Silent Partner

I wanted, more than ever, to know why.

20

Feeling infected, the carrier of some dread disease, I canceled my flight to San Luis, turned on the TV, and created some electronic companionship.

The Kruse murders were the lead item on the eleven o’clock news, complete with sweeping live minicam shots of the murder house and inset photos of Paul and Suza

I

That kind of philosophizing meant he didn’t know much.

I switched back and forth between cha

I absorbed predictions of runs on gun shops, starved attack dogs. The reporter cupped one ear and said, “One moment. We’re about to have a statement from the police.”

The camera shifted to Cyril Trapp, clearing his throat. His shirt was TV blue. His white hair gleamed like a steel helmet. Under the spotlights his mottled skin was the color of dirty sheets. His mustache wriggled as he chewed his cheek. Establishing eye contact with the camera, he read a prepared statement pledging that the full investigative resources of the Los Angeles Police Department would be marshaled to solve these vicious slayings. A tight smile and head shake. He said, “That’s all I’m at liberty to divulge at this time,” and walked away.

The reporter said, “There you have it, Keith and Kelly. Reporting live at the scene of…”

I turned off the set, wondered about Trapp’s presence at the crime scene, waited for Milo to call and clue me in. When he hadn’t phoned by one, I undressed and slipped beneath the covers, dry-mouthed and so tense my palate ached. I tried deep breathing but, instead of relaxing, worked myself into a state of wide-eyed hyperawareness. Embracing the pillow like a lover, I tried to fill my head with pleasant images. None came. Finally, some time before dawn, I managed to sink into sleep.

The next morning I called Milo at the station and was told he was still on vacation. No one answered at his house.

I took in the morning paper. Unlike Sharon’s death, the Kruse murders were being treated as serious news- a headline shouting DOCTOR AND SPOUSE SLAIN ba

The Kruse piece was no exception. Despite all those column inches, Conrad had come up with nothing about the murders that hadn’t been covered on last night’s broadcasts. The bulk of the article was biographical information on Kruse. He’d been sixty at the time of his death, twice the age of his wife- whom the article described only as a former actress. His birthplace was New York City; his origins, moneyed. He’d been commissioned as an officer in Korea attached to a psychological warfare unit, received his doctorate from a university in south Florida and, aided by society co

The death of Lourdes Escobar was a last-paragraph afterthought: “Also found was the body of the housekeeper…”

I put the paper down. New York, old money, society co

Had it been a total fabrication? Failed starlet mother or not, she’d lived like a rich girl- the clothes, the car, the house. Perhaps Linda Lanier had married money- the call girl’s fantasy come true.

Or perhaps she’d gotten it another way. Passing along to her daughter a choice chunk of hillside real estate once owned by a dead billionaire who’d employed her. Still deeded to that billionaire’s corporation and put up on the market the day after Sharon died.

Too many questions. My head was starting to hurt.

I dressed, found a legal pad and a couple of pens, and left the house. Walking down the glen, I crossed Sunset and entered the north end of the University campus. It was eleven-twenty when I passed through the doors of the research library.

I headed straight for the reference section, played with the MELVYL computerized index, and found two books on Leland Belding in the library’s holdings.

The first was a 1949 volume entitled Ten Tycoons. The second was The Basket-Case Billionaire by Seaman Cross. Surprised, because I’d thought all copies of the book had been recalled, I jotted down the call numbers, began looking for anything on Lanier, Linda, but found nothing.

I left the computer and did a little low-tech research- two hours spent turning the pages of volume after volume of the Periodicals Index. Nothing on Linda Lanier here either, but over a hundred articles on Leland Belding, stretching from the mid-thirties to the mid-seventies. I selected what I hoped was a representative dozen references, then took the elevator up to the stacks and began seeking out the sources. By two-thirty I was ensconced in a reading cubicle on the fourth floor, surrounded by stacks of bound magazines.

The earliest pieces on Belding were in aerospace-industry journals, written while the tycoon was still in his early twenties. In them, Leland Belding was hailed as a technical and financial prodigy, a master designer of aircraft and collateral equipment with three patents for every year of his life. The same photograph was used in each, a publicity shot credited to L. Belding Industries: the young inventor sitting in the cockpit of one of his planes, goggled and helmeted, his attention fixed upon the instrument panel. A handsome man, but cold-looking.

Belding’s enormous wealth, precocity, boyish good looks, and shyness made him a natural media hero, and the tone of the earliest popular magazine pieces was worshipful. One article designated him the Most Eligible Bachelor of 1937. Another called him the closest America had come to producing a crown prince.

A prewar profile in Collier’s summed up his rise to fame: He’d been born to wealth, in 1910, the only child of an heiress from Newport, Rhode Island, and a Texas oil wildcatter turned gentleman rancher.

Another official corporate photo. Belding appeared frightened of the camera, standing, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, a large lug wrench in one hand, next to a gargantuan piece of cast-iron machinery. By age thirty he’d attained a monkish look- high forehead, sensitive mouth, thick eyeglasses that couldn’t hide the intensity of round, dark eyes. A modern-day Midas, according to the article, representing the best of American ingenuity combined with good old-fashioned hard work. Though born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Belding had never allowed it to tarnish; he’d favored twenty-hour days, and wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. He had a photographic memory, knew his hundreds of employees by name, but didn’t suffer fools gladly, had no patience for the frivolity of the “cocktail crowd.”

His idyllic life as an only son had been cut cruelly short when both his parents perished in a car crash- returning, after a party, to their rented villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza, just south of Majorca.