by Jan Burke
Ian looked so stunned, Eric found it almost comical.
“No?” Ian said, his hand going to the silver streak.
“He’s mad at us for letting Warren get away from town, right?”
“That wasn’t our fault!”
“Of course it wasn’t. But you know how he is.”
“So if we say this will work, and it doesn’t…” Ian said.
“Exactly. We’re screwed. He’ll just say we fucked up again. When we have Warren in our hands, we tell Uncle Mitch.”
“But if Warren doesn’t show himself…”
“He will.”
Ian looked doubtful.
“He will,” Eric said again, with the confidence of a hunter who had studied his prey for twenty years.
37
I LEFT THE BARBERSHOP AND DROVE BY THE ADDRESS I HAD FOR GRIFFIN Baer’s beach property. I couldn’t blame Baer for trading a farm in for a place in this neighborhood. Baer’s was one of the homes that formed a single row along the wide four-lane avenue — known in that stretch as Shoreline Avenue. On the other side of the avenue, a narrow, grassy park lay along the top of bluffs. At the foot of the bluffs was the sandy, south-facing shore, and beyond that, the Pacific Ocean.
Along that section of Shoreline the homes were huge, with mammoth picture windows, large balconies, and steeply sloping lawns. Many of the mansions were built in the 1920s and 1930s, although here and there one had been torn down and replaced with a contemporary structure. The newer homes seemed to be made of steel and tinted glass.
There was no parking available anywhere near the Baer place on this warm, sunny day, at least not on Shoreline, but I slowed as I neared it. A white Spanish-style home, with arched windows and a red-tiled roof, it didn’t look as if it had changed much from when it was first built. The paint looked fresh and the yard was well maintained. A low white stucco fence surrounded the front yard. There was a For Sale sign in the yard. I wrote down the real estate agent’s name and number. Someone honked behind me.
I drove to the end of the block and turned right, and right again at the alley behind the homes. I found the Baer house and parked blocking the door of the detached, flat-roofed garage in the back. I glanced at the latch on the garage door. It was padlocked shut, so I didn’t think there was a danger that anyone would throw it open and bash my car.
I got out of the car and tried the back gate. It proved to be padlocked as well. I peered over the fence, wondering how this place could have been used for smuggling. Maybe there weren’t as many houses along here then. Shoreline had been a much narrower road in the 1920s, and the park wasn’t in existence yet, but the bluffs had been there. A few miles from this point, they rose into steep, rocky cliffs, but here they were lower and made mostly of clay and sandstone, and in places were covered with ice plant. Although they weren’t as high as the two leg-shaped cliffs that gave Las Piernas its name, a fall from the bluffs would have caused serious if not fatal injuries. Would a bootlegger scale them?
Maybe there had been stairs along this spot in those days. Perhaps the goods were landed somewhere else along the beach and brought by car to this place. But that didn’t seem to make much sense. Why stop here? Why not just go on to the farm?
The house was quiet and from where I stood, it seemed to be empty. After a moment, I got back into the Karmann Ghia. The alley didn’t go through to the next street, but it was fairly wide, and I was able to maneuver the Karmann Ghia around rather than having to back up the whole way.
When I got back to the paper, the late-afternoon siege was on, the troops battering away at deadline. I looked over what I had written so far. I couldn’t add what I had heard about Griffin Baer; that was all unsubstantiated.
I called the real estate agent and told her I was with the Las Piernas News Express and asked for a tour of the house, but she apparently didn’t understand why I mentioned the paper, because she tried to “qualify” me. I bit back a laugh — mortgage interest rates were at a double-digit historic high; I had only held my current job a few months, and would have been a first-time buyer. Another big obstacle was the known fact that no lender wanted to make a home loan to a single woman. But the biggest one of all was that a reporter’s salary wouldn’t have allowed me to buy a single square foot of that neighborhood. So I told her I wasn’t a potential buyer, I was working on a story for the Express. She hung up on me.
I went to work on my story about Max.
I glanced up and saw O’Connor enter the newsroom. He saw me, checked for a moment, then came toward my desk with determined strides. He opened his mouth to say something to me, but I spoke first.
“I’m to tell you that Wildman was a perfect gentleman,” I said.
“Wildman? He’s drunk as a brewer’s fart. I just saw a couple of the boys loading him into a taxi outside the Press Club. He was passed out cold or they never could have managed it.”
“All right, so — a couple of hours before he passed out, Wildman was a perfect gentleman. I should explain that I asked for his help in finding you this afternoon.”
We went through what was now becoming a ritual exchange of apologies. I thanked him for visiting my dad and mowing the lawn.
“I told your aunt not to tell you about that,” he said testily.
“She’s my great-aunt, and she probably thought you were too young to give her orders. Did you tell her your name?”
“Of course I did!”
“She’s also a troublemaker,” I muttered.
“Kelly, no wonder you are as you are. All this uppity-woman stuff is inherited, I see. You haven’t a chance.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps it’s the rest of us who haven’t a chance.”
“True. Aunt Mary says you can tell a Kelly woman anything but where to sit and when to shut up.”
“What have you been up to this afternoon, my fine young renegade?”
“I went to the barbershop.” I told him what I had heard about Griffin Baer.
“Good work,” he said.
“Thanks, but I don’t know if what he told me is true.” I told him about the house. “It doesn’t seem well situated for bootlegging.”
“It’s not as unlikely as you may think. Those old houses have tunnels that lead from their basements to the bluffs. Most of them are sealed off now, but in the twenties they would have been functioning.”
“But wouldn’t just having one of those tunnels make the prohibition agents suspicious of you?”
He smiled and said, “I was only five when Prohibition was repealed, you know.”
“I know you didn’t fight in the Civil War, either. But did Jack or Helen or anyone else ever talk to you about it?”
“From what I’ve been told, almost all of the homes along the bluff had them, and the owners always claimed that they were just a convenient way to get to the beach or take small sailboats out on the water. The government never put enough money into hiring federal prohibition agents, and locally, there were certain cops and judges who were getting protection money to shield the bootleggers.”
“So the town had speakeasies and all of that?”
“Of course. And there was the gambling ship.”
“Gambling ship?”
“A big ship that was anchored offshore, with a sign on its side telling people where they could get speedboats to come out to her. There were a number of ships that were moored between the coast and Catalina in those years, run by gangsters. They sold booze out there, too. The one off Las Piernas caught fire and burned.”
“I didn’t realize Las Piernas had such a wild history.”
“No better or worse than most cities its size.”
“So I should walk along the beach and try to find a tunnel exit?”
“You could, I suppose.”
I told him about the meeting I had arranged with Max Ducane and Lefebvre. “Do you want to join us? I think it would be good to have you there, since you saw the house the night of the murders.”
He hesitated, then said, “Sure.�
��
We talked about what we’d do for the next set of stories. He showed me what he was working on — an interview he had done with Auburn Sheffield this afternoon about the trust and why he had taken on Warren’s unusual request. O’Connor had asked Auburn how he felt about it now that the coroner had identified the true Max Ducane’s remains.
“While I feel the deepest sympathy for Lillian Vanderveer,” Auburn had said, “and for Warren Ducane — assuming he may learn of these recent discoveries — I have absolutely no regrets regarding the trust. It is being given to a young man in whom Warren took a sincere interest, a young man who will, I am certain, bring honor to the memory of the Ducanes.”
“This fits really well with what I’ve been working on,” I said. I waited as he read what I had written about Max. He gave me some useful feedback about it — he was right, I needed to pull back a bit.
“I have too much sympathy for him, I guess,” I said, and told him some of the things Max had said to me off the record.
“Even if it hadn’t been off the record, you were smart to leave all that out, especially since we’ve no quotes from Mr. Yeager. Not that I doubt for a moment that he abused his first wife.” He paused, then added, “It’s not bad to feel sympathy. Reporters who pretend they are objective, above-it-all recorders of the truth are lying to both their readers and themselves, and that lie can be found everywhere in their stories. They often develop a kind of cynical disdain for everyone and everything they write about. Cynicism is just another way to lose objectivity.”
“But you can’t just be a sap, either,” I said glumly.
“No. It’s what degree of that sympathy ends up in the story that you need to watch, especially if you haven’t balanced it with the other side of the tale. If I hadn’t caught that, H.G. or John would have, but in time you’ll be able to catch it yourself, long before it ends up on the page.”
My phone rang. It was Lefebvre.
“Do you know where Bijoux is?”
“The jewelry store on Third Street?” I asked.
“Yes. Can you meet me there in twenty minutes?”
“Hang on.” I covered the phone and told O’Connor about the request.
“I take it he’s not buying you a ring?”
“Yes, for me to put through your nose, if they’ve got one that big.”
“Go,” he said, laughing. “Take advantage of Lefebvre’s cooperative mood while it lasts.”
“But deadline—”
“I’ll polish the story a bit, add what I have from Auburn, and turn it in — if that’s all right with you.”
I told Lefebvre I’d be right there. I thanked O’Connor, grabbed my camera, and took off.
I was closer to the store than Lefebvre was — the police department used to be headquartered nearer to the newspaper, but they had moved to a newer and bigger facility in the 1960s, generally regarded as one of the ugliest buildings in Las Piernas, and not just by those brought to it in the back of a squad car.
Lefebvre greeted me, then looked up at the store and said, “I’m told Mr. Belen is a diamond expert, and the most reliable jeweler in town.”
“I don’t know about that, but Bijoux has been around forever.”
“As if you would have any sense of forever,” he said. “Bijoux, eh?”
“It’s hard for most of the locals to say it,” I said. “I’ve actually heard it pronounced ‘buy jocks.’ You, however, make it sound exotic.”
“I was just thinking that it is a bit plain,” he said. “In French, the word means ‘jewelry.’”
“So are we here to get the Vanderveer diamonds cleaned?”
He smiled. “And I had thought to surprise you.”
“I couldn’t think of any other reason you would invite me to come to a jewelry store.”
“Why, to get a ring for O’Connor’s nose,” he said, holding the door open for me.
“Next time, I’m using the hold button,” I said, and entered the store.
“Speaking of putting things on hold,” he said, following me, “I need you to hang on to the information you hear today. Not run it in a story until I let you know that we can release it. Can you promise me that?”
I tested his resolve on this a bit and found that he wouldn’t budge, so I agreed, with conditions. “If you’ll promise me in return that you won’t wait just for the fun of it,” I said. “Oh — and if I can get this information any other way—”
“You can’t,” he said. “But yes, I agree to your conditions.”
Mr. Belen was an elderly man with a charming accent of his own — one I couldn’t quite place. He had some photographs in hand.
“Mr. Belen is Mrs. Linworth’s jeweler,” Lefebvre said. “Before she gave the necklace to her daughter, she asked Mr. Belen to clean the diamonds and repair any loose settings. Today he told me that he photographed his finished work.”
“Yes, I did,” Belen answered. He sighed. “I’m so sorry that the next time it was seen was under such terrible circumstances. I knew Miss Kathleen. A lovely girl.”
He showed us the photographs — two lovely double-strands of round diamonds. He laid out a black velvet cloth, and Lefebvre gently placed two small sections of the necklace that were still united and twenty-six loose diamonds onto it. At my look of puzzlement, Lefebvre said, “We found most of them under the bodies and in the crevices of the trunk.”
They were in a range of sizes, and Mr. Belen spoke to us as he quickly sorted them. “There should be one hundred and twenty of them,” he said.
“We collected forty-one.”
Mr. Belen raised a brow.
Lefebvre said, “I won’t tell you that our evidence control is always perfect, but with something this valuable, and in a case like this, we are extremely careful. These diamonds were collected under the highest security possible.”
“Could some of the diamonds still be in the car?”
“Every inch of that car, and everything in it, has been searched and sifted through. We’ve gathered much more minute evidence than diamonds.” He turned to me. “That is not for publication.”
“No, why should I tell anyone you’re doing your job?”
Mr. Belen went back to sorting diamonds. Before long, it was clear that most of the missing stones were from a middle section, the part that would hang lowest — and which had the biggest diamonds in it.
“Maybe whoever killed her grabbed the necklace and yanked down,” I said, “and kept whatever he still had in his hands. Stuffed a few more in his pockets.”
“In a hurry,” Lefebvre agreed.
“And took them after he killed her,” I said.
“How could you know that?” Belen asked.
“If she had been alive, I think he simply would have made her take them off and hand them over. The loose stones wouldn’t be in the trunk.”
“They won’t be hard to identify if the killer still has them, just as he took them,” Belen said, “but I suspect he has had them recut. This style of diamond cutting is passé. The newer ways of cutting disperse light in the stone in a way that makes them brighter.”
Lefebvre and I both took photos when Belen had the diamonds laid out in the order they belonged. Belen gave Lefebvre copies of the photos he had taken in December 1957, and looked at me apologetically.
“I’m sure Detective Lefebvre won’t mind making copies for me,” I reassured him.
Detective Lefebvre ignored me as he studied the pictures. “I have some photos of her wearing the diamonds at the party,” he said, “but none of just the necklace itself. Thanks — this will help.”
We left not much later. I mentioned to Lefebvre the Chesterfields and the lighter Jack had given to Katy. He took notes. I thanked him for bringing me along to the jewelry store and told him I’d see him later that night. I had just enough time to have dinner with Dad and Aunt Mary.
As I drove home, I thought I saw someone following me in a dark car. I made a few unnecessary turns to get to streets that
were emptier, where it would be harder for a tail to hide from me. Nothing.
I told myself not to let myself get spooked so easily and kept driving.
38
AS O’CONNOR STEPPED INTO THE FOYER, THE LAST OF THE FOUR TO ENTER the Ducane home, he felt himself surrounded by ghosts. The house was much as he remembered it. He thought of the four murder victims — of Katy, Todd, and the baby, but most especially of the nursemaid, whose blood he had seen on that rainy evening more than twenty years ago. He thought of all that had happened that evening in so short a space of time, and much of it centering around this household.
He recalled the urgency with which Jack had insisted he look for Katy that night — how Jack hadn’t cared about his own injuries (or sending O’Connor out into the rain) half as much as he cared about Katy. He remembered now that Jack said something had been troubling her. He remembered the note to Jack, asking if Mitch was her father, and wondered if that was what had disturbed her that evening. He felt sad for her, thinking of her now from nearly the same age Jack had been, while she had been about the age Max Ducane was now.
When Max turned on the lights, the cleanliness of the house only emphasized its emptiness, made it into a well-kept museum, and added to O’Connor’s feelings of disquiet.
He watched Irene and Lefebvre. As Lefebvre looked around, nothing in his facial expression gave away his thoughts or feelings. He had a large brown envelope in his hands — crime scene photographs, he had told them. Irene, he thought, should never let anyone talk her into getting into a poker game. She was bothered, he could see — by the thought of what had gone on here twenty years ago, or perhaps because the house seemed frozen in another decade. She had a small camera with her, the one she had brought to the groundbreaking ceremony, hanging by a strap around her neck. She wasn’t using it.
“I thought you said this place has been empty for twenty years,” she said to Max. “There’s no dust.”
“Lillian has paid someone to keep it clean,” Max said. “Weird, huh?”
“Seriously weird.” She glanced uneasily at O’Connor. “I mean… Lillian seems to have moved on with her life, but then there’s this house, sitting here.”
