FOR FORTY YEARS Tony Duke had preached the gospel of meaning through pleasure, converting a generation and scooping millions from the collection plate.
The easy life was his creed. For forty years every issue of Duke had splayed that dogma above the masthead.
Over four decades Duke pictorials had grown a bit more daring, but the magazine's format hadn't changed much since its first issue: golden-toned, milk-fed female nudity personified by the Treat of the Month, combined with suggestive cartoons, big-brotherly advice on dress, drink, and the acquisition of toys, token ventures into political journalism.
When Duke published his maiden issue, photographic essays of bare breasts, pouting lips, and willing thighs were nothing new. Pinup calendars had been gas station fixtures for years, and "nature pictorials" had occupied a stable market niche since the invention of the camera. But all that was under-the-counter stuff, supposedly for guys in raincoats and lowered fedoras—sex as dirty, in the finest American tradition. Marc Anthony Duke's revolutionary act had been to veneer the skin rag with respectability. Now Suburban Dad could purchase T & A at the corner newsstand and be regarded as classy rather than creepy.
With its winking scamp logo and gloriously uddered, fresh-faced models, Duke magazine had been a major force in the crumbling of sexual censorship barriers, and Tony Duke had fought his share of legal battles. But his victories in court proved, ultimately, to be market-share defeats as each landmark decision allowed successively raunchier publications to achieve legitimacy. Now, in a world where hard-core porn rentals were the number-one video-store commodity, Duke's airbrushed sensibilities seemed almost quaint. When Tony Duke hit the papers these days, it was usually because he'd thrown a fund-raiser for some worthy cause.
All this and whatever else I thought I knew about him had been gleaned from the papers: California farm boy morphed to starving bookkeeper to failed Hollywood scriptwriter to the author of a dozen forgettable science fiction paperbacks, then finally to head of the gutsy publishing venture that had earned him twenty beachfront acres and the kinds of toys his readers could only dream about. But the papers printed what you gave them, and no doubt Duke employed a fleet of publicists.
He had to be what—seventy, by now?
Older man.
As far as I knew he'd never been implicated in anything violent. On the contrary, he had a reputation as someone who genuinely loved women. Years ago I'd caught the tail end of a televised interview with him—some biographical feature on a network that deluded itself as substantive. Duke had come across still boyish, if a bit frail. A small, narrow-shouldered, goateed, ludicrously tanned elf of a man with an easy-to-listen-to drawl and friendly brown eyes.
Small brown face under a steel-hued hairpiece. Your eccentric favorite uncle, on shore leave from his latest jaunt to locales exotiques, brimming with ribald anecdotes, naughty jokes, and the unspoken promise that he might, one day, take you with him.
As I watched the steaks sizzle, I continued to wonder. About Marc Anthony Duke and Lauren Teague and Shawna Yeager.
A few years ago, when our house was being rebuilt, Robin and I had rented on the beach in western Malibu. During that year I must've zipped past the Duke estate hundreds of times, never thinking about what went on behind those foliage-shielded walls. I had only the faintest memory of a green expanse: palms and pines, banks of devil ivy, geraniums, rubber plants. The gate that had admitted Gretchen Stengel.
Tony Duke had made a fortune knocking down barriers, but he hid be-hind high walls. Milo was right: If Duke was involved it was a whole new game.
I made a salad, mixed iced tea, set the table, tempted Spike outside with porterhouse, and bolted the dog door. Robin came home just as I had everything in place. She looked tired and pale, and her hair was half tied, half loose. A beautiful woman anyway, but I wondered if Tony Duke would've noticed.
"This is wonderful," she said, washing up and pecking my cheek.
I took her in my arms, kissed her face, rubbed her back, ran my fingers through her curls, gently, so as not to snag. The sounds she made and the way she melted against me said I was doing okay, even though most of my concentration was spent blocking out the faces of dead people.
She found a bottle of cabernet that I'd forgotten about, and as we ate and drank my appetite returned. We did the dishes together, took a walk without Spike, holding hands, not saying much. The night was cold enough for visible breath, and the smog had traveled somewhere else. Winter, California style, was finally arriving. I'd check the garden tomorrow, maybe cut back some roses, see what the pond needed. Basic stuff. Concrete stuff. Time to get away from being useless.
When we got back home I got another peck on the cheek and a tired smile. Robin got into bed with a stack of magazines, and I went to my office and switched on the computer.
Marc Anthony Duke's name pulled up sixteen quick hits, mostly press pieces and the official Duke magazine website, decorated with grinning portraits of the man himself and thumbnails of pastied and G-stringed Treats Through the Years that could be enlarged with a click.
I scanned for a while, learned only one new fact: Two years ago Tony Duke had gone into "ultraleisure mode" and passed the day-to-day operations of Duke Enterprises to his daughter Anita. The accompanying PR photo showed an indigo-robed Duke posing proudly with a sternly attractive brunette in her thirties wearing a strapless black evening gown. Anita Duke was taller than her father by several inches, a shapely woman with smooth, bronze shoulders and nice teeth displayed by a tentative smile that appeared anything but happy. Described as "an investment banker with a Columbia University MBA and ten years experience on Wall Street." "These will be years of market growth and consumer-sensitivity for Duke Enterprises," she predicted. "Soon we'll be moving full-force into cyberspace."
I searched for something less laudatory, found a couple of Bible Belt organizations listing Duke Enterprises as "a tool of Satan." Then some paeans from fans—do-it-yourself stuff, with Tony Duke featured high on most-admired lists. From one of these I learned that Duke had been widowed two decades ago and remained single until four years ago, when he'd hooked up with a former Treat with the improbable name............