Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes (37 page)

“You're quite the psychologist, McCone.”

I ignored the dig. “Did Eyestone admit to premeditation?”

“No. He claims Melissa told him that Cordy had an appointment with Vincent that night—Melissa didn't know that Lis actually wrote the letter. Eyestone found it odd, considering they were holding the banquet, so he asked Vincent about it, and Benedict said Cordy must be confused. Eyestone took advantage of the opportunity to leave the banquet early and go over there. Just to talk, she says. But sneaking out of the Blue Fox was tricky, and he'd have to think it out well in advance. Why the secrecy if he didn't plan to kill her?”

“Of course he did, but he'll never admit it. That way his attorney can build a heat-of-the-moment defense. Given how long ago the crime took place, he's likely to get off with a reasonably light sentence. As for Cardinal, there's no proof he killed her.”

“Oh, don't you worry. We'll get it.” Joslyn nodded safely. “You and I know Cardinal's been hitting him up for years, and somewhere in his bank records there has to be proof of that. My partner's a great one for building meticulous circumstantial cases. As to why he killed Melissa—as you suggested the other night, he probably found out she was planning to talk to you.”

I felt a stirring of guilt. “Indirectly, it's my fault one way of the other. I told Eyestone that I was going to persuade Melissa to attend the mock trial.”

Joslyn grunted. After a moment she said, “Well, you couldn't have known.”

“No.” But the guilt remained—always would.

We both fell silent, watching Allie, who was practically hanging upside down in the tree. After a moment I asked, “Did Eyestone say who put the fix in the D.A.'s office?”

“Old man Eyestone's political buddies. Leonard kept quiet until Benedict was charged with murder. Then he went to his father and confessed; he said he couldn't allow an innocent woman to go to the gas chamber.”

“So Russell Eyestone went to his political friends and arranged a deal. A prosecutor who could be bought would be assigned to the case—probably a public defender who could be bought too. Lis would be convicted, and the question of who killed Cordy would be settled. But Lis would not go to the gas chamber.”

Joslyn nodded. “Lis knew that; it was part of the deal they cut with her.”

“But why would she accept what she knew had to be a life sentence? That's bothered me from the first.”

“Felt as guilty as if she'd done it, I suppose. Probably thought she
deserved
life in prison.” Joslyn gave me a bright, mocking smile. “See? I'm a psychologist, too.”

I smiled back at her. “There's another reason: Lis had her daughter to think of. You can't tell me she didn't know how that ring came to be in her attic. In her suicide note she said, ‘you've always known, although I've never dared to ask.' That implies she knew Judy was on the scene. And Stameroff did say that he'd promised Lis to protect Judy against her memories of that night.”

Adah shuttered. “What kind of a kid would pick up a severed finger and . . . plus frame her own mother?”

I'd given that a good deal of thought, and there were quite a few things about Judy that I didn't intend to reveal to Joslyn. She'd find them out soon enough. “Well,” I said, “she really believed Lis killed Cordy. As far as Judy was concerned, her mother wrecked her life.”

“It was going to be wrecked anyway, when her parents divorced.”

“Kids don't think that way; they focus on one thing at a time. I'll bet it never occurred to her that Eyestone murdered Cory. When she saw him in the hall, she focused on him telling her mother and her.”

“I'm glad I don't intend to have kids,” Adah said.

“Melissa's cat is enough for you, huh?”

Damned if she didn't smile like a fond mother.

I turned my thoughts to the past again, to Judy's recollection of a night in late July of 1956, one day after the collision of the
Andrea Doria
and the
Stockholm.
Vincent Benedict came home and drank that night at the kitchen table until he passed out. Then he gave Judy over to the care of the Eyestones, who placed her in a foster home where the prosecuting attorney could have easy access to her. I asked, “Did Eyestone say whether Vincent Benedict knew what Lis had done?”

“He suspected, because of the coins, but at first he wanted to fight the charges anyway. Then Russell Eyestone laid it all out for him, presented him a done deal.”

“And that was the end of Vincent Benedict.”

“You know, Sharon, the whole thing disgusts me. Depresses me, too. What's the point of little people like me fighting for justice when the biggies like Russell Eyestone and his buddies can put the fix in and not be held accountable?”

I shrugged, “I don't know, but what're you going to do—give up?”

“Sometimes I want to.”

“Well, you can't; you don't have it in you. Me either.” I paused, remembering. “You know what Stameroff calls those biggies? ‘The people who count.' Implying, of course, that the rest of us don't count. But you know what else? He's wrong. He just doesn't get it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think that we allow ourselves not to count—by letting it get us down, by giving up. And I think we
can
count—if we get angry enough, brave enough, or maybe are just stupid enough to believe we can make a difference?”

Joslyn looked curiously at me. “You really believe that stuff?”

I shrugged again, “Like they say, everybody got to believe in something.”

On Monday morning before I left for the office, I did some persuasive phone work and finally spoke with Roger Woods at the nursing home in Cedar Rapids where he was a patient. Woods confirmed he'd become and FBI informant infiltrating Communist circles in San Francisco after the death of his father from what he referred to as “Dad's addiction to radical causes.” Melissa had never suspected; to the last she thought her stepbrother true to the cause.

Woods had infiltrated the Institute for North American Studies after he'd met Leonard at an American Communist party meeting, in order to investigate unconfirmed reports that others on the staff shared Leonard's political leanings. “The irony,” he told me, “is that I was about to give the Institute a clean bill of health and let Leonard off with a lecture when the McKittridge girl was murdered.”

After the murder, Woods's FBI contact asked him to relocate to the East Coast; the Bureau arranged for rumors of his death to be circulated among his former associates in San Francisco. For several years he worked as an informant in New Jersey; then he married and moved with his new wife to her home state of Iowa and raised wheat on a farm near Cedar Rapids until arthritis crippled him in the late eighties. Out of sentimentality he reestablished contact with his stepsister when he retired, but as he put it, “She wasn't one of our kind; she'd stayed a Commie sympathizer. And I didn't really like her.”

Woods was talking to me, he said, only out of patriotism. He wanted it known just how much harm the Commies did back then. As far as he was concerned, they were still up to plenty. This democratization of Russia was just a smoke screen.

I didn't bother to tell him that in my opinion, his kind had been the ones to wreak havoc in the fifties. Woods wouldn't have cared.

When I arrived at All Souls, I went directly to Jack's office. He knelt on the floor, rolling clothing up and stuffing it into his backpack. His rock-climbing gear lay nearby.

This was bad news. With Jack, rock climbing as much of a danger signal as heavy drinking was for some people. “Going on vacation?” I asked.

He glanced up, went on packing. “Yes.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“What's to talk about?”

“Judy paid Chavez to harass Liz and me, didn't she?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she's fuckin' crazy, that's why.”

But she wasn't crazy, and he knew it. Manipulative, yes. Jack had been dragging his feet on the case when the harassment began; it had made him angry and spurred him to action. With me, I suspected Judy's motivation had been slightly different: she wanted me to believe in a present-day danger so I'd press harder with my investigation.

“She was obsessed,” Jack added bitterly. “Totally obsessed with getting back at Stameroff for what he did to her and Lis. Just as she was obsessed with getting back with Lis for what she imagined Lis had done to her when she was a child.”

I had a certain feel for the motives behind Judy's actions, having become well acquainted with obsession during the past two weeks. The thought of living in a prolonged state of it was horrifying: being pulled toward something, driven relentlessly by forces you couldn't begin to comprehend . . .

But still it didn't justify what she'd done.

“Jack,” I said, “what about her performance out there the other night? When did it stop being a performance?”

“When you asked her if there had been anyone else at the house. Before that she was acting—damned well, too. She certainly had me fooled.” He rocked back on his heels, naked pain on his face. “Afterward she admitted everything to me. She's been seeing a shrink for years. The memories came back with the aid of hypnosis even before Lis got out of prison. All except that last. Up until then she had believed Lis murdered Cordy.”

“Do you think Judy would have shot Stameroff?”

“Now that she's in custody, she claims she only wanted to scare him. But, Jesus, Shar—you saw her, you heard her.” His eyes clouded; on some level he'd always be haunted by the memory. “I k
now
she would have blown Eyestone away,” he added. “She's . . .so full of hate.”

Hate. Wasn't that what this case had boiled down to? Intolerance and hate, breeding fear and violence. In the fifties we hated the Commies; in the sixties it was the hippie-drug fiend-protestors; in the seventies, fledgling feminists were vilified; the eighties saw backlash against liberals; and now in the nineties, our government was commissioning studies on how to control and use the religious right. Left, right, or smack in the middle—as a nation we don't discriminate in our hatreds . . .

Jack stood, hefted his backpack.

“How long will you be gone?”

“Till I feel sane again. Maybe sanity's all I can reasonably hope for in life.”

“Maybe it's all any of us can reasonably hope for.”

After he left, I sat on his sofa thinking for a while. Then I went back to my office.

Rae was waiting for me, lying on my chaise lounge looking more than a little blue. “You see Jack?” she asked.

I nodded. “You suspected about Judy being behind the harassment, didn't you?”

“Yeah. How'd you know?”

“Something you said that night we were at the Remedy, about the timing of the harassment being perfect.”

“Oh right. Will Jack be okay, do you think?”

That was what I'd been pondering as I'd sat on his sofa. “Maybe,” I said, “if he doesn't try to climb Half Dome.”

Rae wasn't in the mood for light comments, though. She merely stared moodily at the ceiling.

I sat down at my desk. “So how's by you today?”

“Oh . . . okay.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened between you and Willie? I heard a rumor that a diamond ring was in the offing.”

She sat up suddenly, eyes flashing. “Oh, you did? Well, you know what, Shar? Willie's about as romantic as a . . . toaster!”

“No ring?”

“Oh yeah, there was a ring. And flowers. Champagne, too. But you know what the asshole wanted before we could get married?”

Dumbfounded, I shook my head.

“A prenup, that's what!”

“A prenuptial agreement?”

“Yep. He claims that he created a monster in me when he taught me about credit, and if the marriage doesn't work out, he doesn't want me getting my hands on all his money!”

I told myself that if I laughed now I'd blow our friendship for life. With an effort I said seriously, “Hank tells me prenups are a fad since Donald and Ivana. Maybe Willie'll come to his senses.”

“Tough if he does. He knows what he can do with his prenup!” She got up and strode to the door, then turned, “Oh, that Adah Joslyn called while I was waiting for you. She wanted to let you know that Chavez is in custody and Tony Nueva was picked up on the drug charge at a wedding chapel in Reno.”

“Before or after the ceremony?”

“How the hell should I know? I hope it was before. Or, if not, that he didn't have time to get the woman to sign a prenup!”

After she'd left, I allowed myself to laugh. Rae's life often resembled the plot of a soap opera, but compared to Jack's her worst day was a bed of roses. ..

Roses. I stared at the wilted tangerine-colored blossom in the bud vase. Hy's latest tribute, delivered last Tuesday by long-standing arrangement with a nearby florist, while we were still high in the Great Whites. Tomorrow there would be another. On impulse I picked up the receiver and dialed the office of the Spaulding Foundation in the town of Vernon, near Tula Lake.

When I asked for Hy, Kate Malloy, his executive assistant, sounded strained. “He's not here, Sharon,” she said. “In fact, I was about to call you.”

Foreboding made my skin prickle. I thought of a small high-winged plane falling from the sky, of twisted and burning wreckage . . . “What's wrong?”

“Hy's disappeared.”

“What?”

“It looks deliberate. His house is closed up, and he paid his ranch hands two months in advance. Left instructions with his accountant to take care of bills as they come in. And his plane's been tied down at Oakland Airport since last Wednesday.”

Oakland? He'd told me he was going to refuel and fly directly on to San Diego. “You called General Aviation at Oakland?”