Silent Partner

“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 defensive, insisted she was fine, didn’t need any more therapy.”

“She’s fine, all right. Shacked up with a drug addict, probably giving him every pe

“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 her 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.

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, co

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 shu

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, 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.