Their working relationship was cemented in 1941: Vidal served as the “middleman” in a business deal between Belding and Blalock Industries, which supplied wartime steel to the Magna Corporation at a discount rate. Vidal introduced Leland Belding to Henry Abbot Blalock; he was perfectly positioned to do so because Blalock was his brother-in-law, married to Vidal’s sister, the former Hope Estes Vidal.
The Vidals were described as the last descendants of an old, venerable family—Mayflower lineage but dwindled fortunes. Henry Blalock, London-born, son of a chimney sweep, had been admitted to the Blue Book set after his 1943 marriage to Hope; the Vidal name still dripped with social status. Time wondered if brother Billy’s current problems with the Senate would change all that.
Billy and Hope, brother and sister. It explained Vidal’s presence at the party, but not his relationship to Sharon. Not what they’d been talking about …
I searched for further mention of the Blalocks, found nothing on Hope, some business-related references to Henry A. His fortune had been made in steel, railroads, and real estate. Like Leland Belding, he owned it all, had never gone public. Unlike Belding, he’d stayed out of the headlines.
In 1953 he died, age fifty-nine, of a stroke, while on safari in Kenya, leaving a grieving widow, the former Hope Estes Vidal. Contributions to the Heart Foundation in lieu of flowers …
No mention of offspring. What of the child Kruse had treated? Had the widow remarried? I kept thumbing the index, found a single item, dated six months after Henry Blalock’s death: the sale of Blalock Industries to the Magna Corporation, for an unspecified sum, rumored to be a bargain. The decline of Blalock’s holdings was noted and attributed to failure to adapt to changing realities, particularly the growing importance of cross-continental air shipping.
The implication was clear: Belding’s planes had helped antiquate Blalock’s trains. Then Magna had swooped down and made off with the pickings.
Though from the looks of Hope Blalock’s lodgings, those pickings had been substantial. I wondered if brother Billy had played “middleman” again, seen to it that her interests were protected.
Another hour of thumbing brought nothing more. I thought of somewhere else to look, went down to the ground floor and asked the reference librarian if the stack holdings included social registers. She looked it up, told me the Los Angeles Blue Book was kept in Special Collections, which had closed for the day.
My thoughts slid down to the lower rungs of the social ladder, another brother-sister story. I remained in the reference section, tried to find newspaper accounts of the Linda Lanier dope bust.
It was harder than I thought. Of all the local papers, only the Times was indexed, and that only from 1972. The New York Times index went back to 1851 but contained nothing on Linda Lanier.
I went to the newspaper stacks on the second floor—banks of drawers and rows of microfiche machines. Showed my faculty card, filled out forms, collected spools.
Ellston Crotty had dated the bust 1953. Assuming Linda Lanier had been Sharon’s mother, she’d had to have been alive at the time of Sharon’s birth—May 15—which narrowed it further. I spun my way through the spring of ’53, starting with the Times and keeping the Herald, Mirror, and Daily News in reserve.
It took more than an hour to find the story. August 9. The Times, never one for crime stories, relegated it to the middle of Part One, but the other papers had given it front-page treatment, complete with purple prose, photographs of the slain “pushers” and the cops who’d killed them.
The articles jibed with Crotty’s account, minus his cynicism. Linda Lanier/Eulalee Johnson and her brother, Cable Johnson, major “heroin traffickers,” had fired at raiding Metro Narc detectives and been killed by return fire. In a single “lightning operation,” Detectives Royal Hummel and Victor DeGranzfeld had put an end to one of the most predatory drug rings in L.A. history.
The detectives’ photos showed them grinning and kneeling beside bindles of white powder. Hummel was wide and beefy, in a light suit and wide-brimmed straw hat. I thought I detected a hint of Cyril Trapp in the hatchet jaw and narrow lips. DeGranzfeld was pear-shaped, mustachioed, and slit-eyed, and wore a chalk-striped double-breasted suit and dark Stetson. He looked ill-at-ease, as if smiling were an imposition.
I didn’t have to study the picture of Linda Lanier/Eulalee Johnson to recognize the blond bombshell I’d watched seduce Dr. Donald Neurath. The photo was high-quality, a professional studio job—the kind of windswept, glossy three-quarter-face pose favored by would-be actresses for publicity portfolios.
Sharon’s face, in a platinum wig.
Cable Johnson was memorialized in a county jail mug shot that showed him to be a mean-looking, poorly shaven loser with drooping eyes and a greasy duck’s-ass hairdo. The eyes were lazy but managed to project a hard-edged scrap-for-survival brightness. Shrewdness rather than abstract intelligence. The kind who’d make out in the short term, get tripped up, over and over again, by an inflated sense of self and inability to delay gratification.
His criminal record was termed “extensive” and included arrests for extortion—trying to squeeze money out of some small-time East L.A. bookies—public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, larceny, and theft. A sad but petty litany, nothing that supported the papers’ labeling of him and his sister as “major-league dope pushers, ruthless, sophisticated, but for their deaths, destined to flood the city with illegal narcotics.”
Anonymous police sources were quoted claiming the Johnsons were associated with “Mexican mob elements.” They’d grown up in the South Texas border town of Port Wallace, “a tough hamlet known to law enforcement officials as an entry point for brown heroin,” had clearly moved to L.A. with intentions of pushing that substance to the schoolchildren of Brentwood, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills.
As part of their plan, they obtained jobs at an unnamed film studio, Cable as a grip, Linda as a contract player trawling for bit parts. This provided a cover for “narcotics trafficking within the film community, a segment of the population long known to be enamored of illicit drugs and nonconformist personal habits.” Both were known as hangers-on at “left-leaning parties also attended by known Communists and fellow travelers.”
Dope and Bolshevism, prime demons of the fifties. Enough to make shooting a beautiful young woman to death palatable—admirable.
I ran a few more spools through the machine. Nothing linking Linda Lanier to Leland Belding, not a word about party pads.
And nothing about children. Singly or in pairs.
Chapter
27
Old stories, old connections, but the strands were tangling even as they knitted, and I was no closer to understanding Sharon—how she’d lived and why she, and so many others, had died.
At 10:30 P.M. Milo called and added to the confusion.
“Bastard Trapp lost no time snowing me under,” he said. “Reorganizing the dead-case file—pure scutwork. I played hooky, wore out my phone ear. Your gal Ransom had a severe allergy to the truth. No birth records in New York, no Manhattan Ransoms—not on Park Avenue or any of the other high-priced zip codes—clear back to the late forties. Same for Long Island: Southampton’s a tight little community; the local gendarmes say no Ransoms in the phone book, no Ransoms ever lived in any of the big estates.”
“She went to college there.”
“Forsythe. Not right there—nearby. How’d you find out?”
“Through her university transcript. How’d you find out?”
“Social Security. She applied in ’71, gave the college as her address. But that’s the first time her name shows up anywhere—as if she didn’t exist until then.”
“If you have any contacts in Palm Beach, Florida, try there, Milo. Kruse practiced there until ’75. When he moved out to L.A. he brought her with him.”
“Uh-uh. I’m ahead of you. Him I did find plenty of paper on. Born in New York—Park Avenue, as a matter of fact. Big apartment that he sold in ’68. The rea
l estate transfer listed a Palm Beach address and I called down there. These rich-town departments aren’t easy to deal with—very protective of the locals. I told them Ransom had been a burglary victim—we recovered her stuff, wanted to give it back to her. They looked her up. Nada, not even a whisper, Alex. So Kruse hooked up with her somewhere else. And speaking of Kruse, he was not the hotshot psychotherapist you described. I stroked my source at the IRS, accessed the guy’s tax returns. His practice only produced income of thirty thou a year—at a hundred bucks an hour, that’s only five or six hours a week. Not exactly your busy shrink. Another five G’s came from writing. The rest, another half mil, was investment income: blue-chip stocks and bond dividends, real estate, and a little business venture called Creative Image Associates.”
“Blue movies.”
“He listed it as a ‘producer and manufacturer of health education materials.’ He and his wife were sole shareholders, declared a loss for five years, then folded.”
“What years?”
“Let me see, I’ve got it right here: ’74 through ’79.”
Sharon’s last year in college, her first four years in grad school.
“What it boils down to, Alex, is a rich guy living off inheritance. Dabbling.”
“Dabbling in people’s lives,” I said. “The army taught him psychological warfare.”
“For what that’s worth. When I was a medic I caught an eyeful of the army’s psychological warfare. For the most part, worthless bullshit. The Viet Cong laughed at it—ad agencies do it better. Anyway, bottom line is, Ransom emerges as your basic phantom lady with a rich patron. For all practical purposes she could have dropped out of the sky in 1971.”
“Martinis in the sun-room.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing important,” I said. “Here’s another possibility. I looked up the newspaper coverage of the Lanier/Johnson drug bust. Linda and her brother were from South Texas—place called Port Wallace. Maybe there are records down there.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Anything in the papers that Crotty didn’t tell us?”
“Just that in addition to the dope thing, the Red Scare was raised—supposedly the Johnsons went to parties with subversives. Given the mood of the country, that would have guaranteed public support for the shootout. Hummel and DeGranzfeld were treated like Most Valuable Players.”
“Uncle Hummel,” he said. “I called Vegas. He’s still alive, still working for Magna—chief of security at the Casbah and two other casinos the company owns there. Lives in a big house in the best part of town. Wages of sin, huh?”
“One more thing to chew on,” I said. “Billy Vidal and Hope Blalock are brother and sister. Vidal set up deals between Blalock’s husband and Belding. After Blalock’s husband died, Magna bought her out cheap. After Belding died, Vidal ended up chairman of Magna. Mrs. Blalock was bankrolling Kruse—supposedly because he’d treated one of her kids. But she doesn’t seem to have any kids.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Ever get the feeling, Alex, we’re playing somebody else’s game by somebody else’s rules? In somebody else’s goddam stadium?”
He agreed to run a Texas trace and told me to watch my back before hanging up.
I wanted to call Olivia again, but it was close to eleven, past her and Albert’s bedtime, so I waited until nine the next morning, phoned her office, and was told Mrs. Brickerman was up in Sacramento on business this morning and was expected back shortly.
I tried to reach Elmo Castelmaine at King Solomon Gardens. He was on shift again, busy with a patient. I got in the Seville and drove to the Fairfax district, to Edinburgh Street.
The old-age home was one of dozens of boxy two-story buildings lining the narrow, treeless street.
King Solomon Gardens had no gardens, just one pudgy-trunked, roof-high date palm to the left of the double glass entry doors. The building was white texture-coat trimmed in electric blue. A ramp carpeted in blue Astroturf served in place of front steps. Cement had been laid down where the lawn should have been, painted hospital green and furnished with folding chairs. Old people sat, sun-visored, kerchiefed, and support-hosed, fanning themselves, playing cards, just staring off into space.
I found a parking space halfway down the block and was headed back when I spotted a chunky black man across the street, pushing a wheelchair. I quickened my pace and got a better look. White uniform tunic over blue jeans. No corkscrew beard, no earring. The crown of the head yielding to near-total baldness; the stocky body, softer. The face looser, double-chinned, but the one I remembered from Resthaven.
I crossed the street, caught up. “Mr. Castelmaine?”
He stopped, looked back. An old woman was in the wheelchair. She didn’t pay any notice. Despite the heat, she wore a sweater buttoned to the neck and an Indian blanket across her knees. Her hair was thin and brittle, dyed black. The breeze blew through it, exposing white patches of scalp. She appeared to be sleeping with her eyes open.
“That’s me.” The same high-pitched voice. “Now, who might you be?”
“Alex Delaware. I left you a message yesterday.”
“That doesn’t help me much. I still don’t know you any better than I did ten seconds ago.”
“We met years ago. Six years ago. At Resthaven Terrace. I came with Sharon Ransom. Visited her sister, Shirlee?”
The woman in the chair began to sniffle and whimper. Castelmaine bent down, patted her head, pulled a tissue out of his jeans and dabbed at her nose. “Now, now, Mrs. Lipschitz, it’s okay, he’s gonna come get you.”
She pouted.
“Come on now, Mrs. Lipschitz, honey, your beau’s gonna come, don’t you worry.”
The woman lifted her face. She was sharp-featured, toothless, wrinkled as a discarded shopping bag. Her eyes were pale-brown and heavily mascaraed. A bright-red patch of lipstick had been smeared over a puckered fissure of a mouth. Somewhere behind the crease and corrugation, the mask of cosmetics, shone a spark of beauty.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Aw, Mrs. Lipschitz,” said Castelmaine.
She drew the blanket up to her mouth, began chewing on the coarse fabric.
Castelmaine turned to me and said softly, “They reach a certain age, they can never get warm, no matter what the weather. Never get full satisfaction of any kind.”
Mrs. Lipschitz cried out. Her lips worked around a word for a while and finally formed it: “Party!”
Castelmaine kneeled beside her, eased the blanket away from her mouth, and tucked it around her. “You’re gonna go to that party, hon, but you’ve got to be careful not to ruin your makeup with all those tears. Okay?”
He placed two fingers under the old woman’s chin and smiled. “Okay?” She looked up at him, nodded.
“Goo-ood. And we are looking pretty today, honey. All spiffed up and raring to go.”
The old woman held up one shriveled hand. A thick black one wrapped around it.
“Party,” she said.
“Sure, there’s gonna be a party. And you’re so pretty, Clara Celia Lipschitz, that you’re gonna be the belle of that party. All the handsome boys are gonna line up to dance with you.”
A rush of tears.
“Now c’mon, C.C., no more of that. He’s gonna come, take you to that party—you’ve got to be looking your best.”
More struggle to enunciate: “Late.”
“Just a little late, Clara Celia. He probably hit some heavy traffic—you know, all that gridlock I’ve been telling you about. Or maybe he stopped off at a flower shop to get you a nice corsage. Nice pink orchid corsage, like he knows you love.”
“Late.”
“Just a little,” he repeated, and resumed pushing the chair. I tagged along.
He began singing, softly, in a sweet tenor so high it verged on falsetto. “Now C., C.C. Rider. C’mon see, baby, what you have done …”
The music and the repetitive rub of the chair’s tires against the sidewalk set up a lullaby rhythm. The o
ld woman’s head began to loll.
“… C.C. Lipschitz, see what you have done …”
We stopped directly across the street from King Solomon. Castelmaine looked both ways and nudged the chair over the curb.
“… you made all the handsome boys love you … and now your man has come.”
Mrs. Lipschitz slept. He pushed her across the green cement, exchanging greetings with some of the other old people, got to the bottom of the ramp and told me: “Wait here. I’ll be with you soon as I’m through.”
I stood around, got drawn into conversation with a thick-waisted old man with one good eye and a VFW cap who claimed to have fought with Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, then waited, belligerently, as if expecting me to doubt him. When I didn’t he launched into a lecture on U.S. policy in Latin America and was going strong, ten minutes later, when Castelmaine reappeared.
I shook the old man’s hand, told him it had been educational.
“A smart boy,” he told Castelmaine.
The attendant smiled. “That probably means, Mr. Cantor, that he didn’t disagree with you.”
“What’s to disagree? Emes is emes, you got to keep those pinkos in line or they eat your liver.”
“The emes is, we gotta go, Mr. Cantor.”
“So who’s stopping you? Go. Gey avek.”
We walked back across the green cement.
“How about a cup of coffee,” I said.
“Don’t drink coffee. Let’s walk.” We turned left on Edinburgh and strolled past more old people. Past sweating windows and cooking smells, dry lawns, musty doorways.
“I don’t remember you,” he said. “Not as a specific person. I do remember Dr. Ransom visiting with a man, because it only happened once.” He looked me over. “No. I can’t say that I remember it being you.”
“I looked different,” I said. “Had a beard, longer hair.”
He shrugged. “Could be. Anyway, what can I do for you?”
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