agents in nailing these bastards.”
She’s silent.
“They took advantage of you. And Jayne.”
Shredding the tissue into snow.
“She said she’d take care of me,” Maureen whispers with her eyes down, “if anything ever happened.”
Galloway opens his arms and looks around the room. His eyes pop wide. “So where is she? You tried. You used your one phone call to get through to Jayne Mason so she could trot over here — where is she?”
“Her secretary said she’s in France,” Maureen answers in a high voice, “because she’s got this new makeup coming out.”
“And if she was around the corner? Maureen. Look at me.” Galloway touches her gently under the chin. “If she was around the corner, honey, would she walk into this office and admit that she’s a drug addict and she used you like a slave to get what she needs? Or do you think she’d deny it and employ her influence to stay out of Maureen’s little mess? You know Jayne Mason better than anyone. Tell me. Will she protect you like you’re protecting her?”
You can almost hear the small bones breaking. Maureen takes three or four choppy breaths. The rage is spent, the grief begins. She weeps quietly into two open hands realizing how profoundly she’s been betrayed.
When I leave the room, I run smack into Donnato.
“We got Mason’s supplier. It’s the wardrobe girl.”
“Congratulations.”
“Look.”
Special Agent Jim Kelly is striding toward the interrogation room. Jim is supervisor of the Drug Squad.
“She’s going to give up her street connections.”
“This could turn into a nice little narcotics bust,” Donnato murmurs wonderingly.
“That’s because I’m terrific.” I punch Donnato in the arm and laugh. “And now Galloway’s got something for the Director.”
“Not what they expected.”
“Better than they expected. I have to hand it to Galloway, he’s willing to go after Jayne Mason on possession. It’s a political hotcake, but talk about publicity for the Bureau.”
“You’ll close the bar at Bora-Bora tonight.”
‘Want to partner up?”
Donnato smiles at me for the first time in weeks. “I’ve got dinner, homework, and a science project on electromagnets.”
Rosalind comes up to where we are talking. She’s wearing that peculiar look again.
“Santa Monica P.D. on the phone for Ana. You weren’t at your desk. I figured I’d best come after you.”
I speak to an earnest young officer named Brandt who tells me Dr. Randall Eberhardt is dead. Since the deceased has been under investigation by the FBI, he thought I might be interested in coming down to Twentieth Street to have a look, as a courtesy, in the interest of promoting interagency cooperation.
TWENTY-TWO
THE MEW CONTEMPORARY two-story Mediterranean in the exclusive neighborhood north of Montana, five bedrooms, five and a half baths, gourmet kitchen, et cetera, is now skirted by yellow tape marking it as a crime scene.
Three Santa Monica police cruisers and an ambulance are parked at the curb. There isn’t a big crowd — maybe twenty-five neighbors, joggers, housekeepers with babies in strollers — because it is only 2:35 in the afternoon on a Wednesday.
I recognize a Metro reporter from the
I badge the cop at the door and walk inside. From the number of people and their intensity, I know something bad is waiting at the top of the stairs. A Santa Monica police detective is on the phone yelling about the delay in picking up the body. I heard on the radio driving over that there was a four-car collision with fatalities on the 405, so the coroner’s office is probably all backed up.
I walk up the steps, past a ficus tree, toward the crystal chandelier so out of reach. I am stopped again by a cop.
“Where is it?”
“The bathroom.”
Your knees go weak but you go ahead anyway, knowing that what you will see will be awful. Randall Eberhardt made sure it would be as awful as possible.
First I see the metal gas tank rolling back and forth on the silver travertine marble floor. A plastic tube attached to the tank leads over the side of the oversize spa tub. You have to walk right up and lean over to see that the tubing leads to a hole in a plastic bag which he placed over his head. The face has turned blue from cyanosis, a small amount of vomit adheres the purple lips to the inside of the bag. The well-muscled naked body, also a bluish pallor, floats in eight inches of clear water. The gas tank rolls with an empty ringing sound on the cold marble as the body subtly shifts in the water. Lined up neatly around the outside of the tub are children’s bath toys — yellow rubber ducks and red pails with holes for pouring — all of it lit incongruously by warm afternoon sunlight streaming innocently through the bathroom window.
The crime scene guys are putting their triangular markers next to all the relevant objects: the small tank marked Nitrogen, the empty bottle of Valium — a prescription with Claire Eberhardt’s name on it — near the sink. The forensic photographer asks me to step aside so they can get the wide-angle view. I look at Randall Eberhardt’s nakedness floating in its marble sepulchre and it seems to be the effigy of all of our nakednesses — Violeta Alvarado’s, mine, Tom’s, and Maureen’s — and I am ashamed to be the one who has survived to look at it, the way I was ashamed to see my cousin in death. Then, suddenly, I am overwhelmed by an inconsolable heartbreak, as if that underground source of my own grief had split rock and geysered a thousand feet into the air.
I stumble back down the stairs and spot the new widow alone in the living room.
I sit on the sofa beside her and introduce myself as Special Agent Ana Grey.
“Have we met?”
Lying, “No.”
Her legs are crossed, ankles hooked around each other, arms holding herself entwined around the waist of her white tennis skirt.
“The police think it’s a suicide, but that isn’t true.” She snorts and kicks her twisted legs. “Randall would never kill himself.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Somebody murdered him and made it look like suicide.”
She is tearless, indignant, but looking down in that peculiar walleyed way.
“Terrible things have been happening to us. He’s been falsely accused, he’s been hounded, his professional reputation has been attacked. If somebody could do that to us for no reason, none at all, couldn’t they do this?”
“The police will complete a full investigation and an autopsy. Then you’ll know.”
She shakes her head. “They’ll cover it up.”
Her reaction is not uncommon in families where there has been a self-inflicted death. Denial. Paranoia. She can’t let go of it. Of course she can’t.
“If my husband were going to kill himself he would have used a gun.” One hand has gotten loose from her
