Pennines on a Dead Woman's Eyes

by Marcia Muller

  Her hands swept out and down, from the glistening fake curls to the too-bright skirt and blouse hugging her too-plump frame to her cheap pink plastic heels. She was all tricked up—a victim of the myth that illusion is necessary to entice and entrap the male. Women all start out believing the myth to one degree or another, and too many of us never figure out that real women don’t trade in illusion—any more than real men buy into it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  After I left Linda Bautista, I checked in at All Souls and told Jack about my conversation with Bart Wallace and Adah Joslyn. He felt confident that Judy would want to go ahead with preparations for the mock trial, and promised to set up a meeting with her for me. Next I went to my office and buzzed Rae on the intercom. She came upstairs, and we spent half an hour reviewing her caseload. As she got up to leave, I remembered what Jack had said last week about her prospects of a diamond ring from Willie Whelan. No such trinket shone on her left hand.

  “Uh, how’s Willie?” I asked.

  Rae’s round face became pinched. “I’d rather not talk about him.”

  “What happened?”

  “I just can’t talk about it now, okay?” Her mouth twitched in anger, and she whirled and rushed out the door.

  Another he-done-me-wrong story, I thought. And more hard times ahead for Rae.

  I repacked my briefcase and went down to the foyer. Ted wasn’t at his desk, but one of the painters sat on its edge, grabbing the phone. I gave him a reproving look as I moved the tag on my message box so Ted would know I was out; the painter merely grinned vacuously.

  Earlier I’d noticed that the façade of the building finally looked more or less as intended, but along the sides the color still resembled the stuff of baby diapers. If only, I thought, Hank hadn’t been persuaded to buy the paint at discount from the failing store of one of Larry Koslowski’s clients. If only the client hadn’t recommended his second cousin, the painting contractor. If only All Souls wasn’t blundering, rather than forthrightly striding, into the twenty-first century . . . .

  One of the advantages I enjoyed in college was being a demonic researcher. While others were only deciding on the subjects of their term papers, I could be found in a carrel in the library, heavy tomes stacked around me as I relentlessly filled index cards with obscure facts and figures. I’d spend whole weekends in the shadow world of the microfilm room digesting useless details that would have entirely escaped a less obsessive individual, and I would emerge curiously refreshed and satisfied. But now that research was more than a pleasant intellectual exercise, I chafed at the enforced inactivity. And when I surfaced red-eyed and irritable from the main branch of the public library into the five o’clock bustle of Civic Center Plaza, I felt like one of the Mole People.

  What I’d gleaned during the past few hours, however, was highly informative. Think tanks, for instance: they came into widely divergent varieties, from small private research-and-development firms, to nonprofit institutions generally affiliated with universities, to elite entities like Rand and the Institute for North American Studies, which were closely tied to the federal government. The main factor they held in common, as far as I could tell, was the generation of what insiders referred to as “paper alchemy”—written studies and reports that made evaluations, suggested policies and long-range plans, promulgated theories, or described techniques. It wasn’t uncommon for the entire yearly output of a think tank holding a hundred million dollars’ worth of contacts to fit into a single briefcase.

  The R&D industry is a vague one—difficult to quantify or describe. It employs some of the most intelligent and powerful people in this country, and the breadth and depth of its influence on our government can only be guessed at. And because of this influence, particularly upon the upper echelons of the Department of Defense and State, it is an industry with very scary potential.

  Top secret security clearances, unmarked buildings with uniformed guards on every door, hush-hush conferences with high government officials, for-your-eyes-only reports, quick-response work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff—there is enough cloak-and-dagger stuff going on in the think tank industry to satisfy even the most devoted fan of spy fiction. And when you throw in dangerous variables—alcoholism, megalomania, kinky sex, psychological quirks, dubious loyalties—you come up with a horrifying scenario worthy of an apocalyptic film.

  In light of what I knew of the Institute for North American Studies, thinking about that scenario virtually made me shudder.

  But the stuff of bad dreams wasn’t all my research had revealed. I’d also checked into the types of contracts the Institute had held at the time of Cordy McKittridge’s murder: cold war containment; public support for the use of atomic weapons in limited warfare; “biological alteration” for military purposes; procedures for reestablishing the federal government after a global nuclear war. John Foster Dulles’s visit to San Francisco was occasioned by the State Department’s announcement of the award of a multimillion dollar contract to the Institute for a major study on the domestic security threat within the United States.

  Which told me that the Institute had been enlisted in the later stages of the Communist witch-hunt of the fifties. Had to some degree abetted the work begun by the likes of Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—a ruthless probe into the private affairs of citizens that, in my opinion had destroyed as many innocent lives as the Spanish Inquisition.

  I wondered how Adah Joslyn, formerly of Red Hill, offspring of an alliance between a Socialist and a Marxist, would react to that information.

  I’d also checked the local newspaper coverage of both the Dulles banquet and the McKittridge murder. The photographs of Cordy—lovely, blond, patrician—left me uneasy; again I felt the odd pull of the case; it was as if I’d come across the picture of a long-dead friend. The coverage of her murder had been as all-out and lurid as I’d expected. In contrast, the Dulles banquet and an exclusive reception afterward for state and local dignitaries had been closed to the press. Aside from photographs showing the Dulles entourage arriving at St. Francis Hotel where the reception had been held, the only pictures from the event were “official” shots by the Institute’s photographer, Roy Loomis. In one of those, Dulles posed with both Eyestones, Russell and Leonard. The three men were dressed nearly alike, in conservatively styled formal wear, but there the resemblance stopped. Dulles was the pugnacious, bespectacled man I’d often seen in photographs. Russell Eyestone looked handsome, imposing, seemed to tower head and shoulders above his son, in spite of them being of a size. Leonard looked shrunken, anemic; the expression he put on for the camera seemed vaguely haunted, as if he dearly wanted to escape the impressive shadow of his father.

  Before I left the library, I’d called Jack and learned that Judy wanted to meet with me at six at Artists’ Showcase, the theater where she staged her productions. I retrieved my car from the plaza garage and inched along busy Golden Gate Avenue toward Market.

  The area where Golden Gate and Taylor intersect with Market is undergoing a transition, but of what sort it’s hard to say. There are theaters and restaurants catering to playgoers, hotels both upscale and down. Children of the Southeast Asian refugees who have settled in the Tenderloin skateboard on the sidewalks; hookers jealously guard their turf; and of course there are the crazies.

  One of them, a black woman with a wild mane of purple hair and needle tracks on her thin arms, stood on the corner not far from where I’d parked, haranguing the passing cards. Something to do with them giving their money to her, since Jesus didn’t need it anyway. As I walked up the block toward the theater, I passed a pair of hookers leaning against the façade of a defunct sandwich shop. One said, “Lunatic Lady’s really on a roll tonight,” and the other replied, “Yeah, she don’t watch it, I gonna get on a roll, and then she wish she talked nicer ‘bout Jesus.”

  I reached the theater and moved toward its front entrance, but stopped abruptly, my attention arrested by a woman walking up the block
from Market. A tall woman with light fine-spun hair, wrapped in a long cape whose folds billowed in the wind. For a moment I caught my breath, seized by the irrational notion that it was Lis Benedict. Then Judy saw me and waved. I relaxed, but a vague uneasiness stayed with me.

  As she came up to me, Judy saw how I was looking at the cape and smiled. “Yes, it’s Lis’s. I wanted something to remember her by, and I’ve always liked this.” She led me to the entrance of the theater and tapped on one of the glass doors for a security guard to admit us.

  The lobby was dim and cold; stale cigarette smoke lay over a base of mustiness. The guard flicked switches on a light panel before he went away, and a huge chandelier blazed crystal and gilt. Its rays revealed tired red carpet and hangings, more gilt and crystal, walls of marbleized mirrors. The theater, I thought, had not been upgraded since Judy took over the lease.

  She was looking around, mouth pulled down critically, as if seeing it through my eyes. Motioning at an old-fashioned round sofa with tufted red upholstery, she said, “Let’s talk here. My office is a mess since I’ve been living in it.”

  We sat, her black cape ruffling around her like a nesting bird’s feathers.

  “Are you planning to move back to your house eventually?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Right now I think it might be better to sell it.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t attend the funeral.” It had been held on Tuesday, when I was still high in the Great Whites.

  “That’s okay. It was small, the way Lis would have wanted it—except for the press, of course.”

  The security guard emerged from the main part of the theater, and for a moment the open door emitted a babble of voices and the sound of hammering.

  “Pandemonium as usual back there,” Judy said.

  I hadn’t noticed what was on the marquee, so I asked, “Is Deadfall still running?” It was a mystery play that I wanted to see; Jack had offered comps for opening night, but I’d had another engagement.

  “Only for another week. Then I’ve booked a psychological drama that’s been something of a runaway success off-Broadway.”

  “Obviously you’re doing well here.”

  “Yes, I am. Sometimes it almost makes up for not succeeding as an actress, but . . . I go backstage, they’re all rushing around the tension crackles. I can feel it, but I’m no longer a part of it.” She sighed.

  “You did have a long acting career, though.”

  “If you can call what I did acting. I just never got any breaks. I keep thinking that if I’d had the right material, been able to give one really great performance, it would have made all the difference. But maybe not.” She looked pensive for a moment, then abruptly switched the subject. “Sharon, I want to apologize for my father’s behavior last week. Jack told me he went to your house and bullied you. He . . . he means well, but he can be so high-handed.”

  “No apology necessary,” From you, I added silently. “How do you feel about going ahead with the mock trial?”

  “I want to more than ever now.”

  “Is your father still opposed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will that pose a problem for you?”

  No more than it did before. I can handle him.” She leaned toward me, eyes filled with an intensity that was augmented by the glare of the chandelier on her round lenses. Her fingers grasped my arm, almost painfully. Again I was reminded of her mother.

  “I want the trial,” she said. “I want it for Lis’s sake, to clear her name. But I want it for me, too. I have to settle this. You understand, don’t you?”

  I nodded, removing my arm from her grasp. “We’ll go ahead, then. But I’m going to have to ask you a question. Please don’t take offense.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Could your father—Joseph Stameroff, I mean—have planted in your mind some of the testimony you gave at Lis’s trial?”

  “He . . . wouldn’t have done that.”

  “But could he have? Say, during his pretrial visits to you in the foster home.”

  She frowned; I could tell she was working hard at controlling her temper.

  “Think about it, Judy: you’ve said you don’t remember the things you testified to, that it was as if they’d happened to somebody else.”

  “I also told you there’s a lot I don’t remember. I never realized how much until it started coming back.” She shivered, pulled the black folds of the cape around her.

  “Have you remembered other things since we last talked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Well . . . the day after Lis . . . died, I had . . . it wasn’t a dream so much as an image, when I was just on the edge of sleeping. In the image I was on the third floor of the house—the one in Seacliff—looking out the window of my old room at night. There was a heavy fog. The towers of the bridge were lit up, but the mist made them look . . . unreal. And there was something in the dark under the window. I was afraid, really afraid.” She shook her head. “This is stupid, but just talking about it frightens me.”

  “Sometimes mental images can be more frightening than reality, especially when they’re not all that clear. This thing under the window—was it a person? An animal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did it move? Stay in one place?”

  “It moved: I was afraid it would come into the house, up to my room.”

  “Did it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all there was.”

  I considered. During my library research, I’d learned that there had been an unusually heavy fog the night of the McKittridge murder—the kind of fog I’d imagined as I stood in front of the Seacliff house last week, the kind of fog Judy described. It seemed to me that the image she’d seen while half asleep could actually be a true memory of that night. And the thing that moved in the dark? Cordy’s killer?

  Judy said, suddenly and vehemently, “I wish it would all come back! I need to know.”

  Much as I understood that, and much as I wanted the old case resolved, I felt I should caution her. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t remember. You must have had a powerful reason for repressing as much as you have.”

  “No, it’s not better. I can’t live with this . . . void any longer. I can’t get on with my life until I know that Lis was telling the truth about not committing that murder.”

  “Have you seen anyone about these memories? A therapist?”

  Her expression became closed; she shook her head.

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Let me handle this in my own way, will you?” The words were clipped, almost angry. Before I could frame a reply, she demanded. “Now, how are you going to proceed with this case?”

  Swallowing my annoyance, I said, “I did want to talk with your father again, but from what you tell me, that’s impossible. I need to speak a second time with Leonard Eyestone. And I want to tour the Seacliff property.”

  “How do you plan to manage that?”

  “The house is for sale. I’ll call my real-estate broker and arrange to see it.”

  “For an expensive property like that, you may have to pre-qualify before they’ll show it.”

  “The broker is a friend; she’ll find a way.”

  “Why do you want to go there?”

  “Just to see where it all happened.”

  “I haven’t set foot on that property since my parents and I moved to Lake Street right after the murder.” Conflicting emotions washed over her face—discomfort, hesitancy, and finally eagerness. “Sharon,” she said, “take me with you.”

  The request took me completely by surprise. Quickly I searched for a way to dissuade her.

  “Please,” she added. “It might help me remember.”

  “I’m not sure that’s wise.” What if a calling-up of her memories precipitated a major emotional crisis?

  “You’re treating me like a child, the way my father does. With him it’s always, ‘Judy, you don�
��t want to know. You don’t want to remember.’ Well, I do, dammit!”

  “All I’m saying is that maybe that’s not the right way to remember.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.” She thrust her jaw forward and added, “If you don’t take me, I’ll go on my own. Any broker would be glad to show me the property; I can trade on the Stameroff name.”

  Our eyes locked; hers were intractable. After a moment I said, “Let me see what I can arrange.”

  As soon as I got home, I unearthed an old address book and called a friend from college, Mary Norton, who was now a therapist at a Sacramento Street clinic. Mary was just coming out of a group session and had my call transferred to her office. It had been more than two years since we’d gotten together, so we swapped news and gossip for close to ten minutes before I could get to my reason for calling. After briefly outlining Judy Benedict’s experience with resurfacing memories, I asked, “Does this sort of thing happen often? And how accurate are the memories?”

  “To answer your first question, repressed memory is a fairly common phenomenon. We see it a lot in abused children. Was this woman abused sexually or physically?”

  “I doubt it, but the father was an alcoholic and frequently beat the mother, so the environment was abusive.”

  “And you say she’s forgotten most of the events surrounding the murder and trial?”

  “Yes. She says her testimony sounds as if it happened to someone else.”

  “That’s consistent. If a child suffers one single traumatic event, she usually won’t be capable of repressing it. But in this case, where it was a continuing trauma . . . is the woman a self-blamer?”

  “She feels guilty because she testified against her mother.”

  “And probably about a lot of other things, too. Children, especially those who have been abused in any way, tend to believe they’re responsible for the bad things that happen in their lives.”