A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Cliff had flown up to San Francisco Monday afternoon. When he got home early Tuesday evening, around 5:30, his wife said that Fran Ashlock had called, because Bill’s friend Sandi had called Fran to ask if she knew where Bill was. Sandi had called Bill at his office, and when they told her he hadn’t been in since Friday, Sandi got worried. She told Fran she was afraid maybe Bill had had an accident. Then Fran got worried.

  When he got that message from his wife, Cliff was a little concerned too, but he didn’t call anyone—for one thing, he didn’t know whom to call, Fran, Sandi, or Hope Masters. “Well, when I go in tomorrow, I’m sure he’ll be there,” Cliff told his wife.

  But Bill wasn’t in Wednesday morning. Helen Linley said she’d tried to reach him on Tuesday, and Barry Carter from the art department told Cliff he’d called Hope’s house a couple of times on Tuesday, but the maid told him Mrs. Masters couldn’t come to the phone. When Barry asked the maid about Bill, the maid once said she didn’t know where he was, but the other time, she said Bill was at the ranch. Then the production manager, Gene Wollenslegal, who lived near Bill’s apartment, thought maybe Bill was sick, and he’d driven over to see whether Bill’s car was in the garage. It wasn’t, so they thought maybe Bill was still up at the ranch. Cliff thought the missing car didn’t mean much, since he knew Bill was living mostly at Hope’s, but he didn’t have time to talk about it just then, because the client had arrived for the presentation.

  Cliff thought Bill’s layout looked magnificent: a large white board with a picture of a beautiful woman in the center, the woman wearing a sweetly serious look, holding a long-stemmed red rose. The white paper was bordered in black, with a bold black caption: WHAT IF SHE DIES FIRST?

  Cliff was just describing the picture when the door to the layout room opened and one of the girls beckoned to him, urgently. Cliff excused himself and went out into the hall. “Bill’s dead,” someone said. “Helen’s on the phone about it.”

  Cliff hurried down the hall into his own office, past Helen Linley who was talking on the phone, her face drawn with shock, trying to write down what the caller was saying. He picked up on the call from Hope Masters’s father.

  “Can you please tell me again what you just told my secretary?” Cliff asked.

  “Bill Ashlock has been shot,” Van said.

  “Where? How? How did it happen?”

  “At my ranch in Springville, which is near Porterville,” Van said.

  “When?”

  “Sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning,” Van said. “An intruder broke in, somehow got in.” Cliff listened as Van told how the intruder had then grappled with his daughter. She fought off the intruder, Van said, ran to Bill for help, and found him dead, shot in the head.

  “Who was this?” Cliff asked. “Who is he?”

  “My daughter says he was a hired contract killer, and he gave her a rough time, but she finally convinced him to go away.”

  “How?”

  “By telling him either that he already killed one person and that was enough killing, there was nobody there he should kill, or that he had the wrong family, it was a mistake.”

  “How is your daughter?” Cliff asked.

  “She’s in difficult shape now,” Van said. “She’s being held, having been the only one on the scene, the only one there.” Van’s voice was strained, but he spoke clearly.

  “Do you have any idea who this could have been?” Cliff asked. “Somebody who was mad at Bill or something?”

  “No,” Van said, “but I want to make it clear it was our family he was after, not Bill. He was the innocent victim of something he wasn’t involved in. Do you know anything about a photographer who might have been involved, or something?”

  Cliff thought quickly back to Friday, and told Van what little he knew of the man who had come by to take Bill to lunch, the man who had interviewed Bill for three hours without taking notes. He wanted to talk further with Van, but Van said he had to hang up. He gave Cliff his office phone number.

  Cliff looked in the personnel folder and found the name of Bill’s brother in Columbus, Ohio. He called Robert Ashlock, then he left the office and got his car to drive over and tell Fran. He did not call Sandi.

  When he finished talking with Cliff, Van called a man he knew at the Los Angeles Times and asked him to try to find out if a reporter named Taylor was doing a story on the ten most eligible bachelors around town.

  Honey called a few close friends. She asked one of them to call around and tell everybody that the Chips luncheon had been canceled.

  She had just hung up the phone when it rang.

  “May I speak to Hope?” a man asked.

  “She’s not here,” Honey said. “Who’s calling?”

  “This is Taylor.”

  “Oh, Taylor!” Honey cried. “Thank God you’ve called! Oh, Taylor, Hopie is in desperate trouble. She has been charged with murder.”

  “Well, I have been to see my lawyer,” Taylor said calmly, “and he has taken my deposition. Where is Hope now?”

  “They took her to Visalia.”

  “I’ll see to it that they get my deposition right away,” Taylor said.

  “Oh, Taylor, please call the Beverly Hills police and let them know you exist,” Honey begged.

  “After the way they treated me last night, I’m not interested in wasting my time with them,” he announced.

  “But Taylor, they must talk to you. They are looking for you now. You are Hopie’s only witness. You are the only one who can help her. What are you afraid of? Nothing can happen to you.”

  “Oh, yes it can, in the business I’m in,” Taylor told her. “I’m not a national, and they can keep me from leaving the country.”

  “Will you please tell me where you can be reached?” Honey asked.

  “No,” Taylor said.

  “Will you tell me your last name?”

  “No.”

  “Then will you tell me the name of your lawyer?”

  “No.”

  Honey began to cry. “Oh, Taylor, you can’t do this. Taylor, Hopie is in such serious trouble, and the police need your testimony to clear her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Taylor said. “How are the children?”

  “They’re all right,” Honey said, “but they need their mother.”

  Taylor was silent for a moment. “How much is her bail?” he asked.

  “It hasn’t been set yet,” Honey told him. “They will probably arraign her tomorrow.”

  “Oh, well, then,” Taylor said lightly, “good-bye.”

  Honey screamed into the phone. “Don’t hang up! Please don’t hang up! You can’t do this, Taylor. You have to help Hopie! Please help Hopie!”

  “Will Van be in his office this afternoon?” Taylor asked calmly.

  “Yes, I think so,” Honey managed to say.

  “I’ll call him later,” Taylor said. Then he hung up.

  Honey found a tissue and stood for a moment in the kitchen, collecting herself, before she went into the den, where the children were watching television. She tried to keep her voice natural and easy. “Keith, do you know Taylor’s last name?”

  “Yes,” Keith said. “Taylor Wright.”

  Hope was not in Visalia. She was taken first to the Porterville holding tank, after a drive she had thought she might not survive.

  In the back seat of the police car, she was hunched over with pelvic cramps; her wrists were throbbing from the tight cuffs. Beyond the grill that separated the front seat from the back, she could hear the policemen talking; she was sure they were threatening her, indirectly. At first they had seemed pleasant and understanding. “I can understand what you did, it must have been self-defense,” one of them said.

  “No, no, it wasn’t that way,” Hope said. “Bill would never, never hurt me.”

  They talked some more, but when she wouldn’t say anything about Bill, they seemed to get angry. “We’ll just have to throw her in the hole and let the black dykes take care o
f her,” one officer said loudly.

  The car stopped then; she raised her head and saw that they were in the parking lot of the Ranch House, a restaurant along the freeway. “Oh, I have to go to the bathroom,” Hope said.

  “You have to stay in the car,” one of the men told her. “What do you want to eat?”

  “I’d just like a plain vanilla milkshake,” Hope said. They locked the car, and she saw one of them enter the phone booth near the restaurant door.

  In the hot stuffiness of the car, the midday sun beating on the roof, she felt dizzy and sick; she fell over sideways on the coats they’d put in the back seat with her. One of the men was very angry when he came back to the car. “Get off those coats. What do you think you’re doing on those coats?” he yelled.

  Hope pulled herself up and took the milkshake between her cuffed hands, but after one sip she thought she would vomit, so she just held it the rest of the way. The men got into the car and, before they drove off, one of them read her her constitutional rights. Then they said nothing more to her.

  When they stopped the car and told her to get out, she didn’t know where she was. They led her into a small cinderblock building, with barbed wire around the back.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said again, and someone took her into a closetlike room with cement walls, a window covered with cardboard—no light—a toilet, and a combination drinking fountain-sink. Hope thought the room smelled like a year’s worth of vomit and urine that hadn’t been cleaned up. There was a bunk along the wall with a mattress on it, but because it was so dirty, Hope was afraid to lie down; she thought she might catch some disease, so she didn’t use the toilet, either.

  Outside the room, she could hear people talking. Twice she heard a phone ring and a man say, “Hope Masters is not here.” She knocked on the door when she heard that, but no one came. Don’t be scared, she kept telling herself. You have an attorney and eventually someone will find you. Don’t be scared. She bunched her sweater into a ball and leaned her head against it and closed her eyes. After a while—she had no idea when—someone opened the door and told her to come out. She was fingerprinted and photographed, examined for needle marks, then handcuffed again and put back in the police car for the ride to the county jail.

  Sergeant Hensley was tired by the time he took Hope Masters’s fingerprints, and he wasn’t finished for the day yet; he had to go over to the crime lab and start processing the evidence. When he’d finished helping with the autopsy, at dawn, he’d gone to the crime scene, helping Mike Scott and the other deputies. Scott had taken the photographs, using a 35-mm Pentax until he dropped it and then had to use Jack Flores’s Kodak. He took two rolls of color film from the Pentax and put it in the crime lab truck to be taken to the Main Drugstore for processing. Then he took black-and-white photos of everything he’d taken in color.

  Besides the dusting for prints and the photographs, the officers were collecting evidence throughout the house, including bedding, suspected bloodstains from various locations, pieces of clothing, towels and washcloths, a first-aid kit, wadded tissues, and a yellow waste basket that had a white pillowcase with red stains on top of it and the ball of adhesive tape, wadded up, halfway down in the basket. When they were finished, Sergeant Hensley had recorded forty-nine items taken into evidence and sent to the crime lab. Some items were marked directly, others put into containers, tagged and marked with a felt marking pen. Number 49 was listed as “one sheet and one mattress pad.” Later Sergeant Hensley had to correct that. The mattress pad was an item of evidence, having been found beneath the body, but the sheet belonged to the people at Myers Chapel.

  A tall, handsome woman smiled at Hope through the bars at the Tulare County Jail.

  “Oh, I have to go to the bathroom, please,” Hope said.

  “You can use mine,” the woman said. She led Hope to a small, immaculate white bathroom and opened the door. Oh, thank God, Hope thought. I can use a clean toilet. I can relax for a minute. I can wash my hands.

  Once again then, Hope was photographed and her fingerprints taken. She was given a set of clothing: a flowered flannel nightgown with a number on it, a pair of underpants, a pair of jeans, a light blue shirt and a sweatshirt, a pair of white socks, and rubber thong sandals.

  The matron, Elisa Arenas, watched Hope as she took off her own clothes and slipped into the gown. She thought Hope seemed very upset, very tense and nervous.

  “I’m going to ask to take you over to the hospital,” the matron said. “I’m going to ask them to remove the handcuffs on the trip, and I’ll take the responsibility.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of me?” Hope asked. “If I did what they say I’ve done, wouldn’t you be afraid of me?”

  “No,” the matron said. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m a good judge of people.”

  Still, Hope was loosely handcuffed for the ride to the hospital in the police car, with a man driving and Matron Arenas in the front seat, and Hope in the back. During the thirty-minute ride, Hope talked.

  At the hospital, Hope and Elisa Arenas sat on a long bench in a waiting room jammed with people. Once again, the scene seemed unreal to Hope—sitting in a flannel gown, handcuffed, in a strange room filled with strangers. She had no idea of the time or precisely where she was; she only knew it was dark outside. Still, she felt safer in the hospital, a lot safer, than she had felt in the little Porterville jail. She felt here she was in a place with rules, with some kind of order. Only once, as she sat on the bench next to the matron, did she feel threatened, when a young man suddenly stood over her, holding out a Life Saver. He knew she couldn’t take it because of the handcuffs, and he wanted to put it directly into her mouth. Hope bent her head toward the floor; she thought the mint might be poisoned.

  “I hope the doctor will keep you here,” the matron said. Hope wished that, too, but he did not. When Dr. John Wing Hing Wong examined her, with the matron present, he saw two small areas of what appeared to be adhesive tape marks on her left forearm, but he reported no bruises, no evidence of trauma connected with rape. After the pelvic examination, he said she could return to jail. “How long will it be before I know if I’m pregnant, or have a veneral disease?” Hope asked.

  “About three months,” the doctor said. Hope was aghast. “The doctors I’ve dealt with could tell you in about three days, or a week,” she informed him. The doctor did not reply; he thought she seemed emotionally disturbed, and very talkative.

  “I’m sorry the doctor didn’t keep you, but I have no control over it,” Elisa Arenas said. “Have you had a phone call?”

  “No,” Hope said.

  At the jail, after midnight, she used the phone under a sign: WHEN YOU’RE BOOKED, ASK FOR YOUR PHONE CALL. When Honey heard Hope’s voice, she began to cry.

  “I don’t have much time,” Hope said. “Put Keith on the phone.

  “Keith, listen to me,” Hope said. “I just want you to know I’m in a regular jail, and I’ve seen a doctor, and I’m okay. Keith, listen to me. You have always been my sunshine boy, and I expect you to keep your brother and sister happy until I can get back to you. Will you do that for me, Keith?”

  “Yes,” Keith said.

  “I love you,” Hope said.

  In the den at his grandmother’s house, Keith hung up the phone and turned to his ten-year-old sister. “We’re never going to see Mom again,” Keith told her.

  In the hallway at the jail, Hope hung up the phone. Then she leaned her face against the phone and began to cry.

  Elisa Arenas put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t do this to yourself,” she said gently. “I know how you feel, but don’t let go. It isn’t going to help you or them.” Hope straightened up. “You have to come with me now,” the matron said. They rode up in an elevator with no numbers on the buttons. “I’m going to put you in with a black girl, but she’s okay,” Arenas said.

  “Could I please have a cell by myself?” Hope asked.

  “No, single cells are for special case
s,” the matron said. She paused. “Now, I have to tell you that the other matrons might not be nice to you. But just remember that some of them are young and frightened. If it gets bad, just hold on and wait for me to come back.”

  “When will you be back?” Hope asked.

  “I only work part time,” the matron said. “I won’t be back for three days.”

  The elevator stopped and the door slid open. They walked down a long corridor lined with cells, each cell with bars looking onto the corridor. Suddenly, as they walked along, there was screaming and yelling; Hope saw hands thrusting out of the tiny windows, waving, grabbing at her. One of the hands almost got her by the hair. She shrank closer to the matron.

  About two-thirds of the way down the corridor, the matron stopped and took a key from her belt. She opened the door and Hope went in. Most of the yelling died down, as Hope passed each cell, except for the noise coming from a cell down at the end of the hall. Hope found out the woman in that cell was withdrawing from heroin; she heard her thrashing about, screaming and vomiting all through the night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BEVERLY HILLS SOCIALITE HELD AT VISALIA IN RANCH SLAYING (Los Angeles Times)

  MYSTERY VEILS SOCIALITE ARREST (Los Angeles Herald-Examiner)

  SOCIALITE BOOKED FOR MURDER (Owville Mercury-Register)

  SOCIALITE HELD IN SLAYING OF EXECUTIVE (Santa Monica Evening Outlook)

  SOCIALITE FACES MURDER CHARGE; VICTIM IDENTIFIED (Visalia Times-Delta)

  SOCIALITE DENIES GUILT IN SLAYING (Fresno Bee)

  PROMINENTE DAMA DE SOCIEDAD PRESA EN TORNO A UN HOMICIDIO (Los Angeles La Opinion)

  By mutual agreement, the socialite was scrubbing the toilet and the sink with a bucket of disinfectant while her cellmate scrubbed the floor. When Hope was told the scrubbing had to be done twice a day, she winced, feeling a stab in her back. “Would it be okay with you if I do the toilet and sink and you do the floor?” Hope asked her roommate. “Sure,” Vanessa said.