Bannerman's Law

by John R. Maxim

  The father raised a placating hand. He tended to agree. Still . . . “I'd like to talk to him. Where is he now?”

  “In Nellie's suite.”

  “Will he let me enter?”

  The younger man shrugged. “With a gun at your chest. What do you hope to accomplish?”

  Carleton the elder did not answer. He stepped behind his son's desk, formerly his own, and reached into the coat cabinet where the weapons were kept. He selected a large revolver, nickel plated, which he presumed to be of higher quality than the others. He took a small black one as well.

  “You can't be serious,” his son said, rising.

  Carleton the elder understood. He smiled. “Hardly that,” he said.

  “Then what's the gun for?”

  The smile faded. “First,” he said, “it's time to say good-bye to Henry.”

  19

  Nellie had gone away again.

  Alan Weinberg was beginning to envy her.

  “You need some time to yourselves,” she had said. “I'll be back before tea.”

  “Any place in partic . . . ”

  She was gone before he could finish. Her eyes simply blinked out. It was as if a switch had been thrown.

  On the day before, Monday, she had traveled in time to 1920. She was seventeen. Not yet a star. And she had a new beau. His name was Tom. He was ten years older than she was, a cattle rancher, or rather his family owned a ranch up in the San Joaquin Valley.

  They had given him leave to try his hand at acting, get this movie business out of his system. After that, he was expected to return home and settle down. He had done fairly well. He had risen from extra to featured player when he met and fell in love with Nellie. He wanted to show her the ranch that would be his someday. Nellie took a rare break between pictures and went off with him to

  meet the family, and then go camping and canoeing on Tulare Lake.

  She told the Weinbergs about it when she returned. She'd caught two big catfish, which he cleaned and she cooked for breakfast. Then they went swimming. Her blush, when she mentioned the activity, suggested that they had probably gone unclothed.

  She married her rancher-actor a year later. He was killed two years after that. He broke his neck in a tumbling wagon during the filming of a chase by Indians.

  Weinberg saw no sadness when she told him how Tom died. He soon understood why. Tom was not dead to Nellie. She could see him any time she wished. It was more, much more, than the reliving of memories. She could, almost literally, travel in time.

  She could even, she told them, go back to Ames, Iowa, and be a child again. She could relive the day when the Baker Stock Company came to town and her mother took her to see A Winter's Tale and she became smitten with the boy who played the little lost prince. The sweet misery of that unrequited crush faded away in time, only to be replaced by a deeper love of all things connected with the theater. She rarely missed a stage performance in Ames, offering to hang posters or set chairs in exchange for a pass, and always caught the latest moving picture show at the nickelodeon, which opened in the old Hopkins Dry Goods Store after Mr. Hopkins sold out to Loew's Theatrical Enterprises. Three years later, when her mother died, thirteen-year-old Nellie ran off to Omaha to join the Baker troupe.

  On Monday, while Nellie was away with Tom, Barbara took her husband to the bedroom of Nellie's suite and made love to him. Weinberg tried not to show it but he was ill at ease. He kept expecting Nellie to appear in the doorway, which they had left open so that any attempt at entry could be heard. He wished that they had Nellie's gift. He wished that he could throw that same mental switch and go far away with Barbara. To Salzburg. To the night of a party, during the Mozart Festival, which he probably would not have attended until he was told that Barbara would be there. She was Bonnie Predd then. He had known her by reputation but he had never imagined that she would be so ... feminine. So lovely. He was thoroughly intimidated by her. It was she who approached him. Put him at ease. And let him drive her home.

  At her doorway he offered a handshake. She took the hand and held it for a very long time as if deciding what to do with him. At last, with a smile, she offered him coffee. They sat together until dawn, fully clothed, only talking. They did not make love, not that time, and not for many days more. But by sunrise, he, the notorious Axel Streicher, had become her slave. If he had Nellie's gift, he knew that he would never tire of reliving that night, or any of the nights, or days, which they had shared since then.

  Today, Tuesday, with the arrival of Carleton Dunville the elder, he had been unusually tense. It was not his habit to play a waiting game. He found himself becoming irritable. Nellie saw it. She saw Barbara take his hand. It was then that she announced that she would be gone until tea. Two hours. She seemed to be promising that they would indeed have that time to themselves. Now, looking at her, he believed her. There was no life in her eyes.

  As much as he wanted to return to that bedroom with Barbara, he wanted to find a newspaper even more. If the girl, Lisa, had been found, or even reported missing, he wanted to know about it. He wanted to know what was said about her. There were no television sets in this wing, only more of those video machines made to look like movie theater screens. With Barbara covering him, he approached the main hall where he had often seen newspapers at the security guard's station.

  The guards did not see him. They had stepped to the front entrance where that man, Hickey, was for some reason urinating into a bed of pachysandra. Weinberg saw a copy of the Los Angeles Times open on the desk. Making no sound, he took it. He stepped back into the Members' Wing.

  It was on the front page. There was more inside. Barbara stood at his shoulder as he read. He could feel her growing anger.

  “They cut her,” she said in quiet fury.

  ”I know.”

  “They left her naked, with her legs spread apart. They promised they would treat her respectfully.”

  He reached for her hand, squeezing it. Even Weinberg winced at the mental picture of young Lisa, a bloody smile carved into her face, ear to ear. But while sympathetic to the girl, and especially to his wife, he could understand why it was done. It was sensible. This way, even if it were known that she had come to Sur La Mer on Sunday, it would be presumed that this lunatic, this Campus Killer, had found her well after she returned to Los Angeles. Her white Fiero had been located at a Junior College not far from where her body was found. Dunville was smart. Weinberg had to give him that. And all he had promised Barbara was that the body would be found so that it might have a decent burial.

  “Make sure you hide this,” Barbara said into his ear. “Don't let Nellie know.”

  Weinberg glanced at her. There was still no life.

  “She was so young, so pretty,” Barbara said sadly. She touched her fingers to the photograph in the newspaper as if to stroke Lisa's cheek.

  “They all are,” he nodded. There were six more faces across the bottom of the page. All fresh, bright, attractive young women, all dead. The photographs had come from high-school yearbooks. And these six victims were all blond. That bothered Weinberg. He raised his eyes to Lisa's photograph. In newsprint, her reddish hair seemed brown. It was not, in any case, blond.

  There was something else.

  He looked closer. “Does she look familiar to you?” he asked.

  “You mean, other than . . . ” She gestured toward the basement where they had first seen her.

  “Yes.”

  Barbara shook her head slowly, then brightened. “She looks a little like Nellie did. When Nellie was young.”

  He nodded. ''Yes.· I suppose she does but that's not it. I've seen this girl before.”

  “Alan?”

  “Yes, my love.”

  She took the paper from his hands. ”I would like to be held, I think.”

  He smiled beneath his bandages. “We have until tea. Would you like to try something? Do you remember that night when we . . . ?”

  ”I think I just want to be held.”
/>
  He understood. She wanted those faces gone from her mind. Perhaps she wanted to cry. He wanted them gone from his mind as well.

  Still ... the girl ... Lisa. Something about that face.

  Perhaps it would come to him.

  DiDi Fenerty whistled softly.

  “It's paydirt all right,” she said to Molly. “Nellie Dameon's probably the only one on that casualties list who's still alive. If Lisa got her to talk she'll get more than a good grade. This might be worth a book contract.”

  “Why? Just for her recollections of the period?”

  DiDi told her of the Nellie Dameon legend. That, the story was, her attempts to make it in talkies were a failure. That her studio forced her to make two terrible films and, even then, was rumored to have sabotaged the sound tracks in order to break a contract that was paying her $5,000 a week. That they got her on drugs, drove her to the edge. That she went to pieces, retreated into herself and had not, as far as anyone knew, said a single word since.

  “This interview,” Molly asked, choosing her woods, “or this book Lisa might have written. Is that something that anyone would want to keep from being published?”

  “Like who?”

  Molly shrugged. ”I don't know. The studios? You said that they deliberately set out to destroy this woman.”

  DiDi shook her head. “They did that to a number of actors. John Gilbert, for example. Even back then, studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn wouldn't have cared who knew it. It would have helped them keep the others in line.”

  Molly had to agree. No one would care, certainly after all this time, except for film historians. “What if someone else, perhaps another student, knew that Lisa had spoken to Nellie Dameon? And then, soon afterward, Lisa was killed. The killing was unrelated but this person saw an opportunity to break into Lisa's apartment and steal her notes.”

  DiDi considered this, only briefly. “No chance,” she said. “It wouldn't begin to be worth it. Anyway, at least a dozen people would recognize her work. We'd crucify anyone who tried to pass it off as theirs.”

  Molly knew she was fishing. But fishing was all she had. And the burglary of Lisa's apartment was a fact. She stared at the screen. There was that name again. D'Ar-conte. “You say you've never heard of him?”

  She shook her head.

  Molly gestured toward a wall of reference books, all film related. “Might he be in one of those?”

  ”I already looked. But I could make a phone call. Professor Mecklenberg might know.” She hesitated. “Molly,” she cocked her head toward the kitchen phone, “the police have been asking about you and Carla.”

  “When?” She hadn't heard it ring.

  ”I just called Mr. Benedict,” she explained, “to ask about the service. I mentioned that you were here. He said a policeman who saw you at Lisa's apartment called to verify that Carla is her sister and they wanted your name, too. He gave it to them.”

  Molly was silent for a long moment.

  “Are you . . . wanted for anything?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you got quiet, just like that, when I told you about the policeman who came yesterday.”

  “It's nothing.” Molly tried a reassuring smile. “Given what we ... were, the authorities are concerned that we might interfere. That's all.”

  DiDi looked into her eyes. She saw them waver. “I'll help you any way I can,” she said. “But I wish you'd be honest with me. That man who came yesterday. You don't think he was a policeman, do you.”

  Molly drummed her fingers. “No. I don't,” she said finally. “And the man who called was not an FBI agent.”

  “And the one who called Mr. Benedict?”

  “He wasn't a policeman either.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “Because both the police and the FBI showed up this morning at Lisa's apartment. We had to produce identification. The police had no need to ask George Benedict who I am.”

  Didi stared at her. “Molly . . . what's going on here?”

  ”I don't know. Truthfully.”

  “Am I in danger? Truthfully?”

  Molly rocked her head sideways, a gesture of uncertainty. She flicked a finger toward the IBM machine. “Someone, not the police, seems very interested in how much you know. Whatever it is, I sure don't see anything in here that's worth . . . ” Molly stopped herself.

  “Killing for.” DiDi completed the thought. “But you think someone did.”

  Molly grimaced, then shook her head slowly. “The two might still be unrelated,” she said. “But just in case, I'd keep plenty of people around me if I were you. Don't go anywhere alone, not even to the Benedict house. When is the service, by the way?”

  “This Thursday, ten o'clock, Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Sherman Oaks. How can I help in the meantime?”

  Molly picked up a yellow pad on which she'd listed three names. D'Arconte, Nellie Dameon, Sur La Mer. “Find out all you can about these. What's the name of that professor?”

  “Stanley Mecklenberg. Or I could research it myself at the ... ”

  Molly shook her head. “Do it by phone. Don't be seen looking up these names in a library. And if that same man or anyone else comes back asking you questions, say that you gave me a package Lisa left with you. Say that I asked if I could use your computer and then, afterward, acted very strangely but wouldn't tell you what was in the package. Say I took everything with me back to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

  DiDi made a face. “In other words, I'm supposed to set you up.”

  Molly frowned. “If someone got in here,” she asked, “past Kevin, and came at you with a knife, what do you think you'd do?”

  ”I . . . don't know. Scream, I guess. Try to run.”

  “What do you think I would do? What would Carla do?”

  DiDi hesitated, only briefly. “Stick it up his ass?”

  Molly blinked. “Why would you say that?”

  “Lucky guess. But I hear you.”

  “Call your professor.” Molly nodded toward the extension on DiDi's desk. “Is that on the same line?”

  “No. It's mine. Private.”

  “May I make a long distance call? I'll pay for it.”

  “To Westport by any chance?”

  Molly didn't answer.

  “It's on the house,” said DiDi Fenerty.

  Nellie's gift to the Weinbergs—some time to themselves—was not entirely unselfish. She wanted to try, just once more, to go back to the day when her daughter was born.

  But the scenes, as before, came in fragments. And they were always changing. Even the babies kept changing. One time it would be a son and the next it would be a daughter. Or one time she would be allowed to nurse the infant and the next it would be taken from her, forever, before she'd had a chance to hold it.

  The yachtsman, Harland, had told her that there were four babies in all. She still had trouble believing that. She was reasonably sure of only two. There was the little girl with the strawberry birthmark. Nellie had kept her the longest. She had nursed her. She remembered the red hair, grown long enough to be tied with a little green bow. And then one day she was gone.

  She was also quite sure of the boy. He was the first. His hair was dark. He cried a lot. And he hurt the most when he came. She seemed to remember that they thought she might die. She remembered a man's voice saying, ”I need that baby. Save her if you can, but I want that baby.” The voice, and the face peering down at her, was that of Vittorio D'Arconte.

  She had dreamed of him before that and several times since. They were terrible dreams. It was dark, and he would be on top of her. She could taste his breath. It stank of wine and black cigars. She could feel him thrusting into her. Sometimes it was not D'Arconte at all. Sometimes, especially later, he would turn into Victor Dunville. But she soon learned that she could make either of them go away just by thinking of Tom. She could make Tom take their place. She could bear it that way.

  It was, in any case, n
ot really D'Arconte and certainly not Victor Dunville. The psychiatrist said that these were only dreams. They were the prank, he said, of a bedeviled mind.

  This was later. Years later. She still could not speak but she could write. She could scribble questions and answers in her sessions with the staff psychiatrist. Her mind had begun to clear. The psychiatrist told her that she was making fine progress. There was no longer a need, he said, for quite so much medication.

  It was true, he told her one year, that she had once borne a child and that it was, in fact, a difficult birth. The child did not survive it. The father was one of the other members, since deceased. She had wandered into his rooms one night. He had taken advantage of her. By the time the staff realized what must have happened, her pregnancy was too advanced to be terminated.

  As for the other babies she thought she remembered, they were much the same as her memories of the actor who was known as “The Count.” They seemed real to her, of course. But he assured her that they were not.

  Vittorio D'Arconte, he told her, was also long dead. He had fled to Italy, a fugitive from the law, before Nellie had even been admitted to Sur La Mer. But justice had caught up with him. He was shot down, murdered, on a street in Naples. It was in all the papers, the psychiatrist said. Good riddance.

  There was very little resemblance, he pointed out, between Vittorio D'Arconte and our own Victor Dunville. And no likeness at all in terms of character. Mr. Dunville is a humanitarian. A healer. He has devoted himself to restoring the minds of all who came, broken, to Sur La Mer. Making them whole again.

  He has sat with you, the psychiatrist said, on many occasions. He has restrained you, gently, when you have become violent. He has comforted you. Because of your condition, however, you saw this caring restraint as an attack. You saw, through some trick of the mind, a resemblance between Victor Dunville and a man you despised for the ruin he brought on so many of your friends. To you, he was Vittorio D'Arconte.

  For many years she believed him. In time she wondered how she could ever have thought that Vittorio D'Arconte and Victor Dunville were the same man. If there had ever been a resemblance, there was now scarcely a trace of it. Mr. Dunville was older and more portly. The eyes, the nose, even the jawline were very different. D'Arconte had a thin mustache and hair slicked with pomade. Mr. Dunville had been clean shaven and balding.