Given my recalcitrant technophobia, my spending the morning on the Internet amounted to a victory of sorts. My search on Lisette Peterson Johnson yielded some interesting results. The woman had run for school board five different times in the last fifteen years, which told me she was either oblivious, a fatalist, or some kind of megalomaniac. She was definitely a press hound. I scrolled through no less than twenty-five interviews she’d done with the local papers over the years, promoting herself and her pet causes, one of which seemed to be something called “reorientation therapy” for unhappy homosexuals. How hideous.
The woman was canny, I’ll give her that. All that talking and she never let anything of a personal nature slip out, except for the fact that she’d gone to Hollywood after high school to try to become an actress (!), but had come back home after a couple of depressing years. I was about to launch a search on reorientation therapy when I reminded myself of why I had started all this in the first place, that being the urgent need to resuscitate my dead-in-the-water book on ESG.
I had enough on Perry Mason. I’d done the literary analysis. I’d done the political and social context. I’d even devoted a chapter to the merchandising philosophy, which involved deemphasizing individual books in favor of the lengthy list of titles available through a constant stream of reissues. What I needed was a more extensive discussion of Gardner’s travel books, which were not as well known.
Back in his Ventura days, Gardner had joined a sailing party to Cabo San Lucas, a lark that had ended prematurely when the boat tipped over in the shallows off the coast and marooned itself, along with the entire group of revelers. ESG was not one to be discouraged, however. In 1947, he’d made his first trip to the peninsula and on his return began a series of thirteen travel books. These documented his Baja explorations, as well as his adventures in the desert, blimp expeditions, and treacherous journeys deeper into Mexico. What I really wanted to check on, however, was the story Gardner recounted in The Hidden Heart of Baja about making a find of prehistoric cave paintings. Even more interesting was that two years afterward he’d been barred from Baja, accused of stealing archeological treasures and taking them back across the border. It was a trumped-up charge, everyone acknowledged, but I wanted the details.
That investigation, however, was on hold while I waited to hear back from the helicopter pilot who’d accompanied Gardner on the trip in question. But I needed to keep busy. I jotted down some inconsequential factoids from the Baja California Tourist Bureau site, knowing full well I’d never use them, and then I sat there for a while. And sat there, thumbing through my books in despair.
Then I started doing crazy things, like counting the number of times the word diamond appeared in one of Gardner’s titles (five, starting with The Case of the Candied Diamonds, a Speed Dash novelette).
I looked up the word diamond in the dictionary: “A native carbon crystallized in the isometric system, usually nearly colorless such that when free from flaws is highly valued as a precious stone because when faceted shows a remarkable brilliance, and when flawed is invaluable for industrial purposes because it is the hardest substance known.”
Colorless: my prose.
Flawed: my mental processes.
Remarkable brilliance: the thing I lack.
The hardest substance known: material you’re trying to shape into a book.
I spun around in my chair until I felt nauseous. I got up to get some Diet Coke, even though I’d sworn I’d no longer touch the stuff before noon. There wasn’t any. I checked my messages. There weren’t any.
I got Mimi and went back out to my desk. I seated myself with my cat in my lap and got out a fresh yellow legal pad. Nothing like a fresh yellow legal pad.
I wrote ERLE STANLEY GARDNER at the top, in capital letters. But I was distracted by the dust on my desk. I got out the Fantastik, which did the trick. No more dust. No more excuses. I looked at ERLE STANLEY GARDNER again. I started to count the letters. I shook my head, clearing out the cobwebs. Nothing.
I counted how many times a color appeared in one of ESG’s titles (twenty-three, with crimson in the lead: Crimson Jade, The Crimson Mask, The Crimson Scorpion, The Case of the Crimson Kiss). It was like reading tea leaves. If I could just see the patterns, it would make sense. If it made sense, I’d know what to do.
I turned to a new page and wrote JOSEPH ALBACCO on the first line. I looked at it for a while. Then things started to get interesting.
The collect call came from the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi.
“How are you, Ms. Caruso?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Albacco. I’m glad you called. I was sitting here thinking about you, literally. Listen, I want to apologize for the other day.”
“Don’t.”
“I was awful. Everything you’ve been through. I was wrong to speak to you like that.”
“Stop. I’ve been thinking about you, too, Ms. Caruso. About the things you said to me. I needed to hear them.”
“Not like that.”
“Please. I remembered something. I don’t know if it’s important or not.”
“Tell me.”
“You mentioned Morgan Allan, Meredith’s father. You thought Meredith might have been trying to protect him. You mentioned something about the tidelands.”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “Jean had a letter about it. Meredith’s father was advised to sell some tidelands holdings he had, way back in the twenties. I don’t know why exactly, or what it might have to do with Jean or you, for that matter.”
“How did Jean get a letter like that? And what do you know about it?”
“Don’t worry about that now.”
“Well, I don’t know if there’s any connection, or what it could have to do with anything, but my father owned some tidelands, too.”
I didn’t understand.
“Your father? Are you sure about that? How would your father have gotten his hands on something so valuable? I mean, I don’t want to insult your family, but I thought you grew up poor.”
“I did. We never had a cent.”
“And?”
“And one day, after my father was gone, my mother was going through some papers and found the deed to some tidelands, dating way, way back. There was a lease or something on the land that had expired, an oil lease. My dad had been a roustabout in the oil fields, back when he was a young man. I worked on a rig a couple summers, too. He must’ve raised some money to buy the land, I don’t know. Nothing he ever did worked out right. Turned out what he had wasn’t worth much of anything. Big surprise. But my mother found out only after she’d spent our last dime on the lawyers.”
“When was this?”
“Must’ve been, I don’t know, when I was twelve, thirteen. Late forties, I’d say.”
“Did Jean know anything about this?”
“I never mentioned anything to her.”
It seemed like too much of a coincidence.
“Do you have any idea how I could pursue this?”
“Well, the case was handled by an old Ventura law firm.”
It couldn’t be.
“Was it Benton, Orr, Duval, and Buckingham?”
“That was the name. Erle Stanley Gardner’s old law firm. Funny, isn’t it?”