Pennines on a Dead Woman's Eyes

by Marcia Muller

  I frowned. “Lis said—”

  “I know—she’s history. And I also know she’s deathly afraid of going back into a real court of law. I don’t blame her. But maybe if you come up with new evidence . . . That’s why I wanted so badly for you to investigate. If anyone can find out what actually happened back then, it’s you.”

  Big compliment; heavy burden to carry. “You flatter me.”

  Jack’s phone buzzed. He crossed to the worktable, spoke, then held the receiver out. “For you, Ted.”

  Ted said, “I’ve got a message for you from somebody named Alison. You’re to meet with Louise Wingate at Project Helping Hands On Sixteenth Street at ten-thirty.”

  “Thanks.” I replaced the receiver and turned to Jack. “Someone I know who works in the nonprofit sector talked to the friend of McKittridge who testified about finding the note; she’s arranged an appointment for me. I was afraid Wingfield would refuse to discuss the case, but apparently she’s open to it.”

  “I doubt you’ll find that people are hostile after all these years.

  “Somebody’s hostile, Jack. If you want proof, just take a look at the front of Judy’s house.”

  Project Helping Hands occupied a storefront in the grubby heart of the Mission. It had once been a bookstore-and-café; the bar still held steaming urns and towers of Styrofoam cups. Young men and women, most of them Hispanic, sat at the tables toward the front, drinking coffee, talking reading. The nearby shelves housed a jumbled of assortment of pamphlets, used textbooks, college and trade school catalogs, and nearly every self-help manual ever written.

  The rear of the space was broken up into cubicles for counselors and administrators, and in one of them I found Louise Wingfield. She was a tall, vigorous woman dressed in black jeans and a soft, much-washed chambray shift; her gray hair was stylishly short, and her fingers were stained with ink and nicotine. As she waved me into a wooden chair wedged between her desk and the cubicle’s flimsy wall, she spoke into the phone, jabbing at the air for emphasis.

  “Gordon, this young man is our most promising college candidate, and he deserves your support. You must meet with him this week so you can write the recommendation in time for your alma mater’s early decision deadline. . . No, I will not write it. Why? Because, dear, we’re trying to turn these disadvantaged young people into outstanding citizens and leaders, and one thing outstanding citizens and leaders do not do is give recommendations to people they’ve never met ... Friday at four? Fine, dear, he’ll be there.”

  Louise Wingate replaced the receiver and gave me a bright smile as she scrawled a note on a scratch pad. “The only reason Gordon Kane takes that kind of crap from me,” she said, “is because I caught my son and him pig-drunk in my greenhouse when they were only fourteen and gave them both a hiding they’ve never forgotten. Gordon’s still scared shitless of me.”

  I smiled as I took out my notepad. Gordon Kane was a formidable power in San Francisco business and society, and so proper it was rumored that royalty worried about using the correct fork at his table. The images of him “pig-drunk” and “scared shitless” were highly amusing. “You certainly have impressive resources to call upon for your clients.”

  Wingfield ripped the top sheet off the pad and tossed it into her out-box. “Nobody’s impressive once you’ve seen him vomiting on your clean floor. But yes, I’m fortunate to have been born into our little golden circle, as one society editor dubbed it. We know everything about one another, both the good and the bad; consequently, we all owe one another favors.” She leaned back in her creaky swivel chair, looked levelly at me, and added, “I hear you want to talk about Cordy?”

  “That’s right. Did Alison tell you why?”

  “She did. It came as no surprise. Joseph Stameroff has been obsessing for weeks about the prospect of a mock trial and what it could do to his precious adopted daughter. Leonard Eyestone—the present director of the Institute for North American Studies—isn’t too thrilled, either.”

  “You know both of them?”

  “They’re part of our golden circle—Leonard born into it, and Joe a naturalized citizen because of his acquired prestige and wealth. And they’re also two of those impressive resources you mentioned, as is Judy Benedict.” She paused. “Frankly, I can’t say I sympathize with Judy’s biological mother’s cause. Thirty-six years ago—even twenty—I wouldn’t have spoken with you. But a lot’s happened to me since I stopped being a society wife, and that kind of experience gives one a different perspective on the past. What one realizes often isn’t pretty.”

  “Such as what you’ve realized about Cordy McKittridge?”

  “Cordy, among others. Including myself.” Wingfield shook a cigarette from a pack on her desk. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. The few close friends I have from the old desk are all into fitness—for themselves and everybody else. I read an article a couple of years ago that coined a wonderful term for that type—’health Nazis.’ But down here”—she motioned around us—”and in the other neighborhood centers my foundation runs, the clients smoke, so it’s difficult for me to quit. Minority group members don’t think much about purifying the temples of their souls; they’re too busy trying to keep body and soul together. Besides, smoking’s a small wickedness compared to the others available to them, and it gives a great deal of pleasure.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled, and made a face. “Not that I recommend it..”

  “About Cordy . . .” I began.

  “Sorry. I tend to ramble about pet peeves. Anyway, Cordy.” For a moment her eyes narrowed and she appeared to sort through her memories. “You know, even though I now see her and those days for what they were, a part of me feels such a . . . an affection for them. The early fifties . . .”

  “Tell me about them.”

  She tipped farther back in the chair, smoked contemplatively. “Cordy and I had known each other forever. I was a couple of years ahead of her at Burke, though, and for school kids two years is a big gap, so we didn’t really become friends until the summer after my sophomore year at Stanford, when my parents bought a small ranch near the McKittridge’s summer place in the Napa Valley. Cordy had just graduated from Burke and was resisting her parents’ plan for her debut, as well as their pleas that she attend college, or at least finishing school. The debut thing—I’d managed to avoid that myself, so I supported her, but I did try to talk her into giving college a whirl. We spent a lot of time that summer riding and swimming and talking.”

  A slender young Hispanic man with an acne-scarred face and stringy hair that fell to his shoulders came to the door of the cubicle. Wingfield looked at him, then gestured impatiently with her cigarette hand, laying a trail of smoke in the air. “Later, Rick,” He nodded and went away.

  She continued. “I really thought Cordy should go on with her education. She was very bright, in spite of the fact that she tried to give the opposite impression, as was fashionable in those days. But in the end she agreed to make her debut and stayed at home doing . . . whatever it was she did. It was while we were nipping gin in the powder room at the Sheraton Palace during the Winter Cotillion that she talked me into going in on renting the apartment.”

  “What apartment was that? According to the trial transcript Cord lived at her parents’ home.”

  “It never came out at the trial; a great deal was hushed up, for reasons that will become obvious. The flat was in North Beach, on an alley off upper Grant Avenue. Very bohemian, above an Italian bakery. Only one girl actually lived there, but six of us used it for our . . . we called them adventures.”

  “Who were the others?”

  “My roommate from Stanford. Two former Burke girls who attended Mills College in Oakland. A girl names Melissa—the one who lived there full time. I never got to know Melissa well; she was really Cordy’s friend and not around a whole lot.”

  “And these adventures—I take it you mean sexual.”

  “Occasionally they w
ere, but compared to what goes on today, they were pretty tame. Mainly we dressed more wildly than we were allowed to at home or at school, ran around to places our parents wouldn’t approve of with people they wouldn’t want us to know, stayed out late. We gave parties that artists and intellectuals came to, experimented with marijuana. On weekends when our parents thought us safely tucked away in the college libraries or visiting school friends, we’d be right under their noses in San Francisco.”

  I was just the sort of dual life a frivolous society girl would embark on: daring on the surface, but safe enough; if she got in over her head, she could always flee home to the monied nest. But even that degree of duality interested me, given what had happened to Cordy McKittridge. I asked, “What places did you run around to? And who were these people your parents wouldn’t want you to know?”

  “Well, there were the clubs, Sinaloa. Ann’s Four-forty, the Hungry I, the Forbidden City with its Chinese showgirls. Coffee-houses. This wasn’t really the Beat era yet, but the city was full of bohemians. We met artists, poets, actors, all kinds of writers and intellectuals. Wild-eyed socialists, even Communists, I supposed. And there were the less savory places; gambling rooms in Chinatown where they would let Caucasians in; back rooms behind Fillmore district bars; after-hour jazz clubs, blind pigs.”

  Wingfield paused, chuckling. “We had some narrow escapes. At the Forbidden City we ran into one of my parents’ neighbors; the only thing that saved us was that he was with a woman other than his wife. Another time my roommate’s father turned up at Bimbo’s—and he was from Santa Barbara. Fortunately we got out of there before he saw us.” Suddenly her expression sobered. “And there was Cordy’s abortion.”

  “When was that?”

  “August of the summer before she died, right before she . . . started with Vincent. I went with her to the clinic in Ensenada. It was . . . awful. On the way home she passed out at L.A. Airport and I was afraid she’d hemorrhaged, but it was only the heat.”

  I jotted notes on my pad. “Who was the man?”

  “Cordy wouldn’t say. I always suspected it was Leonard Eyestone; she’d been seeing him off and on. But if it was, neither ever admitted to it. Have you spoken with Leonard?”

  “I’m hoping to meet with him later today.”

  “Well, Leonard’s an odd duck—not at all the type of man Cordy usually went with. A Ph.D. in economics. Anyway, I’d seen her with only a few other men the year before our trip to Mexico, and no one as frequently as Leonard. Whoever it was had to have had money; the abortion was expensive, and we went first class.”

  “The man couldn’t have been on one of your wild-eyed socialists, then. This brings us to Vincent Benedict. Was Cordy in love with him?”

  Wingfield’s lip tightened. “In her limited way. One of the things I’ve been forced to face about Cordy is that she didn’t love anyone. Especially herself.”

  “And those notes she received from Benedict setting up their assignations—I gather they went to the North Beach flat rather than to her parents’ home?”

  Wingfield nodded.

  “Did you ever read any of them?”

  “No.”

  “But you were certain they came from Benedict. Why?”

  “His handwriting was distinctive. Bold black writing on gray vellum notepaper. No return address, city postmark.”

  “But how did you know they were from him?”

  “Because Cordy confided to Melissa, who told me. Cordy would always act different when they came—smug, smiling, and secretive.”

  “When did she start with Benedict?”

  “Right after we came back from Mexico.”

  “Did you know Benedict?”

  “Yes. Cordy took me to the Institute a few times, even fixed me up with a date for one of their cocktail parties. I knew most of the people there. It was one of those times that she pointed out the dovecote to me—the house’s architect was an Anglophile, so there had to be a dovecote—and said it was a very romantic place.”

  “And you took her statement to mean that was where she met Benedict.”

  “I knew that was what she meant; Cordy had her ways of making things perfectly clear without actually saying them. I got mad at her when she started hinting around about the cote, and told her to grow up.”

  “When was that?”

  “A couple of months before she died.”

  “But given the way you were sneaking around behind your parents’ back—that wasn’t very grown up, either.”

  Wingfield shrugged. “Maybe I’d become tired of all that by then. I was about to graduate from Stanford and had to make some hard decisions about my future. Somehow helling around in the clubs and having affairs with married men didn’t seem very intriguing anymore.”

  “How many other people knew about Cordy’s and Vincent’s meetings in the cote?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s possible quite a few did, the way gossip circulates in this town.”

  “Lis Benedict?”

  “Well, given that she killed Cordy—”

  “Assume for a moment that she didn’t.”

  “Well . . . it’s still probable that she would have known.”

  “I take it you were also acquainted with Lis.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she behave toward Cordy?”

  “She was equally pleasant to Cordy and to me, in a kind of remote way. Mrs. Benedict was well bred and always acted the lady. That’s why I was so shocked when they arrested her for the murder.”

  “But you believed that she’d done it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you now?”

  “. . . I don’t know. At the time I wanted to believe she had because I wanted the whole thing over and done with so I could get on with my life. Now . . . well, I still can’t imagine who else could have.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” I looked down at my pad; my notes were sparse. “Ms. Wingfield, do you think this dual life you and Cordy and your friends indulged in could have led to her murder?”

  She considered, shook her head. “As I said before, we were really pretty innocent. It was a very minor rebellion against the sterility and conservatism we saw at home and at school.”

  “I didn’t think San Francisco or San Franciscans were very sterile or conservative, even in the fifties.”

  “Then you don’t know how things really were. After the war San Francisco had to grapple with a tremendous inferiority complex and paranoia. The way it coped was to conform.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Wingfield’s face became animated: I suspected that in spite of the painful memories, she was enjoying this discussion of the past. “In the spring of ‘forty-five,” she began, “the city was host to the charter conference of the United Nations. Three thousand visitors representing some twenty-seven countries and the world press crowded into town. The parties and entertainments . . . well, they were spectacular. I know, because my parents gave one at our house on Lafayette Square. Several hundred people—including some men in turbans—attended. For years afterward my mother would related that they drank over a hundred bottles of Korbel champagne, nearly that many cocktails, and smoked a hundred dollars’ worth of cigarette and cigars. I don’t know what the canapés cost because at that point in her story my father would turn cross as a bear and tell her to shut up . . .”

  “I’m rambling again. The point is that for two months San Francisco was party giver to the world. When the U.N. charter was signed and the delegates left, the leaders of society and industry were certain the city would be selected as home to the organization. You can imagine their shock when New York was chosen instead. And at that point the city changed; everyone decided they had to out—New York New York. Skyscrapers went up. Corporations were lured here. With them came the executive families, the executive tracts in the suburbs where we’d once had our country estates. Strangers invaded our clubs and our neighborhoods, our restaurants, shops and
schools. And instead of welcoming the newcomers, our socialites withdrew into the narrow confines of their supremely boring lives. And the children of society, like Cordy and me, rebelled.”

  “And what became of those children of society?”

  “They’re dead, like Cordy. Or as boring as their parents, like the two girls from Mills College who shared the flat. Or they’ve changed with the times, as I have.”

  “Speaking of the others who shared the flat—can you put me in touch with them?”

  “No. My roommate from Stanford died ten years ago. I’m no longer close to the women from Mills, but from what I know of their lives, I can assure you that they’d want nothing to do with your investigation.”

  “What about Melissa?”

  “Melissa I know nothing about. I haven’t seen her since before Cordy died. Cordy’s murder destroyed what little enthusiasm I had for the wild life; I collected the things I kept at the flat, spent the summer dating eligible men, and accepted the first, halfway decent proposal of marriage. In a sense, Cordy’s death doomed me to a living death in a bad marriage—until fifteen years ago, when I broke free of it.”

  “Do you recall Melissa’s last name?”

  Wingfield frowned, lit another cigarette. I can’t . . . That’s odd. I knew it at one time, and I’m usually very good with names. Bird? No, a bird. Wren? Finch? No . . . Cardinal!”

  “Melissa Cardinal. And you say you don’t know how Cordy met her?”

  “No. Cordy was always picking up strays.”

  “What did Melissa do? Was she a student?”

  “No. She worked, and her job involved traveling, because she was in and out of the flat. She was . . . yes, a flight attendant.”

  “For what airline?”

  “One of the big ones with the international routes. I remember her showing us things she’d bought in Paris and London.”

  It was possible, I might be able to locate Melissa Cardinal—just barely possible. I made a note, then asked Wingfield is she could think of anything else that might have had bearing on Cordy’s death.

  She thought for close to a minute, eyes narrowed against the smoke from her forgotten cigarette. Finally she noticed it and stubbed it out, shaking her head. “I can’t recall a thing. Is this really so important at such a late date?”