Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

by Don Pendleton

  "How would you have handled the kid? In your script, I mean."

  "I'd have to find her a royal prince of the line, wouldn't I? Anything less would be anticlimactic for a kid named Mirabel."

  "Or make her a movie star," I suggest.

  "A very big star, maybe."

  "How about television evangelist?"

  He shows a rainbow smile to ask, "What?"

  "Isn't that what you were doing at Church of the Light? Checking out Reverend Annie for television angles?"

  "Oh that. Yes. See what you mean. Wouldn't that make a hell of a story."

  A glimmer in the eyes is followed by a totally blue grimace. "Jesus H. Christ! No! Annie...? Little Ann Marie...?"

  I show him what has to be a dazzlingly red smile as I feed that glimmer. "Want to reconsider that script, Arnold?"

  "It appears," he replies musingly, "as though someone already did that."

  Chapter Seventeen: Hollywood Mystique

  The night was wearing on but I was in easy striking distance from the Los Feliz area so I decided to give it a shot. The address I had for the Sturgis family was more than fifteen years old but the telephone directory still carried a listing there; I figured what the hell.

  Laurel Canyon dumps off near the western end of Hollywood Boulevard; the Los Feliz neighborhood snuggles into the hills at the southern approaches to Griffith Park, east of downtown Hollywood. It's maybe a ten-minute run across, that time of night. But don't try it on a Saturday. That's cruisin' night; you'll find fifty thousand kids in ten thousand cars solidly gridlocked along Hollywood Boulevard between La Brea and Western with ten thousand blaring radios, just socializing in this modern motorized version of the mating ritual.

  Weeknights are different. I had an easy run; almost enjoyed it. Hollywood Boulevard can be enjoyable still. It's not Broadway in Manhattan but you'll see even more colorful scenery sometimes—punk rockers in leather and chains and electric hair, sidewalk vendors, pimps and hipsters, hookers male and female, shopping-cart ladies, winos and beggars, sex shops and porno theaters. All that glitters is not gold or even brass but sometimes it can be fun to just drag the boulevard and be reminded.

  This is not the Hollywood of old, no. Not the Hollywood where hopeful stars of the future are discovered at soda fountains, not the Hollywood where Bogey and teenager Bacall rendezvous at the corner of Hollywood and Vine to hold hands and sigh and entertain forbidden dreams—but it's still Hollywood and the mystique still drifts in the atmosphere there. You can catch it if you try.

  So I dragged the boulevard all the way to Western then jumped up to the wriggly residential streets above Los Feliz, and I found the place at almost exactly eleven o'clock. Bad time to go calling, even on friends, but I had a hunch that would not let me go and I had to give it a try.

  Worked out okay. Wayne Sturgis seemed a very nice man—open, receptive—fifty-five or so, slightly balding, a worn-in smile—dignified but not stuffy, nice looking.

  I identified myself at the door and told him right up front what I was about. He glanced back inside then stepped onto the porch with me and pulled the door shut.

  "I'd ask you in but I think my wife has gone to bed."

  I said, "That's okay."

  "Hate to disturb her. She's been having trouble sleeping."

  I said, "Sure, it's okay. Hate to bother you at this time of night but it really is important."

  "No problem," he assured me. "What can I do for you?"

  "Ann Marie is in big trouble," I told him. "The police seem to think she's been killing off her husbands."

  He said, "So that's it. A policeman was here the other day. He didn't tell me why. Just wanted my version of Nathan's death—how I felt about it and all."

  "How do you feel about it?"

  "It's been seventeen years. What am I supposed to feel? If you mean do I blame Ann for it, the answer is no, I do not blame anybody for it. Nathan was screwed up, that's all. Not his mother's fault, not my fault. Certainly not Ann's fault. They were both just kids, I mean really kids. I thought it was a mistake at the time, but what the hell can you do except give your blessing and hope for the best? Ann woke up in time and got out of it, that's the way I look at it. I'm not even sure if Nathan killed himself over her. He had...other problems."

  "What other problems?"

  Sturgis took my arm and walked me into the yard, obviously to distance the conversation from the house. He said, "We thought of Ann as one of our own. She was in this house every day for two years. She and Nathan were pals. They hung out together, played records, studied, walked down to the malt shop, went to the movies. Understand? They were pals. But I never saw them touching each other. I don't think they'd ever kissed, or even held hands. It worried me, let me tell you."

  "What worried you?"

  "Didn't seem natural. Know what I mean? Nathan was never...too masculine. This friendship with Ann—that was okay, that was fine, there doesn't always have to be a sexual thing between boys and girls—but there weren't any other girls, see. There weren't any boys either. I mean, you know, he had nothing in common with other males his age."

  I put it to him point-blank. "Did you suspect that your son was gay?"

  Sturgis placed his hands on his hips and gazed into the sky. "Of course he was gay," he replied softly. "That marriage was never consummated. I went with Ann myself to file for the annulment."

  "Did she tell you Nathan was gay?"

  "Nawww. She did say they hadn't had sex."

  "What did she give as her reason for the change of heart?"

  Sturgis tossed a glance at his house, moved me a few feet closer to the street, said, "She told me that she and Nathan married for the wrong reason. They were dear friends but simply not in love. She claimed the marriage was for convenience and she felt guilty about that; she was just using us to solve her own problems and it wasn't fair to Nathan, wasn't fair to us. That was a very grown-up little girl, let me tell you."

  "But you still came to the conclusion that Nathan was gay."

  "I knew damned well he was gay. The only damned reason I blessed the marriage in the first place was..."

  I sighed, said, 'To prove you were wrong."

  He sighed too, glanced again at his house, said, "It's a dumb world, isn't it."

  I asked him, "Concerned about Mrs. Sturgis?"

  "She's a worrier," he replied. "Frets if the cat doesn't eat, frets if it eats too much—or if it doesn't play or plays too much. Mary likes the world at even keel."

  I asked, "She get over Nathan okay?"

  "She'll never get over it," he replied softly.

  I said, "Yeah. Well...I'm sorry to revisit all this on you but..."

  "No no, I'm glad you came to see me. I've been wondering ever since the cop was here."

  "Have you kept in touch with Ann?"

  He made a face and replied, "Oh, not directly anymore. For a few years there, we did. It was just that...Mary couldn't let it go. Every time Ann called or dropped by, Mary cried all night. I guess Ann knew that. Anyway, the visits stopped and the calls became more infrequent. We haven't heard from her in, oh, fifteen years maybe."

  I said, "You knew she'd become a minister."

  He said, "Oh yes. Didn't surprise me one bit. Always was a deep kid, very serious about life. I'm just surprised it took her so long to get it together."

  I said, "Well it took several marriages to put it together. She had lousy luck with each of them. This cop thinks she's a black widow."

  Sturgis coughed into his hand and said, “That's ridiculous! A sweeter girl was never born. That girl was an angel. I'll tell anybody that.”

  Black widow... saint... angel. What else?

  I asked, "Ever attended one of her services?"

  "No, I...Ann knows where we live. If she wants contact, she'll make it."

  I asked, "Ever get the feeling that she was psychic?"

  He replied, "If you mean like woman's intuition, yes; she showed plenty of that. Come to think of it
, I used to wonder sometimes if she was reading my mind."

  I lit a cigarette and offered him one; he declined. "Were you in love with her, Wayne?" I inquired casually.

  He said, "Hey! I told you she was like my own."

  I said, "Like your own is not quite the same, and it isn't even that unusual if she were your own. Quite common, in fact. Not talking incest, of course."

  "Well just so we keep that distinction," he said. "I wouldn't have touched her for the world but... what the hell, sure, I'm not ashamed to say I was attracted to her that way but we're not dogs, are we?—we're influenced by more than animal instincts. I felt very protective, very..."

  "She in love with you?"

  Sturgis took an agitated step backward, crossed his arms at his chest, said, "What the hell is this?"

  I told him, "No offense intended. I am trying to understand."

  "What are you trying to understand?" he asked, softening.

  "Not counting Nathan," I explained, "Ann Marie has taken three husbands, all considerably older than her. Is she attracted to older men? A father substitution? Or is it something else?"

  "How much older than her?" he asked quietly.

  "Two of them," I said, "were older than you are right now."

  He said, "Yes, that's interesting."

  Again I asked, "Was she in love with you, Wayne?"

  He said, "It's crazy."

  I said, "Did she hang around the house because of Nathan or because of you? Did she marry Nathan as a way of remaining close to you?"

  He said, "This is really crazy."

  The porch light came on and the door opened. A very aged lady wearing a bathrobe shuffled into view and called out in a querulously wavering voice, "Wayne? Are you out here?" She spotted us, cried almost angrily, "What in the world are you doing out here in the middle of the night?"

  I looked at Wayne and said, "Your mother?"

  Wayne looked at me and said, "My wife."

  I said, “Would you mind if I asked—?”

  "Wayne! You get in here this minute!"

  "Guess I'd better—"

  "May I ask Mary's maiden name?"

  "Boone."

  "Boone?" I needed confirmation on that one.

  "Yes. Maybe you've heard of her. She was a silent film star."

  "Wayne!"

  "She have a sister named Clara?"

  "Half-sister, yes. They haven't spoken for years. I keep telling her it's going to be too late some day, but—"

  "Already too late," I told him. "Clara went home today."

  "What?"

  "Wayne! Get in here!"

  "I'd better be going. Hope I helped."

  Maybe he did and maybe he didn't.

  But it was really crazy, yeah.

  Chapter Eighteen: Patterns from the Loom

  So...are you beginning to see the weave of this tapestry? Or are you already way ahead of me? That's okay. Just don't get too far ahead because the woof is still not all that distinguishable from the warp and it could be very easy at this point to leap to a false conclusion. I was diligently trying to avoid that, to keep an open mind and a balanced perspective.

  That can be hard to do when you are immersed in a situation with as many cross-connections as this one. It's like trying to figure out where you're at in a television soap opera if you can't watch it every day. Like, you know Jane got raped by Jim after Jean stabbed John and Jake exposed Jim as John's illegitimate son and therefore Jean's half-brother, which makes Jim's marriage to Jean an incestuous relationship, so now Jane is carrying Jim's child though married to Jake who is really in love with Jean. Maybe we can follow that okay, but if we missed yesterday's episode in which it was revealed that John's second wife, Jill, is really Jason—Jake's brother—after a sex-change operation, and now Jill has the hots for Jim and Jean has the hots for Jill but Jill wants to adopt the baby Jane is carrying by Jim, then maybe we don't fully understand why Jake is so furious about the whole thing.

  I was not too far from that state of confusion in trying to follow the threads of this case.

  Life is not a soap but both lather up and sometimes you cannot tell the suds apart. Bruce is gay and talks to spirits who send him to me on behalf of Ann but I had found Ann on my own just in time to collect the dying fragments of Herman who is also gay but apparently did not listen to the spirits and wanted to kill Ann who is deeply involved with Francois whom I have known for years so accepted a commission to protect Ann from some nebulous threat although police authorities feel that Ann is the threat after taking note of a web of death around her, including that of her own mother, Maybelle, good friend of Clara who may or may not talk to spirits but certainly expects eternal life and who sent me into the golden past of Hollywood to find my same old friend Francois as a young romantic married to a sickly recluse and loathe to sleep alone in a foreign land so probably consoled himself briefly with Clara and more enduringly with Maizey who is really Maybelle so spurned illegal encampment with Francois for the sake of Ann who seven or eight years later fled to Nathan who is gay or maybe to Wayne who is not but considerably older although not nearly as old as his wife Mary who is Clara's sister. Ann settles for neither but goes on to wed and mourn—or wed and devour, depending on the point of view—three older men including George who is Bruce's father, and maybe she now has her cap set for same old friend Francois and the circle is complete.

  Or is it?

  If you lay it out in a flow pattern, it goes like this: Ann Marie is born. Father Tony dies. Mother Maybelle, or Maizey, falls in love with Francois—but Ann Marie is alive and dependent, so the love affair dies. Maybelle marries Wilson Turner for stability but eight years later Wilson dies thoroughly destabilized. Ann Marie shifts her dependency to Nathan, and Nathan dies. She then marries Donald, Larry, and George in successive dependencies, and they each die.

  Enter, now, a different pattern. Ann Marie has got it together. Apparently she is dependent on no one—but quite a lot now seems to be dependent on her. So what else is different? The pattern of death is different, and I need to get a better understanding of that.

  It was getting onto midnight and it had been a hell of a long day but I could not cut and run home with all this stuff seething in the brainpan so I decided to swing back through the valley for another go at the Light Center. At least I was making my way home; I could take the Ventura Freeway on over to Las Virgenes and go home the back way through Malibu Canyon. This is what I had loosely in the mind anyway when I pulled off the freeway at Van Nuys.

  Twenty or more cars were still in the parking lot when I reached the center and there were plenty of lights at work but apparently the late activities there had concluded and the place was emptying. I found a uniformed security cop loitering in the gazebo I'd shared twice that day with Janulski; I introduced myself and invited him for coffee. He looked me over and checked his watch; said, "It closes in ten minutes," referring to the snack shop on the property.

  His name was Barney, would you believe, a retired navy lifer earning extra bucks the easy way, midnight to eight, to augment the pension. Guy of about fifty, thick black hair just beginning to gray, neat and trim in the uniform and packing a .45 Colt ACP in a very businesslike way. Thirty years in the military puts a stamp on a guy, an unmistakable trademark that says here's a man with self-discipline and staying power, a guy who can cope and maintain. I've always admired those guys because I was part of that system myself and just barely managed to cope with the five years of mandatory service after Annapolis—and the academy itself was no tea party, either.

  I bought the coffee in throwaway cups and we took it with a sack of stale doughnuts back to the gazebo. Barney was not officially on duty for a few minutes so we relaxed and talked navy and swapped a couple of stories. He had been seventeen years a chief gunner's mate and had served on everything from destroyers to battleships. Turned out that he'd also pulled shore duty at the Pentagon during part of the time that I was there so we had a lot in common and he was visi
bly impressed with my stories about ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence.

  So we were buddies by the time the coffee was gone and he had to start his lock-up inspection. He invited me along, which was what I had in mind anyway.

  Barney had not heard that his employer was in jail but of course he knew about the Milhaul tragedy and he knew about the child-fondling incident and Charles Cohan McSweeney—who, it turns out, had been a fellow employee.

  McSweeney had worked for the center as a maintenance engineer and general handyman for about two months before his death. Some of the jobs had to be scheduled so as not to interfere with the center's activities—that is, after midnight—so Barney had been in direct contact with him from time to time.

  "Okay guy, I thought," he told me. "Didn't say much, but there really wasn't that much to be said between us anyhow. I wouldn't have thought of him as a weirdo. Just quiet, that's all."

  I said, "Well, yeah, bent doesn't mean broken. It's just that his particular bend is usually very damaging to young lives. How'd you feel about Annie turning him in?"

  Barney shrugged and replied, "What else could she do? Can't have a guy like that messing around a place like this. And some of these guys, I guess, get real crazy. How 'bout this guy awhile back, tortured all those little kids and chopped 'em up? You never know. But I was really surprised about Charlie. Still can't picture him charging a cop, going after him with a hammer."

  "That what he did?"

  "Way I got it, yeah. Or so the cop said, after he emptied his revolver into him."

  I said, "Witnesses?"

  "Not to the shooting, no. Guess they'd gone to his house to make the arrest. But there were witnesses to the other thing. Way I got it, he walks in there stark naked and starts playing with the kids. Can you beat that? In broad daylight. Guy must have flipped out or something."