The reporter said, “There you have it, Keith and Kelly. Reporting live at the scene of…”
I turned off the set, wondered about Trapp’s presence at the crime scene, waited for Milo to call and clue me in. When he hadn’t phoned by one, I undressed and slipped beneath the covers, dry-mouthed and so tense my palate ached. I tried deep breathing but, instead of relaxing, worked myself into a state of wide-eyed hyperawareness. Embracing the pillow like a lover, I tried to fill my head with pleasant images. None came. Finally, some time before dawn, I managed to sink into sleep.
The next morning I called Milo at the station and was told he was still on vacation. No one answered at his house.
I took in the morning paper. Unlike Sharon’s death, the Kruse murders were being treated as serious news- a headline shouting DOCTOR AND SPOUSE SLAIN bannered over the top half of page 3. The byline was that of a staff writer named Dale Conrad, a name I recognized because he’d covered behavioral science stories in the past, generally doing a slipshod job.
The Kruse piece was no exception. Despite all those column inches, Conrad had come up with nothing about the murders that hadn’t been covered on last night’s broadcasts. The bulk of the article was biographical information on Kruse. He’d been sixty at the time of his death, twice the age of his wife- whom the article described only as a former actress. His birthplace was New York City; his origins, moneyed. He’d been commissioned as an officer in Korea attached to a psychological warfare unit, received his doctorate from a university in south Florida and, aided by society connections and his advice column, built up a lucrative Palm Beach practice before moving to California. His recent appointment to head the department was noted, and his predecessor, Professor Milton Frazier, was quoted as being shocked by the senseless death of an esteemed colleague.
The death of Lourdes Escobar was a last-paragraph afterthought: “Also found was the body of the housekeeper…”
I put the paper down. New York, old money, society connections- reminiscent of the phony background Sharon had created for herself.
Had it been a total fabrication? Failed starlet mother or not, she’d lived like a rich girl- the clothes, the car, the house. Perhaps Linda Lanier had married money- the call girl’s fantasy come true.
Or perhaps she’d gotten it another way. Passing along to her daughter a choice chunk of hillside real estate once owned by a dead billionaire who’d employed her. Still deeded to that billionaire’s corporation and put up on the market the day after Sharon died.
Too many questions. My head was starting to hurt.
I dressed, found a legal pad and a couple of pens, and left the house. Walking down the glen, I crossed Sunset and entered the north end of the University campus. It was eleven-twenty when I passed through the doors of the research library.
I headed straight for the reference section, played with the MELVYL computerized index, and found two books on Leland Belding in the library’s holdings.
The first was a 1949 volume entitled Ten Tycoons. The second was The Basket-Case Billionaire by Seaman Cross. Surprised, because I’d thought all copies of the book had been recalled, I jotted down the call numbers, began looking for anything on Lanier, Linda, but found nothing.
I left the computer and did a little low-tech research- two hours spent turning the pages of volume after volume of the Periodicals Index. Nothing on Linda Lanier here either, but over a hundred articles on Leland Belding, stretching from the mid-thirties to the mid-seventies. I selected what I hoped was a representative dozen references, then took the elevator up to the stacks and began seeking out the sources. By two-thirty I was ensconced in a reading cubicle on the fourth floor, surrounded by stacks of bound magazines.
The earliest pieces on Belding were in aerospace-industry journals, written while the tycoon was still in his early twenties. In them, Leland Belding was hailed as a technical and financial prodigy, a master designer of aircraft and collateral equipment with three patents for every year of his life. The same photograph was used in each, a publicity shot credited to L. Belding Industries: the young inventor sitting in the cockpit of one of his planes, goggled and helmeted, his attention fixed upon the instrument panel. A handsome man, but cold-looking.
Belding’s enormous wealth, precocity, boyish good looks, and shyness made him a natural media hero, and the tone of the earliest popular magazine pieces was worshipful. One article designated him the Most Eligible Bachelor of 1937. Another called him the closest America had come to producing a crown prince.
A prewar profile in Collier’s summed up his rise to fame: He’d been born to wealth, in 1910, the only child of an heiress from Newport, Rhode Island, and a Texas oil wildcatter turned gentleman rancher.
Another official corporate photo. Belding appeared frightened of the camera, standing, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, a large lug wrench in one hand, next to a gargantuan piece of cast-iron machinery. By age thirty he’d attained a monkish look- high forehead, sensitive mouth, thick eyeglasses that couldn’t hide the intensity of round, dark eyes. A modern-day Midas, according to the article, representing the best of American ingenuity combined with good old-fashioned hard work. Though born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Belding had never allowed it to tarnish; he’d favored twenty-hour days, and wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. He had a photographic memory, knew his hundreds of employees by name, but didn’t suffer fools gladly, had no patience for the frivolity of the “cocktail crowd.”
His idyllic life as an only son had been cut cruelly short when both his parents perished in a car crash- returning, after a party, to their rented villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza, just south of Majorca.
Another layer. I stopped reading, tried to make some sense of that. When I couldn’t, I resumed reading.
At the time of the accident, Belding had been nineteen, a senior at Stanford, majoring in physics and engineering. He dropped out of college, returned to Houston to run the family petroleum business, and expanded immediately into the manufacture of oil-drilling equipment, using designs that he’d developed as student projects. A year later he diversified into heavy farm machinery, took flying lessons, proved to be a natural, and qualified easily as a pilot. He began devoting himself to airplane construction. Within five years he dominated the aerospace industry, flooding the field with technical innovations.
In 1939 he consolidated his holdings as the Magna Corporation (corporate press release: “… had Mr. Belding graduated Stanford, he would have received his degree magna cum laude.”), and moved from Texas to Los Angeles, where he built corporate headquarters, an aircraft assembly plant, and a private airstrip on a 1,500-acre tract in the suburb of El Segundo.
Rumors of a public stock offering made bulls and bears take note. But the offering never materialized and Wall Street regretted that out loud, calling Lee Belding a cowboy who’d eventually bite off more than he could chew. Belding had no comment, continued branching out- to shipping, railroads, real estate, construction.
He obtained the contract for a Department of Labor annex in Washington, D.C., built low-cost housing in Kentucky, an army base in Nevada, then bucked the mob and the unions in order to create the Casbah- the largest, most ostentatious casino ever to blot out the Las Vegas sun.
By his thirtieth birthday he’d increased his inheritance thirty times over, was one of the five richest men in America, and definitely its most secretive, refusing interviews and shunning public events. The press forgave him; playing hard to get only made him better copy and gave them more latitude.