Rubicon Beach (26 page)

Lowery’s case was at an impasse before he began. The logical starting point was the man found dead with the bottles and pills in his room on the Ambassador’s fourth floor; the statement of a bellhop and other guests on the floor put the girl in that room ten minutes before the fire began. She’d been carrying what looked to be a dead animal. But the body and identity of the man had gone up in smoke along with the hotel records. Two maids said the description given by the other guests sounded like that of a man who had been at the hotel a while—tall and fiftyish, polite but recently reclusive. The manager of the hotel, who was aware that two medics had been sent up to the fourth floor a few minutes before the fire, thought the man might have been one Richard Dale, who lived on that floor and had been in the hotel long enough to have not paid his bill in some time, which was the only reason the manager remembered his name at all. Over the course of a week Lowery’s detectives couldn’t find a single person in Los Angeles who knew or had heard of Richard Dale.

The case didn’t break for another week, during which time the papers diligently reported the degree to which the police were stymied. Each day Lowery drove up to Malibu to see his suspect, to the disapproval of the doctors. None of these trips was fruitful. He’d returned from one such trip one afternoon and was sitting at his desk trying to think of all the ways one leaves tracks across the landscape of one’s life and how he could find those tracks and follow them, when his door opened and the tracks led to him. Bingo, Lieutenant, said one of his men.

Lowery lowered his feet from the desk. The detective came into the office and laid an open magazine before him. Lowery found himself looking at a picture of Jane Doe in a bed sheet. For several minutes he sat gazing at the picture and the photo credit with it. When he closed the magazine he said to his man, Then let’s locate Mr. Crow and have a talk.

After that things fell into place, up to a point. Larry Crow sent the police straight to Llewellyn Edgar’s house, which they found with several walls missing, two new doors six feet off the ground, and a window erected out by the curb. Edgar himself was in the only part of the house still intact, a servant’s room in back, where he was trying to fit together a hundred bits of shattered pink glass over a black photograph, as though all the pieces of a puzzle had fallen out, leaving an empty hole. Over the next forty-eight hours the police also talked to Madeline Edgar, Eileen Rader, the guests at a party given by Eileen Rader three months before, and several workers at a local construction company who had, around the same time, done some curious work for Mr. Edgar on the house, the results of which were now so unmistakable. In return for a promise of immunity from prosecution Mrs. Edgar made a statement. Lieutenant Lowery asked for medical reports on both Llewellyn Edgar and Catherine, and received the preliminaries the next day in a phone call. “Don’t know that I have much for you, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. “You know the mental state the girl’s in, and Edgar isn’t exactly bowling with ten pins either. At this point it’s tough to make a case against him for assault. Also, molestation’s out.”

“Yeah?” said Lowery.

“Girl’s a virgin. Of course there might have been some other form of sexual contact, but somehow I don’t think so.”

By now the press had gotten the photograph and were running it incessantly. When more details of the story came out, the district attorney’s office settled for slavery charges against Edgar and reduced the second-degree murder charges against Catherine to a hundred sixty-seven counts of manslaughter. Lowery drove up to Malibu to see her again on a shiny blue fin-de-June day. Sitting by her bed watching her dream, he said, Wherever it is you are now, girl, don’t come back. You won’t like it here if you do.

When she opened the door of the cell he was hunched on the floor asleep. She stood beside him and waited for him to wake. He stirred and opened his eyes; he looked as though he didn’t believe he saw her.

She knelt and watched his hands, He held them open before her and then dropped them and said something to her she didn’t understand. Somewhere behind her a door closed, and there was a wiry little man with red hair outside the bars who appeared very startled to see her. He said something and approached the door and then turned and left.

She looked at the prisoner; his face was bathed in the purple light of the sun going down. He moved toward her slowly: he’s afraid he’ll frighten me, she thought to herself—as though anything can frighten me now. He was very near her, and the shadows of black bars rose through the purple light on his face. Looking at him closely, she realized he didn’t seem so much like the other one. He was tired and gray and his eyes hummed with something sad; he looked at her in a way no man had ever looked at her, not held by her face but rather as though he was the poet of a different destiny, of a  different choice made long before, who had never consumed so easily his own vision. His eyes said, I was born in America. They said, I believed one was guiltless as long as his faith was true; I thought the act of treachery was beyond those who did not know its name. I never thought treachery was like a face. I never thought it was something one wore whether he knew it or not.

Better, she wanted to say to him, that faith betrayed you rather than you betray it.

For a while he held her, just by the arm. Then he let go, and she realized she’d been cold from some ocean breeze through some open window. She pushed the cell door and walked to the dark end of the hall, where she turned to look at him once more. The cell door swung back and forth but he didn’t move from his place. She heard footsteps. Lieutenant, she heard someone say. Lieutenant?

“Lieutenant?” Lowery shifted in his chair, opened his eyes. Catherine was still lying on the bed in front of him, her eyes still moving. An orderly was touching him on the shoulder. “I think you nodded off, Lieutenant,” he said. Lowery rubbed his brow with his hand and said to himself, I thought I could investigate where every sharp detective would like to investigate. But the only place I went was cold, from a Malibu ocean breeze through an open sanitarium window.

Lowery returned two days later. Nothing had changed. A week later, after the story had finally dropped out of the papers, he came back. Catherine was still lying on the bed. “If anything,” said one of the doctors, “she seems to have slipped further.” The dreams? said Lowery. “Her eyes are going a million miles a minute,” said the doctor. He looked spooked.

Lowery went to sit by her again. He loosened his collar and examined her a long time, exploring her countenance for a clue. The sun dropped into the sea and, as had happened before, he dozed. When he woke it was dark outside and the bed before him was empty.

He jumped to his feet. He called an orderly and the orderly came running into the room. Before Lowery said a word the orderly took one look at the empty bed and disappeared. In twenty seconds he was back with two other orderlies, a nurse and the doctor. “I fell asleep for about fifteen minutes,” said Lowery. “She was gone when I woke.”

The two new orderlies took off. ln the hall the lights went on and another troop of nurses arrived. The first orderly went to the window by the bed and looked out. “Ten-foot drop,” he said. “She didn’t go this way.”

Lowery wasn’t so sure. He went to the open window and stood in the Malibu ocean breeze looking at the edge of the Malibu cliffs. After a moment his eyes narrowed. “There’s someone out there,” he said.

There’s someone out there, she heard someone whisper, and she ran down the path of the cliffside to watch a ship not foundered on the reefs of her childhood but rather sailing past, teeming with the blind of paradise. When she reached the sand she found it empty, but she saw his form in the water, swimming to shore. The night was dashed with waves. If he were to crawl onto the beach and collapse on his face she would run to him and say, But nothing swims in the dust. But he did not crawl and he did not collapse. He sailed to her; he knew the water; he strode from the sea. She hid the knife in the fold of her skirt and walked out to greet him.

There is a number for everything. There is a number for justice. There is a number for desire. There are numbers for avarice and betrayal. But when the scheme becomes utterly one of avarice and betrayal, then there are no more numbers other than those that quantify what we possess and lose. It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.

He was born in the northern heartland of his country in the year before the outbreak of the first world war. His name was his father’s, Jack Mick Lake, three cracks of gunfire that suited the father as the publisher of a small newspaper outside Chicago. For the son the name was apt less for its explosiveness than for its symmetry. When he was six, the year after the war ended, he discovered the family tree, reaching back to a great English grandfather on Jack Mick Senior’s side, and including two uncles who lived across the state line in Wisconsin. Though too young to understand the thrill felt by a peddler’s daughter named Jane Shear when taken in a London alley by an ancestral nobleman at five-thirty in the morning before the dawn of the Victorian era, Jack Mick Junior could still compute the
equation
of the illicit moment.  As he was staring into the family scrapbook on the afternoon his seventh autumn lapsed into his seventh winter, his mathematical genius found its first expression. After that he closed the book and computed the equations of autumn and winter themselves.

His mother’s past eluded recorded history. She was born to a woman of the Potawatomi tribe, also known as the fire Nation, or the People of the Place of the fire. Originally rooted in the northeast of the country, they migrated southwest. Jack Mick Junior’s maternal grandfather, by what accounts existed, was a white trapper or sailor, perhaps from Europe. Thus there was bastardization on both sides of Jack Mick Junior’s parentage, though it was surmised the union involving the Potawatomi grandmother lacked the thrill that marked the one involving Jane Shear. Precocious enough to compute a number for sexual thrill even though he did not yet understand the experience, he would nonetheless need several years to find a number for rape, let alone humiliation, let alone subjugation. As with avarice and betrayal, once these experiences became a part of the scheme, the scheme became so utterly bankrupt as to defy numbers altogether. Thus his mother, who assumed the name Rae in place of a Potawatomi name for which there were no English sounds, remained to him a woman of mystery as well as strength and depth, until she died at the age of forty-one or -two, when the son was twenty-two or -three.