Authors: Daphna Edwards Ziman
“You going to the funeral?”
Sutter’s hand went through her auburn hair, which fell back into shape over her ears. “I’ve got a lot to hold down here. Mrs. Garrett has her own people there. Cassie’s going.” She trailed off, seeming uncomfortable with the subject.
Jake was surprised but didn’t show it. “I’ll poke around when I’m there and see what else I can drag out,” he offered.
Sutter nodded and pushed herself out of the booth. As she left,
Jake watched her stride, purposeful and strong, the only woman in the room whose body wasn’t the feasting ground for the eyes of the male clientele.
Jake signaled the waitress to bring him another drink. She placed it in front of him, along with a glimpse of her tan breasts, barely held in place by a red velvet bikini top crisscrossed with gold braid—a Las Vegas damsel in distress to go with the bar’s dragon theme.
“Anything else?” she purred.
Jake took in a breath, as if to say something, then changed his mind. He shook his head. “No, that’s it. Just the check.”
Jake reached into his jacket pocket and, for what felt like the thousandth time, pulled out the grainy black-and-white Xerox of Kelly Jensen’s driver’s license.
Hair: Blonde.
It looked honey-colored even in the picture, glossy and full, cut straight, just below the collarbone.
Eyes: Green.
They were large, set above high cheekbones.
Height: 5’7”. Weight: 115.
Jake remembered the body from the Marilyn dress she had worn in her act. That body—leaner but no less curvy than the original—was not messing around. The whole effect had been perfect.
Even if all the recent events hadn’t already scrambled his circuits, Jake would have been feeling uneasy. He was starting to believe that Kelly Jensen had something to do with Porter’s murder—maybe she even did it. But did that explain his infatuation?
That’s how far you’ve gone
, said a thick voice in his head.
You’re the other side of the criminal coin; it’s why you understand their motives and defend them. You have more sympathy for criminals than their victims, and that’s the reason their crimes don’t tear into your conscience. At the core of each case you see an abused child, who has been forsaken and betrayed by a sociopathic or apathetic society. That’s how you justify their crimes.
For the sake of argument, Jake let another voice in his head respond, but when he heard what it said, he wished he’d gagged it:
You’ve always measured yourself against Porter, and whenever Porter had something you wanted, you managed to steal it. Girlfriends in college. Clerkships in law school. Cases as a young lawyer starting out. You pushed Porter to find things he knew you wouldn’t want: Suzanne, politics, Las Vegas. That’s why Porter kept Kelly a secret. She had the power to free him from a life he didn’t really want. Because somewhere in his subconscious brain, Porter knew you would have wanted Kelly.
Shit. Now he was sounding paranoid even to himself. Porter had loved politics and had loved Suzanne, once. As for Vegas, well, you had to live somewhere.
Jake smoothed his hand over the paper and stared at the picture as if he could make Kelly talk, make her tell him her whereabouts, her likes, her dislikes. She’d told Porter about her past. Immediately Jake felt a slug of depression ooze up from his solar plexus and settle wetly on his heart. Porter had loved this woman—Jake knew this for certain somehow—in spite of everything. In spite of her past, the kind that had produced two kids by the time she was twenty. In spite of her line of work, as a seductress who had perfected the art of arousing dicks. If Porter hadn’t loved her, he never would have risked so much for her—his political career, his marriage, his children. The slug pressed down more heavily. He thought of Kelly’s portrait hanging, anonymously to the rest of the world but brazenly visible, in Porter’s office. Kelly and Porter had the kind of love Jake had never even come close to and, he was slowly coming to realize, never would.
Jake brought his glass to his lips and tried to pour the rest of the water down his throat without swallowing. He got about two-thirds of it in before it trickled out the corners of his mouth. He closed his lips and let the liquid pool under his tongue. Kelly had loved Porter.
Son of a bitch.
Jake recognized the crazy reality: how much he now wanted Kelly to love him, too.
EXCEPT FOR THE STEEP HILLS AND THE OCCASIONAL funeral cortege snaking through the grounds, Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles could have been a golf course. Vast, lush lawns rolled up and down inclines and across flat expanses. Groves of eucalyptus trees slouched along the perimeter, dangling leaves and scent. The still air was shushed by the 134, the freeway sweeping along the base of the property toward Griffith Park. A fountain in the center of a giant lake at the entrance continually shot a plume of water thirty feet in the air. The few buildings were mock-Gothic, as if a Yale undergrad had won a competition to design them. The graves themselves were virtually invisible, almost an afterthought, marked by small bronze plaques laid flat in the grass.
Jake stood under a white tent beside the open grave. His left arm enveloped Suzanne Garrett, who wept silently into his chest. Jake’s right hand rested on the dark head of Ian, Porter’s nine-year-old son. Porter’s daughter, fourteen-year-old Anna, stood behind her
brother and held tightly to Jake’s forearm, resting her temple against his bicep, her blonde hair flowing down the back of his arm. Her look of disbelief was mirrored in the faces of the other mourners; distilled on hers, however, it resculpted her adolescent beauty into a portrait of hardened adulthood.
A gospel choir in purple robes covered the silence with their voices. The singers—a multiracial group of children ranging in age from six to sixteen—swayed with the beat and hummed reverently behind the soloist who was belting out “Amazing Grace.”
Hundreds of mourners made up a crowd as ethnically diverse as the choir. Suzanne’s family and Porter’s closest political friends were represented, as well as allies, supporters, donors, and believers. Porter had had an appeal that cut across gender, race, and age. Jake noticed one silver-haired woman, richly dressed in black crepe, moving her toe to the music, although she was off the beat. In the row behind her, a woman bounced a baby in her arms. In the distance, Jake spied a cluster of media vultures, their telescopic lenses trying to capture every tear in the eyes of the immaculately dressed and groomed politicians who were all sunk deep in the act of mourning.
The song finished and the choir shuffled into chairs reserved for them. The priest stepped forward, intoned a few words, and then nodded to Jake. Jake led Porter’s family forward, and each tossed a single white rose onto the coffin. The long silence was punctuated by sniffs and the tentative sound of noses being discreetly blown in public. The singers’ robes rustled in the breeze while the mourners performed an unchoreographed dance with their hands—dabbing eyes with handkerchiefs, burying whole faces in palms, brushing hair out of eyes and off foreheads. At last Jake led the family back under the tent and helped them into their chairs. The priest gestured, and four workers began filling the grave with dirt.
With the ceremony over, some of the crowd began walking
toward their cars, but most hung around in small groups, hugging each other and talking softly. A few loud voices rang out. A line formed under the tent beside Suzanne, who grasped each hand and air-kissed each cheek that was offered her. Jake stood at her side and murmured that she could get into the car anytime she wanted to, but she replied that she intended to greet every guest and acknowledge the support. As he had many times during the two decades he had known her, Jake marveled at her stoicism, her admirable public face that concealed so much—until he noticed her assistant, Cassie, leading a small posse of reporters and photographers up the hill to the gravesite. He watched Suzanne angle her body in their direction, keeping her eyes earnestly on her well-wishers.
She’s campaigning
, thought Jake, disgusted and amazed by her gall. But it all made sense. Porter had been neck and neck with Theodore Henckle, his rival in the Senate campaign. With Suzanne’s connection to the governor and the Democratic National Committee, she could easily be appointed to Porter’s seat in the House. But if she could keep the public’s support, she actually stood a chance of winning the Senate seat herself. It had been done before. And the Senate meant real political power.
Jake smiled woodenly as the mourners trooped by and tried to keep his exhaustion out of his face. His mind was clicking through what he had learned since yesterday. After seeing Alana Sutter at the Dragon Bar, he had flown to Los Angeles. On the plane, he’d called Allan Rich, who managed the art of Sidney Randolph Maurer, and arranged to visit Maurer’s studio on his way into town from the airport.
Seconds after Jake had rung the doorbell, the heavy door had been opened by a short, bald man with a big round belly and a familiar face. Allan Rich was a fantastic talker, so in addition to hearing everything there was to know about Sidney Randolph Maurer and
his career, Jake soon learned his host had been a character actor in the 1950s but, after being blacklisted, had become an art dealer. The peak of his career had been discovering and promoting the famous artist. As he showed Jake around Maurer’s studio, Rich told him story after story about the celebrities who used to come there to pose. Finally Jake was able to ask about Kelly. He described the portrait of Kelly’s face. Rich said he remembered a man paying a lot of money for Maurer to take a picture of his young wife.
“She was the most beautiful young woman I’d seen in a long time. She had danger in her eyes. Sidney loved that. Although he doesn’t usually do private commissions, he made an exception in her case. It was also an exceptional amount of money. The young woman called a while ago, maybe a year or so, and asked if there was a negative and could I make her another print. She was so pleasant, but she also seemed so sad. Something about her made me feel I had to help her.”
“Do you remember her name?” asked Jake.
Rich replied without hesitation. “St. Clair. Natalie St. Clair.”
Jake had been surprised. Just like that, so easily, he had the link between Natalie St. Clair and Kelly Jensen. But there were other factors: Kelly had a husband? Kelly changed her name? Everything he had seen so far had led him to believe she was a single mom.
Jake was deep in thought when he suddenly heard a voice from behind his shoulder that zoomed him back to the present—the funeral.
“Damn shame, damn loss.”
Randy Carlen came up behind Jake and clapped him on the back with his left hand while sliding his other hand down to rest on Suzanne’s lower back. It was an oddly intimate pose, territorial and comforting at the same time. Jake was surprised. He didn’t know that Carlen and Suzanne had ever even met each other.
Jake stood there awkwardly with Carlen squeezed between Suzanne and him. The smell of cigars wafted up from Carlen’s clothes. Suzanne didn’t seem to mind.
A woman approached. “My deepest condolences,” she quavered in the British-sounding diction of the moneyed classes of another era. “Porter was a wonderful man. His mother and I were friends in Washington. I watched him grow up.”
Suzanne accepted the woman’s hand. It was the silver-haired woman Jake had noticed moving awkwardly to the music during the service. Behind her blue-tinted sunglasses, her eyes were swollen and red. A wide-brimmed black hat shaded one side of her face.
“Did you come all the way from Washington?” asked Suzanne politely.
“I live here now,” the woman replied in her thin voice. “But your husband touched my heart; he was a very special person. I followed his career closely. He would have made a great senator.”
“Thank you for your kind words.” Suzanne smiled, her gaze already shifting to the next mourner in line.
Carlen muttered his refrain, “Damn shame,” and shook the older woman’s hand.
“Thank you for coming,” murmured Jake. The woman’s hand in her black glove felt like a bag of sticks.
“I’m Lydia Haines,” she creaked. “Are you family, too?”
Jake cleared his throat. “Jake Brooks. A close friend.”
“Well, we all need those.”
The woman smiled tightly. She didn’t look well. She seemed pale and pained, and Jake noticed her pink lipstick had been applied with a shaky hand.
All heads turned in the direction of a black Mercedes limousine whooshing up the hill and stopping with a crunch of tires. The driver’s door opened, and a huge man in a dark suit got out. He loped
around to the passenger door and held it open. Another man, tall and lean, emerged.
“Who’s that?” Jake murmured to Carlen.
“Todd Gillis.”
“Really?” Jake was intrigued. He’d heard of the investment banker and his donations to Porter’s campaign. He’d also heard of his arrogance and flash. Jake watched as Gillis approached a group of businessmen, trailed by his hulking bodyguard. Around six-foot-three, with salt-and-pepper hair, Gillis wore a handsomely cut charcoal gray suit. He seemed to be between forty-five and fifty, and he exuded power and control.
“Nice of him to come to the ceremony,” Jake muttered dismissively.
“No, you have the wrong idea,” answered Carlen. “The guy’s a real altruist. The kids singing here today? They’re from a group home—what used to be called an orphanage.”
“I know what a group home is,” Jake growled impatiently.
“Gillis owns this one. His charity runs it. Two hundred kids, staff, psychologists, teachers. Gillis is paying for it all.” Carlen looked sheepish. “It makes me feel bad about what I do with all my money.” He brightened. “But then I get over it. Hey, whoa—”
Lydia Haines had doubled over. She appeared to be choking. Jake leaped to her side and bent over to look at her face. She held a handkerchief over her nose and mouth.
“Can you talk?” urged Jake.
Lydia Haines waved him off.
“Can you talk?” repeated Jake more forcefully. He moved closer, preparing to perform the Heimlich maneuver if necessary.