Goldengirl

by Peter Lovesey

  “And the man?”

  The old lady screwed her face into an expression of dislike. “He was more interested in the child’s bones than her personality. I’ll never forget it. I picked her up in my arms and he started touching her legs, not unpleasantly, I mean, but holding them in his hand like he was picking out a grapefruit in a supermarket. She didn’t care for that one bit. Kids know, even at three years old. Damn. Charles is pouring. D’you hear? This will be the weakest cup of tea you’ve had in your life.”

  It looked as if it might be Dryden’s last chance for information off the record. “Was there something odd about the adoption?”

  Mrs. Van Horn hesitated. “I think it was all smoothed over with the lawyers, but the way it was arranged was unlike any other adoption in my experience. People can’t go around homes picking out children as if they were unclaimed strays, can they? It wouldn’t do, Mr. Hofmann. But these folk were doctors, as I mentioned, and somehow they squared it with the welfare authorities.” Her eyes darted toward the kitchen again. “They sent us a garden swing two weeks after the papers were signed. If it had been money, I’d have sent it back, but what can you do about a darned swing? The kids saw it right away, and I was sunk.”

  Hardaker returned, tray in hand.

  “Oh, Charles!” cried Mrs. Van Horn. “You’ve slopped it in the saucers. Mr. Hofmann is from England. They know about tea. Put it on the table here and make yourself inconspicuous. We’re having such an interesting conversation. Sugar, Mr. Hofmann?” Before Dryden could say he didn’t take it, she clicked her tongue and said, “Charles, you forgot the sugar. It’s in the pantry. Second shelf, I’m almost certain.” When Hardaker had gone through, she smiled and murmured, “Top shelf, but no matter. Where were we?”

  “The adoption,” said Dryden. “Did you hear any more about Dean after that?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Van Horn with a sigh. “They were Bakersfield people, you see. That’s eighty miles north of here.”

  “You don’t recall what brought them to Ventura, then?”

  “Oh, the man had some story. What was it now? I believe he claimed to have some interest in the family. A survey, would it be? Yes, he had been working on a survey into the way people grow, of all the darned silly things, and he’d managed to trace Dean from her grandparents. They would be your aunt and uncle, I guess.”

  Dryden nodded.

  “That was what he claimed,” said Mrs. Van Horn skeptically. “I’ll say this for his story: he was looking the child over like she was a laboratory specimen. You know, I had nightmares about that adoption for years after. And I never liked that swing. We got rid of the thing the fall before last. Darn it, here comes Charles.”

  “I brought the biscuits, too — in case,” said Hardaker, with an ungracious smile at Dryden.

  “My, that was thoughtful,” said Mrs. Van Horn. “Now, Mr. Hofmann, was there anything else you wanted to ask me?”

  He didn’t want to queer the old lady’s pitch with Hardaker, but this chance wouldn’t come again. “You said a few minutes ago you’d had some scares since the adoption. What exactly did you mean, Mrs. Van Horn?”

  Hardaker almost threw up his hand. “That isn’t a question Mrs. Van Horn can answer.”

  “Why not?” queried Mrs. Van Horn.

  “Lavinia, I urge you to take care. We don’t know Mr. Hofmann. You might regret —”

  “You won’t gag me, Charles,” Mrs. Van Horn said firmly. “Mr. Hofmann is a fine young man, can’t you see that? He’s the cousin of the child’s mother. He wants to help Dean if he can. For Lord’s sake, let’s be candid with him.”

  “Against my advice, remember,” Hardaker said, his face the color of the poinsettias at the window.

  “Drink your tea, Charles, and don’t fuss. Yes, Mr. Hofmann, I got a little distressed about two years back, when a man telephoned saying he was a newsman doing an article on children’s homes. That didn’t scare me at all, but when he got here, all he wanted to know about was Dean, and I could tell he was no reporter, because he didn’t write a thing down. The questions frightened me. He was very abrupt. I could only suppose he was from the police, or something, and that they had turned up something awful on Dr. Serafin. Darn it, I wasn’t going to say his name. Don’t look at me with that death’s-head expression, Charles.”

  “What was this man like?” asked Dryden.

  “A little older than you. Short. A small man, but forceful. What’s the word they use? Machismo. Yes, he had machismo, all right. And he was a smart dresser. Do you have some idea who it was?”

  “I don’t know. Was he dark?”

  “Swarthy, I’d say. He didn’t have much hair, though. Oh, but he had two beautiful rings. Rubies, they were.”

  Gino Valenti. Two years back. The time the consortium was being formed. Trust Valenti to make his own check on Serafin’s story.

  “He was no cop, anyway,” said Dryden. “They don’t wear rings like that. And you told him what you’ve just told me?”

  “If I recall it correctly, yes,” said Mrs. Van Horn. “He was very insistent, you see, and I didn’t have Charles here that time to speak for me.” She gave Hardaker a warm glance. “It worried me for a long time after. That was when I had the swing moved out. I was getting this recurrent dream that Dr. Serafin had neglected the child until she died and then dissected her and kept her limbs in bottles of Formalin. It was very scary. If you find her, Mr. Hofmann, I’d like to know that she’s all right. Would you let me know?”

  Chapter 12

  Toward the end of Tuesday morning Dryden picked up a felt-tip pen and started listing potential merchandising outlets for Goldengirl. It took an effort to make a start; up to now he had brushed aside the detail, but it couldn’t be shirked any longer. From July, he was giving the pitch, not Serafin. And without the backup of a film and a family saga dating back to pre-war Germany. A campaign had to be prepared, if only in outline.

  On paper, it was no trouble. The market possibilities were limitless. Earlier, he had looked up the press clippings on the merchandising Norman Brokaw had set up for Mark Spitz in 1973. His recollection had been right; by May of that year the potential value of Spitz’s endorsements already under contract was reckoned at five million dollars. He had been featured in every major magazine from Life to Stern, and made TV specials with Bob Hope, Bill Cosby and Sonny and Cher. His poster had sold more than any since Betty Grable’s, and he was pulling down $12,500 for every public appearance. It was good to read. Scale the whole thing up for inflation, the stepup in endorsement advertising and the built-in bonus for a gorgeous blonde, and there was no reason why Goldine should not top twenty million. The only figure she wouldn’t be able to match was the $25,000 Schick had offered Spitz to shave off his mustache on TV. To compensate for that, she would have the edge in the lucrative cosmetics, fashion and domestic goods markets.

  It was like surfing: you caught the wave at its high point and hoped it kept rolling all the way in. The timing was crucial. Like it or not, he had to sell the Goldengirl idea to big business in advance of the Olympics. That meant trading on his reputation, pulling every string he knew. The two-million fee he had settled for as payment wouldn’t be easy money.

  After lunch he drove out to Bakersfield. On the Golden State Freeway, he did some thinking about Serafin. The theory that he was conning Armitage and the others was out. You didn’t equip an Olympic training camp in the mountains and employ a team of coaches, a psychologist and God knows how many ancillary staff to hoist the kind of money the consortium were putting up. Nothing Dryden had learned from Goldine, the newspapers or the reference books conflicted with the story Serafin had told that first evening at Cambria.

  There remained the question: What actually motivated Serafin? Earlier, it was safe to assume it was the prospect of a fat profit. The meeting on Sunday had disposed of that idea. Having masterminded the operation from the start, Serafin should have had a large interest in the proposed car
ve-up of revenue. What had shaped up as a bloodletting had passed off with less dissent than a Quaker prayer meeting. He had relinquished his right to a direct cut of the profits without a murmur. Anything he made out of the project would now be at Goldine’s discretion, and subject to the say-so of his fellow trustees. Yet he hadn’t protested, hadn’t seemed more than mildly interested. There had to be something else in it for him, more potent than dollars. A simple ambition to see his adopted daughter on the Olympic victory rostrum? Dryden doubted it. He was beginning to think along different lines.

  According to the Directory of Medical Specialists, Serafin had been born in Salzburg in September 1920. He had received his M.D. from the University of Geneva in 1945. In March 1938, Hitler’s troops had annexed Austria for the Third Reich. Serafin would have been seventeen at the time, an automatic conscript to the Hitler Youth. Yet by the early forties, he was into his medical training in neutral Switzerland. How had he managed that when the Reich was committed to fighting on so many fronts? Either he had got out of Austria before the Nazis took over, or they had granted his exemption from military service to train as a doctor. To gain that concession, he would have had to convince them he was a committed Nazi.

  The story of Gretchen in Hitler’s Germany had been rich with detail of the Napolas and the operations of RuSHA, but that in itself didn’t stamp Serafin as a former party member. Anyone who had lived through that era must have retained a vivid memory of the Nazi machine. And by implication at least, Serafin had more than once in his narrative expressed disapproval of the Third Reich. Its justification of racial elitism he had dismissed as a “crude philosophy.”

  Still, the impression that had emerged most strongly from that evening in Cambria was Serafin’s fascination with Goldine’s heredity. He had not been able to conceal his pride in pointing out that she was the recipient of Aryan genes. His preoccupation with the child’s physique had been enough to give Mrs. Van Horn recurrent nightmares.

  Then, there was the eccentric upbringing he had given the child, with the heavy emphasis on physical development: the home gymnasium, the exercises, the machine to expand her rib cage, the injections. And the cosmetic surgery, the bleaching of her hair. Was that to groom her for sporting and commercial stardom, or to create an Aryan ideal?

  Thinking back to the Goldengirl film, its opening sequence had suggested Riefenstahl’s influence before anyone had mentioned Nazi Germany. Allowing that Serafin’s formative years were almost certainly dominated by Hitler’s propaganda, there was at least a possibility he might be planning a triumph for Goldengirl at the Olympics as a vindication of the master-race theory.

  Fanciful? It fitted facts. Above everything with Serafin, there was a ruthless sense of purpose. If money was not the motivating force, there had to be something of real power in its place. This afternoon was dedicated to discovering what it was.

  Bakersfield by California 99 presented an unpromising location for a neo-Nazi plot. South Union Avenue bristled with motels in landscaped grounds, with billboards boasting steaks and seafood. The Serafin address was in Alta Vista Drive, in the northeast residential section, well away from the oil installations. The house was brick, detached and large enough to suit an owner with the status of professor. It had a rose arbor and a lawn with a sprinkler working at full pressure. He drove past slowly, parked one block up, and walked back. The woman who answered his ring was blond and in her thirties. Her hair was tied with a blue chiffon scarf and she was holding a struggling three-year-old.

  She wasn’t pleased at hearing it was another inquiry about Dr. Serafin. She had answered questions for a man on Sunday. Said he represented a San Diego newspaper. Now, what was a San Diego reporter doing asking questions to decent people in Bakersfield, she wanted to know, and how many more of these calls was she likely to get? She had never met Dr. Serafin, and knew nothing whatsoever about him. She and her husband had the house on a two-year rental due to expire in September, and they had fixed everything through Fox and Fox, the realty people on Truxton Avenue.

  The senior citizen clipping his hedge two doors down was more forthcoming: “Would this be the CIA? Say no more, mister. I can keep my mouth shut. What do you want to know? Sure, I remember the Serafin people. Three of them, there was. A couple and their daughter. Used to drive a Buick. A professor, I heard. Not the college up the road, but the Human Science place, a couple of miles east, off Chester Avenue. I believe he threw up the job back in seventy-seven, or thereabouts. He was some years short of retirement then, I guess. Say, would that be significant? Yeah, he was five years my junior, I’m positive, and I got to sixty-five just eighteen months back. You thought I was younger? It’s the outdoor life, mister. Keeps me in shape. What else interests you?”

  “The daughter?” prompted Dryden.

  “Didn’t see much of her. She didn’t hang about the street with the other kids, or I’d have talked to her for sure. I relate to kids. With me, the generation gap is nonexistent. But that kid never left the house except in the Buick. I never got what you’d call a face-to-face with her. Not sure I’d care to, candidly. She didn’t rate as a looker. Had some height on her, though. She was inches up on both of them, and she couldn’t have been much over fourteen. Is this helpful?”

  “Sure,” said Dryden. “Did you get to speak to the parents?”

  “A few words now and then. Time of day, generally. Nothing to interest you guys. Hold on, now. I’m forgetting. Serafin had some kind of accent. Till now I never thought much about it. Funny how you just accept these things. Well, the Serafins liked to keep their distance, and people around here respect each other. When I heard the wife took off with some intern from the City Hospital, I kept it to myself, like it was no business of mine. You could see them each lunchtime holding hands on a bench in the Cunningham Memorial Garden.” His eyes bulged. “Say, you don’t suppose he was the contact?”

  “Not a chance,” said Dryden. “Thanks, anyway.”

  “My pleasure.” His informant grinned conspiratorially. “I knew you was CIA when you parked on the next block. Saw you drive past the first time.”

  The campus of the California Institute of Human Science must have been symmetrically faultless when the main four-story block and tower were completed in 1915. A eucalyptus-lined drive exactly bisected five acres of lawn to end at the broad steps and fluted pillars of the portico, itself positioned at the very center of the red brick façade. At some point afterward, the symmetrical concept had been abandoned. A series of extensions in bricks an expert could probably date from their various shades of pink had extended the west wing toward the gate, while the economic strictures of the seventies had reduced further expansion to a colony of gray prefabs on the east lawn.

  “I’d like to see the Professor of Anthropometry, if that’s possible.”

  The porter looked Dryden up and down. “Professor Walsh, sir? You have an appointment?”

  “I don’t,” admitted Dryden. “But I’ve driven up from Los Angeles.”

  The expression hardened under the peaked cap. “You some kind of rep?”

  “I’m not selling anything, if that’s what you mean. The name is Martindale, and I’m from England. Perhaps you’ll be so kind as to convey that message to the Professor.”

  The porter gave him a doubtful look, and dialed a number on the intercom. “Patsy? Listen, some guy here from England wants to see the Prof. Name’s Martingale.”

  “Dale,” said Dryden. “Martindale.” Having gone to the trouble of looking up the name of the English publisher of Professor Walsh’s book on radiographic measurements, he wasn’t going to have it mispronounced.

  The porter repeated it correctly. “Yeah, I know, sweetheart, but see if it rings any chimes with the Prof, will you? This guy seems to think it should.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and told Dryden, “Professor Walsh just finished lecturing. There’s this heap of letters to sign. I tell you straight, Mr. Martingale — What’s that? Yeah. Patsy? Well, that beats everythin
g!” He put the phone down. “Take the elevator to floor three, Mr. Martingale. Professor Walsh’s secretary will meet you there.”

  Patsy got the name right. A small, efficient-looking blonde, she weaved a route confidently through a mass of students converging on the lift, and led Dryden along a corridor lined with bulletin boards. Through an office, presumably her own, to a room unlike any Dryden was prepared for. No filing cabinets, timetable, group photos on the wall. Not a skeleton in sight. It had a thick bottle-green carpet and biscuit-colored hessian wallpaper, three steel-framed chairs with white leather upholstery, and an occasional table with a tall Venetian glass containing white roses. A woman was adjusting the angle of the blinds at the window. Martindale’s name seemed to have made an impact.

  The Professor was obviously still in the lecture theater. There were sure to be questions afterward. He was welcome to stay there for the next few moments. The academic staff in all its robes wouldn’t top the figure in this blue velvet pantsuit. She turned, a brunette with greenish-blue eyes, hair shaped to her head, with a thick fringe. She was near Dryden’s age. The smile she gave him mingled mockery and invitation. “Mr. Martindale from England, I understand.”

  He blinked in surprise. “You wouldn’t be —”

  “Stephanie Walsh?” She put a cool hand into his. “I confess that I am. Won’t you sit down?”

  He sank into one of the steel chairs. “Excuse my confusion. They didn’t tell me downstairs. I presumed Professor Walsh was —”

  “A man?” She took a chair opposite him. “You’re not the first. Perhaps we could both be excused some confusion, Mr. Martindale. You are Douglas Martindale of James and Martindale? The publisher of Anthropometric Radiography and its Applications?”