David Morrell - Double Image

Coltrane felt a chill. “What are you getting at?”

“She never finished high school in Fresno. She and her mother left town. The reason they left is that Melinda Chance also enjoyed being on the football team’s cheerleading squad. She gave two of the players quite a bit of extra encouragement. The quarterback killed a fullback because of her.”

Coltrane’s chill worsened.

“Stabbed him in a parking lot after the spring prom.”

“My God.”

“The killer was eighteen, old enough to be tried as an adult,” Jennifer said. “His family didn’t have any social position. But the boy who got stabbed was sixteen , and his father was a bank president. The jury found the older boy guilty. The sentence was ten years.”

“And Melinda Chance moved on.”

“To Sacramento. She finished high school there and went to college. But by then, her name was Vivian Breuer. B-r-e-u-e-r. It’s a distinctive spelling. I’ll get to why that’s important. In college, she majored in drama, but the drama she was involved in didn’t happen only on a stage. A young man she was dating fell from the ten-story-high balcony of her apartment. The police questioned another boyfriend of hers who was in her apartment at the time of the fall. That second young man was eventually arrested for harassing her. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Drama Department, a forty-six-year-old man with a wife and two children, shot himself to death after the final performance of the Drama Club’s spring production. The play was Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . You’ll never guess who played Maggie, the character Elizabeth Taylor played in the movie, and you’ll also never guess who was suspected of having had an affair with the professor.”

“You can prove all this?”

“Here are photocopies of articles from the Sacramento newspaper. I’ve underlined Vivian Breuer’s name. By now, she was smart enough not to allow herself to be photographed for the yearbook, but the private detective I hired tracked down cast members from that production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , and they identified Vivian Breuer from Melinda Chance’s photos in the Fresno high school yearbook. They’re also the ones who suspected she was having an affair with the professor who killed himself. These are the private detective’s notes of the conversations he had with the cast members, and these are the tape recordings of the same conversations.”

Coltrane looked with horror at the accumulating materials.

“She transferred to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, still majoring in drama, but now she changed her name to Linda Erikson. That last name’s important, too. I’ll explain why in a little while. In Arcata, the lead actor in William Inge’s Picnic beat his male costar to death in an argument after the production’s dress rehearsal. Do you remember the movie of that play?”

“William Holden was the star.”

“Right, and Cliff Robertson was the male costar, and the plot had to do with how Holden, playing a drifter, showed up in a small town in Kansas and stole Robertson’s girlfriend. Kim Novak played the girl.”

“And Tash had the Kim Novak role? You’re suggesting that what happened in the play also happened in life?”

“Except that in the play, one of the male costars doesn’t beat the other one to death. Here are copies of the Arcata newspaper articles about the murder. Note that Linda Erikson managed to avoid getting her photograph taken. The student actor admitted that he killed the other actor because he was jealous about Linda. For her part, Linda professed to be as shocked as everyone else. She said that she was too disturbed about what had happened to continue her studies, and she moved on as soon as she finished testifying at the trial. The student actor got eight years. Here are transcripts and tape recordings of conversations that my private investigator had with members of the Picnic cast whom he tracked down. He showed them Melinda Chance’s high school yearbook photographs. They identified her as Linda Erikson.”

Coltrane’s feet and hands turned numb.

“Meanwhile, the young man who was arrested for harassing her in Sacramento set out to find her as soon as he got out of jail. His search took him to – guess where – Arcata, where his body washed up on the beach one morning. The medical examiner’s report suggested that he had drank too much, gone swimming at night, passed out, and drowned. Here’s a copy of it. You ready for more?”

“No, but I think I’d better hear it.”

“The next place she showed up was San Francisco, but she wasn’t interested in college any longer. She suddenly had the money to start half a dozen clothing boutiques, and now her name was Evelyn Young.”

“I assume that last name’s important, too,” Coltrane said.

“Yes, but this time she’s making a joke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You will.”

“The money for the stores. Where did she-”

“From the Acapulco Venture Group.”

The name had uncomfortable overtones and filled Coltrane with misgiving.

“A subsidiary of Orange Coast Investments,” Jennifer said, “which is a division of Seaview Enterprises” – she paused – “which was owned by Randolph Packard.”

Coltrane looked down at the table and saw double for a moment. “So she lied to me when she said she didn’t know about Packard.”

“One of the things my private investigator couldn’t find out is why Packard would have given her money.”

“Because Packard thought he was her grandfather.” Coltrane explained what he had learned in Mexico.

“Maybe Packard was her grandfather,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane shook his head and regretted it, aggravating a splitting pain. “No. Rebecca Chance told her servant that Winston Case was.”

“Assuming Rebecca Chance told the truth.”

Coltrane’s blurred vision cleared as a terrible thought occurred to him. “She made each man think he was the father? She was trying to set Randolph Packard and Winston Case against each other? She wanted them to fight over her?”

“Like grandmother, like granddaughter.”

“And a lifetime later, Packard finally found his daughter and a granddaughter he didn’t know about, and he gave them money.”

“Or maybe earlier. The fact that in Fresno her mother and she used the last name Chance suggests that maybe they wanted to be found. Maybe they were found in Fresno. From what the private detective was able to learn, they had a lot of money.”

“What happened when she showed up in San Francisco?”

Jennifer shrugged fatalistically. “She changed her technique and joined a sailing club. Two prominent male members competed for her. All three went out on a boat for a weekend up the coast. Only she and one of the men came back. The inquest didn’t dispute their story – that the other man went on deck during the night, lost his balance, and fell overboard. The body was never recovered.”

“Something she did on the boat made the two men fight over her.”

“Of course. Two months later, the man who’d survived was arrested for harassing her.”

“Just like the student in Sacramento,” Coltrane said.

“And just like that student, he drowned shortly after he was released from jail. In this case, he took a boat out by himself, and it capsized.”

“Or maybe she arranged for him to have an accident so there’d be one less person who knew how she got her kicks,” Coltrane said. “The survivors of love affairs with her don’t have much luck.”

“ You’re a survivor. Think about that while I tell you about San Diego,” Jennifer said. “She changed her name to Donna Miller.”