He pressed his hands together, prayerfully. “Please don’t go all academic on me and say anything’s possible.”
I said, “Lou Sherman’s original guess was she was a mixture of bipolar and schizophrenia and nothing I’ve seen or heard contradicts that. When I saw her she was either asleep or lethargic, but something drove her to leave the shelter and trek ten miles, probably on foot. So if I had to bet, I’d say a manic state was more likely than depressed. I talked to one of her co-actors, a guy named Stevenson Beal, and he described extreme and rapid mood shifts back when she was working.”
“The gay fireman.”
“You watched the show?”
“God forbid. I remember Rick working himself up about the character, last thing we needed was another lavender Stepin Fetchit. Beal have anything else to say?”
I described Zelda’s God and mother delusions, my wondering about psychotic archaeology.
He said, “Digging for Mommy in other people’s gardens? Interesting — and now I mean that literally. What if, in the process of getting down and dirty, she ate something toxic?”
“The pathologist found evidence of poisoning?”
“More like question marks, Alex. Her liver and intestinal tract were a mess. Given her lifestyle, his first thought was advanced hepatitis. But that didn’t pan out and her tox screen came back negative. No carbon monoxide, either. I asked him — Bill Bernstein, he’s a senior guy — why look for that, she wasn’t cherry red and she died outdoors. He said I hadn’t established where she died, only where she’d been found. I said there were no drag marks. He said that didn’t impress him and besides, there are cases of people on boats dying from CO when they get too close to the exhaust, he’s thorough, do I have a problem with that? At that point I bowed and scraped and shut my mouth. Then he took a closer look at her guts and found no discrete lesions or obstruction and that bothered him, considering the ravaged state of the tissue. He sent out tissue samples for further analysis. Problem with the advanced panels is if you don’t know what you’re looking for and the culprit isn’t on the list, you’re screwed.”
“Bernstein have any hunches?”
“He’s guessing some sort of alkaloid but that’s as far as he’ll go. If the tests come back negative, the case will remain open and we may never know the truth.”
I said, “If she was a digger, she might’ve ingested some sort of mold or spore — anything that could live in soil.”
“You see any evidence she mucked around in Mrs. DePauw’s flower beds? I didn’t, that place was Home and Garden on steroids.”
“If she plucked a random toadstool, there wouldn’t be any mucking. And now I’m wondering if we could be dealing with pica — eating nonnutritive material like glass, plaster, and dirt. Psychotics exhibit a high rate of it. Did she dig at the house on Bel Azura?”
He pinched his nose. “Don’t know, never read the file. If she did chomp the shrubs up there, it didn’t hurt her.”
“Maybe that was the problem,” I said. “She’d gotten away with it before. Then she didn’t. Also, pica isn’t inconsistent with her former profession. Body image and food issues go with that territory.”
“Actress with an eating disorder, big shock.” He got up and paced, returned to the sofa but stayed on his feet. “Thanks for the hospitality and sorry for putting a damper on your evening.” To Blanche: “That means you, too.”
She followed him to the door.
I told him about my call to Linus McCoy.
He said, “Good old Linus. Jane Smith, huh? It’s like a bad joke.”
“Any new thoughts on finding Ovid?”
“Sorry, insight deficit. Let me sleep on it.”
“Could you help me locate other people from the show? Conventional methods haven’t worked.”
“I’m being asked to engage in extra-legal intrusion into the personal data of law-abiding citizens? Tsk.” He opened the door. “Sure, why not tomorrow? My eyes are crossing.”
He peered toward the kitchen.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any edible scraps lying around? All the talk of poison has gotten me famished.”
Chapter 17
True to his word, Milo phoned at ten a.m.
“Snagged you some info on the SubUrban folk. Got a pen handy?”
“I never gave you the cast list.”
“Golly gosh, I discovered something new called the Internet. Ready? The producers you already know. By the way, they’re married to each other. The guy who played the dad died last year, lung disease. The two Nigerians haven’t paid taxes in the U.S. since the show got canceled and turns out they’re not Nigerians, they’re from Ghana. One of them, Robert Adjaho, runs The New Ashanti Theatre of Drama and Dance in London, here are his factoids.”
I copied.
“The Nigerian wife, Diana Humado, I couldn’t locate. Justin Lemarque, the kid who played the son, is a freshman at Brown. His real name is Justin Levine, only address I’ve got is the school. The sister, Shay McNamara, is actually named Shay McNamara. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and does P.R. for that humongous estate they’ve got there, Biltmore. No news on the dog or the fish, here’s McNamara’s office number.”
I thanked him.
He said, “This level of achievement, I’m sending Doritos to myself.”
Six-twenty p.m. in London gave me a shot at reaching Robert Adjaho. But all I got at the New Ashanti Theatre was voicemail instruction on how to buy tickets. Next performance: Revisiting Othello, opening in three months.
Shay McNamara’s number at Biltmore’s corporate office was answered by a woman named Andrea. “She’s away from her desk, sir. Can I be of assistance?”
“I’m calling about someone Ms. McNamara used to work with named Zelda Chase.”
“Could you spell that, please, sir?”
Ah, fame. “She was an actress, like Shay.”
“I’ll let Shay know, sir. Have a nice day!”
I gave the producers, Hinson and/or Strickland, a second try. This time, I barely got past my name when the woman on the other end said, “I’m so glad I caught you.”
“Pardon?”
“Doctor, this is Karen Anne Jackson, you knew me as Karen Gallardo.”
“Ovid’s babysitter. Hi.”
“More like a P.A. grunt, back then. My secretary told me you’d called about Zelda and I was going to get back to you but it got pretty hectic. Is it a health insurance matter? Because her policy’s long-lapsed. I wish we didn’t have to be so corporate but after all this time, it’s impossible to give her coverage.”
“This has nothing to do with insurance, Karen. Zelda died two days ago.”
“No! Oh, my God, that’s terrible. Was she ill?”
“Quite.”
“Did she... was it suicide?”
Same thing Steve Beal had asked. “Cause of death hasn’t been established yet.”
“Oh, wow. How’s Ovid taking it?”
“It’s Ovid I’m calling about. Zelda’s been living on the streets but no one’s seen Ovid for a while.”
“And you thought Joel and Greer might know? I’m sure they don’t, Dr. Delaware, they’re my bosses and almost everything gets filtered through me and there’s been no contact between the company and Zelda since Sub stopped taping. You’re really worried something’s happened to Ovie?”
“I’d feel better if I knew where he was.”
“Now I feel horrible about not getting back to you sooner. I just didn’t want to be the one to deliver bad news about the coverage. But this is so much worse.”