“Everything worked. Burton was an accountant by training, and he knew how to maximize the money. Joe was a hustler and knew how to make rich people feel rich. His years as a servant’s son paid off regally. After the war there was a hell of a rush into Orange County, and they’d bought in just before it started. A rush and a baby-boom, detective, which deposited on our shores a million happy infants like yourself. And for every new member who joined and paid the handsome dues, Joe and Burt took a little money aside and put it back into the Surfside Club. It grew like those babies did. It was strong, healthy, and happy. They incorporated and took thirty percent each for controlling interest.”
Dorothy took a long drink from her gin and lit another cigarette. Shephard’s beer had scarcely dwindled.
“But it didn’t take a snake to point out the apple,” she continued. “By 1950, the land value had gone up by half. Members and money seemed to fall from the clouds. Apartments, suites, two restaurants, a dock modestly named A Dock by pedestrian Burton. The sailing contingent was something they hadn’t catered to or banked on, but Joe saw they were naturals for his Surfside. So Joe and Burt began to disagree. They were faced with a fortune that neither one even imagined when they started. Why two people can weather the hard times together and then fight when the sun shines is a question that I’ve never been able to answer. But, hell, it happens to marriages all the time.
“Joe saw the club as a big but exclusive plantation, like the one he grew up on. A money-maker plain and simple. But Burt began talking about incorporating as a municipality. He was talking about a sprawling little city on the coast, where people might buy in at a reasonable rate. He saw a planned community, with its own shopping centers, private beaches, a progressive school system. He was thinking democratic. He was talking to the papers and getting a bit of the spotlight that had always been Joe’s. All Joe could do was smile and play along. Like any good businessman, he knew the value of sterling public relations.
“Not falling asleep, are you, detective? The story is just starting to get good.” She drank again from the gin, and though she was nearly finished with her second double, Shephard saw no change in her pale gray eyes.
“Burt was a married man, but he was in love, too, and it wasn’t with his wife. You might call the other woman Helene. They were not altogether discreet, Burton and his mistress. His wife, Hope, remained in a state of disrespectful shock and made no waves. Helene was a wonderful mistress, I suppose, and a clever woman. I might try to explain to you how she got Burt to will his thirty percent of stock to her, but I never really understood it myself. She was a detestable woman in my view, but she got what she wanted, almost all the time.”
Dorothy had just pronounced her judgment on Helene when she was rocked by another spasm of coughing. Shephard wondered for a moment if she would get her breath again. Then, as the silence settled around the table, she brought out another cigarette and accepted the light from Shephard.
“You’re pretty,” she said, as disinterestedly as if she were commenting on the weather, or on a dress. “You looked like a real nervous young man on the tube last night. I flipped channels to compare you to Wade. Well, put it this way, if you’re interested in a broadcasting career, don’t be.” She eyed him lasciviously, which Shephard found unnerving. The wrinkled breasts flattened under her dress as she leaned back for a deep drag on the cigarette.
“I’m just a cop for right now.”
“So,” she continued. “When Burton drowned in the bay one night, the Surfside suddenly had a new partner. Helene and Joe were now in control, and they were delighted.”
Shephard weighed her words against what he knew of human behavior. “Joe and Helene drowned him?”
Dorothy set her drink on the table, fitting the round bottom into an imaginary circle on the wood. “It’s so nice to talk to someone who understands,” she said.
Shephard also weighed her smile against what he knew of human behavior, but nothing came out of it. It was a familiar, knowing smile, but beyond that there was something relieved, almost confessional about it. As he looked again into her eyes, he felt himself in the presence of someone whose life was nothing like his own. She seemed to have orbited elsewhere, seen different places, answered to different codes. He wondered if this was the difference experienced by the rich. But he wondered, too, whether Dorothy Edmond had enough money in her purse to pay for the drinks.
“Joe and Helene drowned him,” she said, repeating his words. Coming from her, they seemed to mean something altogether different. “You see, Helene never really gave a damn about Burton. She and Joe saw the possibility and decided to give it a try. She would pretend love for Burt, and Joe would kill him when the stock was within reach. It wasn’t very imaginative, but it was functional. Joe always had a way with things that worked. That was 1951, if you’re keeping track,” she said. “And it almost didn’t work. You’ll be especially interested in this part, Tom Shephard, both as a man and as a student of murder. That is what you are, right? Burton swam every night, sometimes in the channel in Newport, sometimes south at Diver’s Cove in Laguna.” Shephard imagined the Inside Indicator rough against his hand, the warmth of Jane’s lips as she kissed him there.
“Yes, I’ve been to the cove,” he said.
“Nice place to swim. The plan was to bring some of Joe’s not very respectable friends down from L.A. to do the job. And to do it in the Newport waters where Joe’s friends on the department would be slow to consider it as anything more than an accident. But Joe’s L.A. friends didn’t know the Newport Channel from Minneapolis, and they followed Burton to Laguna one evening and held him under at Diver’s. By the time they got halfway back to L.A. and called in their results to Joe, Burt’s body was floating in unfriendly waters. Of course, one phone call was all it took for Joe to get still another friend — isn’t it interesting how many some people can acquire? — to rescue poor Burton from Diver’s Cove and bring him north to the channel rocks. Those rocks did a nice job of ruining any evidence of struggle. And he was a tough little man, Burton. There must have been quite a struggle.”
She coughed more quietly. Shephard sipped his beer and decided against a cigarette.
“That’s just a little sidelight I thought you’d be interested in,” she continued. “The papers even had hold of it. A couple of service station men recognized Burton as a customer the night he supposedly drowned in Newport. But the Newport cops closed the case, and the Laguna cops had no reason to open it back up in their own front yard. Would you have?”
For the first time, Shephard thought that she was playing with him.
“You might have to,” she said.
“What happened to Helene? Back to New England?”
“Yes. New England. That’s as good a place as any, don’t you think?”
He weighed her words against his own circumstances, trying desperately to get a foothold on the way she thought. To see the world — if even just one corner of it — the same way Dorothy Edmond saw it. Certain images gathered in Shephard’s imagination. The peaceful smile that Dorothy had offered Joe Datilla on the dock, her subservient role as emissary to the fictional bankers, her inviting attitude, the partially exposed breasts. Had she herself been hopeful of Joe’s attentions? Had she perhaps been in love with Burt? Was everything she had said some massive, choreographed lie? The liquor was enough to twist her, he thought.
In times of confusion, Shephard resorted to the obvious: “Tim Algernon and Hope Creeley got burned to death in my city last week. What does all this have to do with them?”