I had to agree with Lucy’s take on Troy, though I still believed he was concealing something. In any event, my curiosity was still piqued. First, I had real concerns about the circumstances of Judy’s death. Second, why did Troy wait to be fingered before he fled? Surely he knew that his role in the affair would come out sooner or later, so if he was going to hide until matters cooled, why not slip away sooner? He had the whole weekend to affect his escape.
We finished breakfast and lingered over our respective drinks: my second cup of coffee, Lucy’s herbal tea. Day was fully broken. In the Pacific, blue was winning over green as the sky reflected off the water, urged on by the bright morning sunshine.
I paid the check, parrying Lucy’s protestations by reminding her that these were expenses, and she’d eventually get the bill. We stepped out into a morning awash in sunshine. As I reached into my handbag for my sunglasses, my fingers touched my semi-automatic handgun. It seemed out of place in Big Sur, but I had promised my brother never to leave home without it when on business.
The rest of the caffeine kicked in as we walked to the car and I was beginning to feel positively jaunty. Lucy got on Route 1 heading south, back the way we had come.
“Isn’t Santa Cruz the other way?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I want to check out SHR in case he stopped there to crash.”
“SHR?”
“It’s only six miles or so back this way. Troy used to work there and he may have stopped to visit, or even to stay.”
“What is it, though? I mean what do the letters stand for?”
“Oh, sorry. I just assume everybody knows of the Saint Helena Retreat in Big Sur. People come from all over to take classes in Gestalt psychology, meditation, yoga and the like. Corporations send executives there for management training and team-building. They’re a self-contained institute with a hotel, eating facilities and a permanent staff ranging from doctors of psychology to dishwashers. Lot of druggies take the menial jobs in exchange for room and board and enough cash to buy pot, acid, ecstasy, or whatever floats their boat. If you’re gonna spend your life stoned, SHR’s a great place to do it.”
The retreat was perched above the most breathtaking stretch of Pacific coastline I’d ever seen. The ocean was a deep, rolling blue that stretched unbroken to the horizon. The beaches in both directions were dotted with craggy outcrops, streaked with patches of different colors undulating under the warmth of the morning sun.
“By noon it’ll all look different, though still awesome. At sunset it’s another show altogether,” said Lucy, sharing my wonder. “But to business.” She pointed the Honda down a narrow dirt road, carefully executing several hairpin turns. We debouched into a broad parking lot with the ocean on one side and various buildings on the other three sides. “We’ll try the restaurant first. That’s where Troy used to work. He probably still has some friends there.”
We entered a one story, flat-roofed building of slate gray. The staff was clearing away breakfast. A few late starters were scattered about the large, plain dining room nursing their last cup of coffee. Lucy spotted a young staffer she either knew or was about to charm the socks off of. I tagged along, imagining the room full of corporate executives, housewives learning yoga, ex-hippies taking a review course in transcendental meditation, all forced to rub elbows at the long Formica tables where family-style eating was compulsory.
Lucy didn’t know the young man but his socks were off in a moment. Yes, he’d heard of Troy Stanton. No, Troy hadn’t been here. Yes, he was positive because in the communal living arrangements, no one came or went without everyone knowing about it.
Oh, and he was about to go off duty and would Lucy and her friend (me) like to bathe in the hot springs, no clothes required. Lucy said she couldn’t think of anything we’d rather do if only Troy could join us, because her friend (still me) was in love with him. This last ploy, designed to squeeze out any forgotten bits of information, yielded nothing. We left the young man to contemplate us naked in the hot springs as best he could, though I’m sure his imagination would have fallen short in my case.
“He’s got to be at Santa Cruz,” said Lucy, meaning the University of California at Santa Cruz.
We continued our northerly trip on Route 1. The scenery was to die for. We skirted the cliffs overlooking the California Sea Otter Refuge, an expanse of Pacific now punctuated by whitecaps, making the colors yet more vivid by contrast. Our route took us by Castroville—the self-proclaimed artichoke capital of the world—and finally put us in Santa Cruz, a Spanish-founded mission town perched on the northern arc of Monterey Bay.
Lucy drove us through the city, then north into the hills. UCSC lies amid a redwood forest. The architects had taken great care to preserve the natural setting and, despite the necessity for roads and buildings, they had never failed to emphasize the primacy of the wooded areas.
We found some metered parking by a building with the uninspired name of Social Sciences I. Lucy wanted to check out the anthropology departmental office. We climbed to the second floor, walked down a long hallway with various artifacts displayed in floor-to-ceiling glass cases, and passed through a set of double doors at the hallway’s end.
A squeal of recognition greeted Lucy from behind a desk on which rested the nameplate of Annabelle Hinton. I was introduced to “Annie” after the girls had gone through the requisite cheek touching. Annie hadn’t seen Troy but knew he was on campus somewhere. “He bummed a couple of joints off o’ Doug Steele,” she’d heard, “and is going to crash at his place over in Grad Student Housing.”
Annie had heard about Judy, as had the whole department, but no one, apparently, was aware of Troy’s role. Lucy didn’t let on what she knew. She explained to Annie that she’d hired me to investigate the circumstances surrounding Judy’s death, and that I insisted on interviewing Troy. She evaded Annie’s questions deftly. “I just want to know more about what was going on in Judy’s head before I let her go,” explained Lucy.
The girls hugged goodbye. We retrieved the Honda and headed west across campus to Graduate Student Housing. Lucy parked in front of a one-story stucco-fronted apartment building. “We need to find apartment 6A,” she said. Its entrance was off to the side. Some knocking roused a sleepy young man dressed only in a pair of jeans. Doug Steele recognized Lucy and invited us in. Lucy got right to the point.
“Yeah, he’s here. That’s his stuff,” said Doug, flicking a glance at a duffel bag propped against a wall. “He seemed real upset—I guess about Judy. But he seemed anxious, too. He didn’t want to talk, just asked me for a little dope. Said he wanted to sit in Sleepless Hollow and think things out.”
“In where?” I interjected.
“Never mind,” said Lucy. “I’ll explain in a minute. How long ago did he leave?”
“About an hour ago.”
“We’ll go look for him. When he gets back will you tell him I need to talk with him. He’ll understand.” Doug accepted this without any show of curiosity.
“Are you in the mood for a hike?” asked Lucy. There was a pervasive hint of woodiness in the air that was invigorating. A hike didn’t seem like a bad idea. I assumed it would be in search of Troy.
“Sure, let’s go.”
Within ten minutes we were among the redwoods on a well-worn footpath. “Sleepless Hollow is a clearing overlooking a stream,” Lucy explained. “Kids gather there to smoke dope, drop acid, or munch buttons, or do ’shrooms.”
“I thought ecstasy was all the rage nowadays,” I said.
“It’s all the rave,” said Lucy. “Ecstasy is for partying all night. It makes people real social. The all-night ecstasy parties are called raves. The psychedelics like LSD are more suited for all-night contemplation, and that’s what they do in Sleepless Hollow.”
I knew that acid meant LSD. I learned that “buttons” were pieces of peyote cactus containing the psychedelic drug mescaline. “’Shrooms” is short for mushrooms and refers to a species of the fungus containing anot
her psychedelic drug, psilocybin. The “Sleepless,” Lucy explained, is for the insomnia that accompanies the hallucinogenic drug trips, which may last 24 hours. I learned a lot about drugs that summer, and this was my first lesson.
As we trudged deeper into the woods a silence descended. We could no longer hear the sounds of campus life. Only the desultory chirping of a lethargic forest bird, and our own footsteps, broke the perfect stillness of the afternoon. The long shadows cast by the tall trees hinted at an impending twilight, though several hours of daylight remained. Lucy had unconsciously moved closer to me. The vast height of the redwoods now felt oppressive rather than wondrous.
“The trail will cross a stream,” said Lucy, “then there’s a narrow path off to the right that leads to the hollow.” We were descending and the trail soon bottomed out at a little gully with a few scattered puddles. As I picked my way around the water, my peripheral vision caught a movement. I paused to look up the gully to my right.
I’d have made a lousy dentist. They never say things like uh-oh or oops. My uh-oh burst forth spontaneously. Lucy stopped suddenly, grabbed my arm for support, and looked in the direction of my stare. “Oh my God,” she whispered, “Oh dear sweet Jesus, not again.”
Fifty yards away, from a log across the gully, hung a body, the feet turning slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles. “Troy Stanton, I presume,” I muttered under my breath. I broke into a run.
Chapter 6
I sprinted down the gully to the body. I wrapped my arms around his legs just above the knees and lifted with all my might to take weight off his neck. I yelled to Lucy to get the rope. She scrambled up the bank, crawled out on the log above me, and began frantically to untie the knots. I willed her to hurry. Finally the knots came undone. She unlooped the rope from around the log. At the last loop, the rope slipped and Troy’s body slid into my arms. I let him down as gently as my strength would allow, guiding his head to a dry patch of the streambed.
It was my turn to undo knots. The rope was not as deeply embedded in the flesh as I had thought it might be. I got the knots out and freed the rope. On my hands and knees, I straightened his head and tilted it upward to begin resuscitation. But his neck and head didn’t move the way they should have. I let him go. I saw now why there wasn’t the typical bloating of a person who dies from the strangulation of hanging. His neck was broken. He’d apparently jumped off the log, suffering the less agonizing death of a snapped spinal cord.
Lucy was standing beside me. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” It was a rhetorical question.
“His neck’s broken. Wait here, I want to have a look around.” Lucy turned away from the body, sank down on her knees, crossed herself, and began to sob.
I walked some yards up the creek, stepping around the various pools of water that remained from the last time it had flowed. I didn’t find anything of interest. I repeated the venture downstream, walking past Lucy who was still weeping over Troy. While I knew there had been no love lost between them, this was a heart-rending sight.
I climbed up to where Troy had spent the last moments of his life. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Perhaps some clue as to how those moments had passed, or some sign that other people had been present. Sleepless Hollow was little more than a clearing among the redwoods, to which logs had been dragged for seating. Remarkably, the container-empties, paper trash, and other jetsam that often litter the sites of youthful convocations were absent. These were environmentally sensitive druggies.
I found no clues. The ground was too well trafficked to pick out Troy’s footprints, or to determine if anybody had been with him. There was no suicide note, though it occurred to me that I ought to search the body.
With this in mind, I rejoined Lucy who was sitting cross-legged, and dry-eyed now, by the corpse. “What are you doing?” she exclaimed, as I dug my hands into Troy’s pockets.
“Looking for a suicide note,” I replied.
But there was none. I found the usual things: wallet, keys, knife. The contents of the wallet were unremarkable. I put everything back. The investigators would repeat this activity and I preferred that they should remain unaware of my having rifled through the corpse’s trouser pockets.
We jogged out of the woods without encountering a soul. I remembered passing some greenhouses about a half-mile from the trail entrance. We continued our jog, Lucy loping easily alongside me. In a small, temporary building beside the greenhouses, we found an office with a couple of students. We explained briefly and let them give directions to the 911 operator.
“I hope you’re up to answering a lot of questions,” I told Lucy.
“I’ve been there before, remember? I can handle it.” She bit her lower lip. She must have been without sleep for 25 or 30 hours by now, but it didn’t show. Lucy was resilient and it would serve her well.
I was also thinking about Judy’s hanging. I could explain the discrepancy of the position of the bed and the length of the rope. Judy might have first moved the bed under the light fixture, affixed the rope, and kicked the bed back as she hung dying. Or the bed may have moved under the impetus of Lucy’s rescue attempt. It was possible that the EMTs had pushed it back when treating Judy. Even the cops might unwittingly have moved it.
No, it wasn’t the bed that bothered me so much as the white lines. In that, we had the coincidence of the altered fingernails, with no apparent cause, occurring at the time of a suspicious death. Coincidence is a red flag for me. What her fingernails had to do with her death, I hadn’t a clue. That’s what kept me intrigued.
“What are you thinking about?” said Lucy. “You look a million miles away.” From a distance the sounds of sirens floated over the redwoods. They would get louder soon.
“I was thinking about Judy’s fingernails. I was thinking that if it weren’t for them, I’d let it go as a tragic double suicide. Boy wrongs girl. Girl kills self. Boy overcome with grief and guilt. Boy kills self.”
“What about: boy kills girl; boy overcome with fear and guilt; boy kills self same way he killed girl,” rejoined Lucy.
“What about: girl kills self; unknown avenger kills boy in same style,” I said, abashed at the unintended coldness of my voice.
“What about: two young people with their whole lives ahead of them murdered because, because…I don’t know why.” Lucy’s eyes filled with tears.
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. That was insensitive. I don’t mean to be.” I reached out to hug Lucy and we held each other until the black wave of despair that hovered over us passed.
“Let me go think about this,” I said. I walked through the office out the back door. In front of me was the entrance to one of the greenhouses. I slipped under the plastic flap. It was like a North Carolina summer inside, hot and steamy. I walked slowly down a leafy aisle trying to gather my thoughts. Thoughts, like cats, are difficult to herd. I grabbed a stray one anyway. It was about Charles. Not a lusty thought, but a desire for Charles to examine Troy’s body.
The sound of the sirens had peaked and was rapidly winding down. I hurried back to meet the onslaught. We led the various EMT and law enforcement personnel back to “Death Valley,” as I had mentally rechristened Sleepless Hollow. Troy had indeed died of a broken neck caused by hanging. Easy as falling off a log, I thought bitterly.
I answered every question forthrightly. I didn’t bridle at my interrogator’s transparent ploy of asking the same question in ten different ways to check my consistency. My patience paid off when I asked where Troy’s body would be taken. An officer pointed out an official from the Santa Clara County Coroner’s office, who gave me the pertinent names and phone numbers.
It was dusk by the time they had finished. A goodly crowd had assembled. Eventually all but a couple of campus cops departed. They stayed to answer questions from the shocked and dismayed crowd of students. These cops really were connected to the community. Perhaps it’s easier within the confines of a college campus than on the city streets.
Exhaustion finally caught up with Lucy. She was emotionally and physically drained, a picture of misery. I led her to the car and helped her into the passenger seat. She gave me a wan smile, leaned back, and closed her eyes. With Lucy settled, I got out my flip-phone and punched in Charles’s number at home. He picked up on the second ring. “Hi, it’s Dagny.” I explained what had happened. He was warm and concerned and sympathetic, and I needed that. It bolstered my own sagging spirits. “Do you think they’ll let you take a look at Troy? Are medical examiners territorial?”
“Not usually. I’ll call them straightaway. I’m going to ask them not to refrigerate the corpse. I want to check the fingernails.”
“Will the method of death have any effect? He didn’t strangle; his neck was broken.”
“I shouldn’t think so. When are you coming back?”
“I’m feeling okay to drive. If we take the 101, it’ll take about five hours. That’ll put us in around two a.m. I’ll call you at work in the morning, if that’s all right.”
“You’d better have done. Don’t drive if you’re too tired.”
“Okay, I won’t. I’ll call you in the morning from wherever.”
I got back in the car on the driver’s side. Lucy had tilted back the passenger seat and was sound asleep. She’d had the presence of mind to leave the keys in the ignition. We left our names, ranks, and serial numbers with the cops. There was no need to remain in Santa Cruz. I gassed up in the city and made the 300-mile drive in just under five hours. Drowsiness hadn’t been a problem. There was plenty to think about.
One thing I decided to do was to interview Judy’s father in Beverly Hills. He might know something that would shed some light on the deaths. I particularly wanted to know about the “gangsta” boyfriend. I knew something about the L.A. Mafia. In one of his early cases, my brother John had fingered the murderer of a don’s fiancée. Retribution had been swift and sure, leaving John a bit queasy about seeing the justice system circumvented. Troy’s death might be a similar act of vengeance. It wasn’t a gangland modus operandi, but it had a certain eye-for-an-eye flavor to it that might have appealed to an overlord.
The Evil That Men Do Page 6