The Secret Keeper

By Dorien Grey

P.I. Dick Hardesty listens with polite interest to his partner Jonathan's stories of his days working for 90-year-old multimillionaire Clarence Bement, helping the old man tend his garden. But when Bement is found dead, an apparent suicide, Jonathan is adamant that the old man would never have killed himself, a theory also held by Bement's grandson, Mel Fowler.

When Mel hires him to investigate, Dick learns Bement's lawyer also died mysteriously, barely a week before Bement. Dick finds himself immersed in a world of greed and familial dysfunction, searching for a missing new will, and Jonathan becomes the target for someone who believes the old man entrusted Jonathan with a secret he is not aware he has.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611878721

Book preview

Author

The Secret Keeper

By Dorien Grey

Copyright 2016 by Gary Brown, Executor of Roger Margason/Dorien Grey Estate

Cover Copyright 2016 by Untreed Reads Publishing

Cover Design by Ginny Glass

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 2009.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Also by Dorien Grey and Untreed Reads Publishing

A World Ago: A Navy Man’s Letters Home (1954–1956)

Short Circuits: A Life in Blogs (Volume 1)

The Butcher’s Son

The Ninth Man

The Bar Watcher

The Hired Man

The Good Cop

The Bottle Ghosts

The Dirt Peddlers

The Role Players

The Popsicle Tree

The Paper Mirror

The Dream Ender

The Angel Singers

www.untreedreads.com

The Secret Keeper

A Dick Hardesty Mystery

Dorien Grey

Dedication

To those who can trust

and those who can be trusted

With Sincere Thanks

I have yet to write a book without drawing upon the expertise and unstinting generosity of my friends and family. In this case, I must acknowledge the invaluable information provided, in equal parts, by:

Former USS Ticonderoga shipmate and retired lawyer Constantine (Con) Filardi

Police Chief (and cousin) Tom Fearn

and

friend extraordinaire, Gary Brown

It’s fascinating to think that in a world of several billion people, it’s still possible for each of us to know things that not another soul on earth knows. We all have secrets, and the reasons we choose or need to keep them vary with the keeper.

But because secrets can weigh heavily on the soul and spirit, we sometimes vent them by sharing them, perhaps disguised in the form of casual conversation with total or relative strangers who have no way of knowing the full weight of their significance.

There are people who, for one reason or another, often by their gentleness and good nature, invite confidences not readily shared with others. Thus, they unwittingly find themselves in the role of The Secret Keeper.

Unfortunately, not all secrets are harmless, and the passing of a secret from one person to another can, like the spreading of a virus, endanger both.

An example? Well, there’s Jonathan…

—Dick Hardesty

Chapter 1

Ouch! What the hell are you doing?

I had just decapitated the shaving-foam bird I’d spritzed into my hand for my morning ritual when Jonathan came up behind me and took an intense interest in the back of my head. He then reached up and yanked a hair out by the root.

Cheerfully ignoring my complaint, he replied, Look what I found! Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up for my inspection. A gray hair! he said with the enthusiasm of a Forty-niner who has just come up with a fist-sized gold nugget. 

Why, thank you, Jonathan. What a wonderful discovery! Now I can go put my name on the waiting list at the old folks’ home.

Still inspecting the hair carefully, he said, Maybe we should name it.

Great idea. I vote for ‘Jonathan.’

Actually, I had found two others on my own over the past month but had quietly dispatched them and didn’t see any point in making a big deal of it. Obviously, Jonathan and I viewed things differently.

Putting his arms around me from behind, he rested his head on my shoulder. Don’t worry—I’ll still love you when you’re old and gray.

You can’t know how much that means to me, I said, then hastened to change the subject. I thought you were fixing breakfast.

I am. I came to tell you it’s ready.

Good. What are we having? 

Geritol and prunes. Quickly releasing me, he made a break for the door before I could get to him.

*

Things had been going very well lately. I’d been able to keep steadily busy, and though none of my cases would make a very interesting novel, they paid the bills and even allowed us to pull a bit ahead. Jonathan had gotten his associate’s degree in horticulture, which gave him a little more time at home during the week, though his belonging to the Gay Men’s Chorus still cut into it more than I would have liked. But he loved it and was really excited when the director, Roger Rothenberger, assigned him a solo for the next concert. 

All our friends were doing well: Tim Jackson was an assistant medical examiner in the coroner’s office, and his other half, Phil Stark, was constantly busy with his modeling career. Bob Allen and Mario Lopez continued to spend what free time they had from their bar jobs working on the sprawling Grand Dame of a Victorian house they were lovingly restoring to its former glory. Jared Martinson was kept busy teaching Russian literature at Marymount College in nearby Carrington, and his partner, Jake Jacobson, was busier than he should have been with his construction business.

In deference to his HIV-Positive status, Jake had cut back on some of his work activities, and was diligent about doing everything his immunologist brother Steve told him to do. To all appearances, he was in excellent health, for which all of us were infinitely grateful. We got together with them whenever we could.

On the home front, Joshua was now attending half-day kindergarten and in day care the other half. One of the Bronson sisters, who ran the Happy Day day care center, took him and a few other of their charges about the same age to the school each day and brought them back. Though it was still several months off, we were making plans to enroll Joshua in first grade at the school nearest our apartment, which entailed a slew of logistical details and not a few problems. He, of course, couldn’t wait, since it meant he was one step closer to getting his own car and going off to college.

But entering first grade meant leaving day care altogether, and Jonathan believed in planning ahead. Considering all the details involved, it was probably a good idea. Getting him to school would be easy enough, but being able to pick him up on time every afternoon always required some serious time-juggling. We had some flexibility with the Bronsons, since their day care center was in their home, and they were very good about looking after him if we were going to be a few minutes late. But we couldn’t count on that once he started a regular school—the Bronsons only took preschoolers. We would look into other after-school day cares but hadn’t had the time yet. We agreed that it wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem, and we certainly couldn’t keep him in day care forever. 

All of which got me to thinking once again of how vastly my world had changed in a relatively short time. I realized, with some degree of concern, that my life was teetering on the brink of becoming stodgy. Reflecting on my past—on the cases I’d worked on and the characters I’d run into, and on my promiscuity before I met Jonathan—I couldn’t help but feel an odd wave of nostalgia and, odder still, of loss. I wouldn’t trade my current life for the world, but let’s face it, it fell somewhat short of exciting.

Recognizing that this line of thinking wasn’t the most positive or productive, I turned my thoughts back to what was going on now, and the positives of my current state.

In retrospect, looking over my relationship with Jonathan, it has occurred to me that I may have presented him in a more saintly light than reality might warrant. I know no one is or can really be as good and sweet and kind as I have probably portrayed him. But the fact of the matter is that love is not unlike the Vaseline that portrait photographers often apply to the lens of their camera to soften the image and hide the subject’s minor flaws. Jonathan is not perfect, but because I love him, for me he comes as close to it as anyone I’ve ever met.

The same is probably true with our relationship. It was by far the best of my life, but it wasn’t all skittles and beer by a long shot. Like any two people, we had our share of conflicts, though they were blessedly rare. I could always tell when something was bothering Jonathan, and though he almost never volunteered the source of a problem, usually all I had to do was acknowledge I knew he had one and he’d tell me. As for me, I’m afraid I do have a bit of a short fuse at times, but I always try to find outlets for what’s bothering me rather than lash out at him or Joshua.

Not surprisingly, Joshua is often the focal point of our disagreements. I admit I tend to let him get away with a little more than Jonathan would, and Joshua is not above playing one of us against the other if he thinks it will get him something he wants. Luckily, he is usually pretty transparent about it. We’d made a rule, too, that we never argued in front of him, which was probably a good thing in that the delay gave us time to calm down, and our arguments almost never got beyond a six on a scale of one-to-ten.

As for what was going on in Jonathan’s apart-from-me life, he was doing very well. I never cease to be amazed at how the world is often like a set of upended dominos—knock one over, and it sets off a chain reaction that can go on indefinitely.

For example, in the course of one of my cases a while back, we had attended a dinner party at the home of wealthy clients Iris and Arnold Glick, who lived in the city’s exclusive Briarwood district. Jonathan had impressed one of the other guests, the wife of a couple who had just bought a new home in the area. She subsequently hired him to do some landscaping work on weekends.

They were so happy with his work they referred him to one of their friends, who referred him to someone else—and from there things, like Topsy, just grew. It hadn’t reached the point where he could afford to give up his regular job, but it was headed in that direction.

He was lucky to have a terrific boss at his regular job at Evergreen Nursery, who allowed him a lot of flexibility during the week whenever he got freelance work. Since he bought all his supplies from Evergreen, and the company didn’t have to pay him for the time he was using them, it was a win-win situation for everyone. And when his boss was looking for a car for his teenage daughter, he offered to trade one of Evergreen’s older but well-maintained pickup trucks for Jonathan’s beloved Toyota.

Though he was very reluctant to lose his baby, the practicality of being able to more easily carry supplies, small trees, shrubs, and his growing collection of landscaping tools than he could possibly get into the Toyota won out.

He didn’t do lawn-mowing or raking or other routine yard maintenance but rather consulted with homeowners on decorative landscaping—which trees, plants, flowers, and shrubs were right for the particular area, where to put in flower beds, etc.

He was, in fact, talking of going back to school for a degree in landscape architecture. By their nature, most of his jobs were short-term and, like the detective business, often sporadic, fluctuating between feast and famine. However, he did have one long-term customer whom he’d come across serendipitously.

One of his first jobs had been planting a decorative hedge around the property of a large house in Briarwood, which took nearly a week to complete. He’d work mornings at Evergreen then spend the afternoons on the hedge.

Reporting on his first day on the job, he mentioned the house next to his clients’, which was distinguished not only by its quiet opulence but by the fact it had a huge vegetable garden and greenhouse, which brought out the farmboy in him.

You’d think they could afford all the vegetables they wanted from the store, he said. The place looks nice from the front—there was a lawn service there today, as a matter of fact—but whoever is taking care of the garden is doing a rotten job. I don’t know why they even bothered putting it in if they’re just going to let it go.

A few nights later, as we were having dinner, he amended his earlier assessment.

I shouldn’t be so quick to judge other people.  

I didn’t know you did, I replied. What do you mean?

"Well, I told you about the house next door to the Gundersons’, the one with the big garden? Just about every day I’ve been working there, I’ve seen an old man in a wheelchair sitting on the patio reading a book, and every now and then I know he’s watching me.

"Well, today he came out of the house and wheeled himself down the sidewalk that leads out to the greenhouse at the back of the yard. He came out a minute later with a hoe on his lap and wheeled across the grass to the garden. How he was able to maneuver the wheelchair through the grass without help and balance a hoe at the same time, I don’t know.

"Anyway, I watched him go to the garden and start trying to use the hoe to take out some weeds along the edge. He couldn’t reach in very far, and it was almost impossible for him to handle the hoe properly, but he tried. A few minutes later, he accidentally dropped the hoe, and he started to get up out of his chair so he could bend down to get it, but I was afraid he might fall if he did that, so I went over to pick it up for him.

"He thanked me, and we got to talking. I couldn’t talk too long because I was still working, but he asked me to stop back after I’d finished, and I said I would. I kept an eye on him while I finished, afraid he might drop the hoe again, but I guess he gave up, because he took a book out of a sort of pouch hanging on one arm of the wheelchair and sat there reading.

"So, when I had the last shrub in, I went back over to talk to him. He’s really a nice man. He must be about a hundred years old, and I don’t know where he got his money, but he has to have a lot of it to live in a house like that, and he lives alone with just a housekeeper. Well, I think she’s a live-in, but I’m not positive.

"Anyway, he said he’d had the garden ever since he had the house built, and he’d planted it all by himself. He said he loved plants and trees and flowers all his life but was too busy making money to do much about it until he retired. But this year, right after he planted the garden, he fell down in his driveway and broke his hip. He can still stand up and take a few steps, but he has to have something to hold on to when he tries. He has that yard service mow his lawn, but he doesn’t want them near the garden.

I told him I was raised on a farm, and that I really missed my mom’s garden—I helped her with it every year from the time I was old enough to hold a trowel. She used to call it ‘our’ garden, hers and mine.

I could almost feel the soft breeze of memory and sadness sweep across him. His voice caught on his last words, and I remembered his brother Samuel, Joshua’s dad, telling me how totally devastated Jonathan had been when their mother died.

His narrative was briefly interrupted for a trip to the refrigerator to get Joshua another glass of milk. Returning to the table, he picked up where he’d left off, but since Jonathan’s stories tend to get a little heavy on the details, I’ll just cut to the chase.

He finished his story with And guess what?

I didn’t have to guess, but I dutifully responded with, What?

He wants to hire me to help him with his garden. He says the people who take care of his lawn don’t know anything at all about gardens, and he wants me to come over three days a week for a couple hours each time. I told him I wasn’t sure I could do it on a regular basis, but he said we should try it out, and then he offered to pay me twenty dollars an hour! Twenty dollars! How could I say no?

He had a point.

*

And so it came to pass—yea, verily—that Jonathan spent an hour or two, three days a week, weather permitting, helping an old man with his vegetable garden, and bringing home bags of tomatoes and onions and peas and squash and zucchini his employer insisted he take.

*

The man’s name, Jonathan said, was Clarence Bement, a name I vaguely recognized, and, as it turned out, he missed Jonathan’s estimate of being a hundred by only ten years.

The next time I had a quick assignment from one of my lawyer clients to do some research at the library, my curiosity led me to also do some checking on Clarence Bement. I was right to have recognized the name.

Bement was once a major powerhouse on Wall Street. I remembered, too, having read once that he had two children and, about forty years before, had been involved in a messy divorce scandal, the details of which had made front page news at the time—1946, I think it was. It wouldn’t rate two paragraphs at the bottom of page 12 today.

Custody of his children and more than half his fortune went to his ex-wife, but he had persevered and, by shrewd business moves, not only made back every penny he’d lost in the divorce but doubled it. Probably having learned from his mistakes, he never remarried.

One of the infinite number of things I love about Jonathan is that, while he is often initially intimidated to the point of being starstruck at the prospect of meeting someone he considers rich or famous, the intimidation vanished if he got to see them as people. He almost immediately felt at ease with Clarence Bement. Not really realizing who Bement was or just how wealthy he was might have been a factor, but Jonathan considered him just a nice, interesting old man who loved the same things he loved.

Every night after spending time working on Bement’s garden, he would bring home stories—never of Bement’s wealth, but of his life outside the business world.

I feel kind of sorry for him, he observed. I think he’s really lonely, and I guess he isn’t all that close to his family, although I think most of them live here or close by. He never talks about them, except for a couple of his grandkids, especially one grandson. I don’t know if he has any friends left, as old as he is. That must really be hard. I know how hard it is to lose even one friend. But to lose them all, one by one… He shook his head. Wow. 

That’s a long way down the road, Babe, I said. Don’t worry about it now.

He nodded but did not seem convinced. I thought that a change of subject might be in order.

So, what does he do with all the stuff from his garden, other than give it to you? Surely he can’t eat it all himself, and from what you say it’s a pretty big garden.

"He has some people come over from a food bank every couple of days. I pick whatever’s ripe and put it on his patio near the back door. His housekeeper takes it in and keeps it until they come. I don’t think she likes me very much—I’ve never seen her smile, and she never says a word to me.

"He always comes out to the edge of the garden while I’m working, and sometimes he’ll talk and other times he just reads. It’s always the same book: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. It’s not a very big book, but he asked if I’d read it, and I told him no.

"Sometimes when we’re having coffee—he always insists I take time off from work to have coffee with him, and I feel kind of strange about that, because I get paid to work, not to drink coffee. But he insists, and he pays me for every minute I’m there, so I sit on the grass and listen to him talk.

"Anyway, sometimes he’ll talk about Mrs. Browning—I didn’t remember she was the one who wrote ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…’ I remember that one from school. I never would have thought such an important businessman like him would have time for poetry, but I guess you never know.

"It’s interesting, though, that it seems like the housekeeper is always looking through the window, watching us. Actually, I think she’s watching me. Mr. Bement jokes about her always spying on him, but I’m not sure he’s really joking, because whenever he sees her coming out of the house he changes the subject to gardening until she goes away."

Don’t let it bother you, I said. Some people are just strange. Probably she’s just watching out for him.

He shrugged, but said nothing.

So, when do think your assignment will be over? I asked. Fall’s coming, and the growing season is just about over for the year.

True. But he wants me to turn the garden over to get it ready for next year. He has a great rototiller.

Surely he’s not going to try to do a garden again next year?

He gave me a surprised look. "Of course he is! I don’t know what he’d do without his garden. I told him I’d help him. And I promised him I’d make a couple of paths across it so he can get close enough to the plants to do some hoeing himself without having to lean way over to do it.

"And then there’s the greenhouse, and we’ll be able to start seedlings in there early in spring, then transfer them to the garden when