by Jan Burke
In one of the photos, I saw that she was holding a cigarette.
“She smoked?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, his brows drawing together. “Every now and then. I don’t remember her being a chain smoker. Smoking was thought to be sexy then, you know.”
“Do you remember her brand?”
“No, but Lillian might.”
He reluctantly gave me Lillian’s number, which he knew by heart, and I used the phone in the conference room to call her. She was understandably upset by the news of the past twenty-four hours, but seemed, if anything, grateful to me. I was surprised by this, until she explained that she had spent the last twenty years not really knowing what had happened to Katy. “Perhaps someday her killers will be punished. Conn tells me this Detective Lefebvre is very good.”
I agreed that he was and gradually worked my way around to asking about the cigarette brand. “Chesterfields,” she answered without hesitation.
Another thought struck me. “Did she use a lighter or matches?”
“She had a special lighter. A gift from Jack. Gold, and it had a Celtic design on it — rather unusual then.”
“Her initials on it?”
“Just the letter K, surrounded by a Celtic knot.”
After I hung up, I told O’Connor what she said and went back to the photos of Katy. I found myself wondering who she might have become if she had been allowed to live. She would have been in her forties now. Would she have aged well? Become a snooty socialite? A bitter divorcée? A pillar of the community?
O’Connor had written that she had been somewhat spoiled and head-strong, but all the same a lively, energetic person, someone who had made others laugh or smile — and really, if she hadn’t gone on to do anything more than that for the rest of her life, we had all been robbed by whoever killed her.
I moved to another stack. These seemed to have been taken in the 1940s and 1950s, and some were obviously taken without the subject’s awareness. Men and women dressed in the styles of the time. Twenty years changes nothing so much as cosmetics and hairstyles. I didn’t recognize anyone in the photos.
O’Connor had finished by then and called me over to where he stood. He had spent some time that morning at the public library and started with a photocopy of a map he had found there. It was a map of Las Piernas and surrounding areas, dated 1955.
“This is the closest I could find to the time,” he said. “But it will help us.”
It was hard not to get caught up in the novelty of seeing what the city looked like then. For one thing, about half the current streets were missing — the housing tracts of the 1960s and 1970s hadn’t been built yet. O’Connor also laid out two more current maps, one of Las Piernas, the other of Southern California.
“ ‘All things must change to something new, to something strange,’” he said.
I looked up at him.
“Longfellow,” he said.
“Oh.”
He seemed disappointed that I couldn’t quote the poet back at him. “Did you study poetry a lot when you were in college?” I asked.
“Never went to college,” he said. Without another word on poets or education, he used the old map to point out the place in the marshes where Jack Corrigan had been found, and where later, not far away, O’Connor had found the body of Bo Jergenson, one of the men who had attacked Jack. “Helen and Jack and I questioned a lot of small-time hoods, and so did Dan Norton, with the police. We slowly put together a list of people who might have been hanging around with Gus Ronden in those days. Jack’s memories of events that night were jumbled, but we learned that he was taken away from the party in a Bel Air. Based on descriptions I got from one of Gus’s neighbors, and comments made by others, I learned that one of Gus’s cronies was named Lew Hacker, a Hispanic man who drove a Bel Air.”
“He’s one of the ones who beat up Jack?”
“I doubt he had to do anything at all,” O’Connor said, “other than hold Jack while this lummox went to work on him.” He showed me a photo of Jergenson, who indeed looked like a giant.
O’Connor marked a place on the map that was roughly in the area where the car had been buried.
“No wonder you couldn’t figure out where Jack had seen the car. The farm is nowhere near the marsh, and there’s nothing around that spot for miles.”
“Back then, the whole of that area was farming,” he said. “But I wish I had looked a little harder. If I had found the place then…”
“Then you probably would have been buried with the car, too,” I said. “Will the DMV have records of the car registration?”
He shook his head. “Not going back that far.”
I thought about what he had written in the article. “Katy didn’t drive a Buick, right? She drove a little roadster?”
“Right. It was found at Thelma and Barrett Ducane’s home. And the elder Ducanes’ car was at the marina. Todd drove an old Hudson that was in the driveway at his own house. I saw it there that night.”
“So among all the people who might be connected in some way, who owned a Buick?”
He frowned. “I don’t know.”
I pointed to the stack from which he had taken the photo of Jergenson. “Who are these people?”
“Gus Ronden and friends, if you can call them that. I learned who most of them were in the weeks after Jack was attacked.”
He also showed me a couple of photos of Gus Ronden — including a set of mug shots. “I know you said his gun was in the Imperial, and was the one used to kill Jergenson. Was his gun found in the trunk, with his body?”
“No, under the front seat. It wasn’t used to kill Gus — the weapon that was used to kill him hasn’t been found.”
I started looking through the photos. “Some of these look as if they were taken with a telephoto lens.”
“Yes. Anytime I learned of anyone who had been known to hang around Gus Ronden, I tried to get a photo. Some photos I took myself, but the telephotos were ones I talked a former staff photographer into taking. There are some here that were given to me by friends of the subjects, or their families, because that was the only way to get a picture of them at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Ducanes weren’t the only ones who disappeared that night. A number of the people in these photos seemed to vanish from Las Piernas — although I think most of them left voluntarily and with money in their pockets.”
“Show me the ones you couldn’t find.”
He sorted a few out of the stack.
“Who made them disappear?” I asked as I looked through them.
“I can’t say with any certainty.”
I looked up. “But you have a guess.”
“Let’s just say that around this time, Mitch Yeager seemed to distance himself from some of his former friends. But I haven’t a shred of evidence to connect him to anything that went on that night. He himself wasn’t in town that weekend.”
I moved on to a photo of the yacht. “Do you think the Ducanes were ever out on the Sea Dreamer?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what you wrote was that the yacht was abandoned, but there was no sign of violence on it, right?”
“Right.”
I looked up. “So whoever attacked them — let’s call them the pirates — would have to overpower four adults. One with an infant. Okay, that’s possible, I suppose, assuming they came aboard with weapons. But the pirates would have to control the Sea Dreamer, and the Ducanes, and whatever boat the pirates returned to shore on. The pirates had to get the two elder Ducanes overboard, then take Katy and Todd and the baby with them on the getaway boat — no, that’s not right. The infant wasn’t with them. The baby was taken from the house by Ronden. Wait, how does Baby Max Ducane get from the house to the Buick?”
“Maybe Ronden met these pirates somewhere, after he left Todd and Katy’s house,” O’Connor guessed. “Katy and Todd might have been dead already.”
I frowned. “T
hat seems so odd — kidnapping a child just to bury it in the trunk of a car with its parents?”
He shrugged. “Can’t argue with the fact that his remains were found there, and that before he was killed, he was home with the nurse.”
“Okay, so let’s look at what happened to the adults. Let’s say the pirates begin by sending Thelma and Barrett Ducane overboard, too far out to sea on a stormy night for them to swim safely ashore.”
“Okay, I’m with you so far.”
“Then they force Katy and Todd aboard the pirates’ boat. They abandon the Sea Dreamer.”
“So now we have better odds for the pirates, and the reason there’s no blood on the Sea Dreamer.”
“Right.”
“The sailor or sailors kill Katy and Todd, put them in the trunk of the Buick, and meet Ronden, who has killed the baby, and toss the baby’s body in the trunk with his dead parents.” I shuddered. “I think I’m glad Ronden got killed a long time ago.”
“Except that whoever planned all of this is still around.”
I went back to the photos and came across one of a young blonde with her arm around a much older man. She was a pretty woman, but there was a certain hardness in her face that kept her from being more than that.
“The woman who was at the party with the giant?”
“Yes. Betty Bradford. When I showed that photo to Jack, he recognized her as the blonde who put her paws on him just before he got knocked out by Jergenson. She hasn’t been seen by anyone since the night of Katy’s birthday party.”
“You think she’s dead?”
“She was Gus Ronden’s mistress, and she was obviously at the party to set Jack up for a beating or worse. Given what happened to Jergenson and Ronden, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was dead, but I don’t know what became of her, Lew Hacker, or a couple of the others.”
“Who’s with her in this photo?”
“Her sugar daddy before Ronden. She must have been something, too. He’d call me every once in a while, wondering if I had learned what happened to her. He was crazy about her. The old fart even gave her a car.” A mischievous light came into his eyes. “Told me he had pink carpet installed on the floorboards because Betty here liked to wear pink underwear.”
I laughed, then suddenly sobered. “What kind of car did he buy her?”
He looked at his notes. “I don’t think he told me.” He frowned. “And stupidly, I didn’t ask.”
“Is Don Juan here still alive?”
O’Connor shook his head. “Died of a heart attack a few years after I met him.”
“Yesterday, when you were telling me about Gus Ronden, you said you went over to his house here in Las Piernas, right?”
“Yes.”
“His Imperial was gone — was there another car there, one that might have been hers?”
“No.”
“And you said Lew Hacker drove a Bel Air, right?”
He thumbed through his notes. “A turquoise and white Chevy Bel Air. It had been seen over at Gus Ronden’s place late that night — maybe sometime after the murders. Neither Hacker nor the car has been seen since then.”
I went toward the phone.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Calling Lefebvre.”
He didn’t stop me, but I could tell it was killing him not to. When Lefebvre answered, I said, “Phil, did you find any other bodies in the Buick?”
“Three not enough for you?”
“Plenty. Listen — was the carpet on the car’s floorboards pink?”
There was a long silence.
“Phil, you should have said, ‘What lunatic would have pink carpet in a car?’ or something like that, because you’ve just given me my answer.”
“Damn it to hell, if someone in the lab—”
“Not the lab’s fault. Listen, we know who owned that Buick before it was buried.”
O’Connor motioned me to shut up.
“We?” Lefebvre asked.
“O’Connor and I know,” I went on, picking up the phone and dodging O’Connor as he tried to hit the switch hook, “but the Express is going to have to be the first to tell the public who the owner is — understood?”
“And what if it’s not a good idea for the public to know that name just now?”
“Detective Lefebvre, do you want to read the name in tomorrow’s Express, or would you like it now?”
“I have a feeling that I am going to have to grant a favor to hear it.”
“Oh no. I’d just like our… spirit of openness and honesty to continue.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. All right.”
So I told him about Betty Bradford and her boyfriends. “If you hear from her or anyone who might know what became of her, you know where to reach me,” I added.
“I haven’t known you twenty-four hours, and already you are a nuisance.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” I replied, and hung up.
“What did he say?” O’Connor asked.
“That I’m a nuisance.”
O’Connor wholeheartedly agreed with this, and for about ten minutes — while I basically ignored him and thought about cars — he gave me shit about spilling my guts to a cop and promising to hold back a story, at which point I stopped him by saying, “Ronden’s body was the one you found near Lake Arrowhead, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m looking at these photos, and I have to tell you, Gus Ronden looks like a city boy to me. Why the cabin?”
“A meeting place, I’m fairly sure. Somewhere out of the public eye.”
“I wonder. You check to see who Ronden’s neighbors were in Arrowhead?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone from Las Piernas?”
“A few. Thelma and Barrett Ducane had a place. Lillian had two places. One that she and Harold bought. The other…” His voice caught, but he tried to go on. “Lillian had a…” He halted and looked away from me. After a moment he said, “She had a big place up there that had been in her family since the early 1920s. She gave that one to Katy — Katy was born there, so Lillian wanted her to have it for her young family. Katy willed it to Jack.” He told me the story of the will in Katy’s safe.
“Hmm. We’ll have to get back to that. Any other locals?”
He studied his notes, and after a few minutes of tense silence — during which I wasn’t sure if he was looking at the notes or just trying to get past the thought of Lillian’s lost hopes — he suddenly said, “I’ll be damned.”
“Griffin Baer, the guy who planted the Buick on his farm,” I said.
O’Connor nodded slowly, then asked, “How did you know?”
“A guess based on your reaction. If it had been a name that was familiar to you before yesterday or today, you would have seen it when you went looking through the property records in 1958, right?”
“Yes.”
I thought over our progress so far. “Maybe if we run the photo you have of Betty, we’ll hear from someone who has seen her since 1958.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “If she’s alive, I don’t think she’s anywhere near here, though.”
“And maybe we should start trying to find out more about Griffin Baer’s friends and associates.”
“I’d bet anything Lefebvre is already at work on that, but sure.”
“Lydia mentioned the heirs fighting over a property on the beach and the farm, but I don’t recall anything about a mountain property, do you?”
“No. But it could have been sold to someone else since 1958.” He noticed that it was about eleven-thirty. “We’d better work through the rest of this another time. You’ll be late for your date.”
“Not a date,” I said.
He began packing up the box. He even let me help him.
“I think you should ask Wrigley to move Lydia over to news side,” I said. “We could use her help.”
“Lefebvre was right,
” he said sourly. “You’re a menace.”
“Nuisance.”
“Both,” he said, but there was no heat in it.
33
I STOPPED BY MY DESK AND PICKED UP MY SHOULDER BAG, WHICH WEIGHED a ton, because it had the big hardcover library book in it. My intercom buzzed. Geoff, the security guard, told me that a gentleman by the name of Max Ducane was waiting for me.
That made something clear. Admonishing myself to call him Max and not Kyle, I made my way downstairs.
Max Ducane didn’t look as happy as I would have expected a new multimillionaire to be. If anything, he seemed troubled. We made small talk as we walked out of the building. His car was around the corner — a new BMW. “Your first purchase?” I asked.
He nodded. “I had my reasons — or thought I did — but are you embarrassed to ride in it? Is it too ostentatious?”
“For someone with your bucks?”
“Maybe I’ll sell it,” he said, glum again.
Once we were settled inside it, he said, “I made reservations at the Cliffside. Is that all right? If you’d prefer, we can just go to a restaurant near here.”
The suggestion gave me pause, but I thought about the fact that I was now living rent-free, had paid off my bills from the Bakersfield move, and had just put a paycheck in the bank.
“I’ve never eaten at the Cliffside,” I said, not adding that I had never thought of myself as someone who could afford to eat there, “but I’ve always heard that it’s a great place. And it’s a smarter choice for us than anywhere nearby, I think, unless you want half the staff of the Express trying to eavesdrop on us.”
“The Cliffside it is, then.”
We were seated in a private room at the restaurant, which is part of a luxury hotel with stunning ocean views. Our waiter had a manner that suggested he was on loan from a palace somewhere. He seated me, placed a fine linen napkin on my lap with a flourish, and handed me an open menu with a smile. Before I even looked at what was sure to be the cause of a painful chapter in my financial history, I made myself say, “Will there be any difficulty giving us separate checks?”