Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

The ranch, in the picturesque territory above Visalia, sloped down from forested Sierra foothills to cover a vast swath of the flat valley floor. There were extensive orchards, square mile after square mile of field crops, herds of cattle, and horses.

“It was Christina’s favorite place when she was a little girl,” Evelyn told me, sitting on the edge of her bed. “She loved to ride her horse and work in the farmyard. She fed the chickens and ducks and helped with the dairy cattle. She won every award you can think of for her riding. Her grandfather called her the best little cowgirl in the West.”

It was a queen-size bed covered with a white chenille spread. The only other furniture in the echoing room was the armchair where I was sitting, a nightstand, and a small maple desk with matching spindle-back chair. The desk was piled with disordered papers, and there were open moving boxes full of books and clothes in a far corner. The windows that flanked the bed’s white wooden headboard overlooked the black canal.

“She and I used to spend a month at the ranch each summer,” Evermore said. “In the winter we would go to plays and movies and recitals. She was a wonderful little ballet dancer and swimmer. We were closer than any other mother and daughter in our circle. The other mothers were all jealous of our relationship.”

Things changed when Christina was eleven. She lost interest in her activities and grew distant from Evelyn. Her grades faltered and she started getting in trouble at school. But the problems ebbed and flowed. After an unpleasant scene, the girl would calm down and revert to her sweet, quiet self. Evelyn would take her to a matinee and then to the Top of the Mark for a late lunch, where the daughter would drink Shirley Temples while she consumed Manhattans, applauding the piano player more loudly as afternoon wore into evening and lights blinked on in the neighborhoods spread out below them.

The more wine Evermore drank, the more freely she talked and the more emotional she became, pouring out her heart to a stranger the way drunks have since some cat in a loincloth first sampled spoiled grape juice and made a sour face, then a happy one. People usually try to get away from loquacious drunks, but I was acutely interested in what she had to say.

The family tragedy surfaced in December 1975 when Evelyn came home early from a trip to Paris with her older sister and found Terrence and Christina asleep together, naked, in her and Terrence’s bed. Terrence swore it was the first time. He begged and pleaded and rationalized and promised that it would never happen again, that there would be no more affairs, that he would get counseling. Evelyn, befuddled by alcoholism, dreading scandal, struggled to believe him. That Christmas he gave her the pink diamond necklace to seal the deal.

It had been created at Tiffany and Company in New York in the 1930s as a gift for the actress Marion Burns from her director Raoul Walsh and was made of color-coordinated stones, starting out deep rose at the bottom of the pendant, shifting to light pink at the top. Evelyn had cherished and despised it, telling herself that it was a token of renewed affection and faithfulness, showing it off to her envious friends, all the while knowing that it was a bribe to buy her silence about her husband’s crime.

Terrence behaved himself during the bright, bracing month of January, but in February Evelyn discovered that Christina was pregnant, and that the incest had been going on intermittently for several years, whenever Terrence was driven by his demon and the opportunity arose. She left her husband then, taking Christina and moving into the Fairmont Hotel, on Nob Hill, across the park from the cathedral where she was married.

That spring, after several months of tears, fights, threats, denials, detectives, and escalating family drama, she fled San Francisco to get away from Terrence and his influence, moving into her sister’s home in Bel Air while divorce proceedings went forward.

Christina’s child was born at Cedars-Sinai in July 1976, a bicentennial baby. A few months later, before the divorce was final, Terrence drowned at the Monterey marina after drinking a bottle of scotch and falling off his yacht in the middle of the night. Evelyn inherited their Pacific Heights mansion and a multimillion-dollar portfolio of stocks and bonds. There was also a million-dollar life insurance policy that Prudential paid off on without a murmur.

Evelyn bought a house in Bel Air near her sister and tried to start over. She enrolled Christina as an eighth-grader at Sea Winds Middle School, where the girl promptly hooked up with a dark-clothed, drug-using crowd. She dyed her blond hair black, played hooky, and got in trouble with the police for vandalism and underage drinking. The following April, during spring break, she wanted to go to Mexico with her friends. When Evelyn refused, backed up by her sister, whom she called on for advice, Christina took her nine-month-old baby and ran away.

“That was the last time I saw her or little Kelly.”

“Her baby?”

“Yes.”

“Where did they go?”

“She went to Mexico with those kids, then to a commune in the San Bernardino Mountains with a man she met in Oaxaca. I hired a detective and he traced her to the commune. But by the time he found it, she was gone.”

The loss of her daughter sent Evelyn tumbling down a steep staircase of drunkenness and promiscuity. After her family intervened and had her hospitalized, she got sober and began the life she had lived ever since-of upper-class sports, charity work, and Eastern spirituality. She had kept a series of detectives on the case through all the years since Christina’s disappearance, spending large sums to follow up leads in San Francisco, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Miami, and many other cities. When Baba contacted her out of the blue the previous summer and told her that he had word of her daughter, his call had sent a thrill through her because the last message she had ever had from Christina was a postcard years before asking for five thousand dollars to be sent to her, general delivery, at the Venice Beach Post Office.

When Evermore went to see Baba Raba at the Murshid Center for Enlightened Beings, he told her that he had met someone who knew her daughter. He said Christina had been living in Venice earlier that year and that the man who knew her didn’t want to come forward because he was a drug dealer who had sold Christina marijuana and cocaine. Baba told Evermore that the dealer would track Christina down if she would give him ten thousand dollars to pay off a pressing debt. During their first conversation, the guru mentioned several things about Christina’s past that he said the dealer had told him. The accurate personal details made Evelyn believe the offer might be legitimate. She wanted to get a private detective involved, but Baba said that would spook the dealer, so she left the matter in his hands, along with a cashier’s check for ten grand.

Through the late summer and early fall, a pattern had developed. Each time it seemed that they were on the verge of making contact with Christina, there would be some hitch that required another chunk of cash to smooth over. The amounts had increased to $15,000 and then $25,000. Under the stress of anticipation and repeated disappointment, Evermore began to drink again, which made it easier for Baba to manipulate her. Each time she got upset about the delays, Baba doled out a few more intimate facts about Christina that could only have come from her or someone who knew her well. He was aware of the incest and told Evermore things about Christina’s relationship with her father that even she didn’t know but which nevertheless rang true.

In early January, he had asked about the necklace. She wasn’t sure how he found out about it, but when she revealed the circumstances in which she had received the diamonds, he told her that she must get rid of them if she wanted her daughter back.