“Now tell me about work. Last I heard, you were asking William for a bar rag to clean off a dog tag that smelled like dead rat.”
“Oh, man, you’re really out of date and I apologize. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to all intents and purposes, I’ve reached a dead end.”
I started with Diana and Ryan’s revelation about Michael Sutton’s birthday celebration at Disneyland and then went back in time and talked about my drive to Peephole and the conversation I’d had with P. F. Sanchez, who’d eventually given me the information about the veterinarian who’d put his dog down. I went into some detail about the shed at the rear of the clinic where euthanized animals were left for pickup by animal control. I also told Henry about Deborah Unruh and the four-year-old, Rain, who’d served as the “practice child.” I went on to fill him in on Greg and Shelly, and my interview with her son, Shawn, who’d assured me the two of them weren’t involved in the kidnapping scheme because they’d left the state by then and were working their way north to Canada. The recitation took the better part of fifteen minutes, but I felt I’d summed it up admirably, even if I do say so myself.
Listening to the story as I relayed it to him, I could still see a certain logic in play. My prime assumption had been wrong, but there were pieces that still intrigued me, even at this late date. Ulf, the wolfdog. The similarities between the two crimes. The ransom demands that totaled forty grand. I couldn’t see the links, but they had to be there.
Henry seemed to take it all in, though I have no idea how he managed to keep the players straight. Once in a while he’d stop me with a question, but in the main, he seemed to follow the narrative. When I finished he thought about it briefly and then said, “Let’s go back to the conversation you had with Stacey Oliphant. What makes him so sure the kidnappers were amateurs?”
“Because they asked for chump change, to use Dolan’s words. Both thought it was odd to ask for fifteen grand when they could have asked for more. Stacey figured if they’d been professionals, they’d have ramped up the demand.”
“Must not have been chump change to them. If they were rookies, fifteen thousand might have seemed like a fortune.”
“Not that the money did them any good. Patrick photocopied the bills and then marked them . . .”
Henry frowned. “How?”
“Some kind of fluorescent pen he used in the export side of his clothing business. Deborah says the marks would have popped out under a black light, which a lot of kids had back then. She also says none of the money ever surfaced, at least as far as she’s heard.”
“They must have figured it out.”
“That’d be my guess.”
“Which is probably why they tried again,” he said. “If they discovered the bills were marked, they couldn’t risk putting the cash in circulation so they got rid of what they had and tried again. Only this time they snatched Mary Claire instead of Rain.”
“Oh, shit. I hope that’s not true. That would mean Patrick set the second kidnap in motion. If the money had been clean, they might have been satisfied with what they netted the first time and let it go at that.”
Henry said, “I’ll tell you something else that just occurred to me. Suppose when Sutton stumbled into the clearing, the two weren’t digging the hole to bury a child. What if their intent was to bury the tainted money?”
I stared at him. “And they buried the dog instead? How’d they manage that?”
“Simple. One stays in the woods to keep an eye on the site. The other goes off, steals the dog’s corpse, and brings it back. They drop the mutt in that hole and hide the money somewhere else.”
“How’d they know about the dead dog?”
“Beats me,” he said. “You told me yourself that a couple of hundred people could have known about the shed and the pickup routine.”
“All this because they were worried the little kid would blab?”
“Why not? I’m just brainstorming here, but it makes sense to me.
Didn’t you tell me Patrick packed the money in a gym bag he tossed on the side of the road?”
“Right.”
“So picture this. They leave Rain asleep in the park. They’ve counted the money so they know it’s all there. Once they get home they discover the bills are lighting up like neon. Either they meant to dump the cash or their intention was to get it out of sight until they felt it was safe to spend. Once the little kid appeared, they decided it was too dangerous to leave the money in that spot.”
“The dead dog’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think? Why not just fill in the hole?”
“They were setting up a cover story to explain what they were doing in the first place. Sure enough, the police exhume the dog and that’s the end of it. No big mystery. Someone’s buried a pet. Might have taken twenty-one years, but it shows you how wily these guys were.”
“ ‘Were’? Nice idea. Like maybe they’re dead or in prison.”
“One can only hope,” he said.
When I got home I decided to let Henry’s suggestions percolate overnight. I’d been overthinking the whole subject and it had only served to confuse instead of enlighten me. Meanwhile, something else had occurred to me. I realized I might have a way to find out if Hale Brandenberg was being honest about Aunt Gin’s sexual orientation. It didn’t matter one way or the other, but I’m a stickler for the truth (unless I’m busy lying to someone at any given moment). There might be evidence at hand.
I went up the spiral stairs to the loft. I have an old trunk at the foot of the bed that I use for storage. I cleared the top and opened the lid, removing neatly folded piles of winter clothing I’d packed away in mothballs. From the bottom I hauled out a shoe box of old photographs that I dumped on the bed. If Aunt Gin had a “special friend” whose existence Hale was trying to conceal, I might find glimpses of her in pictures taken at the time. Aunt Gin had socialized with a number of married couples, but she also had gal pals.
Snapshots tell a story, not always in obvious ways but taken as a whole. Faces appear and disappear. Relationships form and fall apart. Our social history is recorded in photographic images. Maybe someone had captured a moment that would speak to the issue. I sat on the bed and picked through the pictures, smiling at the photos of people I recognized. Some I could still name. Stanley, Edgar, and Mildred. I blanked on Stanley’s wife’s name, but I knew the five of them played card games—canasta and pinochle. The kitchen table would be littered with ashtrays and highball glasses, and they’d all be laughing raucously.
I found shots of two single women I remembered—Delpha Prager and one named Prinny Rose Something-or-other. I knew Aunt Gin had worked with Delpha at California Fidelity Insurance. I wasn’t sure where she’d met Prinny Rose. I studied their photos, with Aunt Gin and without, in groups where one or the other appeared. If there were secret smiles between them, surreptitious glances that might have been picked up on camera, I couldn’t see the signs. I suppose I’d imagined arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, hands slightly too close together on a tabletop, an intimate look or gesture neither was aware she’d revealed. I didn’t see anything even remotely suggestive. In point of fact, there wasn’t a single view of Aunt Gin making physical contact with anyone, which was confirmation of a different kind. She was not a touchy-feely person.
I did marvel at how young she looked. While I was growing up, she was passing through her thirties and forties. Now I could see she was pretty in a way I hadn’t seen before. She was slender. She favored glasses with wire frames and she wore her hair pulled up in a bun that should have looked old-fashioned, but was stylish instead. She had high cheekbones, good teeth, and warmth in her eyes. I’d thought of her as schoolmarmish, but there was no evidence of it here.
I came to an envelope sealed with tape so old and yellow it had lost its sticking power. On the outside she’d written MISCELLANEOUS 1955 in the bold cursive I recognized. My interest picked up. I withdrew an assortment of snapshots. I appeared in the first few pho
tographs, age five, my expression bleak. I was small for my age, all bony arms and legs. My hair was long, bunched up on the sides where bobby pins held the strands back. I wore droopy skirts and brown shoes with white socks that sagged. By that Christmas I’d been living with her for six months or so, and apparently I’d found nothing to smile about.
The next photograph I came to generated an exclamation that expressed my surprise and disbelief. There was Aunt Gin enclosed in the arms of a man I recognized on sight, though he was thirty years younger. Hale Brandenberg. She had her back up against his body, her face turned slightly as she smiled. His face was tilted toward hers. The next five pictures were of the two of them, mostly horsing around. In one they played miniature golf, clowning for a photographer who might have been me since the tops of their heads were missing and I could see the blur of a finger inadvertently covering a portion of the aperture. Another photograph had been taken in the gazebo in the hilltop park so popular with my high school classmates. There were two snapshots of the three of us, me sitting on Hale’s knee with a snaggletoothed grin. I was probably six by then, in first grade, losing my baby teeth. My hair had been chopped short, probably because Aunt Gin got annoyed having to fiddle with it. Hale looked like a cowboy movie star, clean-shaven, tall, and muscular, in a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and boots. I didn’t remember his being in our lives, but there he was. No wonder he’d seemed familiar when I first laid eyes on him. Furthermore, it occurred to me that Aunt Gin had been just about my age, thirty-eight, when this late romance blossomed.
I understood why he was so sure about her sexuality and why he was so well acquainted with her parenting skills. I had a hundred questions about the two of them, but now was not the time to ask. Maybe at a later date, I’d take him out for a drink and tell him what I’d discovered. For the moment, I returned the snapshots to the tattered envelope, which I set to one side while I put the remainder in the shoe box and repacked the trunk. I hardly knew what to think about my discovery. Hale might have been a stand-in father to me if he and Aunt Gin had stayed together. She didn’t set much store by marriage and she probably wasn’t suited for a long-term relationship. But she’d been happy for a while, and in those few images, I could see that I’d been happy as well.
31
JON CORSO
Summer 1967
The whole of the affair with Destiny lasted three and a half weeks, and ended abruptly when Jon least expected it. She was a gift he wasn’t sure he deserved. His attraction to her was so strong and so compelling he assumed it would be with him the rest of his days. She was voluptuous, bawdy, and uninhibited. Her two pregnancies had left their marks, but she was completely unapologetic. Freckles, moles, scars, the small drooping breasts, the softly bulging abdomen, and saddlebag thighs—none of it mattered. She threw herself into sex with joy and abandonment. He would sleep with countless women afterward whose bodies were close to perfect, but most were embarrassed and self-conscious, unhappy with the size of their breasts or the shape of their asses, pointing out shortcomings that meant nothing to him. To him, they were beautiful, but they required constant reassurances about these imaginary flaws.
With Destiny, he was dazzled, a novice whose enthusiasm matched hers. Despite her claims about the open relationship, she had with Creed, there was no question of their meeting at the Unruhs’, where Creed and Shawn popped in and out of the school bus. In the main house, Deborah was a constant presence. Rain had playdates, swimming lessons, and gymnastics. Cars were always coming and going; kids being picked up, kids being dropped off. Their only choice was for her to come to his place as often as she could manage it. For transportation, she borrowed the Unruhs’ Buick.
While Walker was away on vacation, Jon maintained a strict neutrality when he was in the company of Creed and Destiny, making sure no hint of their altered relationship emerged. Destiny, by nature, would have played the situation for high drama. She enjoyed creating conflict, and what better instance of it than two men vying for the same woman, especially if it was her. It was the substance of myth. Competition between them would endow her with status. She was the prize for which they would battle until one or the other was felled. Jon was having none of it. He had no respect for Creed, but he didn’t see why he should suffer humiliation to satisfy Destiny’s love of histrionics.
Waiting for her at his place, he felt suspended, counting the minutes. He woke early, lingering in bed, remembering what they’d done, fantasizing what they’d do next. He never knew when she’d arrive or whether she’d make it at all. He had no idea what excuses she gave for her absences and he didn’t care to ask. Without warning, she’d knock on the door at the bottom of the stairs. At the top there was a second door, and by the time he opened it, she’d be taking the stairs two at a time. She’d fling herself at him, laughing and out of breath. They’d hole up in his room, making love at a frantic pace, all noise and sweat. She taught him about pleasure and excess, all the appetites of the flesh. Between bouts of sex they’d share a joint. His studio was a haze of weed and cigarette smoke. At intervals they’d trail down the stairs, often naked, and wander into the main house, where they raided Lionel’s wine cellar, working their way through his high-end Chardonnay. Dope made them hungry and they devoured everything in sight, most of it junk since Jon didn’t have the money to buy much else. Doughnuts, chips, candy bars, cookies, peanut butter and crackers—their makeshift feasts as intense as the sex.
In order to make time for the long runs he loved, he dragged himself out of bed at 8:00. His weight lifting was halfhearted and many days he skipped. He saw Destiny on random afternoons and after she left, he’d nap, forage for dinner, and then sit down at his desk, which he usually reached by 9:00. He worked into the wee hours, shorting himself on sleep. There was no other way around it. The dope, fatigue, and alcohol took their toll, fogging his brain and breaking up his concentration. This was a problem when Friday rolled around and Mr. Snow was expecting his work. The second week, his deadline came up on him before he knew it, and he was forced to pull an all-nighter, writing feverishly until the sky turned light.
He’d come up with a cool idea about a kid who ran with a pack of wild dogs; this in the Deep South—Georgia, Alabama, someplace like that. He pictured the kid living under the porch of a ramshackle shotgun house, feasting on scraps. Jon could smell the dirt and the animal scent of the boy. He wrote about the hot summer nights when the wind was still and the dogs howled from afar, calling to the kid. He didn’t have a clue where he was going with the story, but he made a good start, fifteen double-spaced pages.
He handed in what he’d done, and sat, as he always did, feigning nonchalance while he waited for Mr. Snow’s response. This time he read several of the pages twice and then flipped through the whole of it, frowning.
Jon said, “You don’t like it.”
“It’s not that. I don’t know what to say. I mean, there’s nothing really wrong here. The prose is serviceable. You lean toward the melodramatic, but it doesn’t play because the setup is manufactured. You think the setting is stark, but it comes off as syrupy instead. Do you know anything about the South? Have you ever even been there?”
“I was using my imagination. Isn’t that the point?”
“But why this? You’re talking about five or six dogs and I can’t tell one from the other. Okay, one has yellow eyes and another one has a rough coat. You’re giving me characteristics, not characters. Even if you write about dogs you have to differentiate. That’s where conflict comes from. Then you have this kid with no personality at all, which is a tough proposition given the situation you’ve put him in. Where’s Jon Corso in this? As far as I know, what you describe here bears no relation to your life or your problems or your hopes or your dreams. Wait, maybe I should ask this first. Have you ever run with a pack of dogs?”
“Not recently,” he said, trying to be flip. The criticism stung. Mr. Snow was blunt and he didn’t pull his punches. Jon felt himself shrink, but Mr. Snow wasn’t d
one.
“You’re writing out of your head. There’s no heart. You understand what I’m saying? This is verbiage, empty sentences. Blah, blah, blah doesn’t mean anything to you and it sure as shit doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Is there a way to fix it?”
“Sure. Here’s a quick fix. Toss it out and start somewhere else. You keep your reader at arm’s length when you should be writing from your gut. That’s the point of fiction, the connection between reader and writer. This is crap. You manage to make it look like a story, but you’re just going through the motions. I want to see the world as you see it. Otherwise, a monkey could sit down and bang this stuff out.”
“Well, that’s bullshit. You said I could write anything I want and then you tear it apart.”
Mr. Snow hung his head. “Okay. Good point. My fault. Let’s skip the issue of content and talk about process. You’re hiding. You’re not giving me anything of you. You’re waving your hands, hoping to distract the reader from noticing how much you withhold. You have to make yourself visible. You have to open up and feel. Mad, sad, glad, bad. Take your pick. I’m not saying you have to write your autobiography, but your life and your experiences are the wellspring. You want to write, you have to tell me how the world looks from your perspective. You have to absorb and deconstruct reality and then reassemble it from the inside out.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Haven’t you ever hated anyone? Haven’t you ever been out of your mind with jealousy or fear? Your little doggie dies and you can hardly get to your room fast enough before you burst into tears?”
Jon considered and then shrugged. “I don’t feel that strongly about things.”
“Sure you do. You’re eighteen—all hormones and emotion, testosterone and angst. The only thing worse than a teenaged guy is a teenaged girl. I don’t want you coming from here,” he said, tapping his head. He put the flat of his hand on his chest. “I want you coming from here. Writing’s hard. It’s a skill you attain by practicing. You don’t just dash off good work in your off-hours. You can’t be halfhearted. It takes time. You want to be a concert pianist, you don’t slog your way through Five Easy Pieces and expect to be booked into Carnegie Hall. You have to sit down and write. As much as you can. Every day of your life. Does any of this make sense?”