The articles jibed with Crotty’s account, minus his cynicism. Linda Lanier/Eulalee Johnson and her brother, Cable Johnson, major “heroin traffickers,” had fired at raiding Metro Narc detectives and been killed by return fire. In a single “lightning operation,” Detectives Royal Hummel and Victor DeGranzfeld had put an end to one of the most predatory drug rings in L.A. history.

The detectives’ photos showed them grinning and kneeling beside bindles of white powder. Hummel was wide and beefy, in a light suit and wide-brimmed straw hat. I thought I detected a hint of Cyril Trapp in the hatchet jaw and narrow lips. DeGranzfeld was pear-shaped, mustachioed, and slit-eyed, and wore a chalk-striped double-breasted suit and dark Stetson. He looked ill-at-ease, as if smiling were an imposition.

I didn’t have to study the picture of Linda Lanier/Eulalee Johnson to recognize the blond bombshell I’d watched seduce Dr. Donald Neurath. The photo was high-quality, a professional studio job- the kind of windswept, glossy three-quarter-face pose favored by would-be actresses for publicity portfolios.

Sharon’s face, in a platinum wig.

Cable Johnson was memorialized in a county jail mug shot that showed him to be a mean-looking, poorly shaven loser with drooping eyes and a greasy duck’s-ass hairdo. The eyes were lazy but managed to project a hard-edged scrap-for-survival brightness. Shrewdness rather than abstract intelligence. The kind who’d make out in the short term, get tripped up, over and over again, by an inflated sense of self and inability to delay gratification.

His criminal record was termed “extensive” and included arrests for extortion- trying to squeeze money out of some small-time East L.A. bookies- public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, larceny, and theft. A sad but petty litany, nothing that supported the papers’ labeling of him and his sister as “major-league dope pushers, ruthless, sophisticated, but for their deaths, destined to flood the city with illegal narcotics.”

Anonymous police sources were quoted claiming the Johnsons were associated with “Mexican mob elements.” They’d grown up in the South Texas border town of Port Wallace, “a tough hamlet known to law enforcement officials as an entry point for brown heroin,” had clearly moved to L.A. with intentions of pushing that substance to the schoolchildren of Brentwood, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills.

As part of their plan, they obtained jobs at an unnamed film studio, Cable as a grip, Linda as a contract player trawling for bit parts. This provided a cover for “narcotics trafficking within the film community, a segment of the population long known to be enamored of illicit drugs and nonconformist personal habits.” Both were known as hangers-on at “left-leaning parties also attended by known Communists and fellow travelers.”

Dope and Bolshevism, prime demons of the fifties. Enough to make shooting a beautiful young woman to death palatable- admirable.

I ran a few more spools through the machine. Nothing linking Linda Lanier to Leland Belding, not a word about party pads.

And nothing about children. Singly or in pairs.

27

Old stories, old connections, but the strands were tangling even as they knitted, and I was no closer to understanding Sharon- how she’d lived and why she, and so many others, had died.

At 10:30 P.M. Milo called and added to the confusion.

“Bastard Trapp lost no time snowing me under,” he said. “Reorganizing the dead-case file- pure scutwork. I played hooky, wore out my phone ear. Your gal Ransom had a severe allergy to the truth. No birth records in New York, no Manhattan Ransoms- not on Park Avenue or any of the other high-priced zip codes- clear back to the late forties. Same for Long Island: Southampton’s a tight little community; the local gendarmes say no Ransoms in the phone book, no Ransoms ever lived in any of the big estates.”

“She went to college there.”

“Forsythe. Not right there- nearby. How’d you find out?”

“Through her university transcript. How’d you find out?”

“Social Security. She applied in ’71, gave the college as her address. But that’s the first time her name shows up anywhere- as if she didn’t exist until then.”

“If you have any contacts in Palm Beach, Florida, try there, Milo. Kruse practiced there until ’75. When he moved out to L.A. he brought her with him.”

“Uh-uh. I’m ahead of you. Him I did find plenty of paper on. Born in New York- Park Avenue, as a matter of fact. Big apartment that he sold in ’68. The real estate transfer listed a Palm Beach address and I called down there. These rich-town departments aren’t easy to deal with- very protective of the locals. I told them Ransom had been a burglary victim- we recovered her stuff, wanted to give it back to her. They looked her up. Nada, not even a whisper, Alex. So Kruse hooked up with her somewhere else. And speaking of Kruse, he was not the hotshot psychotherapist you described. I stroked my source at the IRS, accessed the guy’s tax returns. His practice only produced income of thirty thou a year- at a hundred bucks an hour, that’s only five or six hours a week. Not exactly your busy shrink. Another five G’s came from writing. The rest, another half mil, was investment income: blue-chip stocks and bond dividends, real estate, and a little business venture called Creative Image Associates.”

“Blue movies.”

“He listed it as a ‘producer and manufacturer of health education materials.’ He and his wife were sole shareholders, declared a loss for five years, then folded.”

“What years?”

“Let me see, I’ve got it right here: ’74 through ’79.”

Sharon’s last year in college, her first four years in grad school.

“What it boils down to, Alex, is a rich guy living off inheritance. Dabbling.”

“Dabbling in people’s lives,” I said. “The army taught him psychological warfare.”

“For what that’s worth. When I was a medic I caught an eyeful of the army’s psychological warfare. For the most part, worthless bullshit. The Viet Cong laughed at it- ad agencies do it better. Anyway, bottom line is, Ransom emerges as your basic phantom lady with a rich patron. For all practical purposes she could have dropped out of the sky in 1971.”

“Martinis in the sun-room.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing important,” I said. “Here’s another possibility. I looked up the newspaper coverage of the Lanier/Johnson drug bust. Linda and her brother were from South Texas- place called Port Wallace. Maybe there are records down there.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Anything in the papers that Crotty didn’t tell us?”

“Just that in addition to the dope thing, the Red Scare was raised- supposedly the Johnsons went to parties with subversives. Given the mood of the country, that would have guaranteed public support for the shootout. Hummel and DeGranzfeld were treated like Most Valuable Players.”

“Uncle Hummel,” he said. “I called Vegas. He’s still alive, still working for Magna- chief of security at the Casbah and two other casinos the company owns there. Lives in a big house in the best part of town. Wages of sin, huh?”

“One more thing to chew on,” I said. “Billy Vidal and Hope Blalock are brother and sister. Vidal set up deals between Blalock’s husband and Belding. After Blalock’s husband died, Magna bought her out cheap. After Belding died, Vidal ended up chairman of Magna. Mrs. Blalock was bankrolling Kruse- supposedly because he’d treated one of her kids. But she doesn’t seem to have any kids.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Ever get the feeling, Alex, we’re playing somebody else’s game by somebody else’s rules? In somebody else’s goddam stadium?”

He agreed to run a Texas trace and told me to watch my back before hanging up.

I wanted to call Olivia again, but it was close to eleven, past her and Albert’s bedtime, so I waited until nine the next morning, phoned her office, and was told Mrs. Brickerman was up in Sacramento on business this morning and was expected back shortly.