Bannerman's Law

by John R. Maxim

  It was not that he had reason to think his phone might be wired, except that this is Washington and you never know. What he didn't want was anyone in government, ever again, using his name and Bannerman's in the same sentence. “Irwin . . . you know Bannerman, right? The guy trusts you, right? We have this problem and we wonder if you could . . . ”

  “Absolutely not. Go away. Fuck off.''

  “Look. Hear us out. All we want is . . .”

  “No, you look. I am an officer of the law. I am sworn to uphold the law. You ever hear of it? It's called the Constitution. Nowhere does it say, if this doesn't work, try Bannerman’s law.”

  “Yeah, well, we hear Bannerman’`s law worked for you, Irwin. Last year in New York. We hear about a Jamaican gang that's now mostly dead after you sent him a hit list. We hear you were also feeding names to Lesko and the Bruggs who were then leaving bodies all over Zurich. We hear you're . . . ”

  “I don 't know what you 're talking about.''

  “Bullshit.''

  “Anyway, the New York thing was personal.”

  “‘But it was a win, Irwin. We need a win.''

  “Out. Leave me alone.”

  All this boiled in his mind as he drove to Peoples Drug. He practiced saying no. No matter what it was. Even if Bannerman just had something for him, no strings. There were always strings.

  It came as a relief, therefore, and it caught him unaware, that all it was was the murder of Carla Benedict's younger sister. Thinking that way, in those terms, also left him feeling guilty. Yes, he was sorry to hear it. Yes, he'd make some calls to see what the FBI had. The law's the law, but a creep who kills young women just to see them die is something else. God should be so good that Bannerman got his hands on the fucker and locked him in a room with Carla. She'd take two days with him.

  Bannerman’ s law.

  Yes, he promised. He'd find out what he could.

  12

  “Nellie? How many, like me, have you seen here?”

  “Like you? None, I think. You're very nice.”

  ”I think you're nice, too. But I mean the special guests. The ones in the north wing.”

  She thought for a moment. “Over the years . . . hundreds, I suppose.”

  Barbara closed one eye, doubtfully.

  “In the beginning, I was sick. I don't remember much. But since then, yes. Hundreds.”

  Barbara made a mental note to ask Carleton Dunville. Claim idle curiosity, although he probably wouldn't tell her. Nellie Dameon appeared to read her mind.

  “Carleton, the young one, keeps lists of them. I think they all send money and some come back. He kept the lists in his desk, but not now.”

  Barbara leaned forward. “How would you know that, Nellie?”

  “We used to hear them arguing. Carleton found Henry looking at them. Now Carleton won't let him see them at all. He keeps them in his safe.”

  It was almost too much to absorb.

  The numbers of people who had passed through Sur La Mer, going on to new lives. And how much this old woman knew.

  Barbara was inclined to doubt much of what she said. Consider the source. And yet, in a crazy way, it made sense. The members, it seemed, were no more than props. They were kept there, to legitimize Sur La Mer. And they were, all of them, probably insane. Nellie as well, notwithstanding that Barbara was becoming fond of her. It seemed entirely likely that, over the years, many a careless remark was made in the hearing of one or more of these sick old men and women, part of the furniture, by people who saw only their vacant stares and eccentricities and assumed that nobody was home.

  She would have assumed that as well.

  They watched another film, Polly of the Follies with Constance Talmadge, made in 1922. Barbara inserted the cassette. The machine, she noted, was strictly a player. Unlike the one in her suite, it had no television function. Looking around the room, she saw no newspapers. Only a stack of old magazines in plastic covers. They were old fan magazines. Photoplay Silver Screen, and a few vintage copies of Time.

  “Nellie, what's today's date?”

  “It's Monday.”

  ”I mean, the exact date.”

  ”I don't know.”

  “Do you know what year it is?”

  “No.”

  “Don't you even wonder.”

  “Barbara, it doesn't matter here. Watch the movie.”

  “I'd better go,” Barbara said. A Tiffany clock had just chimed two. She opened the curtains slightly, watching for the guard to pass on his rounds. “I'd like to come again,” she said, turning.

  “Do you like movies? We have shelves and shelves of them.”

  “Could we watch one of yours?”

  Nellie blushed. “That's nice. Thank you.”

  “Could I bring my husband? You'd like him.”

  She hesitated. “Just you, I think, for now.”

  “May I tell him about you?”

  Nellie smiled. The eyes were pleased that she had asked. “But no one else?”

  ”I promise.” Barbara reached to ease the window open. She paused, suddenly frowning. A part of her could still barely believe that this visit had happened. “Nellie?” She turned again. “Does anyone else know you can talk?”

  “The members do. Some of them. And a girl who came to see me.”

  “What girl?”

  “She came yesterday. To my bench. She's going to help me find my children.”

  “You. . . you have children?”

  “Two that I remember. Harland says I have four but Harland says a lot of things that aren't so.”

  “Who is Harland?”

  “You've seen him. In a yachting costume. He goes sailing every morning.”

  Barbara had seen him. On the far side of the lawn. The magic bench, in his case, must be his wheelchair. Barbara wanted to ask about these children Nellie seemed to think she had but an alarm, deep within her brain, had begun to buzz.

  “This girl,” she asked quietly, “is she one of the staff?”

  Nellie shook her head. “Just a fan. She came up through the trees.”

  The alarm bleated. “Or a reporter? Could she have been a reporter?’'

  Nellie heard the low intensity behind the question and she seemed to understand Barbara's concern. She reached a reassuring hand. “I'm sure that she isn't. But I'll ask her when she visits again.”

  Alan, even more than she, could scarcely believe all that Barbara had learned from this old actress who was thought to be an hysterical mute and hopelessly insane. But, like Barbara, his most urgent concern was the girl who had come up through the trees. If she existed at all.

  It appeared that she did. Nellie Dameon even got her name. Lisa something. Benson . . . Bickford. Nellie could not quite recall.

  She remembered, however, that the girl had a camera. And Alan Weinberg had remembered that at the approximate time of this visit, he and his wife had been out on the terrace, sipping coffee, in defiance of Henry Dunville's rules. They soon went back inside but only because their coffee was cold and because the Ruiz woman came out to say that a doctor from the Motion Picture Relief Association had just entered the main gate. Still, this girl, this Lisa, could well have photographed them.

  Alan now remembered an incident of that morning that had made no great impression on him at the time. The young doctor—his name was Feldman—came once each month to check medical records and give routine physicals. Alan had overheard him complaining to Henry, angrily, about Henry's “guests” bothering the members. Henry had seemed confused. He knew that his only guests were the Weinbergs and they had gone nowhere near the old actress or the blind painter. Although the two men clearly despised each other, Henry claimed innocence. He promised to look into it. Minutes later, he heard Henry shouting at his chief of security, a surly goon named Darby, who then rushed out of Henry's office.

  Yes, he thought. Someone had apparently been there.

  “They might have her already,” he said to Barbara. “Darby might have grabbed
her when she came down through the trees.”

  Barbara shook her head. “They'd want to know who she is first. They'd wait. Even Henry would know better than to grab a reporter ... if that's what she is.”

  Alan frowned beneath his mask of bandages^ He envisioned a grainy photograph of himself and his wife on the cover of some supermarket tabloid. Alien Visitors at California Asylum? or Hitler Alive in Movie Madhouse.

  “I'd better ask Henry about her,” he said.

  “You can't say Nellie spoke to me.”

  ”I won't have to.” It was enough that he'd witnessed that scene with young Dr. Feldman.

  It had taken some persuasion and the encounter had not improved their relationship. But Henry, in the end, acknowledged that there had been an intruder.

  They know who she is, he said, and she's not a reporter. Merely a student. Her only interest seems to have been photographing the house and meeting Nellie Dameon. She is being attended to and Nellie Dameon is to be ... examined.

  “Examining that old woman,” Weinberg told his wife, “will probably involve drugs. We don't want him finding out that she can talk, and especially the things she told you.”

  “How do we stop him? We can't move in with her.”

  “You might have to,” he said. “For now, it's time that I met her. Henry has to know that we're her friends.”

  Barbara understood. Henry Dunville was afraid of them already. He might not risk forcing a confrontation without Carleton here to back him up. The flip side was that he would surely wonder about their sudden interest. But Barbara could handle that. She would simply tell him that there was nothing sudden about it. She had been sneaking into Nellie's suite for some time. Watching movies. Because Alan snored.

  “What about that girl?” she asked. “What will they do to her?”

  “What I'd do, I imagine. Give her something else to think about.”

  Barbara understood that as well. He would not hurt her. Not if she meant them no harm. But he would certainly frighten her.

  That afternoon, the thug, Darby, sent by Henry to fetch Nellie Dameon found Barbara Weinberg with her, watching movies. Barbara told him to go away. He returned with the Ruiz woman but Barbara, by that time, had braced a chair against the door that locked only from the outside.

  Ruiz returned with Henry Dunville, this time to the casement window. He demanded an explanation. Barbara confessed to having been coming there for weeks. She claimed to be a fan of silent films and of Nellie Dameon in particular. She said that, given time, she thinks she can get Nellie to speak.

  Henry reacted as she had hoped. He ridiculed her presumption that she could succeed where psychiatrists had failed. He chastised her for breaking the rules. He said all that she had accomplished was the punishment of Nellie Dameon and a substantial fine for herself.

  “Punishment?” In her mind, she thanked Henry Dunville for using that word. ”I can't allow that, Henry,” she said.

  “Neither can I,” said Alan Weinberg who appeared at the window behind Henry and Ruiz, and placed his arms around their shoulders.

  All the rest of that week, they stayed close to Nellie Dameon. They attended no classes. They brought her, on the first night, to their suite in that part of the chateau she had never before seen. She seemed uncomfortable there. She would not speak, not even to Barbara.

  A phone call came from Carleton, the younger, insisting that this foolishness stop at once. Henry had reached him, complained to him, threatened to use force. Carleton, aware that force would surely result in loss of life, forbade it but he did demand an explanation from Alan Weinberg.

  Weinberg was ready for him. He told Carleton of Henry's reputation. That he had abused and mistreated members in the past. That he mocked them and played cruel tricks on them. That he, and the lesbian, Ruiz, were known to demand sexual favors of female staff.

  He had heard no such things. They were strictly guesses, based on Weinberg's intuitive assessment of Henry, intended to persuade Carleton that his concern for Nellie's well-being had substance, if only in his own mind. But the long silence on Carleton’ s end, the lack of argument, convinced him that his intuition was at least in part correct. Carleton, disgust now evident in his voice, said that he would speak to his half-brother and that he would deal with this situation on his return ten days hence. He would instruct Henry, in the meantime, to avoid any escalation of tensions. He asked Weinberg to do the same. Weinberg said that he would as long as Henry and his guards kept their distance. It was Weinberg’ s impression, after hanging up the phone, that Carleton had been told nothing of last Sunday's intruder.

  The impasse went on. They returned Nellie to her quarters—to her world, they now realized—but still she did not speak. They watched movies with her, dined with her, and they took her each¯ morning to her magic bench, retiring thereafter to a respectful distance. Nellie's passivity was such that Barbara almost began to wonder whether their conversation of the preceding Monday night had been a dream. Or, possibly, as Alan Weinberg suggested, the old woman's periods of lucidity were rare. That, he said, might serve to explain how she'd gone undetected so long. But on Friday afternoon, as Barbara selected a film, she spoke.

  “What day is it?” she asked softly.

  “Nellie?” Barbara, startled, rushed to her side.

  “I've been away,” she said.

  “Are you ... all right?”

  She nodded, and smiled. “We went sailing,” she said.

  “Um . . . who did?” Weinberg asked.

  The old woman turned at the sound of his voice. She saw the mask of bandages, the single eye. Her tiny chest heaved as if she might scream.

  Barbara reached for her, taking her head, turning it so that Nellie looked into her eyes. “That's Alan,” she told her. “He's been with us ... since you left.” Barbara threw a glance at her husband. Her expression said I forgot to tell you this part.

  She stayed with them, in the present, all that evening. Alan did his best to put her at ease, a task made more difficult because she could not see his face. But she could hear his voice, kept low and soft with a slight German accent, and she could see the affectionate touching between her two visitors.

  Mostly he listened, as Barbara, in bits and pieces, got her to repeat many of the things she had said before. Alan pressed her only once—on the subject of Carleton Dunville's safe—and she promptly withdrew. Thereafter, he resolved to say little lest he disturb what he thought to be the delicate thread of her sanity. Rather, he leafed through her scrapbooks, pretending interest in them at first but the interest quickly became genuine. He asked her, during a silence, if he might see one of her early films. He pointed to a publicity still from The Hun Within. Barbara had mentioned that title, joking that it could have been about him within his mask. Nellie Dameon seemed pleased that he knew it. She would try to find it for him, she said.

  The next morning, seated on her bench, she was gone again. Barbara wondered where this time. Perhaps to a premiere in New York, going to Jack & Charley's 21 Club afterward, getting a standing ovation as she entered, meeting Dorothy Parker there. Perhaps even a weekend tryst with one of the great screen lovers. Valentino or John Gilbert.

  They stayed with her all that day and through Saturday night. She ate, dressed and undressed without help but in the manner of a sleepwalker.

  One Sunday morning, as they prepared to return with her to her bench, Henry Dunville appeared outside the door to Nellie's rooms. In place of his normal state of seething truculence, Henry appeared conciliatory and a bit breathless. He explained his behavior, through a door that remained closed, to a suspicious Alan Weinberg. Young Dr. Feldman, he said, was at the gate demanding to see another of the members and threatening a court order if he was denied entrance. He asked that Nellie be allowed to go to her bench as usual while they stayed out of sight. She would be returned to them as soon as the doctor departed.

  Alan Weinberg, of course, refused. They would stay together, he said, but they would re
main in her quarters. He could not see the smile that spread across Henry's face.

  Nearly five hours passed before he learned the truth. There had been no visit from Dr. Feldman. But the young girl, Lisa, had come again. She had been captured, drugged, questioned, her apartment looted. Henry, pleased with himself, could not resist gloating. He sent Ruiz to get Weinberg.

  Within an hour after that, the girl, Lisa Benedict, was dead. Henry Dunville had no eyes. Two guards had been taken. The safe had been entered. By late afternoon an accommodation, however tenuous, had been reached with Carleton Dunville the younger.

  Thirty-six hours would pass before Alan Weinberg learned what had been done with the body of the young girl who had heard Nellie Dameon speak and who had wanted nothing more than to hear her speak again.

  It was not a bad idea, he supposed. Deflecting blame on Los Angeles 's latest serial killer. Still, that man, Hickey, had butchered her. It sickened him. And he saw in his wife's eyes that one day, given a chance, she would gladly kill Hickey for what he had done, and Carleton Dunville as well, if the idea had been his.

  13

  His full name was Sumner Todd Dommerich. He liked having three last names. It made him feel special. What he didn't like was being called just Todd. It was too close to Toad. Toad is what his parents used to call him when they were drunk or high. Before he made them stop laughing.

  Sumner Dommerich had been watching from his car when the two women arrived at Lisa Benedict's apartment house. He had been there since seven, parked near the Laundromat across the street and several buildings down on Alameda. On his passenger seat, he'd brought a load of wash and a bottle of Surf in case anyone noticed him and wondered. Not that he thought anyone would, especially. Most people looked right through him. Nor could he explain, even to himself, why he felt he should be there. All he knew was that he felt badly about Lisa Benedict.

  His first thought, when the two women came in their blue Chevrolet, was that they were reporters. It was about time. The morning before, on Monday, he'd waited for three hours expecting to see policemen and film crews come swarming. It was that way for all the others. But here there was nobody. Nothing.