Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

“I was able to locate the babysitter,” he said. “Claudia Zabert.”

“Okay,” said Dusty with a generic smile, too disoriented by the incongruity of their sudden presence to even know she was afraid.

“And — this is going to be difficult.”

His entire face blistered and lurched like a satellite photo of a surgical strike, before returning to a blank composure of unbombed grids.

“Your daughter is Allegra.”

“What?”

Livia tensed and moved closer, self-deputized into suicide watch.

“It’s — Allegra. She’s Aurora. The one you’ve been looking for. They’re the same.”

Dusty tried to say what again but slurred “Grallegwa?” as if in the midst of a stroke. Sinatra’s boy soldiered on.

“It’s my understanding that your mother— Reina —gave Ms. Zabert five thousand dollars for ‘expenses,’ and after leaving Tustin, she and the girl — whom she renamed Allegra — spent time in Northern California. San Bruno, San Francisco, San Rafael. They lived in campsites and motels and with various acquaintances of Ms. Zabert’s. There are at least five recorded arrests for panhandling, vagrancy, and prostitution — it’s actually somewhat remarkable Ms. Zabert was able to maintain her physical ‘custodianship’ of the girl, such as it was. There may have been an involvement in a cult known as the Children of God or ‘the Family,’ but I believe that would have been something she dabbled in on an expedient basis in order to procure food, clothing, and shelter, and have other needs met. Ultimately, they settled in a commune near the Salmon River — this would have been 1981 or thereabouts, when the girl was age three. The commune was located in the Siskiyou Mountains and fairly remote; Ms. Zabert may have been seeking to avoid or escape certain legal pressures and predicaments. She and the girl experienced the communal lifestyle for approximately six years. Toward the end of their stay she joined a second cult, in a less casual way than she had before, and left the commune — with the girl, with ‘Allegra-Aurora’—traveling extensively in Asia, India, and other regions where the members of that group may or may not have had ‘affiliations.’ I’m of the understanding they were living in the U.K. when the girl returned to the States at age fifteen, accompanied by an adult female who, to my knowledge, had no relationship with the cult or Ms. Zabert. I’m fairly confident that at this point in time, Allegra was a runaway. Ms. Zabert did not choose to follow her and remained behind, working as a housekeeper for a family in Knightsbridge.”

She looked into Livia’s eyes, imploring her to be allowed to awaken from this nightmare. But all the woman could manage was to tenderly say: “Dusty…”

She turned to Snoop — pleading now with her executioner.

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“I wish it were.” He’d been careful not to go off-book but allowed himself that improv. “The degree of certainty is one hundred percent.”

What could anyone even do with such information? The profusion of detail and deadpan Dragnet delivery belied the sheer horror. It was like trying to parse the meaning of a massive heart attack or a bullet to the brain. The shock was so great that Dusty wasn’t even sent reeling; instead, she felt something akin to being catapulted into space and embalmed at once. A second opinion would be futile, as it didn’t seem possible the detective could make such an assertion without already being in possession of invincible documents, inalienable proofs. To present anything less than an airtight case would be a recklessly unpardonable moral and professional sin, because if he was wrong… no — he couldn’t be. Snoop Raskin wasn’t a foolhardy man, nor was he prone to career immolation.

She saw it clearly now. On learning the truth, he and Livia put their heads together and seized the moment. With Dusty in New York, far away from the daughter-wife, the stage had been perfectly, fatefully set.

So they flew in from L.A., the detective with his Enigma machine in carry-on. Its decoded message, like the face of God, was fatal to behold.

—

She thought she’d lose her mind — perhaps she already had.

In the days that followed, she was consumed with the idea that Allegra knew she was her mother all along, and their marriage had been a premeditated act — the capstone of an abandoned child’s unspeakable plot of bloodlust and revenge. She stubbornly promoted this theory in a series of crazed, jaggedly hysterical late-night phone calls to the detective, who, in turn, patiently attempted to defuse. He argued that Allegra could only have learned of her origins through her guardian, which was most unlikely; the street-smart woman would certainly have been aware of the legal consequences of her criminal act (the technical abduction of a child for financial gain). To bolster his rationale, he suggested that by the time they landed in the mountain commune, Claudia would presumably have been a fugitive from other crimes, and even more keenly motivated to retain old secrets.

Each time his deftness of logic delivered them to solid ground, Dusty lost her footing, and Snoop had to grab her by the wrists to keep the poor woman from being sucked into a vortex of insanity. He shot at clay pigeons and plugged leaks when they sprang, tap-danced and puddle-jumped from one muddy foothold to another, and chased runaway trains of thought — for example, derailing his client’s idea that the babysitter from hell had gotten in touch with her mother for additional funds. The “profile” of the sadistic matriarch that Dusty had provided led the detective to deduce that Reina was likely holding something over Ms. Zabert’s head that would have made contact disagreeable, if not outright dangerous to her health. Furthermore, he voiced strong doubts that Claudia knew of Dusty’s celebrity (which presumably would have been added incitement for a cash grab), not only because the actress changed her name early on — by the time she started getting noticed in movies, Allegra and her guardian had already left America — but from everything he’d gleaned of their impoverished, insulated life in a hermetic overseas cult, exposure to the movies and gossipy ephemera of Hollywood pop culture would have been effectively nil. There seemed little chance she would have had an awareness of Janine Whitmore’s cinematic transformation.

Dusty wasn’t going for it.

In fact, she thought it was lame — because all Claudia Zabert had to do (“Out of sheer curiosity !” she crowed contemptuously) was Google “Janine Whitmore” and voilà: mystery solved . She had a point, but Snoop stuck to his guns. He counterpunched by proposing that even if Claudia had been aware of her fame all along — if she’d improbably followed her rise to stardom and become Dusty Wilding’s biggest fan — why would she have shared her knowledge with Allegra, risking jail and/or the wrath of that gunslinger Reina Whitmore? Having spoken to certain individuals privy to Claudia’s history (Raskin’s resources were vast — just forty-eight hours before the Gansevoort summit, he had visited Ms. Zabert at a trailer park in Vallejo. She was “profoundly damaged”), he uncovered no evidence that she’d maintained any relations with Allegra after the girl returned to America. He convincingly theorized that no one knew of the orphan’s origins by reason of the simple fact that in close to forty years, the movie star hadn’t been contacted once in that regard, or in any other, not by Ms. Zabert or anyone else, for the most compelling, timeless motive of them all: blackmail. Dusty fought him on that too. (The vortex was always near.) But what if Claudia was feeling guilt over what she’d done, she forcefully suggested. What if she just wanted me to reconnect with Allegra? (She couldn’t bring herself to say, let alone think “my daughter.” She couldn’t even bring herself to use Aurora yet, though why she couldn’t made no sense; it should have been so much easier than Allegra . Everything was a nauseating jumble.) Wouldn’t that be a reason for her to have told Allegra everything? She could have told Allegra, then kind of just faded out of the picture. His categorical response was, “Well, did she? Did she tell Allegra? Did you ever get that call? ” Dusty shouted back, sardonic and crazed, “In a sense!” but Raskin talked emphatically over her. “ No, you didn’t. Because Claudia never knew , and Allegra doesn’t either . I can assure you of that.”