Natural Causes Read Free Page B

wife, who had the brains of a Playboy
bunny and fucked like one. They had the crew out to the house one
Christmas Eve, and that woman got so loaded that she knocked over the
tree. But she looked good doing it. I'll give Quentin that. And
that's all I'll give him. He had what he wanted--all that money could
buy. And if he's dead now because he bought the wrong stuff, well ...
that's tough."
    "What kind of stuff?" I asked him.
    "They found him dead on the bathroom floor in
the Belle Vista. He'd been taking a shower and he apparently slipped
on the soap and fell through the glass shower curtain and bled to
death. Now, understand, this is a guy who couldn't take a piss
without saving the last few drops in a sample bottle. This is a guy
who'd phone his internist to see if there'd been any calls. You going
to tell me that Quentin Dover slipped on soap? And then lay there for
almost two whole days without anyone knowing where he was?"
    "What did he slip on?"
    "His own obsessions, probably. Quentin was
always looking for the easy way out. Anything that could kill the
pain and the worry and ease the burden of having to make all that
dough. Hell, you read the papers. So do the L.A. coroners. It's just
a matter of time before they figure things out. He'd probably been
drinking; he bought his way into the wrong crowd; somebody fed him a
little too much Dr. Feelgood; and he croaked. It happens every day to
much nicer people than Quentin Dover. And if he didn't work for
United, nobody'd give a shit."
    "Not even his wife?"
    Jack shrugged. "You'd
have to ask her."
    ***
    That's what I decided to do. I had Moon phone the
woman to let her know that I was coming out to talk to her about her
husband. While he was arranging the meeting, I found a phone in an
empty office and called the L.A. police to see what they had on
Dover's death. They didn't have much or, at least, they weren't
saying much. The officer I spoke to--a Lieutenant Escobar--read me a
prepared statement, the gist of which was that Dover had died of loss
of blood, following an accident in the shower. When I asked him what
had caused the accident, he gave me the usual runaround.
    "That hasn't been determined, yet. We're waiting
for the results of a chemical analysis of his internal organs. It may
take weeks, even months."
    "Why so long?"
    "He was in pretty bad shape," the cop said.
"You know, he'd been dead for several days."
    "Is there any chance that it might not have been
an accident?"
    "We've more or less ruled out homicide."
    "Could it have been a suicide?" I asked.
    "Death by natural causes is what it says on this
piece of paper," the cop said with a sigh.
    "Then why are you running those tests?"
    "It's standard procedure," he said. "Look,
are you a relative or what?"
    "I'm a Cincinnati Y. 1. My name is Stoner and
I've been hired to look into Dover's death."
    "Hired by the family-?"
    "That's privileged information," I told
him, which really burned him up.
    "You said your name is Stoner?" he said,
and I could hear him scratching my name down on a pad. That's what
they do when they want to put the fear of the Lord into you--take
down your name.
    "Harry Stoner," I said. "I'm
registered with the Ohio Police Commission, if you want to check me
out."
    "O.K., Harry. We might just do that."
    I'll bet, I said to myself. "In the meantime, do
you think you could get me a copy of the autopsy report?"
Escobar snickered. "That's privileged information," he said
and hung up.
    If United was pulling any strings in L.A., Escobar
hadn't heard about it. Which was both good and bad. Good, if it meant
that the company wasn't meddling in the official investigation. And
bad if Glendora couldn't find me a contact or an informant on the
L.A. force. Of course, there was no way to know what United was up to
on the basis of one phone call. And I wasn't about to take Frank
Glendora's outraged protestations of corporate innocence at face
value.
    I was pondering the difference between an
"independent