I drove over the hill thinking about what family had meant to the Dowd kids.
Boundaries were to be blurred, people were to be used, performance was all.
Brad had been abandoned, taken in reluctantly, exploited, expelled. Broughtback to be pressed into service by a woman who resented him and lusted for him.
Years later, after her death, he’d wormed his way back into the family and attained the power role. Knowing he’d never belonged, never would.
By that time, he’d murdered Juliet Dutchey. Maybe other women yet to be discovered.
Reserving his boyhood hobby for three victims.
Back when Milo and I had been theorizing, he’d wondered out loud about Cathy and Andy Gaidelas being parental symbols.
You guys still believe in the Oedipal thing?
More than I did a few weeks ago.
Why Meserve?
The only time I’d seen Brad express overt anger was when he talked about Meserve.
Young, slick manipulator.
Brad seeing himself two decades younger?
Despite the smooth manner, the clothes, the cars—the image—did it all boil down to self-hatred?
A body hanging in a jail cell said maybe.
Used and discarded…it didn’t explain the extent of the horror. It never does. I wondered why I kept trying.
I reached Mulholland, coasted down past dream houses and other encumbrances, unable to let go.
Brad had been the ultimate actor. Protecting Billy and Nora, bedding her, stealing from both of them.
Pressing his own cousin into murderous service, then setting him up to be executed.
Coming on to another cousin—a female cop—at the same time he was being investigated by her colleagues in a showgirl’s disappearance.
Why not? Why would blood ties mean anything to him?
Marcia Peaty had no problem seeing Brad as evil but she was certain Cousin Reynold had just been a penny-ante loser.
Ex-cop, but way off. She’d be dealing with that for a long time. If she were my patient, I’d work at getting her to see she was human, nothing less, nothing more.
When you got down to it, rules and exceptions were hard to separate.
Church deacons sneak into dark houses and strangle families. Diplomats and CEOs and other respectable types embark on sex tours of Thailand.
Anyone can be fooled.
But for arrogance, Brad and Nora might’ve plied their hobby for years.
How long would it have taken before he looted the trust fund completely and decided Nora was no longer useful?
The jet card and the island off Belize said not long.
Did Nora—numbed, callous, perpetually stoned—have any idea her life had been saved?
What kind of life lay ahead for her? Initial severe depression, for sure, once the reality of prison life set in. If she was deep enough to suffer. If she coped and set up a prison theater, things could get rosier. Casting, directing. Experiencing. A few years down the line, she might even merit one ofthose rehab-miracle puff-pieces in the Times.
Or maybe I had too much faith in the system and Nora would never see the inside of a penitentiary cell.
Back on McCadden Place, walking her stuffed dog.
Stavros Menas was wasting no opportunity to shout that she was just another of Brad’s victims.
Milo and I had heard her joking about Meserve’s head but both of us could be made to look foolish on the stand and L.A. juries distrusted cops and shrinks. The disks showed her having consensual sex with Brad and Meserve but nothing more. No forensic evidence tied her directly to the killings and nowadays juries expected nifty science.
Menas would rack up billable hours trying to get everything ruled inadmissible. Maybe he’d put Nora on the stand and she’d finally get a starring role.
One way or the other, he’d earn his million.
The lawyers vying for stewardship of Billy Dowd’s diminished life would also do fine.
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