hollowness, a depression that was fifty times worse than fear. But I held on: rigorously continuing to earn through construction work and golf hustling at least as much as Lorna did as an attorney.
We split the household expenses fifty-fifty, and each contributed monthly stipends to our joint savings and checking accounts. At the end of each month when we did our bookkeeping, Lorna would shake her head at the sad equity of it. We had a running gag at these sessions. We would split the expenses fifty-fifty, but I would pay for everything connected with Night Train. Lorna was mildly amused by him, but considered my noble link to Wacky and the past an obscene object. She thought dogs belonged on farms. 'And the beast is your burden,' she would say as we concluded our paperwork.
One day early in '55, she didn't crack her usual jokes. She was drawn and cross that day. When I looked to her to deliver her line she flung a sheaf of papers at me and screamed, 'It's so goddamned easy for you! Goddamnit, how can you live with yourself? Do you know how hard I work to make the money I do? Do you, Freddy, goddamnit? Don't you think it's sad that I went to school for eight years to become a lawyer and help people, while all you do is swing a hammer and hit golf balls? Goddamn you, you Renaissance bum!'
For the first time I felt my marriage vows begin to impinge me. I began to feel that I couldn't ever be the man Lorna wanted me to be. And for the first time I didn't care, because the Lorna of 1955 was not the Lorna I married in 1951. I started to get itchy to break the whole thing up, to blow it all sky high.
As my love for Lorna entered this awful, angry stasis, I felt stirrings of what I could only call the wonder. Wonder.
Years had passed. With the end of the Korean War and the discrediting of Joe McCarthy, a slightly more sane political climate was emerging. Time seemed to be opening new wounds in my present and healing the old ones in my past. If Lorna was the replacement for the wonder, maybe now it was time to reverse the situation.
Knowing I could never be hired as a police officer, I applied for a state of California private investigator's license, and was refused. I applied for positions as insurance investigator with over thirty insurance companies, and was rejected by each one.
So I hit more thousands of golf balls, recalling the trinity of my youth: police work, golf, and women. Women. The very word bit at me like a jungle carnivore, filling me with a venomous guilt and excitement.
One night I went to a bar in Ocean Park and picked up a woman. The old small talk and moves were still there. I took her to a motel near my old apartment in Santa Monica. We coupled and talked. I told her my marriage was shot. She commiserated; it had happened to her, too, and now she was 'playing the field.'
In the morning I drove her back to where her car was parked, then drove home to Laurel Canyon and my wife, who didn't ask me where I had spent the night. She didn't have to.
I did it again and again, savoring the mechanics, the art of briefly touching another lonely life. Lorna knew, of course, and we settled down to a quiet war of attrition: conversations of exaggerated politeness, awkward attempts at lovemaking, silent recriminations.
Inexplicably, my womanizing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I was sitting in a bar in the Valley nursing a beer and eyeing the cocktail waitresses, when I was hit by the same eerie stillness that had come over me in the irrigation field on the day I had quit the cops. I didn't break down this time, I just became flooded with some incredible nonverbal feeling of what I can only think of as vastness.
I tried to explain it to Lorna: 'I can't explain it, Lor. It's just a feeling of, well, mystery, of truth and illusion, of something much bigger than us or anything else. It's a feeling of commitment to something very vague, but decent and good. And it's not the wonder.'
Lorna snorted. 'Oh, God, Freddy. Are you getting religious on me?'
'No, it's not that. It's entirely different.'
I searched for words and gestures, but none came. I looked at Lorna, who shrugged, with some contempt.
The following week I found out that Lorna had a lover. He was an older man, a senior partner in her law firm. I saw them holding hands and cooing at each other in a Beverly Hills restaurant. My peripheral vision blackened as I strode toward their booth. Unreasonable as it was, I pulled the man to the floor by his necktie, dumped a pitcher of water on his face and followed it with a plate of lobster thermidor.
'Sue me, counselor,' I said to the shocked Lorna.
I moved my dog, my golf clubs and my few belongings to an apartment in West L.A. I paid for three months' rent in advance, and wondered what the hell I was going to do.
Lorna ferreted out my address and sent me a petition for divorce. I tore it up in the presence of the process server who had handed it to me. 'Tell Mrs. Underhill never,' I told him.
Lorna discovered my phone number and called me, threatening, then begging for release from our marriage.
'Never,' I told her. 'Tijuana marriages are lifetime contracts.'
'Goddamn you, Freddy, it's over! Can't you see that?'
'Nothing's ever over,' I screamed back, then threw the phone out my living room window.
I wasn't entirely under control, but I was right. It was a prophetic remark. Three days later was June 23, 1955. That was the day I heard about the dead nurse.
IV
The Crime Against Marcella
17
The initial newspaper accounts were both lurid and disinterested. Just another murder, the reports seemed to be saying.
From the Los Angeles
NURSE FOUND MURDERED IN EL MONTE
Strangulation Death for Attractive Divorced Mother
Scouts and Their Leader Make Grisly Discovery
EL MONTE, JUNE 22—A Boy Scout troop and their leader made a grisly discovery early Sunday morning when returning from an overnight camping trip in the San Gabriel Mountains. When passing Arroyo High School on South Peck Road, one of the Scouts, Danny Johnson, age 12, thought he saw an arm poking out of a line of scrub that runs along the fence on the school's south side. He called this to the attention of his troop leader, James Pleshette, 28, of Sierra Madre. Pleshette went to investigate and discovered the nude body of a woman. He called El Monte police immediately.
Description Broadcast
Police went to the scene and immediately sent out a description of the woman to all Los Angeles TV and radio stations. Response to the broadcast was gratifyingly quick. Mrs. Gaylord Wilder, an El Monte resident, thought the description fit her tenant, Mrs. Marcella Harris, who had been gone since Friday night. Mrs. Wilder was brought to the morgue, where she positively identified the dead woman as Mrs. Harris.
Good Mother
Mrs. Wilder started to sob upon viewing the body. 'Oh, God, what a tragedy!' she said. 'Marcella was such a good woman. A good mother, devoted to her son.' Mrs. Harris, 43, was divorced from her husband, William 'Doc' Harris, several years ago. They have a nine-year-old son, who was spending the weekend with his father. When notified of the death, Harris (who has been eliminated as a suspect) said, 'I have every hope the police will quickly
