Gone

She said, “I know you were snowing me about keeping an open mind, but I’d like to call you if a hot property comes up. Something really worth your while, it’s a terrific time in the market for someone in your position. How about a phone number?”

I gave her a card, paid for the drinks, and walked her to her silver Mercedes roadster.

She got in, started up the car, lowered the top. “I’ll probably never do a book, hate writing. Maybe a cable movie.”

“Good luck.”

“It’s strange,” she said, “after you called, I tried to make sense of it- looking back for something that could’ve predicted it.”

“Come up with anything?”

“This is probably irrelevant- I’m sure I’m reading all kinds of crazy things into insignificant stuff. But if what they’re saying about what happened to those people is true…the gory details, I mean…”

“They’re true.”

She drew a compact from her purse, checked her face in the mirror, tamped her hair, put on a pair of sunglasses. “Mrs. D had this routine she’d go through. When we goofed off during rehearsal, which was often, and she lost her patience but was trying not to show it because she wanted to be one of the gang. Like Mama Cowsill or Shirley Jones.”

“Cool mom,” I said.

“As if that’s ever possible…anyway, what she’d do is start clapping her hands to quiet us down, then she’d make like she was the Red Queen- from Alice in Wonderland. The first few times she a

She went silent.

“Maybe what?”

“This will probably sound literal to you. After spouting all this Lewis Carroll stuff, she’d scrunch up her eyebrows and cackle and raise a finger in the air and start waving it around. Like she was testing the wind. If we still weren’t paying attention- which we usually weren’t- she’d let out this honking noise, could’ve been a man’s it was so deep. Then she’d make goofy eyes and shake her chest like a stripper gone berserk. She was big up there, it was ridiculous.”

Ru

“Finally, if we still weren’t toeing the line, then she’d lower her hand like this, and run it across her throat and place both hands on her hips and scream, ‘Off with your heads!’ It was silly but creepy, I hated when she did it. Nora and Billy didn’t seem to care.”

“And Brad?”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “Brad used to smile. One of those private smiles. Like it was a private joke between him and Amelia. You know about his hobby, right? He was really into it back then. Had all kinds of knives, used to carry knives around. I never saw him hurt anyone and he was never threatening. At least not to me. So it probably means nothing- Amelia with her hand over her throat.”

I said nothing.

Elise Van Syoc said, “Right?”

CHAPTER 48

I drove over the hill thinking about what family had meant to the Dowd kids.

Boundaries were to be blurred, people were to be used, performance was all.

Brad had been abandoned, taken in reluctantly, exploited, expelled. Brought back to be pressed into service by a woman who resented him and lusted for him.

Years later, after her death, he’d wormed his way back into the family and attained the power role. Knowing he’d never belonged, never would.

By that time, he’d murdered Juliet Dutchey. Maybe other women yet to be discovered.

Reserving his boyhood hobby for three victims.

Back when Milo and I had been theorizing, he’d wondered out loud about Cathy and Andy Gaidelas being parental symbols.

You guys still believe in the Oedipal thing?

More than I did a few weeks ago.

Why Meserve?

The only time I’d seen Brad express overt anger was when he talked about Meserve.

Young, slick manipulator.

Brad seeing himself two decades younger?

Despite the smooth ma

A body hanging in a jail cell said maybe.

Used and discarded…it didn’t explain the extent of the horror. It never does. I wondered why I kept trying.

I reached Mulholland, coasted down past dream houses and other encumbrances, unable to let go.

Brad had been the ultimate actor. Protecting Billy and Nora, bedding her, stealing from both of them.

Pressing his own cousin into murderous service, then setting him up to be executed.

Coming on to another cousin- a female cop- at the same time he was being investigated by her colleagues in a showgirl’s disappearance.

Why not? Why would blood ties mean anything to him?

Marcia Peaty had no problem seeing Brad as evil but she was certain Cousin Reynold had just been a pe

Ex-cop, but way off. She’d be dealing with that for a long time. If she were my patient, I’d work at getting her to see she was human, nothing less, nothing more.

When you got down to it, rules and exceptions were hard to separate.

Church deacons sneak into dark houses and strangle families. Diplomats and CEOs and other respectable types embark on sex tours of Thailand.

Anyone can be fooled.

But for arrogance, Brad and Nora might’ve plied their hobby for years.

How long would it have taken before he looted the trust fund completely and decided Nora was no longer useful?

The jet card and the island off Belize said not long.

Did Nora- numbed, callous, perpetually stoned- have any idea her life had been saved?

What kind of life lay ahead for her? Initial severe depression, for sure, once the reality of prison life set in. If she was deep enough to suffer. If she coped and set up a prison theater, things could get rosier. Casting, directing. Experiencing. A few years down the line, she might even merit one of those rehab-miracle puff-pieces in the Times.

Or maybe I had too much faith in the system and Nora would never see the inside of a penitentiary cell.

Back on McCadden Place, walking her stuffed dog.

Stavros Menas was wasting no opportunity to shout that she was just another of Brad’s victims.

Milo and I had heard her joking about Meserve’s head but both of us could be made to look foolish on the stand and L.A. juries distrusted cops and shrinks. The disks showed her having consensual sex with Brad and Meserve but nothing more. No forensic evidence tied her directly to the killings and nowadays juries expected nifty science.

Menas would rack up billable hours trying to get everything ruled inadmissible. Maybe he’d put Nora on the stand and she’d finally get a starring role.

One way or the other, he’d earn his million.

The lawyers vying for stewardship of Billy Dowd’s diminished life would also do fine.

Still no callback from the judge who’d warehoused Billy and sentenced him to eating soft food with plastic utensils.

The time I’d visited, he’d called me his friend, put his his head on my shoulder, and wet my shirt with his tears.

What use is a child with no meaning?

Amelia Dowd had no idea what crop she’d cultivated.

I wondered what Captain William Dowd Junior had known as he’d ambled abroad on grand tours.

Both of them perishing in a car crash. Big Cadillac veering off the road and over a cliff on Route 1, on the way to the Pebble Beach auto show.

No suspicion it hadn’t been an accident.

But Brad had been in town the week they’d set out and Brad knew cars. Milo had raised that with the D.A. The prosecutors agreed it was interesting theoretically but the evidence was long gone, Brad was dead, time to concentrate on building a case against a living defendant.