Camelback Falls

Chapter Twenty-nine

She was Marybeth when they met. Just a kid, saying she was eighteen. Men looked at her, they had since she was eleven. She knew she had that power; sometimes it bored her and sometimes it repulsed her. Most of the time she liked it, when it didn’t scare her, what she could do to men, what they were willing to do for her. Still, her only boyfriend had been Leo, awkward, skinny Leo, who rescued her from Tulsa and her father. But that was all prologue to Phoenix and Jonathan and Camelback Falls.

She was Marybeth, and she had an accent. It didn’t stand out in Tulsa, but she felt like a hick every time she opened her mouth in Phoenix. There are lovely Southern accents, especially attached to pretty girls, but the Oklahoma twang is not one of them. Jonathan picked it out that day, when he walked into the toy store at Scottsdale Fashion Square, a job she had taken to help pay the rent. He said he liked her voice.

He had a voice as rich as his brown, ruddy skin. Man’s skin, used to the sun. As rich as the onyx brown eyes that looked at her so intensely. He wanted a teddy bear. He bought a big one with a red vest and the softest fur in the store. His hands were very large. Then he asked her to go for a drink when she got off work, and she said yes. She was living with Leo. “But I just felt like this whole world was about to open up to me,” she recalled. “So I rolled the dice.”

She slept with Ledger that night. They went up to his big house overlooking the city. She had never seen such a sight before. She didn’t know he was a best-selling author, or a controversial researcher of human sexuality. She didn’t know he was nearly forty years older than her, and she certainly didn’t know about the parties. All she knew was that a world had been opened to her, adult, free, intoxicating.

“I woke up a little before dawn,” she said, “and I walked to this window overlooking the city. It was a whole wall of glass. I could see the city lights, all the way to the far mountains. It was like this enormous jewel. It just shimmered with possibilities. I realized I was totally naked, just standing there in that window, and it was the best goddamned feeling in my life.”

I couldn’t resist. “I thought you said Phoenix has no soul.”

“I was a kid,” she said. “I was beguiled by the city lights.”

That was in January 1979, five months before the shootout in Guadalupe. She stayed another day and night, and then Jonathan sent her home to Leo.

“He said he didn’t want to be tied down with one lover,” she said.

“Sounds so seventies,” Lindsey said from the back seat.

“I didn’t feel used,” Beth said, almost dreamily. “Jonathan invited me back. So I figured I passed the test. I was so inexperienced then, I wasn’t sure if I knew what do. So in a week, Jonathan called me at the toy store and we went on another date.”

That date was to San Francisco, to a book signing. Marybeth was the daughter of a millionaire, but her life had been sheltered and very middle class. Piano lessons, church, and two trips to Europe to see museums. San Francisco with Jonathan was a different level of existence. He took her to expensive restaurants, made her feel like a wined-and-dined lady. He let her stand off to the side as he gave interviews and signed books. He met with the editors of Rolling Stone and went drinking with a crowd that included San Francisco Giant players, Sports Illustrated writers, a TV anchorman, and a jazz musician whose name she couldn’t remember. Jonathan Ledger was famous. Before that, the only famous man Marybeth had met had been the governor of Oklahoma. Indeed, Jonathan was at the zenith of his fame-he embodied the age and the age rewarded him.

That was when the drugs started. At the parties, pot and cocaine were as natural as taking a drink of water. It was impolite to say no, and there was still something of the Tulsa debutante in Marybeth. But the first time she ever sniffed coke and then sneezed the line off into oblivion, she knew she had touched something she was hardwired to love.

“So Jonathan turned you on to coke?” I asked.

“Oh, no, I found that on my own. He was actually protective. He didn’t want me to rush in.”

“What a responsible adult,” Lindsey said. “He’ll sleep with a seventeen-year-old girl on the first date, but he won’t force her to snort cocaine.”

At that point, Marybeth became a regular at Camelback Falls. The parties just naturally morphed into sex parties after a few hours. It didn’t shock her. It felt good. She felt in control. Maybe too much. She took up with one of Jonathan’s rich friends, a former basketball star named Sam. Jonathan had introduced her, slowly, to sex with other men. But she started seeing Sam outside the jurisdiction of Camelback Falls. It made Jonathan jealous. “It was the first time I realized the way power shifts back and forth in a relationship. I finally had the power.”

What she meant, I realized, was the power over Jonathan. “He was very brilliant,” she said, “and very gullible and lazy. He did his best work with me.”

So she kept Jonathan on a string, and played with Sam, and was the center of the parties at Camelback Falls. “It was a beautiful time, whether you believe it or not,” she said. “The people were beautiful. It was very free. Very…noble. I guess it couldn’t last.”

“Where was Leo at this point?” I asked.

“He was still living in our shithole apartment on Roosevelt Street. Driving a cab all night long, nearly getting killed half the time.”

“Did he ever go to Camelback Falls?”

“No.” She half-smiled. “This was the elite. Not in his class.”

“So he went away.”

“I saw him sometimes. Stayed with him sometimes. I felt sorry for poor Leo.”

“Sorry enough to go riding that day in Guadalupe?”

There was a long silence, and then she said, “It didn’t happen that way. You see, Jonathan was always attracted to the dark side. He was a very spiritual man, but the itch he couldn’t scratch was very dark. There’s a connection between violence and sex, but thousands of years of civilization tries to tamp that down, keep it locked in its dungeon. It’s the opposite of romantic love, but it’s just as real. Maybe more so. Jonathan was very attracted to that, so some of the people at Camelback Falls were rough, dangerous types.”

“Like Billy McGovern and Troyce Meadows?”

“Yeah. They were the dangerous, sunburned cowboys, really gorgeous men. But you also had the sense they would kill, take what they want. Not some movie but the real deal. You could almost smell it. That was very attractive to Jonathan.”

“So how did these guys get there?” I asked. “I read somewhere that one of them was Leo’s cousin.”

She laughed. “The media. God, what morons. And you call yourself a historian? That was the story Daddy’s lawyers gave to the publishers and TV station owners. See, Billy was my cousin, not Leo’s. The black sheep of the family, you might say. Jonathan was fascinated by those two, real prison escapees. It was all very arousing, especially for the female guests. The allure of the outlaw, don’t you know.”

I let that all sink in before asking her the next question.

“Dean Nixon?” she said. “Oh, he was there. He was another one of the people Jonathan collected. He had certain attributes…well, you’ve seen photos, so you know. And then he turned out to be pretty good at supplying drugs for Jonathan’s parties out of the cops’ evidence. Jonathan could have paid for all the coke in Bolivia. But getting it that way was more fun to him.”

“So in Guadalupe,” I said, “that twenty pounds of cocaine was destined for parties at Camelback Falls.”

“I don’t think so,” Beth said. “I think Dean and Billy and Troyce had reached some understanding, and they were working together. They were going to sell the drugs on the street.”

“Until that big Hispanic deputy took them,” I said. “Did he ever show up at Camelback Falls?”

“No, never saw him before,” she said. “But most cops are dirty.” She added, “No offense.”

“What about the detective who threatened you? Did he come there?”

“No, Mapstone. You’ve got to understand the makeup of Jonathan’s circle. Dean was there only because Jonathan collected him.”

“Do you know Dean has been murdered?”

Beth was silent.

“And so all this went away after the shooting? Daddy rescued you and you went back to Tulsa?”

“I did for awhile,” she said. “I went to college at Vassar, like Mother wanted. The parole was very generous. So it was easy to drop out and come back to Phoenix.”

“Why?” Lindsey asked.

“Jonathan,” she said. “Don’t you see, Jonathan loved me. I was with him to the end. The parties trailed off after 1980, and I never saw Dean Nixon after I came back to Phoenix. Jonathan left his estate to me, including the books. Really pissed off his ex-wives. But they didn’t sit with him as his life ended, either, did they?”

She stared out at the darkness. “He had beautiful eyes,” she said. “Paige got his eyes.”