“Of course Helene was disgraced. She was a beautiful, powerful woman, but she started to crack when the entire club found out what she had been doing. When Joe found them that night on the boat, he roughed up Burton pretty good. Helene, too. Some of the people around the club probably knew already, but they had two black eyes and a broken engagement as evidence. Still, Helene Lang wouldn’t let go. She stayed there at the Surfside, an outcast from Joe, an outcast from the life of the place. She drank. Made a spectacle of herself more than once. Then she cut her wrist one morning. The maid found her. It was Joe who took her downstairs and put her in his car for the hospital. The doctors didn’t have any trouble putting her back together, but they weren’t sure she was stable enough to let out. They kept her for observation. Which went into treatment. It never stopped. She still goes to a psychiatrist three times a week, or rather he goes to her. Joe Datilla pays for it. When she squandered all the money she had, she had to sell the stock and Joe bought it. That was years later. He didn’t have to, but he threw in a suite as part of the deal. He never could turn her out, Tom.”
Wade sat back down and poured more water. Shephard saw the pained look on his face, the row of tiny droplets above his lips. He had told his son — many years ago when he was a detective, too — that a cop’s job wasn’t to ponder human nature, just to understand it. Maybe those years of understanding the human animal had led him to God, Shephard thought.
“Tom, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, about Helene. I’m not sure why she would tell you what she did or didn’t do. Her doctors probably couldn’t tell you. She probably couldn’t either. Maybe she feels like it’s time to confess. Maybe to hurt Joe. Maybe she doesn’t feel anything I would even understand. But I’ll tell you this. I’m deeply sorry that she did. I’m deeply sorry that you fell into it. I know how bad you hurt after the shooting, and Louise. I wanted Laguna to be a fresh start for you. I’m sorry she brought this onto your shoulders. I apologize for her.” Wade’s voice was shaking as he spoke his next words. “It’s hard for me to talk about, son. It takes me back to a good time that turned out so bad for so many of us. I don’t know how you’re going to find out who killed Tim Algernon and Hope. You may never find out. But you’re not going to find it at the Surfside. Handle it your way. Do what you think is best. But don’t let the bitter heart of an old woman hurt you. She may be dangerous. And not only to herself.”
“She showed me a check that Joe had written to you,” Shephard said, staring down at the floor. “I don’t know why. She wouldn’t say why.”
When he looked back up, there was a wry grin on his father’s face again. Wade shook his head slowly. “I shouldn’t make light of anything that has happened here today,” he said. “And certainly not scoff at the strange imagination of a sick person. That was the down payment on the house I brought you up in, son. Joe had the cash, and his terms were easier than the banks could offer. Every interest point I could save was worth it, you know why?” Shephard honestly didn’t. “Because I was twenty-eight years old and I had a son on the way. I figured the least I could do was put a good roof over his hard little head. I knew you’d come out hard-headed.”
Wade moved behind him and began to rub his shoulders. Shephard marveled at his father’s ability to make him feel like a boy again, a boy in good hands. An entire congregation must feel the same way, he thought: Little Theodore and a thousand more.
Outside, the sun was fierce and the wind had stiffened into a bone-dry Santa Ana. A family left the chapel for their car, and a little girl lifted her dress to catch the gusts. She giggled while her mother scolded and dad looked on, smiling. A good roof over her hard little head, he thought.
The LaVerda jerked to life under him like an animal with a mind of its own. It carried him across the city to the Newport Freeway, which would lead him nearly to the steps of the Surfside Club. Shephard, the hard-headed driver, believing that lies have reasons.
Twenty
Arthur Mink stepped from the guard house and approached the LaVerda, holding onto his hat in the swirling wind. The palm trees of the Surfside leaned drunkenly, their fronds sweeping toward shore, their trunks seemingly ready to snap. Mink’s bony vulture’s face gave way to a smile. “Nice bike,” he said.
“Thanks,” Shephard answered. “It works. I’m here for a ten o’clock appointment with” — and he almost said Helene Lang — “Miss Edmond.” Mink scanned the clipboard. “She sounded a little sauced when she called,” Shephard said, “I’m not sure if she even remembered to...”
“Never mind. If I kept out all the people she was too drunk to call in, she’d never get any visitors. Wind’s a strange one, eh?”
“Early in the year for a Santa Ana,” Shephard said.
“She’s in Suite Two-oh-seven, over B Dock on the water.”
The motorcycle rumbled past the Surfside convention room as Shephard headed for the guest lot once again. He paused a long moment beside the near tennis court, where a young couple still volleyed despite the treacherous wind. The woman’s scarf maintained a stiff starboard pitch, matched by her hair, which was as wavy and golden as Colleen’s. Her partner, a big sturdy man, could have been Wade thirty years ago, Shephard thought. And the racquets could have been wood and the couple on the next court Tim and Margie Algernon, Burton and Hope Creeley, or Joe and Helene. The woman chased an errant ball to the fence, looked at Shephard briefly, then turned away in a flurry of windblown gold.
Shot in her own home by a man who tried to rape her, he thought. I hope it never happens to you.
The halyards of the B Dock yachts banged against their masts, a communal plea to be turned loose into the sea rather than remain chained to land. They rose and fell chaotically, while behind them the open bay churned and heaved. Shephard turned his back to the ships and squinted at the room numbers on the apartment doors. He could hear the Hawaiian music from A Dock. The curtains on Suite 207 were drawn tight.
The stairs to the second story were at the back. Halfway up he stopped and watched a maid push her cart along the walk below, a white towel peeling from the stack and a brown hand snatching it in flight. On the second-floor walkway he paused again to enjoy the Surfside view. To the west, a huge American flag stood stiffly over A Dock, while below it the palm trees bowed as if in supplication. Shephard realized that with no people on the courtyard below him and no cars in sight, the view he now saw could have been the same as it was in 1951, the year of bad luck at the Surfside. The same buildings, the same palm trees, the same ocean in the near distance, green, white-capped, violent. For a moment the feeling was unnerving, as if he had slipped back in time with the mere climbing of stairs. Other remnants from the early days of the Surfside came to mind. The same owner. The woman not thirty feet away in Suite 207. A cop named Wade Shephard, who had probably once stood on this same balcony thinking perhaps of his son just as his son now thought of him. Hell, he thought; should have stayed in L.A. At least the skeletons in the closet were my own.
He knocked on the door and waited while a cat moaned from the other side, miserable but patient. A door that nobody is going to open sounds different, he thought. He tried the knob and found it unlocked.
“Miss Edmond? Yoo-hoo, Dorothy?”
Inside, the suite smelled unmistakably of cat dung. In the vague light he watched a thin white animal cross the floor, stretch, then angle against his leg.