Bannerman's Law (22 page)

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Nellie had gone away again.

Alan Weinberg was beginning to envy her.

“
You need some time to yourselves
,”
she had said.
“
I'll be back before tea
.”

“
Any place in pa
r
tic
.
.
.
”

She was gone before he could finish. Her eyes simply
blinked out. It was as if a switch had been thrown.

On the day before, Monday, she had traveled in time to 1920. She was seventeen. Not yet a star. And she had
a new beau. His name was Tom. He was ten years older
than she was, a cattle rancher, or rather his family owned
a ranch up in the San Joaqu
in
Valley.

They had given him leave to try his hand at acting, get
this movie business out of his system. After that, he was
expected to return home and settle down. He had done
fairly well. He had risen from extra to featured player
when he met and fell in love with Nellie. He wanted to
show her the ranch that would be his someday. Nellie took
a rare break between pictures and went off with him to

meet the family, and then go camping and canoeing on
T
u
lare Lake.

She told the Weinbergs about it when she returned.
She'd caught two big catfish, which he cleaned and she
cooked for breakfast. Then they went swimming. Her blush, when she mentioned the activity, suggested that
they had probably gone unclothed.

She married her rancher-actor a year later. He was
killed two years after that. He broke his neck in a tumbling
wagon during the filming of a chase by Indians.

Weinberg saw no sadness when she told him how Tom
died. He soon understood why. Tom was not dead to Nel
lie. She could see him any time she wished. It was more,
much more, than the reliving of memories. She could,
almost literally, travel in time.

She could even, she told them, go back to Ames, Iowa,
and be a child again. She could relive the day when the
Baker Stock Company came to town and her mother took
her to see
A Winter's Tale
and she became smitten with
the boy who played the little lost prince. The sweet misery
of that unrequited crush faded away in time, only to be
replaced by a deeper love of all things connected with the theater. She rarely missed a stage performance in Ames,
offering to hang posters or set chairs in exchange for a
pass, and always caught the latest moving picture show at
the nickelodeon, which opened in the old Hopkins Dry
Goods Store after Mr. Hopkins sold out to Loew's Theatrical Enterprises. Three years later, when her mother died,
thirteen-year-old Nellie ran off to Omaha to join the
Baker troupe.

On Monday, while Nellie was away with Tom, Barbara
took her husband to the bedroom of Nellie's suite and
made love to him. Weinberg tried no
t
to show it but he
was ill at ease. He kept expecting Nellie to appear in the doorway, which they had left open so that any attempt at
entry could be heard. He wished that they had Nellie's gift. He wished that he could throw that same mental
switch and go far away with Barbara. To Salzburg. To the
night of a party, during the Mozart Festival, which he p
robably would not have attended until he was told that
Barbara would be there. She was Bonnie Predd then. He had known her by reputation but he had never imagined
that she would be so
...
feminine. So lovely. He was thoroughly intimidated by her. It was she who approached
him. Put him at ease. And let him drive her home.

At her doorway he offered a handshake. She took the
hand and held it for a very long time as if deciding what
to do with him. At last, with a smile, she offered him
coffee. They sat together until dawn, fully clothed, only
talking. They did not make love, not that time, and not for many days more. But by sunrise, he, the notorious
Axel Streicher, had become her slave. If he had Nellie's
gift, he knew that he would never tire of reliving that
night, or any of the nights, or days, which they had shared
since then.

Today, Tuesday, with the arrival of Ca
r
leton Dunville
the elder, he had been unusually tense. It was not his
habit to play a waiting game. He found himself becoming
irritable. Nellie saw it. She saw Barbara take his hand. It
was then that she announced that she would be gone until
tea. Two hours. She seemed to be promising that they
would indeed have that time to themselves. Now, looking
at her, he believed her. There was no life in her eyes.

As much as he wanted to return to that bedroom with
Barbara, he wanted to find a newspaper even more. If the
girl
,
Lisa, had been found, or even reported missing, he
wanted to know about it. He wanted to know what was
said about her. There were no television sets in this wing,
only more of those video machines made to look like
movie theater screens. With Barbara covering him, he ap
proached the main hall where he had often seen newspa
pers at the security guard's station.

The guards did not see him. They had stepped to the
front entrance where that man, Hickey, was for some rea
son urinating into a bed of pachysandra. Weinberg saw a
copy of the
Los Angeles Times
open on the desk. Making
no sound, he took it. He stepped back into the Mem
bers' Wing.

It was on the front page. There was more inside. Barbara stood at his shoulder as he read. He could feel her
growing anger.

“
They cut her
,”
she said in quiet fury.

”
I know
.”

“
They left her naked, with her legs spread apart. They
promised they would treat her respectfully.”

He reached for her hand, squeezing it. Even Weinberg
winced at the mental picture of young Lisa, a bloody smile
carved into her face, ear to ear. But while sympatheti
c
to
the girl, and especially to his wife, he could understand
why it was done. It was sensible. This way, even if it
were known that she had come to Sur La Mer on Sunday,
it would be presumed that this lunatic, this Campus Killer,
had found her well after she returned to Los Angeles. Her
white Fiero had been located at a Junior College not far from where her body was found. Dunville was smart.
Weinberg had to give him that. And all he had promised Barbara was that the body would be found so that it might
have a decent burial.

“
Make sure you hide this
,”
Barbara said into his ear.
“
Don
'
t let Nellie know
.”

Weinberg glanced at her. There was still no life.

“
She was so young, so pretty
,”
Barbara said sadly. She
touched her fingers to the ph
o
tograph in the newspaper as
if to stroke Lisa's cheek.

“
They all are
,”
he nodded. There were six more faces
across the bottom of the page. All fresh, bright, attractive
young women, all dead. The photographs had come from
high-school yearbooks. And these six victims were all
blond. That bothered Weinberg. He raised his eyes to
Lisa's photograph. In newsprint, her reddish hair seemed
brown. It was not, in any case, blond.

There was something else.

He looked closer.
“
Does she look familiar to you
?”
he asked.

“
You mean, other than
.
.
.
” She gestured toward the
basement where they had first seen her.

“
Yes
.”

Barbara shook her head slowly, then brightened.
“
She
looks a little like Nellie did. When Nellie was young
.”

He nodded.
''Yes.·
I suppose she does but that's not it.
I've seen this girl before
.”

“
Alan
?”

“
Yes, my love
.”

She took the paper from his hands.
”
I would like to
be held, I think
.”

He smiled beneath his bandages.
“
We have until tea. Would you like to try something? Do you remember that
night when we
.
.
.
?”

”I think I jus
t
want to be held
.”

He understood. She wanted those faces gone from her
mind. Perhaps she wanted to cry. He wanted them gone
from his mind as well.

Still
...
the girl
...
Lisa. Something about that face.

Perhaps it would come to him.

DiDi Fene
rt
y whistled softly.

“
It's payd
ir
t all right
,”
she said to Molly.
“
Nellie Da
meon's probably the only one on that casualties list who's
still alive. If Lisa got her to talk she'll get more than a good grade. This might be worth a book contract
.”

“
Why? Just for her recollections of the period
?”

DiDi told her of the Nellie Da
m
eon legend. That, the
story was, her attempts to make it in talkies were a failure.
That her studio forced her to make two terrible films and,
even then, was rumored to have sabotaged the sound tracks
in order to break a contract that was paying her $5,000 a
week. That they got her on drugs, drove her to the edge.
That she went to pieces, retreated into herself and had not, as far as anyone knew, said a single word since.

“
This interview
,”
Molly asked, choosing her woods,
“
or this book Lisa might have written. Is that something
that anyone would want to keep from being published
?”

“
Like who
?”

Molly shrugged. ”I don't know. The studios? You sa
i
d
that they deliberately set out to destroy this woman
.”

DiDi shook her head.
“
They did that to a number of a
ctors. John Gilbert, for example. Even back then, studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn wouldn't have
cared who knew it. It would have helped them keep the
others in line
.”

Molly had to agree. No one wo
u
ld care, certainly after
all this time, except for film historians. “
W
hat if someone
else, perhaps another student, knew that Lisa had spoken to Nellie Da
m
eon? And then, soon afterward, Lisa was
killed. The killing was unrelated but this person saw an
opportunity to break into Lisa
'
s apartment and steal her
notes
.”

DiDi considered this, only briefly.
“
No chance
,”
she
said.
“
It wouldn't begin to be worth it. Anyway, at least
a dozen people would recognize her work. We'd crucify
anyone who tried to pass it off as theirs
.”

Molly knew she was fishing. But fishing was all she
had. And the burglary of Lisa's apartment was a fact. She
stared at the screen. There was that name again. D'A
r
-
conte.
“
You say you've never heard of him
?”

She shook her head.

Molly gestured toward a wall of reference books, all
film related.
“
Might he be in one of those
?”

”I already looked. But I could make a phone call. Pro
fessor Mecklenberg might know
.”
She hesitated.
“
Molly
,”
she cocked her head toward the kitchen phone,
“
the police
have been asking about you and Ca
rl
a
.”

“
When
?”
She hadn't heard it ring.

”
I just called Mr. Benedict
,”
she explained
,
“
to ask
about the service. I mentioned that you were here. He said
a policeman who saw you at Lisa's apartment called to
verify that Carla is her sister and they wanted your name,
too. He gave it to them
.”

Molly was silent for a long moment.

“
Are you
.
.
.
wanted for anything
?”