Flesh and Blood

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “I didn't see the harm.”

  “No harm done,” he said. “All this kid saw was some skin shots, he doesn't know they were for Duke.”

  “Shots hidden in an issue of Duke. Tony Duke has a thing for young blondes, doesn't he? Both Shawna and Lauren fit that bill.”

  “I'm sure Tony Duke has blondes lining up to be Treat of the Month, but his rep is for screwing them, not killing them. And why would he go for a call girl like Lauren?”

  “No accounting for taste,” I said.

  “I suppose, but some college kid's screenplay fantasies and Gretchen taking a drive to Malibu doesn't exactly get my heart beating.”

  “Malibu's where Lauren placed those calls to the pay phone.”

  “Exactly. You see Tony leaving Xanadu to take calls at a gas station?”

  “Can you tolerate more hypotheses?”

  “Sure, hit me.”

  I gave him my older-man theory, rambled about power and dominance, the vulnerability that Shawna and Lauren might've shared.

  “Tony Duke,” I ended. “Talk about an older man.”

  “So you're trading Dr. Dugger for the Sultan of Skin?”

  “I adapt to changing circumstance. Fifty plus thousand in Lauren's account would be chump change for Duke. He'd also have a good reason to want her laptop.”

  Milo didn't reply. In the background a siren wail climbed like a slide trombone solo, then dopplered into silence.

  “Tony Duke,” he finally said. “Christ, I hope you're wrong. That's just what I need.”

  “What's that?”

  “Big game, small gun.”

  18

  FOR FORTY YEARS Tony Duke had preached the gospel of meaning through pleasure, converting a generation and scooping millions from the collection plate.

  The easy life was his creed. For forty years every issue of Duke had splayed that dogma above the masthead.

  Over four decades Duke pictorials had grown a bit more daring, but the magazine's format hadn't changed much since its first issue: golden-toned, milk-fed female nudity personified by the Treat of the Month, combined with suggestive cartoons, big-brotherly advice on dress, drink, and the acquisition of toys, token ventures into political journalism.

  When Duke published his maiden issue, photographic essays of bare breasts, pouting lips, and willing thighs were nothing new. Pinup calendars had been gas station fixtures for years, and “nature pictorials” had occupied a stable market niche since the invention of the camera. But all that was under-the-counter stuff, supposedly for guys in raincoats and lowered fedoras— sex as dirty, in the finest American tradition. Marc Anthony Duke's revolutionary act had been to veneer the skin rag with respectability. Now Suburban Dad could purchase T & A at the corner newsstand and be regarded as classy rather than creepy.

  With its winking scamp logo and gloriously uddered, fresh-faced models, Duke magazine had been a major force in the crumbling of sexual censorship barriers, and Tony Duke had fought his share of legal battles. But his victories in court proved, ultimately, to be market-share defeats as each landmark decision allowed successively raunchier publications to achieve legitimacy. Now, in a world where hard-core porn rentals were the number-one video-store commodity, Duke's airbrushed sensibilities seemed almost quaint. When Tony Duke hit the papers these days, it was usually because he'd thrown a fund-raiser for some worthy cause.

  All this and whatever else I thought I knew about him had been gleaned from the papers: California farm boy morphed to starving bookkeeper to failed Hollywood scriptwriter to the author of a dozen forgettable science fiction paperbacks, then finally to head of the gutsy publishing venture that had earned him twenty beachfront acres and the kinds of toys his readers could only dream about. But the papers printed what you gave them, and no doubt Duke employed a fleet of publicists.

  He had to be what— seventy, by now?

  Older man.

  As far as I knew he'd never been implicated in anything violent. On the contrary, he had a reputation as someone who genuinely loved women. Years ago I'd caught the tail end of a televised interview with him— some biographical feature on a network that deluded itself as substantive. Duke had come across still boyish, if a bit frail. A small, narrow-shouldered, goateed, ludicrously tanned elf of a man with an easy-to-listen-to drawl and friendly brown eyes.

  Small brown face under a steel-hued hairpiece. Your eccentric favorite uncle, on shore leave from his latest jaunt to locales exotiques, brimming with ribald anecdotes, naughty jokes, and the unspoken promise that he might, one day, take you with him.

  As I watched the steaks sizzle, I continued to wonder. About Marc Anthony Duke and Lauren Teague and Shawna Yeager.

  A few years ago, when our house was being rebuilt, Robin and I had rented on the beach in western Malibu. During that year I must've zipped past the Duke estate hundreds of times, never thinking about what went on behind those foliage-shielded walls. I had only the faintest memory of a green expanse: palms and pines, banks of devil ivy, geraniums, rubber plants. The gate that had admitted Gretchen Stengel.

  Tony Duke had made a fortune knocking down barriers, but he hid behind high walls. Milo was right: If Duke was involved it was a whole new game.

  * * *

  I made a salad, mixed iced tea, set the table, tempted Spike outside with porterhouse, and bolted the dog door. Robin came home just as I had everything in place. She looked tired and pale, and her hair was half tied, half loose. A beautiful woman anyway, but I wondered if Tony Duke would've noticed.

  “This is wonderful,” she said, washing up and pecking my cheek.

  I took her in my arms, kissed her face, rubbed her back, ran my fingers through her curls, gently, so as not to snag. The sounds she made and the way she melted against me said I was doing okay, even though most of my concentration was spent blocking out the faces of dead people.

  She found a bottle of cabernet that I'd forgotten about, and as we ate and drank my appetite returned. We did the dishes together, took a walk without Spike, holding hands, not saying much. The night was cold enough for visible breath, and the smog had traveled somewhere else. Winter, California style, was finally arriving. I'd check the garden tomorrow, maybe cut back some roses, see what the pond needed. Basic stuff. Concrete stuff. Time to get away from being useless.

  When we got back home I got another peck on the cheek and a tired smile. Robin got into bed with a stack of magazines, and I went to my office and switched on the computer.

  * * *

  Marc Anthony Duke's name pulled up sixteen quick hits, mostly press pieces and the official Duke magazine website, decorated with grinning portraits of the man himself and thumbnails of pastied and G-stringed Treats Through the Years that could be enlarged with a click.

  I scanned for a while, learned only one new fact: Two years ago Tony Duke had gone into “ultraleisure mode” and passed the day-to-day operations of Duke Enterprises to his daughter Anita. The accompanying PR photo showed an indigo-robed Duke posing proudly with a sternly attractive brunette in her thirties wearing a strapless black evening gown. Anita Duke was taller than her father by several inches, a shapely woman with smooth, bronze shoulders and nice teeth displayed by a tentative smile that appeared anything but happy. Described as “an investment banker with a Columbia University MBA and ten years’ experience on Wall Street.” “These will be years of market growth and consumer-sensitivity for Duke Enterprises,” she predicted. “Soon we'll be moving full-force into cyberspace.”

  I searched for something less laudatory, found a couple of Bible Belt organizations listing Duke Enterprises as “a tool of Satan.” Then some paeans from fans— do-it-yourself stuff, with Tony Duke featured high on most-admired lists. From one of these I learned that Duke had been widowed two decades ago and remained single until four years ago, when he'd hooked up with a former Treat with the improbable name of Sylvana Spring (“the girl who tamed Tony!”), with whom he'd sired two children.

  Any taming, tho
ugh, had been short-lived. Duke and Sylvana had concluded an “amiable divorce” last year. The kids were proof, claimed the admiring webmaster, of “Tony Duke's Eternal Virility— eat your heart out, Viagra-chompers! Beautiful Sylvan and the rugrats still live in a guesthouse right there on T.D.'s palatial Malibu spreadorama! The Man is ultra-generous and too-cool!”

  Then pages of downloaded cartoons and centerfold photos, copyright infringements I supposed Duke tolerated. One unlined, doe-eyed, pouty-lipped face after another, sponge-rubber buttocks, geometrically barbered pubic triangles. And breasts. Peach-toned and pink-nippled, identically upswept, pneumatic in a way that Nature had never conceived.

  I logged off, returned to the bedroom. Night chill had seeped in, and Robin was wearing a flannel nightgown, buttoned to the neck.

  “I was just about to get you,” she said. “Ready to go to sleep? I am.”

  Her hair was pinned, and she'd scrubbed her face clear of makeup. Her eyes still looked tired, and her lips were chapped. A tiny pimple that I hadn't noticed before had sprouted on her forehead. I got into bed, rolled next to her, smelled toothpaste breath, the merest eau of perspiration. As she began to stretch away from me, I kissed her, touched her.

  She said, “I look horrid— wasn't planning to . . .”

  Then she sighed, hiked up her gown, drew me to her, held me tight. She was wet when I entered her, came quickly, chewed on my nipple, and rocked the pleasure out of me. When her body peeled away from mine, she was already asleep. I lay there on my back, feeling the thump of my heartbeat, feeling alone. She began snoring lightly, and her hand snaked across the bedsheet, touched my arm, found my index finger. Her pinkie curled around the digit and held on.

  Deep in slumber but gripping my finger hard.

  Not daring to move, I waited for sleep.

  * * *

  I awoke the next morning knowing I'd dreamed but struggling to retrieve the details. Something to do with a party . . . palm trees, blue water, naked flesh. Or was I imagining that?

  I took a very hot shower, dressed, made coffee, and brought it to Robin's studio. She was goggled and gowned, about to enter the spray booth with a new mandolin, feigned patience when she saw me. After a few minutes of sipping and chat, I let her be and returned to the house. Thinking about parties again. Tony Duke's lifestyle. The kind of opulence that might attract a girl like Lauren. Would be even more of a lure for the Olive Queen of Santo Leon. Had Shawna Yeager covered for a bash at the Duke estate with a story about going to the library?

  I drove to the U, hurried into the research library, checked out spools of L.A. Times microfiche, and searched the social calendar for mention of any parties thrown by Tony Duke over the last year.

  Nothing.

  Given Duke's reputation that seemed odd, and I retrieved the previous year's worth of spools, covered another six months with still no mention of bashes or fund-raisers at the Malibu estate.

  Maybe there were certain parties Tony Duke kept out of the papers. Or maybe, finding himself a father again, the King of the Easy Life had changed his ways.

  I kept searching, finally found something nearly two years ago. A “star-studded” benefit for a free speech organization that had earned Duke two paragraphs in the social pages and was accompanied by photos of The Man, gaggles of Treats, and various screen-famous faces— a plastic surgeon's bragging session. Anita Duke, too, standing behind her father wearing a conservative dark pantsuit and that same edgy smile as she looked down at her father.

  His attention was elsewhere. He held two children in his lap— a plump-looking baby not more than a few months old and a two-year-old boy with a chubby face surrounded by cloud puffs of vanilla ringlets. No lounging duds for Dad— he wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. The toupee was gone, and his bald head was exposed in full, iridescent glory. Older and smaller than in the official Duke shots— as captured by the paper, The Man resembled nothing but a model grandfather.

  “Paternal pride” read the caption. “Magazine mogul Marc Anthony Duke relaxes with daughter Anita and her half-sibs, tykes Baxter and Sage. Only the absence of son Ben prevented the evening from being a complete family reunion.”

  Son Ben.

  I hurried out of the microfilm room, raced to the reference stacks, found Who's Who, pulled out the most recent copy, and paged furiously to the D's.

  Duke, Marc Anthony (Dugger, Marvin George) b. Apr. 15, 1929. par. George T. and Margaret L. (Baxter). m. Lenore Mancher, June 2, 1953 (dec. 1979) children: Benjamin J., Anita C. m. Sylvana Spring (Cheryl Soames) June 2, 1995 (div.) children: Baxter M., Sage A. . . .

  The rest didn't concern me.

  Son Ben.

  Professor Monique Lindquist's laughter rang in my ears.

  The sex angle— if that's what you want from Ben Dugger . . .

  Dugger dressed and drove below his means, used his father's real surname, eschewed the camera. Casting off notoriety? Rejecting what his father stood for? Both?

  Now his research made sense.

  The mathematics of intimacy.

  Reducing sweat and libido to grids and statistics.

  The anti-Duke. Sins of the fathers . . . bearing some kind of guilt— had his church visit been part of a chronic quest for absolution?

  An older man. Filling the Daddy void.

  When I'd learned about Gretchen's visit to his father's estate, I'd veered away from Dugger, but now I was right back where I'd started.

  Maybe it hadn't been Tony Gretchen had come to see.

  Shawna Yeager posing for Duke magazine. Lauren, reminding herself to call “Dr. D.” to talk about intimacy. Getting a job with Dugger, spending time with him in Newport Beach coffee shops— meals Dugger claimed were no more than vocational guidance. Dugger blushing and sweating as he insisted intimacy hadn't crept into his time with Lauren. But pseudointimacy was exactly what Lauren had sold, and a man could be forgiven for failing to see the truth.

  Self-delusion . . . Lauren, shot to death. Michelle, shot to death, maybe because Lauren had confided in her. Shawna, posing for someone who claimed to be working for Duke.

  There had to be a syllogism floating somewhere in that tangle.

  I had bad news for Milo.

  19

  SHORTLY AFTER FIVE P.M. he called me back.

  “Official confirmation on Michelle and the boyfriend.” No triumph in his voice. “His full name's Bartley Lance Flowrig. Bachelor's degree in shoplifting and burglary, mostly real dumb stuff, no violence. Maybe he and Michelle got desperate and tried to break into the wrong house. Neighborhood like theirs, that could be dangerous.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But guess what?”

  He took the news of Ben Dugger's lineage more calmly than I expected.

  “So maybe Lauren told Michelle about something Dugger would like kept private— a nasty kink, something at odds with his nice-guy image. Something that could damage him as well as his dad. Or expose the link to his dad— he seems to be doing his best to hide his family background. Once Lauren was gone, Michelle and Lance decided to profit from the information. Gretchen knew you'd get to them eventually, tipped off someone at the Duke estate.”

  He let out a long, low whoosh of resignation, then laughed. “Tony Duke and Dr. Ben. No way I'd have made that connection.”

  “That's exactly the point. I picked up some kind of sexual hang-up, and I'll bet I was right. Dugger wears frayed shirts, distances himself from his father and everything his father stands for. But maybe it's a case of protesting too much.”

  “Running from his own quirks . . . So you're back on Junior. What about Senior?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “But at this point that visit to Newport doesn't seem like a bad idea. Not that Dugger won't be prepared— he just about invited you to drop by. But throw out Shawna's name at a strategic moment and see how he reacts. And check out the staff— see if anyone looks antsy.”

  “Shawna,” he said. “Who might've posed for Duke.”

  “Or s
omeone she believed was working for Duke. What if Dugger only used his connections once in a while— to attract young, gorgeous blondes. Not a bad ploy at all, especially when he had a genuine link to back it up, could throw in a visit to the estate. And maybe he scammed Lauren too. Despite her years on the street, she could've been seduced by big bucks. Maybe those calls to Malibu were hooking up with Junior, his not wanting her to call him at either his home or Daddy's. Someone as nondescript as Dugger could've used that phone booth without being noticed.”

  “A rich kid,” he said. “Pretending to be regular folks . . . Okay, let's do Newport tomorrow. I love Orange County— how can you not dig a place that names its airport after John Wayne?”

  “Sure you want me along?” I said. “To Dugger I'm the bad cop.”