“Don’t worry. You can’t cause any more trouble between Tash and me than there already is,” Coltrane said. Coming into the house, Jennifer had asked about the gashes on his mouth. He had told her what happened in Mexico and Big Bear.
“If I’m right, there could be a lot more trouble,” Jennifer said. “I think you’re in real danger.”
“Keep talking.”
“I wanted to find out just who this woman is that she could set your mind spinning the way she did.”
“And? You said her real name isn’t—”
“She was born Melinda Chance.”
“How do you know?”
“I hired the same private detective you did when you wanted to find out where Natasha Adler lived. He didn’t have much to go on, just what you’d told me about the stores she owns and her connection with Rebecca Chance. But that was enough. The stores aren’t owned in her name. They’re controlled by a corporation she runs, called Opportunity Inc. The private detective followed the trail of that corporation and worked backward, but I’m going to explain from the beginning and work forward.” Jennifer opened a briefcase that she had brought with her. “Here’s a copy of a birth certificate. Melinda Chance. Born April twenty-ninth, 1972, Fresno, California. Father unknown. Mother—Stephanie Chance.”
“All that proves is that some woman had the same last name.”
“Here’s a copy of a page from a Fresno high school yearbook.”
His stomach fluttering, Coltrane peered down at the copy she set before him. It was a good-quality photographic reproduction. He scanned the rows of students’ faces and fixed almost at once on the features of a young woman gazing back at him. Her dark hair was a little shorter, and her features were more girlish than womanly, but she had the same smoldering coals in her eyes. Tash. Except that the name under the photograph was Melinda Chance.
“When was this yearbook issued?”
“When she was seventeen. Just before she left Fresno.”
“What’s this caption under her name? ‘Destined to launch a thousand ships’?”
“A compliment about her looks. At first, it puzzled me, too, but it reminded me of a quotation from something, so I asked a reference librarian to track it down for me. ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships . . . ?’ It’s from a Renaissance play by Christopher Marlowe. The face that’s referred to is Helen of Troy’s. I thought the allusion was a little fancy for a high school yearbook, but then I noticed that below the caption it says ‘Favorite activity: the Drama Club.’ Here’s a photocopy of another page from the yearbook. These are the members of the Drama Club. Melinda Chance is easily the eye-catcher. As the caption indicates, among other things, the club practiced by reading scenes from classic plays. Must have been a tough teacher. Portions from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. That’s the play with the ‘thousand ships’ quote. You can see the title on the cover of the book she’s holding in this photograph. It’s about a man who sells his soul to the Devil.”
Coltrane felt a chill. “What are you getting at?”
“She never finished high school in Fresno. She and her mother left town. The reason they left is that Melinda Chance also enjoyed being on the football team’s cheerleading squad. She gave two of the players quite a bit of extra encouragement. The quarterback killed a fullback because of her.”
Coltrane’s chill worsened.
“Stabbed him in a parking lot after the spring prom.”
“My God.”
“The killer was eighteen, old enough to be tried as an adult,” Jennifer said. “His family didn’t have any social position. But the boy who got stabbed was sixteen, and his father was a bank president. The jury found the older boy guilty. The sentence was ten years.”
“And Melinda Chance moved on.”
“To Sacramento. She finished high school there and went to college. But by then, her name was Vivian Breuer. B-r-e-u-e-r. It’s a distinctive spelling. I’ll get to why that’s important. In college, she majored in drama, but the drama she was involved in didn’t happen only on a stage. A young man she was dating fell from the ten-story-high balcony of her apartment. The police questioned another boyfriend of hers who was in her apartment at the time of the fall. That second young man was eventually arrested for harassing her. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Drama Department, a forty-six-year-old man with a wife and two children, shot himself to death after the final performance of the Drama Club’s spring production. The play was Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. You’ll never guess who played Maggie, the character Elizabeth Taylor played in the movie, and you’ll also never guess who was suspected of having had an affair with the professor.”
“You can prove all this?”
“Here are photocopies of articles from the Sacramento newspaper. I’ve underlined Vivian Breuer’s name. By now, she was smart enough not to allow herself to be photographed for the yearbook, but the private detective I hired tracked down cast members from that production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and they identified Vivian Breuer from Melinda Chance’s photos in the Fresno high school yearbook. They’re also the ones who suspected she was having an affair with the professor who killed himself. These are the private detective’s notes of the conversations he had with the cast members, and these are the tape recordings of the same conversations.”
Coltrane looked with horror at the accumulating materials.
“She transferred to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, still majoring in drama, but now she changed her name to Linda Erikson. That last name’s important, too. I’ll explain why in a little while. In Arcata, the lead actor in William Inge’s Picnic beat his male costar to death in an argument after the production’s dress rehearsal. Do you remember the movie of that play?”
“William Holden was the star.”
“Right, and Cliff Robertson was the male costar, and the plot had to do with how Holden, playing a drifter, showed up in a small town in Kansas and stole Robertson’s girlfriend. Kim Novak played the girl.”
“And Tash had the Kim Novak role? You’re suggesting that what happened in the play also happened in life?”
“Except that in the play, one of the male costars doesn’t beat the other one to death. Here are copies of the Arcata newspaper articles about the murder. Note that Linda Erikson managed to avoid getting her photograph taken. The student actor admitted that he killed the other actor because he was jealous about Linda. For her part, Linda professed to be as shocked as everyone else. She said that she was too disturbed about what had happened to continue her studies, and she moved on as soon as she finished testifying at the trial. The student actor got eight years. Here are transcripts and tape recordings of conversations that my private investigator had with members of the Picnic cast whom he tracked down. He showed them Melinda Chance’s high school yearbook photographs. They identified her as Linda Erikson.”
Coltrane’s feet and hands turned numb.
“Meanwhile, the young man who was arrested for harassing her in Sacramento set out to find her as soon as he got out of jail. His search took him to—guess where—Arcata, where his body washed up on the beach one morning. The medical examiner’s report suggested that he had drank too much, gone swimming at night, passed out, and drowned. Here’s a copy of it. You ready for more?”
“No, but I think I’d better hear it.”
“The next place she showed up was San Francisco, but she wasn’t interested in college any longer. She suddenly had the money to start half a dozen clothing boutiques, and now her name was Evelyn Young.”
“I assume that last name’s important, too,” Coltrane said.
“Yes, but this time she’s making a joke.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You will.”
“The money for the stores. Where did she—”
“From the Acapulco Venture Group.”
The name had uncomfortable overtones and filled Coltrane with misgiving.
> “A subsidiary of Orange Coast Investments,” Jennifer said, “which is a division of Seaview Enterprises”—she paused—“which was owned by Randolph Packard.”
Coltrane looked down at the table and saw double for a moment. “So she lied to me when she said she didn’t know about Packard.”
“One of the things my private investigator couldn’t find out is why Packard would have given her money.”
“Because Packard thought he was her grandfather.” Coltrane explained what he had learned in Mexico.
“Maybe Packard was her grandfather,” Jennifer said.
Coltrane shook his head and regretted it, aggravating a splitting pain. “No. Rebecca Chance told her servant that Winston Case was.”
“Assuming Rebecca Chance told the truth.”
Coltrane’s blurred vision cleared as a terrible thought occurred to him. “She made each man think he was the father? She was trying to set Randolph Packard and Winston Case against each other? She wanted them to fight over her?”
“Like grandmother, like granddaughter.”
“And a lifetime later, Packard finally found his daughter and a granddaughter he didn’t know about, and he gave them money.”
“Or maybe earlier. The fact that in Fresno her mother and she used the last name Chance suggests that maybe they wanted to be found. Maybe they were found in Fresno. From what the private detective was able to learn, they had a lot of money.”
“What happened when she showed up in San Francisco?”
Jennifer shrugged fatalistically. “She changed her technique and joined a sailing club. Two prominent male members competed for her. All three went out on a boat for a weekend up the coast. Only she and one of the men came back. The inquest didn’t dispute their story—that the other man went on deck during the night, lost his balance, and fell overboard. The body was never recovered.”
“Something she did on the boat made the two men fight over her.”
“Of course. Two months later, the man who’d survived was arrested for harassing her.”
“Just like the student in Sacramento,” Coltrane said.
“And just like that student, he drowned shortly after he was released from jail. In this case, he took a boat out by himself, and it capsized.”
“Or maybe she arranged for him to have an accident so there’d be one less person who knew how she got her kicks,” Coltrane said. “The survivors of love affairs with her don’t have much luck.”
“You’re a survivor. Think about that while I tell you about San Diego,” Jennifer said. “She changed her name to Donna Miller.”
“Is that a significant last name, too?”
“You bet. You’ll understand why in a minute. She opened more clothing boutiques, ran them for a while, then turned them over to a manager and left on a yearlong around-the-world vacation. That was six months ago.”
“Six months?” The number nudged at something in Coltrane’s memory. “A neighbor of hers told me that’s when Tash showed up in Malibu.”
“As much as the investigator could determine, nothing happened in San Diego. He thinks she’s planning to keep it uncontaminated. A home base. But Malibu was another matter. Melinda Chance or Tash Adler or whatever you want to call her was up to her old tricks—with a new variation that added more excitement. She pretended to be stalked so she could have policemen around her, big men with big guns, whom she would manipulate to fight over her.”
“Pretended to?” Coltrane said. “No, you don’t understand. Duncan Reynolds was in fact stalking her. He—” Instantly, another piece of the puzzle slid horrifyingly into place. “Jesus, he wasn’t stalking her. He was her accomplice. He was doing what Tash asked him to do so the police would believe she was being threatened and she could manipulate her bodyguards until they turned on one another. That explains how Duncan knew about the photographs I took of him. Tash is the only one who could have told him. She must have ordered him to take the evidence and cover her tracks. And then—”
“What’s the matter?”
“What else was stolen?” Coltrane sprang to his feet.
21
A S C OLTRANE SCRAMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS , he heard Jennifer running after him. Frantic, he reached the vault, unlocked it, and charged inside. He flicked at the light switch without stopping, raced past the shelves, reached the false wall in the far left corner, and shivered from more than the vault’s chill when he stooped to free the catches and pull out the wall.
Behind him, Jennifer’s heels sounded urgently on the concrete floor, but his attention was totally directed toward the hidden chamber, the vault’s glaring overhead lights making him squint toward the shadows in there.
“She’s gone.” His voice broke.
Rebecca Chance’s face no longer peered out at him. The life-sized photograph of her haunting features no longer hung on the back wall of the chamber. He took a half step back, as if he’d been pushed, then moaned and lurched into the chamber, knowing what he wouldn’t find but needing to search anyhow. The effort was worthless. The chamber was empty. Every box of photographs had been removed.
Coltrane spun toward Jennifer. “Duncan didn’t know about this chamber. Tash must have told him. Jesus.” Feeling off balance, he groped for a shelf. “When I confronted her in Big Bear, she denied knowing anything about the negatives or Duncan. It didn’t make sense. Why would she lie? So I drove to Duncan’s house in Newport Beach to confront him. Too late. Several days ago, he shot himself.”
“Duncan?” Jennifer turned pale. “Why would he . . .”
“Maybe Tash helped him along, the way we assume she helped two of her old boyfriends along. One less piece of evidence, one less person who knew the truth.”
The implications reduced them to stunned silence.
“What about the last names she used? Tell me why they’re significant,” Coltrane said.
“Breuer. Erikson. Young. Miller. Adler. In college, before I got into graphic arts, I thought about a career in psychology. I took a lot of classes in it. The names Erikson and Adler had a lot of associations when I saw them together. That made me think about the other names. They all fit. Every one of them is a famous psychotherapist. Breuer and Adler were colleagues of Freud. Adler was one of his disciples.”
“I never heard of a famous psychotherapist called Young.”
“Spell it differently. J-u-n-g. She’s making a joke. Or she chose the names without realizing the connection among them, a subconscious slip. My private investigator found out that, under each of these names, she went to a therapist in each of the cities she lived in.”
“And what about Miller?”
“Alice Miller. The subtitle of one of her books is Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness.”
Coltrane’s voice was an uneasy whisper. “Childhood trauma?”
“There’s one other thing I have to tell you.”
“You mean it gets worse?”
“She told you her mother was dead. Well, she’s batting a thousand, because that isn’t true, either.”
22
I N POINT - AND - SHOOT CAMERAS , the viewfinder and the lens have different openings. As a consequence, the image seen through the viewfinder is not quite the same as that received through the lens and recorded on film, making precise framing difficult. The difference between what the viewfinder sees and what the lens sees is known as the parallax effect, and that is what Coltrane suffered now. What he had thought was happening was so at odds with what had truly been happening that the parallax threatened to drive him insane.
At ten the next morning, after he and Jennifer had caught a 7:00 A . M . flight to Oakland, he walked apprehensively along a corridor in the Redwood Rest Facility. In room after room, aged men and women lay in beds. A recreation room revealed a dozen residents in wheelchairs watching a game show on television. In the hallway, a few residents managed to get around with the aid of walkers. Coltrane nodded respectively to them, then stopped where a white-uniformed male
attendant waited outside a room.
The attendant was in his twenties, with wire-rim glasses and his hair tied back in a ponytail. “You’d better prepare yourselves. The odds are, she won’t know you.”
“I don’t expect her to,” Coltrane said. “It’s been years since we met,” he lied. “The last time I saw her was when we lived on the same street in Sacramento. But I have these photographs I took of her daughter.” Coltrane held up a packet. “And when her daughter found out I was coming to Oakland for a photo assignment, she asked me to visit her mother and give these to her.” The camera hanging from Coltrane’s neck gave credence to his story.
“Sometimes her language can be a little frank.”
“No problem. I admire elderly women who speak their mind,” Jennifer said.
“Well, maybe frank isn’t the right word,” the attendant said.
Coltrane tilted his head in puzzlement.
“Shocking would be more accurate,” the attendant said. “But who knows, you might get lucky and catch her in one of her occasional ladylike moods. The doctor said the photographs you’re bringing might improve her mental outlook. Nothing else has, so let’s hope.” The attendant reached for the doorknob. “Just give me a minute to go in and see that she’s presentable.”
“Take all the time you need,” Coltrane said. While the attendant went in, his apprehension swelled.
“So far so good. The story about the photographs worked,” Jennifer said.
“I wish it hadn’t. I don’t want to go in there.”
The photographs of Tash that Coltrane had brought were from the film he had exposed in Acapulco. He had developed the prints the night before, careful to shield Jennifer from the nudes but inadvertently processing an image that he hadn’t even known he had taken. When Carl Nolan had tried to strangle him with the camera strap, Coltrane had fumbled to attempt to pry the hands away and had accidentally pressed the camera’s shutter button. The resultant image, tilted on a forty-five-degree angle, showed the blur of what might have been the side of a hand on the right and the blur of what was possibly a shoulder on the left. Between them, Tash’s face was distinct. Coltrane had never seen an expression of such animalistic delight. He had almost been embarrassed to look at it, so open was the sexual pleasure that she took from watching Carl and him fight because of her.
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