Lorna snorted. “Oh, God, Freddy. Are you getting religious on me?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s entirely different.”
I searched for words and gestures, but none came. I looked at Lorna, who shrugged, with some contempt.
The following week I found out that Lorna had a lover. He was an older man, a senior partner in her law firm. I saw them holding hands and cooing at each other in a Beverly Hills restaurant. My peripheral vision blackened as I strode toward their booth. Unreasonable as it was, I pulled the man to the floor by his necktie, dumped a pitcher of water on his face and followed it with a plate of lobster thermidor.
“Sue me, counselor,” I said to the shocked Lorna.
I moved my dog, my golf clubs and my few belongings to an apartment in West L.A. I paid for three months’ rent in advance, and wondered what the hell I was going to do.
Lorna ferreted out my address and sent me a petition for divorce. I tore it up in the presence of the process server who had handed it to me. “Tell Mrs. Underhill never,” I told him.
Lorna discovered my phone number and called me, threatening, then begging for release from our marriage.
“Never,” I told her. “Tijuana marriages are lifetime contracts.”
“Goddamn you, Freddy, it’s over! Can’t you see that?”
“Nothing’s ever over,” I screamed back, then threw the phone out my living room window.
I wasn’t entirely under control, but I was right. It was a prophetic remark. Three days later was June 23, 1955. That was the day I heard about the dead nurse.
IV
The Crime Against Marcella
17
The initial newspaper accounts were both lurid and disinterested. Just another murder, the reports seemed to be saying.
From the Los Angeles _Herald Express_, June 23, 1955:
NURSE FOUND MURDERED IN EL MONTE
Strangulation Death for Attractive Divorced Mother
Scouts and Their Leader Make Grisly Discovery
EL MONTE, JUNE 22–A Boy Scout troop and their leader made a grisly discovery early Sunday morning when returning from an overnight camping trip in the San Gabriel Mountains. When passing Arroyo High School on South Peck Road, one of the Scouts, Danny Johnson, age 12, thought he saw an arm poking out of a line of scrub that runs along the fence on the school’s south side. He called this to the attention of his troop leader, James Pleshette, 28, of Sierra Madre. Pleshette went to investigate and discovered the nude body of a woman. He called El Monte police immediately.
Description Broadcast
Police went to the scene and immediately sent out a description of the woman to all Los Angeles TV and radio stations. Response to the broadcast was gratifyingly quick. Mrs. Gaylord Wilder, an El Monte resident, thought the description fit her tenant, Mrs. Marcella Harris, who had been gone since Friday night. Mrs. Wilder was brought to the morgue, where she positively identified the dead woman as Mrs. Harris.
Good Mother
Mrs. Wilder started to sob upon viewing the body. “Oh, God, what a tragedy!” she said. “Marcella was such a good woman. A good mother, devoted to her son.” Mrs. Harris, 43, was divorced from her husband, William “Doc” Harris, several years ago. They have a nine-year-old son, who was spending the weekend with his father. When notified of the death, Harris (who has been eliminated as a suspect) said, “I have every hope the police will quickly catch my wife’s killer.” Nine-year-old Michael, distraught, is now living with his father in Los Angeles. Mrs. Harris worked as head nurse at the Packard-Bell Electronics plant in Santa Monica. Both the El Monte Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have mounted a full-scale investigation.
I sat and thought, feeling strangely calm, yet engulfed by a prickly sensation when I put down the newspaper. It was too long after the facts, I told myself, too far away, too prosaic a form of murder. Strictly a non sequitur. I didn’t want to catch myself up in another logical fallacy.
I needed statistics, and the only person I knew who could furnish them was a crime-buff law clerk in Lorna’s firm. I called the office and got him. The receptionist recognized my voice and gave me the cold shoulder, but put me through anyway. After several minutes of amenities, I popped my question: “Bob, what are the statistics on strangulation murders of women, where the killer is not a known’ intimate of the victim?”