The Cover Girl Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
agreed. Mother tried to do what was right. And she did amazingly well. After decades in a twilight world, not knowing whether Ike was President or Ronald Reagan, forgetting half the time that her husband had died in the Korean War and forgetting half the time that that war had been over for decades and that her son was a grown man approaching middle age, Mother had come around.
Something had penetrated the fog. Something like a miracle.
After dinner was over and the dishes cleaned and put away—six hands made quick work—Mother turned on the TV. It was getting late, they had lingered over coffee, and the evening news was just coming on.
There was a follow-up to the Vansittart story. The Coast Guard had dropped a plumb line, trying to find the helicopter. Nothing came up. The lake was too deep at that point, the line couldn’t even reach the bottom.
There was a canned biography of Vansittart. The news people had turned up his high school and college yearbook photos, old newspaper shots and black-and-white footage of the millionaire. Toasting the mayor of San Francisco at some civic dinner, shaking hands with the governor of California at another.
Vansittart must have been quite a fellow. Apparently he’d been ambassador to several postage-stamp nations in the 1960s and 70s, obviously the reward for generous campaign donations to the Presidents of that era.
And newsreel footage of Vansittart escorting movie stars to premieres and rolling dice at the gaming tables in Reno and Las Vegas. Yes, quite a fellow. The reporter in Reno mentioned that Vansittart had been traveling by chartered helicopter to a planned seventy-fifth birthday party—his own—when the ’copter crashed and sank into Lake Tahoe, taking Vansittart with it.
In the morning the Oldsmobile was still in the driveway. Lindsey got into his blue round-back Volvo and headed downtown to the International Surety office. Now that he was assigned to SPUDS he could have moved out, rented space for himself, hired a secretary. But he preferred to work out of the office where he’d worked for so many years.
Not that the atmosphere was perfect. Elmer Mueller, Lindsey’s successor as area manager, was a loathsome bigot, and Mueller’s hand-picked office manager, Kari Fielding, was as vicious as her boss. But in a strange way Lindsey enjoyed seeing them once in a while. It was the way you enjoy having a really miserable day once in a while, he told himself: it makes you appreciate the rest of your life.
But it was Saturday and he was alone in the office. Agent claims would be filed directly through KlameNet. Anything else could wait until Monday morning.
Lindsey used the office computer to log onto the mainframe at National. He printed out the text of Vansittart’s policy, checked the history file, verified that the peculiar description of the beneficiary had been there from the outset. The only changes over the years had come about when the alternate bennie had changed its name. Originally the Chicago Artists and Models Mutual Aid Society, it had become the National Welfare League for Graphic Creators, then the World Fund for Indigent Artists.
Each time the organization changed its name there was a new address and a new set of officers. Well, in forty-plus years, that wasn’t especially surprising. The current address was 101 California Street, San Francisco. Lindsey knew the building well, a gleaming, modern high-rise full of high-profile law firms and corporate offices. A disgruntled ex-client of one of the law firms had burst in with an arsenal of assault weapons one day and reduced the California Bar Association membership sizably. Since then there was better security in the building.
The current President of WFIA was one Roger St. John Cooke. Vice President was Cynthia Cooke. The file showed that the Cookes had been running the fund for a decade. It sounded like a nice little mom ’n’ pop non-profit foundation. The world was full of do-gooders, including those who did well by doing good.
Lindsey made a note to expect some input from the Cookes. (Brother and sister? Husband and wife? Mother and son?) There would be a polite phone call, then a lawyer letter. How handy, they probably wouldn’t even get wet if they had to visit their attorneys on a rainy San Francisco day. But Lindsey wasn’t going to worry too much about the contingent bennies today.
His job was.… He must have been listening to too much music lately. His mind was setting his task to music. A silent orchestra played inside his head as he sang along.
Was the tune Happy Birthday to You…?
Find the girl on the book, Find the girl on the book, It’s Death in the Di-itch.…
Or maybe it was Beethoven’s Fifth.…
Locate the girl! Locate the girl! Locatethegirllocatethe-girllocatethegirl.…
He found himself giggling into the monitor screen. Maybe this job was making him crazy. He shut down the computer, left the office, grabbed a snack downstairs and walked to his car. Traffic in the Caldecott Tunnel was light.
It was a gray day in Berkeley. Lindsey was dressed casually, a heavy sweater over a woolen shirt. He parked in a city garage just off Telegraph Avenue and headed for Cody’s, the town’s premiere bookstore. A clerk at the center desk offered to help him. She had short hair and a spectacularly beautiful face. She wore a Dan Quayle for President tee shirt. Lindsey didn’t know what to make of that, so he didn’t comment.
He asked if she knew of a book called Death in the Ditch. No author, no publisher, but it was probably first issued in 1951 or so. The clerk smiled. “I doubt that it’s still in print. Unless it was a classic of some kind.”
“I don’t know what kind of book it was, except there was a girl on the cover.”
The clerk raised her eyebrows. “A little girl, you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”
“Or a woman. A grown-up woman.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”
The clerk turned away. Over her shoulder she said, “I’ll look in Books in Print. On the CD-ROM.” She punched some keys on a computer. Mysterious boxes and symbols raced across the monitor screen. Finally it settled down. The clerk turned back to Lindsey. “Sorry. Doesn’t show anything like that. Death in Venice? Death in the Bathroom? Death in a Warm, Dark Place?”
Lindsey shook his head.
The clerk nodded. “I didn’t think so. Tell you what.” Lindsey had one hand on the counter, and the clerk put hers on top of his. “Maybe you could try Moe’s next door. First floor, they have a lot of used paperbacks. That might be your best bet.”
Lindsey thanked her and walked next door. It wasn’t raining so he didn’t get wet, even though he wasn’t at 101 California Street.
The clerk was right, Moe’s had thousand upon thousands of used paperbacks. Trouble was, they were arranged by author, not title. Finding Death in the Ditch—if Moe’s had it at all—was about as likely as dropping a pebble from the Goodyear blimp and hoping to hit the right spectator in a stadium full of football fans.
But again a clerk came to the rescue. “You know the San Francisco Mystery Book Store? Twenty-fourth Street? If anybody can help you, they can.”
Lindsey drove across the Bay Bridge, took Duboce Street to Market and turned left on Castro. On a Saturday afternoon the city’s gay community was out in force, but something struck Lindsey as odd. There were teenagers and twenty-something’s and there were gray heads and lined faces, but the thirty- and forty-somethings were missing from the scene. Those, he realized, were the population who’d been living it up fifteen years ago, when the HIV virus was spreading like a stealth disease.
At Twenty-fourth Street he found a parking place and walked to the mystery specialty store. The place was crammed with books and book-lovers. He squeezed through narrow aisles and reached the upstairs room. Hardcovers and paperbacks were intermixed. There must be thousands of them. If Lindsey had been a mystery fan—he was not—he would have been in paradise.
But again, the arrangement was alphabetical by author, not title. He squeezed back down the narrow