“He tried again to talk me out of it. Said he’d seen this kind of thing before—survivor guilt. The more he talked, the angrier I got, the poor man. And since I’d reached my majority, he had no choice. I returned to L.A. feeling righteous with purpose—no longer just another grad student caught up in the grind, I was a woman with a mission. But the moment I stepped into my dorm room, the enormity of everything hit me. I realized my life would never be the same, never be normal. I dealt with it by staying busy, ordering the lawyer around, moving into the house, signing papers. Convincing myself, Alex, that I was in control. I found this place—it doesn’t look that great on the outside, but they really treat her special. Elmo is fantastic, totally oriented toward one-on-one care.”
She lifted my hand to her cheek, then placed it in her lap and held it tight.
“Now you, Alex. Your entree to this mess. The night you found me holding the snapshot was soon after Shirlee had been flown out—what a job, just getting her off the plane and into a van. I hadn’t slept for days, was wired and fatigued. The photo had come in a box with other family papers; it had been in Mummy’s purse the day she died.
“I started staring at it, fell into it, like Alice down the hole. I was trying to integrate everything, remember the good days. But so angry that I’d been deceived, that my whole life had been a deceit—every moment colored by lies. I felt sick, Alex. Nauseous. My stomach was heaving. As if the photo was capturing me—eating me up, the way the pool had eaten Shirlee. I freaked out, stayed freaked for days—I was hanging by a thread when you came in.
“I never heard you, Alex. Not until you were standing over me. And you seemed angry—judging me. Disapproving. When you picked the picture up off the floor and examined it, it was as if you’d invaded me—forced your way into my private pain. I wanted the pain all to myself—wanted something all to myself. I just blew. I’m so sorry.”
I returned the pressure of her hand. “It’s all right.”
“The next couple of weeks were horrible, just a nightmare. I worried what I’d done to you and me, but frankly, I was too drained to do anything about it and guilty because I couldn’t get myself to care more about it. I had so much to deal with: my rage at my parents for lying to me, my grief at losing them, my rage at Shirlee for coming back so damaged, for being unable to respond to my love. At the time I didn’t realize that she was vibrating, trying to communicate with me. So many changes all at once, Alex. Like a jumble of crisscrossing live wires burning into my brain. I got help.”
“Kruse.”
“Despite what you think of him, he helped me, Alex. Helped put me back together again. And he told me you’d come looking for me, which let me know you cared. I cared about you—that’s why I finally forced myself to get together with you, even though Paul said I wasn’t ready. And he was right. I came on like a nympho because I was feeling worthless, out of control, felt I owed you something. Acting like a sexpot made me feel in charge, as if I were stepping out of my personality and adopting a new one. But just for a short while. Later, while you slept, I despised what I’d done, despised you. I dumped on you because you were there.”
She looked away. “And because you were good. I ruined what we had because I was unable to tolerate goodness, Alex. I didn’t feel I deserved goodness. And after all these years, I still regret that.”
I sat there, trying to take it all in.
She leaned over and kissed me. Gradually, the kiss took on heat and depth and we were pressed against each other, groping, our tongues dancing. Then we both pulled away.
“Sharon—”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “Not again. How could you ever know you’d be safe?”
“I—”
She placed a finger over my lips.
“No reason to explain, Alex. Ancient history. I just wanted to show you that I’m not all bad.”
I kept quiet, didn’t say what had passed through my mind. That maybe we could start again—slowly. Carefully. Now that both of us had grown up.
She said, “I’ll let you go now.”
We drove away in separate cars.
Back from Kruse’s house, I sat in my living room with the lights out and turned it over, again and again. Park Avenue, Southampton summers. Mummy and Daddy. Martinis in the sun-room. Genteel cardboard cutouts.
But a nasty little scrap of celluloid said Mummy had been anything but genteel. A rich man’s party girl who’d made love on film, probably used it for blackmail.
My whole life had been a deceit—every moment colored by lies.
I thought about Shirlee Ransom. Vegetative. Squeaking. Wondered if any part of the story had been true.
If she loved her twin, how could she kill herself, abandon a helpless cripple?
Unless Shirlee was dead too.
S and S, silent partners.
A pair of little girls, beautiful, black-haired. Mountains in the background. Ice cream cones in opposite hands.
Mirror-image twins. She’s a lefty; I’m a righty.
Suddenly I realized what had bothered me about the porn loop—the tip-of-the-mind incongruity that stayed under my skin.
Sharon was right-handed but in the film—stroking, kneading—she’d favored her left.
Being a sexpot made me feel in charge. As if I were stepping out of my personality and stepping into someone else’s.
Switching? Trying on a new identity?
The left hand. Sinestra. Sinister. Some primitive cultures considered it evil.
Putting on a blond wig and becoming a bad girl … a left-handed sinister girl.
Suddenly something about the drowning story bothered me—something that hadn’t troubled me six years ago, when I’d wanted to believe her:
The details, the vivid imagery.
Too complex for a three-year-old. Too much for a toddler to remember.
Practiced detail. Or a well-rehearsed lie? Had she been coached? Had her memory enhanced?
As in hypnosis.
As in Paul Kruse, master hypnotist. Amateur film-maker. Professional sleaze.
I was certain, now, that he’d known enough to fill in lots of blanks. Had died with that knowledge. Horribly, bloodily, taking two other people with him.
I wanted, more than ever, to know why.
Chapter
20
Feeling infected, the carrier of some dread disease, I canceled my flight to San Luis, turned on the TV, and created some electronic companionship.
The Kruse murders were the lead item on the eleven o’clock news, complete with sweeping live minicam shots of the murder house and inset photos of Paul and Suzanne in better days. The third victim was identified as Lourdes Escobar, age twenty-two, a native of El Salvador who’d worked as the Kruses’ maid. Her picture portrayed an open-faced young woman with plaited black hair and dark, melting eyes.
Innocent victim, pronounced the reporter, lowering his voice and oozing irony. She’d fled the turmoil and poverty of her native land, fueled by the dream of a better life, only to encounter violent death amid the seductive luxury of the City of the Angels….
That kind of philosophizing meant he didn’t know much.
I switched back and forth between channels, hungry for facts. All three newscasts were identical in style and lack of substance: reporters addressing the anchors instead of the audience, wondering out loud if one of Kruse’s patients had turned homicidal, or if this was just another random L.A. bloodletting.
I absorbed predictions of runs on gun shops, starved attack dogs. The reporter cupped one ear and said, “One moment. We’re about to have a statement from the police.”
The camera shifted to Cyril Trapp, clearing his throat. His shirt was TV blue. His white hair gleamed like a steel helmet. Under the spotlights his mottled skin was the color of dirty sheets. His mustache wriggled as he chewed his cheek. Establishing eye contact with the camera, he read a prepared statement pledging that the full investigative resources of the Los Angeles Police Department would be m
arshaled to solve these vicious slayings. A tight smile and head shake. He said, “That’s all I’m at liberty to divulge at this time,” and walked away.
The reporter said, “There you have it, Keith and Kelly. Reporting live at the scene of …”
I turned off the set, wondered about Trapp’s presence at the crime scene, waited for Milo to call and clue me in. When he hadn’t phoned by one, I undressed and slipped beneath the covers, dry-mouthed and so tense my palate ached. I tried deep breathing but, instead of relaxing, worked myself into a state of wide-eyed hyperawareness. Embracing the pillow like a lover, I tried to fill my head with pleasant images. None came. Finally, some time before dawn, I managed to sink into sleep.
The next morning I called Milo at the station and was told he was still on vacation. No one answered at his house.
I took in the morning paper. Unlike Sharon’s death, the Kruse murders were being treated as serious news—a headline shouting DOCTOR AND SPOUSE SLAIN bannered over the top half of page 3. The byline was that of a staff writer named Dale Conrad, a name I recognized because he’d covered behavioral science stories in the past, generally doing a slipshod job.
The Kruse piece was no exception. Despite all those column inches, Conrad had come up with nothing about the murders that hadn’t been covered on last night’s broadcasts. The bulk of the article was biographical information on Kruse. He’d been sixty at the time of his death, twice the age of his wife—whom the article described only as a former actress. His birthplace was New York City; his origins, moneyed. He’d been commissioned as an officer in Korea attached to a psychological warfare unit, received his doctorate from a university in south Florida and, aided by society connections and his advice column, built up a lucrative Palm Beach practice before moving to California. His recent appointment to head the department was noted, and his predecessor, Professor Milton Frazier, was quoted as being shocked by the senseless death of an esteemed colleague.
The death of Lourdes Escobar was a last-paragraph afterthought: “Also found was the body of the housekeeper …”
I put the paper down. New York, old money, society connections—reminiscent of the phony background Sharon had created for herself.
Had it been a total fabrication? Failed starlet mother or not, she’d lived like a rich girl—the clothes, the car, the house. Perhaps Linda Lanier had married money—the call girl’s fantasy come true.
Or perhaps she’d gotten it another way. Passing along to her daughter a choice chunk of hillside real estate once owned by a dead billionaire who’d employed her. Still deeded to that billionaire’s corporation and put up on the market the day after Sharon died.
Too many questions. My head was starting to hurt.
I dressed, found a legal pad and a couple of pens, and left the house. Walking down the glen, I crossed Sunset and entered the north end of the University campus. It was eleven-twenty when I passed through the doors of the research library.
I headed straight for the reference section, played with the MELVYL computerized index, and found two books on Leland Belding in the library’s holdings.
The first was a 1949 volume entitled Ten Tycoons. The second was The Basket-Case Billionaire by Seaman Cross. Surprised, because I’d thought all copies of the book had been recalled, I jotted down the call numbers, began looking for anything on Lanier, Linda, but found nothing.
I left the computer and did a little low-tech research—two hours spent turning the pages of volume after volume of the Periodicals Index. Nothing on Linda Lanier here either, but over a hundred articles on Leland Belding, stretching from the mid-thirties to the mid-seventies. I selected what I hoped was a representative dozen references, then took the elevator up to the stacks and began seeking out the sources. By two-thirty I was ensconced in a reading cubicle on the fourth floor, surrounded by stacks of bound magazines.
The earliest pieces on Belding were in aerospace-industry journals, written while the tycoon was still in his early twenties. In them, Leland Belding was hailed as a technical and financial prodigy, a master designer of aircraft and collateral equipment with three patents for every year of his life. The same photograph was used in each, a publicity shot credited to L. Belding Industries: the young inventor sitting in the cockpit of one of his planes, goggled and helmeted, his attention fixed upon the instrument panel. A handsome man, but cold-looking.
Belding’s enormous wealth, precocity, boyish good looks, and shyness made him a natural media hero, and the tone of the earliest popular magazine pieces was worshipful. One article designated him the Most Eligible Bachelor of 1937. Another called him the closest America had come to producing a crown prince.
A prewar profile in Collier’s summed up his rise to fame: He’d been born to wealth, in 1910, the only child of an heiress from Newport, Rhode Island, and a Texas oil wildcatter turned gentleman rancher.
Another official corporate photo. Belding appeared frightened of the camera, standing, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, a large lug wrench in one hand, next to a gargantuan piece of cast-iron machinery. By age thirty he’d attained a monkish look—high forehead, sensitive mouth, thick eyeglasses that couldn’t hide the intensity of round, dark eyes. A modern-day Midas, according to the article, representing the best of American ingenuity combined with good old-fashioned hard work. Though born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Belding had never allowed it to tarnish; he’d favored twenty-hour days, and wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. He had a photographic memory, knew his hundreds of employees by name, but didn’t suffer fools gladly, had no patience for the frivolity of the “cocktail crowd.”
His idyllic life as an only son had been cut cruelly short when both his parents perished in a car crash—returning, after a party, to their rented villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza, just south of Majorca.
Another layer. I stopped reading, tried to make some sense of that. When I couldn’t, I resumed reading.
At the time of the accident, Belding had been nineteen, a senior at Stanford, majoring in physics and engineering. He dropped out of college, returned to Houston to run the family petroleum business, and expanded immediately into the manufacture of oil-drilling equipment, using designs that he’d developed as student projects. A year later he diversified into heavy farm machinery, took flying lessons, proved to be a natural, and qualified easily as a pilot. He began devoting himself to airplane construction. Within five years he dominated the aerospace industry, flooding the field with technical innovations.
In 1939 he consolidated his holdings as the Magna Corporation (corporate press release: “… had Mr. Belding graduated Stanford, he would have received his degree magna cum laude.”), and moved from Texas to Los Angeles, where he built corporate headquarters, an aircraft assembly plant, and a private airstrip on a 1,500-acre tract in the suburb of El Segundo.
Rumors of a public stock offering made bulls and bears take note. But the offering never materialized and Wall Street regretted that out loud, calling Lee Belding a cowboy who’d eventually bite off more than he could chew. Belding had no comment, continued branching out—to shipping, railroads, real estate, construction.
He obtained the contract for a Department of Labor annex in Washington, D.C., built low-cost housing in Kentucky, an army base in Nevada, then bucked the mob and the unions in order to create the Casbah—the largest, most ostentatious casino ever to blot out the Las Vegas sun.
By his thirtieth birthday he’d increased his inheritance thirty times over, was one of the five richest men in America, and definitely its most secretive, refusing interviews and shunning public events. The press forgave him; playing hard to get only made him better copy and gave them more latitude.
Privacy, the last luxury …
It wasn’t until after World War II that the honeymoon between America and Leland Belding began to sour. As the nation buried its dead, and working people faced an uncertain future, left-leaning journalists began to point out that Belding had used the war to become a
billionaire while ensconced in his penthouse at Magna headquarters.
Subsequent snooping revealed that between ’42 and ’45, the assets of the Magna Corporation had quadrupled, due to successful bidding for thousands of government defense contracts: Magna had been the armed forces’ prime supplier of bombers, aircraft guidance systems, antiaircraft weapons, tanks and halftracks, even K-ration kits and servicemen’s uniforms.
Terms like robber baron, profiteer, and exploiter of the working man began to crop up in editorials, commentators asserting that Lee Belding was all take, no give, a self-obsessed tightwad devoid of the slightest shred of patriotic spirit. One writer pointed out that he never donated to charity, hadn’t given a penny to the War Bond drive.
Rumors of corruption soon followed—intimations that all those contracts hadn’t been won by putting in the lowest bid. By early 1947 the intimations became accusations and took on enough substance for the U.S. Senate to pay heed. A subcommittee was created, charged with investigating the genesis of Leland Belding’s war profits and dissecting the inner workings of the Magna Corporation. Belding ignored the furor, turned his talents to movies, bought a studio, and invented a hand-held motion picture camera that promised to revolutionize the industry.
In November of ’47, the Senate subcommittee held public hearings.
I found a summary of the proceedings in a business magazine—conservative point of view, no pictures, all small print and dry prose.
But not dry enough to camouflage the racy nature of the main accusation against Belding:
That he was less captain of industry than high-class pimp.
Committee investigators claimed Belding had shifted the odds on contract bids by throwing “wild parties” for War Board officials, government purchasing agents, legislators. These bashes took place in several secluded Hollywood Hills houses purchased by the Magna Corporation expressly as “party pads,” and featured “stag movies,” flowing booze, indulgence in “marijuana reefers,” as well as nude dancing and swimming displays by legions of “young women of loose morals.”
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