The Marilyn Tapes

Melanie

One day, when she could help herself no longer, Melanie confessed her real feelings to Jessica, and Jessica fled the mansion in which beautiful twelve-year-old Melanie lived.

A few weeks later, Jessica came down with rheumatic fever and died.

The years bore on. Melanie Baines was presented to Dallas society, looking like the teenage Grace Kelly. She went east to Vassar, where her mother herself had gone, and on some weekends flew down to Washington, D.C., where J. Edgar Hoover, a good family friend, showed her around the FBI building and told her all about the Bureau.

In her junior year, she told Mr. Hoover that over the past two years she’d become a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, a champion marksman, and an expert with electronic bugging devices, and now she wanted to become the first female FBI agent.

The director was stunned. He gave her all the reasons why women weren’t suited to be agents.

She listened patiently and said, “I’d be an ideal agent, Mr. Hoover. I don’t drink, smoke, or even use bad language. I was raised to be a lady and I’m still a lady.” She smiled at him. “I could really be a help to you if nobody knew about me. I could do jobs that some of your official agents couldn’t.”

The director smiled. He’d long had the same notion himself: an unofficial troubleshooter he could use for the most delicate jobs. And who better than a pretty young woman? What a perfect cover.

In her first six months, she seduced a congressman, long an opponent of the FBI, and taped the proceedings. Suddenly the man became a big supporter of Mr. Hoover. A few weeks after that, she broke into the offices of a Georgetown shrink and photographed some of his files. He had several congressmen as patients. A month after that, she bugged the room in which a strategy session for a Democratic congressman was being held. The congressman lost badly.

As her professional life prospered, her personal life grew grim. She still thought about her childhood friend Jessica and a particularly troubling incident that had happened years ago.

While other girls her age were discovering boys, Melanie had no interest in boys at all. She just wanted Jessica.

One day at a class picnic, she saw Jessica kissing a boy. Melanie was sick, angry, and disgusted.

How could Jessica betray her this way?

The next day, Melanie invited Jessica to the mansion, and they went out to the gazebo in the back. Melanie told her how much she loved her and how she wanted to spend her life with Jessica and how she lay awake nights longing for Jessica to be next to her in bed.

Jessica said, “But, Melanie, I want to be with boys now. I want to be a nice, normal teenager. And you should too.”

Melanie slapped her until her nose bled, until Jessica got up and ran far away. Melanie collapsed on the gazebo floor and stayed there until sundown.

And then two weeks later, Jessica died.

Melanie too, “discovered” boys. She didn’t like them much, and so the summer of her high-school sophomore year, she had another lesbian affair, this one with an energetic girl visiting from Milwaukee. Everything went fine until the girl began to regard Melanie as highly unstable.

She didn’t share any of this with Mr. Hoover. He wouldn’t understand.

Melanie drove around the grade school several times in the blue Chevrolet sedan, rented from Hertz.

Neither the nuns nor the lay teachers were aware of the car. They were too busy scooting kids inside the wide double doors of the two-story red-brick building.

Then she pulled up in the shade of a dusty oak tree.

Melanie wore a white silk blouse, a dark blue fitted skirt, and red two-inch pumps that emphasized her delectable legs. She checked her rearview mirror for the bronze Pontiac that had been following her since last night. The tail’s name was Tully, a private investigator. She’d already checked him out.

Melanie glanced at her Longines wristwatch. The school bell would ring in two minutes. Maybe she’d missed the woman she was looking for.

The red 1959 Plymouth two-door suddenly appeared at the west corner of the playground, near the jungle gym.

She picked up her binoculars to get a better look at the woman driving. She recognized her immediately from the photograph she’d been given. Sara Drury.

The passenger door of the Plymouth opened and a delicate little blonde girl in a blue jumper and white blouse got out.

Laura Drury. Age ten. Melanie had spent the past two days familiarizing herself with all of them — Bellamy and Sara Drury and Mayhew and Tully.

Laura leaned back into the car to give her mother a kiss. Then she was off, carrying a lunch bucket in one hand and a book in the other. She went straight into school.

Melanie watched Sara for a few moments. She was a nice-looking blonde, slightly prim and bookish. Definite possibilities there. Melanie speculated on many women as possible lovers. Most of them failed to meet her standards.

This trip hadn’t been strictly necessary, but Melanie had wanted to check out the routine of Sara and her daughter. If she couldn’t find Sara’s boss, Bellamy, then Melanie would have to compromise Sara. And her little girl.

Take the kid and Sara would find those tapes. Somehow. Some way. Melanie was sure of it.

Melanie had just reached the corner when she saw the bronze Pontiac sedan in the rearview mirror. Tully was still hanging in there.

Melanie would settle with him right now.

Tully

Vanessa had suffered all night, reliving the nightmare over and over: Bellamy putting the gun barrel next to her sex. As for Tully, he had a full night trying to find Bellamy. He’d promised Vanessa he wouldn’t kill him. But that still left him a lot of leeway.

Finally, on one of his cruises by Bellamy’s house, he’d spotted Melanie Baines’ car. She was obviously looking for Bellamy, too. Tully decided to follow her.

Suddenly, the redhead’s car squealed away from the school curb.

Before Tully could even get his car in gear, she was rounding the far corner. He floored the accelerator.

He was going to stay on Melanie’s tail, find Bellamy, and take care of business.

Sara

She spent all morning working on a piece about the forgotten Hollywood beauties of the forties. For Sara, their stars still shone.

Jean Peters... Jennifer Jones... Arlene Dahl... Ann Sheridan... Wanda Hendrix... Mona Freeman... these were the young women Sara idolized when she was growing up. In the theater darkness, they’d made her laugh, cry, and shudder as they worked their way through unlikely scripts.

Though most of them continued working well into the fifties, they had reached their zenith a decade earlier. Now, a few of them were on TV occasionally, but the movies had changed and there was little room for the quiet beauty and dignified sexiness of these women.

She was just finishing the sixth page, thinking that she might have slighted Arlene Dahl early in the article, when she heard the shouting in the outer office.

She hurried to the door and peered out.

A distinguished-looking gent — gray hair, ascot, natty sports coat and slacks — was trying to push his way past Jeff to get into Bellamy’s office.

“I’ll kill the sonofabitch with my own hands!” he shouted.

The line didn’t fit the man’s persona. Back when Curtis Simmons had been a star at MGM, he’d always played paternal doctors and professors and elder statesmen. He would never have taken a part like the one he was playing now.

Jeff held him off like a football lineman. Sara scurried over to them.

“This is really a coincidence!” she spouted. She got a whiff of the actor’s breath and realized that he was drunk.

“Do you know that I had you on my list of actors to call tomorrow morning?” Sara said.

Curtis Simmons suddenly gave up his struggling, and looked at her. “What are you babbling about, dear lady?” He slipped into the familiar ersatz British diction.

“I’m writing a piece on movie stars who are also great Shakespearean actors.”

It was easy to see that his vanity was overcoming his wrath.

“Why don’t we go into my office and talk? You can even have a drink if you like.” She nodded at Jeff. Bellamy kept a fifth of bourbon in his desk drawer.

She led Simmons into her office, helped him into a chair, took the bottle and glass that Jeff handed through the door, and seated herself on the other side of the desk. “You looked pretty angry out there, Mr. Simmons. Would you care to tell me what’s bothering you?”

He was not yet drunk. He poured himself a stiff drink. He took a gulp, gasped a little as the bourbon burned its way down, and said, “I keep trying to put a good face on this, but I guess it’s impossible.” She thought of all the times she’d seen his face on movie screens in Omaha.

“My wife is dying of cancer — hasn’t got more than a month or two — and during the last six months of her illness, I’ve been having an affair with a young actress I met on the set of a TV show. I’ve been lonely — my wife basically shut me out over a year ago, preferring, I guess, to die alone. Anyway, your boss Bellamy took some pictures of the young actress and me... in a most indelicate position. I got a phone call from him recently demanding $20,000 — or else he would send the photos to my wife.”

Sara felt sickened. Bellamy was scum.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I want those photos,” he said. And, with quick and certain grace, he took from inside his suit jacket a silver gun and pointed it at Sara. “And you’re going to help me get them. Right now.”

Washington, D.C

Tolson

Director Hoover had two offices in the FBI building. One was the large, flag-bedecked room with the long table and soft leather chairs where Hoover officially greeted important visitors and held senior staff meetings. On the far wall of this office was a door leading to the inner office where he did most of his work.

Clyde Tolson returned from a United Way luncheon. Clyde had always agreed to participate in charities since Edgar despised glad-handing events. Clyde, on the other hand, enjoyed them.

Tolson opened the door of the large office. Empty. Edgar loved the majesty of the room — the two large American flags and the emblem of the FBI between them — this kind of ceremonial intimidation. Tolson was uncomfortable around it.

Tolson walked to the smaller door on the far wall and knocked.

No answer.

Though Edgar didn’t like to admit it, he was starting to lose his hearing. For a man of Edgar’s vanity, a hearing aid was out of the question. So one spoke to him a little louder. And knocked a little more forcefully.

Tolson knocked a little more forcefully.

He would go in and leave Edgar a note, asking for a brief meeting about the cars in the next year’s budget.

Tolson went inside, closing the door behind him. The small office was as dark and personal as the official office was bright and formal.

He went behind the desk, looking for a note pad.

The desk, as usual, was clean of everything save for standard black telephone and intercom, lone gold Cross pen and gold-framed photograph of Edgar’s mother, a woman Tolson had always considered to be something of a cold and hostile authoritarian. Tolson’s own mother had been sweet and silent, a beauty who had spent her life being pushed around by a selfish husband and selfish in-laws. Tolson could not think of his mother without an enormous melancholy overtaking him.

The drawers were as neat as the desk top. He found a small note pad in the middle drawer on the left row and took it out. And then he saw the name and numbers that Edgar had written at the bottom of the page.

Tolson recognized the prefix as the Los Angeles area. Pasadena, if he wasn’t mistaken.

He stood there angry and frightened as he realized the implications. After the last episode, Edgar had given his solemn pledge that he would never again have anything to do with Melanie. Yet here it was, less than two years later, and Edgar was dealing with her again.

Clyde Tolson felt like a betrayed lover.

He thought back to last night. They always watched the late news together, then had a nightcap before Tolson went back to his own apartment. But last night Edgar had excused himself and disappeared upstairs for a time, and now Tolson knew why.

So he could contact Melanie.

This was the dark side of Edgar, the reckless side. It scared Tolson because someday it would bring Edgar down. And with him would come Clyde Tolson.

He had no idea why Edgar had contacted Melanie again but he was damned well going to find out — by confronting Edgar directly, damn the consequences.

The confrontation would best be left for dinner, where he would say: Edgar, we have a partnership. A bond. Based on our affection for each other and our mutual desire to see the Bureau get the respect it deserves. Working with Melanie could destroy everything we’ve built up over the years. I want to retire with you and spend our last years fishing in the mountains and seeing the new shows in New York and eating fresh shark in Miami Beach.

Melanie could destroy everything.

Melanie

As a tail, Tully wasn’t much.

He lost Melanie twice, in fact, and she had to do everything except send up flares so he could find her again. She loved toying with people, but enough was enough. Tully was pathetic.

Melanie led him into the heart of Los Angeles, to a decayed area with an entire block of empty warehouses. She found a warehouse with a door that would open up. She drove in and parked in the center of the vast, shadowy space that smelled of dust and oil. The floor was littered with crunchy dried rat droppings.

She left her car and hid in a dark corner behind a large, rusted barrel.

Would Tully be so dumb as to fall for this setup?

Sure enough. A few seconds later, Tully came in. On foot. With his gun out. He was dressed well, a nice-looking guy. He crept into the big empty echoing warehouse, looking around cautiously.

He looked inside Melanie’s car, then opened the door and leaned in to check out the glove compartment.

Melanie came up and put her gun with the silencer right at the bottom of Tully’s back.

“Stand up.”

“Hey, shit, no need for guns.”

“Right. Give me yours.”

Tully stood up. And gave her his gun.

“Hands over your head.”

“What the hell’re you doing?”

“Do it.”

“Like in the movies, huh?” Tully tried to smile but Melanie could see he was scared.

“Yeah, like in the movies,” Melanie said.

She patted Tully down and got his wallet. She looked Tully’s investigator’s license over carefully and handed back his wallet. “Who’s your client?”

“They never tell me.”

“Right. Who is it?”

She put the end of the silencer against Tully’s right eye.

“Jesus, the name is Mayhew. He’s a studio executive.”

That was enough for Melanie. She hated pathetic assholes.

“Jesus, listen—”

She put the bullet right into his eye. The exit wound sprayed blood and tissue and bone chips into the air. A little got on the windshield. She could take care of it with a handkerchief.

She dragged Tully by one arm over to the corner with the barrel. She took the lid off, tipped the barrel down on its side and stuffed Tully in, stood the barrel back up, and put the lid back on.

She wiped the windshield. There was blood all over the floor, but there wasn’t much she could do about that.

Tolson

Tolson called a friend on a lower-order movie magazine who might have heard something about Melanie.

“Mel?”

“Yeah?”

“I call you at a bad time? This is Clyde Tolson.”

“Shit.”

“Well, nice to talk to you, too.”

“Got fuckin’ coffee all over my fuckin’ crotch.”

“How’s the wife, Mel?”

“Bitch left me. Took the kid, too.”

“I am sorry, Mel.”

“Said I was too hard to live with. Fuckin’ cunt.”

“Yeah, Mel, pretty hard to imagine you being hard to live with. Say, Mel, do you remember a gal named Melanie Baines?”

“Sure I do. A lesbo. Used to go out with dyke movie stars. Face and bod like that and she likes broads. A fuckin’ waste.”

“You heard anything about her lately?”

Mel laughed. “Oh, yeah, I heard about her all right. Crazy fuckin’ bitch.”

“So she’s still out there?”

“Oh, yeah. Helped demolish this lesbo bar one night. Threw a dyke through a window.”

“My, my.”

“No charges filed, though. This dyke had pulled a shiv on her. Seems Melanie had tried to pick up the dyke’s girlfriend.”

“Hey, Mel? Thanks a lot for your help.”

“Any fuckin’ time,” Mel said.

Tolson hadn’t wanted to call his informant at the LAPD until he knew for sure that Melanie was still out there. Even a single call would alert a few ears that the FBI was interested in Melanie, and Tolson didn’t want her name associated with the Bureau in any way.

Now he’d call the LAPD and see if her rap sheet had any new material. He wanted to have his argument with Edgar laid out in advance.

Sara

All her life Sara had seen people pull out guns and point them at other people. But Curtis Simmons’ gun was real, not celluloid, and it was pointing right at Sara.

“My wife deserves to die with some dignity,” Simmons said. “If she ever saw those—” The words caught in his throat. For a moment, she thought he might cry. “He even made some audiotapes of us somehow, bugged the room we were in, I guess.”

“I wish you’d put the gun away.”

“When I have the photos.”

“You don’t think I have anything to do with this, do you?”

“I don’t care. Getting the photos is all that counts.” He leaned closer to the desk and stuck the gun in her face. “Let me into Bellamy’s private office.”

“Put your gun away, and I’ll take you into his office. I’ll help you look.”

“What kind of trick is that?”

“No trick. I’ll help you look for the photos.”

A knock sounded on her door. Jeff called, “Are you all right in there, Sara?”

“I’m fine.”

Curtis Simmons allowed himself a small smile. He clicked on the safety and put the gun away. “I believe we have a deal.”

They searched for twenty minutes — desk drawers, filing cabinets, closets, even the linings of two worn topcoats — and found nothing.

“What makes you sure they’re here?” Sara asked.

“He’s blackmailed other people. I’m not the first. He keeps the photos here. I’ve been told all about it.”

Sara could tell by his sighs that Simmons was sliding back into anxiety.

“He’s quite the bastard,” Simmons said after starting a second search through the filing cabinets. “He wanted cash. My God, I don’t have twenty thousand dollars. My wife’s medical bills have wiped us out.”

She wished Bellamy were here so she could confront him with this.

“I told him that my wife had terminal cancer and he said, ‘That’s your problem.’”

She said, “I’m going to open the safe for you.”

“The safe?”

“Yes. Behind that landscape print over there.”

She opened the top drawer, found the combination taped to the bottom.

She swung the hinged landscape back and set to work on the numbers, discreetly shielding them from Simmons.

“I’m indebted to you,” he said.

“The photos may not be in here, Mr. Simmons. Don’t get your hopes up.”

She turned the dial right, then left again. A faint click.

“That should do it,” she said.

She reached in, felt two manilla envelopes, and pulled them out. One had “CS” on it. The other was unmarked.

“Here we are,” Sara said.

Inside the first were several black-and-white prints showing Simmons and a fetching young woman, and a roll of film.

“You said there were some tapes?”

“Yes.”

In the second she found two Scotch audio reels. “Here.” She handed him the envelopes.

“You’re just giving them to me?”

“I am.”

“But why?”

“Mr. Simmons, just go home and see your wife.”

He took her slight shoulders in his large hands and kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you.”

She closed the wall safe, swung the painting shut, and escorted Simmons to the reception area door and showed him out.

The incident was over.

Tolson

“Captain Miller? This is Clyde Tolson.”

“Yes, Mr. Tolson.”

“I don’t know if you remember meeting me at that charity benefit for the Rams last year.”

“Of course I do. It was a pleasure meeting both you and Mr. Hoover. How can I help you, Mr. Tolson?”

“Clyde, please.”

“Clyde, then.”

“I’m calling to ask you a favor.”

“The LAPD is always glad to help the FBI.”

Tolson paused. “Actually, this isn’t strictly for the FBI. It’s more personal.”

“I see.”

“A favor for a friend, actually. He wants some background information on a young woman.”

“And she has a record?”

“Well, frankly, he doesn’t know much about her. He would like to have some sense of her background. Ordinarily, I’d go through channels.”

“No problem, Clyde. Just give me the lady’s name.”

“Melanie Baines.” He spelled it.

“Got it.”

He returned Tolson’s call forty-seven minutes later.

“Well, she definitely has a record,” Captain Miller said. He seemed hesitant. “I don’t mean to pry here, Clyde, but I hope your friend is not involved with this lady.”

“Serious?”

“Assault and battery in a lesbian bar in North Hollywood, among other things. She destroyed most of the place herself.”

“Jail?”

“Not according to this. Charges were dropped.”

“What else?”

“Attempted murder. She put two bullets in the windshield of a female friend. The friend called the department but then decided to drop charges.”

“Anything else?” Tolson could feel his heart sinking.

“Then there’s two counts of reckless driving and one of resisting arrest. The second reckless got her another assault-and-battery charge.”

“Oh?”

“She blamed the driver of the parked car she hit. He was an older man and she beat him up pretty good.”

“Any jail time on that one?”

“Not on any of them. This one has friends in high places, somebody who can put the heat on the boys downtown. The worst she’s ever done was six hours in a holding cell.”

Yes, and Tolson knew just who that “somebody” was.

“Oh, wait a minute,” the officer said. “On her second reckless driving she was ordered to see a psychiatrist. Judge made her go to twenty weekly sessions. A Dr. Nessmith. Oswald Nessmith.”

“In L.A.?”

“Yeah, and the D.A.’s office was really pissed. Her file is full of their memos wondering why they’ve never been able to put this one away.”

“Friends in high places you said.”

“Federal friends, you want my guess. Big time friends.”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“I do too, Clyde. I do too.”

Sara

“Some guy, huh? That Eichmann.”

Sara nodded. Manny, who ran the outdoor hot dog stand, was looking at the cover of the three-month-old Time magazine someone had left behind. The cover subject was Adolf Eichmann. Manny’s left arm still bore the tiny blue numbers he had been given in the concentration camp where his wife and two sons had been killed.

Manny gave Sara her chili dog. While she ate, and drank her usual Pepsi, Sara read the Los Angeles Times. She tried to forget the scene in the office with Curtis Simmons.

Meanwhile the world was going to hell. Russia had agreed to send arms to Cuba. Three more deformed Thalidomide babies had been born. The U.S. was establishing a military council in South Vietnam — some experts worried that we might be headed into a war there.

“How’s the screenwriting business?” Manny said, wiping off the counter with a clean cloth.

Good old Manny. He took an interest in his customers. L. A. needed two million more like him.

“My agent’s shopping my latest to Warner Brothers,” Sara said. She held up crossed fingers. “Here’s hoping.”

“You’re due to score,” Manny said.

Several years ago, a beautiful young midwestern couple had left Omaha, he to be an actor, she a writer. In Los Angeles, they pursued their dreams. A little girl came along unexpectedly and changed their plans some — six months after giving birth to Laura, Sara freelanced a few articles to movie magazines. There was little time to write the screenplays she was fashioning after her idol, Billy Wilder.

Sara began to notice frustration in Michael. He was a skillful and engaging actor. But so were several thousand other young men around Los Angeles. He started working with a small, experimental theater group that soon became his whole life. He got a good notice in the L.A. Times for one of his theater plays, and as a result became convinced that this small theater could bring him to the notice of major picture executives if he just hung in there. Sara saw less and less of him.

They began to argue viciously, and after such fights, he’d stay away even longer. He began showing up in very nice clothes, and driving a very nice car. When she asked where he got them, he slammed out of the house, shouting that it was none of her damned business. She feared that he was in trouble with the law. How else to explain hand-tailored suits and white convertibles? But one day, on Wilshire Boulevard, she saw him stepping out of a shiny new Cadillac sedan. A liveried chauffeur had opened the door for him. Behind Michael came a glittering older lady a bit overdressed for the middle of the afternoon. She sparkled as only a Beverly Hills matron can, Zsa-Zsa Gabor being the patron saint of all these women. The woman took hold of Michael’s arm possessively, and they swept into a photography studio. Now Sara knew where Michael got his suits and convertibles. The polite word for it was gigolo.

It ended without much drama. She came home after work one day to find all his possessions gone. That night he called her and said, “Maybe we should try it apart for a while.”

“Michael, we’ve been apart for a long time already. You’re never here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Please, Michael,” she heard herself pleading. “Let’s give it another try.”

“Not right now, Sara. I’ve got a lot of things I need to think through.”

In a week, she had lost six pounds and developed a fever. She had Laura and her job at Insight. She had to hold all this together. And somehow she did.

“Another Pepsi, Sara?”

Sara raised her head. “No, thanks. Pd better get back to the office.”

She walked back to work, unaware of the red-haired woman following her.

In the office, Sara asked Jeff, “Any sign of Bellamy yet?”

Jeff shook his head.

“Did you try his house again?” Sara said.

“Uh-huh. Mrs. Bellamy is of the opinion that he’s probably in Vegas, quote, sticking it in some hooker who’ll give him a disease, unquote.”

“Nice to know there are still a few happy marriages left, anyway.”

Jeff laughed as Sara went into her office. “They’re sneak-previewing that William Holden picture in Pasadena tonight. I’ve got tickets.”

She stuck her head back out the door. “I’ll talk to Mrs. Gregory. I could use a movie tonight.”

For the next twenty minutes, she forgot all about Bellamy — she was going to confront him with the Curtis Simmons episode — and about Michael and about her own unsold screenplays, and instead worked with great concentration on a piece about the “Hollywood Canteen” pictures used as American propaganda during the darkest days of World War II. Propaganda or not, some of them had been very entertaining pictures.

Her phone rang. “For you,” Jeff said on the intercom.

“Take a number.”

“It’s your ex-husband.”

Even though Sara was not actually divorced, Jeff insisted on calling Michael her “ex.” She picked up the phone.

“Sara,” he said, “something’s come up we should talk about.”

Melanie

Where was she most likely to find the tapes?

After killing Tully, Melanie decided to give Bellamy’s girlfriend, a dancer named Erica Dane, another try.

For the past two days, Erica’s duplex had been empty. Melanie assumed she was hiding out with Bellamy somewhere. But she had to be back soon because she had a chorus job at Twentieth tomorrow, a Shirley MacLaine musical. Now was a good time to sit and wait for her.

As Melanie sat waiting in her car, she thought about some of the bars she’d been touring lately. There were times when she just wanted to have fun. L.A. was a labyrinth of bars, gay and straight alike, and she promised herself a major tour of all the new “in” spots when this gig for Mr. Hoover was over.

In her rearview mirror, she saw a Yellow cab approach and stop, and a woman get out.

Erica Dane looked just like her photograph, except her tits were even bigger.

She was carrying an overnight bag. She wore a frilly pink blouse and her knockers made Melanie’s mouth water. She was tall with bleached hair and a hard face. Melanie had found out that she’d left home when she was fourteen and worked the midwestern striptease circuit of the early fifties. Now twenty-seven, she’d lived several lifetimes already.

She went up the walk to her duplex.

Melanie was within three feet of her by the time she opened the front door.

Melanie pushed her through the doorway, stepped inside, slammed the door shut, and then proceeded to slap her four times across the face.

Blood started running from Erica’s nose and mouth.

“I’m nobody to mess with, Erica. And I just wanted to make sure you understood that. All right?”

Erica dropped her overnight case on the floor. She started sobbing, standing there in the middle of the room with those luscious tits heaving inside that pink blouse.

“Who the fuck are you?” she sobbed. “Who the fuck are you?”

Tolson

“Dr. Nessmith, please.”

“May I say who’s calling?”

“My name is Tolson.”

He hated checking up on Edgar this way, but he had to. He had worked too long, too hard to let Edgar ruin it. In the past six months, John Kennedy had seemed less afraid of Edgar — feeling his oats as President. Edgar needed something even more destructive on the Kennedys, and Clyde was going to get it for him.

The brothers’ affairs with Marilyn Monroe — which had driven Edgar to enlist Melanie — was what he needed.

“Dr. Nessmith here.”

“Hello, Doctor. I’m Clyde Tolson of the FBI. You were contacted by Special Agent Rollins, who confirmed that I would be calling, and that I’m who I say I am?”

“Yes, sir. Nice meeting you, Mr. Tolson. How can I help you?”

“I just need a little information on a former patient of yours. A young woman named Melanie Baines.”

“What information, Mr. Tolson?”

“I know that the court ordered her to see you.”

“Yes. But I’m afraid any information I have is confidential.”

“Even where national security is concerned?”

“National security?”

“Dr. Nessmith, I’m not making this call frivolously.”

“I’m sure you’re not.”

“I don’t need specifics. Just some general conclusions.”

“All right.”

“Is she dangerous?”

Hesitation. “She’s what we call chronically antisocial, Mr. Tolson, meaning that she’s a person likely to be in trouble, who doesn’t seem to learn from experience. People like this are typically callous and without firm loyalties.”

“That’s interesting,” Tolson said. “About loyalties.” He wondered how Edgar would like hearing that.

“People of this type are emotionally immature and hedonistic. She also tends to rationalize and justify anything she does.”

“Meaning what?”

“Some of my colleagues would call her sociopathic. By that they mean someone who commits heinous acts without any guilt.”

“In other words, she would never be effective as, say, a law enforcement officer?”

“Oh, no. She doesn’t even share what most people would call common reality let alone a conscience. She acts on impulses that the rest of us couldn’t possibly relate to.” He paused. “Among other things, she’s obsessed with this dead friend from her girlhood. To Melanie, her friend is far more real than the people around her.”

Tolson had written down the words “antisocial,” “callous,” “sociopathic” and “impulses.”

Dr. Nessmith said, “I’m very uncomfortable talking about one of my patients.”

“I appreciate that, Doctor. We’re done. Thank you.”

He hung up.

He couldn’t wait to confront Edgar with his findings.

Mayhew

In 1896, Thomas Edison invented and marketed the Vitascope, a machine that projected images from film onto a screen. The unveiling was on April 23, at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York. Not until 1906, when famed director D.W. Griffith began taking his Biograph actors to Los Angeles for the winter months, did Hollywood begin to play a role in the emergence of film as the universal language. Studios began to give the world that most special of all human animals, the movie star. There were Famous Players and Paramount, Universal and Fox, Warner Brothers and General Film.

The glamour stars came from the studios, seldom the independents: Pickford, Fairbanks, Garbo, Gable, Bogart, Arbuckle, Chaplin, Keaton, Hope, Crosby — all creations and creatures of the studios.

And while these stars were shining over Hollywood, on a Pennsylvania farm a handsome kid named Del Mayhew was growing up. Even when he was ten years old and just one more farm kid in a crowded Saturday matinee, he knew that he could be one of those men up on the screen... Randolph Scott or Robert Ryan or Gary Cooper.

When he graduated from high school, when most of his friends were going to work on their family farm or at the beef plant in town, he set off hitchhiking to the West Coast. His mother was convinced that an axe murderer would pick him up, his father that he would fall into the familiar Hollywood traps of drinking and drugs and gambling and women who gave you diseases.

They didn’t need to worry. Del Mayhew was smart. When he got to Hollywood, he spent his first two weeks taking all the tours. He took a cold, hard look around and realized that he was only one of thousands of good-looking would-be actors in Hollywood. On his second Friday in town, he got a job in the mailroom at the prominent talent agency William Morris and a sleeping room in the valley.

A few short years later, he was a major Hollywood agent, thanks mainly to the fact that he’d saved the life of the agency’s most major of major female stars. She liked to drink and to swim. One midnight at her beach house, she left sixty guests, waded out into the moonlit ocean, and didn’t return.

Mayhew dove in and went after her. He swam her back to shore, performed mouth-to-mouth, and got her to the hospital.

This major female star was not one to forget a kindness and so she went to the agency and said, I want Del Mayhew as my agent.

Thus was born the Del Mayhew of the gossip columns, of the Variety front page, the Del Mayhew who was always seen with the most glittering starlet of the season on Oscar night.

He never told anybody that on the night he’d saved the star from drowning, he’d also put knockout drops in her drink so that if she took her customary dip he’d get to rescue her.

A few years later, Mayhew let himself be talked into dinner with Ross Finestein, a grumpy old bastard who’d run Millennium Pictures for the past thirty years — during which time, the studio had won Oscars for best picture. Millennium was considered the only small studio with real power.

At dinner that night — while Basil Rathbone and Greer Garson (both members of the British exile community in Hollywood) dined together and Ty Power hustled his starlet-of-the-week at the bar — Ross Finestein told Del Mayhew all about the cancer that was eating him up inside.

“I can’t do it any more, kiddo. I can’t run that fuckin’ studio. I just ain’t got the stamina. I’m losin’ two pounds a week. Some friggin’ diet this is, huh?”

Mayhew liked and admired Finestein. Let Louis B. Mayer and David O. Selznick have their pretensions and their huge empty blockbusters. Mayhew preferred Finestein and Harry Cohn, men without polish, perhaps, but men who made good, honest, powerful smaller pictures.

“You’re maybe too ambitious,” Finestein continued, “but you’ve got good taste and you give a shit about pictures. That’s why I’m talkin’ to you tonight, understand? Because you give a shit about making good pictures.”

Finestein died three months later. By that time all the legalities had been settled. Del Mayhew was president of Millennium Pictures.

In the first three years of his tenure, Mayhew bought and produced scripts from such writers as Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, Waldo Salt and Dalton Trumbo. They made fine commercial pictures, too, much to the surprise of many other studio heads. Mayhew was able to get a good alliance with a distributor so everything was fine. Except for one thing. Finestein had neglected to tell him about the massive studio debt that he had been forced to take on to keep afloat all those years — debt that was now eating up the studio.

Mayhew could see failure threatening within a year or two unless he came up with something. After lunch one rainy Tuesday, he walked into his office, and his secretary (whom he’d seduced on her third day here, just to get it out of the way) said that a man named Rossetti was waiting to see him.

Three weeks after he opened the door and got his first glimpse of Mr. Salvitore Rossetti, the entire studio debt was taken care of and several long-needed improvements were made at Millennium studios.

Everybody in Hollywood knew what was going on. The Mob was buying up Hollywood, and Rossetti was a mobster with a real yen to be a player in the glamorous film business. He had ready access to millions of dollars in cash from the Las Vegas skim. He bought fifty-one percent of Millennium. He kept his word to Mayhew about leaving the pictures alone. Mayhew made the pictures he wanted, exactly the way he wanted to make them. Rossetti became a part of the Hollywood scene.

It was because of Rossetti that Marilyn Monroe, the gorgeous but troubled superstar, agreed to do a picture at Millennium. Rossetti had gotten to know her years ago, when she was still number one at the box office, and after a brief affair, became the father she’d never had. He told her to make a picture at Millennium, and so she made a picture at Millennium.

But two years ago, Rossetti made himself another friend, a man who happened to be a candidate for president of the United States.

All these years later, Del Mayhew, twenty pounds heavier, hair thinner, disposition grumpier, sat in his office and stared at the blinking button on his phone, the call he had to take.

“Hello, Mr. Rossetti,” he said, trying to sound relaxed.

“I screened Love on a Dark Street for some friends last night, Del. They loved it.”

“Good. Great.”

“And I read that issue of Film Comment you sent me. I liked the piece on Hitchcock.”

“Look, I know why you called.”

“You haven’t heard from Mr. Tully?”

“Not yet. He was trying to locate a woman named Melanie.”

A pause. “I’m not happy about this, Del. I’ve never asked much of you. I want it resolved within twenty-four hours.”

He had never given Del Mayhew a direct order before.

“It will be,” Mayhew said. “You have my word on that.”

“I want to pay the sonofabitch back. I’m not some piece of garbage he can throw away, even if he is president of the United States. Take care of it for me. Do the right thing.”

“Consider it done.”

Rossetti broke the connection.

Del Mayhew sat there a long time, rubbing his face.

Direct order. No excuses.

Twenty-four hours.

Five minutes later, Del Mayhew was wheeling his new red Corvette through the studio gates. He had to find Tully, the gumshoe that International Investigators had put on the job — the sleazeball who by now had probably been offering the tapes to the highest bidder. The tapes that Mayhew had fucking paid for and wasn’t about to die for.

Sara

“Actually,” Michael said, “I’ve been meaning to call you for a couple of weeks. To, uh, tell you.”

“Why don’t you just say it, Michael,” Sara said, “and get it over with?”

“I’m getting married.”

She had to say something, couldn’t sound as shocked as she felt. “Nice of you to tell me.”

“I mean, I know we need to get a divorce, but we can actually do that pretty fast if — well, you know, if you don’t contest it.”

“Congratulations.”

“Should I tell Laura?” Michael asked.

“All right.”

“I know you’re pissed.”

“No. I’ve been expecting this.”

“Sara, I’m really sorry.”

“Michael, I have to go. I’ll see you tonight.”

After quietly hanging up, she had a good cry, hoping it would make her feel better. It didn’t make her feel better at all.

Washington. D.C

Tolson

The note was on Tolson’s desk when he got back from lunch.

Tolson sipped his coffee. Hard to tell how committed Edgar was to getting rid of an agent. Many times Edgar fired off a note in a moment of pique and then forgot about it. But other times he got very angry with Clyde for not carrying out his orders.

So Tolson had to interpret the notes.

Sullivan had a strike against him by virtue of his name. Edgar was not fond of the Irish — whom he still thought of as Socialist heathens — and he was even less fond of Catholics.

Edgar did not call for Sullivan’s firing, merely for his banishment to the West, where Edgar wouldn’t ever have to see him again.

Edgar tended to fire people on whims: bad breath, bad suit, bad haircut, bad posture, bad shoes and — Edgar’s catchall category — “bad attitude.”

Tolson, on the other hand, hated to fire people.

He spent the next half hour securing Sullivan a transfer to the Denver office, which was in fact a nice area for a man with three growing sons and a wife who liked the outdoors.

He found his mind wandering back to Melanie.

Tolson sat at his desk and shook his head. By rights, he shouldn’t even wait till tonight. He should march right in to Edgar’s office and demand that Edgar get rid of Melanie at once.

But Edgar would never forgive him if he started a scene at work.

No, Tolson thought, better wait.

His friend J. Edgar Hoover could be one mean sonofabitch.

Melanie

Melanie said, “I’m going to give you a choice. You can take those clothes off yourself. Or I will rip them off.”

They were in Erica Dane’s living room. Melanie had her Luger out. She’d closed all the Venetian blinds, and the living room was dim and stuffy. The only air conditioner was a small asthmatic window-unit that dripped onto the gray rug, making a dark spot like dog piss.

She wasn’t impressed with anything she’d seen in this duplex. Couldn’t Bellamy afford better than this for his mistress? Discount furniture and cheap knickknacks?

Melanie sat on the edge of an overstuffed armchair.

“So what’s it going to be?”

“How come you have a gun?”

Melanie laid the gun on the arm of the chair. “I can handle this without it. Take your clothes off.”

Erica smirked. “I done it with a girlfriend a few times. But I like a cock better.”

“Maybe you had the wrong girl.”

Erica quickly removed her blouse. When she was naked from the waist up, her breasts were big happy animals.

“Now the jeans,” Melanie said.

She hooked her thumbs into the waist and shoved them down, along with the pale blue underpants. Her pubic thatch was black.

Melanie stood up. “Into the kitchen.”

“Frank’s going to be plenty pissed.”

“Right,” Melanie said. She retrieved the gun and gave Erica a shove.

Erica led the way into the kitchen. Tan blinds were drawn against the sunlight. The kitchen was hot. At a formica table were four chairs.

“Rope.”

“Rope?” Erica said.

“Any kind.”

“There’s some clothesline in the closet there.”

“Get it.”

She didn’t move.

Melanie had been staring at Erica’s big sleek-as-dolphin tits. Now it was back to business. She took two short steps forward and swung the butt of the Luger against Erica’s jaw.

“You fucking bitch!” Erica yelled through her blood and spittle.

Melanie kicked her in the shin, then backhanded her with the gun.

She slid a chair underneath Erica, who landed on the warm plastic seat. Her face was smeared with blood.

Melanie calmly walked over to the closet, found the clothesline, and lashed her arms and chest tight to the back of the chair.

“Now we’re going to talk.”

“I ain’t gonna tell you anything.”

“Oh, no?” Melanie said. “You’re going to tell me everything I want to know. Everything, you understand?”

Mayhew

International Investigations was in a two-story building on Ventura Boulevard near several new antique shops. Mayhew’s wife liked to shop here, though the slobs hanging around this end of Ventura made Del Mayhew vaguely sick. Beatniks: long unkempt hair, dirty scruffy clothes, and a patronizing glint in their marijuana-dulled eyes.

He parked in the lot behind the investigation firm, went in the back door and up to the second floor.

They had decent digs, he’d say that for them. Most investigative outfits he’d hired were squalid places, squalid as the way they made their money.

But International, with its Mediterranean furnishings, spoke of success.

The receptionist was a formidable matron with a cold eye and gray hair pulled into a bun.

“I’d like to see Mr. Samuelson, please,” Mayhew said.

“Mr. Samuelson is out,” the receptionist said. Mayhew smiled. “May I have your name, please?”

“I’m Del Mayhew.”

She touched an intercom button and said, “Mr. Foyle? There’s a Mr. Mayhew here.”

Steve Foyle was maybe forty, boyish, enthusiastic.

“Are you familiar with my case?” Mayhew asked.

“I’m afraid I’m not, but we put a very good man on it.”

“Mr. Tully?”

“Right. He used to be with Pinkerton.”

“I was to hear from Mr. Tully at eleven-thirty this morning.” Mayhew didn’t mention the fact that he thought that the blackmailer with the muffled phone voice had been Tully — a double-crosser as well.

“And he didn’t call?”

“No. And he’s never missed calling at the exact time he promised.”

“This is most unlike Mr. Tully. He also said he’d be in the office this morning.”

“This is very important to me, Mr. Foyle.”

“I’m going to see to this personally, Mr. Mayhew. I’ll call you later in the day.”

“Do that. It’s very important.”

Washington, D.C

Lenihan

There was a small stone Catholic church just off G Street where Lenihan liked to pray in the cool summer shadows of the early morning. He prayed here even though he was not, strictly speaking, a Catholic, not having made his Easter duty in perhaps fifteen years. But he liked the faint incense and flicker of the votive candles. The church made the real world seem distant.

But mostly he liked the empty church because he felt closer to Dulcie here. Little Dulcie, because she had died when she was only seven, and would always be that age in his mind.

Twelve summers ago, one steamy July day, she’d come home from playing in the park, and she’d climbed up on his lap and said, “Daddy, I don’t feel good.”

Heat, he and her mother Jean surmised.

Little Dulcie woke up the next morning with four degrees of fever, and numbness in her left leg.

At this time, years before Jonas Salk discovered his famous vaccine, there was a word that held primal terror for all parents: polio. And worse: Bulbar paralysis, the most virulent kind, an all-out attack on the nerve cells of the brain stem.

Within days, little Dulcie suffered stiffness in neck and back. Then she lost control of her eyes, tongue and face, even the ability to swallow.

She was put in a hospital iron lung. Jean and David Lenihan stayed with her around the clock. Sixteen days later, little Dulcie was dead.

A month after the funeral, he gave up his position in the CIA, where he had been a successful spook, and signed on with his old friend Jack Kennedy, who was then a congressman from Boston. The two men had met right at the end of World War II, where both had served in the South Pacific theater.

Jack said, “My father thinks I’m going to be president some day, David. That means I’m going to need somebody to be my troubleshooter. You’d do a hell of job.”

So David, with the help of a loan from Jack, bought a home in Georgetown, hopeful that the new job and new digs would start Jean and him on a new road. It was not to be.

David quickly discovered the real Jack Kennedy. The first three assignments David had were to “fix” woman problems. Jack had gotten one of them pregnant, so David had to convince her to have an abortion, for which she would receive a nice “bonus” from Jack.

The second was a husband who knew that Kennedy had slept with his wife and was threatening to go to the newspapers. The man turned down every offer of money, so David tailed the man for three days. The hot-headed mick bastard was a hypocrite. David got pictures of the man entering and leaving colored whore houses. The man dropped his newspaper threats.

The third involved a cop who had caught Jack putting it to a woman in the back seat of a car. The cop wanted money. David paid a visit to a D.C. councilman, a ruthless old black man who basically ran the District of Columbia behind the scenes. David paid him $3,500 to promote this cop to full-rank detective and let him know that Jack Kennedy was responsible. The old councilman grinned with gold teeth.

“That Kennedy better learn to keep his pecker in his pants,” he said, “otherwise he’ll get it gnawed off one day.”

David Lenihan, the troubleshooter, was very successful.

As for David Lenihan, the husband, things did not go nearly so well. He had to cope not only with his own depression from little Dulcie’s death, but also with Jean’s alcoholism.

She’d never been good with booze, always getting angry or melancholy. Now she vanished from the house three or four nights a week. She left in the new Hudson he’d bought for her. Until she smashed it up. He’d hoped this would bring her around. And for a few weeks, she seemed chastened.

But then it was back to her nights out. There was a new addition now. Men. He smelled them on her, saw where they’d torn her clothes, tracked the scratches and bruises their fervid passion had left on her.

He pleaded and threatened, but it made no difference. He even got her into a sanitarium where she dried out for a month.

He had loved her since they were in grade school together. And he would always love her — or the memory of her. But ten years later, she was a demented middle-aged woman who sat in her upstairs room, cared for by the stern Irish maid who fed her alcohol, bathed her twice daily, and swaddled her in prison-plain housedresses. She had a nineteen-inch TV, and spent most of her days in front of it, sobbing over soap operas and melodramas of the thirties and forties.

So now, as he knelt in the back of the church, he prayed for them all, himself included.

An hour later, David Lenihan was standing in the Oval Office before Jack Kennedy’s desk.

Jack Kennedy winced as he sat in his rocking chair. His back was out again. It had been ever since Lenihan had known him. You could see the pain lines around Jack’s eyes and mouth, the gray streaking his otherwise auburn hair, the awkward way he carried himself. The White House staff now joked that the only thing Jack had strength for anymore was his women.

“Bobby is sure this Bellamy has got what he says he has,” Jack said. “Are you?”

“Yes.”

“How did he get them?” Jack asked.

“We need to find out.”

“You need to go out there.”

“When do you want me to leave?”

“Right away.”

Lenihan nodded, thinking back to the phone conversation he’d had with the man named Bellamy four days ago. The White House operator had routed the call to Lenihan’s office — Lenihan being a Special Assistant to the president — because Bellamy was a publisher and she didn’t know where else to send it. “Vital information,” Bellamy had called it. That kind of nut-ball call that came in all the time. But Lenihan talked to Bellamy, who was blunt and not at all intimidated by Lenihan’s position.

“I’ve got something you and the president are going to want,” Bellamy said. He told David what he possessed. “And you either pay me a half million dollars or Time magazine will.”

The next forty-eight hours had been a frenzy of meetings for Jack, Bobby, and Lenihan, which finally concluded with Jack arranging for a half a million dollars in cash.

Lenihan began looking into Mr. Bellamy and learned that the whole matter was moving with dangerous speed.

A White House operative, who’d been checking out Bellamy at Lenihan’s request, spotted a beautiful young woman named Melanie Baines lurking around Bellamy’s office. Baines was known to be an unofficial agent of Edgar Hoover. If that frog-faced little bastard Hoover ever got his hands on what Bellamy had, J. Edgar could blackmail Kennedy and become the de facto president.

So, as in medieval times, the two powerful men dispatched knights to do their battles for them. Hoover had sent Melanie: Jack Kennedy, Lenihan.

Kennedy gave him his shark’s grin. “You CIA guys know how to do stuff like this. If you can bring down a government, you can sure as hell nail Bellamy.” Kennedy’s allusion was to Guatemala, where the CIA had recently toppled a left-wing government and replaced it with a military man more disposed to the wishes of the United States.

The grin left Jack’s face. “David, my ass is on the line here. You’ve got to make this work.”

“I understand.”

Jack sighed. “I fuck around too much.” He looked at Lenihan. “But you get me out of this one, and I’ll give up chasing women. I promise.”

In the years he’d worked for Jack Kennedy, David Lenihan had dealt with union leaders, movie starlets, politicians who stood in Jack’s path, and any number of other citizens who needed to be bought off or scared off or ruined. And after each one of them, Jack gave the same speech. How he was going to reform, quit chasing skirts. It was all bullshit.

Lenihan looked at his old friend across the years now and felt a melancholy for both of them. How fine and shiny and new they’d been at the end of the war. How the years had cost them: Jack’s health and his almost pathetic need for new female conquests, Lenihan and his brooding sorrow for his daughter and wife.

Now, for Lenihan, there was just work — putting out all of Jack’s fires.

Whatever the situation, Lenihan had always been able to handle it successfully; this one would be no different, he felt sure.

And he was grateful for the work because it was a splendid distraction. When he was playing the gumshoe, there was no time to think about his grief or his loneliness. There was solace in the knowledge that he was good at what he did. Solace, and even a modest pride.

“I’ll be on the next flight out.”

“You’ve got to nail this bastard,” Jack Kennedy said, “right to the wall.”

David Lenihan nodded and went home to pack.

Sara

Was it that older woman she’d seen him with? Was that the one he was going to marry? Did he really love her? Was this marriage going to enhance his career?

There were so many things she had wanted to ask Michael when he’d called, but she couldn’t — not and maintain self-respect, anyway.

Her intercom buzzed.

“Bellamy’s on the phone,” Jeff said.

She picked up the phone, trying to refocus quickly.

“Hi, kid.” Bellamy sounded weak.

“Before we start on anything, Mr. Bellamy, I want to tell you that what you tried to do to Curtis Simmons is despicable.”

“I’ve been hiding, kid. I got more important things on my mind than that Simmons bozo. This time I may have bought the farm.”

She had no choice but to listen to him. “What happened?”

“Took too big a bite, and now I may choke to death on it.”

She hated his gaudy melodramas. He was always embroiled in something.

“Where are you?”

“Better you don’t know. People will be snooping around. I don’t know just how I’m gonna handle this yet.”

He should know that she’d given Curtis Simmons the photographs. “Maybe I’d better tell you—”

“You going to be home tonight?”

“Yes.”

“I may need you to meet me, bring me what I need from the safe.”

“Are the police involved?”

“Don’t ask. I have to play my hand out my way.”

“But Mr. Bellamy—”

“I’ll call you at home tonight. Later, kid.”

Tolson

“Clyde? Hal. Everything all right?”

“I could bullshit you, but it isn’t.”

“Well, my news isn’t going to make you any happier. Our little friend Melanie has called Edgar at home four times in the past three weeks.”

“Yeah? I figured.”

“Anything else you want?”

“No. I’ll have to handle things from here. But thanks for checking the phone records. And for setting up the shrink for me.”

“Get what you wanted?”

“Enough to make me sick.”

Louella

“It’s Mr. Gibbons,” her maid, Maria, announced. Louella picked up. “I’ve waited two hours and forty-six minutes for you to return my call. Mr. Hearst always returned my calls promptly, even from ships and planes.”

He sighed. “What can I do for you, Louella?”

“It’s what I’m going to do for you, young man. For you and the entire Hearst organization.”

“And that would be what, exactly?”

“The biggest scoop since Richard Nixon’s slush fund in 1952.”

“Can you get to the point?”

“I’m about to receive the secret tapes of a film star who recently died.”

“Monroe? You’re talking about Marilyn Monroe?” His voice perked up.

“Who else?”

“These tapes — what’s supposed to be on them?”

“Oh, no, no. I don’t say anything until you agree to my terms.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We have a contract.”

“First, I want the column that breaks the story to be run on the front page of every Hearst paper in the country. Second, I want my picture above the column. Third, I want both radio and TV advertising.”

Momentary silence. “Louella, are you nuts?”

“I’m quite sane, thank you. You know the rumors about who Marilyn was seeing.”

“Everybody’s got rumors. I don’t give a shit about rumors.”

“But these tapes will prove that it’s true. In their own voices — and sounds, I believe. Both of them.”

“Holy shit! On the level?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll get to examine these tapes myself and give them to experts?”

“Of course.”

For the first time since she’d met him eight years ago, Daniel Gibbons actually sounded excited about her work.

“Louella, you know how much I respect you.”

Such respect. Forcing her into a two-year contract last time instead of her previous four-year deals, at a lower syndication percentage than Hearst used to give her. Pushing the younger columnists he’d brought aboard himself, instead of her, the queen.

“You’ll meet my terms, then?”

“No sweat.”

“I’ll want it in writing.”

“Since when do you and I need a piece of paper? I mean, if we can’t trust each other, who can we trust?”

“I want a signature.”

“Okay, okay, I want you to be happy, Louella.”

Such a sickening boy now that he smelled a big story.

“I expect prompt responses to my calls.”

“I promise.” Pause. “When do I hear from you again?”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

“Louella, I want those tapes.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Sara

Jeff was getting set to leave the office. “Will you lock up?” he asked Sara.

“Sure. And thanks, Jeff. I really appreciate you looking after me.”

“My pleasure.”

Then he was gone, out into the hall and down seven floors in the elevator.

Before leaving, Sara decided to file away some old issues of Insight she’d been using as reference. Twenty minutes later, just as she was turning out the lights and getting ready to walk out the door, the call came.

“My name’s David Lenihan, Mrs. Drury. I’m in Washington, D.C., but I’m about to catch a flight to L.A. I would like to see you tomorrow morning.”

“In regard to what, Mr. Lenihan?”

“I need some information. Confidentially. Concerning Mr. Bellamy.”

“What kind of information?”

“Mrs. Drury, I’m with one of the government security agencies. This is a serious matter and I hope you’ll be cooperative.”

“I don’t mean to be uncooperative, Mr. Lenihan. But you’re being pretty mysterious.”

“Well, it’s a mysterious world. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Sara scratched her head. Why would a government security agency be interested in Bellamy?

Michael

He liked buying dolls for Laura. Nobody bought a kid more presents than a guilty parent, he thought.

He was in a toy store in Beverly Hills, the land of ermine and diamonds, gold plumbing fixtures and platinum cocktail shakers. He was looking at the new generation of Raggedy Annes when he felt eyes watching him.

A fur-wrapped matron was giving him a discreet look.

Today he played against type, wore a button-down shirt, no tie, and slacks. And they were paid for with his own money.

He had to do this every once in a while, go back to being Michael Drury from Omaha, the kid from behind the stockyards who had been a fair first baseman and who spent a lot of summer Saturdays fishing and a lot of autumn Saturdays hunting. And who loved the maiden fair Sara for her pure spirit and looks and midwestern values. And who had borne him that most lovely of earthly creatures, Laura.

He was in one of these moods this morning so the interested glance from the matron only disgusted him. He gave her a hard stare and went on looking at the Raggedy Annes.

Melanie

Erica Dane’s apartment was even hotter now than when Melanie arrived.

Melanie had been forced to get rough with her, a not unpleasant experience, and she was now working up a light sweat. The weird thing was, Erica still didn’t give up Bellamy’s whereabouts.

Even after Melanie had slugged her twice with her gun.

Melanie decided to use those big pleasurable breasts of Erica’s as vehicles for pain.

She grabbed one and gave it a killer twist.

Erica blubbered.

“Where’s Bellamy?”

“I haven’t seen him for two days.” Erica’s head was down again.

“They do interesting things in South America to women they interrogate. I spent a little time down there and a couple of the generals taught me a few things.”

Erica said nothing.

“One thing is to show the women these pictures of dead people with their eyes ripped out or their arms ripped off or their breasts sliced off. It’s pretty scary.”

Erica grimaced.

“Then they work people over with electric shocks. They shock them so bad that they pass out, but the generals keep this doctor on hand to revive you for more shocks.”

Erica mumbled, “You’re sick.”

“You know what the weirdest one was, though? They strip these women naked and tie them down on their stomachs and stuff cockroaches up the anuses. You should have heard those women scream.”

Erica’s head was still down.

“Erica?”

Erica still didn’t move.

“I’m getting mad, Erica. I’m serious about finding your boyfriend. Are you listening to me? Last chance, Erica.”

Erica did not respond.

So Melanie walked out to the living room and dug in her purse for a slender yellow can and came back into the kitchen.

“You want to watch, Erica?”

Her eyes stayed closed.

Sighing, Melanie sprayed the Ronson lighter fluid all over Erica’s head. She quickly tied a gag over Erica’s mouth, then lit a match and tossed it on the fluid-soaked pile of bottle-blonde hair.

Erica thrashed wildly, swinging the chair around under her bonds, her eyes now crazily open.

Her whole head was on fire.

The gag muffled her screams.

Mayhew

He spent some time on the freeway in his shiny red Corvette, as he often did when he needed to escape, to think, to plan.

Not even radio music. Just himself and this fine piece of machinery. He was going 115 miles per hour without even thinking about the California Highway Patrol.

Then he got the idea, at which point he slowed to sixty, found an exit ramp and headed back to L.A.

“Afternoon, Mr. Mayhew.”

“I saw Mr. Rossetti’s car in the back. Thought I’d stop in and see him.”

This was a private club near Laguna Beach. Very private. Not even a studio chief such as Mayhew rated much respect here. Mayhew had heard Rossetti mention it once. He’d decided to take a chance.

“I’m afraid he’s pretty busy.”

The man was an older, gray-haired gentleman with the nose, ears, and manner of a bouncer. “He really doesn’t appreciate visitors.”

“We’re business partners. I’ll take the responsibility.”

The bouncer shrugged. “Up to you.”

They stood in a shadowy nook off the lobby. Through a large window, Mayhew watched two men tee off on the nine-hole course, their talk enthusiastic but soundless; to Mayhew it was like watching a silent movie.

The bouncer walked down the rich blue carpet to a door and knocked twice, softly, then stuck his head in. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Rossetti. A man’s here. A Mr. Mayhew. He says he needs to see you.”

There was a silence.

“Buy him a drink at the bar and I’ll be along.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jonas bought Mayhew a drink. He was the only one at the bar. He could see in the mirror the door from which Rossetti would emerge. He was eager to tell Rossetti of his plan.

Fifteen minutes later, the door opened.

Rossetti came out. White curly hair, trim body, dark clothes, ominous intensity.

A girl came out the door after Rossetti. She was beautiful. She was also a Negro.

Just outside the door, Rossetti and the girl paused; their hands touched. The girl whispered something, then walked to the lady’s restroom a few feet away. Rossetti watched her affectionately.

Mayhew was stunned. A mafioso at this level... with a black woman.

Rossetti came up the corridor, straightening his tie and unbuttoning his suit.

Mayhew turned on his padded bar stool to speak, but Rossetti’s hand came from nowhere and smacked Mayhew’s face.

His ears rang, and he tasted blood.

“I did not invite you here, Mr. Mayhew, and I resent your being here. Understand me?”

Stars danced before Mayhew’s eyes. He started to apologize, but Rossetti hit him again. This time he fell face first on the floor.

Mayhew

The humiliation was worse than the pain. All Mayhew could think of was the long-ago day, back on the playground of a rural Pennsylvania school, when Bobby Jennings had pounded him to the ground and then sat on him so he couldn’t get up.

The other kids, including the girl Mayhew had a crush on, stood around and laughed.

Now, feeling much the same way, he went to the men’s room and washed the blood off his face and combed his hair and straightened his necktie.

It was all still unreal to him, what had happened in the bar. Such sudden violence.

He took several deep breaths and then returned to the expensive silence of the private club.

Rossetti sat at the bar. The other man, Jonas, was gone.

Mayhew was nervous walking in. Why were he and Rossetti alone?

“Del, I’m drinking bourbon and branch water. How about you? Still Scotch?”

“Scotch.”

Rossetti went around the bar and fixed Mayhew his drink. He sat on the stool beside Mayhew.

“So, Del, what have you got?”

“I came here to tell you about an idea I had. What if I tell the police that Bellamy took something from my office and that I want him arrested. We’d have the entire LAPD looking for him. And when they find him, there’s no way he can tell them about the tapes.”

“So if the police have Bellamy, how do we get the tapes?”

“Tell him that I’ll drop the charges if he hands them over.”

Rossetti chuckled. “That’s a great idea, Del — for the movies. The first thing wrong is that it gets the cops nosing around in our business. The second is that it assumes Bellamy is rational.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “Do you think he’s a rational man?”

Mayhew sighed. He felt like a child now. Rossetti was completely in charge — and scoffing at his ideas.

“Give that idea to one of your crime-picture writers,” Rossetti said. “And never come here again unless you’re invited.”

Mayhew killed his drink in two large swallows. The liquor stung the inside of his mouth.

He looked out at the golf course. The players cast long afternoon shadows behind them as they moved along the green. There was no wind and the sky was very blue and the grass was impossibly green.

Mayhew wanted to project himself into that picture, into another dimension.

“Our agreement was twenty-four hours,” Rossetti said.

Rossetti stood and clapped Mayhew on the shoulder. “Now I think I’ll go for a swim. This place has a wonderful pool.”

Laura

Today, Mrs. Grundy had asked her students to write down the name of their favorite cartoon show.

Laura Drury, always earnest, thought about the matter for nearly ten minutes before writing on her blue-lined white notebook paper: Bullwinkle. He was a dope who knew he was a dope.

Then, when school was out, she raced home to see Bullwinkle on TV.

Within two minutes of opening the apartment door, she had changed into jeans and was plopped down in front of the television, a bottle of strawberry pop in one hand, a small bowl of last night’s popcorn in the other.

She hoped that her babysitter, Mrs. Gregory, didn’t come down right away. She always talked right over TV shows.

The distinctive trumpet music sounded, and there was Bullwinkle prancing across the screen.

She smiled. Bullwinkle always made her feel good, especially when he opened the envelope and said, “Look here. Fan mail from some flounder.”

No matter how many times she heard this particular piece of business, Laura always laughed.

The show started. Then stopped abruptly for commercials. They always teased you this way, the TV people did. They’d pretended that the show was really starting and then — wham! Right into the advertisements.

The commercials ran, all of them for cereals that her mom said were too sweet for her and would give her cavities.

The show started again. This time for real.

And then the phone rang.

Exasperated, she got up and hurried to snap up the receiver.

“Drury residence, this is Laura.”

“Hi.”

Susan! Her best friend! Unless Bullwinkle was on, that is. Then only Bullwinkle was her friend.

“I’ll call you back, Susan. I’m watching Bullwinkle.”

Laura hung up and ran back to the TV set.

When she watched Bullwinkle she could forget the problems of her mom and dad, all the screaming fights, all the tears she’d seen them both cry, all the grief the three of them had felt as their family began to disintegrate.

Laura always watched enviously on school-program nights when her friends came with their mothers and fathers. Real families. Mom tried hard but she was preoccupied and sometimes still bitter and lonely about the break up. And Dad tried hard, too, on the nights when he came over and rather solemnly took Laura out for dinner. Her father spent most of their time apologizing. He was sorry for all the fighting that Laura had had to listen to. Sorry for the break up. Sorry that Daddy and Laura couldn’t live together until Daddy’s life settled down some. And sorry that Daddy hadn’t been a better father.

Laura would sit in the restaurant and watch her father.

Thinking about it made her sad.

The phone rang again. She couldn’t believe it!

She got up from the TV and went over to the phone and picked it up.

“Is Mrs. Drury home?”

“Not yet. May I take a message?”

“Just say that Mr. Simmons called.”

She reached for a pencil and wrote down S-i-m-m-o-n-s.

She went right back to the TV.

“Yoo-hoo!” a voice sang through the front door. It was Mrs. Gregory letting herself into the apartment. “Yoo-hoo!”

Oh, no, Laura thought. Bullwinkle was doomed.

Bellamy

He had never liked colored people. They were lazy, smelly, and stupid, just as his mother had taught him.

So now, as the black man brought him his fifth of whiskey and bottle of Coke, Bellamy said, “How come it’s open? The Coca-Cola.”

The black man, probably fifty, who seemed to be the odd-job person in this rotting motel, shrugged. “I just figured I’d open it for you.”

“Well, you take that fucking Coke out of here, and come back with an unopened bottle.”

“Yessir,” the black man said.

When the man was gone, Bellamy grabbed the fifth of Old Crow and relaxed in the armchair facing the TV screen. It would be just like that colored bastard to take a drink of Bellamy’s Coke.

He stared at the phone, wondering what Erica was doing. With those tits, with that dirty mouth. Usually, Bellamy didn’t like women who talked dirty. But with Erica it excited him.

He tried not to think of his wife or what she’d be like when he finally got home after an absence of four, maybe five days.

He had neither loved nor desired her in many long years, but a divorce was too expensive. He’d worked too hard to let some former chippie from Kansas City, Missouri — who now weighed two hundred pounds and had clacking false teeth — take half his money. He’d stay married and fuck whoever he wanted. Much cheaper that way.

Of course, his life was about to change. After he got the half mil for the tapes from the president’s man Lenihan, maybe he’d take Erica someplace exotic.

The colored man brought him his unopened Coca-Cola.

Bellamy nodded to the bureau. “There’s some change up there. Take a dime for yourself.”

He picked up the telephone and dialed a Washington, D.C., number. David Lenihan’s office.

Just to make the uppity bastard sweat a little, he was going to demand an additional $50,000.

But the secretary who answered said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Lenihan left for Los Angeles this afternoon.”

Bellamy slammed the phone down. Los Angeles? What the hell was going on here?

But he knew just what was going on here.

Lenihan was going to try a sneak attack. Find Bellamy and take the tapes — at gunpoint.

Bellamy rubbed the sweaty gray hair matting his barrel chest. He’d show the bastard.

Tolson

Tolson — in his closed office, jacket off, tie loosened — had spent the past hour calling Los Angeles-area hospitals looking for a Jean Stephens, a woman Melanie had lived with back when Tolson had first attempted to discredit her to Edgar.

Now he called his sixteenth hospital.

“I’m trying to locate a nurse named Jean Stephens.”

“She works in the hospice area. I’ll connect you.”

Finally! Lord, what ordinary agents went through every day of their lives, just to find people and ask them simple questions.

“Hello.”

“Jean Stephens?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Ben Wenwright and I’m an attorney. I believe you know a woman named Melanie Baines, is that correct?” For obvious reasons, he didn’t want her to know who he was.

“We were roommates for a while.”

“She’s come into a small inheritance and we need to locate her.”

There was a pause. “What did you say your name was?”

“Wenwright. Ben Wenwright.”

“And you’re with what firm?”

Clever. “Wenwright and Lauderber is the name of the firm, miss.”

“In Los Angeles?”

“Chicago, miss.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t spoken with her in a while.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Oh, six months ago, I guess.”

“You wouldn’t have a current address for her? Or a current phone number?”

“No, sorry.” Small, feminine, delicate laugh. “She often uses phony names.”

“Phony names?”

“For her phone listings. She once called herself Elmira Johansen.”

“I see.”

“If I hear from her, I’ll tell her I spoke with you. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.”

You’re sorry. All this time wasted for a dead end.

“Well,” he said, unable to stifle his sigh, “thank you.”

Louella

Maria the maid and Juan the gardener stood beneath the den window, looking at each other in bewilderment.

From the window came the sounds of Louella’s giggles as she talked to members of Old Hollywood, the ones she really loved — Walter Pidgeon had been called and then Greer Garson and then Van Johnson and then Judy Garland (who would be, of course, already loaded for the day).

Maria and Juan could not recall seeing Miss Parsons this happy since the time Khrushchev visited Los Angeles. Miss Parsons’ invitation had gone astray in the U.S. mail. Not to get invited to such an event — the humiliation would have been devastating. For an entire week, the old bitch had sulked and fumed until one magical morning the postman said that he had found this envelope stuck in the back of his mail truck, where it had been lost since last week.

Miss Parsons had swept down on the envelope like a buzzard pouncing on its prey, tearing it open at once and letting out an exultant cry.

She had thrown a party for the entire staff, ordering Maria to the basement for champagne and Juan to the bakery for a fancy cake.

And now she was laughing again.

Ever since her phone call from Mr. Rossetti, she had been carrying on.

So Maria and Juan wondered what Mr. Rossetti could have said to Miss Parsons that could have made her this happy.

Melanie

Melanie realized that she’d gotten a little carried away. She’d planned to scare Erica Dane by setting her hair on fire, and then put it out right away. But Melanie had become so fascinated with the burning hair, and how Erica squirmed and jerked in her ropes, making the chair clump across the linoleum floor, that she just kept watching and watching. Like a TV show.

Now that the damage had been done, ol’ Erica definitely had third-degree burns. The thin flesh across her skull had been reduced to naked nerve and fiber and bone. Definitely not pretty. Erica probably wasn’t going to live very long. Her heart would start pumping too hard to compensate for the shock, and she’d croak.

The kitchen stank of hair and burnt flesh. Melanie opened a window, found some Air-Wick, pulled the tongue up and set it on the kitchen counter.

Erica rolled in and out of consciousness every few minutes.

Melanie untied the gag around her mouth.

“Fucking bitch,” she slurred.

“Real nice, Erica. I take your gag off and you call me a name.”

“Frank’s gonna...” Erica’s eyes rolled back. She had drifted away again.

She looked awful: this charred, bloody skull cap on her head, her arms and legs all trussed up.

Melanie went to the sink and filled a Skippy peanut butter glass with cold water. She poured it into Erica’s mouth. It was like trying to feed a baby who didn’t want to be fed.

Water ran out of the mouth that Melanie had bloodied earlier. Erica moaned, and then her eyes appeared again. “You fucking bitch.”

“You know, you might attract a better grade of man if you didn’t swear so much. And dressed a little more modestly.”

The wall phone rang.

Melanie dragged Erica’s chair across the floor, snatched the receiver from its cradle, and put the phone to Erica’s ear and mouth. Then put the Luger to Erica’s head.

“Hello,” Erica mumbled.

“I’m fine. I need... to talk to you...”

A faint male voice in the receiver.

Melanie hung up the phone. Talking had completely drained Erica. Her chin slumped to her shoulders and a faint mewling bubbled up her chest and throat.

She wasn’t going to make it, ol’ Erica wasn’t.

But she’d been useful. Frank Bellamy was surely on his way over here right now. Melanie couldn’t ask for more than that.

“Fuck... fuck...” Erica moaned.

Darn, but Melanie hated coarse language like that. She went into the living room to wait for Frank Bellamy.

Kid

The factory shift let out at three o’clock. The old man usually didn’t make it home till seven-thirty, eight o’clock. Till then the kid was free to play his ten-year-old games without a fight erupting between his parents.

Sometimes the fights got so bad that half the block would congregate on their front porch and force the two apart. The old man, when he was drunk, used his fists.

When he was an even littler boy, the kid used to cry about the fights, go to his room and lie on the bed and sob so hard that the mattress would shake.

Now the kid just left when the fights started.

Today, he walked the open L.A. sewer system.

You found all sorts of neat stuff in the sewers. One time the kid found a gold wristwatch that ticked if you shook it hard enough; another time he found three steelie marbles that some other kid must have lost.

The kid stayed in the sewer an hour and a half.

Then he went to his second-favorite place, the block of abandoned warehouses, where he liked to climb up in the loft and smoke the Lucky Strikes he’d swiped from the old man.

Today, he took the warehouse in the center of the block, walked up the stairs in back, climbed through one of the shattered windows, and crawled out to one of the wide beams that spanned the place. Then he had himself a cigarette.

And then he looked down and noticed on the floor a wide stain, shaped somewhat like the continent of Europe as he saw it in history class.

He wasn’t sure what it was. The stain widened as it neared the large barrels lined against the wall.

Blood?

The kid hoped that was it.

That would be a neat story. And it would be even neater if he found something to go with the blood. A body, say.

The kid crawled back along the beam and went down the ladder and over to where the swath darkened the floor.

He stooped down. Touched the stuff. Still fresh. Sticky.

Blood! It was blood for sure.

He straightened up and stared at the three barrels aligned by the wall.

He made his way along the edge of the blood continent to the barrel with the blood smears down its side. He slid the lid off, and it clanged to the floor, making him jump.

He had to stand up on tiptoe to look inside.

He saw the body. He gulped, frozen to the spot.

The guy shoved down inside had his head twisted, and one blue eye stared upward. His left eye. His right one was just a bloody, ugly hole.

The kid started to sweat. The smell was pretty awful. The guy had shit his pants or something.

The kid stood still for another minute, not wanting to stare but not able to stop.

And then he ran. Out of the warehouse and down the long cracked sidewalk to the next block to a greasy-spoon hamburger joint where there was an LAPD car parked. In through the door, up to the counter where two cops with creaking holsters and giant guns sat drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

“Dead,” the kid said, so out of breath he couldn’t get out the second word.

“Huh?” one cop said.

“Dead,” the kid tried again. “Man.”

“Dead man?”

“Where?” the second cop said.

“Dead man in the warehouse!”

A moment later, he was sitting in the back seat of an LAPD cruiser, guiding the cops to the scene.

Washington, D.C

Tolson

J. Edgar Hoover said, “You’ve been spying on me, Clyde.”

His face was red, even in the low light of this Georgetown restaurant. “No, Edgar, I have not been spying on you.”

One way to piss Edgar off — something Tolson liked to do once in a while, to keep their friendship on an even keel — was to strike a reasonable tone in the face of one of Edgar’s dramas.

“You went into my office—”

“Looking for you.”

“— and looked through my desk—”

“Looking for something I needed.”

“— and then made this terrible accusation that I’ve been in contact with Melanie again!”

“Meaning that you haven’t been in contact with Melanie again?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then why were her name and number written on your pad? And why has she called you at home four times in the past three weeks? No, Edgar, I haven’t been spying on you. I’ve been checking up on her.”

“You had no right—”

“So you are dealing with Melanie again, aren’t you?”

Edgar spluttered.

Tolson sipped the very good white wine following their delicious pork chops and wild rice.

“Do you remember Chicago, Edgar? Or Miami?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Melanie killed three people in those cities alone.”

“She gets the job done.”

“She’s insane.”

“In your opinion.”

“What job is it this time, Edgar?”

Edgar gritted his teeth. “I’m not going to tell you about it.”

“Very well.”

Tolson was being clever. Edgar loved to have secrets pried out of him. But Clyde wasn’t playing his usual role.

“I’d rather not know, actually. One day she’s going to do something that’ll drag you and the entire Bureau down with her. Maybe this time.” He stood up. “I’m going to the men’s room.”

Tolson smiled to himself. He returned five minutes later.

Edgar’s face was still red. “I’m going to tell you why I’m using Melanie and you’re going to listen.”

Tolson knew enough to listen.

And when Edgar finished, Tolson said, “My God, if Melanie can get them, you’ll have Kennedy right by the balls.”

“Then let’s see him try to get me out,” Edgar said, his voice raspy with anger. “Let’s just see him try.”

Sara

“Mom? Do you know where Daddy’s going to take me?”

“I don’t, honey. But I’m sure it’ll be someplace fun, with food you like.”

“Last time he took me to Disneyland.”

“I remember. You had a great time.”

“And the time before that he took me to a movie.”

“Yes, and you enjoyed it.”

“And the time before that—”

Sara laughed and held her arms out for Laura, who climbed up on her mother’s lap.

She weighed barely seventy pounds, and even in a faded Mickey Mouse T-shirt and red pedal pushers, she was heartbreakingly beautiful. Nothing was as sacred to Sara as her daughter and her greatest fear was that something might someday happen to Laura.

“I wish you could go with us tonight.”

“This is for you and Daddy.”

“Will you and Daddy and I ever go anyplace again together?”

“Maybe someday.”

“Like we used to?”

“Maybe, honey.”

She glanced up at the wall clock. “You’d better get washed up and change those clothes. Your dad will be along in half an hour.”

Laura gave her a hug. “I love you, Mommy.”

For a moment, Sara clung to her daughter. Things had changed so much in this past year and she had not yet been able to deal with all the pain and confusion and fear she felt.

Then Laura ran off to get ready.

Vanessa

“I’m Detective Brinkman.”

“Detective?”

“I’m calling about your husband, Mrs. Tully.”

“My husband?”

“I’m afraid there’s been some trouble.”

So here it was. You’re so happy you can scarcely believe it, but something will surely spoil your happiness.

“Mrs. Tully? I wondered if I could stop by and give you a ride.”

“To where?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to identify him.”

“Then he’s dead?”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Tully.”

She began to tremble. “I don’t know if I could do that, Detective Brinkman.”

“Is there somebody else you could recommend? A relative or—”

“I know I don’t sound very grown up.”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Tully. I know how difficult this is.”

“How did he die?”

“We don’t have the medical examiner’s report yet, but it appears he was shot.”

“Where?”

“A warehouse out near Long Beach.”

“Long Beach? He always liked it out there.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes, Mrs. Tully.”

“He was dead when you found him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“On the floor?”

“No, actually, he was — well, inside a barrel.”

“My God.” She felt so confused. “Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet, ma’am.”

“In a barrel,” she said. “In a barrel.”

She sank to the couch and let the phone drop to her lap. In barrel. In a barrel.

Sara

Michael arrived five minutes early and a little too dressed up for taking his daughter out.

When she saw him in the doorway, all got up in a blue suit red tie, she thought back to their wedding day, and how young and appealing he’d looked.

“Hi, Michael. C’mon in.”

Michael stood like a nervous suitor near the door, hands folded in front of him, rocking back and forth on his heels.

“This place looks nicer every time I’m here,” he said. “I like those drapes.”

“Laura picked them out,” Sara said.

“You’ve even got a little office.”

He walked over to the card table in the corner, where sat Sara’s portable Underwood typewriter and the stacked pages of the script she was working on. And a collection of screenplays by Billy Wilder.

“Still reading Wilder, I see.”

“My patron saint. I’ll get Laura for you.”

Laura, in a fresh white blouse and red skirt, stood with a mirror in one hand and a brush in the other, stroking through her long hair.

“Your dad’s here,” Sara said.

Laura smiled. She put down mirror and brush and took Sara’s hand and led her down the hall. “Oh, I forgot. A man named Simmons called, Mom.”

“Simmons? I wonder what he wanted?”

Bellamy

You didn’t reach Bellamy’s status without being insightful and clever, Bellamy frequently told himself.

Take tonight. When he called his girlfriend Erica, she said she was fine. But he knew immediately that something was wrong. So he needed to get over there right away. But he wasn’t about to bumble into a situation where some guy might be standing there holding a gun.

So Bellamy, being clever, parked a block from Erica’s house. He walked around to the alley. And then started his sneak-attack in the gathering dusk.

In Erica’s backyard, he took the .45 from the waist of his trousers, and started across the grass. He eased the back door open and went inside.

The small back porch smelled of apples. He edged up to the kitchen door and peeked through the gauze-like curtain.

The kitchen was empty. He stepped in and closed the kitchen door behind him. He stood in the shadows, listening intently.

Something was wrong here. Really wrong. Erica always had the TV on when she was home. Even when they were in the bedroom balling, the TV was on.

But the TV was not on.

Just the thrum of the refrigerator, the hum and drip of the air conditioner.

Maybe he should run.

But then something odd happened to him. He realized that he was actually worried about Erica.

If it had been his wife, he would have run and not given her a thought.

But with Erica it was different.

He edged closer to the alcove, on the other side of which was the living room.

He knew better than to call out to her. He took a deep breath. Maybe she wasn’t here at all.

He stepped across the threshold, and gasped.

Erica sat naked, bound, and gagged in a straight-backed chair, her head horribly charred.

Melanie stepped out of the shadows and brought the butt of her weapon down on Bellamy’s head.

Vanessa

She was in hell. This version was not hot but meat-locker cold. And instead of flames there were odors. Stomach-turning odors of chemicals disguising the smell of dead human meat. And the devil was not a horned madman, but a thin young doctor in a spotless white medical smock.

Their footsteps rang on the tiled floor as he led her to the rear of the morgue. Here, she was not self-conscious about her crippled leg; she did not care.

Corpses on the steel tables. Three of them uncovered, two of them men, and the sight of dead men’s genitals was disorienting. Next to the woman was a small pile of dark material, her innards. Vanessa was nauseated.

Now she kept her eyes only on the back of the doctor’s smock. She ached to escape.

He took her to a wall where wide drawers were built, four across and three deep. He went to the middle drawer in the second row and pulled it open.

She froze, could not take another step. Could not walk over there and see what lay inside.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Tully?”

Detective Brinkman took her arm. He had white hair and kind blue eyes.

“We’ll make this very fast,” Brinkman said.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“You’ll be okay, Mrs. Tully.”

She stared at his blue eyes. “I don’t want to remember him this way.”

“I lost my wife a couple of years ago in a traffic accident.”

“You’re kind.”

“C’mon now,” Brinkman said, “and we’ll get it over with.”

He led her to the drawer and she looked down and broke into sobs.

She put her head against Brinkman’s chest and he held her.

They had their answer.

The man in the drawer was obviously Tully.

In the parking lot, as Brinkman was leading her back to his car, a man stepped from a jaunty Ford convertible.

She looked up. “Steve?”

“I stopped by your place. Your neighbor told me...” He nodded to the morgue. “Was it...”

“Who are you?” Brinkman said.

“Oh. Sorry.” He put forth his hand. “Steve Foyle, International Investigations. I worked with Tully.”

“I just want to go home now,” Vanessa said.

Steve kissed her on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Vanessa. You know how much I liked him.”

Brinkman led her away.

Foyle got in his convertible and drove three blocks to a corner phone booth. A Beach Boys song blasted from a nearby record store.

“Mr. Mayhew, Steve Foyle. I saw you at the agency this afternoon.”

“Oh. Right. Have you found Tully?”

“I’m afraid we have. He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Murdered.”

“What was found on him?”

“Pardon?”

“Did they find anything on him?”

“Nothing unusual that I know of. Why?”

“I’d better go.”

Foyle wondered what Mayhew was so anxious about. Maybe Tully and Mayhew had made a private deal between themselves.

The phone booth smelled like a toilet.

Foyle was happy to get back to his red convertible and the fresh night air. Fresh as it ever got in L.A., anyway.

Mayhew

The Negro maid had just served dinner. Mayhew’s wife Sheila was sipping her wine when the phone rang in the den.

Mayhew had a dire premonition of who was calling.

And moments later, the maid said, “Sir, it’s Mr. Rossetti.”

“Tell him my husband will call him back,” Sheila said. She was a manor-born woman who grew fat with resentments as she aged.

“No,” Mayhew said, more gruffly than he’d intended. “No, darling, we’re having problems at the studio and I need to talk to him.” He spoke in as courteous a tone as he could muster. He wanted to slap her, a reckless impulse he had every so often.

“My father would never let anybody interrupt his family dinner.”

He went into the den and picked up the phone.

“I wanted to tell you about Tully,” Rossetti said.

“I just heard about him,” Mayhew said.

“I wonder where the tapes are.”

“I’m going to make some calls.”

“You know Bellamy, that sleazeball sonofabitch at Insight?”

“Of course.”

“There’s a little club I own on Santa Monica Boulevard. People don’t know I own it. Bellamy hangs out there a lot. Five days ago, he met Tully there. Tully may have been trying to double-cross his detective agency and sell the tapes to somebody.” He paused. “You know what’s on them, Del. I want those tapes made public.”

Mayhew wondered what Kennedy had done to make the mafioso hate him so much. Early in the presidential campaign, Rossetti had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars and introduced Kennedy to dozens of powerful men across the United States. Kennedy and Rossetti had been photographed on yachts, at movie premieres, playing tennis.

And then, for no reason Mayhew knew, Rossetti turned enemy.

One day last month, Rossetti had asked Mayhew to dinner at the fashionable Coconut Grove. After making the rounds of the Jimmy Stewart table, the Alan Ladd table, the Cary Grant table, Rossetti came over and sat down and said, “My friend the president of the United States is laying the rail to Marilyn Monroe.”

Mayhew had been stunned. “Christ, you really think so? Taking a risk like that?”

“You don’t know Kennedy. The bigger the risk, the more the excitement.”

Rossetti had smiled. Picked up a manilla envelope. Took out three large black-and-white photographs. Handed them over.

The photos showed Kennedy in swim trunks on a yacht. He was standing next to Marilyn Monroe who wore the briefest of bikinis. In the second photo, Kennedy had his arm around Monroe’s shoulder. The third shot showed the two embracing. Obviously more than a friendly kiss.

“These were taken last month. He was flying out here as often as possible. Or meeting her in New York on the pretext that he had business at the United Nations.”

“He’s crazy.”

“He loves danger. I want to nail him.”

“How?”

“I want you to hire a private detective to bug Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom.”

“We’re talking about the president of the United States.”

Rossetti smiled. “I don’t want my name involved. As far as anybody knows, this is your idea. She’s under contract to us. Tell the investigators that we need a bug in her house because we think she’s negotiating a deal with somebody else. The night Kennedy’s supposed to be there, I’ll tell you. Then you tell the guy who planted the bug that you want those particular tapes delivered to you immediately, that same night — before he gets a chance to hear them himself. You understand?”

And so it was done. Mayhew had hired International Investigators and was assigned a man named Tully. Tully taped nine nights running and got very little. The tenth night Kennedy was to show up. Mayhew was alerted. He told Tully to retrieve the tapes as he usually did — after Marilyn Monroe had gone to the studio where she was shooting a picture — but instead of taking the tapes back to International and listening to them, he was to bring them straight to Mayhew’s office.

But Tully hadn’t done that.

Mayhew’s best guess was that Tully had listened to the tapes and realized what he had. But Tully knew his limitations, knew he couldn’t parlay them into a lot of money without help... so he brought Bellamy in.

Bellamy — a professional blackmailer.

Now Tully was dead and in all likelihood Bellamy had the tapes. And Mayhew had no doubts what Bellamy would do with them. He had the brains and the balls for it. Bellamy would shake down John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

He had to find Bellamy, and thus the tapes of Kennedy’s visit to Marilyn Monroe.

So now, Rossetti said: “I want you to get those tapes because I’m going to give them to Louella Parsons.”

Mayhew almost laughed. Louella Parsons! Rossetti didn’t want money. He wanted revenge. Rossetti was insane when it came to Kennedy. What the hell could the guy have done to Rossetti that was that bad?

“I’m going to handle it. Believe me.”

“I don’t care what you have to do, Del. Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening.”

“I don’t care what you need to do. Or what kind of dough you have to spend. I want those tapes.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t need to threaten you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“But everything is on your shoulders, Del. The whole ball of wax.”

“I’ll get the tapes. I promise you.”

“Okay. Now I’ll be able to sleep. Knowing that everything is in your capable hands. And you’ll do the right thing.”

Rossetti hung up.

He was being threatened, Mayhew realized. There was no need for that. He’d get the job done. He was determined. He would make it work.

“Your food’s cold,” Sheila said, as he seated himself at the table.

He didn’t look at her.

“I really do think it’s rude of you to leave the table for a phone call.”

He ate. Said nothing.

“Did you hear me?”

He still didn’t look at her. “I heard you.”

“Well?”

“I want you,” he said, looking up at last, “to shut your mouth or leave the fucking table.”

She sat there, stunned.

He had never talked to her like that before. It felt wonderful.

Melanie

Melanie watched Bellamy come unglued. It was fun.

“What happened to her head?”

“Her hair caught on fire.”

“You bitch,” he sobbed.

Melanie had to admit that ol’ Erica, though still breathing, wasn’t doing too well at the moment.

Bellamy stood next to Erica’s chair, head down to hear the ragged breath escaping from her lips. He seemed at a loss about what to do or say — overwhelmed.

Melanie stood by the front door, her gun pointed at Bellamy’s heart. She had already decided that these two deserved each other.

“What about infection?” Bellamy said in a quaking voice. “Erica could get all kinds of poison from setting her hair on fire.” He was like a lost child.

Melanie shrugged. “I’m not here to talk about Erica, I’m here to talk about you.”

“I love her. I do want to talk about her.”

Melanie smiled. For a sleazy guy like Bellamy, a man without scruples, a faithless husband, a shakedown artist — to see Bellamy crumble like this made her want to barf, especially when he tried to be noble.

Melanie smirked. “You love her, huh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“She’s got nice breasts.”

He gave Melanie a puzzled look. “You keep your hands off her,” Bellamy said.

Melanie moved away from the door. Over to where poor Erica sat slumped and unconscious in her chair.

“Mr. Bellamy, I want the tapes you cheated Tully out of. I figure Tully brought them to you and tried to make a deal. But then you double-crossed him and took the tapes for yourself. He started following me around because he figured that I was going to get the tapes from you.”

“Why do you care about the tapes? I don’t know where they are.”

Melanie said, “I’m getting tired of all this, Mr. Bellamy. I want to get it over with.”

Melanie put her pistol, with its four-inch silencer, to Erica’s head. “I’ll kill her. Somebody who’d set a woman’s head on fire might actually kill her, don’t you think?”

“My office,” Bellamy said.

Evidently, he’d decided that Erica was more important than the tapes and his half mil.

“Your office?”

“I’ll take you there and give you the tapes.”

Melanie nodded at Erica. “You really love her a lot, Mr. Bellamy.”

“I do.”

Melanie squeezed off three quick shots with her silenced gun.

Erica’s body jerked and then was still. The exit wound on the far side of her head looked like an ugly flower. Blood and brains were spattered on the wall.

“She wasn’t a very nice person, Mr. Bellamy. She used filthy language all the time. Now, let’s take a cruise over to your office.”

Hoover

End of a long, grinding day.

J. Edgar Hoover sat at home with his drink and let the memories roar and tumble like a churning rapids through his mind.

The candy stores and silent-movie houses and hiding places of youth. He could hear the boys and girls he played with calling him for a game of pom-pom pullaway, a game he’d excelled at.

Tommy. Best, truest friend he ever had. Darla. Oh Lord what a crush he’d had on her. Going to bed so many nights and tenderly holding his pillow as if it were Darla. And Jamie—

Abruptly, he pulled himself back to the present.

He would be with the ghosts soon enough.

But before he joined them he would show this town, and the smartass national press, that you couldn’t just toss J. Edgar Hoover aside once he’d given this nation every drop of selflessness, wisdom, and patriotism he possessed.

Hadn’t Readers Digest recently stated that without J. Edgar Hoover, this nation might well be in the clutches of the Communists?

Now, there was just the remaining task — getting the tapes. Screw Clyde if he didn’t like it. Clyde was just jealous of Melanie.

He sat back. Sipped his drink. Smiled.

Then he’d pay an Oval Office visit to the president and mention it casually: “Say, Mr. President, somebody sent me these tapes and said you might want to hear them.”

And then he’d watch the handsome young president’s face grow tight and dismayed as the tapes began to play.

J. Edgar Hoover finished his drink and fixed himself another one. Lovely.

Melanie

Poor Bellamy. He obviously kept reliving Erica’s death. Seeing her jerk and jump when the bullets entered her brain. He kept shaking his head, trying to banish the image from his mind forever.

“Now, Mr. Bellamy, I expect complete cooperation. Do you understand?” Melanie said. She wanted to get this over with.

“You didn’t need to kill her,” Bellamy said, his voice dazed and distant.

They were in Bellamy’s cherry-red Caddy near the NBC TV studios in Burbank. This time of night, there were still tourists passing by and pointing.

“Yes, I did.”

“You’re crazy,” he said matter-of-factly. “Aren’t you?”

And then Bellamy couldn’t take it any more. Right there at the stoplight, he went crazy.

First pounding his fist against the dashboard. Then grabbing for Melanie’s slender neck.

Melanie rammed her gun into the curve of Bellamy’s big belly. And he was done.

Vomit poured from his nostrils and his mouth and covered his chest and lap.

“I’m sure glad we took your car instead of mine,” Melanie said. She rolled down her window.

All he could do was sit there, hot reeking vomit all over himself.

“You didn’t have to kill her,” he said calmly. “You didn’t have to.”

Melanie stopped at a gas station and took him into the men’s room, like a mother with a naughty son, and cleaned him up as best she could.

Then, they reached the building housing the Insight offices. As they rode up in the elevator now, the stench was still bad. Not to mention the looks of his shirt and trousers. They walked down the hall to the door marked insight in gold lettering on dark wood.

Bellamy wasn’t doing too well. It was all gone from him now, the money, the pleasure of shaking down the president of the United States, the plans for his final years.

He didn’t care about anything any more. He wanted to give Melanie the tapes and get rid of her. And then get a fifth of bourbon and go to some motel room alone and stay drunk for several days.

And stop thinking about Erica, naked and tied up, jerking around as the bullets exploded in her head.

He was coming to his senses.

They went into his office. It smelled of stale air and cigarette smoke. Bellamy went over and swung the painting to the right, exposing the safe. He dialed the combination.

He opened the safe and put his hand in and felt around and said, “Fuck!”

“What?”

“They’re gone!” Bellamy was fully alert again. Where the hell were the tapes?

“This was stupid, Mr. Bellamy. Lying to me like this.”

“They were here, I swear they were here! I put them here myself!”

The silencer was good for three more rounds. She spent only two.

She put two bullets right into Bellamy’s head, pretty much the same as she’d done to Erica.

Bellamy slumped to the floor.

She sighed. Now she had to start her search for the tapes all over again.