He walked to the door. “And that, my friend, is where I’m choosing to focus my extracurricular attention.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah. I’ll work it from my end; maybe it’ll all connect and we’ll meet in Gloccamorra. Meanwhile, watch your rear.”
“You too, Sturgis. Yours ain’t scorchproof.”
I got Helen Leidecker’s number from San Bernardino information. No answer. Frustrated but relieved—I hadn’t relished testing her integrity—I found a U.S. atlas and located Port Wallace, Texas, in the southernmost part of the state, just west of Laredo. A faint black speck on the Texas side of the Rio Grande.
I called the operator for the South Texas area code, dialed 512 information, and asked for the Port Wallace Chamber of Commerce.
“One second, sir,” came the drawled reply, followed by clicks and several computer squeaks. “No such listing, sir.”
“Are there any government offices listed in Port Wallace?”
“I’ll check, sir.” Click. “A United States Post Office, sir.”
“I’ll take that.”
“Hold for that number, sir.”
I called the post office. No answer there either. Checked my watch. Eight A.M. here, two hours later there. Maybe they believed in the leisurely life.
I called again. Nothing. So much for my assignments. But there was still plenty to do.
The research library had a single listing for Neurath, Donald. A 1951 book on fertility published by a university press and housed, across campus, in the biomedical library. The date and subject matter fit, but it was hard to reconcile an abortionist with the author of something that scholarly. Nevertheless, I made the trek to BioMed, consulted the Index Medicus, and found two other articles on fertility, authored in 1951 and 1952 by a Donald Neurath with a Los Angeles address. The L.A. County Medical Association Directory features photos of members. I found the one from 1950 and flipped to the N’s.
His face jumped out at me, slicked hair, pencil-line mustache, and lemon-sucking expression, as if life had treated him poorly. Or maybe it was living too close to the edge.
His office was on Wilshire, just where Crotty had put it. A member of AMA, education at a first-rate medical school, excellent internship and residency, an academic appointment at the school that loosely employed me.
The two faces of Dr. N.
Another split identity.
I hurried to the BioMed stacks, found his book and the two articles. The former was an edited compendium of current fertility research. Eight chapters by other doctors, the last one by Neurath.
His research involved the treatment of infertility with injections of sex hormones to stimulate ovulation—revolutionary stuff during a period in which human fertility remained a medical mystery. Neurath emphasized this, listed previous treatments as slapshot and generally unsuccessful: endometrial biopsies, surgical enlargement of the pelvic veins, implantation of radioactive metal in the uterus, even long-term psychoanalysis combined with tranquilizers to overcome “ovulation-blocking anxiety stemming from hostile mother-daughter identification.”
Though researchers had begun to make a connection between sex hormones and ovulation as early as the 1930’s, experimentation had been limited to animals.
Neurath had taken it a step further, injecting half a dozen barren women with hormones obtained from the ovaries and pituitaries of female cadavers. Combining the injections with a regimen of temperature-taking and blood tests in order to get a precise fix on the time of ovulation. After several months of repeated treatments, three of the women became pregnant. Two suffered miscarriages, but one carried a healthy baby to term.
While stressing that his findings were preliminary and needed to be replicated by controlled studies, Neurath suggested that hormonal manipulation promised hope for childless couples and should be attempted on a large scale.
The 1951 article was a shorter version of the book chapter. The one from ’52 was a letter to the editor, responding to the ’51 article, by a group of doctors who complained that Neurath’s treating of humans was premature, based on flimsy data, and his findings were tainted by poor research design. Medical science, the letter emphasized, knew little about the effects of gonadotropic hormones on general health. In addition to not helping his patients, Neurath might very well be endangering them.
He countered with a four-paragraph retort that boiled down to: the ends justified the means. But he hadn’t published further.
Fertility and abortion.
Neurath giveth; Neurath taketh away.
Power on an intoxicating level. Power lust loomed as the motivating force behind so many of the lives that had brushed up against Sharon’s.
I wanted very much to speak to Dr. Donald Neurath. Looked him up in the current County Directory and found nothing. I kept backtracking. His last entry was 1953.
Very busy year.
I searched the Journal of the American Medical Association for obituaries. Neurath’s was in the June 1, 1954, issue. He’d died in August of the previous year, age forty-five, of unspecified causes, while vacationing in Mexico.
Same month, same year as Linda Lanier and brother Cable.
The effects of gonadotropic hormones …
Ahead of his time.
Pieces began to fall into place. A new slant on an old problem—improbable, but it explained so many other things. I thought of something else, another part of the puzzle crying out for solution. Left BioMed and headed for the north side of campus. Running, feeling light-footed, for the first time in a long time.
The Special Collections Room was in the basement of the research library, down a long quiet hall that discouraged casual drop-ins. Smallish, cool, humidity-controlled, furnished with dark oak reading tables that matched the raised panels on the walls. I showed my faculty card and my requisition slip to the librarian. He went searching and came back shortly with everything I wanted, handed me two pencils and a pad of lined paper, then went back to studying his chemistry book.
There were two other people hunkered down for serious study: a woman in a batik dress examining an old map with a magnifying glass, and a fat man in a blue blazer, gray slacks, and ascot, alternating trifocaled attention between a folio of Audubon prints and a lap-top computer.
By comparison, my own reading material was unimpressive. A pile of small books bound in blue cloth. Selections from the L.A. Social Register. Thin paper and small print. Neatly ordered listings of country clubs, charity galas, genealogical societies, but mainly a roster of The Right People: addresses, phone numbers, ancestral minutiae. Self-congratulation for those whose fascination with the us-them game hadn’t ended in high school.
I found what I wanted quickly enough, copied down names, connected the dots until the truth, or something damned close to it, began to take shape.
Closer and closer. But still theoretical.
I left the room, found a phone. Still no answer at Helen Leidecker’s. But a sleepy male voice answered in Port Wallace, Texas.
“Brotherton’s.”
“Is this the post office?”
“Post office, tackle and bait, pickled eggs, cold beer. Name your game, we’re game.”
“This is Mr. Baxter, State of California Bureau of Records, Los Angeles Branch.”
“L.A.? How’s the quake situation?”
“Shaky.”
Hacking laugh. “What can I do for y’all, California?”
“We’ve received an application from a certain party for a certain state job—a position that requires a full background check, including proof of citizenship and birth records. The party in question has lost her birth certificate, claims she was born in Port Wallace.”
“Background check, huh? Sounds pretty … covert.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brotherton—”
“Deeb. Lyle Deeb. Brotherton’s dead.” Chuckle. “Unloaded this dump on me in lieu of a poker debt, three months before he passed on. Got the last laugh.”
�
�I’m not at liberty to say more about the details of the position, Mr. Deeb.”
“No prob, Cal, love to help a fellow civil-servicer, ’ceptin’ I cain’t, ’cause we got no birth certificates in Port Wallace—not much of anything other than shrimp boats, black flies, and wetbacks, and the Immigration playing grab-ass all up and down the river. Records are up in San Antonio—you’d best check there.”
“What about hospitals?”
“Just one, Cal. This ain’t Houston. Dinky place run by Baptist naturopaths—not sure if they’re even legit. They service mostly the Mexicans.”
“Were they servicing back in ’53?”
“Yep.”
“Then I’ll try there first. Do you have the number?”
“Sure.” He gave it to me, said, “Your party in question’s born down here, huh? That’s a real small club. What’s the name of this party?”
“The family name is Johnson; mother’s first name, Eulalee. She might also have gone under Linda Lanier.”
He laughed. “Eula Johnson? Birth in 1953? Ain’t that a hoot, you folks getting all covert and everything? Meanwhile it’s public knowledge. Hell, California, you don’t need no official records for that one—that one’s famous.”
“Why’s that?”
He laughed again and told me, then said, “Only question is, which party you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up. But I knew where to find out.
Chapter
32
The same vine-crusted fieldstone walls and mentholated air, the same long, shady stretch past the wooden slab sign. This time I was driving—L.A. legitimate. But the silence and the solitude and the knowledge of what I was about to do made me feel like a trespasser.
I pulled up in front of the gates and used the phone on the stand to call the house. No answer. I tried again. A male mid-Atlantic voice answered: “Blalock residence.”
“Mrs. Blalock, please.”
“Who shall I say is calling, sir?”
“Dr. Alex Delaware.”
Pause. “Is she expecting you, Dr. Delaware?”
“No, but she’ll want to see me, Ramey.”
“I’m sorry, sir, she isn’t—”
“Tell her it concerns the exploits of the Marchesa di Orano.”
Silence.
“Would you like me to spell that, Ramey?”
No answer.
“Are you still with me, Ramey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Of course, I could talk to the press instead. They always love a human interest story. Especially one with heavy irony.”
“That won’t be necessary, sir. One moment, sir.”
Moments later the gates slid open. I got back in the car and drove up the fish-scale drive.
The verdigris roofs of the mansion were gold at the peaks where the sunlight made contact. Emptied of tents, the grounds looked even more vast. The fountains threw off opalescent spray that thinned and dissipated while still arcing. The pools below were shimmering ellipses of liquid mercury.
I parked in front of the limestone steps and climbed to an immense landing guarded by statuary lions, recumbent but snarling. One of the double entry doors was open. Ramey stood holding it, all pink face, black serge, and white linen.
“This way, sir.” No emotion, no sign of recognition. I walked past him and in.
Larry had said the entry hall was big enough to skate in. It could have accommodated a hockey stadium: three stories of white marble, rich with moldings, flutings, and emblems, backed by a double-carved white marble staircase that would have put Tara to shame. A concert-hall-sized chandelier hung from the gold-leaf coffered ceiling. The floors were more white marble inlaid with diamonds of black granite and polished to glass. Gilt-framed portraits of dyspeptic-looking Colonial types hung between columns of precisely pleated ruby velvet drapes tied back with beefy gold cord.
Ramey veered right with the smoothness of a limousine on legs, and led me down a long, dim portrait gallery, then opened another set of double doors and showed me into a hot, bright sun-room—a Tiffany skylight forming the roof, one wall of beveled mirror, three of glass that looked out onto infinite lawns and impossibly gnarled trees. The flooring was malachite and granite in a pattern that would have given pause to Escher. Healthy-looking palms and bromeliads sat in Chinese porcelain pots. The furniture was sage and maroon wicker with dark-green cushions, and glass-topped tables.
Hope Blalock sat on a wicker divan. Within her reach was a bar on wheels holding an assortment of decanters and a crystal pitcher frosted opaque.
She didn’t look nearly as robust as her plants, wore a black silk dress and black shoes, no makeup or jewelry. She’d drawn her hair back in a chestnut bun that gleamed like polished hardwood, and she stroked it absently as she sat at the very edge of the divan—barely lowering rump to fabric, as if daring gravity.
She ignored my arrival, continued staring out through one of the glass walls. Ankles crossed, one hand in her lap, the other gripping a cocktail glass half-filled with something clear in which an olive floated.
“Madam,” said the butler.
“Thank you, Ramey.” Her voice was throaty, tinged with brass. She waved the butler away, waved me toward a chair.
I sat opposite her. She met my gaze. Her complexion was the color of overcooked spaghetti, overlaid with a fine mesh of wrinkles. Her aqua-blue eyes could have been beautiful but for sparse lashes and deep, gray sockets that made them stand out like gems in dirty silver. Frown lines tugged at her mouth. A halo of post-menopausal down encircled her unpowdered face.
I gazed at her glass. “Martini?”
“Would you care for a splash, Doctor?”
“Thank you.”
The wrong answer. She frowned, touched one finger to the pitcher and dotted the frost. “These are vodka martinis,” she said.
“That will be fine.”
The drink was strong and very dry and made the roof of my mouth ache. She waited until I’d swallowed before taking a sip, but took a long one.
I said, “Nice sun-room. Have them in all your homes?”
“Just what kind of doctor are you?”
“Psychologist.”
I might have said witch doctor. “But of course. And just what is it you want?”
“I want you to confirm some theories I have about your family history.”
The skin around her lips turned white. “My family history? What concern is that of yours?”
“I just got back from Willow Glen.”
She put her glass down. Her unsteadiness made it rattle against the tabletop.
“Willow Glen,” she said. “I believe we used to own land there, but not any longer. I fail to see—”
“While I was there I ran into Shirlee and Jasper Ransom.”
Her eyes widened, squeezed shut, and reopened. She gave a hard, forced blink, as if she hoped she could make me disappear. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then why did you agree to see me?”
“The lesser of two evils. You mention my daughter, make vulgar threats about going to the press. People of our station are constantly subjected to harassment. It behooves us to know what kind of baseless rumors are being circulated.”
“Baseless?” I said.
“And vulgar.”
I sat back, crossed my legs, and sipped. “It must have been hard for you,” I said. “Covering for her all these years. Palm Beach. Rome. Here.”
Her lips formed an O. She started to say something, shook her head, favored me with another hand wave, and gave a look that said I was something the maid had neglected to sweep up. “Psychologists. Keepers of secrets.” Brassy laugh. “How much do you want? Doctor.”
“I’m not interested in your money.”
A louder laugh. “Oh, everyone’s interested in my money. I’m like some bag of blood crusted with leeches. The only question is how much blood each of them gets.”
“Hard
to think of Shirlee and Jasper as leeches,” I said. “Though I suppose, over time, you’ve been able to turn things around and see yourself as the victim.”
I got up, inspected one of the bromeliads. Gray-green striped leaves. Pink flowers. I touched a petal. Silk. I realized all the plants were.
“Actually,” I said, “the two of them have done quite well for themselves. Much better than you ever expected. How long did you figure they’d last, living out there in the dirt?”
She didn’t reply.
I said, “Cash in an envelope for people who didn’t know how to make change. A dirt lot, two shacks, and let’s-hope-for-the-best? Very generous. As was the other gift you gave them. Though at the time, I imagine, you didn’t view it as a gift. More of a throwaway. Like old clothes to your favorite charity.”
She shot to her feet, shook a fist that trembled so violently she had to restrain it with her other hand. “Who the hell are you! And what do you want!”
“I’m an old friend of Sharon Ransom’s. Also known as Jewel Rae Johnson. Sharon Jean Blalock. Take your pick.”
She sank back down. “Oh, God.”
“A close friend,” I said. “Close enough to care about her, to want to understand how and why.”
She hung her head. “This can’t be happening. Not again.”
“It isn’t. I’m not Kruse. I’m not interested in exploiting your problems, Mrs. Blalock. All I want is the truth. From the beginning.”
A shake of the gleaming head. “No. I … It’s impossible—wrong of you to do this.”
I got up, took hold of the pitcher and filled her glass.
“I’ll start,” I said. “You fill in the blanks.”
“Please,” she said, looking up, suddenly no more than a pale old woman. “It’s over. Done with. You obviously know enough to understand how I’ve suffered.”
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