Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes (19 page)

“Hah!” She folded her arms, cloaking herself in tattered dignity. “Not anymore, we're not. Bastard ran out on me Friday night, took our emergency money and stuck me with the rent.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“To his relatives.”

“Where?”

“National City? Chula Vista? One of them damn placed between San Deigo and the border.” She made a gesture of dismissal. “You know what I say to him? I say good riddance. Tony promises and promises, but he sure don't deliver.”

“What did he promise?”

“The ring, the wedding chapel in Reno, two nights at Circus Circus. We were gonna play the slots, blackjack, win big. What a bunch of shit! All I got was an empty stash box and the rent coming due.”

“You don't think he's coming back?”

“He better not. But he won't anyway, not after the beating he took. He'll hole up forever.”

“What beating? When?”

Linda Bautista regarding me silently, then stretch out her hand for money, fingers flickering in a grotesque imitation of her runaway lover. I sighed, reached into my bag, and handed her a ten.

“What happened,” she began, stuffing the bill into the V of her pink blouse, “was Tony had this scheme. Week before last he got some bucks off this guy who'd been hired to do somebody.”

“You mean commit a murder?”

“Jesus, no!” Linda's hand flew to her breast. “Nothing like that! Just cause some trouble, you know?”

“Go on.”

“Well, anyway, then around the middle of last week Tony found out something else had gone down—something bigger. So he decided to hit the guy again. And the guy beat the crap out of him.”

“This guy—who hired him?”

“I don't know. Tony said it was somebody big, but Tony's just a lot of talk and no action. He was supposed to get all this money the second time so we could go off to Reno, and now look at me. I got nineteen bucks in the bank and the rent coming due, and I wouldn't marry him if he came crawling back and kissed my ass.”

Behind the defiance in her eyes I could see real disappointment. The dreams that Tony Nueva had shattered weren't big dreams, but they were likely to be the best Linda Bautista would ever have. Fool that I am, I took another ten from my bag and handed it to her along with one of my cards. “Linda, this is an advance. If you hear from Tony, find out where he is and let me know. Or if you remember anything else he said about the guy he was trying to get the money from, give me a call.”

She looked down at the card and bill in her hand, then closed her fingers tightly over them. “You're not gonna hurt him or anything?”

“No. I just need to ask him some questions.”

“That's good. Tony's an asshole, but I kind of . . . “ For a moment her lower lip trembled. She got it under control, added, “It's just that I thought he was different—you know? But he turned out like all the rest. I don't get it. I mean, look at me. What's
wrong
with me?”

Her hands swept out and down, from the glistening fake curls to the too-bright skirt and blouse hugging her too-plump frame to her cheap pink plastic heels. She was all tricked up—a victim of the myth that illusion is necessary to entice and entrap the male. Women all start out believing the myth to one degree or another, and too many of us never figure out that real women don't trade in illusion—any more than real men buy into it.

After I left Linda Bautista, I checked in at All Souls and told Jack about my conversation with Bart Wallace and Adah Joslyn. He felt confident that Judy would want to go ahead with preparations for the mock trial, and promised to set up a meeting with her for me. Next I went to my office and buzzed Rae on the intercom. She came upstairs, and we spent half an hour reviewing her caseload. As she got up to leave, I remembered what Jack had said last week about her prospects of a diamond ring from Willie Whelan. No such trinket shone on her left hand.

“Uh, how's Willie?” I asked.

Rae's round face became pinched. “I'd rather not talk about him.”

“What happened?”

“I just can't talk about it now, okay?” Her mouth twitched in anger, and she whirled and rushed out the door.

Another he-done-me-wrong story, I thought. And more hard times ahead for Rae.

I repacked my briefcase and went down to the foyer. Ted wasn't at his desk, but one of the painters sat on its edge, grabbing the phone. I gave him a reproving look as I moved the tag on my message box so Ted would know I was out; the painter merely grinned vacuously.

Earlier I'd noticed that the façade of the building finally looked more or less as intended, but along the sides the color still resembled the stuff of baby diapers. If only, I thought, Hank hadn't been persuaded to buy the paint at discount from the failing store of one of Larry Koslowski's clients. If only the client hadn't recommended his second cousin, the painting contractor. If only All Souls wasn't blundering, rather than forthrightly striding, into the twenty-first century . . . .

One of the advantages I enjoyed in college was being a demonic researcher. While others were only deciding on the subjects of their term papers, I could be found in a carrel in the library, heavy tomes stacked around me as I relentlessly filled index cards with obscure facts and figures. I'd spend whole weekends in the shadow world of the microfilm room digesting useless details that would have entirely escaped a less obsessive individual, and I would emerge curiously refreshed and satisfied. But now that research was more than a pleasant intellectual exercise, I chafed at the enforced inactivity. And when I surfaced red-eyed and irritable from the main branch of the public library into the five o'clock bustle of Civic Center Plaza, I felt like one of the Mole People.

What I'd gleaned during the past few hours, however, was highly informative. Think tanks, for instance: they came into widely divergent varieties, from small private research-and-development firms, to nonprofit institutions generally affiliated with universities, to elite entities like Rand and the Institute for North American Studies, which were closely tied to the federal government. The main factor they held in common, as far as I could tell, was the generation of what insiders referred to as “paper alchemy”—written studies and reports that made evaluations, suggested policies and long-range plans, promulgated theories, or described techniques. It wasn't uncommon for the entire yearly output of a think tank holding a hundred million dollars' worth of contacts to fit into a single briefcase.

The R&D industry is a vague one—difficult to quantify or describe. It employs some of the most intelligent and powerful people in this country, and the breadth and depth of its influence on our government can only be guessed at. And because of this influence, particularly upon the upper echelons of the Department of Defense and State, it is an industry with very scary potential.

Top secret security clearances, unmarked buildings with uniformed guards on every door, hush-hush conferences with high government officials, for-your-eyes-only reports, quick-response work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff—there is enough cloak-and-dagger stuff going on in the think tank industry to satisfy even the most devoted fan of spy fiction. And when you throw in dangerous variables—alcoholism, megalomania, kinky sex, psychological quirks, dubious loyalties—you come up with a horrifying scenario worthy of an apocalyptic film.

In light of what I knew of the Institute for North American Studies, thinking about that scenario virtually made me shudder.

But the stuff of bad dreams wasn't all my research had revealed. I'd also checked into the types of contracts the Institute had held at the time of Cordy McKittridge's murder: cold war containment; public support for the use of atomic weapons in limited warfare; “biological alteration” for military purposes; procedures for reestablishing the federal government after a global nuclear war. John Foster Dulles's visit to San Francisco was occasioned by the State Department's announcement of the award of a multimillion dollar contract to the Institute for a major study on the domestic security threat within the United States.

Which told me that the Institute had been enlisted in the later stages of the Communist witch-hunt of the fifties. Had to some degree abetted the work begun by the likes of Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—a ruthless probe into the private affairs of citizens that, in my opinion had destroyed as many innocent lives as the Spanish Inquisition.

I wondered how Adah Joslyn, formerly of Red Hill, offspring of an alliance between a Socialist and a Marxist, would react to that information.

I'd also checked the local newspaper coverage of both the Dulles banquet and the McKittridge murder. The photographs of Cordy—lovely, blond, patrician—left me uneasy; again I felt the odd pull of the case; it was as if I'd come across the picture of a long-dead friend. The coverage of her murder had been as all-out and lurid as I'd expected. In contrast, the Dulles banquet and an exclusive reception afterward for state and local dignitaries had been closed to the press. Aside from photographs showing the Dulles entourage arriving at St. Francis Hotel where the reception had been held, the only pictures from the event were “official” shots by the Institute's photographer, Roy Loomis. In one of those, Dulles posed with both Eyestones, Russell and Leonard. The three men were dressed nearly alike, in conservatively styled formal wear, but there the resemblance stopped. Dulles was the pugnacious, bespectacled man I'd often seen in photographs. Russell Eyestone looked handsome, imposing, seemed to tower head and shoulders above his son, in spite of them being of a size. Leonard looked shrunken, anemic; the expression he put on for the camera seemed vaguely haunted, as if he dearly wanted to escape the impressive shadow of his father.

Before I left the library, I'd called Jack and learned that Judy wanted to meet with me at six at Artists' Showcase, the theater where she staged her productions. I retrieved my car from the plaza garage and inched along busy Golden Gate Avenue toward Market.

The area where Golden Gate and Taylor intersect with Market is undergoing a transition, but of what sort it's hard to say. There are theaters and restaurants catering to playgoers, hotels both upscale and down. Children of the Southeast Asian refugees who have settled in the Tenderloin skateboard on the sidewalks; hookers jealously guard their turf; and of course there are the crazies.

One of them, a black woman with a wild mane of purple hair and needle tracks on her thin arms, stood on the corner not far from where I'd parked, haranguing the passing cards. Something to do with them giving their money to her, since Jesus didn't need it anyway. As I walked up the block toward the theater, I passed a pair of hookers leaning against the façade of a defunct sandwich shop. One said, “Lunatic Lady's really on a roll tonight,” and the other replied, “Yeah, she don't watch it,
I
gonna get on a roll, and then she wish she talked nicer ‘bout Jesus.”

I reached the theater and moved toward its front entrance, but stopped abruptly, my attention arrested by a woman walking up the block from Market. A tall woman with light fine-spun hair, wrapped in a long cape whose folds billowed in the wind. For a moment I caught my breath, seized by the irrational notion that it was Lis Benedict. Then Judy saw me and waved. I relaxed, but a vague uneasiness stayed with me.

As she came up to me, Judy saw how I was looking at the cape and smiled. “Yes, it's Lis's. I wanted something to remember her by, and I've always liked this.” She led me to the entrance of the theater and tapped on one of the glass doors for a security guard to admit us.

The lobby was dim and cold; stale cigarette smoke lay over a base of mustiness. The guard flicked switches on a light panel before he went away, and a huge chandelier blazed crystal and gilt. Its rays revealed tired red carpet and hangings, more gilt and crystal, walls of marbleized mirrors. The theater, I thought, had not been upgraded since Judy took over the lease.

She was looking around, mouth pulled down critically, as if seeing it through my eyes. Motioning at an old-fashioned round sofa with tufted red upholstery, she said, “Let's talk here. My office is a mess since I've been living in it.”

We sat, her black cape ruffling around her like a nesting bird's feathers.

“Are you planning to move back to your house eventually?” I asked.

“I don't know. Right now I think it might be better to sell it.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't attend the funeral.” It had been held on Tuesday, when I was still high in the Great Whites.

“That's okay. It was small, the way Lis would have wanted it—except for the press, of course.”

The security guard emerged from the main part of the theater, and for a moment the open door emitted a babble of voices and the sound of hammering.

“Pandemonium as usual back there,” Judy said.

I hadn't noticed what was on the marquee, so I asked, “Is
Deadfall
still running?” It was a mystery play that I wanted to see; Jack had offered comps for opening night, but I'd had another engagement.

“Only for another week. Then I've booked a psychological drama that's been something of a runaway success off-Broadway.”

“Obviously you're doing well here.”

“Yes, I am. Sometimes it almost makes up for not succeeding as an actress, but . . . I go backstage, they're all rushing around the tension crackles. I can feel it, but I'm no longer a part of it.” She sighed.

“You
did
have a long acting career, though.”

“If you can call what I did acting. I just never got any breaks. I keep thinking that if I'd had the right material, been able to give one really great performance, it would have made all the difference. But maybe not.” She looked pensive for a moment, then abruptly switched the subject. “Sharon, I want to apologize for my father's behavior last week. Jack told me he went to your house and bullied you. He . . . he means well, but he can be so high-handed.”