by Clark Howard
“At that time I was making forty a week gross, and raising Lorna was getting to be more of an expensive proposition every week. So I talked it over with Aunt Flo and she said go ahead and try it if I wanted to. So I did. I got a kitchenette in Hollywood, an equity card, and started hounding the casting offices. The assistant director I mentioned put me onto a few jobs and before long I was getting more or less steady work, making twice, sometimes three times what I had made in Santa Barbara. It wasn’t an easy life, not by a long shot, and it was lonely: down here all week fighting for jobs with one hand and fighting off studio wolves with the other, and only getting to see Lorna on weekends; but at least I was able to help Aunt Flo more with the bills and still put a little away for the future.
“Well, ultimately it all paid off—at least the money part of it. Eventually I got to be a pretty fair actress and started getting a speaking part here and there. One of the studios put me under contract and sent me to their repertoire school and little by little I began to be noticed and remembered and—well, the rest is obvious. I came a long way, all by myself, and I did it the hard way, studying and working, and not once, not a single time did I go to bed with any son-of-a-bitch in town, no matter how much he could have helped me.” She paused and looked frankly at Devlin. “I want you to believe that, Dev; it’s important to me that you believe it. Do you?”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I believe you.”
She took another cigarette and lighted it herself while Devlin turned to signal the waitress for fresh drinks.
“So,” she said after the drinks came, “that’s part one of the Jennifer Jordan epic. I had made it pretty well. I had a nice apartment and Aunt Flo and Lorna came down to live with me and everything was going just fine. And then one summer, when I was between pictures, I decided that the three of us should get away for awhile and spend some of my hard earned money on a nice expensive vacation. I wanted to do something special for Aunt Flo, to pay her back for helping me keep my baby girl. So I let her pick any kind of vacation she wanted us to go on, any place she’d always dreamed of going. She picked a South Seas cruise.
“And that,” Jennifer said, almost biting the words off, “was how I met J. Walter Keyes.”
“He was on the ship?” asked Devlin.
“He wasn’t just on the ship,” she said caustically, “he was the ship. Captain J. Walter Keyes, master of the good ship Polynesia. Sea captain, gentleman, sophisticate, man of the world. And there I was, a rising young actress, oh so worldly on the silver screen but oh so naive off the set. Bear in mind now that my total experience with men at that time had consisted of a very brief marriage to an immature high school boy, plus several years of in-fighting with lecherous producers, directors, talent agents and various other vermin that populate my profession. In other words, I was ripe—overripe, even—for a real operator. And if Walt was never anything else, he was always about the smoothest bastard with women that you’ll ever see. I suppose it came from years of practice and a confirmed opinion that all females are merely receptacles for the male lust, I don’t know. At any rate, he used that finely developed routine of his on me and I fell for it—and him—like the proverbial ton of bricks.
“He courted me throughout the entire cruise, twenty-eight days. Gave me the whole routine: captain’s table for dinner, flowers in the cabin every time we made port, paying elaborate attention to Lorna, listening until all hours to my tales of woe about being an actress—everything. And I was completely charmed by every minute of it. A lot of it, I realize now, was nothing more than the fact that he was thirteen years older than I was, and vastly more experienced; but at the time, to my untrained eye and mind, he was the absolute personification of the perfect man. So much so,” she cast her eyes down as she said it, “that at the end of the cruise I proposed to him.”
Devlin took a swallow of his drink and said nothing.
“That doesn’t repulse you?” she asked.
“Should it?” he countered. She shrugged.
“Perhaps not. Not at this point in the story, I suppose.” She took a swallow of her own drink and shuddered slightly. “All right. Let’s see if you shock easily. Two months after the cruise we were married. We bought a house up in the Hollywood Hills and began to make plans about what Walt would do; neither of us wanted him to continue as a cruise captain because he would have to be away too much; but he’d never really done anything else: all he knew besides running a ship was how to be sweet and polite and impress people. So it presented a problem—but finally we hit on a solution. It wasn’t our idea, really; it came from an actor I had worked with a couple of times, Floyd Boland; you may have seen him in something, older man, character actor, been around for years.
“Anyway, we had Floyd and his wife over one night and he suggested that Walt hire a couple of accountants, lease an office and set up a business management company exclusively for people in the entertainment field. He seemed to think it would go over very well, said there was a definite need for a business of that kind run by a reliable, responsible person. He even offered to be Walt’s first client.
“Well, it sounded like a good idea so we did it. I gave Walt nearly all of my savings to get him started, and I used all the personal contacts I had to help him drum up business. I guess I must have introduced him to every professional I’d ever worked with, from leading men down to walk-ons. And it worked, just as Floyd had predicted. Walt charmed them right out of their bank accounts. He got some of the old pros like Floyd, and some of the rising young stars like Molly Carlyle and Dan Merritt, and a whole stable of would-bes and may-bes like Bill Conner and Bobby Greer, people who had steady money coming in temporarily from short term studio contracts or television shows. In short, he built up a well balanced clientele. Some of them he kept on permanently; others—the would-bes I mentioned—he used until their steady income stopped and then dropped them for other, more prosperous clients. Inside of two years he had one of the most successful business management firms in town.
“Now,” she said pointedly, “comes the sordid part of this great American success story. I never really gave much thought to just how Walt was building the business, other than to assume that he was using his charm to get clients and his wits to keep them. But gradually I began to pick up a rumor here and there that Keyes Enterprises not only handled financial matters for its clients, but other matters as well. Some of the rumors concerned abortions; not just two or three, but a number of them. And I heard about arrangements that were made for—well, for certain types of parties—orgies—that were held at a beach house. There were stories, too, about payoffs for illegitimate pregnancies; the kind of payoffs that some poor, stupid girl gets shoved down her throat. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I began to pick up bits and pieces about Walt’s personal infidelities with girls that worked for him—”
She stopped and stared at Devlin, stared at a deep, disturbed frown that darkened his face and drew the scar tautly over his cheek-bone.
“What’s the matter?”
“What you just said, about personal infidelities with girls who worked for him: do you know any of their names?”
“Well, I’m not sure, of course; the wife rarely is, you know. But there was a public relations girl he had at one time, Lily Lamont: and there was a lady—I should say female—obstetrician who didn’t actually work for him but was mixed up in some way in an abortion he arranged for Molly Carlyle; and then there was a receptionist named Abby Daniels who worked for him for several years—”
Of course, Devlin thought, of course! The girl’s age, her looks, the regular checks she received, the mental breakdown: it all fit. Abigail Daniels wasn’t a blackmailer; she was Keyes’ mistress.
Devlin felt warm inside, eager, as a bloodhound picking up the first true scent in a swamp full of confusing odors. He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the table.
“I think I’ve heard enough background,” he said quietly. “Will you answer some specific questions for
me now? ”
“Of course.”
“You said earlier that you suspected your husband of being a sexual psychopath. On what do you base that suspicion? ”
“Several things. The rumors, first of all. They are few and far apart, I’ll admit—those concerning his personal infidelities, that is—but nevertheless they are there; and most of them have originated with reliable sources, so I’m reasonably certain that he is playing around.”
“Which, of itself, doesn’t make him a sexual psychopath,” Devlin said.
“No, of course not. But it does indicate a tendancy to engage in extra-marital sexual activity. Anyway, that’s only the first part of my suspicion; the first of three parts, as a matter of fact. The second part is based on a little private library of his that I accidentally uncovered; a collection of very bizarre little pamphlets neatly tucked away at the back of the bottom desk drawer in his study. They’re all written in English but they were printed in France and Sweden; and they are all fully illustrated—honestly, Dev, you can’t imagine some of the photographs that people actually posed for.”
“Perhaps I can,” he told her. “I broke up a statewide pornographic operation one time.”
“Yes, but these aren’t just pornographic; they aren’t limited to the various positions of intercourse or to fellatio or cunnilingus; no, they go much farther than that. Each book is devoted to one particular sexual perversion: there’s one on troilism, one on sodomy, and then there’s urolagnia and paedophilia—my god, you wouldn’t believe the way that one is illustrated—”
“Are these clinical type books, prepared as studies of these particular subjects, or what?”
“God, no. There’s nothing clinical about them. They’re written in very elementary language. Each one, you see, is sort of a guide for people who want to participate in the various acts; they explain in great detail just how to go about it.”
“I see,” Devlin said quietly.
“No, you don’t,” Jennifer told him, “not quite, not yet. There’s one other thing about them: on some of them written across the top of the cover, is an ‘x’ and a date—just on some of them, mind you. Others have nothing written on them. And on the ones that are marked, all the dates are different.” She leaned forward, her face tense. “Dev, I think he’s checking them off, one by one, as he experiences them. ”
“That’s possible,” he said non-committally, even though he had already arrived at the same conclusion himself. “You said there were three parts to your suspicion. What’s the other one?”
Now she sat back in her chair again and her face, still strained and tense, slowly turned pale.
“That’s the most frightening part of it all,” she said in a voice trying not to tremble. “I—I have reason to believe that he has—well, that he has plans for—for Lorna.”
“Your daughter?”
“Yes.” Jennifer quickly snatched a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed at the corner of one eye. “She’s thirteen now, Dev, as I told you. And like me, she’s filling out rather early—”
“Don’t do that,” he said, seeing that she was compulsively biting her lip again.
“The last time she was home from school—it was after I had found the books—I noticed Walt doing little things that—well, that somehow didn’t seem right. He got into the habit of wrestling with her in the pool, letting his hands—touch her. And it seems that he was always finding some excuse to go into her room after she was in bed—” She bit her lip again. “Dev, it’s driving me out of my mind!”
“All right.” He reached across the table and took her hand. “Just remember that Lorna is all right; nothing has happened to her, and I promise you that nothing will.”
“I’ve been sick with worry. One of those pamphlets of his, the one on paedophilia, doesn’t have an ‘x’ or a date on it yet and I—I keep imagining that he’s saving it for her—”
“All right,” Devlin said again, putting pressure on her hand. “You may be right,” he admitted, “but as long as nothing has happened to her yet there’s no need for you to worry. She’s back east in school and she’s safe. If and when Keyes comes back, you can take steps then to see to it that he doesn’t come into contact with her again.”
“Take steps? What steps? How?”
“Legal action, of course. Incidentally, why haven’t you divorced him, or at least left him?”
“I’ve been too afraid to do either,” she said wearily. “I have no grounds for divorce, not really. Rumors I’ve heard, a few sex pamphlets I’ve found—”
“If those pamphlets are as profusely illustrated as you said, I’m sure a domestic relations court would consider them pornographic. Just having them in the house, especially when your minor daughter is home, would probably constitute mental cruelty to you. You’d have a good chance of being granted a divorce on that.”
“I—I’ve been afraid to try anything like that; afraid of what he might do. You see, even though these rumors start about him every now and then, his reputation for the most part is still pretty flawless. Most of his respectable clients never hear those things; they think of him about the same way that Everett Simmons does, and you remember what a lily white picture he painted the other night.”
She was knotting the handkerchief around her fingers, but stopped when he reached out to touch her hand again.
“You can’t imagine how jealously he guards his reputation,” she went on. “He’s almost violent about putting up a proper, respectable front. I really think he might—might actually kill anyone who tried to associate him with scandal of any kind. ”
“He may not be in a position to kill anyone, or to do anything else,” Devlin said darkly.
“What do you mean?” She was frowning but her eyes had widened almost fearfully.
“I don’t believe your husband has been kidnapped, Jennifer; at least, not in the usual sense of a kidnapping. He’s been abducted, I’m reasonably certain of that, but I don’t think it’s for ransom.”
“If not for ransom, then for what?”
“I don’t know, but perhaps you can help me find out. Does the name Damon Fox mean anything to you? Dr. Damon Fox?”
“Damon Fox,” she said thoughtfully. She shook her head. “No, not that I can think of.”
“You’ve never heard your husband mention him, never seen his name on any papers, anything like that?”
“No. If I have, I don’t remember it.”
“How about Abraham O’Hara? He’s a minister.”
“No, that doesn’t ring a bell either.”
“All right, once more.” Devlin hesitated only an instant. “Todd Holt. Did you ever hear or see the name Todd Holt?”
She shook her head again.
“No, sorry.”
Devlin sat back in the booth and studied his empty glass for a moment.
“Is it possible that your husband might have had dealings with one or more of the men I named without you ever knowing about it, or ever even hearing about it?”
“Oh, yes. Very possible, in fact. In the beginning Walt used to tell me every little thing that happened in the business; but for the past few years he’s made little mention of it at all. About the only person who would be able to tell you for sure whether he’s ever had any business dealings with anyone is his secretary.”
“Evelyn Lund,” Devlin said, remembering the severe hairstyle and the extraordinary legs.
“Yes,” said Jennifer, slightly surprised. “You’ve already talked with her?”
“Just briefly.”
“Was she cooperative?”
“Only as far as she had to be. I may approach her again.”
“I don’t imagine you’ll do any better this time,” Jennifer said coolly. “Evelyn is a nice person really, but when it comes to business she can be as coldblooded as any man. Walt trusts her emphatically; he’s said so many times. It would be like moving Gibraltar to get her to discuss his private business without his permission.”
; “I might try anyway,” Devlin said, keeping his tone neutral even though he had already decided to see Evelyn Lund again. He glanced at his watch. If he left now, he might even be able to catch her today still. “I’m afraid I have to be going now. May I call you later tonight?”
“Dev,” she took one of his hands in both of hers, “I don’t want to go back to that house again.” She suddenly became very nervous. “It’s too full of bad thoughts, bad worries. I’ve been getting—very nervous there lately. Now, after talking about all this, after telling it for the first time, I don’t think I could stand being there again—not right now—not—”
“All right.” He took his keyes from his pocket and extracted one from the case. On one of the cocktail napkins he wrote his address. “Go to my apartment and wait for me there. Try to get some sleep.”
“Yes.” Her voice was greatly relieved. “Thank you, Dev.”
“Come on,” he said, getting up.
He paid for their drinks and put his arm around her shoulders as they walked back out to their cars.
Sixteen
“It was my fault!” the voice of Abigail Daniels snapped from the tape recorder in the Blue Room.
“It was not your fault,” Dr. Fox told her.
“It was, it was, it was!”
“It was not your fault,” the doctor repeated calmly but firmly.
“But I let him do all those things to me, don’t you understand?” she said irritably. “I let him use me! I let him teach me to do things, terrible things, animal things—”
“Your mind had been conditioned by an intellect superior to yours. You were not responsible.”