Bannerman's Law (42 page)

“
Paul
.
.
.
” she said wearily.
“
This is not like I'm
parachuting into Somalia. It's just not that big a deal
.”

“
I'll sleep on it
.”

“
Not yet, you won't. Bring the powder
.”

₃₀

Young Ca
r
leton was drained.

He was exhausted.

Three hours ago he had watched hi
s
father dance under the impact of a dozen bullets. It had been so odd.
S
urreal.
He didn't fall at first. He staggered about d
r
u
nk
enly
,
taking little mincing steps. The shots didn
'
t even sound like shots.
More like a chain saw. Finally, he just sat. He sort of
folded in half, legs straight
,
and crashed, seat first, to the
earth. His upper body, arms trailing, slowly tilted forward
as if taking a final bow. Toward Barbara. It was like ballet.
Even
to
the final nod of his head. Then Barbara
,
tears on
her cheeks, simply turned and walked away.

His own thoughts surprised him. He found, watching
her disappear into the night, that he didn
'
t blame her at
all. It was as much a suicide as murder. His father's own
words had killed him.

He had dragged the body into the chaparral, once he could move, once he stopped trembling. He had walked
four miles by moonlight, back to the main road, and a m
ile after that before he found a bar sufficiently crowded
that he would not be noticed or remembered. He had called
Darby. Told him to bring the truck and something in which
to wrap the body.

So, at last, he was an orphan. And an only child. Not
counting, that is, the odd half-brother or sister still out
there somewhere but he was certainly the last to carry the Dunville name. The use of it, for the first time in his life,
required no adjective. No more young Ca
r
leton. No more
Dunville the younger.

It felt strange. As if a weight had been lift
e
d. He felt
so free, in fact, that he now wondered anew whether that riddled mess in the basement had actually sired him. There
had never been much of a resemblance. Even less to
Henry.

He had asked his father about that once. His father
brushed
-
the question aside. He insisted that none of the special guests at the time would have dared go near the Dunville private stock of brood mares. Arrogance again. Young Carleton, now the only Carleton, had long rather
hoped that one of them had.

There were two possible candidates. He'd spent hours,
over the years, with their files. Both had the right coloring,
the right bone structure and both had interests that were
similar to his. One was still alive, quite successful, more
or less behaving himself. Dunville had decided, or rather
fantasized, that he was the one. He imagined himself calling on this man someday and asking, straight out, whether
he remembers creeping into the Members' Wing sometime
around March eighth of 1965.

But he knew he wouldn't ask. This man, now the father
of a congressman, could hardly be expected to take him
in his arms. Still, it would have been nice.

He would have been able to believe, once and for all,
that he was untainted by the Dunville genes that also
seemed to carry the curse of eventual madness. His
father
had shown interesting signs of imbalance in recent years.
Henry was simply a ba
d
seed. And his supposed grandfa
t
h
er, the Count, had died strapped to a bed, raving, in the
very room where Henry now lay.

Count Vitto
ri
o D'A
r
con
t
e. Bastard son of the duke of
Parma. Italian war hero. Shot down six Turkish planes. Or
eight. Or twelve, depending on the telling. These heroics,
in any case, led the duke to recognize him, hence the title.
Steered him into the Italian film industry, which was then
controlled by the aristocracy. A new art form. Best not
left to the Jews or Germans. Made his mark but was forced to defend the family honor when insulted by a Fascist rabble-rouser. His pistol against a shotgun. Dropped him in
one shot, at thirty feet, although he was wounded himself. Thought it best to spend a year or two making American
films. Stayed on.

Dunv
i
lle did not believe a word of it. Except that he
flew. The Count, according to his
...
father, had kept a
little Ryan Seaplane at the Santa Barbara Marina with which he made regular 250-mile drug runs to Ensenada.

Among his customers was one Ave
r
y Johnson, then
executive director of Sur La Mer. When relatives of some
of his other customers began shooting at him on the streets
of Los Angeles, he decided to blackmail Johnson into let
ting him lie low for a while at the asylum.

Once there, and safe, he was in no great hurry to leave. He had, at his disposal, at least four of the world's most
beautiful wome
n—a
lthough evidently they were all some
thing of a wreck at the time. He insisted that they be kept
bathed and beautified and costumed. And drugged, where
necessary. He enjoyed them all, an
d
shared them all. Ex
cept Nellie Da
m
eon. He kept Nellie for himself. Although
she probably never knew it.

Later that year, one of his Mexican suppliers got into
trouble. He was sitting in a shore restaurant one night
when his mistress and another man entered, nuzzling each
other. The supplier crushed the other man's skull with a
champagne bottle and slashed his mistress with the broken
stem. Nothing might have come of it had there not been
an American diplomat in the same restaurant that night.
The authorities felt compelled to make a gesture.

The Count spirited his supplier out of Mexico in the
tandem seat of the Ryan Seaplane and put him up at Sur La
M
e
r
. But the man was trouble from the start. Bad
tempered, more so when drunk, would not obey the rules
and he wanted the use of Nellie. Enough was enough. The
Count put him to sleep with a dose of his own wares.

Months later, another Mexican associate, named Ga
l
inas, asked what became of him. The Count, unwilling to admit that his late guest was now nourishing the bougainvillea, ad-libbed that he was now living in another state,
under a new identity, for which the Count had trained him
during his stay. This new identity must, of course, remain
a secret. He was honor bound.

Galinas, far from doubting this, decided that it was quite a good idea. He asked D'A
r
conte to begin creating
a new identity for him as well. An entire life history such
as, he suspected, the Count had already created for himself. This Mexican, in fact, would become an Italian. He
was already more or less European in appearance and the
Count could help him with his accent. Perhaps he
,
too,
could have been an aviator. Or a race car driver. Disfig
ured in a crash. Undergoing a long series of reconstructive
operations. That would explain a year or two of bandages
and his eventual new face.

The Count was entirely willing to do this, for a price,
but had no wish to be killed when the Mexican was ready
to cut off the last link with his past. He would keep records. The Mexican would know it.

By 1933,
Señor
Galinas had not only moved into his
new identity but into a new family. He was a widower
with two handsome infant sons, both of whom resembled
him because they were in fact his own, courtesy of another
deranged but fertile inmate of Sur La Mer. He had also
begun converting drug profits into California real estate,
specifically vineyards. In less than a decade, with imported
wines cut off by the war in Europe, his new name would
be on the labels of half the cheap domestic wines sold
in America.

Vittorio D'Arconte, meanwhile, knew a good thing
when he saw it. His next move was to recreate himself.
He became Victor Dunville and got himself named to the
Board of Trustee
s—t
he only other trustee being Ave
r
y
Johnso
n—a
nd eventually became executive director when Johnson, who had argued against him once too often, elec
trocuted himself in a bathtub.

The vintner, by the middle 1930s, had become a life
benefactor of Sur La
M
er. A plaque in the main hall so
honored him. He was the first but the list grew. Slowly,
at first. In the beginning they were mostly drug traffickers
who thought it prudent to plan for their retirement. Then,
by word of mouth, other types of criminals appeared. The
Count, now Victor Dunville, specialized in embezzlers for
a while but avoided mafia types. The latter were far too
family-oriented for his taste. Never willing to end all ties
to their past.

Staff was not much of a problem. Quite a few had been
stealing from the members for years or otherwise amusing
themselves with them. For most, it was simply a matter
of putting further temptation in their path, catching them
in the act, and blackmailing them into continued loyalty.
Money usually did the trick for surgical and psychiatric
staff, most of whom had established practices on the out
side, and saw a chance to earn handsome fees that need
not be shared with their partners, their spouses, or the tax collector. All such transactions, of course, were recorded
against the day when they might try to withdraw their
services.

Several of these associations yielded unanticipated
long-term benefits. One staff psychiatrist, whose duties in
cluded convincing female members that they'd only imag
ined having had children, himself had a son by one of
them. The psychiatrist, Marcus Feldman, brought the son
home to his barren wife, told her that he was the illegiti
mate issue of two famous movie star
s—t
he mother was
his patien
t—a
nd suggested that they raise him as their
own. They did, and the son grew up to be an internist.
Quite a good one. Third in his class at Johns Hopkins.
And, unaccountably, a rather decent young man. Named
Michael.

When the Motion Picture Relief Fund decided that it
really ought to assign one of its affiliated doctors as a
liaison with Sur La Me
r—a
sort of inspector genera
l—
Ca
r
leton the elder rushed to nominate young Mich
a
el.
Young Michael was flattered and pleased to accept. All
went smoothly enough until the young doctor began hearing stories from the members, and noticing the occasional special guest. He questioned Carleton the elder who, after
making an unsuccessful attempt to bribe him into minding
his business, sat him down and laid his father's dossier
before him.

His proposition was straightforward. Make your inspec
tion visits, verify that the members are receiving good
care, report back to that effect and keep your mouth shut
on all matters that do not concern you. Say or do anything
that might bring unwelcome scrutiny to Sur La Mer and
the reputation of your late father will become the first
casualty. Your dear mother's life will be the second. You,
after a brief period of mourning, will be the third.

That arrangement, th
e
surviving Dunville re
fl
ected,
seemed to be working in spite of the fact that they had
no real hold on the young doctor other than his sense of
duty to a parent who had lied to him al
l
his life. Still,
young Dr. Feldman did more or less as he was told. Al
though not meekly. He visited his charges, saw to their needs, but insisted that they have no contact whatsoever
with any of the special guests. He also saw to it that no
new patient of child-bearing age was ever again institu
tionalized at Sur La Mer.