Savages: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) Read Free Page A

investigator, she hadn’t succeeded in stopping the wedding: the “brother-in-law” reference to Tamara proved that. Now after four years Ogden was back knocking on my door again, and not so imperiously this time. Why? I didn’t want to work for her again, but I was curious enough to listen to what she had to say.
    I dialed the number on the message slip. A woman with a Spanish accent answered, asked for my name, and went away to deliver it. Ten seconds later Celeste Ogden was on the line, thanking me for returning her call. The voice was familiar, low pitched and aggressive, but the inflectionwas different. Subdued, tinged with something I couldn’t quite identify.
    “I imagine you were surprised to hear from me again,” she said, “after such a long time.”
    “Yes, I was.”
    “I didn’t know who else to call. The police . . . they won’t listen to me. I need someone to
listen
to me.”
    “Police, Mrs. Ogden?”
    “They say it was an accident, that it couldn’t be anything else. But they’re wrong. I don’t care what anyone says. He did it. He’s responsible.”
    “Did what?”
    “Nancy’s dead,” she said in a cold, flat voice. “My sister is dead and that bastard killed her.”

2
    C eleste Ogden lived on the upper westward slope of Nob Hill, in the penthouse of an ornate apartment house built in the twenties. I’d been there before, four years ago, so I knew what to expect. The liveried doorman gave me the kind of fish-eyed look his breed reserves for the lower variety of salesman until I dropped the Ogden name and said I was expected; then he shifted into mock deferential and allowed me to enter. A room-sized elevator whisked me up six floors about as fast as a race car accelerating from zero to sixty. The penthouse had a double-door entrance and chimes that rang with a cathedral-like resonance. A Latina maid, probably the same one who’d answered the phone, opened the door and silently conducted me into a massive sunroom, where she left me to wait.
    The room, which opened onto a broad terrace strewn with stone statuary, reeked of old money and old-fashioned elegance. Heavy teak and mahogany furniture, Orientalcarpets, Tiffany lamps, gilt-framed paintings of what looked to be old Dutch burghers and their families in various stages of a picnic. It should have been bright and cheerful, with golden afternoon sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but it wasn’t. It had an aloof, museum-like aspect enhanced by a hushed silence.
    I wandered over to an unused fireplace. On the mantel was a gilt-framed photograph of Celeste Ogden and a white-maned, white-mustached man some twenty years her senior. I’d never met her husband, but the gent in the photo had the distinguished, self-confident look of a successful vascular surgeon. He also had a possessive hand placed firmly on her shoulder. I moved from there to the windows. Hundred-and-eighty-degree view: cityscape, the Bay, Alcatraz and Angel Islands, the Golden Gate Bridge. Add a few thousand a month, minimum, to whatever exorbitant rent the Ogdens were paying. If they were renting; for all I knew, they owned this penthouse.
    I’d been there about a minute and a half when Celeste Ogden came in. In one hand she carried a white, shirt-sized gift box. She apologized for keeping me waiting, thanked me again for agreeing to see her. Subdued, all right, but that didn’t affect the imperious, iron-willed air she projected. Or the simmering anger that was evident in her gray eyes. She was past forty now, but she didn’t look it. Slim, trim, her sharp-chinned face unlined and glowing in a way that indicated a recent face-lift; dark hair perfectly coiffed, beige pantsuit that appeared to be silk and was as unwrinkled as her skin, a gold locket at her throat, and rings galore.The diamond wedding rock on her left hand threw off daggers of reflected sunlight as sharp as laser beams.
    She invited me to sit down, sat herself on a round-backed