Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes (28 page)

I went up to the house, range the bell. No one home. As I turned away, I spotted a neighbor picking up the evening paper from her front steps and called out, “Does Enrique Chavez live here?”

“Father or son?”

“Son.”

“Yeah, he's still there. The old man took off with a bimbo six months ago.”

“Thanks.” I went back to my MG to wait.

An hour passed. The fog spread farther inland, slipping over the hills behind me and riding along their contours. Lights came on in the nearby houses: even though it was daylight saving time, we'd have an early evening. The Chavez house stayed dark.

I stared through the mist dotting my windshield. The house was set in a small hollow, and the fog lay strangely still there, as it had at Seacliff the night Wingfield and I made our pilgrimage. As it might have on the night Cordy McKittridge had died . . .

I didn't want to think about that night. I pushed the images aside. They came on steadily in spite of my efforts. I said aloud, “God, what's wrong with you?”

I hadn't slept well in days, but by now my weariness felt like an intrinsic part of me, something I thought about no more than the blood coursing through my veins and arteries. Deep down, I was furious with myself for having become so involved—no, face it, obsessed—with long-ago events that I could neither prevent nor change. Furious, too, with present-day events that told me the past was not ad dead as I'd like it to be. But my rage was curiously blunted; on the raw-nerve level where I was operating. I felt beyond it all, simply too tired to expend my energies on nonproductive emotion.

Full dark now, and still no one home at the Chavez house. Too much to do this evening to wait it out. I drove over to Bell Market on Twenty-fourth Street and used the pay phone to check in with All Souls.

Ted answered, still on duty at twenty to seven. “Louise Wingfield called,” he said. “The former owner of the Unspeakable is Jed Mooney. There's a number where you can reach him.” He read it off, then asked, “What is that—one of those rock groups that puke on stage?”

“Just a defunct coffeehouse. Anything else?”

“No. Jack is upstairs, in conference with Judy. He said if you checked in, I should tell you to come by here at eight for a strategy session.”

“Tell him, I'll try.”

I hung up and placed a call to Jed Mooney. He said he'd be happy to talk with me about “the last good decade,” and gave me an address on Thirty-first Avenue in the Outer Richmond.

On the way back to my car, I wondered what kind of person would refer to the tacky, conformist fifties in such a manner.

A leftover member of the Beat Generation—that's what kind of person. I knew plenty of die-hard hippie; they were everywhere, living in throwback communes in the hills or going about perfectly ordinary pursuits, like my mailman. But I'd never before met a leftover Beat.

Jed Mooney was in his sixties, tall, very thin, and wearing the uniform of another day: black jeans, black sweater, goatee, and crew cut. From outside, his stucco house looked the same as the others on the block, but its interior resembled what I imagined his coffeehouse had been like. The living room walls were plastered with blown-up photographs of Ginsberg and Kerouac and Ferlinghetti; a folk singer with an odd nasal voice droned on the stereo. Mooney had lit a candle in a wax-encrusted Chianti bottle against the encroaching dark. He invited me to pull up a cushion to a low table and sat opposite me, hands clasped on its teakwood surface. “You said you want to talk about the Unspeakable.”

“Yes, I understand you owned it from—”

“‘Fifty-two to ‘sixty-six when, regrettably, declining interest forced me to close.”

“This was a Beat hangout?”

“In its latter stages. Early on, we catered to a more political clientele—socialists, anarchists, Communists. The repressive climate of the times either sent them underground or forced them to mend their ways, so to speak, and then we attracted a livelier crowd. I preferred them, as you can see.” He gestured around at Allen, Jack and Lawrence.

“A wonderful era,” he added. “I suppose you're too young to remember it.”

“What I remember of the fifties is more along the lines of Hula Hoops and cars with big tall fins.”

Mooney snorted. “Yes, that's what the fifties are usually remembered for. And the sixties—everyone identifies them with the hippie, not his more intelligent predecessor. The brief Beat era” –his eyes glistened in the candlelight—”what a joyous time!”

“I thought Beat meant down-and-out.”

Mooney looked sternly down his rather long nose at me. “Young woman, you're sadly misinformed. As Kerouac once said, ‘Beat means beatitude, not beat up.'” He moved his gaze reverently to the writer's photograph; if he'd been standing he would have genuflected. “The Beats felt everything,
dug
everything. They were religious, they looked everywhere for God.”

He was right: I had been misinformed about that short but historic movement, and I would have liked to learn more, but my time was limited. “Actually, Mr. Mooney,” I said, “it's our earlier clientele I'd like to talk about. Specifically, a woman named Melissa Cardinal and her stepbrother, Roger Woods. They may have frequented your coffeehouse in the early fifties, before ‘fifty-six, anyway.”

Mooney pursed his lips; after a moment he nodded. “I remember them. Roger Woods was an interesting man. He had a good deal of training in political science, had worked toward the Ph.D. somewhere. Then he became disillusioned, dropped out. I believe something had happened to his father, and it made him bitter and angry toward society.”

“And Melissa?”

“She was less interesting. An airline stewardess. It was said she did a little courier work on the side—documents, that sort of thing. But in hindsight—we were all very romantic then, Melissa may have started the rumors herself to avoid being typed as a mere waitress-in-the-sky.”

“Are you saying that she and her brother were Communist party members?”

“Roger was, had been for years. I'm not sure about Melissa. And Roger was not a member in good standing. The Party kept a low profile, especially after the conviction of eleven of their leaders in forty-nine on charges of violating the Smith Act. Roger was too angry, too vocal. He openly advocated the violent overthrow of the government. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Party members who killed him.”

“
Killed
him?”

“That's what we heard. Summer of ‘fifty-six, I believe. In Seattle. They said he was shot to death on the docks. Some claimed he was attempting to recruit longshoremen for the Party; others claimed he was trying to escape to Russia.”

“Did Melissa confirm any of this?”

“She wouldn't discuss Roger. Finally, about a year later, she stopped coming around.”

“What about a young woman names Cordy McKittridge? Did she ever come to the Unspeakable with Melissa?”

Mooney's eye widened. “So that's what this is about—the murdered debutante. Yes, she was a friend of the Cardinal girl, and for a while she came often. But that stopped in the spring of ‘fifty-five, long before she was killed.

“Did she always come with Melissa, or with a man?”

“Wherever those two girls went, there also went a crowd of men.”

“But you don't remember anyone in particular?”

“There was a friend of Roger Woods, but he struck me as a dabbler, a hanger-on.” He paused, “Sorry, I don't recall his name.”

“Can you describe him.”

“No, I can't. When a man stood next to Cordy McKittride, you scarcely noticed him, except perhaps to envy him. She was beautiful and warm. Fresh as a spring rainstorm, soft as the down . . .” He broke off, smiling ruefully. “As you can see, Ms. McCone, I'm a poet—and an exceedingly bad one.”

“You remember Cordy so vividly,” I said, ignoring the invitation to comment on his similes.

“Some individuals have that effect. My memories of Cordy are especially strong. For me she'll forever be caught in candlelight—young, beautiful, and perfect.”

Lis Benedict had said something like that in her suicide note, about Cordy being forever frozen in Vincent's emotions. “You sound as if you cared for her.”

He turned the full force of his melancholy smile on me. “Very much, but she never knew. Cordelia McKittridge would never have returned the feeling—not to a man like me. She was special and I, alas, am not.”

I sensed he had enough wistful self-knowledge to see through any comforting platitude I might offer, so I asked a question instead. “The coffeehouse—why did you call it the Unspeakable?”

Again a smile came, trembled, and extinguished itself. He said, “I thought it would negate the unspeakable—my loneliness. It didn't. Nothing ever has.”

Jed Mooney insisted on giving me coffee—a bitter Turkish blend that would eat at my stomach lining all evening—and I didn't have the heart to refuse. For twenty minutes he spoke of the days when the Unspeakable was a mecca for the hipster; of poetry readings, improvisational jazz; of drugs, sex and absurdity. I listened distractedly, my thoughts fixed half a decade earlier than that, toying with the interrelationships among a debutante, an airline hostess, a faceless man, and a Communist who advocated the violent overthrow of a government. By the time I was able to take my leave of Mooney, it was well after eight, and the fog wrapped the city in a smothering embrace.

I was missing Jack's strategy session; by now he'd be furious with me. But I had nothing new to offer—yet. Perhaps tomorrow, after I'd read the original police file on the murder. That would mean another late night, but given the way I felt, I wasn't going to sleep much in any case.

What now? I could call Adah Josyln, see if she'd heard form either NCIC or CJIS about Roger Woods. But it was much too soon for that, and a call would prompt her to ask about my day's activities—something I didn't care to rehash at the moment. I supposed I could run by Enrique Chavez's house again, stake it out until he returned, but that didn't feel right either. I was restless, primed for action. My earlier exhaustion was now pushed far below my level of awareness.

I stood next to my car, blinded by the mist, feeling the pull. Tried to resist, but couldn't. Gave in to it.

Seacliff was only a dozen or so blocks away. I got into the MG and headed west.

The driveway of the Institute's former home curled away from me under its overhanging cypresses. Clotted mist hung heavy and oddly still in their branches. Foghorns groaned and howled up by the Gate, and the cold air smelled of the wild open sea. I stood at the foot of the drive, wondering about the security here.

The property seemed as deserted as it had on the night Wingfield and I came out. If the owners were having it patrolled, the guard's rounds would probably be cursory and very intermittent; police patrols were frequent in Seacliff and besides, the location of the house—on a street with no immediate outlet, dead up against the National Recreation Area—made the prospect of vandalism a slim one.

I started stealthily up the drive, walking to one side of the gravel, my footsteps scarcely audible. The dry leaves of a nearby stand of eucalyptus rattled overhead. As I rounded the curve, I saw the house—tall, massive, black as the grave beyond the security lights. Nothing moved here, not even birds in the ivy.

So this was how it had been that June night thirty-six years before. In the dark, through the mist, a killer had waited as I did now.

I skirted the house, glancing briefly at its third-story dormer windows, wondering at which one Judy had stood in fear of the thing that moved in the dark below. I believed her fragmented memories—no exaggeration there. She'd heard someone, seen something. Perhaps witnessed an act so terrible that she'd unconsciously willed herself to forget it.

Beyond the house was a slate-floored terrace, walled at the cliff's edge. I crossed it, leaned over the wall, bracing myself on the palms of my hands. Surf roiled against jagged rocks below; to my right, where the crescent of China Beach and the towers of the Golden Gate were, I saw only mist. I turned away and started waling toward the dovecote.

Didn't matter that it was no longer there. Didn't matter that I wasn't sure of the exact location. I kept going. The ground sloped gradually at first, then leveled off. Some fifty feet beyond that, it dropped steeply—a rocky tumble covered with tenacious Monterey pines—all the way to the sea. Somewhere on this flat expanse had been—

My foot slammed up against stone, pain shooting through the toes in spite of the protection of my athletic shoe. I cursed, hopped a little, the squatted and felt around with my hands. A curving brick foundation. I'd found the place where Cordy had died.

For a moment I stood, my eyes closed. Listened to the crash of waves, sough of branches, lament of foghorns. Images intruded, the nightmare pictures of my dreams. I opened my eyes again, shook my head. What was I
doing
here?

Ignoring my own question, I knelt beside the foundation. Touched it again, gently. Thought of Cordy. Thought of them all: Lis and Vincent Benedict, their young daughter, Judy. Louise Wingfield, Russell and Leonard Eyestone, Melissa Cardinal, Joseph Stameroff. And Roger Woods, even though he had probably never come here. And Roger's father, Larry, who had defied the forces of conservatism and breathed his last in an L.A. charity ward. . .

And again I thought of Cordy.

So much blood. So much pain. What would drive a person to inflict that much pain? The usual—fear, rage, even hatred—weren't enough to explain it. Insanity? Sheer random acting out of psychosis? That might be so today, but in the fifties? Well, maybe; there have always been monsters. But what kind of monster would inflict such pain, commit such desecration, and then gently lay the victim out, closing either eye with a penny?