Bannerman's Law

by John R. Maxim

  “Miss Lesko?”

  “Yes.”

  “Colonel Belkin says she is very strong. Not strong like you are. But also soft.”

  “I'm not?”

  “Your . . . skin is soft. Your touch is soft. At this moment, even your eyes. But you? No, you are not soft.”

  Carla said nothing. She waited, hoping that he would say more about her, what he liked about her. But Yuri did not realize that. He thought that the subject at hand was still Susan.

  “In the beginning,” he said, “Colonel Belkin thought that she would weaken Paul Bannerman, make him vulnerable. But now he says that she has made him more complete. I think this must be true. Last month, in Zurich, I met a young woman, a girl who . . . ” Yuri realized his mistake. His hand stopped moving.

  “It's okay.” Carla poked him. ”I won't be jealous.”

  “We are not ... I mean, it's not that we have . . . ”

  “Yuri…”

  He grinned, first sheepishly, then warmly. “Her name is Maria. I met her at the zoo. She had a little girl with her. The child was too small to see the bears so I put her on my shoulders. Maria thanked me. We walked together all that afternoon. It was a wonderful day for me. I think of it all the time.”

  Carla waited. “Well?” she prodded.

  ”I . . . investigated her. She is a cellist. My age. Quite a good family. She is widowed. Her husband was a reserve officer, Swiss Army. He died in a training accident. I went to see her perform. I sent flowers afterward. She called to thank me. We talked. She invited me to dinner at her parents' house but I did not go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then I think, someday I will have to tell her I am KGB. I am afraid of what I might see in her eyes when I tell her this. And I will lose forever the way she has made me feel. But now, you talk of Susan Lesko. She did not run from Paul Bannerman when she learned who he is. And it makes me think . . . perhaps Maria will not run from me.”

  “She might not. But Susan was already hooked on Paul Bannerman before she began to catch on. Take your time, Yuri. Don't tell her right away.”

  “Lying is bad. It is never forgotten.”

  “Paul didn't lie. He just left out a few things.” Like fifteen years of his life. “Maria will leave out a few things, too. Mistakes. Old hurts. Old boyfriends. We all do that.”

  The Russian fell silent.

  Carla turned to face him. She touched his cheek. She saw that his eyes were elsewhere. “Yuri ... go for it,” she said. “Stop moping.”

  ”I was only . . .”

  “Call her now. Tell Maria that you met Jane Fonda but all it did was make you miss her. Tell her you would like very much to meet her parents.”

  “Perhaps.” The little boy smile returned. It became a blush. “Perhaps from my hotel I will . . . ”

  “Not later. Now. I'll give you some privacy.” Carla rolled out of bed and picked up her bra from the floor. She would wait in the bathroom. She thought she needed to cry again anyway. She had a very large hunch that unless Maria blows him out of the water, she'd had her last good uncomplicated screw from Yuri Rykov.

  The simple overseas call became a major production. Yuri decided that he certainly could not speak to Maria while naked and still damp with Carla, so he toweled himself off and dressed. Then, rehearsal time was needed and more coaching from Carla. What if she this? What if she that? Answers shouted through the bathroom door. At last, exasperated, Carla came back into the bedroom. She demanded Maria's number. She would dial it for him, ready or not, and hand him the phone.

  The telephone rang as she was reaching for it.

  She picked it up.

  “Yes,” she said, “this is Ms. Benedict. Who is this?”

  Then she listened, her eyes widening, her mouth falling open, as a young male voice told her that he would never have hurt her sister. That she had always smiled at him.

  21

  Molly was thinking in circles and she knew it. The more she read of Lisa Benedict's files, the less motive she could find for anyone to want them destroyed. And none at all for murdering her.

  Molly clung to the assumption that Lisa was the random victim of a serial killer. There was no reason to suppose otherwise. But there was still the phony detective and the equally bogus FBI agent, one of whom had almost certainly burglarized her apartment.

  One thing that was clear, however, was that the situation involved potential danger. The phony detective had made a point of verifying Carla's name, and her own, and of finding out where they were staying. Weapons might possibly be needed. Just as possibly not But better safe than sorry.

  It was one in the afternoon when she placed her call to Anton Zivic's shop in Westport. Her intention was to ask that John Waldo fly out immediately to secure clean weapons, have them nearby, but stay out of sight as backup.

  All this would be communicated through the sentence, “I'm not having a nice time.” The coded remark would also alert Anton that the phone she was using was not necessarily secure. He would answer, “Take the night off,” or “Take tomorrow off,” depending on when John Waldo could leave. He would ask no questions but he would expect her to brief him fully as soon as she could get to a phone she considered safe.

  His response, however, was “Get off your feet. I will call you after you've rested.” He broke the connection.

  Molly stared at the phone, frowning. She understood the response and she didn't. Literally, it meant that she should get to her safe house because trouble is imminent. Because there was no safe house in this instance, she took it to mean the Beverly Hills Hotel. As for the trouble, she assumed that the FBI had identified her and Anton knew it. But that wasn't trouble. Only an annoyance.

  Could there be trouble at the hotel? With Carla? Molly punched out the direct number to her bungalow. She heard a busy signal.

  No, she decided. Anton would not have ordered her back to that hotel if he wasn't sure it was safe to go there. Carla was on the phone, probably talking to her father.

  “Here's the scoop on Sur La Mer.”

  DiDi Fenerty, waving a yellow pad, entered the room where Molly still sat at the IBM console. DiDi pulled up a chair.

  “Professor Mecklenberg, by the way, says he's going to graduate Lisa posthumously. I don't know whether it helps or hurts. But he says she's earned it and he wants to announce it at the graduation ceremony.”

  ”I guess that's nice,” Molly said, “but it should be the family's decision.”

  “He's going to ask.” She riffled the pages of her pad. “There's a lot of stuff here. Also on Nellie Dameon and . . . there was a D'Arconte. First name, Victor. You probably can't read my writing.”

  Molly sneaked a look at her watch. When Anton says get off your feet, he means now. She was beginning to have bad feelings about Carla and what other trouble she might have got into. With DiDi waiting, she tried Carla one more time. Still busy. Then she called the hotel operator to confirm that the phone hadn't been left off the hook. It wasn't. A woman was using it. Molly decided that time was not critical.

  Molly sat back. “What did you find out?” she asked.

  She listened as DiDi read an oral history of the property, as a private estate and then as an institution. The institution was private although it technically fell under the supervision of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, formerly the Motion Picture Relief Fund, founded in 1921. Its patients, she said, were mostly loonies who were too far gone for the Motion Picture Country House. Originally, back in Nellie Dameon's day, many of them were actors and actresses who'd gone out of their head from drugs. DiDi gave the names of key medical and administrative officers, including three generations of Dunvilles.

  Molly nodded frequently. She made few notes. The information DiDi had was pretty much what was shown in Lisa's files and in considerably less detail. No fault to DiDi. Lisa had been at this for months. Lisa had the names of fifty or more inmates—called members—dating back to 1926. It was not a very long list, given tha
t length of time. Lisa, Molly assumed, had only listed actors. No production people or screen writers.

  “Let's go on to Nellie Dameon,” she said.

  “One more thing.” DiDi raised a finger. “If you care, I can get you a set of plans for Sur La Mer. I called my father. He's a developer. He said his Santa Barbara office can get them from the county clerk.”

  Molly's interest was slight. Her larger impression was that she now knew the source of DiDi's money. But because DiDi had taken the trouble . . . “Sure. Nice work. Can he messenger them, my attention, at the Beverly Hills?”

  “No problem.”

  DiDi began on Nellie Dameon. Again, there was nothing new. Bad voice for sound. Career in ruins. Went over the edge. No record of children. The only jarring note was Lisa's observation that Nellie Dameon's voice was perfectly normal. But it meant nothing, necessarily. Maybe, as they'd discussed, she was sabotaged. Or maybe, over sixty years, she'd learned to enunciate. Molly listened with forced patience.

  “Victor D'Arconte is an interesting character,” DiDi said, flipping to another page. “Also a sleaze.”

  She began reading.

  “According to Mecklenberg, Victor D'Arconte was an actor on the Sennett lot. Pretty well known but never a star. They called him “The Count” because he claimed he was the third son of some Italian prince or other. He made a few pictures over there. Also claimed to have been an aviator during World War One, said he shot down several Turkish planes before being shot in the hip by ground fire. Left him with a limp. Probably limited the roles he could take.”

  Molly nodded, not in agreement but trusting that this was somehow relevant.

  “The story is,” DiDi went on, “he showed up in Hollywood around 1920. A whole slew of Italian actors, directors, and technicians came here at about that time because the Italian film industry was collapsing. Everyone wanted American pictures, which was actually ironic.”

  “Uh . . . why?”

  Molly regretted the question almost instantly. She had blundered onto a theme that was DiDi Fenerty's passion.

  “The Italians were the real pioneers,” she proclaimed. “Not Hollywood. They invented the costume epic. Used enormous sets, thousands of extras. Used real lions in Quo Vadis, 1912. They made El Cid, Macbeth, and The Last Days of Pompeii while we were doing the Keystone Kops. They had a tremendous influence on DeMille and Griffith. If you want to be astonished, see Cabiria. Greatest film ever made up to that point. It had Hannibal's elephants crossing the Alps, the siege of Syracuse—”

  “DiDi . . . ” Molly raised a hand.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “You said Victor D'Arconte was a sleaze.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she nodded. “Big time. The Count was a drug pusher. People don't realize it but heroin and especially cocaine were just as common in early Hollywood as they are now. One story says that D'Arconte was already a morphine addict because of the hip and started dealing to support his own habit but Mecklenberg says he never touched it. Says he just saw more money in dealing than he did in acting.”

  DiDi flipped a page. “D'Arconte,” she said, reading, “used to fly the cocaine in from Mexico himself. Heroin came from the Chinese but he had a piece of that action too. He used to deal in broad daylight on the corner of Fourth and Spring. The police never bothered him because they thought he provided a service. Kept the stars going, working twelve-hour days. Mecklenberg says you could stand on that corner and see half of the biggest names in Hollywood.”

  Molly was afraid she'd name them. “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “Someone tried to shoot him. Once on his corner and once in his car. The police couldn't ignore it anymore so he was busted, and indicted. He dropped out of sight in 1930, maybe back to Italy. But in those ten years he ruined more lives than talkies. There was . . . ”

  Molly blinked so that her eyes would not glaze.

  ”. . . Wallace Reid, Alma Rubens, Barbara La Marr. Big stars. His junk killed all three. La Marr was only twenty-nine. Reid died in a padded cell at thirty. It ended the careers of about a dozen more. Mabel Normand, Juanita Hansen . . . ”

  “Nellie Dameon?”

  DiDi shook her head. “If she did drugs, I never heard it.”

  And yet, according to Lisa's notes, thought Molly, Nellie had mentioned his name. “Would she have known him otherwise?”

  “Of him, at least. Sure.”

  “This man who died in a padded cell . . . ”

  “Wallace Reid.”

  “Might that have been at Sur La Mer?”

  ”I don't know. Maybe.”

  “You said Victor D'Arconte skipped in 1930. How old would he have been?”

  DiDi looked at her notes. A flier in World War I. A working actor before that. “Around forty, I guess. What are you thinking?”

  Molly took a long breath. ”I don't know. Just fishing. Looking for a way that this might all tie together.”

  “As in Victor hiding out at Sur La Mer?”

  “Something like that.”

  DiDi made a face. It suggested not so much doubt as indifference. “It's an interesting thought. But if he did, who would care now? The guy's got to be long dead.”

  Molly chewed her pencil, thoughtfully. “Let's play with that for a minute. How would he swing it?”

  “Get some doctor to commit him, I guess. Say the doctor was a junkie. One of his customers.’'

  “Doctors don't need dealers.”

  “They don't need to have their addictions made public, either. He could have blackmailed one.”

  “Okay,” Molly nodded. “But how long could he have fooled the staff at Sur La Mer?”

  A small shrug. “He was an actor. Maybe a good one.”

  “Fine. And, given the indictment, he would have changed his name. But the place was full of other actors, including Nellie Dameon. Wouldn't they have recognized him?”

  “Nellie wasn't talking. The others were batty, or at least past caring. Which brings me back to my question. Who would care now?”

  Molly sighed.

  More circles.

  DiDi, she felt sure, was almost certainly right. Let's say, she thought, that Victor D'Arconte did hide out at Sur La Mer. Let's say he bribed or blackmailed whoever was running the place. Let's even say he took the name Dunville.

  Wait. Where did that come from?

  Oh, yes. According to Lisa's notes, Nellie Dameon thought she had a son, last name possibly D'Arconte or possibly Dunville.

  Okay. Let's say that she's not entirely crazy. Let's say that she had a son—not to mention a daughter with a strawberry mark and hair like Lisa's—and that the father was the drug-dealing actor D'Arconte.

  Let's say all that's true, keeping in mind there's no sign that Lisa suspected any such thing. What have you got?

  An interesting footnote to Hollywood history. That's all. Of interest solely to people like DiDi and her professor. No real scandal. No reputations to be ruined because all of the principals, except Nellie, are long dead. The kids, if they exist, would be in their sixties. If they're not at Sur La Mer, which they're obviously not if Nellie asked Lisa to find them, they were probably given up for adoption and would have no idea who their real parents were. And might not care.

  Circles.

  “I'd better get going,” she said. “Carla really shouldn't be alone.”

  “Anything else I can do?”

  Molly shook her head. She began erasing the copied files. “Just remember what I said about staying out of this. I took these disks. You have no idea what's on them. But let me know who asks.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Sure. On Thursday. I assume you'll be there.”

  DiDi nodded. “Mr. Benedict asked me to speak. Molly?”

  ”Uh-uh?” The last of the files winked off.

  “Why don't you just drive up to Sur La Mer? Ask them straight out.”

  ”I might just do that.”

  With Molly gone, the house seemed suddenly empty.
The computer even more so. One minute it had Lisa in it— her words, her thoughts and dreams. The next it was blank.

  DiDi wished she had been more help. It was hard to imagine Molly Farrell, no matter how good she was, going out and finding a killer that an army of police had been hunting for the better part of two years. But at least she might find the son of a bitch who robbed her afterward.

  Maybe, thought DiDi, she'd do a little detective work herself. Make a call or two. Save Molly the trip.

  The phone was right there.

  She dialed Santa Barbara information.

  22

  “Wait. Don't hang up.”

  Sumner Dommerich heard the shouted plea from Lisa's sister as he lowered the phone. He hesitated.

  “There's no way I can trace this,” she called. “There's no risk to you.”

  He knew that. He was at a public phone on Victory Boulevard in Burbank. At an Exxon station. He didn't mind talking to her but there was always the chance that the man who had pissed on his car and slapped him would go out again. He had gone into a small mission-style apartment building just across the street. It had to be where he lived. He had taken mail from a box as he entered. The man, Hickey, had stopped just in time. Dommerich’s gas gauge had hovered on empty most of the way back from Santa Barbara.

  ”I . . . don't know what else I can tell you,” he said, returning the phone to his lips. He had told her he didn't do it. That Lisa had been nice to him. He had told her about the man in the silver Honda who had been following her and taking her picture with a video camera. He had given her his license number but not his name. Tracing the license would take time. Dommerich needed that time to decide how best to make him pay.

  ”I don't know either,” Lisa's sister was saying. “But you must know something. You can help me find out who did it.”

  ”I just know it wasn't me.”

  “You said you were her friend. I need a friend too.”

  Dommerich shook his head. He hadn't said that, exactly. All he said was that he liked Lisa and she liked him. Or at least she smiled at him. The one thing he hardly ever did was lie. Except for today. Today he had called in sick at work because he had to follow that man. They didn't even care that much.