Silent Partner

Billy and Hope, brother and sister. It explained Vidal’s presence at the party, but not his relationship to Sharon. Not what they’d been talking about…

I searched for further mention of the Blalocks, found nothing on Hope, some business-related references to Henry A. His fortune had been made in steel, railroads, and real estate. Like Leland Belding, he owned it all, had never gone public. Unlike Belding, he’d stayed out of the headlines.

In 1953 he died, age fifty-nine, of a stroke, while on safari in Kenya, leaving a grieving widow, the former Hope Estes Vidal. Contributions to the Heart Foundation in lieu of flowers…

No mention of offspring. What of the child Kruse had treated? Had the widow remarried? I kept thumbing the index, found a single item, dated six months after Henry Blalock’s death: the sale of Blalock Industries to the Magna Corporation, for an unspecified sum, rumored to be a bargain. The decline of Blalock’s holdings was noted and attributed to failure to adapt to changing realities, particularly the growing importance of cross- continental air shipping.

The implication was clear: Belding’s planes had helped antiquate Blalock’s trains. Then Magna had swooped down and made off with the pickings.

Though from the looks of Hope Blalock’s lodgings, those pickings had been substantial. I wondered if brother Billy had played “middleman” again, seen to it that her interests were protected.

Another hour of thumbing brought nothing more. I thought of somewhere else to look, went down to the ground floor and asked the reference librarian if the stack holdings included social registers. She looked it up, told me the Los Angeles Blue Book was kept in Special Collections, which had closed for the day.

My thoughts slid down to the lower rungs of the social ladder, another brother-sister story. I remained in the reference section, tried to find newspaper accounts of the Linda Lanier dope bust.

It was harder than I thought. Of all the local papers, only the Times was indexed, and that only from 1972. The New York Times index went back to 1851 but contained nothing on Linda Lanier.

I went to the newspaper stacks on the second floor- banks of drawers and rows of microfiche machines. Showed my faculty card, filled out forms, collected spools.

Ellston Crotty had dated the bust 1953. Assuming Linda Lanier had been Sharon’s mother, she’d had to have been alive at the time of Sharon’s birth- May 15- which narrowed it further. I spun my way through the spring of ’53, starting with the Times and keeping the Herald, Mirror, and Daily News in reserve.

It took more than an hour to find the story. August 9. The Times, never one for crime stories, relegated it to the middle of Part One, but the other papers had given it front-page treatment, complete with purple prose, photographs of the slain “pushers” and the cops who’d killed them.

The articles jibed with Crotty’s account, minus his cynicism. Linda Lanier/Eulalee Johnson and her brother, Cable Johnson, major “heroin traffickers,” had fired at raiding Metro Narc detectives and been killed by return fire. In a single “lightning operation,” Detectives Royal Hummel and Victor DeGranzfeld had put an end to one of the most predatory drug rings in L.A. history.

The detectives’ photos showed them grinning and kneeling beside bindles of white powder. Hummel was wide and beefy, in a light suit and wide-brimmed straw hat. I thought I detected a hint of Cyril Trapp in the hatchet jaw and narrow lips. DeGranzfeld was pear-shaped, mustachioed, and slit-eyed, and wore a chalk- striped double-breasted suit and dark Stetson. He looked ill-at-ease, as if smiling were an imposition.

I didn’t have to study the picture of Linda Lanier/Eulalee Johnson to recognize the blond bombshell I’d watched seduce Dr. Donald Neurath. The photo was high-quality, a professional studio job- the kind of windswept, glossy three-quarter-face pose favored by would-be actresses for publicity portfolios.

Sharon’s face, in a platinum wig.

Cable Johnson was memorialized in a county jail mug shot that showed him to be a mean- looking, poorly shaven loser with drooping eyes and a greasy duck’s-ass hairdo. The eyes were lazy but managed to project a hard-edged scrap-for-survival brightness. Shrewdness rather than abstract intelligence. The kind who’d make out in the short term, get tripped up, over and over again, by an inflated sense of self and inability to delay gratification.

His criminal record was termed “extensive” and included arrests for extortion- trying to squeeze money out of some small-time East L.A. bookies- public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, larceny, and theft. A sad but petty litany, nothing that supported the papers’ labeling of him and his sister as “major-league dope pushers, ruthless, sophisticated, but for their deaths, destined to flood the city with illegal narcotics.”

Anonymous police sources were quoted claiming the Johnsons were associated with “Mexican mob elements.” They’d grown up in the South Texas border town of Port Wallace, “a tough hamlet known to law enforcement officials as an entry point for brown heroin,” had clearly moved to L.A. with intentions of pushing that substance to the schoolchildren of Brentwood, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills.

As part of their plan, they obtained jobs at an unnamed film studio, Cable as a grip, Linda as a contract player trawling for bit parts. This provided a cover for “narcotics trafficking within the film community, a segment of the population long known to be enamored of illicit drugs and nonconformist personal habits.” Both were known as hangers-on at “left-leaning parties also attended by known Communists and fellow travelers.”

Dope and Bolshevism, prime demons of the fifties. Enough to make shooting a beautiful young woman to death palatable- admirable.

I ran a few more spools through the machine. Nothing linking Linda Lanier to Leland Belding, not a word about party pads.

And nothing about children. Singly or in pairs.

27

Old stories, old connections, but the strands were tangling even as they knitted, and I was no closer to understanding Sharon- how she’d lived and why she, and so many others, had died.

At 10:30 P.M. Milo called and added to the confusion.

“Bastard Trapp lost no time snowing me under,” he said. “Reorganizing the dead-case file- pure scutwork. I played hooky, wore out my phone ear. Your gal Ransom had a severe allergy to the truth. No birth records in New York, no Manhattan Ransoms- not on Park Avenue or any of the other high-priced zip codes- clear back to the late forties. Same for Long Island: Southampton’s a tight little community; the local gendarmes say no Ransoms in the phone book, no Ransoms ever lived in any of the big estates.”

“She went to college there.”

“Forsythe. Not right there- nearby. How’d you find out?”

“Through her university transcript. How’d you find out?”

“Social Security. She applied in ’71, gave the college as her address. But that’s the first time her name shows up anywhere- as if she didn’t exist until then.”

“If you have any contacts in Palm Beach, Florida, try there, Milo. Kruse practiced there until ’75. When he moved out to L.A. he brought her with him.”

“Uh-uh. I’m ahead of you. Him I did find plenty of paper on. Born in New York- Park Avenue, as a matter of fact. Big apartment that he sold in ’68. The real estate transfer listed a Palm Beach address and I called down there. These rich-town departments aren’t easy to deal with- very protective of the locals. I told them Ransom had been a burglary victim- we recovered her stuff, wanted to give it back to her. They looked her up. Nada, not even a whisper, Alex. So Kruse hooked up with her somewhere else. And speaking of Kruse, he was not the hotshot psychotherapist you described. I stroked my source at the IRS, accessed the guy’s tax returns. His practice only produced income of thirty thou a year- at a hundred bucks an hour, that’s only five or six hours a week. Not exactly your busy shrink. Another five G’s came from writing. The rest, another half mil, was investment income: blue-chip stocks and bond dividends, real estate, and a little business venture called Creative Image Associates.”

“Blue movies.”