Silent Partner (46 page)

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Better than Leland Belding... "She was very bright," I said.

"She was a brilliant girl, Alex. Not that some things weren't a struggle in the very beginning—toilet training, for one, and all the social things. But I just dug my heels in and stuck with it—good practice for when I had to train my boys. But anything intellectual she absorbed like a sponge."

"How did your boys get along with her?"

"No sibling rivalry, if that's what you mean. She was tender with them, loving, like some terrific older sister. And she wasn't threatening because she went home every night—in the beginning that was hard for me. I wanted so much to adopt her, make her all mine and let her lead a normal life. But in their own way Shirlee and Jasper did love her, and she loved them too. It would have been wrong to destroy that, wrong to rob those two of the only precious thing they owned. Somehow they'd been given a jewel. My job was to polish her, keep her safe. I taught her about being a lady, brought her pretty things—a pretty

canopied bed, but kept it there, with them." "She never spent the night with you?" She shook her head. "I sent her home. It was best." Years later, with me, she'd sent herself home. I have trouble sleeping anywhere but my own bed. Early patterns... early trauma...

"She was happy just the way things were, Alex. She thrived. That's why I never called in the authorities. Some social worker from the city would have come down, taken one look at Shirlee and Jasper and stuck them in an institution for the rest of their lives, with Sharon farmed out to a foster home. Paperwork and bureaucracy—she'd have slipped between the cracks. My way was best."

"Summa cum laude," I said, tapping the photo. "Certainly seems so."

"She was a pleasure to teach. I tutored her intensively until she was seven, then enrolled her in my school. She'd done so well she was actually ahead of her classmates, ready for third-grade work.

But her social skills were still weak —she was shy around children her own age, accustomed to playing with Eric and Michael, who were still babies." "How did the other children relate to her?" "At first as an oddity. There were lots of cruel comments, but I put an end to them right away. She never did get really sociable, wasn't what you'd call popular, but she did learn to mix when it was necessary. As they got older the boys started to notice her looks. But she wasn't into that kind of thing, was mostly concerned with getting good grades. She wanted to be a teacher, to make something of herself. And she was always at the head of the class—that wasn't just my bias, because when she went down to Yucaipa for junior high and high school, she got consistent straight A's, including on honors courses, and her scores on the S.A.T. were among the highest in the school. She could have gotten in anywhere, didn't need me for acceptance to Forsythe. As it was, they gave her a full scholarship plus stipend."

"When did she change her mind about becoming a teacher?"

"Beginning of her senior year. She'd majored in psychology. Given her background, you could see why she'd be interested in human nature—no offense. But she never said anything about actually becoming a psychologist until she went to a Careers Day at Long Island University—representatives of various professions sitting at tables, handing out literature and counseling students. She met a psychologist there, a professor who really impressed her. And
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apparently she impressed him as well. He told her she'd make an excellent psychologist, was quite adamant about it to the point of offering to sponsor her. He was moving to Los Angeles, guaranteed her acceptance to graduate school there if she wanted it. It was a real boost for her—to see herself as a doctor."

"What was this professor's name?"

"She never told it to me."

"You never asked her?"

"She was always a private person, told me what she wanted me to know. I came to learn that the worst way to get anything out of her was to ask. How about some pie?"

"I'd love to, but I'm really full."

"Well, I'm going to have some. I crave something sweet. I just really crave that, right now."

I learned nothing more through a half hour of photo albums and family anecdotes. Some of the snapshots featured Sharon—lithe, smiling, beautiful as a child, enchanting as a teenager, mothering the boys. When I commented on them, Helen said nothing.

By nine o'clock, an awkwardness had settled between us. Like two kids who'd gone further than they should have on the first date, we were pulling back. When I thanked her for her time, she was eager to see me leave. I left Willow Glen at five after, and was back on Route 10 forty-five minutes later.

My freeway companions were semis hauling produce, flatbeds loaded with specimen trees and hay. I started to feel logy and tried listening to music. That made me even drowsier and I pulled off near Fontana, into the lot of a

combo self-serve Shell station and twenty-four-hour truck stop.

Inside were scuffed gray counters, red vinyl booths mended with duct tape, rotating racks of freeway toys, and hard, heavy silence. A couple of broad-backed teamsters and one sunken-eyed drifter sat at the counter. Ignoring over-the-shoulder glances, I took a comer booth that provided the illusion of privacy. A thin waitress with a port-wine stain on her left cheek filled my cup with industrial-strength liquid caffeine, and I filled my mind with a tempest of questions.

Sharon, Queen of Deception. She'd risen, literally, from the muck, made "something of herself"

in fulfillment of Helen Leidecker's Pygmalion dream.

That dream had been tinged by selfishness—Helen's desire to relive her urban intellectual fantasies through Sharon. But no less sincere for that. And she'd wrought a remarkable transformation: a wild child tamed. Chiseled and buffed into a paragon of scholarship and good breeding. Top of the class. Summa cum laude.

But Helen had never been given all the pieces to the puzzle, had no idea what had taken place during the first four years of Sharon's life. The formative years, when the mortar of identity is blended, the foundation of character set and hardened.

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I thought once again of that night I'd found her with the silent partner photo. Naked. Regressed to the days before Helen had found her.

A two-year-old boy's tantrum kept coming to mind.

Early trauma. Blocking out the horror.

What horror for Sharon?

Who'd raised her for the first three years of her life, bridging the gap between Linda Lanier and Helen Leidecker?

Not the Ransoms—they were too dull to have taught her about cars. About language.

I remembered the two of them, gazing after Gabe and me as we left their dirt patch. Their sole souvenir of parenthood, a letter.

Your only little girl.

She'd used the same phrase to refer to another set of parents. Noel Coward bon vivants who'd never existed— not in Manhattan, Palm Beach, Long Island, or L.A.

Martinis in the sun-room.

Wax-paper windows.

Separating the two, a galactic abyss—the impossible leap between wishful thinking and dismal reality.

She'd tried to bridge that gap with lies and half-truths. Fabricating an identity out of the fragments of other people's lives.

Losing herself in the process?

Her pain and shame must have been terrible. For the first time since her death, I let myself feel really sorry for her.

Fragments.

A Park Avenue snippet from well-born Kruse.

A car crash orphan story lifted from Leland Belding's bio.

A ladylike demeanor and love for erudition from Helen Leidecker.

No doubt she'd sat at Helen's feet, absorbing stories about the way the "idle rich" comported themselves out in the Hamptons. Had enhanced her knowledge, as a Forsythe student, strolling past the gated entrances of sprawling beach estates. Collecting mental images like bits of broken seashell—images that enabled her to paint me a too-vivid picture of chauffeurs and clam spouts, two little girls in a pool house.

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Shirlee. Joan.

Sharon Jean.

She'd rotated the story of the drowned twin one way for Helen, another for me, lying—to those she ostensibly loved—with the ease of brushing her hair.

Pseudo-twinship. Identity problems. Two little girls eating ice cream. Mirror-image twins.

Pseudo multiple personality.

Elmo Castelmaine was certain "Shirlee" had been born crippled, which meant she couldn't be one of the children

I'd seen in the scallop-edged photo. But he was relying on information Sharon had provided.

Or lying himself. Not that there was any reason to doubt him, but I'd grown allergic to trust.

And what was to say the crippled woman was really a twin? A relation of any kind? She and Sharon had shared general physical traits—hair color, eye color—that I'd accepted as proof of sisterhood. Accepted what Sharon had told me about Shirlee because at the time there'd been no reason not to.

Shirlee. If that was even her name.

Shirlee, with two e's. Sharon had made a point of the two e's. Named after her adoptive mother.

More symbolism.

Joan.

Another mind-game.

All those years, Helen had said, I felt I understood her. Now I realize I was deluding myself. I barely knew her.

Welcome to the club, Teach.

I knew that the way Sharon had lived and died had been programmed by something that had taken place before Helen had discovered her gorging on mayonnaise.

The early years...

I drank coffee, explored blind alleys. My thoughts shifted to Darren Burkhalter, his father's head landing on the back seat, like some bloody beachball___

The early years.

Unfinished business.

Mal had chalked up another victory: he'd got a new Mercedes, and Darren would grow up a rich
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kid. But all the money in the world couldn't expunge that image from a two-year-old mind.

I thought about all the misborn, afflicted children I'd treated. Tiny bodies hurled into life's storm with all the self-determination of dandelion husks. Something told to me by a patient came to mind, the bitter farewell comment of a once self-confident man who'd just buried his only child: If God exists, Doc, he fucking well has a nasty sense of humor.

Had some sick joke dominated Sharon's formative years? If so, who was the comedian?

A small-town girl named Linda Lanier was one half of the biologic equation; who'd supplied the other twenty-three chromosomes?

Some Hollywood hanger-on or one-night-stand mattress jockey? An obstetrician with an after-hours sideline scraping away life? A billionaire?

I sat in that cafe and thought about it for a long time. And kept coming back to Leland Belding.

Sharon had grown up on Magna land, lived in a Magna house. Her mother had made love to Belding—office boys knew that.

Martinis in his sun-room?

But if Belding had sired her, why had be abandoned her? Palmed her off on the Ransoms in exchange for squatting rights and paper money in an unmarked envelope.

Twenty years later, the house, the car.

Reunion?

Had he finally acknowledged her? Created an heir? But he was supposed to have died six years before that.

What of his other heir—the other little ice cream eater?

Double-abandonment? Two dirt patches?

I considered the little I knew about Belding: obsessed with machines, precision. A hermit. Cold.

Cold enough to set up the mother of his children?

Hypothetical. Ugly. I dropped my spoon. The clatter broke through the silence of the truck stop.

"You okay?" said the waitress, standing over me, coffeepot in hand.

I looked up. "Yeah, sure, I'm fine."

Her expression said she'd heard that one before. "More?" She hefted the pot.

"No, thanks." I pushed money at her, stood, and left the truck stop. Had no trouble staying awake all the way to L.A.

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I GOT home just after midnight, adrenaline-jolted and drunk on riddles. Milo rarely went to bed before one. I called his house. Rick picked up the phone, projecting that odd, groggy vigilance that E.R. docs acquire after years on the front lines.

"Dr. Silverman."

"Rick, it's Alex."

"Alex. Oh. What time is it?"

"Twelve-ten. Sorry for waking you."

"S'okay, no sweat." Yawn. "Alex? What time is it, anyway?"

"Twelve-ten, Rick."

Exhalation. "Oh. Yeah. I can see that. Confirmed by the luminescent dial." Another yawn. "Just got in an hour ago, Alex. Double shift. Couple hours of down time before the next one kicks in.

Must have dozed off."

"Seems a reasonable response to fatigue, Rick. Go back to sleep."

"No. Gotta shower, get some food down. Milo's not

here. Stuck on night watch."

"Night watch? He hasn't done that for a while."

"Didn't have to for a while. Seniority. Yesterday, Trapp changed the rules. Pig."

"That's the pits."

"Not to worry, Alex, the big guy'll get even. He's been pacing a lot, got that look in his eye—half pit bull, half pitbull."

"I know the one. Okay, I'll try him at the station. Just in case, please leave him a message to call me."

"Will do."

"Goodnight, Rick."

"Good morning, Alex."

I phoned West L.A. Detectives. The cop who answered sounded groggier than Rick. He told me Detective Sturgis was out, had no idea when he was returning.

I got into bed and finally dozed off. I awoke at seven wondering what progress Trapp had made with the Kruse sex killings. When I went out on the terrace to get the papers, Milo was out there, slumped in a chaise longue, reading the sports section.

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I said, "How 'bout them Dodgers, big fella." The voice was someone else's, hoarse and thick.

He lowered the paper, looked at me, then out over the glen. "What army camped in your mouth?"

I shrugged.

He inhaled deeply, still taking in the view. "Ah, the good life. I fed your fish—could swear that big black-and-gold one's growing teeth."