Bloodlines (35 page)

"What do you mean?"

"The Ducanes weren't the only ones who disappeared that night. A number of the people in these photos seemed to vanish from Las Piernas-- although I think most of them left voluntarily and with money in their pockets."

"Show me the ones you couldn't find."

He sorted a few out of the stack.

"Who made them disappear?" I asked as I looked through them.

"I can't say with any certainty."

I looked up. "But you have a guess."

"Let's just say that around this time, Mitch Yeager seemed to distance himself from some of his former friends. But I haven't a shred of evidence to connect him to anything that went on that night. He himself wasn't in town that weekend."

I moved on to a photo of the yacht. "Do you think the Ducanes were ever out on the Sea Dreamer?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what you wrote was that the yacht was abandoned, but there was no sign of violence on it, right?"

"Right."

I looked up. "So whoever attacked them--let's call them the pirates-- would have to overpower four adults. One with an infant. Okay, that's possible, I suppose, assuming they came aboard with weapons. But the pirates would have to control the Sea Dreamer, and the Ducanes, and whatever boat the pirates returned to shore on. The pirates had to get the two elder Ducanes overboard, then take Katy and Todd and the baby with them on the getaway boat--no, that's not right. The infant wasn't with them. The baby was taken from the house by Ronden. Wait, how does Baby Max Ducane get from the house to the Buick?"

"Maybe Ronden met these pirates somewhere, after he left Todd and Katy's house," O'Connor guessed. "Katy and Todd might have been dead already."

I frowned. "That seems so odd--kidnapping a child just to bury it in the trunk of a car with its parents?"

He shrugged. "Can't argue with the fact that his remains were found there, and that before he was killed, he was home with the nurse."

"Okay, so let's look at what happened to the adults. Let's say the pirates begin by sending Thelma and Barrett Ducane overboard, too far out to sea on a stormy night for them to swim safely ashore."

"Okay, I'm with you so far."

"Then they force Katy and Todd aboard the pirates' boat. They abandon the Sea Dreamer."

"So now we have better odds for the pirates, and the reason there's no blood on the Sea Dreamer."

"Right."

"The sailor or sailors kill Katy and Todd, put them in the trunk of the Buick, and meet Ronden, who has killed the baby, and toss the baby's body in the trunk with his dead parents." I shuddered. "I think I'm glad Ronden got killed a long time ago."

"Except that whoever planned all of this is still around."

I went back to the photos and came across one of a young blonde with her arm around a much older man. She was a pretty woman, but there was a certain hardness in her face that kept her from being more than that.

"The woman who was at the party with the giant?"

"Yes. Betty Bradford. When I showed that photo to Jack, he recognized her as the blonde who put her paws on him just before he got knocked out by Jergenson. She hasn't been seen by anyone since the night of Katy's birthday party."

"You think she's dead?"

"She was Gus Ronden's mistress, and she was obviously at the party to set Jack up for a beating or worse. Given what happened to Jergenson and Ronden, I wouldn't be surprised to hear she was dead, but I don't know what became of her, Lew Hacker, or a couple of the others."

"Who's with her in this photo?"

"Her sugar daddy before Ronden. She must have been something, too. He'd call me every once in a while, wondering if I had learned what happened to her. He was crazy about her. The old fart even gave her a car." A mischievous light came into his eyes. "Told me he had pink carpet installed on the floorboards because Betty here liked to wear pink underwear."

I laughed, then suddenly sobered. "What kind of car did he buy her?"

He looked at his notes. "I don't think he told me." He frowned. "And stupidly, I didn't ask."

"Is Don Juan here still alive?"

O'Connor shook his head. "Died of a heart attack a few years after I met him."

"Yesterday, when you were telling me about Gus Ronden, you said you went over to his house here in Las Piernas, right?"

"Yes."

"His Imperial was gone--was there another car there, one that might have been hers?"

"No."

"And you said Lew Hacker drove a Bel Air, right?"

He thumbed through his notes. "A turquoise and white Chevy Bel Air. It had been seen over at Gus Ronden's place late that night--maybe sometime after the murders. Neither Hacker nor the car has been seen since then."

I went toward the phone.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Calling Lefebvre."

He didn't stop me, but I could tell it was killing him not to. When Lefebvre answered, I said, "Phil, did you find any other bodies in the Buick?"

"Three not enough for you?"

"Plenty. Listen--was the carpet on the car's floorboards pink?"

There was a long silence.

"Phil, you should have said, 'What lunatic would have pink carpet in a car?' or something like that, because you've just given me my answer."

"Damn it to hell, if someone in the lab--"

"Not the lab's fault. Listen, we know who owned that Buick before it was buried."

O'Connor motioned me to shut up.

"We?" Lefebvre asked.

"O'Connor and I know," I went on, picking up the phone and dodging O'Connor as he tried to hit the switch hook, "but the Express is going to have to be the first to tell the public who the owner is--understood?"

"And what if it's not a good idea for the public to know that name just now?"

"Detective Lefebvre, do you want to read the name in tomorrow's Express, or would you like it now?"

"I have a feeling that I am going to have to grant a favor to hear it."

"Oh no. I'd just like our... spirit of openness and honesty to continue."

"That's what I was afraid of. All right."

So I told him about Betty Bradford and her boyfriends. "If you hear from her or anyone who might know what became of her, you know where to reach me," I added.

"I haven't known you twenty-four hours, and already you are a nuisance."

I didn't say anything.

"Thanks," he said.

"You're welcome," I replied, and hung up.

"What did he say?" O'Connor asked.

"That I'm a nuisance."

O'Connor wholeheartedly agreed with this, and for about ten minutes-- while I basically ignored him and thought about cars--he gave me shit about spilling my guts to a cop and promising to hold back a story, at which point I stopped him by saying, "Ronden's body was the one you found near Lake Arrowhead, right?"

"Yes."

"I'm looking at these photos, and I have to tell you, Gus Ronden looks like a city boy to me. Why the cabin?"

"A meeting place, I'm fairly sure. Somewhere out of the public eye."

"I wonder. You check to see who Ronden's neighbors were in Arrowhead?"

"Yes."

"Anyone from Las Piernas?"

"A few. Thelma and Barrett Ducane had a place. Lillian had two places. One that she and Harold bought. The other..." His voice caught, but he tried to go on. "Lillian had a..." He halted and looked away from me. After a moment he said, "She had a big place up there that had been in her family since the early 1920s. She gave that one to Katy--Katy was born there, so Lillian wanted her to have it for her young family. Katy willed it to Jack." He told me the story of the will in Katy's safe.

"Hmm. We'll have to get back to that. Any other locals?"

He studied his notes, and after a few minutes of tense silence--during which I wasn't sure if he was looking at the notes or just trying to get past the thought of Lillian's lost hopes--he suddenly said, "I'll be damned."

"Griffin Baer, the guy who planted the Buick on his farm," I said.

O'Connor nodded slowly, then asked, "How did you know?"

"A guess based on your reaction. If it had been a name that was familiar to you before yesterday or today, you would have seen it when you went looking through the property records in 1958, right?"

"Yes."

I thought over our progress so far. "Maybe if we run the photo you have of Betty, we'll hear from someone who has seen her since 1958."

"Maybe," he agreed. "If she's alive, I don't think she's anywhere near here, though."

"And maybe we should start trying to find out more about Griffin Baer's friends and associates."

"I'd bet anything Lefebvre is already at work on that, but sure."

"Lydia mentioned the heirs fighting over a property on the beach and the farm, but I don't recall anything about a mountain property, do you?"

"No. But it could have been sold to someone else since 1958." He noticed that it was about eleven-thirty. "We'd better work through the rest of this another time. You'll be late for your date."

"Not a date," I said.

He began packing up the box. He even let me help him.

"I think you should ask Wrigley to move Lydia over to news side," I said. "We could use her help."

"Lefebvre was right," he said sourly. "You're a menace."

"Nuisance."

"Both," he said, but there was no heat in it.

**CHAPTER 33

I STOPPED BY MY DESK AND PICKED UP MY SHOULDER BAG, WHICH WEIGHED a ton, because it had the big hardcover library book in it. My intercom buzzed. Geoff, the security guard, told me that a gentleman by the name of Max Ducane was waiting for me.

That made something clear. Admonishing myself to call him Max and not Kyle, I made my way downstairs.

Max Ducane didn't look as happy as I would have expected a new multimillionaire to be. If anything, he seemed troubled. We made small talk as we walked out of the building. His car was around the corner--a new BMW. "Your first purchase?" I asked.

He nodded. "I had my reasons--or thought I did--but are you embarrassed to ride in it? Is it too ostentatious?"

"For someone with your bucks?"

"Maybe I'll sell it," he said, glum again.

Once we were settled inside it, he said, "I made reservations at the Cliffside. Is that all right? If you'd prefer, we can just go to a restaurant near here."

The suggestion gave me pause, but I thought about the fact that I was now living rent-free, had paid off my bills from the Bakersfield move, and had just put a paycheck in the bank.

"I've never eaten at the Cliffside," I said, not adding that I had never thought of myself as someone who could afford to eat there, "but I've always heard that it's a great place. And it's a smarter choice for us than anywhere nearby, I think, unless you want half the staff of the Express trying to eavesdrop on us."

"The Cliffside it is, then."

We were seated in a private room at the restaurant, which is part of a luxury hotel with stunning ocean views. Our waiter had a manner that suggested he was on loan from a palace somewhere. He seated me, placed a fine linen napkin on my lap with a flourish, and handed me an open menu with a smile. Before I even looked at what was sure to be the cause of a painful chapter in my financial history, I made myself say, "Will there be any difficulty giving us separate checks?"

He said, "Not at all, miss, but--" just as Max tried to protest that this was his treat.

"It can't be, Max. I'm supposed to be working, remember?"

He glanced nervously at the waiter, who was feigning just the right amount of indifference, and said, "All right. But another time, then."

"Another time."

I had decided that I would do my best not to appear shocked at the prices on the menu, but the real shock turned out to be that my menu didn't have any prices on it at all.

"Excuse me," I said to the waiter, holding the menu out for him to see. "I think I have a misprinted one."

Max said, "The Cliffside is a bit old-fashioned, I'm afraid. Why don't we switch menus?"

At that point, I finally figured out what was going on. "I can't believe it," I said. "Only men get menus with prices on them?"

He smiled. "Neanderthal, I agree. I promise not to drag you by the hair into a cave after dessert."

The indignation I felt over the "ladies" menu allowed me not to faint when I finally did get a look at the prices. The waiter was placing bread on the table and filling our water glasses while reciting the specials with a level of enthusiasm that suggested the chef had chosen these items in our honor. I thought about ordering nothing but a side salad, then told myself that it would be worth it to pack a lunch every day next week in order to not look like a pauper just now. I thought Max--a recent college student--would understand a low-budget order perfectly, but I didn't want to appear to be a nobody to the waiter.

So I ordered duck in blackberry sauce, which came with grilled vegetables and little pancakes stuffed with wild rice. Max ordered a porterhouse steak. We considered and rejected the idea of having some wine, both of us having a lot of work before us that afternoon.

Max asked me how long I had worked for the Express. I told him that I was new there, but had worked at the Californian. He tried asking about that, but seemed to quickly pick up on the fact that I didn't want to reminisce about Bakersfield.

When the waiter brought the salads, he nearly tripped on my shoulder bag, which I had set on the floor. He acted as if people tried to trip him all the time, that keeping his balance while treading a path of hidden obstacles was part of the service a member of the staff of the Cliffside was happy to render to its customers. I apologized as Max picked up the bag and set it on an empty seat. "What the hell do you have in this thing," Max asked, "a brick?"

"A library book. Mind if we stop by the downtown library on the way back to my office?"

When I told him I was reading Interview with the Vampire, he said he had already read it, and talked about it enthusiastically, but he was good about not spoiling the ending for me.

"You okay these days?" I asked, thinking that by now he had relaxed enough to tell me what was on his mind.

"Sure. Well--no. Actually, I don't know how to answer that." He sighed and set down his silverware. "I don't know what to do." He smiled a little crookedly. "Can we talk off the record for a while?"

I agreed that would be all right. He had tensed up again, and I knew that as it was, he was feeling so uptight, I wouldn't get much out of him otherwise.

He took a minute to figure out how to begin, then said, "When the story came out--about them finding the real Max Ducane--I felt horrible. I mean, I already feel like a fake, you know?"

"Why? Because of a name? Lots of us have names that others have had before us. Think of all those John Smiths."

"But they weren't believed to be someone else. Each John Smith is who he is, and his grandmother and his uncle know which one he is. Few people got their names the way I did."

"Right. You could have been in my situation, named after an old song, and have everyone sing the damn thing to you whenever you leave a party."

He laughed.

I liked his laugh; it was one that made you want to laugh with him.

The strangest thing happened, though. Maybe because I had been looking at pictures of Katy and Todd Ducane all morning, I could see why Warren Ducane had mistaken him for his brother's child. I decided to keep that to myself.

"Max, if you think about it, all of us have made-up names. So you got this one in a courtroom. You're hardly the first person to legally change his name. Unless you don't like the name?"

"No, it's fine. In fact ...do you know who I was named after? When I was Kyle, I mean?"

"No," I admitted.

"It was my uncle's middle name. Adam Kyle Yeager. A man who died in prison. Now, there's a hero. It wasn't even anything glorious like civil rights or civil disobedience. He was a felon. A thief, among other things. From all I've heard, he was a local gangster."

"He must have meant something to somebody, for you to be named after him."

"Oh, my father thought the world of him." He caught himself and said, "Mitch, I mean." He looked away for a moment, then said, "For the most part, not knowing who my birth parents were hasn't bothered me. After Mom-- Estelle--died, I really wanted to know who they were, and every now and then I wondered about them. But on the upside, by the time I was ten or so, if I saw Mitch Yeager acting like a jerk, I knew he wasn't my father. I was always free of him--I hadn't inherited anything from him."

"I can see both sides of it, I suppose. I think curiosity would have gotten the best of me by now."

"That's really all it is for me at this point--curiosity. I've met people who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, or farther back than that, but whose own lives haven't been worth much of anything at all. So I told myself that what mattered was what I did with my life. Who I am, what I made of myself."

"I agree."

"And I've had incredible advantages. I don't deny that. Estelle Yeager loved me. I didn't grow up in poverty, or being discriminated against for the color of my skin. I've never had health problems. Hell, just being born in this country is something to be thankful for. There are plenty of horror stories about what can happen to orphans, so for a bastard, I'd say I've done really well. Mitch Yeager might not love me, and maybe he's always planned to use me for his own purposes, but he has spent a lot of money on me."

"I know what you mean about the advantages," I said, "and maybe you were better off than some other orphans, but didn't you feel kind of bad about being shipped off to boarding school?"

"If I hadn't gone to boarding school, I would have been raised by Mitch, and I don't think that would have been so great. As it is, the headmaster of my school sort of took me under his wing, became a better adoptive father than Mitch was. So I was lucky there, too."

"Back up a second. You said Mitch wanted to use you. How?"

He toyed with his steak, then said, "Sonya, his new wife? She's nice. But not too bright. The kids he's had with her take after their mother, according to Mitch. I hardly know them, so I couldn't say. Anyway, he wanted me to be a kind of caretaker of his businesses, along with my cousins--Eric and Ian. We'd see to it that his kids died wealthier than he did."

"And would you have been compensated for that? Or were you supposed to just be grateful to have a chance to repay him for adopting you?"

"No, I would have been compensated. And generously."

I studied him for a moment. "But you turned him down by accepting Warren's offer."

"Oh yes. Mitch is furious with me. I don't blame him. I even offered to pay back what he spent on my upbringing and education. I'd be embarrassed to repeat what he said to me, but he ended by telling me he didn't want the money because I was his responsibility, and he had never backed down on one yet."

"Ouch. I grew up Catholic, so I recognize that weapon. Guilt."

"Yes. But to be honest, I don't feel guilty about Mitch. Maybe I should, but I don't. I hated the way he treated Mom. I've even wondered if ...well, never mind that. I haven't ever been close to him, but that's not the problem. It's just that he ...how can I describe it? He ensnares people."

"So Warren Ducane and Auburn Sheffield gave you a way out of his trap."

"Exactly."

"You know, I can't help but think there was more to it than that. Auburn said you had turned them down."

"Believe it or not, Lillian convinced me."

"How?"

He was silent. I waited. I concentrated on my lunch for a while. He hadn't been eating much, and still didn't. That made me feel a little self-conscious, so I stopped and looked up at him.

"That night," he said, "at the dinner party? After you left?"

I turned crimson, but said, "Don't tell me... you threw something, too?"

He smiled and shook his head. "No. I meant, after everyone else left, Lillian and I talked. I can't explain it, really, but I feel comfortable around her."

"I know what you mean, or at least--I went over there with a chip on my shoulder, totally expecting her to look down her nose at me, but ended up liking her in spite of myself."

"Same here. I thought she might want me to be some kind of replacement grandson or something."

"That would have been pretty creepy."

"Creepy. Yes. This whole thing has lots of creepy aspects to it."

"But she didn't pressure you?"

"Not openly," he said, amused, "but subtly? Maybe she did. She got me to talk about school and my plans to work for Mitch. Like I said, it was easy to talk to her. She also said that whether I called myself Kyle or Max, she'd like to get to know me, because she had known my mom, and liked her."

"She meant Estelle?"

"Yes. Then she asked Hastings--her butler--to bring out some photos. They were of Mom when she was young, maybe nineteen or so. I guess Mom had been dating a friend of Lillian's then, because the man she was with in the photos wasn't Mitch. She looked... so beautiful, so happy. I don't remember her that way. I guess she was sadder, more fearful, when I was a kid. She drank a lot, and it made her look older than she was. Even her posture had changed from that of the girl in the photos. Maybe because she was always cowering around Mitch."