Pennines on a Dead Woman's Eyes

by Marcia Muller

  Judy looked down at where her hands tightly clasped Lis’s black cape; she’d rescued it from the floor, folded it lovingly, and now seemed reluctant to let it out of her grasp. “Lis is dead,” she said in a small voice, “and very few people believed in her innocence to begin with. You might as well release the contents of the letter to the press.”

  Joslyn nodded decisively. “We’ll just say it’s new evidence and skirt the issue of how we discovered it.” She looked sternly at Judy. “I don’t know why I’m cutting you this much slack, but you’ve got a powerful ally in McCone here.” Then she turned to me. “So where do we stand? What else have you found out since we last talked? As if this wasn’t enough.”

  I related my day’s activities. When I got to the part about my visit to her parents, she turned another stern look on me.

  “Lot of nerve, bothering them without consulting me first,” she commented.

  “I tried to consult. You weren’t available. You ought to at least get an answering machine.”

  “I’ve got one. I just keep forgetting to turn it on. Hate the damn things. What did you think of my folks?”

  “I liked them. But I can see why they’d be hard to live with.”

  “‘Hard’ doesn’t begin to describe it. Anyway, this Commie connection—you think there’s anything to it?”

  “It’s worth following up.” I looked at Judy. “What do you recall about your biological parents’ political stance?”

  “They toed a strict conservative Republican line, I’m sure. In the fifties, people in the military-industrial-intellectual alliance would have been fools not to; they had little choice in the matter. Security clearances were absolute requirements, both for the Institute staff and for their families.”

  “Then there’s no line of inquiry there.” I turned back to Joslyn. “Will you run the name Roger Woods through NCIC and CJIS?”

  “Sure. Not much to go on, though, and the feds and state are damned slow. I’ll see if I can’t get them to expedite this.” She stood, picked up Lis’s letter. “I’ll have to take this,” she told Judy, “but eventually you’ll get it back.”

  Judy released her grasp on the cape, moved her hand as if to stay Joslyn. Then she pulled it back, shaking her head. “Take it. Keep it.” To me she added, “I meant what I said earlier—I don’t want it anymore.”

  I was home in bed by midnight, exhausted but wakeful. Ralph and Alice sensed my unease and pressed close to me, hemming me in on either side until I felt like a booked between furry bookends. The cottage had not been harmed, and there were no messages on my answering machine tape—not even from Hy, which puzzled me. Still, I lay tense, waiting for stealthy noises outside or the ring of the phone or doorbell. And as the hours passed, Adah Joslyn’s question kept replaying in my mind: Are you sure you’re not promising more than you can deliver?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Thursday morning there had been a heap of garbage in front of my house; on Friday I found Justice Joseph Stameroff in his gray Towncar. As I went down my front steps, his driver got out and opened the door to the backseat. Stameroff motioned for me to get in. I complied, doubting that a state supreme court justice would harm me in front of curious neighbors who were eyeing the car while leaving for work.

  Like Judy’s the night before, Stameroff’s face was marked by pronounced strain lines. Arrogance still shone in his eyes, but it was clouded by worry and sorrow. He said, “I’ve come to ask you one last time to put a halt to this mock trial.”

  “I can’t. By involving yourself, you’ve ensured that.”

  “Miss McCone, I’d gladly back off. And I’ve observed a certain . . . force of character in you. You could stop the trial if you chose.”

  “Maybe, if only Jack Stuart were involved. But it’s Judy who’s determined to go forward. Have you ever tried to stop her when she’s bent on a course of action?

  He sighed. “Tried, yes. Succeeded? No.”

  “She’s given you a lot of trouble over the years, hasn’t she? I hope the bargain you struck with Lis Benedict was worth it.”

  “I struck no bargain with her.”

  “Come on, Stameroff, we both know there was a cover-up and that you were smack in the middle of it. Why don’t you admit it—at least to me?”

  “Miss McCone, at the time of the Benedict trial, I was a very small cog in the wheel of justice. If Mrs. Benedict bargained, it was with someone far more important than I.”

  “Just following orders, were you? Was adopting Judy one of them?”

  Wearily he shook his head. “You don’t understand at all, do you? I genuinely cared for the little girl. She was alone in the world—or soon to be—and needed me in a way no one had before. It may surprise you, Miss McCone, but even a man of whom you think so little is capable of loving. Judy is going to be badly hurt in the next few days, and I have no choice but to defend myself.”

  “We all have a choice.”

  “If I do, then I fail to see it.”

  We sat silent for a moment, sharing the one thing we had in common—our sense of impending ruin. Finally, surprisingly, Stameroff offered me his hand. “I don’t suppose we’ll have occasion to speak again.”

  “No, I don’t suppose we will.”

  I got out of the car and watched it inch away along my narrow congested street. Then I went about my self-appointed rounds.

  The morning had downed foggy, and like any true San Franciscan, I felt a measure of relief. Long warm stretches are just not natural for our city by the bay; when one continues for more than a few days, memories of the strange mugginess preceding the quake of ‘89 surface, and we tend to become jumpy and short-tempered. As I waited beneath the closed clamshell dome of the Institute for North American Studies building, I actually enjoyed watching the gray salt-laden moisture stipple its curved glass.

  Leonard Eyestone was late for our ten o’clock appointment. After twenty minutes I stood and moved restlessly about the lobby. To the far left of the reception desk was a recessed hexagonal area that reminded me of an apse in a church. I went over there and found a small photograph gallery with a cushioned bench in its center.

  The photos depicted events in the history of the Institute: furnishing being moved into the Seacliff house: Russell Eyestone accepting a plaque from John F. Kennedy; the ground-breaking here on the Embarcadero; opening ceremonies for the new building. Most of the others showed men at lecterns—delivering speeches, accepting awards, shaking hands with public figures. I recognized one I’d seen on microfilm at the library of the Eyestones with John Foster Dulles. In yet another, of a head table at a banquet, I found an attractive young Lis Benedict. I stepped closer and studied the man to her right. Vincent Benedict had been good-looking in a dark, dissipated way; the camera had caught him in what I assumed was a characteristic pose, cocktail glass halfway to his lips. All the photographs, even the recent ones, were stamped in their lower left-hand corner with a silver signature: Loomis.

  “Ah, there you are.” Leonard Eyestone had come up behind me.

  I turned. He was impeccably clad in gray pinstripe, but his face looked puffy, his protuberant eyes tired. We shook hands, and he motioned at the bench.

  “If you don’t mind, we’ll talk here,” he said. “My office is in chaos. We’re getting ready for a press conference, and for some reason my staff are convinced that reporters notice such details as dust.”

  “Press conference? About what?”

  “A major new contract—quite a coup. A five-year, sixty million dollar study of the religious right, with emphasis on their disruptive tactics and potential for undermining established social institutions. If our findings are as we expect, we’ll also develop the frame work for a teaching apparatus—public seminars, lectures on college campuses—to educate citizens to the inherent dangers.”

  “This study is funded by the government?”

  “Department of Health, Education and Welfare.”

  “I’m surprised the present admi
nistration would take off after the religious right.”

  “Why? The administration is concerned with stability. The religious right are extremists, have been known to be a source of embarrassment in the past. They’re capable of doing incalculable harm to the conservative position.”

  I could see his point; as a liberal, I too was concerned about the rise of the religious right. But government funding of a study obviously designed to control them smacked of the same sort of intolerance displayed by those who would outlaw abortion, forbid the teaching of evolution in the schools, and ban books that did not agree with their own narrow outlook.

  “This study is a far cry from the contract you people announced the night Cordy McKittridge was murdered,” I commented. “From taking off after the far left to talking off after the far right is a long way to come in only thirty-six years.”

  “Ms. McCone, we are not ‘taking off after’ anyone. Nor have we ever done so. We are merely contracting with the government to determine the facts of the situations we study.”

  “And after you issue your reports, you don’t care how they’re interpreted? How they’re used—or against whom?”

  He sighed, as if weary of trying to explain a simply concept to a slow child. “That’s right. We’re merely contracting to gather information and apply objective analytical techniques.”

  “And you have no personal stake in the outcome?”

  “Personal stake? No. Now, if you’re asking me if I have a personal opinion, that’s something else entirely. I believe that all forms of extremism have negative effects on our society. But if we can contain them, channel them, they can be used for the public good. In the case of this study, if we can objectify and quantify the religious right—in layman’s terms, find out what makes them tick—we can neutralize their undesirable effects while utilizing those that may bring about greater stability for American society as a whole. It’s what we should have done with the Communists and the Vietnam War protesters.”

  Now I felt uneasy. “You mean use them without their being aware of it?”

  “Essentially.”

  “To preserve the status quo?”

  “To improve it.”

  “But to preserve the position of those currently in power?”

  “Well . . .” He shrugged.

  “To discourage change, unless it’s government-mandated?”

  “For the greater good.”

  Troubled, I looked around at the photos on the walls surrounding us; they were stark testimony to the Institute’s alliance with those in control at any given time. Too much power was contained here in Eyestone’s shrine to the intellect. Too damn much power that could be used—abused—to ride roughshod over the rights of the largely powerless individual.

  Eyestone said, “You don’t like the concept.”

  “It takes me back to Big Brother.”

  He made a dismissive sound. “Fictional nonsense—and badly outdated. My point is that extremism has no place in modern society. Terrorists, mass murderers, protester of every stripe: we can’t afford rampant individualism anymore. Nor can we afford unplanned societal change.”

  I’d seldom felt so entrapped by an argument, and I sensed it was structure to accomplish just that. Eyestone had presented me with a thorny dilemma: on one hand, I abhorred terrorists and murderers as much as I did protestors who resorted to mindless violence or intimidating tactics. On the other hand, when he spoke of curtailing the rights of individual . . .

  “What place would First Amendment freedoms have in this scheme of things?” I asked.

  “They’re vastly overrated. You’re politically naïve if you believe they actually exist anymore.”

  “I’m not as politically naïve as you think. What you’re talking about here is an oligarchy, where only those approved by the few in power would be granted the right to register an opinion. It hasn’t quite come to that yet.”

  Eyestone’s lopsided face skewed in a smile. “Oligarchy! Why, Ms. McCone, I had no idea your vocabulary was so extensive!”

  “Why, Dr. Eyestone, one can’t help but pick up a few four-syllable words at Berkeley. But to get back to what we were talking about—do your colleagues here at the Institute share your personal opinion?”

  “To varying degrees.”

  “And has that always been the Institute’s political stance?”

  “You mean, of course, was it the stance at the time of the McKittridge murder? More or less.”

  “The intellectuals of the cold war era were a fairly conservative breed?”

  “Yes, with the exception of a few household names—C. Wright Mills and Erich Fromm, for example. There were a number of reasons for that, from the dramatic—fear of HUAC and blacklists—to the mundane—enjoyment of postwar prosperity. Both were operative here at the Institute. We’re a privately held corporation, founded and built by my father. We rely on our contracts for our profit, and the contracts come from the government and big business. Surely you can understand the implications of that?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You sound disapproving, fitting for one who attended Berkeley and picked up those four-syllable words.” He smiled as he spoke, as if trying to take the edge of the conversation. “Now what else can I tell you about my organization?”

  “I’d like to talk about Cordy for a minute. How long had you been romantically involved with her before she broke it off?”

  He seemed surprised at the change of subject and had to think for a moment before he replied, “About two and a half years.”

  “She was only a high school girl when it started?”

  “Cordy was never only a high school girl, and she could be very . . . persuasive when she saw something –or someone—she wanted. In hindsight, I realize I seemed sophisticated to her, and of course the clandestine quality of the affair was titillating. Also, it didn’t hurt that I had a good deal of money of my own and stood to inherit more, as well as control of the Institute.”

  “You say the affair was clandestine. I thought you brought her around to Institute parties.”

  “As a friend of the family, a surrogate older brother, might.”

  “So few people knew you were seeing her?”

  “Only her younger friends—Louise Wingfield, for example.”

  “You saw Cordy at the apartment in North Beach, then?”

  “Ah, you know about that?”

  “Louise Wingfield told me. Did you know Melissa Cardinal?”

  “Was she the little blond flight attendant? I saw her occasionally.”

  “What about her stepbrother, Roger Woods?”

  Eyestone frowned. “I don’t recall any brother.”

  “Stepbrother. He lived in the flat with Melissa before the others began contributing to the rent.”

  “Then I couldn’t have known him, could I?”

  “I guess not. But you may have a chance to meet Melissa if you accept the invitation I’m here to extend.”

  “And what is that?”

  I explained about the Historical Tribunal calendaring the mock trial for the weekend and added, “Since Justice Stameroff is participating, I thought it would be interesting for all of you who testified at the original trial to be there. And Melissa Cardinal, even though she wasn’t actually a witness.” I doubted Cardinal would accept my invitation, but I’d decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  Eyestone thought for a moment. I waited to see if my blatant appeal to his vanity would work. Finally he smiled. “I’d be pleased to attend, Ms. McCone. I’ll see you at City Hall tomorrow morning.”

  Louise Wingfield said, “I suppose if I don’t attend this mock trial, you’ll forever suspect me of having murdered Cordy.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Oddly enough, I like you and care what you think of me.” She hesitated, sunk in thought. “Jose and Leonard will be there. Judy. And you say you’re going to try to persuade Melissa to attend. Old home week, God, what a motley group!”

  “Wil
l you be there?”

  “Yes. I don’t like the idea, but I suppose it’s all part of the cathartic process. I see from the morning paper that the police found evidence that points to Lis being a suicide.” She gestured at a copy of the Chronicle that lay on the corner of her desk.

  I’d seen the article; it had been written just in time for the city edition. “Lis’s death still constitutes a form of murder; she might not have killed herself if she hadn’t been harassed.” Then I switched subjects. “I need to clarify a point about your testimony at the original Benedict trial, as well as ask you a few more things about Cordy. Do you have time?”

  Wingfield leaned back in her chair and reached for a cigarette. “Go ahead. I don’t seem able to accomplish much this morning anyway.”

  “First your testimony: when the note to Cordy arrived at the apartment, was anyone else there?”

  She thought, eyes narrowed. “Melissa was.”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “ . . . I must have.”

  “Did the police question Melissa?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Later, did Stameroff ask you if Melissa was present?”

  “No. As I mentioned before, the subject of the apartment and the people who shared it was ignored for Cordy’s family’s sake.”

  Or someone else’s, I thought. “Did anyone ever approach Melissa about testifying?”

  “I wouldn’t know. The day the note came was the last time I saw Melissa until I went to her apartment last week.”

  “All right. Now, about Cordy: what were her political opinions? Were they conservative or liberal?”

  “What few she had—and that wasn’t many—were conservative. All of us who were raised in San Francisco society thought that way. Even on the college campuses we were more concerned with becoming well-rounded individuals—the educational catchphrase of the day—than with exploring new concepts or ideologies.” She grimaced ruefully. “That’s why they called us the “Silent Generation.”

  “And as far as you know, Cordy never flirted with radicalism? Communism?”