Criminal Carma

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

She wanted to go to the Chart House in Malibu. I swung over to Pacific Avenue and followed it a mile north to where it changed names, becoming Nelson Way and then Ocean Boulevard. A block south of Colorado Avenue, we swooped down onto the Coast Highway, passing beneath the antique structure of the Santa Monica Pier with a light stream of Beemers, Mercedeses, and middle-aged rich guys on Harleys returning to their straitjacketed lives after a weekend of desperate play in the Southern California sun.

Past the little ghetto of multimillion-dollar shacks that sits on the sand below Palisades Park, the world opened up to our left. Beyond its white fringe, the black ocean stretched in a long shallow arc to lace the beaches of Oahu and Japan. To our right, ragged bluffs rose up against the starry sky, hugging the road as it unspooled along the curve of the coast.

At the seaside restaurant an aging valet crept away in the Lincoln while I escorted Evelyn inside with my right hand in the silky small of her back. The maître d’ addressed her by name with a warm smile and a half bow. We were promptly escorted to a window table with a white cloth and candle. Just beyond the plate glass, ten feet below us, the nighttime surf, always exciting, crashed against a boulder breakwater. Farther out, but still within range of the restaurant’s spotlights, smaller rocks were bobbing and diving like seals in the heaving water.

“Where are you staying at the beach?” Evelyn asked after the waiter brought her a beaded glass of chardonnay.

“With friends,” I said, briefly. I was drinking O’Doul’s. “How long have you lived in Venice?”

“I bought the house in November,” she said, and took a pretty good slug of the wine.

“What made you want to move there?”

She looked at me with her eyes liquid, deep, slightly blurred by alcohol. I wondered how much wine she’d had before I arrived at her house. “It’s a long story,” she said.

“We have all night.”

She kept her shining eyes on mine for a few more seconds, then shook her head. “You don’t want to hear about my problems.”

“I’d be happy to listen,” I said. “But I don’t want to pry.” She was either going to open up or she wasn’t.

“I appreciate that.” She placed her hand on mine. I wasn’t sure if she meant my willingness to listen, my discretion, or both.

The food was ambrosial. We started with crisp Caesar salads and crusty bread. She had sautéed Dover sole. I had grilled swordfish. We split a delectable side dish of creamed spinach with baked crumbs on top. She had two more glasses of chardonnay, amber and sparkling in the candlelight.

“I know it’s just a chain restaurant,” she said as we were finishing, “but I love this spot.” She was looking out the window, through our shared reflection, at the waves breaking on the beach beyond the boulders. Two sea lions had swum in and flopped on the sand. “The ocean is so wild and beautiful here.”

“It’s a great restaurant,” I said conversationally. “That was the best meal I’ve had in weeks.”

She didn’t look at me when I spoke, continuing to gaze out the window.

“My daughter was conceived on that beach down there where the sea lions are,” she said quietly, more as if reminding herself than informing me. When I didn’t say anything, she looked over at me. “It was the most beautiful day of my life. There was nothing out here then, just the sea and sky. We spread our blanket where the rocks sheltered us from the road and made love naked in the sun. His family was one of the biggest landowners in the Central Valley, and my grandfather Phelan was mayor of San Francisco at the turn of the century and a United States senator after that, and there we were, screwing like two peasants on the seashore.” She laughed, a bit drunkenly. “I hope I’m not embarrassing you.”

“Not at all,” I said. “When was that? When was your daughter conceived?”

“It was Indian summer,” she said, getting dreamy again. “September 1960. We were married that June, after Terry graduated from Stanford. I had just finished my freshman year. We had a huge wedding at Grace Cathedral. It was the talk of the town. We went right around the world on our honeymoon. We spent two weeks in Hawaii at the Royal Hawaiian on Waikiki. Went to Japan and India and Iran and Egypt. Spent two weeks in Paris and two weeks in London. We were presented at court to Queen Elizabeth.

“That spring, when I was a schoolgirl at Stanford, I would have died before having sex outdoors in a public place. But by the time we got back from that trip, I was a different person.” She paused for a moment, remembering, then went on: “That’s when I first got interested in yoga. In India, on our honeymoon. We went up to the headwaters of the Ganges, where the famous ashrams are. Everyone said the atmosphere was so pure up there you could hear om in the air all the time, and you could!

“Everything about life seemed exciting and magical then. Christina was born the following June, on our first wedding anniversary. That was a miracle to me. I was happier than I had ever been before. Holding her when she was a little baby was like being in heaven. And I loved Terrence so much. He made me feel like the luckiest woman in the world.”

“Sounds like a wonderful life.”

She had been smiling wistfully, drifting in a drinker’s nostalgic haze, but her face changed when I spoke, turning grim. “It didn’t last,” she said. “I caught him with a typist from his office that Christmas. It was downhill from there. We still had some good times and I hung on to hope as long as I could. But he wouldn’t stop. I finally divorced him… too late. Because of him, I lost my daughter… my Christina.”

“What happened to her?”

“She disappeared.”

“When?”

She shook her head. “Let’s get out of here. If you are really interested, I’ll tell you about it, but not here. Take me home.”

She reached for her purse when the waiter brought the check, but I took the leather folder from his hand and paid in cash, then led her out of the restaurant into the cool California night. She was wobbly from all the wine. The looks that I got from the maître d’ and valets ranged from sly to sympathetic to suspicious.

She was so quiet on the drive back to her house that I was afraid she had passed out. But when I looked over I saw that her eyes were open, staring out at the ocean. When I helped her from the car, she leaned her breasts against me and breathed alcohol fumes in my face. Inside, she dropped her wrap on the floor by the door.

“I’m sorry the place is so bare,” she said, gesturing at the empty living room through an archway to our left. “I rented out my house in Bel Air furnished, and I haven’t gotten around to buying new stuff for this place.”

When I prompted her, she resumed her story, first in the kitchen, where she got a bottle of wine and two glasses, then upstairs in her bedroom. It was the usual. After the first affair, her dream of an ideal life was shattered, but there was still a lot to hang on to. Terrence worked his way up rapidly in the Prudential Insurance Company, where he had family and fraternity connections, becoming a vice president in his early thirties. They moved into a series of steadily larger houses, drove ever more expensive cars, and went on elaborate vacations. There were apologies and promises and special gifts each time she discovered a new affair.

She spent her time swimming, golfing, playing tennis, and attending country club dinners and charity dances, consoling herself with increasing amounts of alcohol as the privileged years played out. She doted on her daughter, with whom she rode in Golden Gate Park and at her in-laws’ sprawling ranch.

The ranch, in the picturesque territory above Visalia, sloped down from forested Sierra foothills to cover a vast swath of the flat valley floor. There were extensive orchards, square mile after square mile of field crops, herds of cattle, and horses.

“It was Christina’s favorite place when she was a little girl,” Evelyn told me, sitting on the edge of her bed. “She loved to ride her horse and work in the farmyard. She fed the chickens and ducks and helped with the dairy cattle. She won every award you can think of for her riding. Her grandfather called her the best little cowgirl in the West.”

It was a queen-size bed covered with a white chenille spread. The only other furniture in the echoing room was the armchair where I was sitting, a nightstand, and a small maple desk with matching spindle-back chair. The desk was piled with disordered papers, and there were open moving boxes full of books and clothes in a far corner. The windows that flanked the bed’s white wooden headboard overlooked the black canal.

“She and I used to spend a month at the ranch each summer,” Evermore said. “In the winter we would go to plays and movies and recitals. She was a wonderful little ballet dancer and swimmer. We were closer than any other mother and daughter in our circle. The other mothers were all jealous of our relationship.”

Things changed when Christina was eleven. She lost interest in her activities and grew distant from Evelyn. Her grades faltered and she started getting in trouble at school. But the problems ebbed and flowed. After an unpleasant scene, the girl would calm down and revert to her sweet, quiet self. Evelyn would take her to a matinee and then to the Top of the Mark for a late lunch, where the daughter would drink Shirley Temples while she consumed Manhattans, applauding the piano player more loudly as afternoon wore into evening and lights blinked on in the neighborhoods spread out below them.

The more wine Evermore drank, the more freely she talked and the more emotional she became, pouring out her heart to a stranger the way drunks have since some cat in a loincloth first sampled spoiled grape juice and made a sour face, then a happy one. People usually try to get away from loquacious drunks, but I was acutely interested in what she had to say.

The family tragedy surfaced in December 1975 when Evelyn came home early from a trip to Paris with her older sister and found Terrence and Christina asleep together, naked, in her and Terrence’s bed. Terrence swore it was the first time. He begged and pleaded and rationalized and promised that it would never happen again, that there would be no more affairs, that he would get counseling. Evelyn, befuddled by alcoholism, dreading scandal, struggled to believe him. That Christmas he gave her the pink diamond necklace to seal the deal.

It had been created at Tiffany and Company in New York in the 1930s as a gift for the actress Marion Burns from her director Raoul Walsh and was made of color-coordinated stones, starting out deep rose at the bottom of the pendant, shifting to light pink at the top. Evelyn had cherished and despised it, telling herself that it was a token of renewed affection and faithfulness, showing it off to her envious friends, all the while knowing that it was a bribe to buy her silence about her husband’s crime.

Terrence behaved himself during the bright, bracing month of January, but in February Evelyn discovered that Christina was pregnant, and that the incest had been going on intermittently for several years, whenever Terrence was driven by his demon and the opportunity arose. She left her husband then, taking Christina and moving into the Fairmont Hotel, on Nob Hill, across the park from the cathedral where she was married.

That spring, after several months of tears, fights, threats, denials, detectives, and escalating family drama, she fled San Francisco to get away from Terrence and his influence, moving into her sister’s home in Bel Air while divorce proceedings went forward.

Christina’s child was born at Cedars-Sinai in July 1976, a bicentennial baby. A few months later, before the divorce was final, Terrence drowned at the Monterey marina after drinking a bottle of scotch and falling off his yacht in the middle of the night. Evelyn inherited their Pacific Heights mansion and a multimillion-dollar portfolio of stocks and bonds. There was also a million-dollar life insurance policy that Prudential paid off on without a murmur.

Evelyn bought a house in Bel Air near her sister and tried to start over. She enrolled Christina as an eighth-grader at Sea Winds Middle School, where the girl promptly hooked up with a dark-clothed, drug-using crowd. She dyed her blond hair black, played hooky, and got in trouble with the police for vandalism and underage drinking. The following April, during spring break, she wanted to go to Mexico with her friends. When Evelyn refused, backed up by her sister, whom she called on for advice, Christina took her nine-month-old baby and ran away.

“That was the last time I saw her or little Kelly.”

“Her baby?”

“Yes.”

“Where did they go?”

“She went to Mexico with those kids, then to a commune in the San Bernardino Mountains with a man she met in Oaxaca. I hired a detective and he traced her to the commune. But by the time he found it, she was gone.”

The loss of her daughter sent Evelyn tumbling down a steep staircase of drunkenness and promiscuity. After her family intervened and had her hospitalized, she got sober and began the life she had lived ever since-of upper-class sports, charity work, and Eastern spirituality. She had kept a series of detectives on the case through all the years since Christina’s disappearance, spending large sums to follow up leads in San Francisco, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Miami, and many other cities. When Baba contacted her out of the blue the previous summer and told her that he had word of her daughter, his call had sent a thrill through her because the last message she had ever had from Christina was a postcard years before asking for five thousand dollars to be sent to her, general delivery, at the Venice Beach Post Office.