The Evil That Men Do Read online

  “Could she have been drugged with a large dose and then hanged?” I asked.

  “Not really,” said Charles. “Large doses of steroids are harmful, but the effect’s not immediate. At worst you’d get sick and throw up. Besides, there weren’t any traces of pills in her stomach, and I couldn’t find any injection sites, though in three days at room temperature they’d heal over somewhat.”

  “I’ll get up with Lucy and try to find out more about Judy’s personal habits.”

  “To be honest, I don’t think there’s enough to suggest foul play. I don’t see a connection between the striations and her death, and I don’t think the coroner will either. It might just be something natural we don’t understand. What we don’t know about the human body far exceeds what we do know. Still, I don’t like unexplained details. I asked the lab to test for steroids. We’ll have the results tomorrow.”

  Charles stopped and rubbed his chin, then took a long pull of the Newkie Brown, looking at me over the top of the glass. The look suggested the business part of our meeting was over.

  We stayed and talked until midnight, exchanging stories from our respective professions. He told me more about his training under Dr. Cranston, his middle-namesake. The talk about names brought mine to light.

  “Dagny Taggart Jamison,” mused Charles. “Of course. I wondered about the Dagny but I couldn’t place it until now. No doubt your parents were readers of Ayn Rand?”

  “You got it. My brother John’s full name is John Galt Jamison. We are the Atlas Shrugged kids.”

  “Most singular way to name one’s children,” commented Charles. “When you read Atlas Shrugged—as I assume you have done—did the Dagny character make you feel as though you weren’t your own person?”

  “Not really. She’s an admirable figure and it’d be unrealistic for a real person to try to live like a fictional one. And you know, Ayn Rand was very much a realist. It’s more like, maybe, a Hispanic family naming a kid Jesus.” (I gave it the Spanish pronunciation—Hey Seuss—and was quite pleased with myself.) “He’s not expected to become a religious leader and get himself crucified. I think we sibs understood the high standards of our namesakes and tried to live by them the way a person might want to have the charitable qualities of a Mother Teresa or the leadership qualities of a George Patton.”

  Charles said, “I certainly hope my parents didn’t expect me to be as successful and famous as Sir John Cranston. But anyway, it doesn’t hang me up, so I guess I understand. I gather that you’ve never been tempted to run a railroad.” He winked at me when he said it.

  “Naw, business isn’t for me like it was for Rand’s Dagny. I like to think small, pick at one or two problems at a time, turn them over until I know everything about them, and then come up with solutions that fit the facts. That’s why I like what I do, though to tell the truth, a lot of P.I. work is routine and boring.”

  “So’s a lot of medical practice,” agreed Charles, “but the several interesting cases that come one’s way make it worth the while.”

  “What I admired in fictional Dagny as a character, what I strive for, is her dedication to her principles, her bravery, her toughness, and how she didn’t let adversity damage her.”

  Charles gave me a penetrating look as if he understood the emotion between the lines of my words. I was embarrassed for a moment, feeling as though I’d been melodramatic, but I’d expressed what I felt. We continued talking about our lives and ourselves well into the third (or was it the fourth?) round of Newkie Brown.

  It was six in the morning when I realized that Newkie Brown is really Nukie Brown. My head felt nuked. I skipped the jog in favor of two aspirin and two more hours of sleep. By eight I felt pretty good, and by nine I was in the office, sipping coffee, combing through mail, and updating the files in my laptop computer.

  When John trained me to be a P.I., he had me write all the facts of a case on three-by-five index cards. These could be pinned to a large corkboard, and arranged and rearranged, in the hope of discovering relationships that would propel the case forward. Nowadays I accomplish the same end by entering everything I know about a case into a database on my laptop. The computer does the work of displaying the data in various configurations. John still likes the corkboard because he can pace in front of it. He feels as though the pacing contributes to the thought processes and one cannot, after all, pace in front of a computer screen, leastwise not the kind I can afford.

  I was entering the facts surrounding Judy Raskin’s sad death when the office phone rang. It was Lucy. She’d had a sleepless night, increasingly convinced that Judy’s death was foul play. I filled her in on my “date” with Charles, particularly mentioning the fingernail oddity.

  “That clinches it,” she said. “You have to do something.” Then, as an afterthought—she couldn’t resist the romantic side of the picture—she added, “I think he likes you.”

  I wasn’t sure how she could know that. I had only related the parts of the conversation regarding Judy. Nonetheless, it pleased me for her say it.

  “I like you too, Dagny, even if your Spanish is a little rough.” In a more serious voice, “I want you to take my case. Puhlease, por favor!”

  I had to admit that the one loose end intrigued me. I’ve never been a believer in coincidence. I said, “Okay, Lucy, here’s the deal. I’ll take the case only until the cops get involved. We don’t know what the lab reports will look like, and we don’t know what Charles, I mean Dr. Clarke, is going to recommend to the coroner. I charge twenty-five bucks an hour plus expenses.”

  “You don’t, either! I know you charge seventy-five. I don’t want a discount.”

  “Twenty-five’s my student rate, take it or leave it. The point may be moot, anyway.”

  “Thanks, Dagny. I’ll take it. I want you to start today. Would you be willing to drive out to the university so I can show you our apartment? I’ll set something up with Troy, you know, Judy’s boyfriend, and I’ll try to get you in to see Dr. Akrich, too.”

  Lucy certainly wasn’t going to waste a moment, but I didn’t mind. It’s nice to be out and about in the California spring sunshine, so a visit to the university in Isla Vista didn’t seem like such a bad idea. A conspiracy of motivations moved me. I was curious about Judy, even if it turned out she really did kill herself. It was morbid curiosity, plain and simple—a little weakness of mine. It was also an excuse to stay in touch with Charles. Finally, I’d grown to like Lucy. I liked her determination and forthrightness—a quality the fictional Dagny had possessed and that I admired. I liked the depth of her feeling for her dead friend. I liked the freshness and vigor of her youth. Though our ages were only a few years apart, I felt old compared with her, and if not that, certainly more experienced—and I don’t mean with guys—but with life. I believe my affection for her was in part my wanting to play big sister.

  I said, “Whew, you get right on it, don’t you, but okay. I’ll drive out there if you’ll give me directions.”

  Lucy told me how to find the home of Doris and Ernest Worthington, where she was staying temporarily. Isla Vista is the other side of Goleta. If you take freeways and traffic cooperates, it’s about a twenty-minute drive from downtown Santa Barbara. I prepared a contract for Lucy, penciling in the twenty-five dollar rate.

  I found the apartment without difficulty. Lucy met me at the door. She wore a pair of Calvin Klein jeans and a short-cut, unbuttoned Levi jeans jacket. Underneath was a T-shirt with the logo of some cosmetics company, ironic since she wasn’t wearing any make-up. An inch of midriff was exposed, predating a style that was soon to become de rigueur for the young and flat-bellied (and, lamentably, for the old and flab-bellied, in some cases). A small, gold crucifix dangled from around her neck over the front of the T-shirt.

  “Hi Dagny, thanks for coming. I guess the first thing to do is have a look at where it happened. I haven’t been back. I asked Doris to get me a few things, but she didn’t want to go in there, either. She was going to ask Er
nie, but I didn’t want Ernie fumbling through my underwear, so I’ve been borrowing stuff.”

  Lucy was nervous, spurting out her phrases in short, rapid bursts. She wasn’t looking forward to visiting her former digs. She didn’t really need to, as I could look around myself. Later, when she had other living arrangements, she could have someone else move her belongings. But before I could volunteer to go alone, she was leading the way.

  To relieve her anxiety Lucy launched into a history of the surroundings. “Graduate student housing consists of several dozen 4-plexes erected during World War II as living quarters for coastal defense workers. They were supposed to be temporary but after the war the University purchased them, fixed them up, and now rents them to graduate students. They cost the same as a dormitory, but food’s not included. Still, a lot of us students prefer the peace and privacy not found in a dorm, and we’ve learned how to shop cheap.”

  “You’d make a good docent,” I quipped, as we strode up to our destination.

  The apartment was ordinary throughout, except for Judy’s bedroom. Even there most of the signs of death and investigation had been removed. Only the light fixture leaning against the wall in a corner, and some bare wires dangling from the ceiling, bore mute testimony to the tragedy. I wondered what Judy had stood on, or what her captor had stood her on, to raise her to the ceiling. I put the question to Lucy.

  “The bed, I guess. There wasn’t the usual kicked-over chair like in a soap opera.”

  The bed was queen-sized with a firm mattress. It might have worked.

  “How tall was Judy?” I asked.

  “Five-nine.”

  I got out the measuring tape on my key chain. The ceiling height was 89 inches—just under seven and a half feet. I had Lucy stand on the edge of the bed and stretch as far as she could toward the hole in the ceiling, while I stood on a kitchen chair and measured the distance from her neck to where the light fixture had hung. Her lower lip had slipped under her upper teeth.

  We both got back down. “I’m sorry I have to ask this. How far off the ground were her feet?”

  Biting her lip, Lucy considered for a minute. “At least a foot, maybe a foot and a half.”

  “Hmm. Her height at the neck is about five feet. Suppose she was a foot off the ground. That’s six feet. So the wire she hung from was at most a foot and a half long. But your neck was a good three feet from where you stood on the edge of the bed to where the light fixture was hanging.”

  “Oh wow! She couldn’t have used the bed.”

  Before I could say it, Lucy had done the arithmetic and drawn the conclusion. The excitement of discovery overcame her horror.

  “It’s hard to see how she could have,” I said. “Are you sure there wasn’t anything else around she could have climbed up on, like this chair? I’ll check the police photos in any case.”

  “I’m positive about that. I thought she’d used the bed just as I had when I pulled her down.” She shuddered at the thought of clasping the corpse to herself.

  “Do you want to get anything while we’re here?” I asked. She nodded. While she was collecting her things from the other bedroom, I explored the bathroom that the girls had shared. The drawers had the expected female stuff in them—multiple hairbrushes, toothbrushes, a loose tampon or two, various containers of makeup. The medicine cabinet had a few pill bottles whose labels indicated antibiotics, decongestants, something for diarrhea, and, pointedly, no steroids. The usage dates on most of the vials had expired. I looked in each one to make sure it contained what it said on the label. Each appeared to.

  Lucy had an armload of clothes and was standing at the door to the bathroom. I asked, “Is there any other place where Judy might have kept pills?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did she ever take steroids, possibly for some illness or injury?”

  “Judy was healthy as a horse. She didn’t even get PMS.”

  “Did she work out?”

  “You mean with weights? No, she jogged and swam.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do. In a minute we were outside, our faces less somber. The blue sky and bright late morning sun belied the horror of a few days ago. The scent of the Pacific floated in on a breeze.

  I reminded Lucy about the whitening at the fingernail root. “Think hard. Could she be popping pills without your knowing it?”

  “I don’t think so. I knew Judy fairly well. There were some things about her undergraduate years at UCLA that she alluded to kind of vaguely but never spelled out. But not drugs, I’m sure of that.”

  “Did she have a family doctor?”

  “Maybe back in L. A. Here we use the infirmary because it’s free to students. I can’t remember Judy ever going there, or maybe one time for a cold.”

  I changed the subject. I could check out the steroid business more carefully later. There are all sorts of tricks for getting information from a person’s medical or pharmaceutical records. “Did you arrange something with Troy? I’d like to talk to him if I could.”

  “He said he’d meet us at noon at the co-op. We can walk over there as soon as I put my things away.”

  We were on our way shortly. Lucy led us unerringly through a maze of buildings and grounds. We entered the student union on one level, climbed up a flight of stairs, and navigated corridors past pool tables, video games, and food and drink machines. We finally arrived at the co-op, which was a large fast-food restaurant, a blend of Burger King, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, but with distinctly institutional odors. It was less crowded than I’d have expected, considering the noon hour. Lucy looked around briefly, spotted her quarry, and ten seconds later I found myself shaking hands with Troy Stanton.

  Chapter 4

  He reminded me of a young Harrison Ford. Not terribly handsome—no Brad Pitt, he—but with rugged good looks. He was about five ten, sandy brown hair, and an athletic build on the stocky side. His light brown eyes darted about avoiding direct contact. For a strong man his handshake was weak, perhaps in deference to my gender. He wore the student standard issue of jeans, T-shirt, and running shoes. His only jewelry was a stainless steel Timex. His demeanor was one of discomfort.

  “Thanks for meeting with us,” I said, after Lucy’s brief introduction. We all sat down around a table ostensibly wiped clean, but with stains and graffiti still visible. I settled into my chair, crossed my legs, and leaned forward. “I’m sorry about Judy. Lucy told me you used to date her.”

  “That’s right. For about a year and a half. I can’t believe Akrich did this to her.”

  “It was terrible,” I agreed. “Would you’ve expected a reaction like this from her?”

  “Honestly, no. Judy was mostly cool-headed. I never thought she was suicidal. But she suffered a shock that would flip anyone out. She must’ve gone ballistic. But, anyway, why are we having this meeting? What’s with the investigator?”

  The last question was directed toward Lucy, whom I had asked while we were walking over not to reveal what we had discovered. Nonetheless, she joined in with her opinion of the “suicide,” and her reason for hiring me, which I suppose she had to do. I did manage to catch her eye to warn her off saying more, either about Charles’s discovery or the results of our measurements a half hour earlier. She took the hint and shut up, but Troy could see the implications.

  “Are you saying someone killed Judy?” he asked incredulously.

  “Well, I suppose if she didn’t kill herself, somebody must’ve done it,” answered Lucy, with an accusatory tone that put me on edge. I wanted to defuse the situation but I could sense matters reeling out of control. Before I could think of what to say, Troy had replied sharply.

  “I find that hard to believe. What a grotesque idea! And if you’re thinking I had anything to do with it, forget it. I may have argued with her and said some things, but I was upset and angry at the time.”

  “Several times,” interrupted Lucy.

  “Okay, several times, but I still wouldn’t ha
rm her, or anybody for that matter. Anyway”—his voice cracked—“I loved Judy, and you know I loved her.”

  “And you weren’t at her defense. Where were you?” continued Lucy in the same tone.

  Troy’s eyes flashed, but he didn’t answer. Lucy was not helping the cause by grilling the boy. I finally managed to kick her under the table, and she went silent. I wanted information from Troy, not this anger that was boiling up in him.

  I addressed Troy in my most soothing voice. “Nobody is accusing anyone of doing anything. Judy’s manner of death is still unanswered, at least in my mind. I’m just trying to collect information. So let me ask you, do you know of anyone who might have wanted Judy dead, or would benefit from her death?”

  He thought a moment, running a hand through his hair. “Not really. She has a half-brother but I don’t think inheritance is at stake.” He pondered for another moment—and I was glad to see he was cooling down. “She used to make allusions to a former lover she had at UCLA. ‘He’s a gangsta,’ she’d say in a New Jersey accent. I always thought she was jerking me around. She knew I was a little jealous of her ex-lovers.”

  “Was he also jealous of her?” I asked. One could fill Arlington National Cemetery with the victims of people who were “a little jealous.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know a damn thing about him, not even his name.”

  I figured I could check this out later. Troy shifted in his chair and glanced at his watch.

  “Look, I gotta run. I don’t have to answer any more questions. Man, Lucy, I thought you were my friend.” He got up to leave.

  I stood up as well and said, “Would you let me know if you think of anything else?” I said, fishing out a business card. “I’d appreciate it.”