Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

I watched the road ahead. I knew it was too much to ask if she had gotten a name from this MCSO voice who called. And she hadn’t.

Beth was slowly getting her story straight. Or some kind of story straight. So I decided to push my luck.

“Beth, remember when you told us you didn’t know what Camelback Falls is?”

“Yeah,” she said, guilelessly. “What is it?”

“It’s a house, on Camelback Mountain,” I said. “And you would have to know that, considering we have some photos of you in the house, in some interesting circumstances.”

Out of my peripheral vision I watched for a reaction. She just stared into the windshield, her face sheltered by the darkness of the road.

I went on. “I also assume you would know the name Camelback Falls because I was reading one of Jonathan Ledger’s books today, and the book lists Beth Proudfoot as the copyright holder.”

She said, very quietly in a glassy, precise voice, “You fucker.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

She was Marybeth when they met. Just a kid, saying she was eighteen. Men looked at her, they had since she was eleven. She knew she had that power; sometimes it bored her and sometimes it repulsed her. Most of the time she liked it, when it didn’t scare her, what she could do to men, what they were willing to do for her. Still, her only boyfriend had been Leo, awkward, skinny Leo, who rescued her from Tulsa and her father. But that was all prologue to Phoenix and Jonathan and Camelback Falls.

She was Marybeth, and she had an accent. It didn’t stand out in Tulsa, but she felt like a

hick every time she opened her mouth in Phoenix. There are lovely Southern accents, especially attached to pretty girls, but the Oklahoma twang is not one of them. Jonathan picked it out that day, when he walked into the toy store at Scottsdale Fashion Square, a job she had taken to help pay the rent. He said he liked her voice.

He had a voice as rich as his brown, ruddy skin. Man’s skin, used to the sun. As rich as the onyx brown eyes that looked at her so intensely. He wanted a teddy bear. He bought a big one with a red vest and the softest fur in the store. His hands were very large. Then he asked her to go for a drink when she got off work, and she said yes. She was living with Leo. “But I just felt like this whole world was about to open up to me,” she recalled. “So I rolled the dice.”

She slept with Ledger that night. They went up to his big house overlooking the city. She had never seen such a sight before. She didn’t know he was a best-selling author, or a controversial researcher of human sexuality. She didn’t know he was nearly forty years older than her, and she certainly didn’t know about the parties. All she knew was that a world had been opened to her, adult, free, intoxicating.

“I woke up a little before dawn,” she said, “and I walked to this window overlooking the city. It was a whole wall of glass. I could see the city lights, all the way to the far mountains. It was like this enormous jewel. It just shimmered with possibilities. I realized I was totally naked, just standing there in that window, and it was the best goddamned feeling in my life.”

I couldn’t resist. “I thought you said Phoenix has no soul.”

“I was a kid,” she said. “I was beguiled by the city lights.”

That was in January 1979, five months before the shootout in Guadalupe. She stayed another day and night, and then Jonathan sent her home to Leo.

“He said he didn’t want to be tied down with one lover,” she said.

“Sounds so seventies,” Lindsey said from the back seat.

“I didn’t feel used,” Beth said, almost dreamily. “Jonathan invited me back. So I figured I passed the test. I was so inexperienced then, I wasn’t sure if I knew what do. So in a week, Jonathan called me at the toy store and we went on another date.”

That date was to San Francisco, to a book signing. Marybeth was the daughter of a millionaire, but her life had been sheltered and very middle class. Piano lessons, church, and two trips to Europe to see museums. San Francisco with Jonathan was a different level of existence. He took her to expensive restaurants, made her feel like a wined-and-dined lady. He let her stand off to the side as he gave interviews and signed books. He met with the editors of Rolling Stone and went drinking with a crowd that included San Francisco Giant players, Sports Illustrated writers, a TV anchorman, and a jazz musician whose name she couldn’t remember. Jonathan Ledger was famous. Before that, the only famous man Marybeth had met had been the governor of Oklahoma. Indeed, Jonathan was at the zenith of his fame-he embodied the age and the age rewarded him.

That was when the drugs started. At the parties, pot and cocaine were as natural as taking a drink of water. It was impolite to say no, and there was still something of the Tulsa debutante in Marybeth. But the first time she ever sniffed coke and then sneezed the line off into oblivion, she knew she had touched something she was hardwired to love.

“So Jonathan turned you on to coke?” I asked.

“Oh, no, I found that on my own. He was actually protective. He didn’t want me to rush in.”

“What a responsible adult,” Lindsey said. “He’ll sleep with a seventeen-year-old girl on the first date, but he won’t force her to snort cocaine.”

At that point, Marybeth became a regular at Camelback Falls. The parties just naturally morphed into sex parties after a few hours. It didn’t shock her. It felt good. She felt in control. Maybe too much. She took up with one of Jonathan’s rich friends, a former basketball star named Sam. Jonathan had introduced her, slowly, to sex with other men. But she started seeing Sam outside the jurisdiction of Camelback Falls. It made Jonathan jealous. “It was the first time I realized the way power shifts back and forth in a relationship. I finally had the power.”

What she meant, I realized, was the power over Jonathan. “He was very brilliant,” she said, “and very gullible and lazy. He did his best work with me.”

So she kept Jonathan on a string, and played with Sam, and was the center of the parties at Camelback Falls. “It was a beautiful time, whether you believe it or not,” she said. “The people were beautiful. It was very free. Very…noble. I guess it couldn’t last.”

“Where was Leo at this point?” I asked.