Sinister Heights Read Online Free Page B

definite?”
    â€œI’ll come to it. Leland was about sixty-five, still married to his first wife, with a grandson. The woman’s name was Cecilia Willard, a telephone switchboard operator at the plant. In court he claimed they never met, but sometime or other they had to have spoken, even if she was just putting through a call. She said she was nineteen when they had their fling.
    â€œShe delivered in the old Woman’s Hospital in Detroit. I’ll give you a copy of the birth certificate. It was a daughter. She named her Carla, with a C . No father’s name given. The child was three years old when Cecilia filed for paternity. That worked against her in court; the judge couldn’t understand why she’d waited so long. She said she was proud and wanted to make it on her own, but when a recession set in and she lost her job the going got too hard. Also she resented Leland for chucking her out with the rest of the batch. They hadn’t had any contact after their affair ended, when she was transferred to the switchboard at GM headquarters, probably because the first Mrs. Stutch got suspicious. That’s an educated guess. By all accounts the old witch died of pure spite. Anyway, Cecilia’s explanation didn’t play, and the blood test was inconclusive. The case never went to the jury.”
    â€œDid she appeal?”
    â€œNo; and that’s important.” She knocked the top off her vodka, then followed it with a drink of water. It was that old shot-and-a-beer action on which Detroit holds the patent. Stutch had had his influence. “There are two newspaper clippings in the envelope with the birth certificate. One of them is Cecilia’s obituary. She had an aneurysm seven years ago at the age of sixty-two. You didn’t see the item? I’m not surprised. There were only a couple of lines about the paternity suit. It’s a jaded old world when even sex scandals get stale. She kept the name Willard. Apparently she never married. The article listed two survivors: her daughter and a grandchild.”
    â€œAh.”
    She folded her hands under her chin. Her fingers were unpainted as well, and on one of them she wore a blue diamond in a fussy old-fashioned setting. That would be her late husband’s taste. Everything else about her was ceramic and sleek. Hard-fired , she’d said. “I think I resent that ‘Ah.’ You think I’m pursuing this because I may still be on the hook into a third generation.”
    â€œThat’s a lot to get out of one syllable.”
    â€œNever mind. Don’t judge me until you’ve heard me out. When Leland died and his safe deposit box in the National Bank of Detroit was opened, it contained eighteen years’ worth of canceled checks made out to Cecilia Willard against his personal account. He’d been sending her between one and five thousand dollars a month since just after her case was thrown out of court. In the light of that I don’t think there’s any reason to wonder why she didn’t bother to appeal the decision.”
    I rolled Scotch around my mouth and let it evaporate up my nasal passages. “It wouldn’t be looked on as any sort of admission once a good lawyer got through with it. He might just have felt sorry for her.”
    â€œMy husband wasn’t a philanthropist, Mr. Walker. He built two hospitals, but that was when he was getting old and he refused to trust his health to the existing facilities. If he helped Cecilia out, it was because he felt responsible. It’s significant that he stopped writing checks after eighteen years. That’s as long as the law would have required him to provide child support. He paid what he thought he owed, no more and no less.”
    â€œThen he shouldn’t have contested the suit.”
    â€œUnderstand, he never said a word to me about the case, or anything else associated with his past life. He lived in the present. I think