Part Three
“The way to power is to take it.”
Jeff
He thought about her all the time, in the moony, sad way of a young man in love for the first time. He was a New Hampshire boy from a solid family and was, if not a great catch, at least a decent catch for the right woman. If he could just find the right woman. And now he thought he had.
But he seemed unable to sway Sara. Even though her marriage was over, she still seemed to hold on to hope. But soon Sara would have to accept him in a serious way, or he’d give up and find somebody else.
He was five minutes late, but for once didn’t worry about it, didn’t start forming an excuse for Mr. Bellamy, who sometimes got there right after dawn.
He greeted all the usual people on the elevator, and proceeded to the solemn, locked door marked INSIGHT.
Jeff took out his keys, opened the door, and went inside. The smell hit him. He gagged.
With reluctance, he went on through the front office and into Mr. Bellamy’s private domain.
He found Bellamy sprawled behind his desk, bloody and covered with flies attracted to the feces that had filled his pants.
He glimpsed Bellamy’s bullet-blasted head, then looked quickly away.
He had never seen anything like this before. He felt panic, and great fear.
Dazed and slow, he went to the outer office and called the police.
Sara
At the same time that Jeff was calling the police, Sara was dropping Laura off at school.
The playground was bustling. Girls jumped rope and played hopscotch; boys ran around and threw a yellow rubber football. Kids were on the swings.
But not all girls and boys were thus occupied, of course.
In the corner of the playground was the tall, awkward girl who didn’t feel good enough about herself to join the others; the boy with his head buried in the comic book, indifferent to the clamor of his peers; three black girls already artificially segregated, jumping rope by themselves. There would be others already driven from the main group for any number of reasons: because they lisped or limped, because they were so stupid that the other children laughed at them, or because they came from home environments so strange they felt like aliens visiting another planet — and were perceived by their peers to be just that.
Here and there were teachers speaking to their favorites. And one couldn’t blame them. Teachers had every right to have favorites.
And as Laura opened the car door, Sara remembered what it was like to be her age, what a wonderful time it had been for her, and would be for these kids, too — even some of the outcasts would recall their school days fondly, forgetting (at least for the most part) all the cruel things their peers had done to them.
“Mommy?” Laura said, as she grasped the door handle.
“What, honey?”
“Last night with Daddy? I think he wishes you would’ve been there with us.”
She pretended that Laura’s words hadn’t stirred her. “You do, huh? Why do you think that?”
“Just because of how he was acting.” Her blue eyes were wistful. Every day she said something about them getting back together.
“Did he say anything special?” Ridiculous, pumping her own daughter for a hopeful word or two.
“I could just tell. The way he looked at me.”
So he hadn’t really said anything.
Now Sara felt ridiculously disappointed.
“Maybe next time.”
“You always say that, Mommy.”
“It’s true. The next time you two go somewhere, I’ll ask if I can tag along. How’s that?”
She stared at Sara. “Really?”
“Really.”
“That’d be great.”
Sara smiled. “Have a good day in school, hon.”
Laura got out of the car, one more kid in brown and white saddle shoes and white anklets and the school uniform, hefting her Bullwinkle lunch pail in her right hand and her books in the other.
She vanished into the throng of kids.
Melanie
Melanie waited until she saw Sara leave, then she swung her rental car to the back of the school.
Yesterday afternoon, she’d checked out the school and found that, on returning to class after recess, Laura passed right by a large lost-and-found board that was five feet from the door to the basement.
In an envelope marked “Laura Drury” she had put a note: “Laura: Wait for me here after the bell. Miss M.”
Now she found the rear door to the basement, and went inside, the envelope in her pocket.
She found the stairs leading to the first floor on Laura’s side of the building. She peeked out in the hall, found it empty, went out and pinned the envelope to the lost-and-found board, and snuck back down the steps, leaving the door ajar so she could see out.
Lenihan
Lenihan got in late to L.A. and went to his suite in the posh Fenwick Hotel. He took from his suitcase his framed photograph of little Dulcie and set it reverently on the nightstand.
He sat in his underwear, smoking an L&M filter cigarette, staring at little Dulcie and remembering her silver laughter when they’d played hide-and-seek. He could always find her because of her laughter. No matter where she hid in their big back yard, even if she hid in the garage, she could not stop herself from giggling, and so finding her was easy. He would always lift her up then and hold her with a devout love that had frequently brought tears to his eyes. He knew what was important in this life. Little Dulcie.
Staring at the photo now in a threadbare Los Angeles motel room, a hairy middle-aged man in boxer shorts, he recalled little Dulcie’s laughter exactly. As if she were in the room with him at this very moment.
Then he spoke to her as he did each night, in the perfect thoughts he carried like jewels in his mind.
He turned off the light, lay down wearily in bed and fell into a ragged sleep.
He wasn’t sure what time the argument started. It wasn’t even that loud an argument, but it woke him. He lay for a time listening to the hurtful words being spoken on the other side of the wall between husband and wife. She started crying. The man finally slammed out of their room after she repeated for the tenth time that she would not give him the divorce he wanted.
Then, in the ensuing silence, Lenihan lay wide awake in the lonely air of the hotel room. In the lonely dark.
For once, he thought neither of his daughter nor his wife, but of his last operation for the Office of Strategic Services in the waning months of World War II, when he received two Purple Hearts.
With thirty other men, Lenihan had parachuted behind enemy lines on Manchuria, where the Japanese Army was holding four thousand American prisoners in concentration camps.
They spent four days killing Japanese soldiers. They killed them with bullets and knives and bayonets. They killed them singly and in bunches. On the second day it rained so hard that some of the corpses they’d put in shallow graves floated free. They knew the war was nearly at an end. They just prayed it would come soon.
By the time they reached the main camp, their own number had shrunk to twelve.
On the evening they were to raid the camp, loudspeakers announced that the war had ended. Cheers went up from the American prisoners. Lenihan was dispatched to persuade the Japanese in charge of the camp to surrender. By dawn, four of the top Japanese had committed suicide rather than surrender.
Lenihan and his men went through the cells where the Americans were held. It was gruesome. There were men who weighed no more than seventy pounds. Men with arms and legs being eaten by gangrene. Even the heads of two men who had been executed by decapitation.
After the war, Lenihan stayed with Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan as the OSS became the Central Intelligence Agency. The wartime pact between the United States and Russia was fast disintegrating and the U.S. government meant to check communism around the world. But Lenihan was not by nature a political animal and was not disposed to killing some poor Thai peasant who called himself a “Communist.”
So, in 1946 — a year after John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been elected the congressman from Boston’s Eleventh District — Lenihan met Kennedy at a Georgetown cocktail party, and a month later went to work for him as a troubleshooter.
And now, he was on yet another mission, the most important of Jack Kennedy’s political career.
I always have the same nightmare. I’m walking down a street and a very handsome man stops me and asks me for my name and I tell him — but I’m speaking in a language he’s never heard before. Then he looks more closely at me and hurries away. He looks upset and frightened. When I told my psychiatrist about this, he says the dream is about my fear of going insane. A lot of people know that my mother spent a good part of her life in and out of institutions, but what most people don’t know is that my maternal grandmother and her husband were also put away several times. It’s in my family, all the way back, and sometimes when I get depressed, I’m afraid I’m going to lose control, the way my grandparents and mother did sometimes — just lose control totally and they’ll put me away forever.
Sara
The boxy white ambulance was parked at an angle to the curb and was flanked by four police cars.
A crowd formed outside the police cordon in the bright sunny morning, watching.
Sara knew instantly that there was something wrong in the tall, shining office building that held Insight.
She went up to a cop and said, “I’m Sara Drury. I work inside. At Insight.”
“You’ll want to see Detective Rabinowitz. He’s in charge of the investigation.”
“Did something happen at Insight?” Sara felt an adrenalin-rush of panic.
“You’d better ask Detective Rabinowitz.”
Uniformed officers were stationed throughout the lobby, asking people questions, pointing them to the elevators.
When Sara stepped from the elevator on her floor, she saw a handsome, older man with a good haircut and a good suit talking to Jeff.
All the other men and women wore the dark uniforms of the LAPD, the white smocks of the medical examiner’s office, or the rack suits of the crime lab.
Jeff nodded at her. The man stopped talking and motioned Sara over.
“Somebody killed Mr. Bellamy in his office last night,” Jeff said.
“Mrs. Drury, I’m Detective Rabinowitz. I’d like to talk to you, after Jeff and I finish.”
She forced herself to remain calm. God — Mr. Bellamy dead. “Of course. I’ll wait in my office.”
The offices were crowded with people and equipment. Flash bulbs blazed every few moments and men with tape measures and small whisk brooms and small clear evidence bags worked everywhere. She almost peeked into Mr. Bellamy’s office, but stopped herself. She did not want to see something so horrible she might never be able to forget it.
She couldn’t relax, of course. She went to the window and looked out at Los Angeles. She could see buildings that had been built in the early 1920s and were now slowly coming down in urban renewal projects. She could see faded advertisements painted on their backs — for cough syrup and pipe tobacco and a Pilsner beer. The ads dated back to her favorite period in L.A. history, just when the talkies had reached their zenith.
“Mrs. Drury?”
She turned to Detective Rabinowitz.
“Is now okay?”
“Of course,” Sara said.
Rabinowitz sat in the chair on the other side of Sara’s desk. He told her what had happened.
Sara got scared, deeply scared, learning, as if in a vision, the true nature of the universe — dark and completely unpredictable.
Melanie
Melanie waited at the top of the basement stairs, peering out behind the door into the hall of the school. The corridor was alive with children laughing and shouting and shoving.
“Help you with something?”
Melanie turned, startled, and looked down the concrete basement stairs to where, near the furnace, a uniformed janitor stood amidst cobwebs and dusty sunlight.
“Just going to see the principal about my little girl. Thought I’d take a shortcut.”
The janitor, bald and hawkish, looked skeptical. “This ain’t a shortcut.” He sidled left, toward a black wall phone.
“Wait right there, please.”
He reached for the phone.
“Would you like to see some identification?”
She was already moving down the steps, hand on the iron banister.
“No, no, you just wait right there.”
She leaped.
Her feet touched the basement floor as the edge of her right hand slashed into the janitor’s neck with a blinding karate-chop.
Dentures flew from the man’s mouth as his head struck the wall by the phone.
The receiver dangled free, the dial tone loud in the dusty basement.
She hung up the receiver and dragged the janitor over to a dark corner where he wouldn’t be found for a while.
The class bell rang.
Melanie then went back up the stairs to the door. The hall quickly cleared. At first she couldn’t see Laura anywhere.
And then she saw her, just where she wanted to see her.
At the lost-and-found board, holding the note.
Melanie opened her purse and took out a clean, white handkerchief. Then she took out a small bottle of chloroform and doused the handkerchief with it.
Vanessa
So many things helped define Tully.
Tully had been Wildroot Hair Oil, Cavalier cigarettes, True magazine, Montgomery Ward underwear, Thom McCann black wingtips, blue Arrow button-down shirts, a Merchant Marine photo of himself and three mates, his First Communion rosary, a deck of cards with photos of topless women on the backs, a photograph of his uncle who had been killed fighting the Japanese near the China mainland, and his Tom Mix Club membership card, issued July 14, 1932, from radio station WPIK.
Vanessa didn’t know what she was looking for.
But she sensed that eventually, whatever it was, it would show itself as a symbol or a sign from God.
She did pretty well, really, breaking down only twice so far as she quietly went about searching the drawers and cabinets and closets and pockets and hat bands that had belonged to her beloved Tully.
Every phase of his life was in these drawers: boy, teenager, and man.
She was still unable to quite believe that it had actually happened; that Tully was actually gone.
But then the cold suffocating odor of the morgue would fill her nostrils and she would know that, yes, he was dead.
She kept on searching.
Sara
As soon as Detective Rabinowitz had finished with her, a tall, quietly handsome man knocked on her office door and said, “I’m David Lenihan. From Washington.” He reminded her that he was from a federal agency that had been investigating Mr. Bellamy, and was here to talk to her for a few minutes.
“Oh, right. C’mon in.”
He sat and stared at her for a long moment.
“Mr. Bellamy was murdered, I understand.”
“Yes, so we’ve been told.”
“Do you have any idea who might have done it?”
“Why, no, I don’t. I would have told the police.”
“I didn’t mean to insult you, Mrs. Drury. I just thought you might take a guess.”
“I can’t, Mr. Lenihan. I just don’t have any idea at all.”
His brown eyes smiled, but behind them was a hard, cold intelligence.
“I understand the safe was open, Mrs. Drury.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know if something was taken?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But $2,500 was left behind in his desk?”
“Yes.”
“So the police don’t think it was a normal robbery.”
“I guess not.”
“You know the combination to the safe?”
“Yes.”
The sad smile again as his eyes lingered on the framed photograph of Laura. “She’s a beauty.”
“Thank you.”
“Reminds me a little of my own daughter.”
“Oh. How old is she?”
His eyes shifted to her. “She died several years ago. Polio.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Have you ever opened the safe?”
“Once.”
“When was that?”
“Uh, yesterday.”
“Would you mind telling me why you opened it?”
“I had to get something for somebody.”
“Oh?”
She had to lie. She didn’t want Curtis Simmons implicated in any of this. Not with his wife dying of cancer.
“Mr. Bellamy asked me to open it.”
He watched her carefully.
She knew that he knew she was lying.
“To take something out?”
“Yes, to take something out and put it on his desk. An envelope.”
“I see. And was that the last time you spoke to Mr. Bellamy?”
She nodded. “Yes.” She paused. “May I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Why are you investigating Bellamy?”
He stood up. “That’s one question I can’t answer, Mrs. Drury. I’m sorry.”
He nodded and left her office. She had the impression that she’d inadvertently told him more than she meant to.
Then she thought of his face when he’d mentioned his dead daughter, and the shaky quality of his voice. Several years, and he still wasn’t over her.
But then you’d never get over the loss of your child. Never.
Melanie
Had to be quick. Right in the middle of a school like this.
She took four long steps from the basement door and said, “Hi, Laura.”
And Laura turned from the lost-and-found board. “Are you Miss M?”
“Yes.”
Melanie glanced down the long hallway. Clear.
She was four steps from Laura. “I’ve got a surprise for you, honey.” Three steps. Two. Now—
She slapped the chloroformed handkerchief to the girl’s face and held her tight. Laura wriggled against her, and gasped so hard Melanie feared Laura was going to throw up.
Then she was still. Inert.
Melanie picked her up and carried her under her arm like a puppy back down the basement steps, past the sprawled janitor, up the far steps to her car right outside.
She dropped her onto the back seat, closed the door and slid behind the wheel.
She was soaked with sweat and panting so hard she was disgusted with herself. Really had to lay off the fats and the sweets.
Lenihan
Del Mayhew looked the part of a studio executive, suave, $25 razored haircut, $1000 custom-made suit, steely grip, and a smile to rival Burt Lancaster’s.
“I’ve got to admit, Mr. Lenihan, you’ve got my attention. All the way from Washington just to see me?”
“I’ll come to the point, Mr. Mayhew. You hired a private investigative agency recently.”
“You’ve been doing some homework.”
“A man named Tully did the work.”
“Yes. Tully.”
“He was murdered yesterday.”
“I heard that.”
Lenihan studied him a moment and then said, “I know what he was looking for, Mr. Mayhew.” He paused. “And so do you.”
Mayhew pursed his lips in thought. “I don’t have them.”
“But maybe they will come into your possession eventually.”
“I’m not optimistic, I guess.”
“Let’s be honest, Mr. Mayhew. You’re turning Los Angeles upside down to find them. And so am I. I even know who’s putting the heat on you.” He paused. “Rossetti plays rough, but I play rougher. I have all the resources of the government.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Lenihan did not smile. “I guess that would be a matter of interpretation, Mr. Mayhew.”
Lenihan picked up a note pad from Mayhew’s desk and wrote down the number of his hotel.
“You can reach me there, Mr. Mayhew.”
Lenihan rose to go. He didn’t offer his hand.
Vanessa
In the golden morning sunlight, she finally stopped in her search and broke down. Sat in the recliner Tully had liked so much and started sobbing.
She opened one of Tully’s drawers for one of the white handkerchiefs she had always kept ironed for him.
And that’s when she found it, the little black address book.
The pocket-size book protruded slightly from inside the three-ring notebook in which Tully kept his job and expense ledger. She must have missed it before and jarred it loose now.
She carried it carefully, as if it were a fragile heirloom, back to Tully’s recliner.
Even before she opened it, she knew that she’d found something important.
Tully had probably slipped the small notebook inside the larger one by accident. He had always been tucking one thing into another and this tendency, coupled with his absent-mindedness... well, he’d spent a lot of time calling, “Hon, could you come in here and help me find something?”
Perhaps that was the role she’d valued most with Tully. Being his mother. She liked lover and wife and friend very, very much but there was something endearing about seeing a big, blunt otherwise self-sufficient Irish guy like Tully reduced to a helpless little boy.
“Hon, could you come in here and...”
She heard the ghostly words now. Out of the bedroom they came, past the small dining room with the good mahogany table Tully had proudly paid cash for, into the living room with its twenty-one-inch blonde Admiral console and its shelf of Reader’s Digest Condensed novels.
And then she had to smile.
Tully had finally rejoined her. She could feel his presence right next to her. Tully was with her now.
She opened the small black notebook and saw neat rows of blue ink names and blue ink phone numbers.
Some of the entries had dates next to them, indicating, she supposed, which investigation they belonged to.
There were so many pages of names and numbers that it would take her a while to find any that could help her.
But she didn’t mind, now that Tully was keeping her company.
She made herself some Butternut drip coffee. She no longer resented the sunlight. Or the noisy birds. Or the fact that the world had gone right on spinning after Tully’s death.
Indeed, she was filled with a great peace and purpose as she stood at the window watching a pair of cardinals perched on the clothesline.
The little black notebook was right there in Tully’s chair, waiting for her. She had a clear, true purpose for her life now, and thanked God for it.
Rossetti
Rossetti knew all about the Hollywood-Mob connection. Frank Costello was a good friend of Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures. Jimmy Durante and George Raft could often be seen in the company of Lucky Luciano. Producer Bryan Foy, at Warner Brothers, often held parties that included the likes of Mickey Cohen and Big Al Polizzi.
Rossetti even remembered how, in the late forties, a reporter for one of the Hollywood dailies attempted to prove this conclusively. Before he could finish the first installment of his promised “racket-busting” series, he was found in the trunk of his car minus his nose, fingers and penis. And his heart. They’d ripped it right out of him.
A few years after Senator Estes Kefauver tried to dig up some of the same connections the reporter had been investigating. All of this came to naught until Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy began investigating the connection between organized labor and organized crime, and the hold James Hoffa had on the Teamsters union.
Mob bosses feared that Kennedy, if he got Hoffa, would be encouraged to look for Mob connections with other labor unions — including Hollywood labor unions, which had been tightly controlled by the Mafia since at least the early 1940s.
It was well known in Mob circles that Carlos Marcello, the head of the Mob’s New Orleans family, wanted the Kennedy brothers dead. Robert Kennedy had come after Marcello directly and personally, using the attorney general’s office to not only harass and inhibit the Mob, but to put its leaders in federal prison.
Rossetti had heard it whispered in late 1961 that Marcello was planning the assassination of president John Kennedy. “Cut off the head of the snake and the tail will die, too.” Meaning that if John were killed, Robert would be rendered powerless. Lyndon Johnson — JFK’s successor — hated Robert Kennedy as much as Marcello did.
But, it was explained to Rossetti, other Mob bosses leaned on Marcello to try some other means of bringing down the Kennedys. If Americans ever discovered that the Mob was behind the assassination of the beloved president, the Mob would be destroyed for sure.
And so Marcello devised the idea of publicly exposing John and Robert Kennedy as the reckless playboys they were.
Rossetti was asked to have Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom bugged by someone who couldn’t be traced to the Mob. He was to get her on tape with either John or Robert. Rossetti’s employers didn’t care. Once his bosses had those tapes, the Brothers Kennedy would be politically dead, their reputation and careers destroyed, abandoned to the, dust-heap of history.
His orders weren’t Rossetti’s only reason for wanting the president to tumble. Rossetti had been careful to present his Negro lady friend not as a whore or even as a mistress but as a serious and intelligent woman he both respected and loved. But even knowing this, John Kennedy, who was happy to trade the most noxious race jokes, once quipped to a yacht-load of people, well within the lady’s earshot, “Rossetti goes for the dark meat when he carves up a turkey.”
There was no recourse. One didn’t upbraid the president of the United States, particularly when you were a guest on his yacht.
No, one waited for a chance at vengeance.
Rossetti, who was always reading the classics in an attempt to improve himself, lived by the words of Francis Bacon: “Revenge is a kind of wild justice...”
Rossetti was at last ready to defend his true love’s honor. And at first the plot had gone well. He had entrusted the job to Del Mayhew, who had hired a private investigator, and they had actually gotten some tapes proving that John Kennedy had been seeing Miss Monroe and — well, no administration could stand that kind of scandal.
But things went wrong. The private investigator tried to cut himself in on the action. And now the P.I. was dead and God only knew where the Mob’s Marilyn tapes were.
Rossetti was halfway through his breakfast of bran flakes and grapefruit when the maid appeared, cradling the white phone like a priest his chalice and trailing a phone cord behind her.
“There’s a call for you, Mr. Rossetti. He said it’s urgent.”
“Thanks.”
She set the phone down in the sunny breakfast nook where Rossetti liked to sit and watch the golfers on the back nine of his country club.
“Hello.”
“Morning, my friend. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
Rossetti’s breath caught in his throat.
He had talked to this man, the West Coast boss of bosses, perhaps three times in the decade Rossetti had been out here.
“It’s a great morning,” Rossetti said.
“Great, great.” His voice had the oily vigor of a TV minister’s. Suddenly the voice was hard. “We put a lot of trust in you. Word I’m getting is that things aren’t going so good.”
“Just a temporary problem.”
“Losing the fucking tapes is a temporary problem? Bellamy had them, but now where the fuck are they?” He paused. “I promised my doctor and my wife I won’t get upset. Fucking ulcers. You’re a young man. You don’t have to worry yet — not about things like that.”
No, thought Rossetti, not about things like that.
“I’m getting a lot of heat.”
“I’m sure,” Rossetti said.
“A lot of people think, a man in my position, nobody gives him heat. But I get heat. I’m getting heat from friends of ours in the midwest who are unhappy about certain things going on in Washington.”
“I realize that.”
“You know what I got in addition to ulcers?”
“No,” Rossetti answered dutifully.
“I got hemorrhoids, I got constipation and I got gout. And you know how old I am? Seventy-one. I shouldn’t have any of this bullshit till I’m at least eighty.”
Rossetti wasn’t sure what to say.
“You know why I’m telling you all this?”
“Why?”
“So you’ll know that I’m not in the best of moods. So if somebody was to fuck up an important assignment, I would not have much patience.”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do, my friend. Because I like you. You got ambition and you learn, and you got class. That impresses me.”
“Thank you.”
“But the heat I’m getting, that’s what’s making my body act up this way. Your fuck-up is my fuck-up. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“A couple of our people wouldn’t mind taking a run at me. They could use this. ‘He gives the job to Rossetti and Rossetti fucks it up. He don’t even give the job to the right guys any more. He’s too old.’ That’s what they’ll say.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“You got twenty-four hours.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Tell that to my gout. You ever know anybody with gout?”
“An uncle once, I guess.”
“He dead?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if he had gout and he’s dead then he’s a lucky man to be dead. We got an understanding, my friend?”
“Yes. Guaranteed.”
Melanie
As she pulled the rental car into the garage, Melanie checked again to make sure that nobody followed her. The road along the ocean was empty. She was safe.
She got out and opened the back door and pulled Laura out. The girl was sweaty.
She carried her out of the garage and quickly up the back stairs. The ocean rolled in behind her.
Somebody could be walking on the beach.
Or out on a boat with binoculars.
She couldn’t afford to take any chances.
She hurried unlocking the door, getting the girl inside.
She carried her straight through the small house to the bedroom she’d arranged for her.
She’d done the bed up nicely, going to Penney’s for pink sheets and blanket, and a plump brown teddy bear so maybe she wouldn’t be so scared when she came out of the chloroform.
She laid her on the bed, listening to Laura murmur and faintly moan in her sleep.
Melanie got her all tucked in and stood up and looked at her for a time and then left the room.
“Mr. Drury?” said the female voice.
“Yes.”
“I need to talk to you about your daughter. Your wife’s phone is busy at the moment so I decided to call you instead.”
“Who is this?”
“A friend of your daughter’s.”
“What about her?”
“I have her. She’s safe, but I have her.”
She could hear his small gasp.
“Is this a joke?”
“No joke, Mr. Drury.”
“But why?” His voice rose. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I want the tapes that were in Bellamy’s office safe and you’ll have to help me.”
“Help you do what?”
“Convince your wife to find those tapes for me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know about any tapes.”
“You tell her that if I don’t have those tapes by nine o’clock tonight, I’m going to kill Laura.”
“No, no, please, wait!” Drury was frantic now. “I need to know who you are.”
“Who I am doesn’t matter.”
“But you have Laura now?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s all right?”
“Just sleeping.”
“Please, don’t do anything...”
“This is strictly business, Mr. Drury. Once I have the tapes, your lives will return to normal. Here’s my number.” She rattled it off. “And no cops, of course. You know what’ll happen if you call the cops.”
She hung up.
Louella
Louella was in the screening room of her house. Universal had sent over a copy of the new Sandra Dee-Robert Goulet-Andy Williams movie in hopes that she would boost it in her column. But even by Louella’s tolerant standards the picture was terrible.
She stopped the film to take the call from Gibbons, the man from Hearst.
“Good morning, Louella. How are things going?”
“Things, Mr. Gibbons, are going fine.”
“Then you got the tapes?”
“Not yet.”
“But you know when they’re coming?”
“Not exactly.”
A hesitation. “Oh. I thought you’d have them by now. I thought you said—”
“Very soon, Mr. Gibbons.”
“So everything’s on track, then?”
“Everything’s very much on track, Mr. Gibbons.”
“Okay, okay. And the things you expect from us? Your photo. The guarantee of front page. No problem, Louella. I’m keeping all this under wraps, of course.”
“Fine.”
“You’re a sweetheart, Louella.”
“I’m hanging up now,” Louella said.
A couple of weeks ago, I had this terrible argument with Bobby Kennedy. I saw that he wasn’t ever going to leave his wife for me. Not ever. I think he wanted to, but there were so many things he had to overcome — his friends and family and the Catholic church. I just stayed drunk for three days after that argument, and then I had this friend over and I showed him something I’d never shown anybody, this diary I kept with some of the things John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy had both told me about government — about who was crooked and taking bribes, about who was homosexual, about who was working for the Mob and who was spying for Russia — all kinds of terrible things like that. After I showed it to him, my friend took my hand and said, “Marilyn, if anybody ever finds out about this diary, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill you right away.” That was the first time I ever got scared about knowing John and Robert Kennedy.
Washington, D.C
Tolson
Had Edgar gone around the bend?
Last night, Clyde had pretended to be intrigued with Edgar’s efforts to get his hands on the Monroe tapes, to get at the Kennedys. But that was a stall for time. Actually, it was a terrible idea. Worse, it was an incredibly dangerous idea. Melanie was a psychopath. And it would be up to Clyde to stop her.
So he’d gotten up seven times during the night. Seven times.
He’d sat on his bed and smoked a lot of cigarettes.
And wondered how he could stop Melanie.
At work in the morning, Clyde was groggy until he’d had his third cup of coffee.
The roses came just after eleven, brought in by a neatly dressed Negro man. All the secretaries in the front office turned to look at the resplendent red flowers, so regal in their green wrapping.
Who were they for, and why?
The buxom receptionist carried them to a small, frail woman in the back who immediately broke into a smile.
Then the entire office knew who’d sent the roses. Not a lover or a regretful husband, but Clyde Tolson. The only executive who had the tact and taste to treat the office workers as real people.
The small woman’s name was Mindy. Her four-year-old daughter was in the hospital for some tests. Clyde was a nice guy.
Today he was already in his office when the women arrived. His phone lights showed that he was busy making many brief calls.
Curious that Clyde had gotten to the office so early. And even more curious that he didn’t come out and say hello to them, as usual.
“Sonofabitch.”
He wasn’t much of a swearer, Clyde. Back on the farm where he’d been born and raised — Laredo, Missouri, in the year 1900 — Clyde had been taught the Good Book, which meant keeping a pure mind and a clean tongue. He had abided by these rules all the way up: from his brief years in a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, business college; to his years as confidential secretary to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker; to his years as associate director, the number-two man in the FBI.
But this morning, so much was at stake. Edgar was getting wilder and crazier in his attempts to hold on to power. And God only knew that Melanie was up to out there in Los Angeles.
So this morning he’d come to work an hour before even the most zealous employee showed up, and started dialing the number for Melanie he’d found in Edgar’s office.
By now, he must have dialed her twenty times. He decided to try once more.
“Hello.”
“Hello!” Tolson exclaimed. “Who is this?”
“Conchita, the maid.”
“The hotel maid?”
“Si.”
“Is Miss Melanie Baines there?”
“I give you the front desk.”
A male voice said, “Desk.”
“I’m trying to find Melanie Baines, who was staying in Room 408.”
“Yes, sir. She checked out yesterday afternoon.”
“Any idea where she might have gone? Any forwarding address or phone number?”
“No, sir.”
Tolson hung up and then dialed a two-digit interoffice number.
Edgar’s private number.
“We need to talk, Edgar.”
“Believe it or not, Mr. Tolson, I’m busy,” Edgar snapped.
“We need to talk now,” Tolson said.
He slammed down the phone.
He had never treated Edgar this way before. Never had the nerve.
Now there was no choice.
Mayhew
“Mr. Murchison, please.”
Moment.
“Del, how’s it going today?” Murchison said.
“I need a quarter million dollars in cash and I need it right away,” Del Mayhew said.
“My God, Del, what the hell is going on?”
“I wish I could tell you but I can’t.”
“But a quarter of a million, Del. That’s a fortune.”
“The studio has at least that much cash on hand.”
“I suppose. Yes.”
“Then you know I’m good for it.”
“But that money’s not yours, Del. You’d need the approval of your board.”
“You could fix it for me, Hugh. I think I’ve done a lot for you the past couple years. Brought you big accounts.”
“Yes but—”
“And now I need a favor, Hugh. There’s a lot riding on it.”
“It would take me a while.”
Mayhew smiled, knowing he’d get his way. “Two hours.”
“Two hours?”
“That’s all the time I have, Hugh. I’ll see you then.”
This was Mayhew’s last best try to get the tapes. If anybody beat him to possession of them, it would be the government man, David Lenihan.
And with a quarter of a mil, Mayhew knew he could buy Lenihan off.
On a government salary, a man would be a fool to reject a quarter of a million dollars.
Michael
His first reaction was to deny the truth that Laura had been kidnapped, to consider the phone call a hoax.
He stared out the huge window of Kathryn’s Malibu house, dimly aware of the beach below and a sailboat on the horizon.
Somebody had kidnapped Laura.
He had to call Sara.
The phone rang six times before she picked it up.
“Hi, Michael. I’m afraid this isn’t a very good time to talk. Somebody killed Bellamy. Murdered him. Jeff found the body here this morning.”
“Wow. Listen...” Stay calm, he thought, to help Laura. “I need to see you. Right away.”
“Tonight?”
“No, sooner. Something’s happened, Sara, and I have to talk to you face-to-face.”
“Are you all right, Michael?”
“I’m okay. I can meet you at the Hideaway restaurant near your office in forty-five minutes.”
“I’ll see you then.”
He left a brief note for Kathryn and finished it with several Xs for kisses. She was a sentimental lady and liked things like that. The note said only: I need to help Laura with an emergency. I’ll call you tonight. Love, Michael.
He got into the T-Bird Kathryn had bought him and drove quickly to the freeway.
Simmons
Only when he was drunk could you take full measure of the actor, Curtis Simmons.
He would (in his cups) tell you about the time he appeared in a 1946 picture with Sonny Tufts and Tufts got top billing and three times as much money. Or the picture with Gloria Swanson when she said, during a kissing scene, in front of the entire crew, “You have breath like a pig, Curtis!” Or the time (by now his career was sinking fast) he made a juvenile delinquent picture at American-International (playing the fey high school teacher) and was told by a sweaty, illiterate graduate of the Method that “you, Daddy-O, are no longer relevant.”
Or how about when he had paid down on a new home, counting on a large salary from a picture with Elizabeth Taylor, only to have Taylor suffer one of her mysterious illnesses and force cancellation?
Dear God, he’d lost seventeen-five in earnest money!
Nowhere, it seemed, was there a thespian more ill-starred than Curtis Franklin Simmons.
Last night he was supposed to be at his dying wife’s bedside in his demi-mansion Colonial home, in his silk smoking jacket with his expensive brandy. The English lord in his manor.
But he’d looked at her in so much pain, wasted to little more than bone, blue eyes glassy with the disease burning through her, and all he could feel was... guilt.
He had ceased loving her long ago, and had never been faithful. He found her company dull, sick or not.
And so he’d fled to his den.
And out of monotony (Maren, his true love, was in Las Vegas, doing a vocal turn in the lounge) he decided to play the tapes he’d taken from Bellamy’s office. He wanted to hear them once before destroying them.
He put one of the tapes on the reel-to-reel machine, made himself comfortable in his chair, and raised his brandy glass.
The tape began to play. The quality was bad. At first he didn’t recognize the voice. But surely it wasn’t him and it wasn’t Maren. Sara had given him the wrong tapes.
Then he realized who he was listening to.
Marilyn Monroe. Oh good God.
And one of the Kennedys. Yes. Absolutely.
It sounded like Robert.
Simmons sat straight up, wide-eyed.
He spent the next several hours in his den, playing all the tapes, nervously smoking cigarettes.
And then, transformed into a festive mood, he went into his wife’s room and sat by her side and held her hand until she went to sleep.
He spent the rest of the night in the den, trying to reach Maren in Las Vegas. He wanted to tell her that their money worries were over — that after his wife’s death there would be plenty of money. Plenty.
But he couldn’t reach her.
Finally, so drunk he could barely walk, he flopped down on the couch, an old Rudy Vallee picture flickering on the TV, and slept the sleep of a happy man.
By noon, the worst of the hangover had waned.
The nurse was here to see to the Mrs., and Simmons had finished his half-hour exercise program of light weightlifting and running in place. While he was no longer a star, he hoped to continue working. Staying in shape was important.
Now, dressed in a yellow shirt, white duck trousers, and brown leather sandals, he took the white telephone out by the pool.
He lit a cigarette and dialed the number.
“Good morning, Mrs. Drury. I want to thank you for yesterday. We need to talk about the tapes—”
“I can’t talk right now, Mr. Simmons. I’m heading out the door. You’ll have to call me later.”
She hung up.
And Simmons was left staring at the phone.
Mayhew
The agent sitting in front of Mayhew’s desk was tough, but Mayhew liked him. For his top star in a picture like the one Mayhew proposed, the agent didn’t want a simple salary. He wanted “participation,” a piece of the profits right off the top. Gary Cooper did this with High Noon; likewise Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Irving Berlin in White Christmas.
“Del,” agent Harry Solomon said, “we’re sitting here talking a payoff of millions of dollars and you’re not paying attention.” Something was woefully distracting Del Mayhew.
“Home life?” Harry Solomon said.
“Home is fine, Harry.”
“Mistress making you crazy?”
“I don’t have a mistress, Harry.”
“What kind of studio head doesn’t have a mistress?”
“It’s just sinuses.” Mayhew felt himself blush. He really needed to pull things together. He was losing it.
His intercom buzzed.
“Excuse me a minute, Harry.”
“A Mr. Murchison from your bank,” his secretary said.
He took the call eagerly.
“Del, Hugh Murchison here. I’ve got it for you. All new currency in hundred-dollar bills. I’ve even put it in a leather valise for you.”
“I appreciate this, Hugh.”
“I could really get my tit in a wringer for doing this. Maybe I should be reporting it to the FBI. There’s no kidnapping or anything involved, is there?”
“Not at all.”
“You coming to get it?”
“Yes. In an hour.”
They hung up.
The call gave him new encouragement that he was going to get the tapes soon.
“So why don’t you have a mistress?” Harry Solomon asked.
“No time.”
Harry shook his head. “All these beautiful girls all over your lot. And all going to waste.”
Mayhew leaned forward. Now he was hungry to negotiate hard. “Your contract is bullshit.”
“Del, do you have any idea how hot Steve McQueen is just now?”
“Not a million and a half hot, not when he also gets ten per cent of the gross.”
“You want to know how bad Zanuck wants him, the kind of dollars Zanuck is talking about?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“I promised Zanuck a call back by noon tomorrow.”
“Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to keep Zanuck waiting, would we?”
“He’s a nice guy.” Harry grinned. “Some of the time, anyway.”
Mayhew stood up. “I have to leave. But I’ll call you before noon tomorrow with my answer.”
Ten minutes later, Del Mayhew was on the freeway, roaring toward his bank and the valise containing $250,000 in cash.
I had a small affair with a Los Angeles cop named Tom just after I split with Joe DiMaggio. It was strange how I met him. I was sprawled in the middle of a dark side-street at midnight in the middle of a cold April downpour. I was also half-naked and drunk.
I had started drinking that afternoon, alone in my bedroom. At one point I looked out and saw this teeny-tiny kitten, this calico, and I went out and got her. I fixed her warm milk and then I took a comb and got her all cleaned up and then I got under the covers and put her down next to me. She was like my baby sister. We just slept and slept and slept.
When I got up the house was dark.
I started drinking again, too. And because I hadn’t had much to eat that day, I got drunk pretty fast.
I went in to pick up the kitty but she scampered ahead of me into the kitchen. I’d left the door open when the kid had brought groceries earlier in the day. The kitty went right out the door, into the night and the pouring rain.
I went after her. All I had on were my mules and this very thin silk robe. Outside, the robe caught on the vines and the latticework and got tom pretty bad.
But I didn’t care. All I could think of was the kitten and how it would get run over by a car. I ran down the center of the street crying for the kitten but I couldn’t find her anywhere.
At that moment the only thing that mattered to me in the whole world was that kitten. I knew she loved me the way I’d always wanted to be loved — because I was good and kind and helpful, not just because I had a wicked smile and a big pair of tits — and I had to find her so we could spend our lives together, had to.
Anyway, a while later, Tom found me. He was on duty, in his police car. He took me back home and got me dried off and put in bed. I was so depressed, all I could think of was killing myself.
Then he came in with the tiny little kitty in the palm of his hand.
He’d found her on the floor, meowing.
Apparently, she hadn’t liked the world out there after all.
She wanted to be with me.
Sara
Sara reached the restaurant before Michael and waited for him in one of the booths, the walls of which were covered by framed black-and-white celebrity photos. She thought maybe he’d called her today because he wanted to get back together.
He walked quickly in and sat down and said tensely, “It’s about Laura.”
“Laura?”
He nodded. His eyes burned.
He wanted to tell her everything but the waitress intruded to give them menus. “Two fries, two Cokes,” he snapped, so they would be left alone.
“What’s wrong?” Sara said.
“Laura. Somebody’s — taken her.”
“Taken her?”
In a hushed voice, he told her.
As he spoke, she felt her insides clutch, and she fought to restrain her anxiety in this public place. She felt dizzy, and the walls pressed in. She forced herself to stay logical and clear.
The waitress delivered their Coca-Colas and french fries, and went briskly away.
Sara looked at her french fries and felt nauseated. No food now. No way. “You never heard the woman’s voice before?”
“No.”
“Did it sound long-distance?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Could you hear Laura in the background?”
“No.”
“She didn’t describe the tapes?”
“Just that Bellamy put them in his office safe.”
“The only tapes in there were ones he was using to blackmail Curtis Simmons, the actor.”
“Bellamy blackmailed people?” He blinked.
“Simmons came in with a gun and demanded some audio tapes and some photos.”
“Then Bellamy is really into something dangerous,” Michael said. “And now we’re into something dangerous.” He inhaled his cigarette smoke deeply. His hands trembled. “And maybe it’s the same thing.”
She reached across the booth and touched his wrist and said, “We’ll get her back, Michael. I know we will.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
She had never seen her husband look older or sadder. Not even his handsome Rodeo Drive clothes could make him look happy now.
She wanted to cry but stopped herself.
“We need to think, Michael,” she said. “And think hard. Now tell me about this woman’s voice again.”
Michael didn’t have the strength for this situation, but thank God she did.
Lenihan
Sara and Michael left the restaurant, walking as calmly and coolly as they could. Neither of them noticed the man parked several cars down, watching them.
Lenihan watched them walk to their car. He thought of Laura, the girl in the framed photograph on Sara Drury’s desk. A nice family.
As Lenihan and his wife and little Dulcie had once been a nice family.
Lenihan started the engine to follow them.
Washington, D.C
Kennedy
His wife Jacqueline and the children were out of town, so President John F. Kennedy ate lunch alone and hastily returned to the Oval Office where he continued dialing David Lenihan’s hotel room in Los Angeles.
This morning had been taken up with four meetings: Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Discussions had ranged from the worsening situation in Vietnam — the Chiefs were asking for more troops — to how unhappy Vice President Lyndon Johnson was with his routine duties. He wanted “something major” according to McGeorge Bundy, one of the few Kennedyites able to get along with the harsh, vulgar Texan.
But now there were more pressing problems to worry about than Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.
Kennedy peered through the horn-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose at the afternoon edition of one of the Washington papers that had just been brought to him.
Near the bottom of the front page was the headline: publisher SLAIN IN OWN OFFICE.
The story then described how the man, named Frank Bellamy, had been murdered.
He was the same man who had called David Lenihan and asked for half a million dollars for the Marilyn tapes.
All the president could think was that J. Edgar Hoover’s unofficial agent Melanie had gotten to Bellamy first. A full-fledged psychopath, she had murdered before.
And if Melanie had the tapes, Hoover would have them soon.
And if Hoover had them...
He took his glasses off and leaned back and vigorously rubbed his eyes.
Vanessa
The address she’d found in Tully’s notebook was of a beach house out near Malibu beyond the section where movie stars and studio executives lived.
Next to the address was the name “Baines.” The day before he died, Tully had mentioned Melanie Baines to her, said that this Melanie had been following him around. Tully had wanted to find out who the woman was and what she wanted from him. So Tully in turn had started following Melanie and, after checking out the local Hertz offices and getting the name of the redhead renting the car, ended up at the beach house.
Vanessa sensed she had found the name she was looking for.
Along the beach below, in the hot sun, a woman in a red bikini rode a chestnut mare through the edge of the waves and a few surfers rode their boards.
The drive in the battered old Chevy had taken Vanessa twenty-two minutes.
She looked down the wide stretch of beach and saw the house, a relatively new home with a garage beneath. Even from here, she could see that the curtains were closed. Somebody didn’t want to be seen.
Because of the open area of sand, she couldn’t sneak up to the house. She’d have to drive up and invent some lie to get herself inside, so that once she was facing Melanie she could take out the gun and make her tell her the truth.
She angled the car off the highway and drove down the narrow road to the beach house.
The garage entrance was around back, and she saw that the door was open and the garage was empty.
But she sensed that somebody was inside the house.
Watching her.
Laura
Once upon a time a man lured a little girl into his black car. He told her that something bad had happened to her mother and that he would take the little girl to her. But the man was lying. He just wanted the little girl. He took her to a dark woods and did naughty things to her. Then he took out an axe and hacked up the little girl into pieces.
Years ago, her friend Betsy Coughlin had told Laura this story and it was the first thing she thought of as she emerged from the depths of the chloroform.
Then she remembered the lady who’d grabbed her and clamped a handkerchief with something bad-smelling on it over her face.
She didn’t remember anything else.
She awakened in this room, bound at wrists and ankles, a gag stretched tight across her mouth.
She smelled the new pink sheets on which she lay.
She saw beside her, in the dusty beam of sunlight from the high window, a teddy bear.
She heard ocean waves and the rough sound of her own breathing behind the gag, which was soaked with her warm saliva.
And she heard a car coming close to the house, stopping.
Maybe it was her mom.
And then she thought that maybe it was the woman coming back. Maybe she had gone to get an axe.
She heard somebody climb up the back stairs.
And knock.
Somebody was knocking!
If it was the woman with her axe, she wouldn’t knock. She would just come in.
Laura tried to scream, but nothing much came out, just a hum.
Please, please hear me, Laura thought. And tried to scream some more. But all that happened was that her throat started to hurt.
Then the knocking stopped.
Was the person going to give up and go away?
Please don’t go. Please stay. Please come and help me.
Vanessa
She felt self-conscious, standing on the back porch, knocking on the door every thirty seconds or so, and looking out at a lonely gull black against the hazy afternoon disc of sun.
She knocked again. She didn’t really expect an answer. Curtains were drawn over the door window and the room window.
If anybody was inside, he or she was being quiet.
She’d thought of breaking a window and getting inside. But if Melanie caught her inside, she’d most likely kill her just as she’d killed Tully.
Dying didn’t scare Vanessa. But the prospect of dying without avenging Tully did.
For a moment, she thought she heard a faint, plaintive sound, like a muffled animal bleat. She stood still, listening.
Then the gull she’d been watching emitted some distant squawk.
The gull, she thought. That’s what I heard.
She walked down the porch and put her ear to the room window. She heard nothing.
She went down the steps and got in her battered Chevrolet and drove off to a hill where she could look down on the beach house.
She stayed there a long hour, waiting to see if anybody came out or went in. But nobody did.
Washington, D.C
Tolson
Tolson knocked once, then came right into Edgar’s office.
Edgar hurriedly hung up the phone as Tolson shut the door behind him and threw a newspaper on Edgar’s desk.
Edgar ignored the paper.
“Look at it, Edgar.”
Edgar’s bull-dog face seemed ready to growl. Nobody talked to J. Edgar Hoover this way. Not even his only friend and confidant, Clyde.
He picked up the paper.
“Bottom of the front page,” Tolson said.
Edgar turned the paper over and scanned the stories. His eyes fell on the article about the murdered publisher. He read it quickly. He kept his face clear of expression.
“And just what does that prove?”
“Bellamy,” Tolson said, “the man in the middle of this tape business — what that proves is that Melanie is at work again. Killing people.”
“Maybe she had to. If she did.”
Tolson shook his head. “Maybe she had to? But that’s not all, Edgar. Did you see the L.A. Times? Page seventeen.” He dropped another paper on the desk.
Glumly, Edgar laid the newspaper flat on his desk and turned the pages, “PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR FOUND SLAIN?”
“Right. A Mr. Tully.”
“So?”
“Melanie moved from her hotel. The clerk there told me that a Mr. Tully had been looking for her.” Tolson ran a hand across his face. “I think she’s killed two people on this case so far, Edgar. How many more will it be?”
“You’re shouting!”
“So are you!”
Tolson sighed and turned away to the window and looked out at Washington, D.C. After World War II, the city had started to lose some of its elegant charm. There were too many people, too many crass souls. The kindness was gone from the city now, the cordiality. Only the greed remained.
He turned back. His voice was sad. “I want us to retire together, Edgar, and do exactly what we want and be in public favor. We’ve worked hard for all these years, and we deserve a good retirement.”
Edgar stared at his desk, sullen.
“Edgar?”
“I’m listening.” He didn’t look up.
“Call her off. I don’t know how to get ahold of her. I’ve tried.”
“I can reach her.”
“Will you do it?”
“I want you to leave now, Mr. Tolson.”
Edgar kept his head down. Only when he was very, very angry did Edgar call Clyde Mr. Tolson.
“Take care of this, Edgar,” Clyde said. “Right away.”
Tolson closed the door quietly.
Sara
“You sure you want to do this?” Sara said, her voice trembling.
“Very sure,” Michael answered. “I grew up with guns.”
“It scares me.”
“We’re both scared, but it’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Sara stared out the window of Michael’s car, a plush new baby-blue Thunderbird.
He took her hand and looked at her Somberly. “If we could go to the police, I wouldn’t need a gun, but we can’t go to the police. Otherwise, Laura will be—” he paused and said, more softly, “I’d feel better with a gun.”
She nodded, silently. She knew, after all, that Curtis Simmons had one. And she knew almost as surely that he had the tapes — those she had given him by mistake — which was why he had been trying to reach her. Now they would have to go to Curtis Simmons’ house and get the tapes back, at gunpoint if necessary.
Michael got out of the car and stood by the door as traffic streamed past.
He’d passed CLARK’S GUN-A-RAMA many times. He hadn’t paid it much attention other than to think that the place was probably packed with John Birchers and other right-wing lunatics. Michael was an Adlai Stevenson Democrat. GUN-A-RAMA wasn’t the kind of place he frequented.
He saw a hole in the traffic, dashed across, and went into the gun shop.
Waist-high oak-and-glass display cases lined either wall and racks of shotguns and rifles were arrayed at the rear. The store smelled of gun oil.
Oddly, an FM classical station filled the air with gentle Debussy.
If he’d had to predict the kind of guy who worked here, Michael would have leaned to the beer-bellied, tattoo-armed, greasy-haired redneck you always saw at truck stops. But the man behind the counter was tall, and wore a striped button-down shirt and an elegant Rolex watch.
“Afternoon. Help you?”
“I’m looking for a handgun.”
“I see. Well, why don’t we step over here?” They walked to a display case filled with handguns.
“May I ask what you want this for?”
“Uh, protection.”
“In your home?”
“Yes.”
The man looked at him carefully. “Are you trained with firearms?”
Michael nodded.
The man smiled. “I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be here if my father hadn’t died and left me this store.” He laughed. “Not all the gun people like me. I guess they resent me force-feeding them Debussy. Tried to sell this store when my father died, but I couldn’t get a fair price so I decided to run it myself.”
Michael nodded again. He just kept thinking of Laura.
“How about that one?” Michael said.
“That .45? It’s a Colt model from World War II.” He smiled again. “See? I’m learning this business after all.”
He reached down and brought up a silver-plated Colt .45.
The last time Michael had handled a gun was back in Omaha, when he’d shot at targets with his old man.
He sighted along the barrel, curled his finger around the trigger.
“This is fine. And some ammunition.”
The store owner studied him a moment. “You look kind of upset. Maybe you should come back tomorrow and buy this gun.”
Michael smiled at him and leaned casually against the case. “I’m fine.”
The owner’s gaze lingered a moment. “That’ll be fifty dollars.”
Michael walked out of the store with a .45 in one suit coat pocket and a box of bullets in the other.
Lenihan
The man had been in the gun shop ten minutes now. Sara sat in the car waiting for him.
Lenihan watched her from his car down the block.
Then the man was back. Trotting across the street to the car. Inside, he leaned to Sara and showed her something. A gun, probably. Sara shook her head, seemed to argue.
Maybe Sara didn’t want him to have a gun.
By now, Lenihan was assuming that the man was Sara’s husband, Michael.
Michael steered the car out from the curb, heading south, and Lenihan was not far behind.
Melanie
She was afraid the ice cream would melt. She’d picked up a quart of peppermint at the supermarket. What little girl could resist peppermint? She figured it would calm her down a bit. The object was to scare the parents, not Laura.
She pulled off the ocean highway, moving down the narrow road to the house.
She saw the fresh tire tracks.
She drove the car around back to the garage, pulled inside, and walked back to the tire tracks in the sand.
Somebody had been here during her short trip to the supermarket.
She squatted and examined the tracks closely. New tires, from the look of them, but that didn’t mean anything. Somebody had been here.
She stood up and stared at the house. She was a professional. Who could possibly have found out where she was?
Maybe the whole caper was coming undone by some subtle mistake. Happened sometimes. Even to the most careful of professionals. She might have botched the job.
She hurried back to the car, grabbed the ice cream, and scampered up the stairs, drawing her Luger from her jacket pocket.
Everything was locked up tight. No sign of anybody trying to force a way in.
She put the key in the lock, turned the knob.
Not a sound in the place.
Quietly setting the ice cream inside the door, she checked room by room as she headed for Laura’s bedroom, her Luger leading the way. Nothing.
Finally, she came to the locked door. She silently unlocked it, paused, then kicked the door open.
Laura lay tied up and gagged on her little pink bed next to her fuzzy brown teddy bear. Laura stared in horror at the Luger.
Melanie was so happy to see her, she immediately shoved the gun back into her pocket and said, “You wait right here, honey. I’ve got something for you.”
She laughed at herself. What a dumb thing to say. Where could Laura go?
By the time she brought the peppermint ice cream and two spoons back to the bedroom, it was half-melted.
She and Laura would have themselves a nice little party anyway.
It’s funny how people look at movie stars. When I lived in Los Angeles County Orphanage, I’d see some of them on the street because RKO was nearby. And they looked different to me — they had a kind of poise arid glow that us mortals just couldn’t have. I especially liked it when they would lean out of their limousines and wave to us kids on the sidewalk in front of the orphanage. It was like watching gods pass by in chariots. One day I saw Rita Hayworth, who I always thought was the most beautiful of all the movie stars. And she looked right at me and smiled. But that night I had a really strange dream — this limousine was passing by in the street and it stopped and the window started to roll down but instead of a movie star there was just this horribly grinning skeleton wrapped in an evening gown. I never had that dream again until I was a movie star — and then I realized that the skeleton was me... that movie stars weren’t special people at all, just people with a lot of problems. One time when I went to Tahoe for the weekend, I had to get special medication on top of my sleeping pills so I could sleep. Every time I’d close my eyes, I’d see that skeleton leaning out of that limousine.
Winona
In the beginning, she had been terrified. First there was the word “cancer,” the most imposing and chilling word in the entire vocabulary, and then came two failed operations and then the gradual retreat of her closest friends — as if they might catch it from her breasts.
Tears had not nourished her, nor prayer, nor rage, nor self-pity.
Nor had her husband, that celebrated, sophisticated rake, Curtis Simmons, a.k.a. George Smythe from Dalton, Illinois, where his family had been so poor they’d had to use a two-holer out back.
What a prize Winona had been then, the lovely, refined daughter of a genuine Californian who could trace his roots back five generations, and who had been smart enough to invest his modest inheritance in real estate on what would become Wilshire Boulevard.
She was twenty-six by the time she met Curtis Simmons at one of her mother’s charity functions, and already burdened with the knowledge that she could never have children.
Two months later, Winona totally bedazzled, they were married. He changed quickly. He woke up to find himself in the best of all possible circumstances. He had a booming career as an actor and was now married to the daughter and fortune of the Reynolds family, one of the hallowed names in Los Angeles society.
It was three years before she caught him cheating, though of course he had been doing it virtually since their honeymoon.
An indiscreet starlet had sent a perfumed letter to the house. She was a chorus dancer who was pregnant with Curtis’ child, and desperately hoped he’d been serious when he said he’d leave his wife for her. Winona felt great pity for both the dancer and herself. She took $500 cash from a drawer, wrapped it in paper, and put it in an envelope addressed to the dancer, with a note: Use this however you see fit.
She said nothing of this to Curtis.
He ran to patterns down the years, two “serious” romances per year with chippies to fill in the gaps. She should have left him long ago, but she was not self-confident enough. Sex was not pleasurable to her, and she loathed social evenings with preening movie stars. So she said nothing. And pretended to know nothing.
She always lived as if this would change some day. As if one fine shining morning she would rise to find that her husband had come to love her as tenderly as she’d always hoped, as tenderly as she’d loved him in those first years.
But that was not what happened at all.
One fine shining morning, at age fifty-one, she woke up to find that she was dying of breast cancer.
“How are you today?”
As usual, he came in and kissed her on the forehead. Still handsome, quick, charming.
“May I ask you a favor, Curtis?”
“Of course, darling.”
“Will you burn our bed after I die?”
“What?”
“Because you won’t have enough respect for my memory to keep your whores out of our bed.”
He looked stunned. “Oh God, Winona, you’re not in another of those moods, are you?”
He gave her another peck on the cheek. “You’re always crabby in the morning, darling. You’ll be feeling much better in a few hours.”
He strode from the room.
He had not listened to anything she’d said.
He would bring his whores here and they would sleep in this very bed and he would not think of her at all.
I went to see my mother one time after she got out of the mental hospital. I was doing some modeling then and an assignment took me to Portland, where my mother was living.
I knew right away that something was wrong because the rooming house where she stayed was the sort where derelicts bought rooms by the night.
She was up on the top floor, where the roof slanted, so there wasn’t much standing room.
She was sort of cool to me, at first. My mother was a very intelligent woman but she never believed that I had inherited her intelligence. She had on this faded gray housecoat and worn slippers. She looked frail and old. She hadn’t tinted her hair lately, so it was almost completely gray.
She asked me how my life was going and I suppose I exaggerated how good things were. I didn’t want to worry her.
And then I said, “Mom. You haven’t touched me. I tried to give you a hug when I came in but you pulled away. Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Of course I’m glad to see you. You’re my daughter.”
And for some reason when she said that, sitting there in the afternoon light through her grimy window, I saw my mother clearly for the first time in my life.
I saw that my mother was insane.
It was in the eyes. And in the way her lips always seemed to be mouthing silent words.
I felt guilty. I’d blamed my mother for so many things in my life... Every time I got seriously unhappy, I’d hate my mother for not taking good care of me when I was growing up.
I fell at her feet and wrapped my arms around her hips and put my face in her lap and began sobbing.
She started rocking a little, and singing some old lullaby, strange and a little off-key, and when I looked up, I saw that she was crying, too, soft tears on her wrinkled cheeks.
And I hugged her all the tighter.
I had never loved my mother as much as I did at that moment.
Melanie
Melanie had to feed Laura like an infant. She was, after all, tied up.
“Taste good?”
Laura nodded silently.
“Peppermint’s my favorite kind.” Melanie thought a moment. “It was Jessica’s, too. Sometime I’ll tell you all about Jessica.” She sat on the edge of the bed, feeding Laura.
“I don’t want anymore ice cream,” Laura said. “I want to go home.”
“You can’t go home. Not now. Now have some more ice cream.”
She put the spoon to Laura’s mouth again but Laura abruptly turned her head away.
Without thinking, she hit Laura in the face and temple with a closed fist, slamming the girl’s head against the wall.
For a moment, Melanie felt good about what she’d just done. Laura had deserved it.
But Melanie began to wonder if Laura’s head hit the wall too hard. Laura lay there still as death, her eyes closed.
She hurried into the bathroom, soaked a washcloth in cold water, and came back. Placing the cloth on Laura’s forehead, she untied her bonds, plumping up a pillow for her head.
She felt for her pulse. It wasn’t strong.
Laura didn’t stir.
Melanie shook her gently.
“Laura, Laura. You need to wake up now. I’m really sorry I hit you so hard.”
Melanie leaned closer, searching for any sign of life.
“Laura, you can have all the ice cream to yourself.”
The phone rang.
She ran out and picked up. “Yes?”
“Melanie?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Edgar. Who do you think it is?”
She swallowed. “Yes, Mr. Hoover?”
“Melanie, I think we should just forget this whole assignment. Things are getting sticky.”
“What things?”
“I don’t have time to explain. I just want you to stop what you’re doing. All right?”
Usually, she did exactly what Mr. Hoover asked her to. But not this time.
“I’ve been working hard for you, Mr. Hoover, and I can’t give up on something this far along. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.”
And then Melanie Baines did what almost no one on the planet had ever done: She hung up on Mr. J. Edgar Hoover.
Sara
In the 1930s, when the studio star system was at its peak, a few movie icons were not merely appreciated, they were cherished. The studios were so apprehensive that exuberant fans would break into the stars’ homes that they asked Beverly Hills police to have special patrols in these neighborhoods around the clock. And the police did just that, circling certain neighborhoods in open Chevrolet touring cars, with binoculars and extra weapons.
Sara remembered this from research for her articles.
While Curtis Simmons had never been one of those gods, he hadn’t done badly as the perennial second-lead at MGM. And while he didn’t have the largest house in Bel Air, his white Georgian home was beautiful in the soft afternoon sunlight, the green grounds of rolling, flawless beauty. A winding brick drive ran past the columned front, leading to full shade trees in the back.
Michael parked in back, next to a blue DeSoto convertible.
He picked up the gun from the seat.
“You sure you want to take that with us?” Sara said.
“Positive,” he said.
They got out of the car and walked around the west end of the house on a narrow walk to an ornate wooden side door, where he knocked.
A small woman in the gray dress of a maid opened the door. “Yes?”
“We’d like to see Mr. Simmons please. Tell him it’s Mrs. Drury.”
“Very well.”
The interior was a traditional but elegant European motif, with period furnishings and an Aubusson rug in the living room, Chinese porcelains and flowered, upholstered sofas.
They sat on one of the sofas, where they could look out at the pool.
They fell silent. The big house was very quiet. Sara felt intimidated and scared.
And then Simmons was there, looking very much like the sophisticated second-lead he’d played throughout his long career, all gussied up in a paisley dinner jacket and peach-colored ascot.
“Well, I have to say this is a surprise,” he said. He looked and sounded scared.
Washington, D.C
Kennedy
Lyndon Baines Johnson had been in the Oval Office now for more than fifteen minutes, trying to get Kennedy to help out a former constituent of the vice president.
“He’s about to go to prison, Jack. And he’s a good family man.” Which, translated, meant that he probably didn’t ball more than six, seven workers a week.
Johnson usually called the president “Jack” when they were in the White House. Johnson was dressed in his standard blue serge suit, garish patterned tie, white shirt that he had custom-made by the dozens, and snakeskin cowboy boots. Few of the easterners who worked for Kennedy actually liked Johnson, viewing him as vulgar, mean and relentlessly corrupt.
Kennedy sighed. “I’ll see what I can do, Lyndon.” Then he smiled. “You sure know a lot of people who’re in trouble. Don’t you know any honest people?”
Lyndon smiled right back. “Now where would I get the chance to meet any honest people? I’m a Democrat.”
Johnson sat forward in his chair. “You should learn to call on me more often, Jack. There are a lot of things I could take care of for you, if you wanted me to.”
But Kennedy’s mind had begun to wander again. He wondered what was going on in Los Angeles. Why the hell hadn’t David Lenihan called?
He stood up. “I’ll keep that in mind, Lyndon.”
“And you’ll talk to Bobby about my friend?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, was Lyndon Johnson’s sworn enemy. If Lyndon Johnson wanted any favors from the Justice Department, he’d have to go through Jack Kennedy. He’d never get any help from Bobby.
As was his custom, Kennedy walked Lyndon to the door, shook his hand good-bye.
Then Kennedy went back to his desk, lifted the receiver and dialed the number of David Lenihan’s hotel room.
Sara
“Would you care for a drink?” Curtis Simmons said.
Sara shook her head. “No, thanks. Is there a private place to talk?”
“The den, I suppose. You seem upset.”
“We’ll talk in the den,” Sara said.
Simmons led the way to a room filled with bookcases.
“I think I’ll have a sherry,” Simmons said. “Sure you won’t join me?”
“We’re sure.”
Simmons poured sherry from a cut-glass decanter, then toasted them in the arch manner of an actor in a sherry commercial.
In the theatricality of this performance, Sara was able to see that Simmons’ tears of concern for his dying wife yesterday had also been a performance. He simply hadn’t wanted to pay blackmail.
Simmons parked himself on the edge of his desk.
“Now you’ll tell me why you’re here.”
“I want the tapes,” Sara said.
“The tapes?”
Michael finally spoke. “Our daughter’s life is on the line here, Simmons. That’s all we can tell you. We just want the tapes.”
Simmons looked as if he might deny any knowledge of what they were talking about, but then decided against it. “Surely, Mr. Drury, you realize how much such tapes are worth.”
“You don’t understand. Our daughter’s life is being threatened.”
Simmons smiled. “This all sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it?” He glanced at Sara.
Sara was breathing raggedly. “For our daughter, Simmons, we’ll do whatever we have to do.” She meant it to sound like the threat it was.
She didn’t notice Simmons slide his hand into the wide pocket of his smoking jacket until it was too late. Now he pointed a small revolver at Michael’s chest.
“I’ve had a lot of practice with this particular scene,” Simmons said. “When you’ve played the cad as many times as I have, you’re quite comfortable pulling a gun on somebody. And ordering him out of your house.”
He gestured toward the door with his gun.
“Come on now, the fun’s over.”
“We meant what we said,” Sara said.
“Whatever you’ll get for them, it isn’t worth a little girl’s life,” Michael said.
Simmons frowned. “I do what I have to survive. Don’t try to make me feel guilty.”
He edged around them so that he stood with his back to the door. Sara saw Michael try to ease his own gun from his pocket but Simmons was watching him too closely.
Suddenly Michael drove his shoulder into Simmons’ chest. The revolver spun from his hand.
Simmons slammed back against the door, and the two tumbled to the floor. They rolled around, scrambling for the gun.
Simmons managed to get off a right-hand punch that dazed Michael.
Michael brought his knee up hard between Simmons’ legs.
Simmons grunted in pain but kept inching his hand toward the weapon.
Sara was just about to dive for the pistol when a woman’s voice barked, “Stop it! All of you!”
Winona Simmons stood gaunt and pale in the doorway. She wore a formal royal blue robe and house slippers. In her right hand, quite steady, was a large handgun.
“Get up, Curtis.”
“Darling, you should be in bed,” Simmons said, trying to catch his breath.
Winona looked at Sara and said, “I can imagine what you’re going through, Mrs. Drury, and I’m sorry. Curtis has always been a selfish and duplicitous ass, but I never thought he’d be capable of anything like this — where a child’s life is at stake. Curtis, you get those tapes right now.”
“I don’t owe these people anything,” Simmons said, sullenly picking himself up from the floor.
“Get the tapes, Curtis,” Winona Simmons said, “and please shut up.”
Simmons silently cursed his wife — why couldn’t the bitch just die? — but he got the tapes.
Louella
She called his business office, his social club (where he often spent time with his beautiful, colored girl friend), his country club, and even his home.
Rossetti wasn’t anywhere.
Her call from Gibbons at the Hearst office bothered her more than she’d thought. She now shared his anxiety. When were the tapes actually going to be in her eager hands?
With the tapes, Louella would once again be the top gossip columnist in the nation. Even more, she would play a major role in the history of her country.
Louella dialed a number from her small, leather-bound, gently perfumed book marked PRIVATE.
“Good afternoon.”
“Has Mr. Rossetti come back yet?”
“Is this Miss Parsons?”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid not, Miss Parsons.”
“Is Monica there, then?”
“Monica?”
“Please. I know all about Monica and Mr. Rossetti. We’re friends. Would you ask her to come to the phone?”
“I can’t do that.”
“You mean you’re refusing me, young man?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Parsons, but those are my orders, directly from Mr. Rossetti.”
“Put her on the phone, please, or I’ll see that you lose your job.”
“Don’t say you talked to me.”
“Don’t you worry about it. I’ll take responsibility.”
“Hold on, then.”
A minute later, a soft, cultured voice said, “Good afternoon, Miss Parsons.”
“Nice to speak to you again, Monica.”
Monica had started out as a cocktail waitress, and that was still her cover in case Rossetti’s wife (or the attorney Mr. Rossetti’s wife might someday hire) got nosy.
“I understand you’re looking for Mr. Rossetti.”
“Yes.”
“He’s supposed to be back here in an hour or so.”
“You’ve spoken with him lately?”
“About twenty minutes ago.”
Louella sighed. At least he hadn’t mysteriously vanished or been killed, which was always possible with his type. “I’ve been leaving messages everywhere.”
“He did say he was working with you on something pretty big.”
“Did he say how it was going?”
“I gather it was going all right.”
“You’re very sweet, Monica. You’ll have Mr. Rossetti call me?”
“Of course. As soon as he comes in.”
After hanging up, she stared at the phone, thought of calling Gibbons to give him a status report.
No. Let the bastard sweat a little more.
The irony did not escape Marilyn. She was now in a mental hospital (Payne Whitney Psychiatric Hospital in New York) at about the same age her mother had been when committed for the first time.
She had had an affair with Yves Montand during the filming of Let’s Make Love, in 1959.
Marilyn felt sure that the affair was blossoming into a real relationship and would lead to marriage, that Montand would divorce his wife and marry her.
But then, one day, she heard an astonishing thing on the radio. Yves Montand was saying to a gossip columnist, “I want to stop these rumors about Marilyn Monroe and me. I have a wife and family. Marilyn is spreading these rumors, not me. She’s mentally ill, and I want nothing to do with her.”
Marilyn lost the next six days in a fog of prescription drugs and alcohol. Her situation was not helped by the fact that every time she turned on the TV or radio, there was Yves saying he was happily married, and that Marilyn was just some kind of “pain freak” so strung out she “frightened” him. Not enough for him simply to dump her and dash her dreams of marriage; like DiMaggio, he now wanted to destroy her.
When her maid found her, Marilyn was crawling around naked on her bedroom floor. She had fouled herself and her pale body was streaked with feces.
She acted completely insane, calling out for Stanley Gifford, the man who had never admitted that he was her father; and her first husband, James Dougherty, the big Irishman who had always treated her so lovingly.
Her maid got Marilyn cleaned up and phoned her doctor.
Melanie
Laura was alive.
By the time Melanie returned to the bedroom after talking to Mr. Hoover, Laura was sitting up in bed. The ropes Melanie had stripped from her lay like dead snakes on the floor.
“You really had me scared for a minute,” Melanie said, coming through the door.
“Was that my mom on the phone?”
“No, honey, it wasn’t.”
“Will you call her?”
“Your dad’s going to call me.”
“When?”
“I’m not sure just when.” Melanie paused.
“How’s your head, Laura?”
“Hurts. How come you took me here, anyway?”
“I’ll see if I can find some aspirin for you.”
“How come you took me from school?”
“I thought we could be friends.”
“Couldn’t I just talk to my mom or my dad?”
“Laura, just relax and everything will be all right. I promise.”
Melanie knelt down next to Laura and daubed at the girl’s forehead with a damp cloth but, without any warning, Laura sprang from the bed and was racing for the living room, slamming the bedroom door behind her.
Melanie walked out and looked in the living room.
Where had Laura gone? Outside?
She opened the front door and looked out.
Laura was nowhere to be seen.
Then she heard a faint, brief, shuffling sound behind her.
As she turned, she smiled.
Laura was still in the house. She was in the closet.
Melanie went to the sofa and took a fresh silencer from her purse and affixed it to the Luger.
“Laura?”
No response.
“We’re going to have some fun, Laura. I’m going to start shooting bullets into the closet. I’ve only got six of them but I’ll bet I can hit you at least once. Even though I can’t see you.”
No response.
“Are you ready, Laura? On the count of three I’m going to start firing. One.”
She raised the Luger and sighted it downward slightly, right where a little girl would be if she were sitting on the floor, then raised it slightly to aim above. She wanted to scare her, not kill her.
“Two.”
She steadied her hand.
“Three.”
She fired.
Laura’s scream filled the house.
Mayhew
Ordinarily, the first thing bank vice president Hugh Murchison did was put out a hand and offer a hearty cliche. But not today.
He waved Mayhew into his office.
“Shut the door, Del.”
A small leather valise sat in the middle of the desk.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Murchison said, grimly.
“Good job,” Mayhew said, reaching for the valise.
A strong hand clamped his wrist. “It’s not that easy, Del.”
“I really don’t want your hand on me.”
Without loosening his grip, Murchison said, “Then tell me what’s going on.”
“I can’t.”
Murchison sighed and removed his hand. Leaning back in his chair, he lit himself a Winston. He inhaled a deep drag and exhaled it slowly toward the ceiling.
“Del, you deal in fantasy, I deal in reality.”
“I don’t have time for speeches.”
“I’ve got a board of directors. I can’t just make a quarter million dollar cash withdrawal without telling them something.” He leaned forward. “Has one of your stars been kidnapped?”
“No.”
“Is one of them being blackmailed?”
“No.”
“Goddammit, Del, we have to cut the bullshit here.”
“Hugh, I’m a loyal customer who keeps a big balance on hand for the studio. Now I need a personal favor and I deserve it. If you want my house for collateral, I’ll be happy to put it up.”
Murchison took another drag on his cigarette. The collar of his blue button-down shirt showed dark signs of sweat.
Del Mayhew was indeed a valued customer. He had also set Murchison up with several beautiful young women he said were contract players at the studio. Actually, they’d been expensive call girls but they’d loved the fantasy that they were “starlets” and Murchison had loved it even more.
“Why the hell do you need this much cash?”
“Call it an opportunity.”
“A business opportunity?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“When a customer withdraws this much cash, I’m supposed to inform the police and the FBI.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”
Murchison stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“You owe me one,” Murchison said.
Mayhew got to his feet, hefting the case full of cash, and started toward the door.
“Right, Hugh,” Mayhew said. “A big one.”
Sara
She could scarcely believe it.
Lying on Michael’s lap was a manilla envelope, inside which were the tapes that were going to free Laura.
As they were backing out of Curtis Simmons’ winding driveway, Michael said, “It’s over now, Sara. Everything will be fine.”
He looked pale and anxious, and she supposed she looked as bad. “I guess I’m not as sure as you. I need Laura in my arms before I’ll feel right again.”
He steered toward the gates.
“It’s nice being with you again, Michael — even under these circumstances.”
He smiled at her. “I feel the same way.”
When he reached the gates, he waited for a break in the traffic.
“You’re a good man, Michael,” she said.
“Not good enough. Not after the way I’ve treated you and Laura.”
Suddenly the car sank — first one side and then the other. The tires—
David Lenihan’s face appeared at Michael’s window. He was closing the blade of a pocket knife.
He had punctured the tires.
He leveled a pistol at Michael. “Roll down the window, Mr. Drury.” The gun had a fat silencer on its barrel.
“Sonofabitch,” Michael muttered. His gun was still in the glove compartment.
Michael rolled the window down.
Lenihan leaned in. “I’ve been following you most of the day, Mrs. Drury. I knew you’d eventually lead me to what I’m looking for. Give me the tapes.”
“No,” Michael said. “Our little girl is being held hostage for them.”
Lenihan stared icily. “I have some appreciation for what you’re going through. But I have to take the tapes. I’m sorry.”
As before, Sara heard the curious sorrow in the man’s voice. But his manner was absolutely firm, cold, scary.
He put the tip of the gun to Michael’s head. Sara felt grief, rage, despair.
She handed the manilla envelope across the car to Lenihan.
Washington, D.C
Hoover
One night long ago, when he had been reading an inspiring history of the United States, Hoover asked the chief of Capitol Police, Captain Leonard H. Ballard, if he could tour the Senate building late at night by himself. If any senators were present, they would curse him or brownnose him, depending on their politics. They would spoil his visit.
“Well, you won’t actually be alone, Mr. Hoover. I’ve got ninety men assigned to night patrol. But nobody will bother you except for the ghosts — and all they do is give speeches.” Ballard had laughed heartily.
And so on a rainy Tuesday evening, Hoover had toured the building and let himself be suffused with its history, from the quiet dignity of the Rotunda to the stillness of the Capitol Prayer Room to the eerie echoes of the Senate Chamber with its wooden desks and ceremonial snuff boxes and the spittoons that a visiting author named Charles Dickens found so repellent.
He had walked through some of the underground chambers built in the last century, and heard the ghosts that Captain Ballard had warned him of.
The ghosts had spoken to him.
They had told him that for most people, death meant the indignity of extinction. Yet for a few there was a life afterward — for those who had been strong or cunning enough to make their mark on this great nation’s history.
Walk the halls and look at the faces in the portraits and sculpture. Make note of the eyes. They tell you of a special need to be remembered, and that went for somebody as dynamic as Daniel Webster and as self-effacing as that little bastard Harry Truman.
Make your mark. Avoid utter extinction. Be remembered.
But Clyde was right, Hoover thought now. He’d screwed it up. Putting Melanie on the job. My God, he must have been crazy...
The phone interrupted his memories.
“Yes?”
“It’s Clyde. Edgar, I realize that you’re still angry, but—”
“There’s something I need to tell you, Clyde.”
“You got ahold of her?”
“Yes.”
“How’d it go?”
“Not well. She wants to go through with it. She hung up on me, Clyde.”
“Oh God,” Clyde Tolson said. “Oh God.”
Melanie
“Laura? Laura!”
Still nothing.
“Laura! Laura, you answer me right this minute!”
Silence again. And the drifting acrid smell of gunsmoke. She’d pumped four bullets into the door.
“Laura, if you don’t say something I’m going to start shooting again.”
Silence.
She could go right in there and pull her out, of course, but that would be missing the point. She wanted Laura to come out on her own. To submit, show that she was a good little girl.
Silence.
Melanie groaned in frustration. She took aim.
“Last chance, Laura. All right?”
She squeezed off more shots. The air was raw with gun smoke. She was careful to keep her shot high. Didn’t want to hit Laura. Her gun was finally empty.
She listened carefully, wanting to hear a whimper of submission, wanting Laura to yield to her.
But nothing.
Then she saw the puddle of red blood spreading from beneath the door.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh good Lord, no.”
Hoover
Every once in a while, even though he knew it was a sin, J. Edgar Hoover went into his private bathroom and emptied out his prostate gland.
Just doing what his doctor told him to. Keep that prostate of yours cleaned out, Edgar.
Edgar hoped The Man Upstairs understood that he was just following doctor’s orders.
Usually, he thought of Darla, the girl he’d loved when they were in sixth grade.
Down the years, the FBI had confiscated lots of hardcore porn, thus Hoover had access to raunchy stuff. He’d come in here and spread a few of the photos out on the edge of the sink, bare breasts and exposed vaginas, but it wouldn’t work. To Edgar, they were just sinful women who should be ashamed of themselves.
Images of Darla always helped him get his prostate cleaned out. But now it wasn’t working.
He knew the problem. He couldn’t stop worrying about the tapes Melanie was after and all the risks involved. How could he empty out his prostate when he had that weighing on his mind?
Try to look on the bright side of it, he finally said to himself. Suppose she calls and says, “I’ve got them, Edgar.” Boy, would he have cause for celebrating then. He wouldn’t have any trouble cleaning out his prostate if that happened.
With a reluctant sigh, he gave up. Zipping his pants, he turned out the light and left the bathroom.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги