Without even realizing it, she had driven back to the Marmont. She had been planning to stay at her co-op in West Hollywood, but now that she was here, she realized that she needed to go back to the place where she and Linc had spent so much time together. She also needed the comfort of being near a friend who had also lived through those crazy times.
A few minutes later, she was standing at the door of the bungalow.
“Oh, Ron!” she cried as he answered the door. Then she fell into his arms.
It was the next morning before she was even able to think. She had ended up spending the night in one of the two bedrooms at the bungalow, unable to forsake its cozy comfort. Awakening to the smell of roses and the chattering of the birds, she remembered why she was there. She sat up in bed, and went over again what she knew: someone was looking for Iris, probably because of her testimony before the HUAC inquisitors. Everyone Iris had named was a known Communist, and had nothing more to lose by being named yet again. Except for two: herself and Linc. She was out: her life hadn’t been ruined by Iris’ testimony. Or at least, not that she had been aware of until now. Which left Linc. Or rather, Linc’s sons. They were the only ones she could think of who might have wanted to avenge Linc’s ruined career. They had been small when she had known them; the elder, Brent, had been only eleven when Linc died, and the younger, Johnny, seven or eight. But they had loved their father. Linc’s being branded a Communist had given his ex-wife the ammunition she needed to prevent him from seeing them. According to Linc, she was a selfish, lazy, bitter woman, who only wanted the children to get back at him. Subject to outbursts of bizarre behavior, she had later been hospitalized for schizophrenia. Though Charlotte had seen the boys often on their frequent visits with Linc before the custody battle, she had lost touch with them after his death. What had become of them? she wondered. Then she remembered Linc’s sister. Maybe she would know. Charlotte and Linc had visited her several times in the New Jersey suburb where Linc had grown up. Could it be that she still lived there? Charlotte tried to remember her married name: Kelly, no; Kenney, no; Kinney, yes. Elaine Kinney. Her husband had been a Bill.
Picking up the phone on the bedside table, she called long distance information and asked for the Kinneys’ number. To her astonishment, the operator gave it to her right away. They still lived on the same street. Then she called Tracey and told him what Perkins had said about Iris’ testimony, and that she was planning to talk with Linc’s sister about the boys.
She left Los Angeles a day later, after a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire with her agent and a producer about a movie project that sounded as if it were about to die in development hell, as ninety percent of them seemed to do. Which left her back where she had been before: facing the twice-postponed deadline on her autobiography, a matter that she would rather not have thought about at the moment (though at least she now had something to say about the middle period of her life). On the plane ride back, she turned her thoughts instead to the case, remembering the feeling she had had at the beginning that the pieces of Iris’ life didn’t add up. Now she had the missing piece: the piece that was the link between Hollywood and Maine. Or maybe it was just a missing piece; she was sure there would be others. With an important piece now in hand, she lined up what she had in her head, the way a jigsaw puzzle player lines up the pieces he thinks will be needed for a particular section. After betraying her friends (just thinking about it made Charlotte want to spit), Iris had left Hollywood—not on account of being blacklisted, not even on account of world weariness or the desire for solitude—but out of self-loathing, and perhaps, fear of being considered a pariah by her friends. She retired to Hilltop Farm with her bottle, and developed the Thoreau connection. How, Charlotte still wasn’t sure—not that it was important. If she’d been a friendly witness, it wasn’t on account of Civil Disobedience. Maybe it was just on account of being in Old Town.
Reminded of that essay, Charlotte remembered a line that Thoreau had quoted to her character, Margaret Fuller, in On Walden Pond: “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death.” Iris had chosen to bleed to an everlasting death in Maine, by living a life of austerity and solitude. Perhaps she had adopted Thoreau’s philosophy not out of conviction, but as a form of self-recrimination, his words and his way of life being a penance for her sins. Why else would she have set up that secret altar to her past in the green-wallpapered room? Charlotte asked herself. If she had truly taken Thoreau’s philosophy to heart, she would simply have buried her past in the same way that that young vision quester had buried his past in the grave in the dingle next to Little Beaver Pond, and started over. But by keeping a light burning at the altar of her misdeeds, it seemed to Charlotte that she had in some sense been opening the door to the retribution of the fates. Instead of ignoring her dark side—or getting rid of it in any of the many ways one could—by burying it, laughing at it, rising above it—she had appeased it with offerings, and it had responded by coming back for more. Pamola had been her nemesis.
The idea that Iris may have been murdered by a specter out of her past was an intriguing one: it appealed to Charlotte’s dramatic sensibilities. But when she looked at it more rationally, it sounded quite fantastic. First there was the basic question: Would the forty-year-old ruin of a career be motive enough for murder? Then there were the more ordinary ones: How would one of Linc’s sons have ended up on a mountain in Maine with a pistol crossbow? How would he have known that Iris would be climbing the mountain that day? How would he have known of Coley’s camp? Her head spinning, she dismissed the premise of one of Linc’s sons being the murderer as being too farfetched. Keith was the far more likely suspect, especially when one considered that the probable weapon was a crossbow with an Indian charm on it. He had called Coley one of Black Elk’s Blue Men—a man driven by jealousy and greed—but maybe it was he who was the Blue Man. Keith had criticized Coley for being a self-appointed shaman, but it seemed to Charlotte that he was playing the same game, albeit more subtly and with more success. “Keith is a pipe-carrier,” Didias had informed her with the utmost solemnity. Which meant that he was the king of his own little spiritual realm. It seemed to Charlotte, as she came across reproductions of medicine shields and kachina dolls everywhere she went, that Native American spirituality was going to be to the nineties what Eastern spirituality had been to the sixties and seventies. How much better to be king of a bigger spiritual realm, by riding the crest of a wave of New Age fascination with Native-American ways?
Especially when you would be getting in on the ground floor with a million-dollar foundation.
She arrived at JFK Airport at five, exhausted from her quick trip back and forth across the continent. When she got back to her town house in Turtle Bay a short while later, she went promptly to bed, and didn’t wake up until seven the next morning. After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, home fries, and coffee at her local luncheonette, she went back home to call Elaine Kinney. She wanted to put the possibility of one of Linc’s sons being the murderer to rest. She figured that if she eliminated the least likely possibility, that would free her mind to concentrate on the most likely one. Occam’s Razor again. She had to admit, however, that some of her zeal to find Iris’ murderer had abated. She no longer felt any obligation to an old friend, that was for sure. In fact, the vindictive side of her wanted Iris’ murderer to get away with it, wanted even to give him a medal. But whatever vindictive feelings she may have harbored were overshadowed by the need to figure it all out, to subject Iris’ death to the same unyielding light that had just been shone on the corners of her own life. Charlotte’s friend, Kitty Saunders, who was fond of doing character readings—from the Tarot cards, tea leaves, the palms of the hands, you name it—had always described Charlotte as a wanderer, a person who thrives on the fuel of new experiences. Which was true. But she was a wanderer who relied heavily on her compass. In the wilder
ness, she needed to know where north was, and where south, east, and west were; where up was, and where down was.
She had yet to find her way in the wilderness that was Iris’ murder.
An hour later, she had retrieved her car from the garage, and was on her way out to Ho-Ho-Kus, the northern New Jersey suburb with the Indian name that never failed to elicit some comment from whoever heard it, to say nothing of being the bane of copy editors: one unbroken word (Hohokus) or hyphenated? And if hyphenated, upper or lower case for the second “Ho” and the “Kus”? Though Linc had left town for good when he was eighteen and had been dead for over thirty years, he remained Ho-Ho-Kus’ most famous former resident. And if there was ever a chance that the townspeople might forget that one of Hollywood’s greatest stars had grown up there, there was always Elaine to remind them. In fact, their middle-class upbringing was one of the things that had drawn Charlotte and Linc together. In a town in which many had clawed their way up from the bottom; such a background had been a rarity. And perhaps the reason they both had ended up in Hollywood instead of going on to lead comfortable lives in Ho-Ho-Kus, or, in Charlotte’s case, Hartford, was that their middle-class backgrounds had rested on such shaky foundations. Charlotte’s father, a successful attorney, had walked out on his family when Charlotte was a girl, and although he had paid for Charlotte’s tuition at a posh finishing school, he had paid for little else, which meant that her mother had always had to struggle to support Charlotte and her sister. Linc’s mother had married twice after his father died, in both cases to unreliable men with drinking problems whose priorities did not include providing for their families.
As Charlotte headed over the George Washington Bridge into the New Jersey suburbs on the other side of the Hudson, she considered what excuse she was going to use for her visit, and how she was going to raise the subject of Linc’s sons. She also wondered what it was exactly that she wanted to find out about them. On the first point, she decided to lie, her talent for dissimulation being a skill that she had parlayed into a lifetime career. She would tell Elaine that she had been in Ho-Ho-Kus for whatever reason, and, remembering that Elaine lived there, decided to drop by. On the second point, she decided to play it by ear: one advantage of being a wanderer was that you recognized that new discoveries were often made despite the fact that you might not have a destination in mind.
She pulled up in front of the Kinneys’ house forty-five minutes later. It still looked exactly the same: a small, charming faux-Tudor cottage on a quiet tree-shaded street lined with other small, charming faux-Tudor cottages. Elaine greeted her warmly, and escorted her into a neat living room.
The first thing Charlotte noticed was a picture in a silver frame on an end table. Identical to one in Iris’ green-wallpapered room, it showed Iris standing between Charlotte and Linc, with her arms around their waists. Just seeing it almost made her choke.
Charlotte needn’t have worried about how to bring up the subject of Linc’s sons. The subject was a natural one for two people who had absolutely nothing in common but the boys’ father.
“And what about Brent and Johnny?” Charlotte asked, having heard in tiresome detail about Elaine and Bill’s recently purchased retirement home on the inland waterway in south Florida.
Elaine sighed. “It’s a sad story. As you may know, Gloria was hospitalized for schizophrenia in 1961,” she said, referring to Linc’s wife.
Charlotte nodded. She had heard about it through the grapevine.
“She never came out again,” Elaine said. “She died there last year. After she was committed, the boys continued to live with their stepfather, but from what I understand, he pretty much left them to take care of themselves—that is, when he wasn’t being abusive.”
“How sad,” said Charlotte.
Elaine nodded. “We wanted to take them in, but Bill was out of work. Nor was there anything from Linc; as you know, he was broke when he died. In fact, he still owed money to the lawyers who represented him in the custody battle. I felt terrible about it, but I don’t think we would have gotten them anyway.”
“Why not?” Charlotte asked.
“Gloria had named the stepfather as their legal guardian.”
Charlotte had assumed that the boys had gone to live with Elaine after Gloria’s hospitalization. Elaine’s news left her feeling conscience-stricken as well. “I feel terrible,” she said. “You should have contacted me. Maybe there was something I could have done.”
“What?” said Elaine. “If we couldn’t get custody, there wasn’t any chance that you would have been able to.”
Elaine was right. “Maybe I could have looked after their interests in some way,” she said. “Protected them.”
“How? We had no way of knowing that their stepfather was abusing them. It only came out later on. Anyway, it wasn’t so bad for Brent. He was sixteen by then, and he just took off on his own after a year or so. He’s done very well. He even worked his way through college.”
Named after the actor Brent Fogarty, who had been Linc’s closest friend, Brent had been the spitting image of his father. Charlotte could still remember his pale white face at the funeral, a miniature of Linc’s own. “And Johnny?”
“John’s a bum. He hitchhikes around the country, working at odd jobs here and there. By the time he was in his early twenties, we were back on our feet financially, and we offered to send him to college. But he just turned his nose up at our offer. It made me pretty mad.”
“I can imagine,” said Charlotte sympathetically.
“He had this anti-materialist ethic. He also had a very big chip on his shoulder. He said that he was the way he was because of his upbringing. Well, if you ask me, that’s a cop-out. There are lots of people who have difficult upbringings who don’t turn into bums.”
Charlotte nodded in agreement.
“We had a big scene here one night, during which he set fire to the last of his money at the kitchen table.” She nodded toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “To show his contempt for money, and for our middle-class values.”
“Where is he now?”
Elaine shrugged. “I have no idea. I haven’t heard from him in a couple of years. But he’ll show up eventually. He always does.”
“And Brent?” she asked.
“We’re still in touch with Brent. He lives out in Colorado, near Linc’s old ranch in Ouray. He’s happily married, with two children. We don’t see him much. He won’t come East; he says he can’t stand the congestion. But we get out there to visit him every couple of years.”
“What does he do out there?”
“He has a sort of dude ranch. Hunting, fishing, white-water rafting.”
Charlotte could easily picture Brent in such a setting. As she remembered, he had his father’s adventurous streak. Linc’s ranch in Ouray had been his favorite place, and the boys had spent a lot of time there. It would make sense that Brent would be drawn to that life.
Elaine had now moved on to the careers of her own children.
Charlotte, who had been lulled almost to stupefaction by Elaine’s nonstop recap of thirty years of family history, suddenly snapped to attention. Colorado! The Ford Bronco that Jeanne had noticed at Hilltop Farm had had a Colorado license plate. Could it be? she wondered.
She endured a few more minutes of conversation and then, after thanking Elaine for the visit, beat a hasty retreat to the nearest pay phone. Thank goodness Tracey was at the barracks. “Howard!” she said, almost breathlessly.
“Ayuh!” he said, in his usual laconic tone. “This. Charlotte?”
“Yes. Listen. I need some information right away. I’d like you to find out what make of car is registered to a Brent Crawford of Ouray, Colorado.”
“Gonna tell me what this is all about?” he asked.
“Not quite yet,” she replied.
“It’s gonna cost ya.”
“Cost me to get the information or cost me that I’m not going to tell you what it’s all about?” she
teased.
“The latter. You’re going to owe me one. The former’s free. Though it’ll take a few minutes to check with the DMV out there. Where are you, anyway?”
“In New Jersey. But I’m on my way home.”
“I’ll call you there in an hour.”
Charlotte was unpacking her bag on her bed when the phone rang an hour later, on the dot. It was Tracey. “It’s a black Ford Bronco,” he said, and proceeded to give her the license plate number.
Charlotte had found the trail, and she didn’t like where it was leading. It was Brent whose black Ford Bronco Jeanne had seen parked on Stillwater Avenue, and once, on the grounds of the farm itself, when she had noticed the driver studying the house through binoculars.
“It seems to me that I remember a vehicle fitting that description having something to do with the case we’re working on now. Remember that case?” Tracey asked. “It’s a murder case.”
“I remember,” she said.
“I also seem to remember your telling me just yesterday that Linc Crawford’s son might have a motive. May I remind you that the withholding of information in a murder investigation is a crime?”
“Now, don’t go getting all huffy on me. I’m not withholding anything. In fact, I’m going to need your help following up on this. Has Pyle been calling the hikers who were signed out to Katahdin?”
“Yep,” Tracey replied. “Found one who saw Jeanne Ouellette on Hamlin Peak, which confirms her alibi.”
Murder on High Page 21