CHAPTER

twenty-seven

I felt angry on Malcolm’s behalf: unsubstantiated rumors weren’t our usual fare. When I’d listened to the tape for the first time, when I’d transcribed and essentially dismissed it, I’d wondered why you’d bothered interviewing a washed-up hack politician. Now, I felt I knew at least part of the answer: McKenna.

You could hardly have believed Malcolm guilty of involvement in the Forrester killing. The case was solved, the killer in jail, serving life with no possibility of parole. McKenna might have sicced O’Toole on Malcolm; a photo of the famous director entering the District Attorney’s office, posted online alongside some scurrilous accusation, would have been milk and honey to him. It was possible, even likely, that McKenna invented some of his own gossip. But you’d never pay for that sort of rubbish.

A man like Malcolm, a wealthy landowner, a handsome Hollywood star, might stir neighborhood passions. His cousin probably wasn’t the only one jealous of Malcolm’s possessions and success. I tried to put myself in your shoes, Teddy, decode the DA’s interview from the point of view of a writer in touch with Glenn McKenna. Were you hoping to find some hint that local gossip—or the DA’s overreaction to local gossip—changed Malcolm’s mind about fighting Claire for Jenna’s custody?

I reread each grubby letter, studied each photo. On the fourth page, faint hand-drawn circles appeared around occasional letters and numerals. Someone had scrawled “0 = pswd” on the reverse side of the same page, an equation I hadn’t previously noticed. I located the e-mails Jonathan had forwarded after your death, quickly isolated the message from <McK> which I now recalled in sharp detail, an e-mail that led to a password-protected site, a dead end at the time.

0 = pswd. Circled digits equal password. I printed the circled letters and numerals on a scrap of paper. Hands poised at the keyboard, I felt the manic joy of the puzzle solver, but I hesitated, pondering the choice: To enter or to ignore. Information is a strange and unruly beast. Once you know, you can’t unknow, can’t unlearn or conveniently forget. Once you leap into the abyss, you can’t tread air like a cartoon character with pinwheeling feet, reverse gravity, and regain the cliff.

I closed my eyes as my fingers keyed the password. The screen flickered and changed.

A less polished site than CCtruthtelling.com, this seemed to be McKenna’s preview site, the private pages where he stashed materials prior to publication, perhaps while taking time to check their veracity or, more likely, their potential for attracting lawsuits. The printed material McKenna had given me was taken directly from this work space, the photographs far clearer in full color. The carefree sunbathers gamboled in the waves. Were the girls recognizable celebrities? None of the faces seemed familiar.

Several shots featured broad expanses of water in the foreground, figures in the background on a distant beach. I focused on the far background, a small building, a wooden shack, visible behind the laughing people.

I scrolled down. Yes, that was definitely Malcolm, a younger Garrett Malcolm, the shot reframed so that he held hands with a partial woman who disappeared out of the frame. The woman’s features were blurred, as though she’d abruptly turned her head. Her dark hair flew outward in a wedge that obscured her profile. Underneath the picture, a caption, no, not a caption, but a string of numbers: 939495?

I wondered whether there ought to be spaces between the numbers, whether they represented years: ’93? ’94? ’95? Malcolm had married the glamorous Claire Gregory in 1992. I studied each screen of McKenna’s preview site, hunting for another version of the shot, one in which the woman’s face was clear, her identity revealed. I compared the woman with other women on the site, to the frolicking sun worshippers enjoying the crashing waves, but I didn’t find a match.

Maybe, I thought, it was nothing more than a shot of Malcolm and a casual acquaintance, someone he’d bumped into on a street in a nearby town. I studied the twined hands in the photo. The pose suggested a certain intimacy, a quality of urgency, almost secrecy.

Malcolm’s marriage to Claire had lasted six years. The one characteristic of the woman in the photo that stood out, that was absolutely clear, was the color of her dark hair, brunette, almost black. Claire Gregory, like Harlow and Monroe before her, was a legendary blonde.