Jane Chambers ushered me into a sedate, all-wood foyer. “The study in back of the dining room. You’ll see the rope. Now, if you’ll excuse me I want to do some gardening.”

She took off dabbing at her eyes. I found the room, stepped over the crime scene rope and wondered why the bastard did himself in where his loved ones would see the gore.

It looked like a classic self-inflicted shotgun job: overturned leather chair, the outline of the stiff chalked on the floor beside it. The weapon, a double-barreled .12 gauge, was right where it should have been—three feet in front of the body, the muzzle coated with blood and shredded tissue. The light plaster walls and ceiling showed off blood and caked-on brains to full advantage, the teeth fragments and buckshot a dead giveaway that the victim had stuck both barrels in his mouth.

I spent an hour measuring trajectories and spatter marks, scraping matter into test tubes and dusting the suicide weapon for latents. When I finished, I took a bag from my evidence kit and wrapped up the shotgun, knowing full well it would end up the property of some LAPD sportsman. Then I walked out to the entrance hall, stopping when I saw a framed painting hung at eye level.

It was a portrait of a clown, a young boy done up in court jester’s garb from long, long ago. His body was gnarled and hunched; he wore a stuporous ear-to-ear smile that looked like one continuous deep scar.

I stared, transfixed, thinking of Elizabeth Short, DOA at9th and Norton. The more I stared the more the two blended; finally I pulled my eyes away and settled them on a photo of two arm-linked young women who looked just like Jane Chambers.

“The other survivors. Pretty, aren’t they?”

I turned around. The widow was twice as dusty as before, smelling of insect spray and soil. “Like their mother. How old are they?”

“Linda’s twenty-three and Carol’s twenty. Are you finished in the study?”

I thought of the daughters as contemporaries of the Sprague girls. “Yes. Tell whoever cleans it up to use pure ammonia. Mrs. Chambers—”

“Jane.”

“Jane, do you know Madeleine and Martha Sprague?”

Jane Chambers snorted, “Those girls and that family. How do you know them?”

“I did some work for them once.”

“Count yourself lucky it was a brief encounter.”

“What do you mean?”

The hallway phone rang. Jane Chambers said, “Back to condolences. Thank you for being so nice, Mr.—”

“It’s Bucky. Good-bye, Jane.”

“Good-bye.”

I wrote out my report at Wilshire Station, then checked the routine suicide file on Chambers, Eldridge Thomas, DOD 4/2/49. It didn’t tell me much: Jane Chambers heard the shotgun explosion, found the body and called the police immediately. When detectives arrived, she told them her husband was depressed over his failing health and their eldest daughter’s failing marriage. Suicide: case closed pending forensic crime scene work-up.

My work-up confirmed the verdict, plain and simple. But it didn’t feel like enough. I liked the widow, the Spragues lived a block away, I was still curious. I got on a squadroom phone and put in calls to Russ Millard’s newspaper contacts, giving them two names: Eldridge Chambers and Emmett Sprague. They did their own digging and calling, and got back to me on the station extension I was hogging. Four hours later I knew the following:

That Eldridge Chambers died enormously wealthy;

That from 1930 to 1934 he was president of the Southern California Real Estate Board;

That he nominated Sprague for membership in Wilshire Country Club in 1929, but the Scotsman was rejected because of his “Jewish business associates”—i.e. East Coast hoodlums;

And the kicker: Chambers, through intermediaries, got Sprague kicked off the real estate board when several of his houses collapsed during the ‘33 earthquake.

It was enough for a juicy newspaper obit, but not enough for a test-tube cop with a foundering marriage and time on his hands. I waited four days; then, when the papers told me Eldridge Chambers was in the ground, I went back to talk to his widow.

She answered the door in gardening clothes, holding a pair of shears. “Did you forget something or are you as curious as I thought you were?”

“The latter.”

Jane laughed and wiped dirt from her face. “After you left I put your name together. Weren’t you some sort of athlete?”

I laughed. “I was a boxer. Are your daughters around? Have you got someone staying with you?”

Jane shook her head. “No, and I prefer it that way. Will you join me for tea in the backyard?”

I nodded. Jane led me through the house and out to a shaded veranda overlooking a large bent grass yard more than half dug up into furrows. I sat down in a lounge chair; she poured iced tea. “I’ve done all that garden work since Sunday. I think it’s helped more than all the sympathy calls I’ve gotten.”

“You’re taking it well.”

Jane sat down beside me. “Eldridge had cancer, so I half expected it. I didn’t expect a shotgun in our own home, though.”

“Were you close?”

“No, not anymore. With the girls grown up, we would have divorced sooner or later. Are you married?”

“Yes. Almost two years.”

Jane sipped tea. “God, a newlywed. There’s nothing better, is there?”

My face must have betrayed me. Jane said, “Sorry,” then changed the subject. “How do you know the Spragues?”

“I was involved with Madeleine before I met my wife. How well do you know them?”

Jane considered my question, staring out at the uprooted yard. “Eldridge and Emmett went way back,” she said finally. “They both made a lot of money in real estate and served on the Southern California board together. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, since you’re a policeman, but Emmett was a bit of a crook. A lot of his houses went down during the big quake in3, and Eldridge said that he has lots of other property that has to go bad sooner or later—houses made out of the worst possible material. Eldridge got Emmett booted off the board when he found out that phony corporations controlled the rentals and sales—he was enraged that Emmett would never be held responsible if more lives were lost.”

I remembered talking with Madeleine about the same thing. “Your husband sounded like a good man.”

Jane’s lips curled into a smile—it looked like against her will. “He had his moments.”

“He never went to the police about Emmett?”

“No. He was afraid of his gangster friends. He just did what he could, a little nuisance to Emmett. Being removed from the board probably cost him some business.”

“‘He did what he could’ isn’t a bad epitaph.”

Now Jane’s lips curled into a sneer. “It was out of guilt. Eldridge owned slum blocks in San Pedro. When he learned he had cancer, he really started feeling guilty. He voted Democratic last year, and when they got in he had meetings with some of the new City Council members. I’m sure he gave them his dirt on Emmett.”

I thought of the Grand Jury probe the scandal sheets were predicting. “Maybe Emmett’s heading for a fall. Your husband could have been—”

Jane rapped her ring finger on the tabletop. “My husband was rich and handsome and did a mean Charleston. I loved him until I found out he was cheating on me, and now I’m starting to love him again. It is so strange.”

“It’s not so strange,” I said.

Jane smiled very softly. “How old are you, Bucky?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Well, I’m fifty-one, and I think it’s strange, so it is strange. You shouldn’t be so all-accepting of the human heart at your age. You should have illusions.”

“You’re teasing me, Jane. I’m a cop. Cops don’t have illusions.”

Jane laughed—heartily. “Touché. Now I’m curious. How did an ex-boxer cop get involved with Madeleine Sprague?”