“Are there any suspects?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. After the funeral yesterday, we-Alan and me-we talked to a fellow Alan went to school with. He has something to do with the law. He said it could have something to do with all that trouble over at Rosedale Station, but of course Joya left there before anything happened. Everybody thinks it was just some bum, some vagrant, some kind of drifter. There’s so much crazy violence around these days. Well… I’m here trying to pack up, her things. What is your name again? McGee. Oh, God, I was about to say that I’d tell Joya you called. I’ve got to hang up now. I’m going to cry again.”
I talked to Meyer again in the evening, aboard my houseboat.
I explained to him my reservations about the professionalism of one Forgan. “From the conversation I had with Kesner after Forgan left, I know that Forgan told Kesner that Mrs. Murphy-Wheeler had put in a complaint about their making the dirty tapes on location. A citizen who complains to the authorities should be protected, unless he or she is willing to make sworn statements.”
“Maybe she was. Or maybe Mr. Forgan didn’t take it all that seriously. Maybe he thought he was dealing with somebody who’d been released or fired, trying to get even.”
“Okay. But I was the idiot who told Grizzel about it when I sat with him and with Jean Norman later.”
“If you hadn’t mentioned it to him, certainly Kesner would have, Travis. And probably long before you saw Grizzel. Kesner would have wanted to warn him about Forgan and his partner looking around the area. You pick up imaginary guilt the way serge picks up lint.”
“Joya was a very able and happy lady. She was outraged about how they had turned Jean Norman around. She wanted people punished. And I think it got her killed.”
“But you didn’t get her killed.”
“Okay Meyer. All right. I didn’t.”
The midnight news told us that the nude battered body of Jean Norman had been taken out of the Missouri River by a police launch after having been reported by a tug captain. It said that authorities believed there was a possible connection between the murder of Miss Norman on Sunday night and the brutal rape murder of Mrs. Murphy-Wheeler near Ottumwa the previous Thursday morning. Law enforcement units all over the Midwest were on the alert for any information as to the whereabouts of Desmin Grizzel. Bikers in nine states were being stopped and interrogated.
“And that is the one way he would not travel,” Meyer said.
“I don’t see how he can risk any kind of traveling, not with that well-known face.”
“He’s found something that works,” Meyer said. “Think about Jean Norman. Would she have walked over to a wall to talk across it to Desmin Grizzel? To talk to something out of her nightmares? I’ll bet she had no idea until he grabbed her and yanked her across and took her into the bushes. Would Joya, dressed for running, let Grizzel catch up with her?”
“He can’t disguise his dimensions. He’s the size of an offensive guard. Six two, two sixty or seventy, great big gut.”
After I thought about it a while, I phoned Lysa Dean. It was a little after ten in the evening her time.
“You again?” she said. “Look, I’ve got guests.”
“I can hear them. I won’t take up much time, okay?”
“What is it?”
“Dirty Bob managed to get very close to two people who had every reason to be very wary of him.”
“The woman in Omaha and the one in Iowa?”
“You’ve been keeping track. Good. I’m trying not to be boring about this, Lee. I don’t know if there’s any chance of him coming after you. I don’t know if he wants to get to me that much. I don’t know how much risk he’s willing to accept, how crazy he is. But you know the dimensions of him.”
“Big big old boy.”
“Just don’t put any trust at all in any stranger who comes in that size, man or woman. He can disguise everything but his size.”
“I shall consider myself warned.”
“I could come out there. A live-in guard.”
“Well, you do tempt me, but no, thanks.”
Twenty
THE THURSDAY newspapers carried diagrams of the floor plan of the Lysa Dean house, with those Germanic-looking crosses newspapers use to indicate where bodies are found.
A person or persons unknown had snapped the gardener’s neck and flung him into the pool. The slender Korean woman who had served us the salad and tea had been chopped across the nape of the neck with a kitchen cleaver wielded with such force it was clear that she had been dead before her body hit the kitchen floor. Lysa Dean had evidently been caught a few feet from the panic button of her alarm system, in the corner of her bedroom near the bed.
It had happened, as near as could be judged, at eleven in the. morning on Wednesday, the twenty-fourth. Miss Dean had not been on call that day. The dotted line showed that the intruder had been admitted to the grounds by the gardener, through the front gate. He, or they, had killed the gardener near the rear entrance to the kitchen area. He or they had then slain the maid, who had been fixing Miss Dean’s breakfast of tomato juice, dry toast, and tea, and gone through the house to find Miss Dean just leaving her dressing room. There she had been chased, caught, taken to her custom bed, and brutalized. Broken fingers, chipped teeth, and bruises, which were said to have happened at least an hour before death, indicated that she had been kept alive for a considerable amount of time before she was finally smothered by being jammed face down into her pillows.
There were the inevitable references to the Manson murders, to which they bore no resemblance at all. There was editorial comment in the newspapers and on television about drugs, terrorism, pornography, the ineffectuality of the law, the vulnerability of prominent persons, the decay of morality, the decline of values.
Sidebar stories detailed her long career in cinema and television, her marriages and divorces, her awards, her life-style. Others gathered comment from people she had worked with and worked for.
“It is a sad and sickening loss. I hope whoever did this terrible thing will be brought to justice.”
“She had a lively style, a quick and earthy wit. Television will be the poorer for her loss.”
“Lysa Dean was an unashamedly sensuous woman who very much enjoyed her life and enjoyed being Lysa Dean.”
“Everybody I know is out buying more locks and chains and alarm systems. You wouldn’t believe the panic that has hit this town. It’s like we’re back to the Charlie Manson days all over again.”
An editorial expressed bafflement at how any suspicious person or persons could have avoided detection by any of the public and private patrols. But it did say that it was a lot easier to invade the area during broad daylight than at night. Deliveries were made during the daylight hours, and unlike some of the newer secure communities, there was no central checkpoint through which all traffic had to pass.
I had a feeling of loss, but in some strange way it was diluted by the many faces of Lysa Dean. There was so much artifice involved, so much playing of games, so much posing, I could not identify the single specific person who was gone. And indeed it was that bewildering variety which had made me uncharacteristically less than eager to bed her down both times she had made her availability unmistakable. There is a curious reluctance to play that ultimate game with a composite of strangers, with all the faces of one particular Eve. She was lively, fun to be with, but I did not know her. Perhaps the closest I had come to comprehending the real Lysa Dean was when I had been in her little projection room and seen her collection of X-rated tapes and her little drawer containing the massager. Maybe at the very heart of her there was an icy and unbelievable loneliness.