If Lee had this money, plus the dough he was spending in Mexico, why didn’t he pay off Baxter Fitch?
If he had the money, why did he go to Ben Siegel to try to borrow ten grand to meet Fitch’s blackmail demand?
How could Lee have bought and furnished this house, put Kay through college and still have had a substantial sum left when his cut from the aborted heist couldn’t have amounted to more than fifty grand or so?
Of course I told Kay; of course she couldn’t answer the questions; of course she loathed me for dredging up the past. I told her we could sell the house and get an apartment like other normal squarejohns–and of course she wouldn’t have it. It was comfort, style–a link to her old life that she would not give up.
I burned the money in Lee Blanchard’s Deco-streamline fireplace. Kay never asked me what I did with it. The simple act gave me back some smothered part of myself, cost me most of what I had with my wife–and returned me to my ghosts.
Kay and I made love less and less. When we did it was perfunctory reassurance for her and a dull explosion for me. I came to see Kay Lake Bleichert as wasted by the obscenity in her old life, just short of thirty and already going chaste. I brought the gutter to our bed then, the faces of hookers I saw downtown attached to Kay’s body in the darkness. It worked the first few times, until I saw where I really wanted to go. When I finally made the move and came gasping, Kay stroked me with mothering hands, and I sensed that she knew I’d broken my marriage vow–with her right there.
1948 became 1949. I turned the garage into a boxing gym, complete with speed bag and heavy bag, jump ropes and barbells. I got back into fighting trim, and decorated the garage walls with fight stills of young Bucky Bleichert, circa ’40–’41. My own image glimpsed through sweat-streaked eyes brought me closer to her, and I scoured used book stores for Sunday supplements and news magazines. I found sepia candids in Colliers; some family snapshots reproduced in old issues of the Boston Globe. I kept them out of sight in the garage, and the stack grew, then vanished one afternoon. I heard Kay sobbing inside the house that evening, and when I went to talk to her the bedroom door was locked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The phone rang. I reached for the bedside extension, then snapped that I’d been a couch sleeper for the past month and flailed at the coffee table. “Yeah?”
“You still sleeping?”
It was the voice of Ray Pinker, my supervisor at SID. “I was sleeping.”
“Past tense is right. Are you listening?”
“Keep going.”
“We’ve got a gunshot suicide from yesterday. 514 South June Street, Hancock Park. Body removed, looks open and shut. Do a complete work-up and drop the report off with Lieutenant Reddin at Wilshire dicks. Got it?”
I yawned. “Yeah. Premises sealed?”
“The stiff’s wife will show you around. Be courteous, this is filthy rich we’re dealing with.”
I hung up and groaned. Then it hit me that the Sprague mansion was a block from the June Street address. Suddenly the assignment was fascinating.
o o o
I rang the bell of the pillared colonial manse an hour later. A handsome gray-haired woman of about fifty opened the door, dressed in dusty work togs. I said, “I’m Officer Bleichert, LAPD. May I express my condolences, Mrs.–”
Ray Pinker hadn’t given me a name. The woman said, “Condolences accepted, and I’m Jane Chambers. Are you the lab man?”
The woman was trembling underneath her brusqueness; I liked her immediately. “Yes. If you’ll point me to the place I’ll take care of it and leave you alone.”
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.