Double Image

1

A CHAOS OF EMOTIONS THREATENED TO TEAR COLTRANE APART: relief, horror, triumph, dismay, victory, revulsion. Sinking to his knees, staring down in shock toward the headless torso that had been Ilkovic, he had a terrible sense that the corpse was actually that of his father. But this time, his father hadn’t blown his brains out – Coltrane had done it for him.

“Thank God,” he murmured. Tears mixed with the rain on his cheeks. “Thank God.”

Immediately, fear reinvaded him. He had to get help for McCoy. But with McCoy’s car destroyed, there wasn’t any way to drive back to the Pacific Coast Highway. He would have to do it on foot. Ten miles away along a mud-slogged road. It would take hours. McCoy would bleed to death by then.

Despite his exhaustion, Coltrane struggled to his feet, but no sooner did he start to run toward the storm-obscured hills than he lurched to a halt, a sudden thought seizing him. There was a way to drive for help. He had forgotten there was another vehicle – Ilkovic’s. If he could find where…

Coltrane stared toward the headless corpse. Something rose in his throat as he took one hesitant step after another. Stooping, afraid that Ilkovic’s mangled hands would thrust up and clutch his throat, Coltrane trembled and pulled up Ilkovic’s rain slicker. He had been convinced that the worst was over, that there couldn’t be anything more horrifying than what he had just endured, but now he realized how wrong he had been. Touching Ilkovic’s warm corpse, fumbling in his pants pockets, feeling his spongy flesh beneath his wet garment, Coltrane became so light-headed, his mind reeling, that he feared he was going to pass out. His quivering fingers brushed against a set of keys. He tightened his grip and pulled his hand free, squeezing the keys rigidly in his palm lest he lose them as he slumped onto his hips, fighting not to throw up.

Slowly, he wiped his mouth and straightened. Find the car, he urged himself. Where would Ilkovic have left it? Coltrane had heard McCoy drive into the valley – but he hadn’t heard Ilkovic’s car. Did that mean Ilkovic had left it on the ridge above the valley? The trajectory of his bullets had indicated that at the start he was shooting from up there. Had he abandoned his vehicle and come down on foot?

Go! Coltrane inwardly shouted. You have to get help for McCoy!

Running through the dark rain, doing his best to follow the road, he felt the muddy ground angle upward, his lungs heaving, his legs straining. The effort of his ordeal had so drained him that he wavered as he reached the top. Where would Ilkovic have left the car? Not on the ridge, not where Coltrane could have seen it from below. Farther beyond the ridge. Near the road. Ilkovic wouldn’t have wanted to get too far from his escape route.

Coltrane slammed into the hood of the vehicle before he saw it. The startling impact shocked him backward, his knees, thighs, and lower abdomen in pain. But he didn’t have time to let his further injuries slow him down. His thoughts were totally on McCoy. Grabbing the driver’s door of what he now recognized was a dark van, he tugged, cursed when the door didn’t budge, fumbled to unlock it, and finally scrambled up behind the steering wheel. It took his shaking right hand three tries to fit the key into the ignition switch. Starting the van, putting it into gear, he warned himself to go slowly. Don’t get stuck in the mud. He put on the headlights and made a slow, gentle turn, praying as he felt the tires slip in the wet earth. But they gained traction, and he exhaled when the van completed its arc. Starting back through the hills toward the Pacific Coast Highway, he pawed at the levers on the steering wheel and found how to activate the windshield wipers. Throughout, he was conscious of a terrible odor, but with so many activities occupying his attention, it was only when he was on his way that the rank stench in the van fully struck him. It reminded him of rotten meat, and he suddenly knew, his soul frozen, that the rear of the van was where Ilkovic had butchered Daniel.

2

POLICE RADIOS SQUAWKED. The headlights of numerous emergency vehicles pierced the night gloom of the valley, their crisscross pattern creating a sense of being in a maze. The storm had diminished to a drizzle, its din no longer muffling the drone of idling police cars. Although Coltrane had warned the state trooper whose cruiser he had nearly run off the highway that the stream would be too high and fast for an ambulance to get across, the officer had radioed for one, regardless. Now its white outline, haloed by the glare of headlights, stayed fifty yards behind McCoy’s gutted car, amid the other emergency vehicles, all of them trying to remain far enough away that they wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene.

On the opposite side of the stream, across which Coltrane had again made his way no matter the risk, a medevac helicopter hovered, its whirling rotors creating a high-pitched whine, its searchlights aimed toward the charred ruins of the western town. Those lights forced Coltrane to shield his eyes as he sat in a puddle among jumbled scorched timbers, cradling McCoy’s listless body where he had pulled it gently from its makeshift hiding place. McCoy’s body was cold; Coltrane wrapped his arms around him, desperate to warm him. “You’re going to be all right. They’re going to take care of you.”

McCoy made no response. His only motion was a slight rise and fall of his chest.

“Don’t die on me, McCoy. You’ve got help now. You’re going to be fine.”

The young state policeman, who had at first tried to keep Coltrane from entering the swollen stream and who had in the end followed him, waved to the helicopter, motioning for it to set down next to the ruins. The reflection of the chopper’s searchlights gleamed off the red cross on the side of the white fuselage.

Coltrane hugged McCoy, doing his best to transfer his body heat. The medevac attendants jumped out, stooped to avoid the whirling rotors, and ran toward the ruins, mud splashing their white uniforms. In less than two minutes, while Coltrane described the gunshot, they rigged up an IV line and an oxygen mask. As much as Coltrane was eager for McCoy to be rushed to a hospital, he felt an odd sense of separation when the attendants eased McCoy onto a stretcher and hurried with him to the chopper. The noise of the rotors changed from a whine to a roar as the chopper lifted off. Coltrane stared upward, waiting until the chopper’s searchlights were extinguished and he could barely hear the receding whump-whump-whump before he turned to the state policeman, who told him yet again that there were many people with an awful lot of questions for him.

By then, the police had rigged safety lines across the swollen stream, allowing investigators to cross toward the ruins. The peripheral glare from their flashlights revealed their stark wet faces, their annoyance about their useless rain gear changing to bewilderment and then astonishment as Coltrane explained what had happened. A part of him warned that he ought to wait until he had the advice of an attorney, but he told himself that he didn’t have anything to hide. Requesting an attorney would only make it seem that he did have something to hide. If Coltrane’s original plan had worked and he had managed to ambush Ilkovic, that would have been another matter, he knew. But McCoy’s presence had changed everything. Coltrane couldn’t imagine any law-enforcement officer or district attorney wanting to arrest and prosecute someone who had risked his life defending a wounded FBI agent. So, their amazement growing, Coltrane walked them through it, showing them his disabled car and the tires that Ilkovic had shot out. He showed them where he had hidden McCoy among the charred timbers. He took them back to and across the stream, to where McCoy had been shot and where Ilkovic had later set off an incendiary device in McCoy’s car. All the while, the investigators were trying to preserve the crime scene, keeping a distance from the already-existing foot marks in the mud. As cameras flashed repeatedly, Coltrane couldn’t help thinking that everything was twisted around – he should be taking the photographs; he shouldn’t be the reason the photographs were being taken.

“Who was he?” A state police lieutenant pointed toward the body.

“Dragan Ilkovic.” Coltrane explained about Bosnia, about Daniel, Greg, and Coltrane’s grandparents.

“This guy killed an LAPD detective?”

“I hope his fingerprints are on record somewhere,” one of the medical examiner’s team said in the background. “It’s going to be hard as hell to identify him without a…”

Then the photographers were finished, and somebody set down planks so the investigators could get closer to Ilkovic’s body without making new tracks in the mud. Coltrane wasn’t sure when Nolan and Jennifer had arrived. As he turned from answering more questions, he suddenly saw them making their way through the glare of headlights and flashlights. He prepared to start reexplaining, but the first thing Nolan did was introduce himself to the officer in charge, and the first thing Jennifer did was peer from Coltrane toward Ilkovic’s corpse and take a shocked step backward.

At once, Nolan was gripping Coltrane’s arm, tugging him away. Nolan’s burly shoulders were rigid with anger. “Looks like you got a little lost, forgot where the house was. Where you were supposed to meet us. Just what the hell are you doing here?”

“There was a slight change of plan,” Coltrane said.

“You led Ilkovic out here to try to kill him.”

“Did I?”

“You think a grand jury’s going to believe you didn’t set this up?”

Coltrane shrugged wearily. “You’re right. I did come out here to kill him.”

“You admit it?”

“But then McCoy showed up, and we talked about it, and he convinced me I was wrong. But I never got the chance to leave – because that’s when Ilkovic shot McCoy. After that, it was self-defense.”

Nolan stared at him for the longest while. “That’s your story.”

“That’s my story.”

“You better hope McCoy pulls through to verify what you just told me.”

“I hope he pulls through, no matter what.”

“Just the right tone of sincerity. It might work. I think you might actually get away with this.”

“I’m not getting away with anything,” Coltrane said. “That son of a bitch shot McCoy. If not for me, McCoy would have died out here.”

“If not for you, my friend, McCoy wouldn’t have been here at all.”

Coltrane didn’t have an answer for that.

The state police lieutenant interrupted. “We’re going to have to take you back to headquarters and get your statement.”

Coltrane nodded. “Can I have a minute to talk to…” He pointed toward Jennifer, who was glancing around in dismay, totally disoriented.

The lieutenant didn’t look happy. “I don’t want you talking to anybody who isn’t associated with this investigation – not until we’re finished. If she’s involved in this, you’re not the only one who wants to talk to her.”

The next thing, Coltrane was getting into one cruiser and a policeman was escorting Jennifer to another. The vehicles, followed by Nolan’s, struggled up the muddy slope, tires slipping, drizzle glistening in the gleam of headlights.

3

AT 2:00 A.M., after five hours of questions, the state police finally told Coltrane that he could go home. “But keep us informed about anyplace you might be, and don’t leave the Los Angeles area.”

They had replaced Coltrane’s soaked, filthy, blood-covered clothes with a pair of coveralls.

“I’ll get these back to you,” he said.

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity. You’ll be seeing us often enough.”

Outside the interrogation room, Coltrane found Jennifer on a wooden bench in the hallway. Her short blond hair, still wet from the rain, was pressed against her head. Her discouraged gaze was directed toward the gray-tiled floor. She glanced up and barely nodded as he came out.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Yeah, they told me it would be okay.” Dejected, Jennifer stood. “Sergeant Nolan’s around here somewhere. He said he’d give us a ride back to Los Angeles… Mitch…”

“What?”

“Why in God’s name did you…”

Nolan came down the hallway.

Most of the hour drive back was in silence.

“You’re lucky. They told me they’re probably going to buy what you’re selling,” Nolan finally said.

“I’m not selling anything.”

“As long as McCoy backs you up, which you’re lucky about also, because the word from the hospital is that he’s going to pull through.”

Thank heaven, Coltrane thought.

“Of course, you’ll still have to convince the grand jury,” Nolan said. “But for the time being, you’ve got a break from the state police. Not you and I, though. We’re not finished. If I wasn’t so tired, I’d take you over to the Threat Management office right now. Tomorrow, you’re going to come over and explain to me why you think you’re so damned much better than me that you can jerk me around.”

“I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention.”

“Save it for tomorrow.”

“There’s something I have to do first. After that, I’m all yours.”

“Something you have to do? Put it off. Believe me, there’s nothing more important than-”

“Yes, there is. Daniel’s funeral.”

The car became silent again.

“Yeah, go to the funeral,” Nolan said. “I’ll see you there. Greg’s is the day after. I’ll see you there, too. Not that there’s anything left of Greg to bury.”

“My grandparents’ funeral will probably be the day after that.”

“Maybe we ought to give you a medal for shooting the son of a bitch.”

They drove another mile in silence.

“Where do I drop you? Your place or Packard’s?” Nolan asked.

“The airport.”

Nolan visibly tensed. “You’re not supposed to leave the area.”

“The America West parking garage. I left my car there Saturday night.”

In the middle of the night, the access to the airport was almost deserted. Nolan stopped outside the parking garage.

Coltrane opened his door. “I’ll meet you at your office at four.”

“I know you will.”

Coltrane waited for Jennifer to get out with him.

She didn’t.

“Something the matter?” Coltrane asked.

“Sergeant, since we’re in the neighborhood, would you take me to my apartment in Marina del Rey?”

Nolan frowned toward her and then at Coltrane.

4

AT ALMOST 4:00 A.M., Coltrane’s street was quiet, his Westwood town house in darkness. His headlights reflected off puddles. Reluctant to be closed in by the garage, he parked at the curb and climbed the wet steps to his concrete patio. The air was cool enough to make him shiver. He kept telling himself that Ilkovic was really dead, that the police had checked his town house for explosives, that he had nothing to be afraid of. All the same, as he inserted his key in the front door, he felt uneasy.

He reached inside and flicked a light switch, illuminating the living room before he entered. The furniture was in disarray from the bomb squad’s search, but the disorder that troubled him was the empty bottle of chardonnay on the coffee table, as well as three wineglasses, two of them half-full, on the counter next to the telephone. They were from Saturday afternoon, when he had celebrated with Jennifer and Daniel, showing them his photographs – just before Ilkovic’s phone call had forced them to set down their glasses. Saturday afternoon. It seemed impossible that Daniel had been killed since then.

Coltrane locked the door and stepped hesitantly toward one of the wineglasses, the one that was empty, remembering that Daniel had finished his before he and Jennifer finished theirs. The once-sparkly glass had a film of dried liquid. Reverentially, Coltrane picked it up, careful not to touch Daniel’s faintly visible fingerprints. He stared at them for the longest time. At last, he set down the glass, went to a cupboard in the kitchen, pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey, and drank three long swallows straight from the bottle’s mouth. Gasping, he set it down, the fire in his throat and stomach not strong enough to distract him from his emotions.

He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, which was also in disarray because of the bomb squad. After stripping off the coveralls, he went into the bathroom and took the longest shower he could ever recall, repeatedly soaping his hair and body, rinsing, soaping, scouring himself, trying to rid himself of the lingering feel of death. Despite the bruises on his legs, chest, and arms, he toweled himself roughly until his skin was raw. He had come here to get extra clothes and other things he would need for Packard’s house. But all of a sudden he felt too exhausted to go there. He stripped the covers from the bed, intensely aware that Ilkovic had been in this room and touched them. He dragged a sheet and blanket from a hallway closet and spread them over the bare mattress. He programmed his bedside clock to wake him at 9:00 A.M., turned off the lights, crawled wearily between the sheet and the blanket, and tried to sleep.

5

THE JANGLE OF THE TELEPHONE ROUSED HIM FROM A RESTLESS, anxious semi-consciousness in which arms seemed to squeeze his chest and rain had the color of blood. Dazed, he directed his bleary vision toward the bedside clock. A little after six. He decided it must be Jennifer or Nolan or the state police.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Coltrane?”

Coltrane didn’t recognize the voice. “Who wants to know?”

“I’m a reporter for the L.A. Times. I’d like to-”

No sooner had Coltrane hung up than the phone rang again.

The next reporter was from the Associated Press. Coltrane unplugged the phone in the bedroom, but the phone downstairs rang almost immediately, and by the time Coltrane got downstairs to unplug that one, he heard a man’s voice on the answering machine identifying himself as a reporter for Newsweek, asking him to describe details about -

Coltrane pulled the plug.

He knew what was coming. Fighting his cramped muscles and his exhaustion, he hurried upstairs, put on a navy blazer and gray slacks, packed two suitcases with clothes, slung a camera bag over his shoulder, and managed to get outside, to drive away a few seconds before a TV news truck sped past him. In his rearview mirror, he saw it pull up in front of his town house.

There were three TV news trucks at the church in Burbank when he got there a little before one. Keeping a distance from each other, identical-looking, attractive, stern-eyed women wearing business suits spoke into microphones, their backs to the church while cameramen recorded the mourners filing in. Coltrane couldn’t help wondering if any photographs he had taken had ever interfered with someone’s grief. Now he knew what it felt like to be on the other side. After parking his car in a lot behind the church, he debated whether to risk going in, then decided that the TV news team couldn’t know what he looked like – to the best of his knowledge, no photograph of him had ever been published.

So he took the chance. Jennifer was already in the church when he entered. She wore a black dress and veil. The latter didn’t quite conceal how weary her features were. Sitting next to her, apparently surprising her, Coltrane nodded. She nodded somberly back, looked as if she was about to say something, then turned toward the pallbearers carrying Daniel’s coffin down the center aisle toward the altar. Daniel’s ex-wife, supported by an elderly man who might have been her father, sobbed and followed the coffin, her footsteps unsteady. After the coffin was set on a bier and Daniel’s ex-wife took her place in a front pew, a priest accompanied by altar boys came out to begin the Mass for the Dead. Coltrane couldn’t help remembering the mournful classical music that Ilkovic had repeatedly left on his answering machine: Verdi’s Requiem.

Well, Ilkovic, damn you, you’re the one being judged now.

The priest gave a eulogy in which he alluded to Milton’s Paradise Lost and how one of the hardest acts of faith was to justify God’s ways to human beings. “When something this incomprehensible occurs, we find ourselves powerless and adrift. What kind of God would permit such savagery? What kind of universe presents the conditions in which something this horrid can happen? We are tested to our utmost limits. Tested,” the priest emphasized. “If we are to persevere, we must not turn our backs on God. We must not turn our backs on the world. What we must hate and turn our backs on is the evil that we were put on earth to overcome.”

Turn our backs? Coltrane thought. I don’t think so. Daniel, I got even for you.

After the service, Coltrane accompanied Jennifer from the church. “Can you wait here a minute?” He went over to Daniel’s ex-wife, embraced her, and explained how sorry he was. Perhaps on medication, she didn’t seem to hear. Nolan, who evidently had been in the back of the church, watched from the side of the steps. After exchanging glances with him, Coltrane made his way back through the mourners, most of whom he recognized from various times when he had visited Daniel at the hospital.

“Are you okay?” he asked Jennifer.

“No.”

“I’m sorry,” Coltrane said.

“For what? You didn’t kill Daniel.”

“For what you had to go through.”

“What I’m sorry about,” Jennifer said, “is that you didn’t tell me what you were planning to do. You shut me out.”

“I didn’t want to put you in danger.”

“You still shut me out. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me what you were doing. You treated me like a stranger. But you’re a stranger. I would never have believed you were capable of…”

Coltrane glanced away, self-conscious.

“I’m a stranger to myself,” Jennifer said.

“What do you mean?”

“That argument we had about guns. Now that Ilkovic is dead, I feel like a coward.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wish I’d had the chance to blow the bastard’s head off.”

Coltrane was shocked.

“I’ve never been this confused,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane touched her arm. “After we go to the grave site, do you want to get some lunch and talk about it?”

“No.”

“You want a little time alone?”

“Yes. These past few days, we’ve been together a lot. Sometimes it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Different, huh? Me wanting to be alone?”

Coltrane spread his hands in a gesture of futility. Abruptly he was distracted by a commotion at the edge of the crowd. Evidently someone had identified him to the news teams, because they were swarming in his direction.

Pursued by cameramen, he barely reached the parking lot ahead of them.

6

FIFTEEN MINUTES FROM THE CEMETERY, Coltrane swerved into yet another narrow alley, checking his rearview mirror, satisfying himself that the TV news trucks no longer followed him.

He drove to where he had waited throughout the morning until it was time to go to Daniel’s funeral, to where he felt confident that the news teams wouldn’t be able to find him – because Ilkovic hadn’t been able to find him there. In the maze of streets in the Hollywood Hills, cresting a tree-lined slope, he peered down at his sanctuary. After everything he had been through, the house’s castlelike appearance made him feel secure. The green-tinted copper on the garage door reminded him even more of a fortress, as did the two upper levels, each with a parapet.

Because the garage door’s remote control was in the disabled rental car that he had abandoned the night before, he parked at the curb. It was an odd sensation to feel free to leave his vehicle in the open and not be afraid that someone would try to kill him. Exhausted, he secured the front door behind him, peered up the stairs toward the sun-bright living room, then moved in the opposite direction, down toward the vault.

It was where he had gone when he had arrived earlier, where he had spent the morning waiting to go to Daniel’s funeral. After what he had been through, the vault no longer seemed repellent. Indeed, he wondered why it had ever seemed that way to begin with. Needing something to occupy him, he knew without doubt what that something would be. Determined to shut out his nightmares, he unlocked the vault and passed the gray metal shelves, reaching the far left corner. The glaring overhead lights no longer seemed harsh. The fifty-five-degree air no longer made him shiver. The concrete walls no longer seemed to close in on him. He reached toward the back of the shelving, freed the catches on each side, and pulled out the wall.

Again, the incredibly beautiful face gazed out at him. The vault’s light spilled into the hidden chamber, casting a glow over the picture, making the woman seem alive. He stepped closer, admiring the perfect geometry of her face, the elegant chin, curved lips, high cheeks, and almond-shaped eyes. Her lush black hair framed her features alluringly. Her brilliant white shawl made her dark eyes magical.

His mouth dry, Coltrane picked up one of the boxes and carried it out to the shelves. After removing the lid, he carefully took out one eight-by-ten photograph after another, studying them, setting them along the shelves, picking up new ones. He lingered over a close-up in which her eyes gazed so directly into his that she gave the allusion of being in the present. He couldn’t tell what filled him with greater awe: Packard’s genius or his subject. He had never seen any woman so entrancing.

“Mitch?”

The voice came from beyond the vault.

Coltrane flinched.

“Mitch, it’s Duncan Reynolds.”

In a rush, Coltrane crossed toward the open door.

“Mitch?”

He heard Duncan coming down the steps, and he left the vault, closing the door a moment before Duncan could have peered in. That was when Coltrane realized he had no intention of telling Duncan about the photographs.

7

“I SAW YOUR CAR OUTSIDE.” Duncan put away his key. “I’m surprised I caught up to you. I brought this for you, but I expected I’d have to leave it here, rather than be able to give it to you in person.”

Wondering about the box he was handed, Coltrane tried not to look uneasy about his departure from the vault. He didn’t want Duncan to suspect that he was hiding something. “A telephone with a built-in answering machine?”

“The service is still hooked up. Now I won’t have so hard a time getting in touch with you about the details of buying this house.”

“Well, I’ve been a little busy,” Coltrane said.

“So I found out when I turned on the television this morning. You certainly did a good job of hiding your nerves when I met you here on Sunday. Are you hurt?”

“Cuts and bruises.”

“The television news made it seem like a nightmare, and you seemed like a hero.”

“More like a damned fool. I almost got myself killed. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Yes, the strain shows on your face. I’m sorry for intruding. I’ve got the purchase agreements for the house and the furniture. We can talk about them another time.” Duncan opened his briefcase, handing him documents. “You asked me to find out more about the history of the place.”

“Yes?” Coltrane leaned forward.

“I did a title search and learned that in addition to the movie producer who first owned the property-”

“Winston Case.” Coltrane remembered the name from a biography about Packard that included background about some of the houses he had photographed.

“That’s right. He owned the property from 1931 until 1933, the year Randolph photographed it. Then, from ’33 until ’35, it was owned by a woman named Rebecca Chance.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know anything about her. She’s a name on a document. She was the only other owner. In the fall of ’35, Randolph took possession of the house, buying it through a corporation owned by a corporation owned by a corporation that Randolph inherited from his parents. That sort of secrecy was customary with him. He used the same method to purchase an estate in Mexico, for example, and was equally concerned about maintaining his privacy there. As far as this house is concerned, to my knowledge he never actually lived here.”

“And no one else ever occupied it?”

“That’s correct, which explains its superb condition. Since no one was here to wear it down, it didn’t require much repair. With the exception of the installation of the vault and the darkroom, the house remains the same as when it was built in the thirties.”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m buying it.”

8

IN PHOTOGRAPHY, when unfocused rays of light reflect off an object and strike a negative, they create overlapping blurs known as “circles of confusion.” That was how Coltrane felt, trapped in circles of confusion. What are you doing? he asked himself. As he drove through frustratingly dense traffic toward the police administration building in downtown L.A., his mind – no matter how weary – wouldn’t let him have any peace. Do you think that if you put yourself in a time frame that goes back far enough, you’ll be able to feel as if nobody you love has died?

He thought of the most important object in his life – the photograph of his mother pushing him in the swing at the trailer park. It was impossible to count the hours that he had spent, both as a child and an adult, staring at that photograph, projecting himself into it, imagining that he was there. Always, the effort had been frustrating, because the woman and the boy in that picture remained frozen in time, whereas he continued to get older. He wasn’t a participant. He was an observer. He and that boy were no longer the same. And yet the woman was always his mother.

Do you think that if you live in Packard’s house the way it was in the thirties, you’ll trick yourself into feeling remote from the present, less traumatized by what Ilkovic did to your grandparents and Daniel and Greg? Your problems won’t go away. They’ll be the same in the past as the present. But the past will raise different problems, intruding on the present.

9

“HAVE YOU ANY IDEA HOW I CAN FIND INFORMATION ABOUT A woman who lived in Los Angeles in the thirties?” Coltrane asked.

Nolan wasn’t prepared for a change in topic.

“She owned the house I’m buying,” Coltrane explained. “I’m trying to find out some history about the property.”

“Haven’t you been listening to me?” Nolan asked. “You’re barely going to scrape through this and stay out of prison. If I were you, I’d keep my mind on what to tell the grand jury.”

“If I keep thinking about Ilkovic, I’ll go crazy.”

“Well, you’re not going to get much of a break from talking about him. The state police want you to drive back up there. They want another heart-to-heart. At six-thirty.” Nolan glanced at his watch. “Which gives you ninety minutes.”

“They’re working late.”

“You’re a popular guy.”

Coltrane rubbed his raw eyes and stood.

“The library has city directories,” Nolan said.

“What?”

“For the thirties. She owned the house how long?”

“From ’33 until ’35.”

“Follow her through the directories. Where did she move after she left the house you’re buying? See if she’s in the ’36 listing. Same thing with the phone book. Eventually she’ll disappear from the listings – either because she moved to another city or she died. If she died, there’ll most likely be an obituary in the L.A. Times. Of course, it’ll take awhile for you to check all the copies of the newspaper for the year when she no longer appears in the listings, but if it’s important to you…”

“The house has a colorful past. I’d like to know more about it,” Coltrane said.

“With all the problems you have-”

“It’s better than thinking about the last few days.”

“Can’t argue there. What you need is a private investigator.” Nolan pulled a business card from a drawer. “Try this guy. He’ll need whatever you’ve got on her, including a photograph.”

“I don’t have one,” Coltrane lied.

10

RETURNING TO PACKARD’S HOUSE NEAR MIDNIGHT, he was so exhausted he could barely keep his eyes open. A glance in his rearview mirror showed him that his second lengthy conversation with the state police had etched deep fatigue lines into his face, as had his insistence that if they had more questions, they were going to have to wait: He was leaving the next day to go to Connecticut for his grandparents’ funeral.

He put the car in the garage, locked the house’s front door behind him, and finally took halting, weary steps into the living room. There, he accomplished the monumental task of removing the gray slacks and navy blazer that he had worn to Daniel’s funeral so long ago this morning. Tired to the point of dizziness, he sank onto his sleeping bag.

But his mind wouldn’t let him rest. Half-formed nightmares made him twitch. The mangled hands of Ilkovic’s headless corpse seemed to reach up to choke him. Jerking awake, he strained to see the luminous dial on his watch and exhaled in despair when he discovered that the time was only twenty-five after three. Just keep lying here, he told himself. Close your eyes. You’ll soon be asleep again. But his ravaged nervous system refused to obey. Before he left for New Haven, he had to make plane reservations and contact his lawyer about the documents that Duncan had given him. He had to arrange for his accountant to send escrow checks. He had to -

He got up and proceeded through darkness into the dining room and then the kitchen. After turning on a light beneath one of the counters, he found the documents where he had set them next to the stove. He read them and felt that they were straightforward. Had it not been that he wanted to be certain of gaining unquestioned title to the property, he would have signed them right away, without bothering to wait for his lawyer’s opinion. Negotiation wasn’t an issue. At all costs, he intended to gain possession of this house.

Next to the refrigerator, a blinking red light caught his attention: the combination telephone/answering machine Duncan had given him. Coltrane hoped that it was Jennifer who had called. He regretted the way their conversation had ended at the funeral. He wanted to settle their differences. But then he realized that Jennifer couldn’t possibly know the phone number here. It wasn’t listed. He himself hadn’t known until Duncan gave it to him at the end of today’s conversation.

Coltrane pressed the play button. For a moment, he had the irrational fear that Verdi’s Requiem would start playing, that Ilkovic’s guttural voice would again threaten him, that last night hadn’t happened, that his waking nightmare hadn’t really ended. But what he heard instead was almost as troubling.

No message at all. Just silence. Then a click.

Only a wrong number, he told himself.

Sure.

He poured water into a glass, but instead of drinking it, he found himself leaving the kitchen. That was how he perceived his action. He didn’t choose to leave so much as he discovered that he was doing so. The moment he started, however, he knew where he was going.

It took him no time at all to unlock the vault, pull out the section of shelves, and enter the hidden chamber. After Duncan’s visit, he had been careful to put the photographs back and close the wall, lest Duncan – perhaps wondering about what Coltrane had been doing in the vault – might come back to satisfy his curiosity. Again, Coltrane removed the box and took out photograph after photograph, arranging them on shelves, admiring the woman.

When he finally put them away and left the vault, he was surprised to find that the sun had been up for several hours.

11

NEW HAVEN WAS A FOOT OF SNOW, a bitingly cold wind, and a funeral to which almost no one came because most of Coltrane’s grandparents’ friends had died before them. After listening to the minister’s final prayers, he put his gloved hands on each of the coffins and whispered, “Good-bye.”

Back at his grandparents’ house, he began the long, heart-sinking process of disposing of the accumulation of a lifetime. The telephone rang as he sorted through a shoe box full of receipts.

“How are you feeling?” Jennifer asked.

“About what you’d expect.” Snow lancing against the living room window made Coltrane look in that direction.

“I thought I’d call to try to cheer you up.”

“I’m glad you did.” Coltrane thought he heard Jennifer exhale in what might have been nervous relief.

“A lot of memories to deal with, I bet,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane slumped into his grandfather’s rocking chair. “I lived here until I was eighteen, until I moved out to Los Angeles to go to college. Last night, I slept upstairs in my old bedroom. The furniture’s still the same. In fact, it’s even in the same position. The only spot I haven’t… I keep wanting to go down to where I used to hide in the basement when I was a kid – where I used to think about my mother. But I can’t bring myself to look at where” – he could hardly say it – “Ilkovic killed them.”

“Are you going to sell the house?”

“No. I ran into some seniors who were friends of my grandparents. One old couple had their rent raised, and they can’t afford to live in their apartment anymore. I’m going to let them stay here for free. They said they didn’t want charity, so I told them they’d be doing me a favor – that I needed somebody to take care of the place.”

“Nice.”

“Well” – Coltrane looked at the big Christmas tree in the corner of the living room – “it’s that time of year.”

“Will you be back for the holiday?”

“I don’t think I can manage by then.”

“Oh.” Jennifer’s voice dropped. “I was hoping… I’m still having trouble about… I don’t want to have anything hanging between us. I’m sorry about what I said after Daniel’s funeral.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting some time to yourself.”

“But I could have picked a better time to say it. I’m still confused, but…”

“You’re not the only one.”

“Maybe I’m ready to talk about it now.”

“We’ll do that when I get back,” Coltrane said.

“Yes. Not on the phone.”

“Not on the phone. Have a good holiday.”

“Same to you. At least as good as you can. Mitch, I haven’t forgotten about the special edition of the magazine. The photographs are still at Packard’s house. When you come back…”

“I’ll make sure you get them.”

The snow lanced harder against the front window as Coltrane hung up. He walked to the window and watched dusk thicken. Cars struggled through deepening drifts.

His photographs – they had completely slipped from his mind. It was a measure of how severely things had changed. A week ago, he had been elated about the new direction that his life was taking. He had felt reborn. And now he could barely recall the sense of renewal that had made him excited. Out of habit, he had brought a camera with him, but it remained in one of his suitcases, along with shirts that he hadn’t unpacked.

Going into the front hallway, smelling must, he started up the oak staircase. The banister felt wobbly. Or maybe I am, he thought. In his bedroom, he opened his suitcase, took out his camera, set it aside, and removed a large manila envelope that he had reinforced with stiff cardboard to make sure that it didn’t bend.

The envelope contained a dozen photographs from the chamber in Packard’s vault. He spread them out on the bed and stared down at them, directing his gaze from left to right. Dizzily returning to the first, he began again.

And again. The haunting woman looked back at him.

12

“SHE WAS AN ACTRESS.”

It was four days after Christmas. Coltrane was back in Los Angeles, sitting in the uncluttered office of the private investigator he had hired before going to New Haven.

The man’s name was Roberto Rodriguez. Short and slender, with silver sideburns, wearing spectacles and a conservative suit, he looked more like an attorney than a private detective.

“This is a photocopy of the police file. You can keep it.”

“Police file?” Coltrane worked to steady his right hand as he opened the file. A faint blotched image on a Xerox of a photograph peered up at him, making him tingle. As imprecise as it was, the image left no doubt. That lush dark hair. Those expressive lips and almond-shaped eyes. He was looking at the woman in Packard’s photographs.

He turned the page and frowned at typescript that was hard to read, faded by age and what incomplete portions of characters suggested was an overused typewriter ribbon. “Missing persons department?”

“The complaint was filed by her agent back in 1934,” Rodriguez said. “She had a five-year contract with Universal. Nothing major. She certainly wasn’t a star, although judging from the photo I used to make that Xerox, she could have been. When she didn’t show up for the start of a picture, the studio grumbled to her agent, and the agent realized that he hadn’t heard from her in over three months. Which tells you how close they were.”

“And?”

“There isn’t an ‘and.’ She was never found.”

Coltrane felt a sinking sensation. “But how could Randolph Packard have purchased the house from her if she was never located?”

“Who knows? Maybe after a year she was assumed dead and her parents got permission to put it on the market. Somewhere in that file there’s a summary of a telephone interview with them. The detective in charge of the investigation wanted to know if she had ever shown up where they lived in Texas. They claimed they hadn’t seen her in four years. Which tells you how close the family was.”

Coltrane turned more pages, shaking his head, baffled.

“The detective notes that the family didn’t have a phone. The interview took place at the local police station,” Rodriguez said. “Add the abundance of ain’ts and double negatives, and you get the impression of a down-on-his-luck, undereducated farmer. But his last name isn’t Chance. It’s Chavez. The daughter’s first name isn’t Rebecca. It’s Juanita.”

“She changed her name to disguise her Hispanic origins?”

“I love old movies. I love to read about them,” Rodriguez said. “Back in the twenties and thirties, you get male stars with ethnic names. Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro come to mind. The studios played up their sultry appearance. But I can’t think of more than a few female stars – I’m talking major – who didn’t have a white-bread appearance and name. That doesn’t mean they were white-bread. Several of them had ethnic backgrounds, but they hid it. Had to. Rita Hayworth’s a good example. She didn’t become famous until the forties, but her career started in the thirties. She was Hispanic. Her real name was Margarita Cansino. She had dark hair and a widow’s peak that made her look very Spanish at a time when there was a growing prejudice against Mexicans. So she dyed her hair auburn and plucked out her widow’s peak to make her hairline look symmetrical. She added some voice lessons to get rid of her accent, changed her name, and managed to assimilate herself. It looks to me like Rebecca Chance did the same.”

13

“HERE.” The reference librarian, a petite young woman in braids, escorted Coltrane into a Spartan room that had several microfilm machines. “When you’re finished, please bring the film back to my desk.”

“Thanks,” Coltrane said.

It had been years since he had used this kind of machine, but his familiarity with it soon came back. After attaching the roll to a spindle on the right at the bottom, he fed the film through the machine and linked it to a spindle on the left. By twisting a knob, he could forward the film past the light that projected and magnified the small print onto the screen. The roll was for all the issues of the L.A. Times that had been published during the last quarter of 1934, which, according to the police report Coltrane had brought with him, was when Rebecca Chance, born Juanita Chavez, had disappeared – specifically, during the second week of October. The missing persons’ report had been filed on October tenth, two days after she failed to show up for work. That meant Coltrane had only nine issues of the newspaper to spin through before he got to the period of time that interested him, but to give himself some context and to avoid missing any seemingly innocent reference to her earlier, he made an effort not to speed ahead but, rather, to take his time and do the job right.

The headline for the October first issue was about Franklin Roosevelt and the President’s efforts to deal with the Depression. A related story described the worsening economic conditions in Los Angeles. International news about fears of a war in Europe were next to a report of a local fire in which five children and two adults had burned to death. If you weren’t in a bad mood when you woke up, Coltrane thought, you would be after reading all this.

As the machine’s fan whirred, preventing the heat of the bulb from burning the microfilm, Coltrane spooled further on. He paid close attention to the entertainment section in each issue but failed to find any mention of Rebecca Chance. Even when he got to October tenth, the day the police had been told that she was missing, he still didn’t find any mention of her. Was the studio keeping her disappearance quiet in order to avoid a scandal? If so, what kind of scandal?

On page eighteen, two days later, October twelfth, he finally found it, “Actress Missing,” a story only six inches long that basically summarized what was in the police report. She had failed to report for work at Universal. The studio had grumbled to her agent. The agent had tried to phone her and then had gone to her home, where no one answered. A neighbor said that he hadn’t seen any sign of activity in the house, including lights, for at least a week. When police searched the house, they found nothing that appeared to have been disturbed or missing. An assistant director at the studio said that she was always on time and knew her lines – it wasn’t like her to fail to be punctual. There weren’t any gaps in her clothes closet to indicate that she had packed and gone on an unannounced trip. Foul play was suspected.

A photograph accompanied the article, and Coltrane had the impression that the article might not have been printed at all if Rebecca Chance hadn’t been so beautiful. Although the photograph, obviously a studio still, didn’t do her the justice that Coltrane knew was possible, he had trouble taking his eyes away from it. The tone of the article wasn’t reverential. It didn’t treat her as a star. That the small piece was buried in the middle of the newspaper reinforced the impression that this was being considered more a crime story than a show-business one. Up-and-coming and promising were the words used to describe her. At the end of the article, Coltrane wrote down two titles, the films she had most recently appeared in: Jamaica Wind and The Trailblazer.

Finishing the issue for October twelfth, he continued to the next day, and the day after that. On page twenty of the latter, Rebecca’s photograph, another studio still, immediately caught his attention. It, too, couldn’t compare to Packard’s amazing depictions of her. Nonetheless, her gaze held his own. When he finally broke away and read the article, he learned that the only hint of progress in the investigation was that an actress friend at Universal had told the police about crank phone calls and obsessive fan mail Rebecca had complained about. The calls and the letters all seemed to have come from the same person, and they were all about the same thing: vows of eternal love. “The ‘eternal’ part sounded creepy,” the actress friend said. Rebecca had apparently thrown the letters away – when the police went back to search her house again, they couldn’t find them. The police were speaking to other actresses who might have received similar letters. Other than that, there weren’t any leads.

Coltrane leaned back in his rigid wooden chair and rubbed his forehead. The copy of the police report that Rodriguez had given him made no mention of an overinsistent fan. Did that mean the file was incomplete, or did it mean that the police had put no credence in the story the actress friend had told? Perhaps the actress friend hadn’t been such a close friend after all; perhaps her only motivation had been to get her name in the newspaper. If the police discounted her claims, would they have mentioned them in their report? This wasn’t the only discrepancy Coltrane had noted. The first article had listed Rebecca’s age as twenty-two, while the missing persons’ file had given her age as twenty-five, a figure supplied by her parents. At the same time, it had not mentioned Rebecca Chance’s real name. Ohio, and not Texas, was now her home state. All of this suggested to Coltrane that the newspaper hadn’t gotten a look at the police report but had received its information through an intermediary, what seemed to Coltrane like a studio publicist who was protecting the studio’s investment in her, persisting in its white-bread image of her.

The effort had worked. Coltrane scanned the bold print at the start of every article in every issue on the microfilm, continuing through to the end of the year, feeling an odd sense of time overlapping when he reached December twenty-ninth, the same date as when he now examined the microfilm. There were no further references to the disappearance of Rebecca Chance. He rubbed his eyes, which felt as if sand had fallen into them. Stretching his arms, he glanced at his watch and blinked with shock. A few minutes before six o’clock. He had been here seven hours.

14

“JAMAICA WIND?”

“Yes.”

“The Trailblazer?”

Coltrane nodded.

“Never heard of them.” The purple-haired clerk was about twenty. Videotapes crammed the shelves behind him.

“I’m not surprised. They never heard of them over at Tower Video, either. But they told me that if anybody would know how to get a copy of them, it’d be you.”

The clerk, who also had a ring through his left nostril, straightened a little, his pride engaged. He pulled Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide from beneath the counter and started to leaf through it.

“They had a copy of Maltin’s book over at Tower,” Coltrane said.

“These movies aren’t in it?”

Coltrane shook his head.

“Well, if Maltin doesn’t list them, it’s a pretty good sign these things have never been shown on TV.”

“Except maybe since that edition of the book came out,” Coltrane said. “And Maltin himself admits that his book doesn’t include every minor film that ever had only a couple of showings at midnight forty years ago.”

The clerk, who was wearing an Edward Scissorhands T-shirt, pulled another reference book from beneath the desk. This one was called A Worldwide Filmography. It was oversized, battered, and thick. He looked through the pages. “Jamaica Wind. Yep, it exists.”

“I never doubted that.”

“Universal, 1934.”

“Right.”

“Guy Kibbee, William Gargan, Beulah Bondi, Walter Catlett, Rebecca Chance.”

Coltrane felt his pulse increase.

“Sounds like a remake of Rain,” the clerk said.

“What?”

“This is almost the same cast as Rain, but without Joan Crawford.”

“You really do know your movies.”

The clerk, who wore a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, straightened with greater pride. “I try. But I have to tell you – I never heard of this actress here at the end: Rebecca Chance.”

“She had a short career.”

“What else was she in?”

“That other movie I’m trying to find.”

“The Trailblazer? Let’s have a look.” The clerk flipped to near the back of the book. “Yep. Same company. Same year. Bruce Cabot, Hugh Buckler, Heather Angel, Tully Marshall, and…” The clerk made a drumroll with his hands. “Rebecca Chance. Now we’re getting somewhere. The picture was directed by George B. Seitz.”

“Who?”

“A couple of years later, Seitz did The Last of the Mohicans. Matter of fact, some of these actors were in that movie.”

“You continue to amaze me.”

“In this case, it’s not so amazing.”

The clerk pointed toward a row of film posters above the shelves of videos on the opposite side of the long room. One of them, tinted orange, faded, announced THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS – STARRING RANDOLPH SCOTT. Scott, incredibly young, was seen in profile. He held a flintlock rifle and wore a buckskin jacket as well as a coonskin cap. Two Indians fought each other in the background. At the bottom, bold letters proclaimed DIRECTED BY GEORGE B.SEITZ.

“A friend of mine’s a George B. Seitz fanatic. He gave me that poster to put up. Personally, I don’t get what’s so special about Seitz’s work. He’s sure not Orson Welles. But my friend’s an expert. He’s the guy to ask.”

15

THE FRAIL, distinguished-looking, white-haired, elderly gentleman had a Vandyke beard and a cane. Bundled in a thick brown cardigan sweater, he was waiting at the metal gate of his home in Sherman Oaks when Coltrane parked in front. The expansive Tudor house was high in the hills, the glinting lights of the valley spread out below.

“I didn’t realize how late it was,” Coltrane said after he shook hands and introduced himself. A cool breeze tugged at his hair. “If I’d thought about it, I never would have let the guy in the video store call you.”

The elderly man made a “think nothing of it” gesture. His voice was reedy. “Sidney knows I don’t go to bed until two or three in the morning. Anybody who wants to talk about the work of George B. Seitz is welcome anytime.”

“Actually, Seitz isn’t why I’m here.”

The elderly man looked confused.

“What I’m really interested in is an actress he directed in The Trailblazer.”

“Which actress?”

“Rebecca Chance.”

The elderly man nodded.

“You know about her?” Coltrane asked.

“About her? Not in the least.”

Coltrane felt something deflate inside him. “I guess I’ve bothered you for nothing. I’m sorry. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“But I’ve seen her work.”

Coltrane froze in the act of turning toward his car.

“You came to talk to me about The Trailblazer. Don’t you think it would be more satisfying if you watched it?”

“Watched it?”

“I don’t have every picture Seitz made. Many of the silents were on film stock that disintegrated before they could be preserved, although I do have copies of the most famous ones, such as The Perils of Pauline, which he wrote before he became a director. The sound pictures he directed are another matter. From Black Magic in ’29 to Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble in ’44, the year Seitz died, I’ve managed to track down a print of every film Seitz made.”

The dignified gentleman, who introduced himself as Vincent Toler, escorted Coltrane into his house, the living room of which had a screen behind retractable oak panels at one end and a projection room adjacent to the opposite end, the two rooms linked via a space behind an Andrew Wyeth painting that slid to the side.

Toler, Coltrane learned, was a widower, a retired neurosurgeon who lived alone. He had hated being a neurosurgeon, he explained. “I never wanted to enter medicine, but my father, who was a doctor, bullied me into doing so. What I really wanted was to work in the movies. In what capacity, I had no idea. I just knew that was what I loved, but my father wouldn’t hear of it, and I wasn’t brave enough to stand up to him.” After Toler retired, he had happened to see an Andy Hardy movie on the American Movie Classics channel, had remembered the delight with which he had watched it as a boy, had reexperienced the same delight, and had noticed when viewing the movie on its next AMC showing that the director was George B. Seitz.

That name had meant nothing to him, but when he asked the clerk at a video store he frequented (the same video store to which Coltrane had gone) to find other movies that Seitz had directed, Toler had been delighted to discover that Seitz had directed almost all the Andy Hardy movies and many other movies that Toler recalled fondly from his youth. “I started collecting videos, but some of Seitz’s movies weren’t available on video, so the next step was…” Toler indicated the reel of film that he was attaching to the projector. “It’s been an interesting hobby. You could say that I’m collecting my youth.”

As he finished setting up, Toler explained that Seitz had invented the cliffhanger serial in 1914 and had eventually switched to feature films in 1925, making westerns, mysteries, crime melodramas, and comedies. “He was a professional. His pictures were on schedule and underbudget. More important, he knew how to entertain.”

Settling into a plush chair, Coltrane was surprised that his anticipation of seeing Rebecca Chance move and speak was making him uneasy. After Toler turned off the lights and then turned on the projector, tinny epical music, evocative of rivers, plains, and mountains, obscured the projector’s whir. Simultaneously, a beam of light hit the screen, showing a brilliant black-and-white image of a hand that opened a book and revealed the title, The Trailblazer, with Seitz’s “directed by” credit below the title. Coltrane gripped the upholstered arms of his chair as the cast list appeared. There wasn’t any separate card for the star; rather, all the actors’ names appeared together on a list, with the star’s name at the top. Rebecca Chance’s was the sixth name down. Seeing it made Coltrane lean forward.

Writers. Cameraman. As the hand continued to turn pages, the music built to a dramatic peak, and all at once, Coltrane was startled by the last of the credits.

“Produced by Winston Case?” Coltrane said in shock.

“You recognize the name?” Toler asked from the darkness behind Coltrane.

Good Lord, Coltrane thought. Rebecca Chance hadn’t only bought Case’s house, she had worked with him. They were connected. “Do you know anything about him?”

“Not a lot. This is the only picture he produced for Seitz.”

“What about Rebecca Chance? Was she in any other of Seitz’s movies?”

“No.”

While they spoke, the screen showed a wagon train making its way across a prairie. A lean, tall man in buckskin, Bruce Cabot, was leading the pioneers. The vista was impressive, as was the multilayered sound track – the creak of wagon wheels, the plod of hooves, the jangle of harnesses. The dramatic use of sound was amazing, given the limitations of recording devices then in use. But Coltrane didn’t care about that. All he did care about as he watched intently, scanning the crowd of pioneers, was a glimpse of…

“I did a little research on Case,” Toler’s disembodied voice said. “He started producing in 1928, just as sound was coming in. Except for The Trailblazer and one other film, he wasn’t associated with anything I’ve heard of.”

“That other picture wouldn’t be Jamaica Wind, would it?”

“How did you know?”

“That’s the other picture I’m looking for. Rebecca Chance is in that one also.”’

Coltrane kept staring at the wagon train. It entered a canyon, where Cabot frowned toward smoke rising from a hollow. He told the wagon train to wait while he and one of the pioneers investigated.

“But you’ve never seen her act?” Toler asked.

“I’ve only seen stills.”

“What made you interested in her?”

Avoiding the question, Coltrane asked, “When does she appear?”

“Soon.”

In the hollow, Cabot galloped to the burning wreckage of a Conestoga wagon. He found a dead dog with an arrow through it, dismounted next to a middle-aged man and woman who were sprawled on the ground, and checked to see if they were still alive. His scowl toward their heads, which were discreetly out of camera view, made clear that they had been scalped. The pioneer who had come with him heard a noise, pulled out his handgun, crept toward a stream, and shouted for Cabot to come running.

Movement behind reeds against the bank of the stream revealed a terrified figure emerging from a hiding place. The figure was a woman, and Coltrane became even more attentive, trying to identify Rebecca Chance’s features. But despite her disheveled hair and grimy face, it was instantly clear that she wasn’t Rebecca.

“I keep forgetting she’s only a supporting player.”

“But she has an important part,” Toler said.

After the woman had been helped to the wagon train and cared for, introducing herself as Mary Beecham, Coltrane understood. There had been someone else in their party, she told Cabot, sobbing – her sister, Amy. The Indians who had attacked their wagon had taken her with them.

Because the attack had happened only a few hours earlier, there was still a chance to get Amy back if a rescue party set out immediately, but that would leave the wagon train undermanned and vulnerable. The pioneers had to make a moral choice – whether to forget about Amy, look after themselves, and keep going, or whether to jeopardize the good of the many for the possible good of one person. Cabot’s doe-eyed looks at Mary made clear that he had fallen instantly in love with her. He told the pioneers that they could do what they wanted but that he was going to rescue Mary’s sister. Coltrane had the strong suspicion that Cabot was motivated less by wanting to rescue Amy than he was by wanting to impress Mary. In a dramatically staged scene, Cabot galloped off with six men, following the raiding party’s tracks, while the wagon train proceeded in a different direction.

Coltrane felt light-headed as the scene shifted and he saw Rebecca secured by a rope, stumbling next to the raiding party, who jeered at her from their horses. She, too, had disheveled hair and grimy features, but nothing could obscure her riveting beauty. Her blouse had been torn, revealing more of her right shoulder, almost to her upper breast, than he had realized was permitted by censors back then. Similarly, her skirt was torn up to her knees, exposing her stockings, the tantalizing sight of which seemed more sensual than bare flesh would have been. The animal quality suggested by her lush, tangled hair, the insolence in her dark eyes, the defiance in her full lips made for as erotic a combination as he had ever seen.

“My God,” he whispered.

“Yes,” Toler said, “she could have been a star. But I never saw her in another movie.”

“This was her last. She disappeared.”

Coltrane watched, awestruck as a member of the raiding party tugged the rope and made her stumble, a movement that she accomplished with the grace of a dancer while still making it look like a stumble. In fact, all of her actions had similar grace. Her body had a sensual fluidness that caused every gesture, no matter how trivial, to be impossible to look away from. When she spoke, Coltrane wasn’t prepared for how wonderfully full-throated and sonorous her voice was. Whatever Hispanic accent she had brought to Hollywood, she had worked hard to eliminate. She had re-created herself, and yet there remained the slightest hint of the origins she was trying to disguise.

Coltrane was so enthralled that he had trouble concentrating when other actors were featured in the story. Bruce Cabot pursued the raiding party, overcoming brush fires, thunderstorms, swollen rivers, buffalo stampedes, avalanches, and ambushes in his determined effort to save the sister of the woman he loved (the structure of the film was obviously indebted to the cliffhanger serials that Seitz had directed in his youth). Meanwhile, the wagon train overcame similar obstacles. A young man had taken over Bruce Cabot’s role as expedition leader and was proving himself to be such a hero that Mary, praying for Cabot to come back with her sister, had fallen in love with Cabot’s substitute. Seitz crosscut between the two sets of adventures. To build suspense as to whether Rebecca’s character was still alive, her screen time was reduced after an Indian, angered by her insolence, grabbed her long black hair and wielded a knife to cut it off.

Watching Cabot scale a cliff and race through a forest, Coltrane waited with mounting frustration for Rebecca to reappear, and when she finally did, the Indian was hurling her off a cliff into a river. The fight between Cabot and the Indian was suspenseful, but all Coltrane cared about was another glimpse of Rebecca, who made him inhale sharply when he saw her wading from the river, her wet clothes sticking to her, her soaked dark hair slicked back against her head and hanging down her back. Every curve of her body was emphasized. It was as if she were one with the water, her body gathering substance as she emerged from it, retaining the fluid grace of the waves. She was Venus rising from the water. With her head tilted back, every magnificent detail of her face was pronounced, and if it had earlier seemed questionable that Bruce Cabot would instantly fall in love with Mary Beecham, there was no strain of credulity at all when he triumphed over the Indian and hurried to help Rebecca, only to see her wading from the sensuous waters and to be overcome with attraction.

In the end, he brought Rebecca back to the wagon train, where he announced that he and Rebecca were going to be married. But Rebecca’s sister had a surprise of her own – she was going to be married to the man who had taken Bruce Cabot’s place. Hugs and kisses. A good laugh all around, no hint whatsoever of the sexual complexities embedded in the story. As the camera panned to the snowcapped mountains, the music reached a crescendo. The End appeared. The screen went black.

In the darkness, Coltrane heard the camera whirring. He heard a chair creak as Vincent stood in the darkness, presumably to go into the projection room and shut off the machine.

“You said Rebecca Chance disappeared after making this movie?” Vincent’s disembodied voice asked.

Coltrane was so enraptured by what he had seen that he had to force himself to speak. “That’s right.”

“When I told you I didn’t know much about Winston Case, I neglected to tell you all of what I did know,” Vincent said.

“Oh?”

“This was his last picture, too. He disappeared after producing it.”

16

COLTRANE RETURNED TO PACKARD’S HOUSE AT TWO IN THE morning. His circles of confusion not only had come back but were more severe than ever. His mind was filled with a welter of overlapping blurs. Surely the police would have known that Rebecca Chance wasn’t the only person associated with The Trailblazer to disappear. Why hadn’t Winston Case’s disappearance also been noted in the newspaper? The two incidents would have reinforced each other and made a good story. Had the studio covered it up? Or had Winston Case’s “disappearance” been merely a retreat from the movie business, which would have been the same as vanishing from the face of the earth, as far as Hollywood was concerned.

In his kitchen, the red light on his answering machine was blinking.

Uneasy, he pressed the play button.

“Mitch, are you… I’m beginning to worry.” Jennifer sounded as if she’d just walked swiftly from somewhere or was having trouble restraining her emotions. “Have we got a problem? Duncan Reynolds phoned me at the magazine to ask when he could expect the issue that features your collaboration with Packard. He happened to mention that you’d talked to him from New Haven the day before and that you’d be back in Los Angeles last night. That was certainly news to me. Without him, I wouldn’t even have known that you have a telephone and an answering machine over there and what your number is. If you don’t want to see me, fine. I have no intention of crowding you. But whatever’s going on, we still have to work together. I need those photographs. You don’t have to bring them over. Just FedEx them. But for heaven’s sake, do something.”

17

“I APOLOGIZE,” Coltrane said the next morning.

Jennifer motioned him toward a chair in front of her desk, then closed the door to her office.

“Things have been a little hectic,” he continued. “I had to meet with Nolan. Then I went to see McCoy in the hospital.”

Jennifer’s stern blue eyes assessed him. “How is he?”

“In pain, but feisty as ever. If he keeps improving, his doctor’s going to release him in a couple of days.”

“Good,” she said flatly.

“And it looks as if the district attorney isn’t going to make trouble for me.”

“Excellent,” Jennifer said without inflection. “And sometime during the rest of the day, couldn’t you have found a chance to let me know about all these good things that were happening?”

“Well…”

“Maybe I’m not looking at this properly. Maybe I was foolish to think that it wasn’t just you but the two of us who ran from Ilkovic, that I had a right to hear what you just told me. As it happens, I already know about McCoy – because I went to see him. And I know about the district attorney – because I phoned Nolan.”

Coltrane raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. “I could have done this better. In New Haven, I got so involved in my memories about my grandparents that I felt too low to talk to anybody. When I got back… I’ve been trying to sort some things out and… Here are the photographs.” He set the portfolio on the desk.

“Thank you.”

“I feel as if somebody else took them.”

“But the fact is, you did, and they’re wonderful. A lot of terrible things have happened, Mitch, but that doesn’t mean you have to turn your back on the good things.”

Coltrane sighed. “Look, I know I was wrong not to keep in touch. I don’t want any tension between us. What do you say we go to dinner tonight? We’ll have that talk we said we were going to have. And maybe I’ll show you a surprise.”

18

AS COLTRANE HEADED UP A SHADOWY, tree-lined, curving street in Sherman Oaks, Jennifer looked at him, baffled. “Where are we going?”

“To the movies.”

“Up here?”

“It’s an out-of-the-way theater.”

“Well, you did say this was going to be a surprise. I might as well lie back and enjoy the ride.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Dinner had been at a place called the Natural Food Café – low-fat foods, no pesticides, no preservatives – a welcome change from Coltrane’s recent fast-food dietary assaults on his body. The grilled salmon, wild rice, and steamed vegetables had tasted wholesome and soothing.

His conversation with Jennifer had also been soothing, a lot of issues having been settled: his confusion about himself, her confusion about him.

“When I saw you that night – covered with mud and ashes and what looked like blood – when I saw what you had done to Ilkovic, I couldn’t… I felt as if I didn’t know you anymore.”

“I didn’t know myself.”

“And then I couldn’t get over that you’d misled me, that you hadn’t told me what you were planning to do.”

“I’m not sure I realized what I was planning until I was actually doing it. There’s a lot to be confused about.” He touched her hand. “The best thing I can suggest is that we share our confusion and try to move on together.”

Jennifer studied him for the longest time. “Yes.”

He stopped in front of the Tudor house on the street above the glinting valley. As Jennifer got out of the car, tightening her shawl against a chill evening breeze, she shook her head. “What are we doing here?”

Vincent Toler, wearing a blue cashmere pullover, emerged from the house, his cane clicking on the concrete walkway.

Jennifer looked increasingly bewildered.

“Good evening, Mitch.” The elderly man sounded cheerful.

“Good evening, Vincent.”

“And this is Jennifer?” Vincent offered his wizened hand. “Welcome.”

Jennifer shook his hand, not sure what was going on. “Thank you. Vincent…”

“Toler. I understand you’re a movie fan.”

Jennifer turned toward Coltrane, her eyes twinkling with amusement. “You mean we really are going to see a movie? You’re coming with us, Vincent?”

“No, the two of you are coming with me.”

Jennifer immediately looked baffled again as Vincent guided them toward the house.

“I collect old movies,” Vincent explained. “Last night, Mitchell watched The Trailblazer with me.”

“I’m beginning to understand. Over dinner, I heard about…” Jennifer looked at Coltrane. “So this is where you saw it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to be predictable and boring.”

“You’re definitely not that.”

They entered Vincent’s living room, which he explained had been converted into a screening area for a once-famous director who had owned the house in the fifties.

“What was his name?” Jennifer asked. When Vincent told her, she shook her head. “I don’t think I ever heard of him.”

“His specialty was comedies. His sense of humor fell out of fashion. Sic transit gloria.” Vincent’s tone was filled with melancholy. “At least George B. Seitz died before he fell out of fashion.”

“Mitch told me how much he enjoyed The Trailblazer. He made me wish I’d seen it with him. Now that I know the movie we’re going to watch, I can’t wait.”

“Oh,” Vincent said. His Vandyke beard emphasized the drop of his chin. “I hope I’m not going to disappoint you.”

“Disappoint me?”’

“You won’t be seeing The Trailblazer.”

Coltrane frowned. “We won’t? But I thought-”

“I know many collectors of vintage films. I made some phone calls this morning and managed to track down the other movie you’re interested in.”

“You’re kidding.” Coltrane sat forward. “You’re telling me you actually found a copy of-”

“Jamaica Wind.”

19

THE PROJECTOR WHIRRED, the screen glinted with a black-and-white drawing of palm trees, and South Seas music started playing. Beneath the title, the director’s name appeared.

“Never heard of this man, either,” Jennifer said.

“For good reason, I’m told.” In the darkness, Vincent came back from the projection booth. “The collector friend who loaned me these reels says that this director didn’t have a quarter of the skills that Seitz had.”

“Apparently not,” Jennifer said. “Hawaiian music in Jamaica? God help us.”

Coltrane gripped his chair when Rebecca Chance’s name appeared.

Cameraman.

Screenwriters.

Produced by…

“Winston Case?” Jennifer sounded surprised. “Wasn’t he the first owner of…”

“Packard’s house.” Coltrane kept his gaze fixed on the screen. “Rebecca bought it from him. And Packard bought it from her.”

“And took thousands of pictures of her,” Jennifer said. “What on earth was going on?”

“I’m hoping this movie will help us find out.”

When Coltrane had developed his prints updating Packard’s series about L.A. houses, he had gone over each of them with a magnifying glass, searching for the slightest imperfection in the darkroom process: a bubble in the emulsion, a water spot. His concentration had been intense. But it didn’t equal the intensity with which he now stared at the images before him. Vincent was right: The direction of Jamaica Wind was clumsy compared with Seitz’s work on The Trailblazer. Coltrane didn’t care. The movie’s faults didn’t matter. Rebecca Chance was in this movie. That was what mattered.

The plot was about English pirates fighting to unseat a corrupt British governor-general. The lean, dashing, mustached hero alternated sword fighting with kissing the heroine, the daughter of the governor-general’s aide.

“This is terrible,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane concentrated harder on the screen.

“Look at that beach,” Jennifer said. “It obviously isn’t in Jamaica. It looks more like Santa Monica. I think I see the curve of Malibu in the background.”

The camera kept whirring, images glinting.

“But wait a minute,” Jennifer said. “Now it’s a different beach. That tropical foliage isn’t just a bunch of ferns and palm trees they stuck in the ground. They’re real. Where do you suppose… I bet they went down to Mexico.”

“There she is.” Coltrane sat up.

Rebecca Chance emerged from a cluster of vines and totally dominated the screen. She turned a piece of junk into a work of art. She made the director’s clumsiness become insignificant.

Coltrane felt as if a hand pressed upon his chest, but the sensation wasn’t threatening – it was stimulating. Rebecca Chance wore a flower-patterned sarong that exposed about the same amount of cleavage as the heroine’s, but the heroine looked like a boy compared to her. Rebecca’s lush dark hair hung down to her bare shoulders. Her left leg was exposed to her exquisite knee. Her feet were splendidly bare. It turned out that she, too, was in love with the hero and was spying for him. A chase through a tropical forest reached a climax when Rebecca found herself trapped on a cliff above the sea and escaped by making a spectacular dive into the ocean. Later, when she waded from the ocean, Coltrane inwardly gasped at the parallel between this scene and the scene in The Trailblazer where she was thrown from a cliff and waded from a river. Both scenes were similar to some of the photographs that Packard had taken of her rising from the ocean, the same erotic association with water and waves. In the end, she was killed when she showed the hero and his men an underwater passage into the fortress. The hero and his men displayed appropriate grief and anger, pressed on with their assault, defeated the governor-general, and freed his prisoners, one of whom was the heroine. Hugs and kisses. Sad words about Rebecca’s passing. Homilies about freedom. Music up. Fade out.

“What junk,” Jennifer said.

“What a beautiful woman,” Coltrane whispered.

“I’m sorry, Mitch. I didn’t hear you.”

“I said, she has incredible screen presence.”

“No question. She could have been a star.”

As Coltrane continued to stare at the blank screen, Vincent turned on the lights, then excused himself. “I’ll go make some coffee.”

The moment he was out of earshot, Jennifer told Coltrane, “But we didn’t learn anything to help us understand why Packard took so many pictures of her, then hid them.”

“We didn’t learn that, but we did learn something. Did you recognize the cliff she dove from?”

“Should I have?”

“It’s the same cliff she stood on when Packard photographed her,” Coltrane said.

“One cliff’s pretty much the same as-”

“No, this one has a distinct rock formation farther along its edge. It reminds me of a cat arching its back.”

“I didn’t notice any rock formation in any of the photographs of her on the cliff.”

“I guess I’ve had more time to study them.”

Jennifer frowned. “You saw a similar rock formation on the cliff in this movie? You watched it that closely?”

“To make sure, I’ll ask Vincent to replay the scene.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said without enthusiasm, “by all means, ask him to replay it.”

20

“I HAD A GOOD TIME,” Coltrane said. To go to dinner, he had picked Jennifer up at the Southern California offices on Melrose. Now he stopped next to Jennifer’s BMW in the almost-deserted parking area behind the building. “I’m glad we finally had a chance to talk.”

“We need to talk more,” she said.

“I know what you mean. What Ilkovic put us through, I don’t think we’ll ever get over.”

“The person I had in mind was Rebecca Chance. We need to talk more about your interest in her.”

“How about tomorrow night?” Coltrane asked. “New Year’s Eve.”

“I was wondering if you were going to suggest doing anything.”

“An appropriate night. The end of the past. The start of the future.”

“But what about the present?”

They studied each other.

Coltrane leaned close, kissing her gently on the lips, feeling the brush of his skin against hers. When he eased back, he gazed into her eyes, assessing her reaction, wondering if he’d done the right thing.

“That’s something else we haven’t done in a long time,” Jennifer said.

When he kissed her a second time, her mouth opened. Her tongue found his. With her body against him, he felt a tingle flood through him.

“Anything special you’d like to do tomorrow night?” he asked.

“More of what we’re doing now.”

“That can be arranged.”

“Maybe I’ll even distract you from Rebecca Chance.”

“Jealous of her?”

“You talked an awful lot about her tonight,” Jennifer said.

“The photographs of her don’t make you curious?”

“The only person I’m curious about is you.”

They kissed again, hungrily.

Jennifer broke away, breathless. “What time tomorrow?”

“I’m suddenly thinking about right now.”

“Can’t.” Jennifer inhaled. “The end of the year or not, I have an eight o’clock breakfast with my most important advertiser. I have to look alert.”

“Six tomorrow night?” Coltrane asked. “Come over to my place. I’ll make my famous marinara sauce.”

“Which place is that?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your town house or…”

“Oh.” Coltrane realized what she was getting at. “Packard’s. The furniture’s going to be delivered tomorrow. I thought you’d like to see it.”

“Yes and no. Packard’s house has unpleasant associations for me.”

“That’s another reason we have to use New Year’s Eve to put the past behind us.”

21

COLTRANE WAITED UNTIL JENNIFER GOT INTO HER CAR AND drove away, her red taillights disappearing around a corner. He thought for a moment, then picked up his car phone and pressed numbers.

“Vincent, I’m sorry to call you this late, but I remembered that you told me you didn’t go to bed until two or three in the morning. I was wondering if you’d do me a favor. I’d be glad to pay for any expenses it involves. I don’t care what it costs. Before you return Jamaica Wind to your collector friend, would you ask him if we could take it to a duplicating studio and have it transferred onto videotape? It would be a way of protecting the movie. Also, would you mind doing the same with your copy of The Trailblazer? I’d very much like to have copies of them.”