Milo growled, cracked his knuckles. “Asshole co-opted me.”
“I saw him on the news.”
“Wasn't that a display? Bullshit augmented by horseshit. And more to follow: Word has it Trapp's pushing the sex maniac angle. But those women weren't positioned like any sex murder victims I've ever seen—no spread legs or sexual posing, no rearranged clothing. And, as far as my coroner source can tell, given the state of the bodies, no strangulation or mutilation.”
“How did they die?”
“Beaten and shot—no way to tell which came first. Hands tied behind the backs, single bullet to the back of the head.”
“Execution.”
“That would be my working guess.”
He took his anger out on a breadstick, crunching and wiping crumbs off his shirt. Then he finished his beer and went to get another one from the fridge.
“What else?” I said.
He sat down, tilted his head back and poured brew down his throat. “Time of death. Putrefaction's no exact science, but for that much rot to go down in an air-conditioned room, even with the door open, those bodies had to be lying there for a while. There was gas bloat, skin peel, and fluid loss, meaning days, not hours. Four to ten days is my source's theoretical range. But we know the Kruses were alive last Saturday, at that party, so that narrows it to four to six days.”
“Meaning they could have been killed either after Sharon died, or before.”
“That's right. And if it was before, a certain scenario rears its ugly head confirming your theory about Rasmussen. I called the Newhall sheriffs station about him. They knew him well: ugly drunk, chronic troublemaker, very short fuse, multiple assault busts, and he did kill his dad—beat him to death, then shot him. Now we know he was getting it on with Ransom, but not as an equal, right? He was a major maladjust, probably had half her IQ. She was manipulating him, playing with his head. Let's say she had some major beef against Kruse and mentioned it to Rasmussen. She wouldn't even have had to be direct—as in go and kill the bastard. Just hint around, complain about how Kruse had hurt her—maybe use hypnosis. You said she knew hypnosis, right?”
I nodded.
“So she could have used it to soften Rasmussen up. Angling for some white-knight pussy of his own, he went and played Lord High Executioner.”
“Killing his father all over again,” I said.
“Ah, you shrinks.” His smile faded. “The maid and the wife died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He stopped talking. The silence put me somewhere else.
“What's the matter?”
“Seeing her as a murder contractor.”
“Just a scenario,” he said.
“If she was that cold, why'd she kill herself?”
He shrugged. “Thought you might be able to fill in that one.”
“I can't. She had problems, but she was never cruel.”
“Fucking all those patients wasn't an act of charity.”
“She was never overtly cruel.”
“People change.”
“I know that but I just can't see her as a killer, Milo. It doesn't sit right.”
“Then forget it,” he said. “It's all theoretical bullshit, anyway. I can spin you ten like it in as many minutes. And it's about as far as we're gonna go, given the state of the evidence—too many unanswerable questions. Like are there phone records tying Rasmussen to Ransom between the time the Kruses died and the time she died? Newhall to Hollywood is a toll call. Normally, that would be easy to trace, except when I tried, the records had been pulled and sealed, courtesy of my employers. And who reported Ransom's death in the first place? Normally, if I wanted to know that, I'd just take a peek in her file, but there ain't no goddam file. Courtesy, my employers.”
He got up, rubbed his hand over his face, and paced the kitchen.
“I drove up to her house this morning, wanted to talk to her neighbors, see if any of them had made the call. I even figured out who lived across the canyon and visited them to see if they'd seen anything, heard anything, maybe a peeper with a telescope. Zilch. Two of the four houses in hercul-de-sac were unoccupied—owners out of town. The third's owned by this free-lance artist, old gal who does children's books, shut-in, bad arthritis. She wanted to help. Problem is, from her place you can't see what's going on in Ransom's—just the driveway. No good view from any of them, matter of fact.”
“Party pad architecture,” I said.
“Hmm,” he said. “Anyway, from her garden, the artist could see some comings and goings. Occasional visitors—women and men, including Rasmussen—in and out after about an hour's time.”
“Patients.”
“That's what she assumed. But all that stopped about half a year ago.”
“The same time she was caught sleeping with her patients.”
“Maybe she decided to retire. Except for Rasmussen—she held on to him. He kept coming, not often, but up until a month ago, the artist remembered seeing the green truck. She also described a guy who sounded like Kruse—he stayed longer, several hours at a time, but she only saw him once or twice. Which doesn't mean much. She can't get around too well—it might have been more often. Other interesting thing is that a photo of Trapp didn't register. Which means he probably wasn't one of Ransom's boyfriends. And if the bastard was investigating the case, he never bothered to talk to the next-door neighbor—didn't even do the basics. Sum total: Slimeball's involved in the cover-up. And I'm off the case. Goddammit, Alex, it makes my adrenals hurt.”
“There are other question marks,” I said. “Your scenario's based on some kind of hostility between Sharon and Kruse. She was having problems—she told me so at the party. But nothing indicates they were with Kruse. At the time of her death she was still registered as his assistant. She showed up at a party to honor him, Milo. I did see her arguing with that older guy I told you about. But I have no idea who he is.”
“What else?” he said.
“There's lots of other factors to consider: Belding, Linda Lanier, the blackmailed doctor, whoever he is. And Shirlee, the missing twin—I called Olivia Brickerman, tried to get into the Medi-Cal files. The computer was down. I'm hoping for something soon.”
“Why're you still pushing that? Even if you find her, you won't be able to talk to her.”
“Maybe I can find someone who knows her—knew both of them. I don't believe we'll ever understand Sharon without knowing more about Shirlee, about the relationship between the two of them. Sharon perceived Shirlee as more than a sister—they were psychological partners, halves of a whole. Twins can develop identity problems. Sharon chose that topic—or something like it—for her doctoral dissertation. Ten to one she was writing about herself.”
That gave him pause.
“Air your dirty laundry and get a Ph.D.? That's considered kosher?”
“Not at all. But she managed to get around lots of things.”
“Well,” he said, “you go ahead, look for your twin. Just don't expect too much.”
“What about you?” I said.
“I've got another day and a half left before Trapp locks me into some new plum assignment. Seeing as we're dealing with thirty-five-year-old stuff, there comes to mind someone who might be able to educate us. Someone who was around in those days. Problem is he's unpredictable, and we're not exactly good buddies.”
He got up, slapped his thigh. “What the hell, I'll give it a try, call you tomorrow morning. Meantime, keep reading those books and magazines. Uncle Milo will be giving you a pop quiz when you least expect it.”
Chapter
22
I spent the rest of the day getting a master's degree in Leland Belding, starting where I'd left off—the demise of the Senate hearings.
Immediately following his reprimand, the billionaire threw himself into the movie business, renaming his studio Magnafilm, scripting, directing, and producing a string of combat sagas featuring rugged individualist heroes who bucked the establis
hment and emerged victorious. All were panned by the critics as mechanical and bland. Audiences stayed away.
In 1949 he purchased a Hollywood trade paper, fired the film critic, and installed his own yes man. Bought a string of movie houses and filled them with his product. More losses. In 1950 he went into deeper seclusion than ever and I found only one reference covering the next two years: Magna's patent application for an aluminum-reinforced girdle that suppressed bulges but heightened jiggle. The device, developed for an actress with a tendency to corpulence, was marketed as the Magna-Corsair. American women didn't go for it.
In late 1952 he emerged, suddenly a new man—a public Leland Belding, attending premieres and parties, squiring starlets to Ciro's, Trocadero, the Mocambo. Producing a new string of films—vapid comedies heavy with double entendre.
He moved from his “monastic” apartment at Magna headquarters to an estate in Bel Air. Built himself the world's most powerful private jet, upholstered in leopard skin and paneled with antique walnut stripped from a centuries-old French chateau that he reduced to rubble.
He bought Old Masters by the truckload, outbid the Vatican for religious treasures plundered from Palestine. Snapped up race horses, jockeys, trainers, an entire racecourse. A baseball team. An entire passenger train which he converted to a moving party pad. He acquired a fleet of custom-made cars: Duesies, Cords, Packards, and Rolls-Royces. The world's three largest diamonds, auction houses full of antique furniture, more casinos in Vegas and Reno, an assortment of domiciles stretching from California to New York.
For the first time in his life he began contributing to charity—hugely, ostentatiously. Endowing hospitals and scientific research institutions, on condition that they be named after him and staffed by him. He threw lavish balls supporting the opera, the ballet, the symphony.
All the while, he was assembling a harem: actresses, heiresses, ballerinas, beauty queens. The most eligible bachelor had finally come into his own.
On the surface, a radical personality shift. But a Vogue writer, reporting on a bash Belding threw for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described the billionaire as “standing on the sidelines, unsmiling and fidgety, observing the festivities rather than participating in them. He looked, to these admittedly cynical eyes, like a little lost boy locked in a room full of candy—so much candy that he's lost his appetite for sweets.”
Given all the partying, I expected to find something about William Houck Vidal. But there was nothing, not even a snapshot, to suggest that the former “management consultant” had participated in the metamorphosis of his boss. The sole mention of Vidal during the early fifties was a quote in a business journal regarding early development of a new fighter bomber. A quote attributed to “W. Houck Vidal, Senior Vice-President and Head of Operations for Magna.”
One man going from businessman to playboy. The other reversing the process. It was as if Belding and Vidal were perched on a psychic teeter-totter.
Switching identities.
Then, in early '55, all of it stopped.
Belding canceled a gala for the Cancer Society, dropped completely from sight. Then commenced what one magazine called “the greatest rummage sale in history.” The mansions, cars, jewels, and other trappings of princely consumption were sold—at great profit. Even the movie studio—nicknamed Magnaflop—earned millions in real estate appreciation.
The press wondered what Belding's new “phase” would be. But there was none, and when it became clear that the disappearing act was permanent, coverage grew progressively sketchier until, by the mid-sixties, neither Belding nor Magna was mentioned other than in financial and technical journals.
The sixties: Oswald. Ruby. Hoffman and Rubin. Stokely and Rap. No shortage of actors willing to strip for the camera. No one cared about a rich hermit who'd once made bad movies.
In 1969, Leland Belding's death was reported “somewhere in California, following a prolonged illness.” In accordance with the bachelor billionaire's will, a group of former Magna executives assumed leadership of Magna, with the chairman of the board position going to William Houck Vidal.
And that was it. Until 1972, when a former reporter and hack ghostwriter named Seaman Cross produced a book claiming to be the unauthorized biography of Leland Belding. According to Cross, the billionaire had faked his death in order to achieve “true peace.” Now, having meditated in solitude for seventeen years, he'd decided he had something to say to the world and had chosen Cross as his Pepys, granting hundreds of hours of interviews for a proposed book before abruptly changing his mind and calling off the project.
Cross went ahead and completed the book anyway, titling it The Basket-Case Billionaire and obtaining a “strong six-figure advance.” During its very brief life, it had caused a furor.
Not my kind of stuff. I hadn't paid much attention to it at the time. But I ate it up now, didn't put it down until I finished.
Cross's thesis was that a personal tragedy during the early fifties—a tragedy Belding refused to discuss but which Cross guessed was romantic—had plunged the young billionaire into a manic playboy phase, followed by serious mental collapse and several years of convalescence in a private mental hospital. The man who emerged was “a phobic, paranoid, self-obsessed devotee of a bizarre personal philosophy combining Eastern religion, militant vegetarianism, and Ayn Randish individualism taken to the extreme.”
Cross claimed numerous visits to Belding's home, a hermetically sealed geodesic dome, somewhere out in the desert, which the billionaire never left. The mode of transport was dramatic: Cross was driven, always blindfolded, always in the middle of the night, to a heliport less than an hour out of L.A.—the implication was El Segundo—then flown to the dome for about two hours and whisked home before dawn.
The dome was described as equipped with a computerized communications panel by which Belding could monitor his international business interests, regulate air and water purification systems (developed by the Magna Corporation for NASA), automatic vacuuming and ambient chemical disinfection, and a convoluted network of pipes, valves, tubes, and chutes through which mail, messages, sterile food and drink entered and waste material exited.
No one but Belding was allowed inside the dome; no photos or sketches were permitted. Cross had been forced to conduct his interviews from a booth on wheels, positioned so that it abutted a speaker panel on the dome.
“We communicated,” he wrote, “by a two-way microphone system that Belding controlled. When he wanted me to see him, he afforded me a view through a clear plastic window—a panel that he could blacken with the touch of a button. He used this blackout panel, not infrequently, to punish me for asking the wrong question. He would withhold his attention until I apologized and promised to be good.”
Bizarre as that was, the strangest part of the story was Cross's description of Belding:
Emaciated to near-Auschwitzian dimensions, full-bearded, with long, matted gray hair reaching halfway down his back, tangles of crystal necklaces hanging from his wattled neck, and huge crystal rings on every finger. The nails of those fingers were polished a glossy black, sharpened into points, and appeared nearly two inches long. The color of his skin was an eerie greenish-white. His eyes, behind thick rose-tinted lenses, bulged exophthalmically and never ceased to move, darting from side to side and blinking like those of a toad hunting flies.
But it was his voice that I found most unsettling—flat, mechanical, completely stripped of emotion. A voice devoid of humanity. Even now I shiver when I think of it.
Cross's posture throughout the book was one of morbid fascination. He couldn't conceal his antipathy toward the billionaire, but neither could he tear himself away.
At regular intervals [he wrote] Belding would interrupt our sessions to nibble on raw vegetables, drink copious amounts of sterilized water, then squat to urinate and defecate, in full view of this writer, into a brass pot that he kept atop an altarlike platform. Once the pot had sat on the altar for precisely fifteen minut
es, he'd remove it and expel it through an evacuation chute. During the process of excretion, a self-satisfied, near-religious expression would settle upon his gaunt, raptorish features, and though he refused to discuss this ritual, my reflexive impression was: self-worship, the logical culmination of a lifetime of unbridled narcissism and power.
The latter half of the book was fairly dull stuff: Cross pontificating about the weakness of a society that could create a monster like Belding, transcripts of Belding's ramblings on the meaning of life—a barely intelligible amalgam of Hinduism, nihilism, quantum physics, and social Darwinism, including indictments of the “mental and moral dwarfs who deify weakness.”
The biography ended with a final burst of editorializing:
Leland Belding represents everything wrong with the capitalist system. He is the grotesque result of the concentration of too much wealth and too much power in the hands of one eminently fallible and twisted man. He is the emperor of self-indulgence, a fanatical misanthrope who views other life forms as nothing more than potential sources of bacterial and viral infection. He is preoccupied with his own body on a corpuscular level and would like nothing more than to live out his days on a planet denuded of all animal and plant life, other than those organisms required to sustain what remains of the wretched life of one Leland Belding.
The Basket-Case Billionaire had been a well-kept publishing industry secret, catching even the Magna Corporation by surprise, garnering massive post-publication attention, and shooting immediately to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list. A record paperback sale was made. Magna lost no time in suing Cross and his publishers, claiming the book was a hoax and libelous, producing medical and legal documents proving Leland Belding had indeed died, years before Cross claimed to have spoken with him. Reporters were taken to a gravesite at company headquarters; a body was exhumed and verified as Belding's. Cross's publisher got nervous and asked the writer to produce his data.
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