Shamus In The Green Room (18 page)

tion management. Microfilm is far less reliable than digital me-

dia. It dries out and gets brittle with age.” She shot me a

warning glance. “And this machine! Always on the fritz!” She

pushed up the sleeves of her cream-colored Qiana blouse and

wrestled the film into place, over the black roller and down be-

tween the glass plates. “Number seven. I don’t know how many

times the technician has worked on it.”

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“ ‘Film loads from the top,’ ” I said, reading from the frayed

sticker stuck to the side of the machine. “ ‘Put the reel on the

metal spindle. Pull back and lift the take-up roll lever. Slide

the film forward and over the black roller.’ That’s exactly what

I did.”

“Now the Reset button,” she said, grinding her teeth. “It’s

blue. Automatic. Just push.”

I pushed, and the thing started spinning until it stopped

dead and we smelled burning.

With a sigh, she directed me to machine number 6.

The Peninsula Center Library had the full run of the Palos

Verdes Peninsula News. Twice a week, every Thursday and

Saturday since 1937, residents of the four cities on the Penin-

sula (Rolling Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, Palos Verdes Estates,

and Rancho Palos Verdes) could turn to the Peninsula News

to learn which challenger had ousted which incumbent for a

seat on the water board; which middle-school vice principal

played which Shakespearean villain in which local produc-

tion; when the next city-council meeting would be held;

where the best surf breaks were; who was coaching the Little

League.

I sat at machine number 6, looking for Owen Madden.

Oscar Nichols said he had been a popular science teacher at

Palos Verdes High. Maybe an article about the science fair?

This was a small, close-knit community. Somebody’s prizewin-

ning project about how a windmill works, or how to measure

the accuracy of meteorological forecasts would definitely con-

stitute local news. And the prizewinning student would, of

course, insist on posing for a picture with good old Mr. Mad-

den, who’d always been so supportive.

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No such luck.

I made my way through the 1970s. The weeks and months

flowed by. People lived. People died.

I finally found a mention of him. Owen Madden was, in fact,

a Dr. In 1975, he’d received a grant from the National Science

Foundation on behalf of a group of his advanced-placement

students who were involved in an ambitious oceanography

project. They were building a model of the outer three hun-

dred kilometers of the earth, which could be used to develop a

better understanding of the principal features of plate tecton-

ics, including seafloor spreading, the pattern of magnetic

stripes frozen onto the seafloor through faulting, thrust fault-

ing, subduction, and volcanism.

Unfortunately, there was no picture.

I moved on to the next decade.

Dr. Madden had died around the same time Oscar Nichols

had come back to town. Nichols had been arrested in 1978 and

had stayed away for two years, which put Dr. Madden’s death

somewhere around 1980.

Sunday, April 3, 1980, to be precise. A full-page obituary

appeared that following Thursday.

Dr. Owen Madden of 562 Pilgrim Lane, age forty-seven,

had been a widower. Born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, un-

dergraduate degree from Boston College, Ph.D. in zoology

from Harvard University. An amateur bird-watcher. A chess

player. He liked to roller-skate. When he failed to get tenure at

Connecticut College, he moved out to California to work at

Palos Verdes High, where he’d been a beloved teacher for over

fifteen years. Several of his former students went on to pursue

careers in the sciences, crediting Dr. Madden with inspiring

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their young minds. He left behind a daughter, age eleven. Her

name was May.

The cause of death was suicide.

There was a picture.

Dr. Madden had a prominent nose, bushy eyebrows, and a

mustache to match. A halo of brown hair. Kind eyes.

The memorial service was to be held at three p.m. on the

following Saturday, at the Wayfarer’s Chapel, on Palos Verdes

Drive South.

I was at the end of the reel, so I turned the knob to reverse

and waited for the machine to finish rewinding the film.

Then I slid the cartridge off the spindle and loaded the next

one.

It didn’t take long to find it. The article was prominently

positioned in the society section.

The reporter wasn’t the sentimental type. He stuck to the

facts.

The school principal gave the eulogy.

The school choir sang hymns.

Over four hundred people came to mourn Owen Madden’s

passing.

And Maren Levander was among them, just like Oscar

Nichols had said.

I read this particular sentence several times: “ ‘His daughter

loved him dearly,’ commented baby-sitter Maren Levander, 18, of

Palos Verdes Estates, her eyes brimming over with tears. ‘May’s life

will never be the same.’ ”

Maren was the baby-sitter. Maren was sad for the kid. No

hysterical outburst. No acid trip. No inappropriate behavior.

Just the phrase, “Emotions were running high,” which is no more

and no less than you’d expect.

167

Had Oscar Nichols made the whole thing up? But why

make something like that up?

I was going in circles. Smoke rings. Everything dissolving

into nothing.

I heard the hard snap of the microfilm as it finished

rewinding.

I was done here—fine. But I was hardly done.

t

5 6 2 P i l g r i m L a n e .

It was a nice house, not as fancy as the houses along Paseo

del Mar, with their picture-postcard views of the ocean, but

nice all the same, backed up against a hillside, two stories, ivy-

covered brick, with a neatly trimmed front lawn, a bay win-

dow, and an attached garage.

This was the house where Owen Madden had lived with his

daughter, May. It was a long shot, but maybe May still lived

there.

There’d been a girl there that day Maren and Lisa got their

tattoos. That’s what Barker had said.

Maybe May Madden was that girl.

I walked up the stone pathway. Next to the water hookup,

a green garden hose was coiled inside a large, terra-cotta pot. It

looked like a snake. The mailbox was stuffed with circulars.

Some had fallen onto the welcome mat. I picked one up.

It was addressed to “Resident.”

I rang the bell, but there was no answer.

“You won’t find anybody there,” I heard a voice call out. I

turned around. It was the woman next door. She was sitting on

her porch with a bottle of beer in her hand.

168

“You don’t look familiar, but I’m not wearing my glasses.

You looking to buy?” She took a sip of her drink, then put it

down on a metal card table. “Everybody who buys around here

tears down these perfectly good houses to build a mansion or

some such crazy thing. Perfectly good houses. Poor Phoebe.

She must be turning in her grave. Not me. They’ll have to drag

me out by my bootstraps.”

“Phoebe?” I walked across the lawn toward her.

The woman shrugged on a flannel shirt that had been

hanging over the back of her chair, taking care to pull out her

long, gray ponytail. She separated the ponytail into two parts,

then pulled on the ends to tighten it.

“Phoebe Madden was my neighbor,” she said. “My friend

of twenty-some years.”

“I see.”

“Don’t be shy,” she said, patting the chair next to her.

“Have a drink with me.” She squinted into the sun. The lines

around her eyes deepened into furrows. “It’s almost cocktail

hour, after all.”

I smiled. “I’d love some water.”

“Join me for a whiskey,” she said.

“Lemonade?”

“Whiskey sour.”

“How about a beer?”

“Done.”

She bent down and opened a small portable fridge at her

feet. She handed me a Molson’s Golden and an opener.

“Thank you,” I said, cracking open the bottle. I sat down

on a flimsy rattan chair and took a sip. “I thought this was

Owen Madden’s house.”

169

“It was Phoebe’s house,” she said. “Phoebe moved in after her

brother died. Raised his daughter all by herself. Lung cancer. She

went like that.” The woman snapped her fingers. “Two weeks

tops. Terrible thing. And the house went even quicker.” She

laughed. “It sold in maybe a day. So you’re out of luck, dear.”

“I wasn’t looking to buy.”

“Were you a friend of Phoebe’s?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “I wanted to talk to May, actually. We

know some of the same people. I’m worried about them. I

thought May might be able to help.”

“You just missed her,” the woman said, opening another

beer. “In and out of town real fast, that girl was. She cleaned

out the house, gave away what she didn’t want, and left in a

whirlwind. She’s got a big, important job. Phoebe was so proud.

Fund-raising, I think. Philanthropy. Save the whales, something

like that. Guess she had to get back to work. Can I get you some

cheese, maybe?”

She brought out a tray with a nice, runny Camembert and a

hard white cheddar. We ate the cheese and talked for a while—

about movies, the economy, local politics. She told me you

could learn everything you needed to know about the history

of the Palos Verdes Peninsula from its plants: food and drink

plants from pre-Columbian times, like the lemonadeberry and

the prickly-pear cactus; medicinal plants from the mission

days, like horehound and castor bean; hitchhiking plants like

tumbleweed; wild oats that arrived with feed grains during the

cattle era; landscaping plants like acacia and eucalyptus that es-

caped from the large estates of the 1900s.

Her name was Diana Muldaur.

We watched the sun go down together.

170

When it was time for me to go, Diana went into her house

with the empty tray and came back with a shawl wrapped

around her thin shoulders. She was carrying a stack of

brochures.

“May left these behind,” she said, handing them to me.

“You might want to look through them. Maybe make a dona-

tion. She always liked a good cause, May did.”

I thumbed through the brochures on my way back to my car.

Pollution, habitat destruction, and overfishing take a serious

toll on our oceans, so Oceans Conservancy works to preserve

and restore the rich diversity of ocean life and the quality of

coastal waters.

May worked for the Oceans Conservancy. A good cause, yes.

I started up the car, then Gambino’s phone started to ring.

I fumbled around for it in my bag.

“Hello?”

A hang up. Again. This was getting weird. I looked at the

register. The call came from a 323 number I didn’t recognize. I

turned off the engine. I took off my seat belt. I pressed Redial.

It rang once, twice.

A woman’s voice answered: “Hello? Peter?”

“Are you looking for Peter Gambino?” I asked sharply.

“Who is this?”

She hung up.

My hands shaking, I pressed the button for a full readout

on the last fifty incoming calls.

Four were from me.

Two were from Gambino’s partner, Tico.

The remaining forty-four were from her.

171

I stared at the phone in disbelief.

It started to ring. I picked it up. “You better talk to me

this—”

It was Gambino.

“You’re right. We need to talk,” he said in a voice I didn’t

recognize.

In The Glass Key, Janet Henry has a dream. She and her

lover, Ned Beaumont, are lost in a forest. They wander for a

long time, then come upon a house. They find a glass key un-

der the mat. When they open the door, the key shatters in the

lock. Inside, there are hundreds of snakes slithering and hiss-

ing on the floor. In despair, the lovers realize they can never

lock them in again.

Once you open a door and see what’s on the other side, you

can’t unsee it. The knowledge is yours forever.

I pulled away from the curb.

I knew how to get home, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t lost.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

Isaw Gambino through the shattered glass of the dining room

window. He was sitting at the table, staring into his lap.

I let myself in and called out a halfhearted hello.

No answer.

“How’d your meeting with the D.A. go?”

No answer.

It’s over, I said to myself. Out loud, I said, “Talk to me.”

He was quiet, like he always was when we were fighting. He

hated fighting. I hated having to drag the words out of him.

“Is this really how it’s going to end, Peter?”

Pause.

“Please. Say something.”

“I don’t have the energy for this today, Cece.”

“For what?”

He closed his eyes, then opened them, like he was just wak-

ing up. “I need to show you something.”

174

He took my hand and led me over to the wall opposite the

broken window. I was confused.