Clandestine

Years had passed. With the end of the Korean War and the discrediting of Joe McCarthy, a slightly more sane political climate was emerging. Time seemed to be opening new wounds in my present and healing the old ones in my past. If Lorna was the replacement for the wonder, maybe now it was time to reverse the situation.

Knowing I could never be hired as a police officer, I applied for a state of California private investigator's license, and was refused. I applied for positions as insurance investigator with over thirty insurance companies, and was rejected by each one.

So I hit more thousands of golf balls, recalling the trinity of my youth: police work, golf, and women. Women. The very word bit at me like a jungle carnivore, filling me with a venomous guilt and excitement.

One night I went to a bar in Ocean Park and picked up a woman. The old small talk and moves were still there. I took her to a motel near my old apartment in Santa Monica. We coupled and talked. I told her my marriage was shot. She commiserated; it had happened to her, too, and now she was "playing the field."

In the morning I drove her back to where her car was parked, then drove home to Laurel Canyon and my wife, who didn't ask me where I had spent the night. She didn't have to.

I did it again and again, savoring the mechanics, the art of briefly touching another lonely life. Lorna knew, of course, and we settled down to a quiet war of attrition: conversations of exaggerated politeness, awkward attempts at lovemaking, silent recriminations.

Inexplicably, my womanizing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I was sitting in a bar in the Valley nursing a beer and eyeing the cocktail waitresses, when I was hit by the same eerie stillness that had come over me in the irrigation field on the day I had quit the cops. I didn't break down this time, I just became flooded with some incredible nonverbal feeling of what I can only think of as vastness.

I tried to explain it to Lorna: "I can't explain it, Lor. It's just a feeling of, well, mystery, of truth and illusion, of something much bigger than us or anything else. It's a feeling of commitment to something very vague, but decent and good. And it's not the wonder."

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.

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