Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes

by Marcia Muller

  PENNIES ON A DEAD WOMAN’S EYES

  By

  Marcia Muller

  Copyright 1992 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

  Ebook Copyright 2011 by AudioGO. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-60998-617-9

  42 Whitecap Drive

  North Kingstown, RI 02852

  Visit us online at www.audiogo.com

  PART ONE – THE VICTIMS

  CHAPTER ONE

  “At first they were going to kill me. Then they changed their minds and only took away thirty-six years of my life.”

  The older woman was perched beside me on the guardrail of the road leading to the telecommunications tower at the top of Bernal Heights. Wind gusted across the barren hillside and loosened tendrils of her white hair; the pale afternoon sunlight transformed them to a shimmering spiderweb. She stared toward the spires of downtown San Francisco, eyes narrowed against the glare. Smog blanketed the Bay Area today from the eastern hills to the city itself, making the panorama look like an old-time sepia-toned photograph.

  After a moment she added, “Only took away thirty-six years. And my husband. My child. The entire middle of my life.”

  I waited, not wanting to interrupt the flow of her thoughts.

  “And all the time I was innocent,” she said. “They kept me as long as they did because I wouldn’t admit to it. Wouldn’t express remorse or tell them what they wanted to hear. If I hadn’t almost died of a heart attack, I’d still be in prison.”

  I’d expected the claim of innocence, but now that she’d made it, I had no immediate response. I’ve never been one for snap judgments, and I certainly wasn’t going to make one in this case. When I didn’t reply, she faced me, fixed me with an insistent stare. Her eyes were a curious translucent aquamarine, sunken deep in their sockets and edged with pale lashes. I shifted on the guardrail, pulled back slightly.

  The woman, Lis Benedict, and I had climbed the hill from her daughter’s house on one of the steep little streets below. Doctor’s orders to walk vigorously once a day, she’d said, plus the house was small and she couldn’t stand the confinement. In truth, I preferred to talk with her in the open. The murder for which she’d been convicted had been an unusually vicious one involving multiple stabbing and mutilation, and, though old and frail, she had an aggressive, temperamental manner that made me uneasy.

  “Miss McCone,” she said, “you have no idea what it’s like to lose that much of your life.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The worst thing is that you become permanently stuck in the past. This old woman who exists here in the nineteen nineties—this embarrassment and guilty burden for her daughter—she isn’t the real me. The real Lis Benedict is still back in nineteen fifty-six.”

  “And the years you spent in prison?”

  “A bad dream that I’m still waiting to wake from.” She gestured at the cityscape below. Almost all of San Francisco was visible, from Hunters Point to the Golden Gate Bridge. Ironically, one of the few places we couldn’t see was the exclusive Seacliff district south of the bridge, where the murder had been committed.

  “Look out there,” she commanded. “In nineteen fifty-six most of those downtown skyscrapers, including the hideous pyramid, weren’t built yet. So I simply don’t see them. That ugly red tower on Sutro Heights—I ignore it. But once there was a hug oil storage tank on the far side of Potrero Hill; for me it’s still there. Playland-at-the-Beach, Fleishhacker Pool, the City of Paris: the landmarks of my youth are gone. And yet I still see them.

  An unusual mind-set, I thought, but probably not uncommon for newly released prisoners. I considered it for a moment, tried to imagine how it would feel to return to a world that had been altered by a span of nearly four decades.

  She seemed to take my silence for lack of understanding. Thrusting her face close to mine, she asked, “Am I making myself clear?”

  Again I shifted away. “Yes, you are. What would it take to bring you into the present?”

  “I’m not sure anything could.”

  “Then why pursue this?”

  “I told you before, for my daughter’s sake. Judy had begged me and begged me to have my case reinvestigated. I’ve got no resistance left, and I suppose I owe it to her. You see, she was the only one who discovered the evidence they used to convict me. She was only ten years old at the time. The prosecutor, Joseph Stameroff, manipulated her into testifying against me. Later, when her father didn’t want her, Stameroff and his wife adopted her and did their best to turn her totally against me. But Judy always loved me, and reestablished contact when she became an adult. She even dropped the Stameroff name and started using Benedict again. Six weeks ago when the governor commuted my sentence because of my health, she invited me to live with her. This is the only thing she’s ever asked of me. How can I refuse her?”

  “Maybe the best way for both of you to get on with your lives is to let the past go.”

  Emotion mottled her parchment-pale skin. “I wish that were possible. But Judy feels so terribly guilty about her part in what happened to me. She’s repressed most of her memories of the murder and the trial, and she’s spent her whole life running—San Francisco to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to New York, back to San Francisco again. When she finally settled down here, she buried herself in her work. This relationship with your Jack Stuart is the first normal one she’s had that I know of, but even that is connected to my case.”

  Jack Stuart was our criminal-law specialist at All Souls Legal Cooperative. I didn’t know all that much about his relationship with Lis Benedict’s daughter, but what she’d said about Judy’s earlier life didn’t ring true. She’d been an actress, and her career path had taken her from amateur productions in San Francisco to commercials and occasional TV roles in Hollywood to soap operas in New York. She’d once told me she finally got tired of the daily grind of daytime TV and opted to return home, where she’d borrowed money from her wealthy adoptive father and set herself up as a producer, bringing off-Broadway shows to a small downtown theater. Jack had met her at a fund-raiser for an actors’ workshop that she sponsored, and although I’d socialized with them a number of times, I’d seen no indication that their relationship was strongly involved with her mother’s murder conviction. Lis Benedict, I suspected, was overplaying that aspect of Judy’s life, and it made me wonder if she might not be guilty of something less than maternal altruism.

  I said, “So Judy is the only one who wants your case reinvestigated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you also stand to gain from it?”

  She bristled at that. “For your information, Miss McCone, I stand to gain very little. Jack plans to take my case before the Historical Tribunal rather than actually request a new trial.”

  That fact hadn’t come up in my brief conversation with him earlier, and the omission annoyed me. Obviously it was deliberate.

  San Francisco is a city that takes a great deal of pride in its history, and at that time it boasted two quasi-judicial bodies that conducted mock trails before actual residing judges—the Court of Historical Review and the Historical Tribunal. The former scheduled its hearing during the noon hour, when attorneys, often in period costume, argued issues of some importance—was Fatty Arbuckle guilty of the murder for which he was convicted in 1921?—and questions of pure whimsy—was Groucho Marx a genius or just funny? The Historical Tribunal’s proceedings were lengthier, extending an entire weekend, and more serious. Neither, however, had true legal jurisdiction, and I was fairly sure that Jack had neglected to tell me of his intention so as to avoid an argument about whether All Souls’ chief investigator should devote her time to researching an old case for a mock
trial.

  I asked, “Why not go for a new trial?”

  Lis Benedict looked away, seemed to be studying a ship in the channel beyond Hunters Point with great interest. Her pallor was pronounced in the direct sunlight; beneath the flaccid flesh, her bone structure seemed to have crumbled, leaving only a hint of the once-elegant contours of her cheeks and brow. With surprise, I realized she had been striking when young, perhaps even beautiful.

  After a moment she turned to me, pain naked in her aquamarine eyes. “Because I am history, Miss McCone. The Historical Tribunal may rule in my favor, but there will never be any true exoneration for me.”

  I bit my lip, feeing the full force of her hopelessness.

  “Will you help Jack prepare my case, Miss McCone?”

  Not answering, I stared at the smog-shrouded hills across the bay, their contours as blurred as the true facts of a thirty-six-year-old homicide case. This woman, I thought, had been through absolute hell—infinite varieties and refinements of hell that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. What was I to tell her? I’m sorry, but I’ve had a rough time of it this past year, and I can’t risk becoming involved in yet another case where I might get torn up emotionally. I used up all my reserves on other clients, other victims. I’ve got nothing left for you.

  In my peripheral vision I saw Lis Benedict’s hands clench together, gnarled knuckles going white, but she didn’t repeat her request. I wished I could simply agree, relieve her anxiety, but something in me held back. The crime—the vicious slashing and mutilation of her husband’s twenty-one-year-old lover—was absolutely repugnant to me. And much as I pitied Mrs. Benedict, I had to admit that I really didn’t like her. Not well enough, at least, to do battle with Hank Zahn, my nominal boss at All Souls, who would say that I had no business wasting my time and the co-op’s money on such an investigation.

  Finally I said, “Let me think about it over the weekend. We’ll talk again on Monday.”

  The sudden sag of her shoulders told of her disappointment, but she didn’t voice it. She must have become skilled at stifling vain protests during all those years when parole had repeatedly been denied her. “I’ll expect to hear from you then.” She stood, waited for me.

  You go ahead,” I told her. “I want to sit awhile.”

  She shook my hand and moved toward the narrow strip of blacktop that curled between the white telecommunications tower and the access road below. I watched her go: a thin, erect figure clad in a long navy sweater and slacks, walking carefully but proudly, and never looking back.

  When she rounded the curve and disappeared from sight, I got up and crossed the pebbled ground to where the cliff dropped off to the roofs of distant houses. I selected a smooth slab of rock and sat down cross-legged, feeling out of sorts and emotionally stingy.

  Two painful cases in the course of one year had left me professionally burned out, all my zest and caring and passion reduced to ashes. I could feel it even now, sitting here in the sun on a fine spring afternoon: a torpor, a flatness. For six months I’d toed a careful line, creating a work life that was productive, comfortable and safe. But all the while I’d been tensed against an event that would shatter that balance. Whether Lis Benedict was guilty or innocent didn’t matter; the reopening of this long-ago murder case, rife with details that would turn the stomach of the most seasoned homicide investigator, had the dangerous power to do that.

  The Two Penny Murder, as it had come to be called, was a San Francisco legend, on a par with Phoenix’s Trunk Murders and Los Angeles’s Black Dahlia Case. In the early hours of Saturday, June 23, 1956, the badly mutilated body of a post-debutante Cordelia McKittridge was discovered by a gardener in a dovecote on a three-acre estate belonging to the Institute for North American Studies, a think tank dedicated to pondering issues of public policy and national defense. Cordy, as she was called, had literally been hacked to death the night before with a pair of gardening shears. Her body had then been laid out ritualistically, as if it were in a coffin: a final bizarre touch was a penny covering either eye.

  Suspicion naturally centered on the think tank staff, an elite corps of intellectuals recruited from the most prestigious universities in the country. While lofty-minded, they apparently also had their earthy side; at least two were rumored to be having affairs with Cordy, a member of a wealthy family whose fortune went back to the days of the Nevada silver boom. Since her debut at the Winter Cotillion two years before, Cordy had delighted in shocking proper San Francisco society, and the dovecote—a small circular structure with high-beamed rafters, nestled on a wooded bluff above the Pacific—had been the scene of many a tryst. On the night of her death she reportedly had an appointment for a rendezvous with biochemist Vincent Benedict, but Benedict and his colleagues were gathered at a banquet at a financial district restaurant that evening. Prosecuting attorney Joseph Stameroff would later argue that the assignation was a setup engineered by Benedict’s wife, Lisbeth, and that the resulting confrontation had been bloody and final.

  That, anyway, was what the jury at Lis Benedict’s trial had believed. At the time there were rumors of the involvement of people in high places, collusion between the police and the prosecutor’s office, influence brought to bear by the rich and powerful family of the victim–the usual talk that surfaced in high-visibility murder cases that combined society, wealth, power and sex –but in the end no one gave them much credence. Lis Benedict was sentenced to die in the gas chamber, was reprieved at the last hour, and then had her sentence commuted to life in prison. Every time she came up for parole, the former prosecutor and a representative of the McKittridge family’s law firm appeared at the hearing and argued successfully against her release.

  That was virtually all I knew about the Two Penny Murder—facts I’d gleaned from a newspaper update that had run when Mrs. Benedict got out of prison. And the only reason I’d read it in the first place was my connection with Judy. Gruesome murders hold no fascination for me; I’ve seen too much ugliness in my work as a private investigator to relish gory accounts of true crime, current or historical. I supposed I could take a look at the trial transcript over the weekend. . .

  For a moment I stopped thinking about it, emptied my mind, and tipped my head back, feeling the sun on my face. I’d often climbed up here to the little-used public land at the tip of Bernal Heights during my years at All Souls, some dozen steep blocks away on the northwestern incline. A barren russet outcropping, it towers above the ill-assorted small dwellings that crowd the lower slopes, standing fast in the face of nature’s worst assaults. While much of the city is built on sandy fill that shifts or even liquefies during an earth tremor, this hill is bedrock; while other areas are easily altered by wind, rain, or tide, the elements have little impact here. I suppose a good part of the place’s appeal for me is its homely permanence, which seems to embody a refreshing honesty and truth.

  Honesty and truth: commodities that are generally in short supply for an investigator. How much of either was Lis Benedict offering me? The woman seemed sincere, but so do many murderers who claim innocence of the crimes for which they’ve been imprisoned. My conversation with her had been too brief to allow me to take an accurate reading.

  Finally I got up, brushed off the seat of my jeans, and started downhill. At the far side of the access road I angled along several blocks to where I’d left my car on Wool Street near Judy’s house. The homes I passed were an odd mixture: frame cottages, stucco row houses, small apartment buildings, classic Victorians. Many had vegetable gardens; a few had illegal chicken coops. There is a hint of the rural about Bernal Heights, which may be why it attracts couples with young children, newly arrived émigrés from Mexico, aging and nostalgic hippies, and oddball institutions such as All Souls.

  As I rounded the corner of Wool Street, I saw a crowd in front of Judy’s white Victorian. Concerned, I quickened my pace. The crowd –not large, since it was midafternoon on a Friday—milled about, murmuring in subdued voices. Lis Benedict stood jus
t inside the low picket fence staring at the house’s façade. As I went closer, I saw words spray-painted in red on the clapboard: Murdered. . . Killer . . . Bucher. They hadn’t gotten all the spellings right, but the meaning was clear.

  I pushed through the gawkers and touched Mrs. Benedict’s arm. “Who did this? Did you see?”

  She shook her head, unable to look away from the words. The paint was so fresh that it still dribbled. It speckled the white clapboard like a huge blood-spatter pattern. Judy was going to be horrified when she returned from the theater and saw this.

  I turned and shouted to the people behind us, “Did anyone see who did this?”

  More murmurs. Then a man in coveralls said, “A kid, looked Mexican. Ran off that way.” He pointed downhill toward Mission Street. “Shouldn’t be hard to find him. He’s got that red enamel all over his hands.”

  I turned back to Lis Benedict. She hadn’t moved. Her shoulders slumped, and the proud tilt of her head had vanished. I touched her arm again: slowly she looked at me. Her eyes were dull, their translucence muddled.

  She said, “They warned me.”

  “Who did?”

  “Voices on the phone.”

  “You’ve received threatening phone calls? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She swallowed, took a deep breath, grasped my hand to steady herself. “I wanted you to decide whether or not to help me on the merits of my case alone. If I’d mentioned the calls, it would have sounded as if I were begging. I never beg. My life has been demeaning enough without stooping to that.”

  Pride, stubborn pride. It could get you hurt, even killed. “When did you receive the calls?”

  “They started on Tuesday, have been coming regularly ever since.”

  “How often?”

  “Two or three times a day.”

  “What do they say?”

  “The same as it does up there.” She motioned at the house. “Even worse.”