Liar Read online

  “No, it’s all right. Glad to have some warning. It will help me to not overreact when Frank tells me. I mean, it really isn’t a big deal, is it?”

  “Unless maybe you were recently forcibly separated from someone, and spent time worrying about whether he was alive or dead. Then you might be forgiven for being a little worried the next time he says he’s going out of town to find a witness.”

  “Thanks,” I said, vowing to keep silent on the issue of her connection with McCain. Which was not an issue, I reminded myself.

  “Look, I’m between cases here. I know you and your aunt were just yanking McCain’s chain when you told him I was working with you, but I’d be happy to help you out. You want some help locating this cousin of yours?”

  “Sure. But don’t call in any favors at the DMV or the voter registrar’s offices just yet. I think her phone bills may lead us to him.”

  “Found a number for him?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, and told her what I had learned so far.

  “Libraries, bookstores and elementary schools?”

  “Maybe he sells children’s books,” I said. “All of this is assuming it was Travis she was trying to reach.”

  “Were the calls made during the day?”

  I looked at the bill again. “Most were. Some of the library calls were made in the early evening. But more interesting are the dates; I think she was trying to tell him that his father had died. Maybe she wanted him to go to Arthur Spanning’s funeral.”

  “It must have been Travis. You want to fax me that list of Maguires and Sperrys? I could start checking them out for you.”

  “You sure you have time for this?”

  “One day I’m going to convince you that I don’t make offers just to hear the sound of my own voice.”

  “Okay, okay. Thanks. Give me your fax number.”

  I wrote it down, then said, “I’ll call these last three numbers—the ones for the longest calls. If I get a little time, I’m going to try to look up the story of the DeMont murder. If I learn anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Same here.”

  I went back to work on my story, getting interrupted only when Frank called to break the news of the Idaho trip to me. When I reacted calmly, he said, “Rachel already told you, didn’t she?” I confessed. He laughed, then told me he’d be home late.

  If he was going to be home late, I wasn’t going to have the luxury of staying late at the paper; two dogs and a big cat can only be kept waiting for so long. Jack, the best of neighbors, was always more than willing to help out with pet care, but I didn’t like to abuse his generosity.

  I called the Lake Arrowhead Library and asked if anyone there recalled speaking to a Briana Maguire within the last month. I was politely told that the library received many phone inquiries in a given month, but the librarian was kind enough to ask other staff members anyway. No one recalled speaking to her. I asked if someone named Travis had visited the library recently. That got a laugh. I mentioned that he might have been selling children’s books; no, the library did not buy children’s books from traveling salesmen.

  She transferred me to someone in acquisitions, who went on to give me a brief explanation of the library’s acquisitions procedures. They involved a complex decision-making process that made me feel a new respect for children’s librarians, but left me no wiser about Travis or Briana’s call.

  I drew a blank with the other libraries as well.

  I decided to look up the DeMont murder. I knew the year, but couldn’t recall the month. I called Mary and asked her if she remembered.

  “Of course I do. It was summer. July or August. Hotter than Hades. Are you making any progress?”

  I told her what I had learned so far.

  “Hmm. I expected more by now, I’ll admit.”

  “Your faith in me is inspirational. Do you know what Travis does for a living?” I asked.

  “No idea.”

  The DeMont story was too old to be indexed on the computer, which meant I’d have to look it up on microfilm in the library—the place formerly known as the morgue. This type of search was much slower, but it would have the benefit of letting me see the story in a context, next to other stories.

  I asked for the appropriate roll of film and threaded it through a reader. Context. Gwendolyn DeMont had been murdered a month before Elvis died, in one of the years I had spent in Bakersfield as a green reporter, years away from Las Piernas by much more than a fixed distance. I hit the forward switch and stopped the reel on an early July issue. I adjusted a few knobs and the images of old news came into focus. The late seventies.

  Nostalgia wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I ruthlessly hit the forward switch again. Eventually, I found the headline I was looking for. It was an Orange County story, so the Express didn’t give it big play on the first day. It ran on the inside of the B section.

  “Heiress Found Slain.” About a twenty-four-point headline. Beneath it, in slightly smaller type, “Husband Missing.”

  Husband missing. Not, I supposed, for the first time.

  9

  The story was told in a straightforward fashion. The previous morning, a Monday, Gwendolyn DeMont Spanning had been found dead of multiple-stab wounds. The body of the sixty-two-year-old heiress to the De-Mont sugar beet fortune was discovered in her bed by her housekeeper, Mrs. Ann Coughlin. No weapon was found at the scene. Time of death was uncertain, but Detective Harold Richmond of the Los Alamitos Police Department told the reporter that police estimated Mrs. Spanning died late Friday night or early Saturday morning. The home, which was surrounded by strawberry fields—the only crop now raised by the family—was somewhat isolated. Nothing appeared to have been stolen and the motive for the murder was unknown.

  Police were trying to locate her husband, Arthur Spanning, who was apparently out of town on business. According to the housekeeper, Mr. Spanning had been home when she left the house on Friday. However, she told police, he traveled frequently. She was unable to say where he might have gone on his most recent trip.

  The Spannings had no children; Mrs. Spanning was survived by an uncle, Horace DeMont, and three cousins, Leda DeMont Rose, Douglas DeMont and Robert DeMont, all of Huntington Beach.

  I glanced at my watch. I needed to leave soon to get home in time to walk the dogs before dark. I raced through the issues that followed, seeing the stories about the murder getting more and more play. I made copy after copy of articles I told myself I could read at home, and tried not to be lured by lurid headlines:

  Murder of Reclusive Heiress Stuns Quiet Community

  Spanning Alibi Is Bigamy: Husband of Slain Heiress Admits He Led Double Life

  Bigamist Not Charged with Wife’s Slaying

  DeMont Family Brings Suit: Seek to Prevent Bigamist from Inheriting

  I thought of shy Briana, suddenly the object of this type of scrutiny. Of Travis, at eleven, certainly old enough to read these headlines. I rewound the reel of microfilm and shut the machine off.

  Later that night, I sat on the living room floor, surrounded by the boxes from Briana’s house. Cody, my cat, was eyeing the piles of paper with twitching tail; I tensed as he tensed, and saw him ready to pounce. As on all his previous forays, I was able to shoo him off before he did much damage, but the scuffle woke the dogs. Worn out from a long run on the beach, Deke, a big black Lab, quickly went back to sleep, but Dunk, the shepherd, decided to gently sniff at all of the boxes again. Apparently satisfied, he lay down with a paw across my ankle and went back to sleep. This show of possessiveness was oddly comforting. Technically, he’s Frank’s dog, and like his master, he was soon snoring.

  I stretched a little, then went back to work. The phone calls to Briana’s former neighbors hadn’t been of much use; only two of the neighbors remembered her, and neither knew what had become of “Mrs.” Maguire or her son. They told me that she and her son had kept to themselves, had been polite but very private. After reading the headlines, it was easy to unde
rstand why Briana and Travis had sought privacy.

  I made notes based on the articles I had copied, recapping what I had learned, putting the information in chronological order.

  As Mary had remembered, Gwendolyn DeMont was raised by her grandfather after her mother’s death. Gwendolyn’s father, who died a hero’s death in World War I, was one of two sons, but apparently her grandfather had quarreled bitterly with his surviving boy, Horace DeMont. When the old patriarch died, this son was left only a small monetary bequest; the bulk of the estate, including all the DeMont lands, was left to Gwendolyn.

  At the time of her grandfather’s death, Gwendolyn was forty-five years old. Within a month of his death, and to her uncle Horace De-Mont’s shock, she married one of the few men who had ever made her acquaintance: the estate’s sixteen-year-old gardener, Arthur Spanning.

  In the articles, her uncle made much of the fact that throughout her life, Gwendolyn seldom ventured outside the family home. She was shy of strangers, especially male strangers. It was Horace DeMont’s contention that Arthur Spanning had connived his way into the household and then taken advantage of her grief. That Arthur bore no real affection for her was now proven by his illegal second marriage. Greed and impatience, DeMont said, had led Arthur to murder his rich wife.

  This was vigorously denied by Arthur’s older brother, a man named Gerald Spanning. Gerald Spanning had once been Arthur’s legal guardian—like Gwendolyn, Arthur had lost his parents at an early age. He speculated that this might have been one reason Gwendolyn felt drawn to Arthur, who had worked on the estate from the age of twelve. Perhaps she took advantage of a young man’s first crush, but Gerald Spanning had consented to the marriage of his underage brother because Arthur’s heart was set on it.

  However set Arthur’s heart had been at sixteen, it roved by the time he was twenty-two. Briana, who was then working in a nursery and landscaping supply company, was courted by and married the charming young man she knew as Arthur Sperry. His landscaping business required frequent absences.

  The articles in the Express supplied few details about this business, but apparently Gwendolyn had indulged her young husband’s whim to have his own business, to earn his own money. If this business required him to travel, she did not seem upset by her days alone.

  The cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Coughlin, was interviewed. She had worked for the Spannings for twelve years. She worked there every weekday, with weekends off, and did not live on the premises. She declared that the Spannings had always seemed to be a happy couple, that Arthur was an attentive husband. True, she admitted, they slept separately, but she had never heard them argue or complain of one another. Mrs. Spanning seldom ventured away from the house, and was rarely seen outdoors except in her own very private garden—a garden Mr. Spanning tended for her. No, Mrs. Coughlin was sure Mrs. Spanning had never had the least idea of Mr. Spanning’s other life.

  Police said that Mr. Spanning’s claims concerning his whereabouts on the evening of the murder were borne out both by emergency room personnel at Las Piernas General Hospital and the Las Piernas Police Department. At the hospital, Travis received treatment for a severely lacerated hand. The boy said he had been sleepwalking and thrust his hand through a back-door window. To add to the upheaval in Mr. Spanning’s life, his car had been stolen from the hospital parking lot. Ironically, police had taken the report of a stolen vehicle for “Mr. Sperry” and later, when Gwendolyn Spanning’s body was discovered, this report was used to further back Mr. Spanning’s claims regarding his whereabouts on the night of the murder.

  Not much was revealed about Arthur Spanning’s double life, possibly because Arthur was able to engage excellent legal help, but also because Arthur, Briana and Travis refused interviews. The “double life” article was largely conjecture, but not wild conjecture. The reporter noted that although Las Piernas and Los Alamitos border one another, they are separated by a county line. It was theorized that this division helped Arthur to keep his two identities separate—many tax, business, birth, marriage and other records were maintained separately in each county.

  Arthur Spanning was a man unknown to his neighbors, not active in the community in any way, a person who lived behind high fences and strong gates, and who dealt with most others through his lawyers. Mrs. Coughlin and the lawyers were the only persons who saw much of either of the Spannings. With the exception of rare and rather strained contact with the families of Horace DeMont and Gerald Spanning, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Spanning shunned the world around them.

  If the Spannings had been more active socially, Sperry’s friends might have noticed that he resembled the heiress’s husband. As Arthur Sperry, head of a middle-class family, he had many friends and admirers. All admitted that they knew little of his history or work, but all described him as charming and helpful, an excellent listener who was loyal to his friends. He was active in his local parish.

  To the great frustration of the DeMonts, no criminal charges were filed against Spanning; their lawsuit to prevent him from inheriting Gwendolyn’s estate was also unsuccessful.

  What happened with the bigamous marriage to my aunt was typical of cases where there is no clear attempt to defraud the second spouse. Although the marriage to Briana was invalid, it was apparent that Arthur didn’t marry Briana for financial gain, so no criminal charges were filed against him. She was given custody of their son, and refused Spanning’s offer of child support.

  I made a quick search of the remaining boxes from the apartment; there were some photos of Travis that might come in handy, but not much else.

  The dogs suddenly scrambled to their feet; I heard Frank’s car pulling into the driveway. I began to put the papers away. I was putting the stack of bills into one of the desk boxes when something caught my eye. It was a puce-colored flyer, announcing that Cosmo the Storyteller would be appearing in a free program for children at the Crescent City Public Library on the second of January at one o’clock.

  Crescent City. The first library on the phone bill. And one so far north of San Pedro, Briana would have no reason to check a book out of it, let alone attend a children’s program. Cosmo the Storyteller.

  Frank called a greeting from the front door. I set the boxes and papers aside and hurried to give him a proper welcome home. I was patient, which is not the first attribute anyone will mention in my eulogy. I listened to him talk about his day, let him vent some steam about cases that would suffer while he was away, even waited until he had changed clothes and was starting to pack for Idaho before I told him that I thought I had figured out how to find Travis.

  10

  We rode to LAX with Pete and Rachel early the next morning; the flight to Boise from Los Angeles International had been cheaper than any out of Las Piernas, but involved ten times the headaches. The department doesn’t have to justify headaches, only dollars.

  While we watched brake lights on the San Diego Freeway, I repeated to Rachel what I had told Frank the night before.

  “I don’t get it,” Pete said, listening in on our conversation. “How can you be sure Travis is this storyteller?”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  He snorted. “So this is just a hunch? Woman’s intuition?”

  Don’t be such a pain in the ass! I wanted to shout, watching Rachel scowl at him. “Just leave Pete up there in Idaho—okay, Frank?” she said.

  Oh, God.

  Frank, who was driving, glanced into the rearview mirror to look at Pete, then shook his head. “Even the governor couldn’t pardon me for doing something like that.”

  “It was more than a hunch,” I said. “And I’m not saying he’s the storyteller—just that this storyteller probably knows where to find him. Briana made calls after Travis’s father died. Probably trying to find Travis.”

  “An assumption,” Pete pointed out.

  “Yes, I’ll admit that.”

  “A logical one, Pete,” Frank said. “This woman was such a loner, she didn’t even have an address book. She
was dead for some time before anyone noticed she was missing. She didn’t have much money—seemed to be barely getting by. But when the father of her son died, she spent over sixty dollars calling public libraries. I doubt she was trying to hunt down a book.”

  Pete shrugged. “Okay. Go on.”

  “The calls were to libraries up and down the state,” I said, “but they started with Crescent City—which is not far from the Oregon border. Crescent City is the same place the flyer comes from. Briana didn’t have a car, but even if she did, I doubt she would have driven seven or eight hundred miles to see a storyteller. So why would she have a flyer from a distant library for a children’s event?”

  “You call this library yet?” Pete asked.

  “Pete,” Rachel said with exasperation, “we left the house at six o’clock in the morning. You think the average public library was open for business by then?”