Silent Partner (31 page)

Cross claimed numerous visits to Belding's home, a hermetically sealed geodesic dome, somewhere out in the desert, which the billionaire never left. The mode of transport was dramatic: Cross was driven, always blindfolded, always in the middle of the night, to a heliport less than an hour out of L.A.—the implication was El Segundo—then flown to the dome for
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about two hours and whisked home before dawn.

The dome was described as equipped with a computerized communications panel by which Belding could monitor his international business interests, regulate air and water purification systems (developed by the Magna Corporation for NASA), automatic vacuuming and ambient chemical disinfection, and a convoluted network of pipes, valves, tubes, and chutes through which mail, messages, sterile food and drink entered and waste material exited.

No one but Belding was allowed inside the dome; no photos or sketches were permitted. Cross had been forced to conduct his interviews from a booth on wheels, positioned so that it abutted a speaker panel on the dome.

"We communicated," he wrote, "by a two-way microphone system that Belding controlled.

When he wanted me to see him, he afforded me a view through a clear plastic window—a panel that he could blacken with the touch of a button. He used this blackout panel, not infrequently, to punish me for asking the wrong question. He would withhold his attention until I apologized and promised to be good."

Bizarre as that was, the strangest part of the story was Cross's description of Belding: Emaciated to near-Auschwitzian dimensions, full-bearded, with long, matted gray hair reaching halfway down his back, tangles of crystal necklaces hanging from his wattled neck, and huge crystal rings on every finger. The nails of those fingers were polished a glossy black, sharpened into points, and appeared nearly two inches long. The color of his skin was an eerie greenish white. His eyes, behind thick rose-tinted lenses, bulged exophthalmically and never ceased to move, darting from side to side and blinking like those of a toad hunting flies.

But it was his voice that I found most unsettling— flat, mechanical, completely stripped of emotion. A voice devoid of humanity. Even now I shiver when I think of it.

Cross's posture throughout the book was one of morbid fascination. He couldn't conceal his antipathy toward the billionaire, but neither could he tear himself away.

At regular intervals [he wrote] Belding would interrupt our sessions to nibble on raw vegetables, drink copious amounts of sterilized water, then squat to urinate and defecate, in full view of this writer, into a

brass pot that he kept atop an altarlike platform. Once the pot had sat on the altar for precisely fifteen minutes, he'd remove it and expel it through an evacuation chute. During the process of excretion, a self-satisfied, near-religious expression would settle upon his gaunt, raptorish features, and though he refused to discuss this ritual, my reflexive impression was: self-worship, the logical culmination of a lifetime of unbridled narcissism and power.

The latter half of the book was fairly dull stuff: Cross pontificating about the weakness of a society that could create a monster like Belding, transcripts of Belding's ramblings on the meaning of life—a barely intelligible amalgam of Hinduism, nihilism, quantum physics, and social Darwinism, including indictments of the "mental and moral dwarfs who deify weakness."

The biography ended with a final burst of editorializing:

Leland Belding represents everything wrong with the capitalist system. He is the grotesque result
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of the concentration of too much wealth and too much power in the hands of one eminently fallible and twisted man. He is the emperor of self-indulgence, a fanatical misanthrope who views other life forms as nothing more than potential sources of bacterial and viral infection. He is preoccupied with his own body on a corpuscular level and would like nothing more than to live out his day on a planet denuded of all animal and plant life, other than those organisms required to sustain what remains of the wretched life of one Leland Belding.

The Basket-Case Billionaire had been a well-kept publishing industry secret, catching even the Magna Corporation by surprise, garnering massive post-publication attention, and shooting immediately to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list. A record paperback sale was made.

Magna

lost no time in suing Cross and his publishers, claiming the book was a hoax and libelous, producing medical and legal documents proving Leland Belding had indeed died, years before Cross claimed to have spoken with him. Reporters were taken to a gravesite at company headquarters; a body was exhumed and verified as Belding's. Cross's publishers got nervous and asked the writer to produce his data.

Cross reassured them and held a defiant news conference, his editor at his side, in front of a public storage vault in Long Beach, California, where he'd stashed thirty cartons of notes, many of them supposedly signed and dated by Leland Belding. Cameras whirring, he unlocked the vault, opened box after box, only to find each stuffed with notes unrelated to Belding. Frantic, he continued searching, produced old college essays, tax returns, stacks of bound newspapers, shopping lists—the detritus of a life soon to be ruined.

Not a word on Belding. Cross's horror was captured in close-up as he shrieked conspiracy. But when a police investigation concluded that no one but the writer had entered the vault, and his editor admitted she'd never actually seen the alleged notes, Cross's credibility vanished.

His publishers, faced with public humiliation and a legal adversary rich enough and tough enough to bankrupt them, settled quickly: They ran full-page ads in major newspapers featuring apologies to the Magna Corporation and the memory of Leland Belding. Immediately ceased further publication, and recalled all volumes shipped to stores and wholesalers. Refunded the record paperback advance to the soft-cover house.

The publishers then sued Cross, demanding return of his advance plus interest plus punitive damages. Cross refused, hired attorneys, countersued. The publishing house filed a criminal complaint for fraud and misrepresentation in New York District Court. Cross was arrested, fought extradition and lost, was shipped back East and imprisoned for five days at Riker's Island. During that

time he claimed to have been beaten and homosexually raped. He tried to sell his account of the ordeal to several magazines but none was interested.

Released on bail, he was found one week later in a tenement room on Ludlow Street in New York's Lower East Side, head in the oven, a note on the floor admitting the book had been fiction, an audacious scam. He'd taken the risk, believing Magna would be too publicity-shy to challenge him, hadn't meant to harm anyone and was sorry for any pain he'd caused.

More death.

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I turned to the magazines, looking for coverage of the hoax, found a long feature in Time, complete with a picture of Cross, shackled, in police custody. Next to that was a shot of William Houck Vidal.

The chairman of Magna had been photographed walking down courtroom steps, a wide smile on his face, the fingers of one hand held in a victory V.

I knew that face. Big and square and deeply tanned. Narrow pale eyes, a few blond hairs remaining in the brush-cut hair.

A country club face.

The face, fifteen years younger, of the man I'd seen with Sharon at the party. The old sheik she'd been trying to convince of something.

I REACHED Milo the next morning and told him what I'd learned.

He said nothing for a moment, then: "I've got a US history lesson lined up at eleven. Maybe we can tie up some more loose ends."

He arrived at ten after ten. We got in the Seville and he directed me east on Sunset. The boulevard was Sunday-empty even on the Strip. Only a thin gathering of brunchers and featherheaded rockers hunched at sidewalk cafes, mixing with coke whores, call girls, and call boys trying to shake off the night before.

"Wholesome," said Milo. He pulled out a cigar, said, "You got me started on these again," lit up, and blew soapy-looking smoke out the window.

"What is that? Panamanian?"

"Transylvanian." He puffed with enthusiasm. Within seconds the car was fogged.

We cruised past La Brea, past Western. No more cafe scene, just fast-food stands, pawnshops, discount outlets,

and darker skin tones. Through the window came laughter and transistor music seasoned with bursts of Spanish. Families strolled the boulevard—parents young enough to be kids themselves, marshaling broods of black-haired cherubs.

"Now that's wholesome," I said.

He nodded. "Cream of the crop—I mean it. Poor devils ransom everything they own to the goddam coyotes, get raped, robbed, and ripped off trying to make it over the fence. Then we treat 'em like vermin and send 'em back, as if the goddam country wasn't built on immigration—hell, if my forebears hadn't stowed away on a steamer and snuck in through Canada, I'd be digging potatoes somewhere out in County Cork." He thought about that. "Seen postcards of County Cork. Maybe better off?"

We passed through the Hospital Row that stretched between Edgemont and Vermont, rode past Western Peds, where I'd spent so much of my life.

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"Where're we going?" I asked.

"Just keep driving." He ground the cigar out in the ashtray. "Listen, there's something else I should tell you. After I left you yesterday, I took a drive out to Newhall and spoke to Rasmussen's old lady—Seeber."

"How'd you find her? I never gave you her name."

"Don't worry, your virtue's intact. Newhall sheriffs took her statement on the accident. I got the address from that."

"How's she doing?"

"Seems to have made a good recovery—already has another guy shacking up with her. Skinny Casanova with junkie eyes and dirty arms, thought I was raiding and was halfway out the window before I calmed him down."

He stretched, yawned. "Anyway, I asked her if Rasmussen had been working much recently. She says no, his temper had gotten him into too many scraps. Nobody wanted him on their crew.

She's been supporting the both of them for the past six months with the roach wagon gig. Then I popped the matter of the thousand bucks he left her on the pillow, and she almost wet her pants.

Even

though the sheriffs released the money to her, she's scared I'm gonna confiscate it—what's left of it. Chances are Junkie's shoveled most of it up his arm.

"I calm her down, tell her if she cooperates she can keep it, keep all the rest of it too. She gives me this look that says 'How'd you know about all the rest of it?' Bingo. I say, how much was it, Carmen? Fess up. She hems and haws, tries to play hard-to-get—gives it her best shot, but she really doesn't have much will and finally she just blurts everything out: D.J. had come into lots of money recently, was throwing it around, buying expensive parts for his truck. She's not really sure of the exact amount—ya know? But she found ya know forty-four hundred more in one of his ya know socks."

"How long ago was recently?"

"Couple of weeks ago. At least one week before everyone started dying."

I kept driving, past the Silverlake district and Echo Park, toward the western edge of downtown, where skyscrapers rose out of a tangle of freeway loops and back streets, glinting silver and bronze against a mud-bottomed sky.

"If it was cash for kill," he said, "you know what that means. Premeditation—someone'd been planning that contract. Setting it up."

He told me to turn left on an unmarked alley that climbed north of Sunset and tunneled between two building-supply lots. We passed dumpsters stuffed to the rim, graffiti'd rear walls, piles of plywood discards, damaged window screens, and hacked-up packing crates. Another quarter mile and we were weaving on cracked asphalt through weed-choked lots. At the back of some of the lots were lean-to shacks that looked ready to crumble. The alley angled and turned to dirt.

Fifty yards later it terminated at a cinder-block wall. To the left, more dead grass; to the right of
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it a crow's-eye view of the freeway.

"Park," said Milo.

We got out. Even this high up, the traffic roared from the interchange.

The block wall was topped by barbed wire. Cut into the block was a round-topped wooden door scraped raw by time and the elements. No lock, no handle. Just a rusty metal spike imbedded in the wood. Looped around it was a leather thong. Hanging from the thong was an old, corroded cowbell. A tile sign over the door said: RUE DE OSCAR WILDE.

I looked up at the barbed wire, said, "Where are the gun turrets?"

Milo frowned, picked up a rock, and hit the cowbell. It gave off a dull clunk.

All at once, from the other side of the wall came a rising tide of animal sounds. Dogs, cats—lots of them. And barnyard clatter: poultry clucks. Goat bleats. The animals got closer, louder-—so loud that they almost blocked out the sound of the freeway. The goats were the loudest. They made me think of voodoo rites, and the back of my neck tingled.

"Don't say I never took you anywhere interesting," said Milo.

The animals were scratching at the other side of the wall. I could smell them.

Milo called out, "Hello."

Nothing. He repeated the greeting, pounded the cowbell several times.

Finally a whiny, crackling voice of indeterminate gender said, "Hold your frigging water. Who's there?"

"Milo."

"So? What do you want me to do? Break open the frigging Mouton Rothschild?"

"Opening the door would be a good start."

"Wouldn't it just."

But the door did push open. An old man stood in the doorway, wearing only a baggy pair of white boxer shorts, a red silk scarf around his neck, and a long puka-shell necklace that rested on a hairless chest. Behind him an army of quadrupeds bounced and squealed and churned up the dust: dozens of dogs of uncertain pedigree, a couple of battle-scarred tomcats, and in the background,

chickens, geese, ducks, sheep, several black Nubian goats, which licked the dust and tried to chomp our cuffs.