Degree of Guilt

by Unknown

  ‘I’m Jeanne-Marc Steinhardt,’ the woman said, adding dryly, ‘My mother was French.’

  There was something bloodless in the reference, as if she were speaking of a vase and not a person. Terri extended her hand.

  ‘Teresa Peralta.’ Smiling, she added, ‘My mother was Guatemalan. Still is, actually.’

  ‘How nice for you.’ Jeanne Steinhardt looked past her at the room. ‘Mine slashed her wrists when I was five. For years, I thought it was the art.’

  What, Terri wondered, should she say to that? ‘Then I’d change the decor,’ she finally answered.

  Steinhardt turned to face her. ‘Oh? And what would your mother favor? Although I’m afraid an oil of the Madonna and Christ child would be incongruent with my background.’

  Terri felt herself tense; the sole ambiguity in Steinhardt’s remark was whether its bias arose from class or race. ‘Many of us,’ she said evenly, ‘used to favor a framed portrait of James Colt. Preferably one that glowed in the dark.’

  Jeanne Steinhardt looked surprised and then moved her lips in an expression of chill amusement. ‘I take it,’ she said at last, ‘that you know what’s on that tape.’

  Terri nodded. ‘I’ve stopped lighting candles for James Colt, if that’s what you mean. And so did Mary Carelli, after Mark Ransom played it for her.’

  Jeanne Steinhardt stared at her openly, as if appraising and reappraising. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I saw her on 60 Minutes last night. Impressive. Please sit down.’

  Silent, she led Terri to a long couch in the middle of the room, a white cotton fabric with an Aztec design. Terri sat at one end, Steinhardt at the other, hands folded, legs carefully crossed.

  It was time, Terri thought, to soften her tone. ‘Your mother,’ she ventured. ‘That must have been hard.’

  ‘I barely remember her.’ Steinhardt gave an elegant shrug. ‘It’s less a loss than an absence.’

  Terri tried to imagine her life had Rosa Peralta been ‘absent.’ It was, Terri found, like imagining that she herself did not exist. In that moment, she saw the emptiness she sensed at Jeanne Steinhardt’s core as the absence of love.

  ‘As you say,’ Terri answered, ‘I’ve been fortunate.’

  Steinhardt made a dismissive gesture. ‘You came about my father, and his tape.’

  Terri nodded. ‘About the tape, and about Mark Ransom.’

  Steinhardt gave her a curious look. ‘What is it that you care to know? Seeing that your client has already killed him.’

  Terri was silent for a moment, gazing out the window. There was a pool outside, a long oval that contrasted with the lines and angles of the house itself. A Hispanic poolman stretched over it with a long wire net, reaching for a tropical leaf that marred the blue surface of the water.

  ‘How was it,’ Terri asked, ‘that Mark Ransom acquired that tape?’

  ‘That part’s quite simple.’ Steinhardt gave a thin smile. ‘I called him.’

  That, Terri thought, was no surprise. ‘For what reason?’ she asked politely.

  The question was perfunctory; Terri was quite certain that she already knew the answer: money. Steinhardt was silent for a moment. ‘Because,’ she answered coolly, ‘I found listening to it so educational.’

  Terri hesitated. ‘Wasn’t it confidential?’

  ‘That was certainly my father’s intention. He left instructions that all tapes were to be destroyed by his executor.’ Steinhardt permitted herself another cold smile. ‘I’m his executor.’

  Terri tried to choose a neutral voice. ‘Don’t you have problems with the psychiatrist-patient privilege?’

  ‘Oh, I think not. Laura Chase moved beyond my father’s ministrations, as it were, when she put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.’ The husky voice seemed to drop a register. ‘Perhaps Laura felt she’d graduated.’

  Terri paused again, off balance. Beneath this woman’s icy air of intelligence and self-interest, Terri felt another emotion which she could not identify. ‘Still,’ she said carefully, ‘people might argue that Laura would have wanted to protect her privacy.’

  Steinhardt shrugged. ‘They might. But I don’t expect to hear from her about it. Which left me quite free, my lawyer confirms, to contact Mark Ransom.’

  Steinhardt seemed to be speaking by rote, Terri thought: there was a certain relentless quality to her indifference, as if she wished to ensure that it was noticed.

  ‘What did you tell Ransom?’ Terri asked her.

  ‘Just enough.’ The clipped words had a faint derisive edge. ‘That I admired his work. That I’d read an article he’d written about Laura Chase – “Flesh Become Myth,” I believe he called it. That I shared his interest in Laura’s death. And that, were he interested, I might let him listen to my father’s tapes.’ She smiled at the coffee table. ‘At a price to be negotiated, of course.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That he wanted to meet me.’ The strange smile reappeared. ‘So we did. Sitting in my father’s office, with the door locked, surrounded by his tapes.’

  The image of their meeting, Terri found, unsettled her. ‘Where is his office?’ she asked.

  Steinhardt gave her a look of surprise. ‘Here, of course, in my father’s home. So very private, so very him.’

  Terri hesitated. ‘May I see it?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Steinhardt led her through a hallway hung with Flemish tapestries and opened a white door. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed.

  Terri entered the room. It was sparsely furnished, almost entirely in white – including the couch for patients to lie on and Steinhardt’s leather chair at its head. The empty touch and chair were haunting, Terri thought; they reminded her that Steinhardt could not help Laura Chase.

  ‘As sterile as an operating room,’ Jeanne Steinhardt said from the door. ‘But then someone once called my father “The Surgeon of the Mind.”’

  Terri turned. ‘Where are the tapes?’ she asked.

  Steinhardt pointed. ‘Through here.’

  In the wall, between the couch and the chair, was a door Terri had not seen. Steinhardt walked quickly past her and unlocked it.

  The second room was dark.

  Steinhardt switched on a black desk lamp. Terri saw shelves, books on psychiatry, a single desk, two black chairs, no prints or vases anywhere. The room was wholly impersonal.

  ‘The inner sanctum,’ Steinhardt said in a mocking stage whisper. ‘My father’s cerebral cortex. Or, perhaps, his essence.’

  Terri walked toward the bookshelf on the far wall. It was honey-combed with slots, as if for tapes of someone’s favorite music. But these tapes, in white plastic cases, were coded with Roman numerals, numbers, years, dates. Removing one, Terri felt unclean.

  ‘It could be anyone,’ Steinhardt said behind her. ‘How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands?’

  Staring at the tape, Terri replayed Steinhardt’s words, her tone of voice, sensed some feeling she still could not grasp.

  ‘How did you know which tapes were of Laura Chase?’

  ‘My father had an index.’ Once more, the voice turned sardonic. ‘I showed it to Mark Ransom when we met. Rather like a shopping list.’

  It was difficult, Terri found, to look at Steinhardt. She edged along the shelf, her gaze sweeping hundreds of tapes. Then found a gap; one shelf, then half of another, were empty.

  ‘That space represents Laura Chase,’ Steinhardt told her. ‘Her cure took quite some time.’

  Terri was silent for a moment.

  ‘Ransom took them?’ she finally asked.

  ‘Yes. That was part of our negotiation.’ Steinhardt sounded almost amused. ‘He wanted to work at home.’

  Terri stared at the last shelf of tapes, less to inspect them than for something to do.

  There was, she saw, another gap. It was small, two empty slots where tapes would fit. She placed her fingers there. ‘And this?’ she asked. ‘Also Laura Chase?’

  ‘I don’
t know.’ Steinhardt paused. ‘If so, they would have been out of order.’

  Terri looked at the tapes on either side. If she understood Dr Steinhardt’s code at all, they belonged to two separate patients; the numbers and numerals were different, and the dates overlapped.

  ‘Was there anything in this space?’

  For a moment, Steinhardt looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure. I noticed that the other day. But I couldn’t remember.’

  ‘If there were tapes, could Mark Ransom have taken them?’

  Steinhardt shrugged. ‘It’s possible, I suppose – once or twice I let him listen in here, alone. You know, when he couldn’t wait.’ Steinhardt’s voice turned dry. ‘He seemed to like communing with Laura in the room where she had most exposed herself – figuratively speaking, of course. How he must have wanted to be my father.’

  Terri felt a kind of chill. ‘Would the index show if tapes were missing?’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘It would have. Yes.’

  Terri began to turn, then was stopped by a black and white photograph, the ascetic face of a man in his sixties.

  It hung on the wall by itself. The man’s face was thin, his skin like parchment; his eyes, pale and translucent, betrayed no feeling.

  ‘Your father?’ Terri asked.

  Steinhardt nodded. ‘I hung it myself, just before Mr Ransom’s visit. It seemed somehow appropriate.’

  Terri was quiet for a moment. Turning, she asked, ‘Can you tell me about that?’

  ‘Of course.’ Steinhardt took one chair, Terri the other. ‘It was really quite amusing, in its way.’

  The dimness of the room, Terri realized, was oppressive. ‘In what way?’ she asked.

  ‘The way he changed. When he arrived, Mark Ransom projected this restless energy – a prisoner in his own skin, a red-haired Irishman wrestling with his devils. It was something you could feel if he’d never said a word.’ Steinhardt gazed around her, profile almost leonine. ‘But once he got here, in this room, it was like he’d entered a cathedral. When I showed him the tapes, all he could do was stare.

  ‘“Play one for me,” he asked.’ Steinhardt’s voice became almost teasing, as if replaying the moment. ‘So I did. Just one.’

  ‘The one he played for Mary Carelli?’

  ‘Oh, no. Like Laura herself, I wanted to save the best for last.’ Steinhardt flicked back her hair. ‘For him, the sound of her voice was enough – Laura Chase, returned from the dead.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He just sat there, hunched forward, listening. He hardly moved.’ Steinhardt smiled. ‘And when it was over, he offered me a hundred thousand dollars.

  ‘I told him, more in sorrow than in anger, that his offer was deficient. And then I told him about Laura’s last tape.’ The strange smile returned. ‘The one with James Colt.’

  It had been a game between them, Terri realized. Quietly, she asked, ‘What did Ransom say?’

  ‘Oh, it was more how he looked that confirmed my sense of value. His face was – how should I say it – so avid.’ Steinhardt’s voice took on the jaded tone of a woman mocking a discarded lover. ‘It felt as if I had offered him Laura Chase herself.’

  Terri imagined the moment with something close to horror. In return for money, Jeanne Steinhardt had set far more in motion than she could ever have imagined.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We reached an agreement, sitting here in this room. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus thirty percent of any royalties.’ Steinhardt gazed up, as if addressing her father’s picture. ‘The last ten percent,’ she said in a mordant tone, ‘was for letting Mark take Laura home with him.’

  Terri watched her face. ‘Did he say how he would use the tape?’

  ‘No. But I assumed that he would use it to promote the book. The tape goes far toward explaining her suicide, don’t you think?’ Pausing, Steinhardt still gazed at her father’s photograph. ‘Laura’s, that is.’

  For a moment, Terri found she had lost her train of thought. Then she asked, ‘Did he ever talk about playing the tape for Mary Carelli?’

  ‘No.’ Steinhardt turned back to Terri, her voice edged with contempt. ‘But then he also failed to tell me that he saw the tape as foreplay. With my limited imagination, I merely saw it as the basis for a number-one best-seller regarding Laura’s suicide. You know, the book that finally tells the world “Who Killed Laura Chase.”’

  Terri paused. ‘In connection with Laura Chase,’ she asked, ‘did he mention any other women?’

  Steinhardt paused. ‘I do recall him mentioning Lindsay Caldwell,’ she finally said. ‘Although the connection wasn’t clear to me.’

  Terri hesitated, surprised at this mention of the distinguished actress, still beautiful at forty, and as well known for her social causes as for the Oscars she had won. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Terri had heard Lindsay Caldwell speak on women’s issues. Drawing on her own painful evolution from ‘Barbie Doll to Superwoman,’ as Caldwell dryly put it, the talk had been surprising for its candor and universality. She was, Terri thought, the polar opposite of Laura Chase – the kind of woman whose politics and persona Mark Ransom would most resent.

  ‘What did he say about her?’ Terri asked.

  ‘The first reference I don’t exactly recall. I do remember Mark asking if I knew her. Which I don’t.’

  ‘Did he ask whether she had some connection to Laura Chase?’

  Steinhardt shook her head. ‘He didn’t, and I don’t know. But unless I’m wrong, Laura died when Lindsay Caldwell was barely out of her teens.’

  Terri’s gaze moved across the shelves to the space where two tapes might have been. ‘Did Lindsay Caldwell ever see your father? Professionally, that is?’

  ‘I didn’t memorize the index, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Steinhardt hesitated. ‘When I listened to the tapes, I confined myself to Laura Chase. The last tape, really.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  Steinhardt’s expression turned cool, her voice cooler. ‘The circumstances of her death intrigued me.’

  Terri paused again, decided not to pursue it. ‘A moment ago,’ she said, ‘you mentioned Ransom’s “first reference” to Lindsay Caldwell. Was there another?’

  ‘Yes. He called me from New York. I had asked to read what he had written, to be sure he truly understood the implications of Laura’s tape. He was going to be here, he explained, to see Lindsay Caldwell. He sounded quite pleased with himself.’ Steinhardt gave a faint smile. ‘I never saw his draft, and he never met with Caldwell. He was scheduled to meet with her one day after Mary Carelli.’

  Terri paused. Quietly, she asked, ‘May I see the index?’

  ‘No.’ Steinhardt’s voice was level. ‘I’m afraid you can’t.’

  The woman’s gaze was watchful, impenetrable – rather, Terri thought, like the cold face in the photograph.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Terri said, ‘you can look at it yourself. All I want to know is whether Lindsay Caldwell was a patient of your father’s.’

  Steinhardt’s look turned curious. ‘To what end?’

  ‘I’m not sure, quite. Perhaps she knows something about the tape.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to ask Miss Caldwell about any relationship to my father.’ Turning, Steinhardt gazed at the rows of tapes. ‘After Mark Ransom and I made our arrangement, I burned the index.’

  Once again, Terri was surprised. ‘Why?’ she finally asked.

  Steinhardt’s eyes moved to her father’s picture. ‘For the same reason,’ she answered coldly, ‘that I now intend to destroy these tapes. Because I had done what I set out to do.’

  All at once, and for the first time, Terri understood what Steinhardt had done. And then she saw, as Steinhardt still did not, how pointless all of it had been. Softly, she said, ‘This was never about money, was it?’

  ‘Oh, it was.’ Steinhardt’s smile was bleak. ‘If I made Mark Ransom pay dearly for that tape, I thought he would have no choice but t
o use it. And I dearly wanted him to use it.’

  Terri nodded. ‘Because of your father.’

  ‘Yes.’ Steinhardt’s eyes became fierce. ‘Have you ever listened to that tape?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was a revelation to me. For almost fifty minutes, Laura Chase talks about how worthless James Colt had made her feel. By the end, she was sobbing convulsively. My father spoke only to ask for more detail about what they did to her. And then he told Laura that her time was up.’ Steinhardt’s voice became so raw that it sounded painful. ‘By the time the tape was over, I knew that my father was a collector and we were his specimens. Every one of us.’

  But no one else, Terri thought, would hear what Steinhardt heard. Quietly, she asked, ‘When did your mother kill herself?’

  ‘Thirty years ago. She died quite anonymously. No one remembers her, including me.’ Steinhardt’s face had turned to stone. ‘But now, because of me, no one will ever forget who murdered Laura Chase.’

  ‘I find it refreshing,’ Johnny Moore told Terri, ‘that this case offers us at least one celebrity who’s still alive.’

  Terri sat on the balcony of a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, courtesy of Christopher Paget, speaking into the first cordless telephone of her experience. Moore would make her smile, Terri thought, if she weren’t so depressed.

  ‘Do you have a number for her?’ she asked.

  ‘Just her answering service. I took the liberty of leaving a message on your behalf: “Call Teresa Peralta, attorney for Mary Carelli, regarding Mark Ransom.”’ Moore laughed softly. ‘An adequate attention getter, I would think, even in la-la-land. Otherwise, I’d have left a message from Ransom himself.’

  Terri gazed across a courtyard filled with flowers, watching the sun fall into an ocean she could not see. ‘I wonder if she’ll call me.’

  ‘That may depend,’ Moore answered, ‘on why Ransom wanted to see her. Or she him – although I find that harder to understand.’

  His voice was sardonic. ‘Jealous?’ Terri asked.