Silent Partner

complied, a pair of hicks in hog heaven. Up until the day they died. And the twins remained a secret.”

“Cold,” said Milo.

“But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Hummel and DeGranzfeld were Belding’s boys. Narcotics detectives, in a perfect position to set up a phony dope bust. Bankrolled by Belding, they could get their hands on plenty of heroin. They kept the uniforms outside, went into that apartment alone to set up the shoot-out, arrange the crime scene. But getting rid of Linda and Cable solved only part of Belding’s problem. He was still stuck with two little babies he didn’t want. Under the best of circumstances, raising twins is a challenge. For someone like Belding the prospect would have been overwhelming- a lot scarier than designing girdles or buying up companies. So he resorted to habit-bought his way out of it. And his deal with the Ransoms was a lot cheaper than any he would have had to cut with Linda and Cable. The same arrangement with Sharon’s twin and some other couple.”

Some other dirt lot. No Helen Leidecker. The other girl ending up crippled, or…

“Set up his own kids’ mother to be ripped off, then sold them. Ultra-cold.”

“He was a cold man, Milo, a misanthrope who preferred machines to people. He never married, never developed normal attachments, ended up a hermit.”

“According to the hoax book.”

“According to everyone. Seaman Cross just embellished reality. And you know babies get abandoned all the time. With a lot less reason. Casa de los Ninos was full of them.”

“Why the Ransoms?” he said “What connection would a billionaire have with people like that?”

“Maybe none. When I say Belding did these things, I don’t mean literally. He probably never got his hands dirty, had some intermediary, like Billy Vidal, handle it- that was his specialty: procuring people for Belding’s needs. Where the intermediary found them, who knows? But their being retarded would be a plus, not a minus. They’d be passive, obedient, not likely to get greedy or ask questions. They think concretely, are stubborn- good at keeping secrets. Or forgetting. I had an exhibition of that just yesterday. On top of that, they were anonymous- neither of them even knew their birthdays; no government agency had any record of them. Not until 1971, when Sharon went away to college and Helen Leidecker decided they needed extra protection and took it upon herself to file for Medi-Cal and Social Security. If she hadn’t, I’d never have found them.”

Milo said, “If Ransom hadn’t named the crippled woman after Shirlee.”

“Yes. And I don’t profess to understand that- she was full of weird symbols. But be that as it may, giving a child to Shirlee and Jasper was equivalent to erasing that child’s identity. Perhaps Belding never even expected her to survive. But Helen Leidecker discovered her, tutored her, sent her out into the world.”

“Out to Kruse.”

“Kruse went to that Careers Day at L.I.U. under the guise of altruism. But he was a predator- a lecher and a power junkie, always on the prowl for new disciples. Maybe he was attracted by Sharon’s looks or maybe he’d seen Linda Lanier’s loop and was struck by the resemblance. In either case, he turned on the charisma, got her talking about herself, saw how evasive she was about her background, and grew even more intrigued. The two of them were a perfect match for mind control: she, molded by Helen, no real roots. He, lusting to play Svengali.”

“Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid gang.” Milo’s big face had darkened with anger.

“On a one-to-one level,” I said. He got up and brought back a beer.

As he drank I said, “He took her under his wing, Milo. Convinced her she’d make a great psychologist- her grades made that realistic- brought her out to California with him, set her up in grad school, set himself up as her adviser. He supervised her cases, which always involves some therapy. He turned it into intensive therapy. For Kruse that meant bizarre communications, hypnotic manipulation. Like many people with confused identities, she was an excellent hypnotic subject. His power role in their relationship increased her susceptibility. He ageregressed her, exposed early childhood memories that intrigued him further. Some sort of early trauma that she was unaware of on a conscious level- maybe even something about Belding. Kruse started snooping.”

“And making movies.”

I nodded. “An updated version of her mother’s loop- part of the ‘therapy.’ Kruse probably presented it to her in terms of reattaching her to her roots- to mother love. His game was controlling her- building up one part of her, tearing down another. Using hypnosis, he could suggest amnesia, keep her consciously unaware. End up knowing more about her than she knew herself. He fed her bits of her own subconscious in calculated nibbles, kept her dependent, insecure. Psychological warfare. No matter what you saw in Vietnam, he was an expert. Then, when the time was right, he turned her loose on Belding.”

“Big bread, big-time control.”

“And I think I know exactly when it happened, Milo. The summer of ’75. She disappeared with no explanation, for two months. The next time I saw her, she had a sports car, a house, a damned comfortable life-style for a grad student without a job. My first thought was that Kruse was keeping her. She knew that, even made a joke about it, told me the inheritance story- which we now know was bullshit. But maybe, in a sense, there was some truth to it. She’d put in a claim on her birthright. But it played havoc with her mind, accentuated her identity problems. The time I found her staring at the twin picture, she was in some kind of trance, almost catatonic. When she realized I was standing there, she went crazy. I was sure we were through. Then she called me up, asked me to come over and came on to me like a nymphomaniac. Years later she was doing the same thing with her patients- patients Kruse set her up with. She never got her license, remained his assistant, worked out of offices he paid the rent on.”

I felt my own rage grow. “Kruse was in a position to help her, but all the bastard did was play with her head. Instead of treating her, he had her write up her own case as a phony case history and use it for her dissertation. Probably his idea of a joke- thumbing his nose at the rules.”

“One problem,” said Milo. “By ’75, Belding was long dead.”

“Maybe not.”

“Cross admitted he lied.”

“Milo, I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. But even if Belding was dead, Magna lived on. Lots of money and power to leech off. Let’s say Kruse leaned on the corporation. On Billy Vidal.”

“Why’d they let him get away with it for twelve years? Why’d they let him live?”

“I’ve been turning that over in my mind and I still can’t come up with an answer. The only thing I can come up with was that Kruse also had something on Vidal’s sister, something they couldn’t risk coming out. She endowed his professorship, set him up as department head. I’ve been told it was gratitude- he treated a child of hers, but in her husband’s obituary there was no mention of children. Maybe she remarried and had some- I was going to check on that before I found out about Willow Glen.”

“Maybe,” said Milo, “the Blalock thing is just a cover- Vidal using his sister as a screen, with the payoff really coming from Magna.”

“Maybe, but that still doesn’t explain why they let him get away with it for so long.”

He got up, paced, drank beer, had another.

“So,” I said, “what do you think?”

“What I think is you’ve got something there. What I also think is we may never get to the bottom of it. People thirty years in the grave. And it all depends on Belding being the daddy. How the hell you going to verify that?”

“I don’t know.”

He paced some more, said, “Let’s get back to the here and now for a sec. Why did Ransom kill herself?”

“Maybe it was grief over Kruse’s death. Or maybe it wasn’t suicide. I know there’s no proof- I’m just hypothesizing.”

“What about the Kruse killings? Like we said before, Rasmussen’s not exactly your corporate hit man.”

“The only reason we latched on to Rasmussen was that he talked about doing terrible things around the time the Kruses were murdered.”

“Not just that,” he said. “Asshole had a history of violence, killed his own father. I