her baby what stands between you people and the bulk of your half brother’s money? And control of Letronique Cosmetics?”

  There was a little gasp from Lucille, but her brother-in-law’s charm stood up just fine. “Why, that’s ridiculous!” he said. He was just short of laughter.

  “I think you should leave, Mr. Ross,” Lucille said. Louis let the mask drop for a split-second, just long enough to shoot his sister-in-law a look that said why did you let him in in the first place?

  “Our future—and I can speak with confidence for the family on this topic, Mr. Ross—is secure. Both in and out of Letronique Cosmetics. It is true, the child Faith is carrying stands to receive the bulk of my brother’s estate. As you probably know, he has been unwell.”

  That was a nice way to express a months-long coma and an inoperable tumor, I thought. Unwell. This, undoubtedly, was a direct descendent of the people who used to describe the Civil War as “the late unpleasantness.”

  “But bulk or no bulk, he has not forgotten us. We are well provided for, all of us. And as far as the company goes, we will retain enough voting stock to keep our jobs—my brother Robert and I work for the company, as you undoubtedly know—and the traditional family seat on the board of directors as long as we desire.”

  “Faith was always hard to figure out,” Lucille said. It was hard to think a woman like her could efface herself so successfully, but she had. I almost jumped when she spoke. “She seemed to think she’d walked into some Gothic novel or something; always acting like an outsider, misinterpreting all our efforts to make her feel at home. When Paul couldn’t run the business anymore, and had to be hospitalized, she wouldn’t reach out to us. She wouldn’t let us reach out to her, either.

  “Of course we were upset when she had that horrible medical experiment done to her—”

  “You mean artificial insemination?”

  That was what she’d meant, all right. She shuddered when I said the words. I thought she was a little out of date, but everyone to his own hang-up.

  I was thinking there was nothing to this investigative reporter business. One rude sentence, and these people opened up like Joe E. Brown’s mouth. I decided to try another.

  “So you’ve always been nice to her.”

  Louis looked sheepish. Charmingly sheepish. “Well, I did tease her, at first. Until I found out how sensitive she was. To my eternal shame, I was the first person to call her The Waif.”

  “But you’ve never done anything to justify her belief that one or all of you is trying to kill her.”

  I expected a bigger laugh out of Lucille, but what I got was a snort. Louis, apparently, was speechless.

  “She thinks we’re trying to kill her?” Lucille’s voice cracked—it wasn’t designed for the higher notes of skepticism.

  “Or cause a miscarriage,” I said.

  “That’s why you came here?”

  “I wanted to ask you about it.”

  “Are you a policeman?” Louis was deferential.

  I told him I wasn’t.

  “You must be Faith’s psychiatrist,” Lucille said. “Well, to answer your question, yes, she is crazy. Kill her, for God’s sake!”

  “I’m not a psychiatrist,” I said. “I’m a reporter from The Grayness.”

  You might have thought I’d said I was a kiddie porn vendor. I’d never spoken a sentence with greater impact, and I never thought I’d get such a kick out of following the code of The Grayness.

  “After all,” I said, “The Grayness wouldn’t want to print anything that wasn’t true.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “THAT IS NONSENSE, YOUNG man.” It was an icicle of a voice—cold, clear, and sharp. It chilled the room.

  It was Alma Letron, the wicked stepmother. Circe, I’d thought downstairs. She had changed from street clothes, and was now dressed for the part. She was wearing a sort of purple-red lounging robe that went from her collarbone to the floor. It hid her feet, making the Dalek comparison even stronger. Faith had told me that Alma was fifty years old or close to it, but that glide was still something to see.

  Louis and Lucille did everything but curtsy and bow as Alma made her way across the hotel’s carpet and sat down. She chose another antique wooden chair to sit in. This one had a high back, and upholstered arms. It didn’t especially look like a throne until she sat in it.

  “Nonsense,” she said again. “How many times must I repeat myself, Mr. Ross? I know you’re not mute; your foolishness has been resounding all through the suite.”

  It was a little early in our acquaintance for me to call such a queenly individual a liar, but that’s what she was. I can shout, but I hadn’t been shouting then, and I doubted the Westbrook would be pleased to hear such a valued customer promulgating a canard about their world-famous soundproofing.

  “You must be Alma Letron,” I said, just to let her know I wasn’t intimidated. Or not to let her know I was intimidated. It bothered me I couldn’t decide which.

  She didn’t bother to acknowledge. “I already know who you are. You say your newspaper never prints anything that isn’t true.”

  “I said we don’t want to print anything that isn’t true. Sometimes it happens anyway.”

  She sniffed. “Yes, like that disgraceful business about Baro.”

  “Who?”

  “Baro. He’s a sculptor. A genius. He was kind enough to let me stage a show of his work. Your newspaper said his work was infantile and derivative. A man named Sanford, as I recall.”

  “He’s the art critic. That was his opinion.”

  “He’s a liar, and that was a scandalous piece of libel. You journalists are all alike—you tear down those you can’t understand. That’s why I’ve told my family to have nothing to do—”

  “I’m not here as a journalist,” I said.

  She gave me a Circe look. I wanted to feel my nose to make sure it wasn’t turning into a snout.

  “More lies,” she said.

  This is what I get, I thought, for trying rudeness as a tactic. Like the young gunslinger, I had run into the champ. There was nothing to do but keep shooting.

  “I’m here as a friend of your daughter-in-law.”

  Lucille, who had been so rich-bitch and superior when she’d first let me in, had faded and lost focus in Alma’s presence, like the image on a movie screen in a bright light. When I saw the look the older woman turned on her now, I almost expected her to wink out of existence altogether.

  She didn’t, though. She met the gaze, and said, “Not me, Mother.”

  The cold eyes swung back to me. I figured the least I could do was be as brave as Lucille. “No,” I said. “Not her. I should have said I’m a friend of your stepdaughter-in-law.”

  The eyes were no longer cold. In front flash, they melted and burned. “Get out of my house!”

  “She did marry your stepson, didn’t she?”

  “Get out, or I’ll have Louis throw
you out!”

  I looked at Louis, then showed him a little smile. I discovered that smile back in high school. Look amused enough, and you’ll never have to find out if you are actually as tough as you think you are. Louis did not seem especially enthusiastic at the idea of throwing me out.

  “She does have rights,” I told the old woman. It was hard to meet that glare more than a few seconds. “The baby—your late husband’s grandchild—has rights.”

  “That child is nothing to Andrew Letron! And that little tramp has no right to try to fob off her despicable little bastard as Paul’s son. It will not be tolerated. It… will… not… be… tolerated!”

  The heat vanished as quickly as it came. She was all ice again. She looked at me, as though wondering why she’d wasted so much energy on me. “Do you speak to the creature?”

  I wanted to do a little exploding of my own, but I was controlling myself. “Yes,” I said.

  “Tell her, then. Tell her. No matter how many lawyers she bribes, how many corrupt men, French or American, she gets to help her with her big brown eyes and her little-girl innocence. She will not get away with it. I’ll see her dead first.”

  From Lucille, there was something between a gasp and a groan. From Louis, there was a strangled, “Mother.”

  Alma ignored them both. “You’ll tell her?” she demanded.

  I shook my head. “She already knows.”

  I listened to myself say that, decided life only gives you a certain number of perfect exit lines, and decided to take it. For all my worrying though, it turned out to be harder to get out of that room than it had been to get in it. First Alma tromped all over my exit by sniffing loudly and getting up from her throne and gliding from the room. Then Louis and Lucille surrounded me and started telling me, pleading almost, that Mother Didn’t Really Mean It. I said of course, and kept trying to make it out the door.

  Lucille at one point even took me by the hand and asked me to understand. I remember being surprised that such a cool-looking blonde would have such warm hands. Then I got another surprise, but before I could do anything about it, I was at the door. I grabbed the knob, said a hasty good-bye, and left.

  But the Letron family wasn’t done with me yet. As the elevator doors were closing, just before they met, a tall, slim young man slithered between them and grinned at me triumphantly.

  I knew he was a Letron (Peter, twenty-two, the youngest one) for two reasons. One, he had the look, and two, the hotel wouldn’t let a maintenance man dress so shabbily. Peter was wearing green twill work pants and a white T-shirt under a plaid flannel lumberjack shirt. All were sweat-stained and perforated with dozens of brown-edged holes. Like he’d been blasted by a shotgun, or was the sloppiest smoker in the world.

  He followed my eyes and read my mind. “I work in these clothes. Welded sculpture. Glass blowing. Car customizing.”

  “You’re Peter,” I informed him. “Faith told me about you.” She’d told me that of all the Letrons, Peter had been the least troublesome, because he spent so much time at his hobbies, he had no time for anything else.

  “I figured. Listen, I heard you talking to the clan back there.”

  “You and your mother both.”

  “Listening at keyholes is a family trait. The difference is, I admit it.”

  “So you listened. You want to tell me I’ve got it all wrong, too?”

  He stopped grinning. “No, I just hope you’ve got it all wrong. Weird stuff is going on, and I’m worried.”

  “Like to tell me about it?”

  “Yeah, but not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t get out of the elevator. I shouldn’t even be out in the corridor. If the hotel people see me in these clothes, they’ll know I’ve been torching in the suite again.”

  “Torching?”

  “Propane, you know. A small one. Nothing dangerous. I’m doing some glass sculpture—I could go nuts from boredom in this place.”

  “And the hotel management doesn’t want you to do it.”

  “Right,” he said. The injustice of it all was bothering him. “All because I set fire to their lousy curtain once. I put the fire out. We paid for the curtain.”

  I fought down an urge to storm out of the building. I figured if he was with me, he couldn’t be burning the place down. I didn’t want to know if I was wrong.

  “So when are you going to tell me all about it?” Whatever it was. I was losing track.

  “How about tonight? Eight o’clock okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was about to ask where we should meet. Instead, I said, “I mean, no. How about tomorrow afternoon? Say four o’clock. Do you know where The Grayness building is?”

  “I’ll find it,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. The elevator arrived in the lobby. Peter hid in the corner until the door closed, and the machine took him back up. I noticed all this without really paying attention. All my attention was devoted to the little piece of Westbrook Hotel stationery Lucille had surprised me with; her warm hands pressed it into mine just before I’d left the suite.

  I hadn’t been able to wait anymore, and I sneaked a look at it while Peter and I were talking. It had the name and address of a small French restaurant. It would be French. The rest of it read, “Tonight. Eight o’clock. Please be there. Must talk to you. L.”

  I’d be there all right. It was beginning to look as if secret assignations were another family trait.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I WENT BACK TO The Grayness before I went home. It was out of the way, at right angles to my apartment, in fact, but I was hoping for some results from my overseas phone calls.

  What I had done was to bend the journalistic mechanisms of The Grayness to my own ends. The foreign bureaus (especially the big ones, like the one in Paris) are pretty much at the beck and call of anyone in New York who can think of a decent excuse, or even a feeble one. Mine was that someone on the TV page had asked me to gather research on the Ten Best Real-Life Stories That Have Yet To Be Made Into TV Docudramas, and that Paul Letron would be mentioned, because there were so many rumors about him and so few facts. Rumors always make better docudramas than facts.

  Anyway, the Paris people had to fall for it. I had told them to send anything they got to my desk at The Grayness. They probably would have gotten suspicious if I’d asked them to send the stuff to my apartment.

  The best I expected to find on my desk was a phone message, maybe a Telex. What I got was a huge package of wire-facsimiles. I was costing The Grayness a lot of money on this. I felt guilty, but I could stand it. It was not hard to assuage my conscience with the idea that there really could be a story in this mess.

  It was getting harder and harder to doubt Faith’s story. There was the marriage certificate. Two of them, actually. Church and civil. In France, apparently, you need both. There was a certified copy of the will Paul Letron had made. I hadn’t practiced my French since the famous semester abroad, but as far as I could make out, it tallied with Faith’s account in every particular.

  It occurred to me that it was a little odd for a lawyer to hand out a copy of the will like that, on the basis of one secondhand request from an American reporter. I didn’t (and don’t) know anything about French law, but hell, the client wasn’t even actually dead yet.

  The next document answered my question. I mean, it was still odd, but at least I knew why the lawyer had felt free to send the will along. The next thing in the pile was a fax of a certified copy of the signed instructions Letron had filed with him, authorizing him to cooperate with anyone authorized by his wife to see any document whatever, up to and including the will. He must have foreseen that people would be a little put out with all these unorthodox arrangements.

  There was also a document designed to take care of the issue of artificial insemination. It stated that the undersigned, Paul Letron, a resident of the Republic of France and a citizen of the United States of America, and so on and so forth, had frozen a quantity of
his sperm, and had left it in the care of the clinic herein described, and the doctor so named, and hereby authorized his wife, Faith, access to it at her sole discretion. It went on to state in no uncertain terms that he, and he alone, was to be considered the father of any child said wife might conceive from the date of the signing of this document until such time, if any, that she remarry. Furthermore, the document passed everything to the kid as soon as he (or she) was born if Letron had not yet died by then.

  I wouldn’t have thought it was possible a few minutes ago, but I was beginning to be a little sorry for Alma Letron. She could rant and rave all she wanted to about “We will not allow it,” but the way her stepson had set things up, that kid could come out Chinese, and the family wouldn’t be able to challenge its paternity.

  For the first time, I was beginning to think that maybe somebody was out to murder Faith.

  I immediately told myself not to be ridiculous. This was a fascinating situation, and there were some strange personalities involved, Faith’s among them. But murder conspiracies, I mean, come on. The situation was melodramatic enough without murder. Granted, it happens sometimes, these bizarre and terrible murder cases, rich people, weird motives, actual doubt about the guilt of the accused. Usually, they happen in Texas. Reporters cover them, and lap them up in their greedy, gossip-loving little hearts, before regurgitating them like mother seagulls for a public piping up for excitement. Undoubtedly, at this moment, sixteen top reporters are waiting for two more rich people in Texas to get together as murderer and victim so they can swoop in, write a book about it, and make a lot of money.

  But in this case, the theoretical victim-to-be was a friend of mine, someone I had known literally since she was in diapers. Furthermore, I, as the folks at The Grayness kept me constantly aware, was not a Real Reporter. Therefore, this could not be a Real, or even a Potentially Real, murder case.

  It was, however, a Real Case of galloping paranoia in progress when I returned to my apartment.