Silent Partner (38 page)

His column in that crass magazine was positively offensive. However..."

"However, in the end, expediency won out."

He twisted beard hairs, made, them crackle. "When I heard about his... research, I realized letting him in had been an error in judgment—but one impossible to undo without creating adverse publicity."

"So instead you made him department head."

He continued playing with his beard. Several brittle white hairs rained down on the desk.

"Back to the Ransom dissertation," I said. "How'd it get through departmental scrutiny?"

"Kruse came to me requesting that the experimental rule be waived for one of his students.

When he told me she planned to submit a case study, I immediately refused. He was persistent, pointed out her perfect academic record. Said she was an unusually skillful clinician—for what that's worth—and that the case she wanted to present was unique, had major research ramifications."

"How major?"

"Publishable in a major journal. Nevertheless, he failed to sway me. But he kept pressing, buttonholing me daily, coming into my office, interrupting my work in order to argue his case.

Finally, I relented."

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Finally. As in fill the coffers. I said, "When you read the dissertation, did you regret your decision?"

"I thought it was rubbish, but no different from any other clinical study. Psychology should have remained in the laboratory, true to its scientific roots, never been allowed to venture out into all that poorly defined treatment rubbish. Let the psychiatrists muck around in that kind of silliness."

"You had no idea it was autobiographical?"

"Of course not! How could I? I never met her, except once, at her oral exam."

"Must have been a tough exam. Kruse, you as his rubber stamp. And an outside member: Sandra Romansky. Remember her?"

"Not in the slightest. Do you know how many committees I sit on? Had I the smallest inkling of any impropriety, I would have put my foot down—you can count on that."

Reassuring.

He said, "I was only tangentially involved."

"How thoroughly did you read it?" I asked.

"Not thoroughly at all," he said, as if seizing on extenuating evidence. "Believe me, Delaware, I barely skimmed the blasted thing!"

I went down to the department office, told the secretary I was working with Professor Frazier, verified that the file was missing and called Long Island information to find the number of Forsythe College. Administration there confirmed that Sharon Jean Ransom had attended the school from 1972 through 1975. They'd never heard of Paul Peter Kruse.

I called my service for messages. Nothing from Olivia or Elmo Castelmaine. But Dr. Small and Detective Sturgis had phoned.

"The detective said don't call him, he'll get back to you," the operator told me.

She giggled. "Detective. You getting involved in something exciting, Dr. Delaware?"

"Hardly," I said. "Just the usual."

"Your usual's probably a major rush compared to

mine, Dr. Delaware. Have a nice day."

One forty-three. I waited seven minutes and called Ada Small, figuring to get her between patients. She picked up the line, said, "Alex, thanks for getting back so quickly. That young woman you referred, Carmen Seeber? She came for two sessions, then didn't show up for the third. I called her several times, finally managed to reach her at home, and tried to talk to her about it. But she was pretty defended, insisted she was fine, didn't need any more therapy."

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"She's fine, all right. Shacked up with a drug addict, probably giving him every penny she owns."

"How do you know that?"

"From the police."

"I see." Pause. "Well, thank you for the referral anyway. I'm sorry it didn't work out."

"I'm the one who should be apologizing. You did me the favor."

"That's all right, Alex."

I wanted to ask if Carmen had shed any light on D J. Rasmussen's death, but knew better than to try to breach confidentiality.

"I'll try calling her next week," she said, "but I'm not optimistic. You and I both know about the power of resistance."

I thought of Denise Burkhalter. "All we can do is try."

"True. Tell me, Alex, how are you doing?"

I answered too quickly: "Just dandy. Why?"

"If I'm out of line, please forgive me. But both times we've spoken recently, you've sounded...

tight. Tense. On full burn."

The phrase I'd used, in therapy, to describe the fast-track mind-set that overtook me during periods of stress. What Robin had always called hyperspace. And managed to soothe me out of...

"Just a little tired, Ada. I'm fine. Thanks for asking."

"I'm glad to hear that." Another pause. "If you ever do need to toss things around, you know I'm here for you."

"I do, Ada. Thanks and take care."

"You, too, Alex. Take good care of yourself."

I walked toward the north end of campus, stopping for a cup of vending-machine coffee before entering the research library.

Back to the Periodical Index. I found nothing on William Houck Vidal, other than business quotes prior to the Basket-Case Billionaire lawsuit. I backtracked and found a Time piece on the War Board Senate hearings, entitled "Hollywood Meets D.C. Amid Rumors of Scandal"—a piece I'd missed while culling Belding material.

Vidal had just made his first appearance before the committee and the magazine was trying to flesh out his background.

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A headshot photo showed him with fewer wrinkles, thick blond hair. A blinding smile—the good teeth Crotty had remembered. And wise-guy eyes. Vidal was described as a "socialite who'd parlayed shrewdness, connections and more than a soupc,on of charm into a lucrative motion picture consulting position." Hollywood sources suggested it was he who'd persuaded Leland Belding to enter the movie business.

Both men had attended Stanford. As a sophomore Vidal had served as the president of a men's club that Belding also belonged to. But their association was thought to have been casual: The future billionaire had shunned organizations, never attending a single club function.

Their working relationship was cemented in 1941: Vidal served as the "middleman" in a business deal between Belding and Blalock Industries, which supplied wartime steel to the Magna Corporation at a discount rate. Vidal introduced Leland Belding to Henry Abbot Blalock; he was perfectly positioned to do so because Blalock was his brother-in-law, married to Vidal's sister, the former Hope Estes Vidal.

The Vidals were described as the last descendants of an old, venerable family—Mayflower lineage but dwindled fortunes. Henry Blalock, London-born, son of a chimney sweep, had been admitted to the Blue Book set after his

1943 marriage to Hope; the Vidal name still dripped with social status. Time wondered if brother Billy's current problems with the Senate would change all that.

Billy and Hope, brother and sister. It explained Vidal's presence at the party, but not his relationship to Sharon. Not what they'd been talking about...

I searched for further mention of the Blalocks, found nothing on Hope, some business-related references to Henry A. His fortune had been made in steel, railroads, and real estate. Like Leland Belding, he owned it all, had never gone public. Unlike Belding, he'd stayed out of the headlines.

In 1953 he died, age fifty nine, of a stroke, while on safari in Kenya, leaving a grieving widow, the former Hope Estes Vidal. Contributions to the Heart Foundation in lieu of flowers...

No mention of offspring. What of the child Kruse had treated? Had the widow remarried? I kept thumbing the index, found a single item, dated six months after Henry Blalock's death: the sale of Blalock Industries to the Magna Corporation, for an unspecified sum, rumored to be a bargain. The decline of Blalock's holdings was noted and attributed to failure to adapt to changing realities, particularly the growing importance of cross-continental air shipping.

The implication was clear: Belding's planes had helped antiquate Blalock's trains. Then Magna had swooped down and made off with the pickings.

Though from the looks of Hope Blalock's lodgings, those pickings had been substantial. I wondered if brother Billy had played "middleman" again, seen to it that her interests were protected.

Another hour of thumbing brought nothing more. I thought of somewhere else to look, went down to the ground floor and asked the reference librarian if the stack holdings included social registers. She looked it up, told me the Los Angeles Blue Book was kept in Special Collections,
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which had closed for the day.

My thoughts slid down to the lower rungs of the social

ladder, another brother-sister story. I remained in the reference section, tried to find newspaper accounts of the Linda Lanier dope bust.

It was harder than I thought. Of all the local papers, only the Times was indexed, and that only from 1972. The New York Times index went back to 1851 but contained nothing on Linda Lanier.

I went to the newspaper stacks on the second floor— banks of drawers and rows of microfiche machines. Showed my faculty card, filled out forms, collected spools.

Ellston Crotty had dated the bust 1953. Assuming Linda Lanier had been Sharon's mother, she'd had to have been alive at the time of Sharon's birth—May 15— which narrowed it further. I spun my way through the spring of '53, starting with the Times and keeping the Herald, Mirror, and Daily News in reserve.

It took more than an hour to find the story. August 9. The Times, never one for crime stories, relegated it to the middle of Part One, but the other papers had given it front-page treatment, complete with purple prose, photographs of the slain "pushers" and the cops who'd killed them.

The articles jibed with Crotty's account, minus his cynicism. Linda Lanier/Eulalee Johnson and her brother, Cable Johnson, major "heroin traffickers" had fired at raiding Metro Narc detectives and been killed by return fire. In a single "lightning operation," Detectives Royal Hummel and Victor DeGranzfeld had put an end to one of the most predatory drug rings in L.A. history.

The detectives' photos showed them grinning and kneeling beside bundles of white powder.

Hummel was wide and beefy, in a light suit and wide-brimmed straw hat. I thought I detected a hint of Cyril Trapp in the hatchet jaw and narrow lips. DeGranzfeld was pear-shaped, mustachioed, and slit-eyed, and wore a chalk-striped double-breasted suit and dark Stetson. He looked ill-at-ease, as if smiling were an imposition.

I didn't have to study the picture of Linda Lanier/ Eulalee Johnson to recognize the blond bombshell I'd

watched seduce Dr. Donald Neurath. The photo was high-quality, a professional studio job—the kind of windswept, glossy three-quarter-face pose favored by would-be actresses for publicity portfolios.

Sharon's face, in a platinum wig.

Cable Johnson was memorialized in a county jail mug shot that showed him to be a mean-looking, poorly shaven loser with drooping eyes and a greasy duck's-ass hairdo. The eyes were lazy but managed to project a hard-edged scrap-for-survival brightness. Shrewdness rather than abstract intelligence. The kind who'd make out in the short term, get tripped up, over and over again, by an inflated sense of self and inability to delay gratification.

His criminal record was termed "extensive" and included arrests for extortion—trying to
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squeeze money out of some small-time East L.A. bookies—public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, larceny, and theft. A sad but petty litany, nothing that supported the papers' labeling of him and his sister as "major-league dope pushers, ruthless, sophisticated, but for their deaths, destined to flood the city with illegal narcotics."

Anonymous police sources were quoted claiming the Johnsons were associated with "Mexican mob elements." They'd grown up in the south Texas border town of Port Wallace, "a tough hamlet known to law enforcement officials as an entry point for brown heroin," had clearly moved to L.A. with intentions of pushing that substance to the schoolchildren of Brentwood, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills.

As part of their plan, they obtained jobs at an unnamed film studio, Cable as a grip, Linda as a contract player trawling for bit parts. This provided a cover for "narcotics trafficking within the film community, a segment of the population long known to be enamored of illicit drugs and nonconformist personal habits." Both were known as hangers-on at "left-leaning parties also attended by known Communists and fellow travelers."

Dope and Bolshevism, prime demons of the fifties. Enough to make shooting a beautiful young woman to

death palatable—admirable.

I ran a few more spools through the machine. Nothing linking Linda Lanier to Leland Belding, not a word about party pads.

And nothing about children. Singly or in pairs.

OLD STORIES, old connections, but the strands were tangling even as they knitted, and I was no closer to understanding Sharon—how she'd lived and why she, and so many others, had died.

At 10:30 P.M. Milo called and added to the confusion.

"Bastard Trapp lost no time snowing me under," he said. "Reorganizing the dead-case file—pure scutwork. I played hooky, wore out my phone ear. Your gal Ransom had a severe allergy to the truth. No birth records in New York, no Manhattan Ransoms—not on Park Avenue or any of the other high-priced zip codes—clear back to the late forties. Same for Long Island: Southampton's a tight little community; the local gendarmes say no Ransoms in the phone book, no Ransoms ever lived in any of the big estates."

"She went to college there."

"Forsythe. Not right there—nearby. How'd you find out?"

"Through her university transcript. How'd you find out?"

"Social Security. She applied in '71, gave the college as her address. But that's the first time her name shows up anywhere—as if she didn't exist until then."

"If you have any contacts in Palm Beach, Florida, try there, Milo. Kruse practiced there until 75.

When he moved out to L.A. he brought her with him."