THE SMOKING GUN OF ELIZABETH HENZE by MICHAEL COLLINS

* * * *
This, sadly, is probably the last Michael Collins story EQMM will be featuring. The author, whose real name was Dennis Lynds, was a great friend of this magazine and its editors. He passed away this past summer, and unless further manuscripts are found with his effects, his P.I. Dan Fortune will be seen no more in stories. A write-up of this seminal author follows the story. 
* * * *

Elizabeth Henze is born in a small town near Amarillo, Texas, in 1960, seven years after Fred Henze comes home from Korea. She is the last of Fred and Hildy Henze’s children, and the only girl.

Korea was Fred’s second war. He made the mistake of remaining in the reserve after returning from World War II, which he still calls the “real” war. For most of that first war, Hildy Henze operated a lathe in an Amarillo defense plant. She liked working, was not happy when the men returned and took back their jobs. She never did anything about it. It was so much easier to live the life everyone agreed was the way it was supposed to be. But she never forgot those war years, and whenever she read about a successful career woman, she would say that could have been her, and that it would be different for her daughter.

From the day Elizabeth is born, Hildy tells her that a girl should have a career, be independent, and go as high and far as any boy. When it comes to a career, Hildy tells her daughter, to achievement and recognition, a girl should be no different from a boy. But, she warns, a girl must try harder. Hildy insists Elizabeth take all the same classes the boys do in grammar and high school, badgers Fred to teach her everything he teaches her brothers about math and business and investing. Elizabeth proves to be smarter than the boys, and far more ambitious, but she is a normal teenager, and wants to belong, be like everyone else, so she also learns to dance, twirl, and dress to make the boys look at her.

In high school she learns for the first time that her mother was right, a girl has disadvantages, the playing field is not level. She also learns a great deal her mother and father did not teach her, from her girlfriends and television and movies and popular novels and the teachers and Bobby Travis. The one thing she wants but has not achieved by junior year is to be editor of the school newspaper. The faculty advisor, Mr. Birch, can choose anyone from the staff or even from outside to be editor. But everyone knows that if last year’s managing editor was a junior he becomes editor in his senior year. When Elizabeth is a junior, Bobby Travis is a senior and the editor. A tall, handsome boy who has his own car and looks good in jeans and boots and a black Stetson.

“If you make me managing editor, Bobby, Mr. Birch’ll make me editor next year. I’ll be a good editor, Bobby.”

“Hey, I don’t know, Liz. I mean, we never had a girl editor on the paper. Hell, not even a girl managing editor.”

“I’m the best reporter and editor, and you know it.”

Bobby grins. “For a girl.”

“For anyone,” she says flatly. “And that means you, Bobby Travis. I know more and I write better than anyone.”

“Maybe,” he says, and his grin is different. “But what else can you do? I mean, a girl’s got to try harder, right?”

They are in a booth at the coffee shop after school. They have taken a break from the newspaper, are all but alone. Bobby Travis seems very aware of this, still has that different grin. Elizabeth is equally aware of being alone with him. She is aware of his different grin, and of what she and her girlfriends have often talked about.

“What do you want me to do, Bobby?”

“Hey, I mean, I got to get something out of it, right, Liz?”

Elizabeth thinks about it, and realizes that a girl is different from a boy even in career and recognition. A girl has many disadvantages, yes, but she also has certain advantages. Even an edge if these advantages are used properly, and under the right conditions. Elizabeth becomes managing editor.

When Bobby Travis graduates, and Mr. Birch isn’t sure a girl should be editor, she convinces him the way she convinced Bobby Travis. Her position as editor, with all her other activities, gets her elected student-body president and class president, and she sails into the University of Texas on a good-citizen scholarship from the Lion’s Club, another for achievers with limited means from the American Legion, and is instantly flagged as a freshman to watch.

* * * *
“She knew way before I did that I’d never leave Amarillo. Down at TU she says to me, ‘I like you a lot, Bobby, but in life we move on. The land of opportunity.’“

I found Robert O. Travis drinking Jack Daniels over ice on the terrace of a country club on Amarillo’s eastern edge. He stared at my missing arm.

“Vietnam?”

“Frostbite,” I told him. “Prospecting in Alaska.”

He looked suspicious that I was somehow insulting him, but remembered who he was, and dismissed such an absurd thought. The terrace bordered the first tee and eighteenth green, and I soon learned he was first vice-president of the local bank founded by his great-grandfather, where his father was still president and chairman, and where he had worked all his life since college. He had thickened around the middle, acquired that aura of idle flabbiness endemic to the sons and grandsons of important men in small cities, and had never forgotten Elizabeth Henze. He took a drink of the Jack and stared out across the final green toward all those years ago in the land of opportunity.

“She ever get into serious trouble in high school? Drugs, sex, cheating, anything?”

He looked at my card again: Daniel Fortune, Private Investigations. “She in some kind of trouble?”

“Under indictment in California for fraud, embezzlement, and grand theft.”

He took a drink. “You don’t say.”

A gaudy foursome was approaching the final green.

“What can you tell me about J. James?”

“Some kind of financial genius, ‘cordin’ to the Wall Street Journal. In hot water right now.”

“A genius to a lot of people,” I agreed. “A crook to a lot of others, including the U.S. government.”

“Which side you working for?”

“The side says he’s a crook.”

“And you figure to tie Liz up with him?”

“She’s tied up to him, all right. The only question is how.”

Travis finished his Jack Daniels, waved for the waiter to bring another round. “You want me to help you find that out? Send her down with this James guy?”

“Anything you might have. Letters. Rumors. Anything her family might have told you.”

He contemplated his glass. “Lost touch with Liz the day she left TU. Everyone in Amarillo did, even her brothers. Like I said, she knew none of us’d ever get out of Amarillo.” There was a wistfulness of what might have been in his voice that was also endemic to the sons and grandsons of important men in small towns.

We watched the gaudy foursome make hash of easy putts. When I’d finished my ale, and the foursome had headed for the locker room arguing about who owed who money, I got up to leave.

Travis signaled for another Jack Daniels. “You know somethin’ funny? She was the best writer and editor we had, bar none.”

At TU, Elizabeth soon learns that money is important for anyone who wants to make an impression. Her scholarships, while adequate for her needs, will not pay for what it takes to get noticed, so she goes to work part-time for a BusAd professor who runs a co-op, and a biology professor who moonlights as a consultant. As a sophomore she majors in BusAd, does an internship at a local investment firm, and meets Mark Todd.

Two years older, Mark Anthony Todd is from another small Texas town. Taller, blonder, and handsomer than Bobby Travis, jeans, boots, and a Stetson that look even better on him than they did on Bobby Travis. He has much better shoulders. He also has charm and ambition, is a big man on campus in theater, a top student in aerospace engineering, and a fellow investment intern.

Elizabeth signs up for theater. She auditions and is cast in the first show: Sweet Bird of Youth. Mark Todd is the star. He has a steady girl, but he soon notices Elizabeth. Most men do. She has worked on that.

“You don’t have a lot of talent, but you have a real stage presence,” Mark Todd tells her. “Charisma.”

“We look good together,” she says. “You need a tall woman.”

“I’m just about engaged.”

“That’s too bad. I’m free and footloose.”

It is no contest. The girl who has followed him to TU from his home high school can give him all the usual, but she is not in Elizabeth’s league. In charm, ambition, and sheer drive, Elizabeth and Mark are a match, the golden couple. Mark succumbs before that first play closes. He senses even then that she is much smarter than he is, but they make a dazzling couple, and that is all he needs at the time.

It is Elizabeth’s idea to write a theater-movie column for the campus newspaper that is soon picked up by some local weeklies, shopping guides, and “Things to Do” booklets in motels. They soon learn that a series of plugs for the attractions at specific theaters will be rewarded by grateful exhibitors. Even less frequent plugs will earn them free tickets they can sell on the side. They do well, bank the money.

Mark convinces his father to pay for one more year and a master’s degree, but even then he will finish a year before Elizabeth. His father expects him to go to California and an excellent job in a large aerospace company. Mark agrees on California, but it isn’t aerospace he and Elizabeth have in mind. Not at first, anyway. He will always have the engineering to fall back on, but the movies and TV are where the big bucks are, and in those youth counts.

“Go for broke, right?” he says. “Hollywood, here I come.”

“Hollywood, here we come,” she says.

“Hey, you’ve got a year to be the big star here, finish your B.A.” He is earnest. “Why don’t I go ahead, set things up. Get a pad, an agent, some contacts. Then you come out as soon as you graduate.”

“No way, Jose. You go nowhere without me, buster.”

“You don’t trust me!”

“Not out of my sight. When you storm Lotus Land, can Liz be far behind?”

He laughs. “I never really figured it any other way.”

“Good. You’ll live longer. We’ll get married right after commencement, and be in the air by noon.”

They are in the air by noon—first class, with the good wishes of the Drama Department. (They cash in the tickets they got from each set of parents. That increases the substantial “loan” they have from the same parents, and all they managed to save from their enterprises while at TU.) They have the stake, the names of former TU drama students who are working on the Coast, and an introduction and recommendation from the director-in-residence to his agent.

They are on their way to Hollywood. The golden couple.

* * * *
Austin is a handsome city of trees and lakes at the edge of the hill country of Central Texas. A dignified town, as befits the state capital and home of the campus of the University of Texas. My first stop was the office of Rudolph Baum in a corner of the Business Administration Building. He did not want to talk about Elizabeth Henze.

“She was reasonably competent, as I recall, nothing special.”

“What made you hire her?”

“She seemed more eager than most applicants, and, as I said, reasonably competent.”

“Not because of how she looked? She didn’t come on to you?”

He flushed angrily. “I’m a married man, Mr. Fortune. A professor. She was a student, and a freshman at that. I would have fired her on the spot.”

“And you don’t know anything about her recent relationship with J. James?”

“I’ve had no contact with her since she left the university.” A bitterness tinged his voice. “I wish I did have something to help you convict her.”

I had a feeling he meant it. Whatever memories he had of Elizabeth Henze were not pleasant ones.

Jorge Medina, the biology professor with the consulting business, told me why when he met me in his laboratory. “That’s because Rudy had fantasies of a great romance. Offered to leave his wife if Liz’d marry him. Poor Rudy.”

We were in his laboratory where he had been joking with four of his grad students as I came in. He sent them back to work on the research for his next scientific paper, and sat on the edge of a lab bench to talk to me.

“How about you?” I asked.

“No way,” he laughed. “I never even tried. She did my books, knew exactly how much I was making in my side business, and told me all about Rudy. We were ‘pals.’ Professors in Austin were not what she had in mind. Academia isn’t where the spotlight falls, or where the rich and famous play.”

“She wanted the rich life?”

“Who doesn’t? It’s what we’re all taught to want, isn’t it?”

“She ever do anything illegal while she worked for you and your clients?”

That was when his face closed down. “Why are you so interested in Liz?”

“I’m not,” I told him. “The lawyers for all the small investors James’s company fleeced of their life savings are.”

“They think Elizabeth was part of the scheme?”

“So do I. All I have to do is prove it.”

“Ah.” He nodded, and then shook his head. “I don’t think I can help you.”

I heard not denial in his voice but conviction. “Can’t or won’t?”

He smiled. “There was something wonderful about her. Her inventiveness and eagerness and desire to conquer our world.”

“She’s not so wonderful now.”

“Perhaps that’s because the world we gave her wouldn’t let her be.”

* * * *
In Los Angeles, Elizabeth and Mark put a down payment on a house in Studio City once owned by Steve McQueen. They buy a five-year-old Mercedes and a three-year-old Porsche. The agent approves—image is everything—and suggests lessons, coaches, and a lot of new clothes. They make friends through the former TU actors. The agent sends them on calls, Elizabeth lands a few small TV parts, Mark gets a screen test. The test is not a success, but the agent goes out on a limb to get him a featured role in a big TV movie. He bombs, and must be replaced. He has no real talent. Elizabeth has some, but not much. Neither comes across on film.

They run out of money after a year and a half. Mark gets a job with an aerospace subcontractor in Van Nuys. Elizabeth finds an opening in a biological consulting firm doing much the same work as the professor at TU. Their combined pay covers the mortgage, taxes, car payments, and food. Not much more. Their agent tells them that if they are to break through in Hollywood, they must go on with the high life they’re living to maintain their image and expand their connections.

Mark is arrested for stealing from his boss, who, as bad luck would have it, is a wheeler and dealer skating on the edge himself, is a shade paranoid, and quickly spots Mark’s skimming. Because he is white, married, college-educated, and a homeowner with no previous record, he is given a fine and probation. But now Mark can’t find a job in aerospace; the only extra work Elizabeth can get is secretarial work. Small Equity-waiver stage parts bring in no money.

Three years after they left Austin, a friend suggests a quick marijuana score, supplies them with good Mexican pot. Mark soon makes the mistake of selling a lid to a federal undercover agent at a big Hollywood party. They are still white, a couple, college-educated, own their own home, but he is also on probation, so this time he is sentenced to two to five years. Elizabeth, as a first offender, gets a year plus. With their age and background they do their time in minimum-security prisons, and Elizabeth is paroled in six months.

The house is gone and the cars. The agent has dropped them, most of their friends have vanished. The friend who supplied the pot feels a little guilty, likes Elizabeth, and arranges for her to sublet a nice condo in Brentwood. A few old TU grads get her some small bits on TV.

When Mark is paroled after eighteen months, they decide their best option is for him to head East where he is not known. He conceals his past, and lands a good job at another aerospace company. He sends her all the money he can, doesn’t tell her he’s living in a dump and eating at McDonald’s. But he admits to being lonely and wants to come back to L.A. She tells him she wants that too, but that she is barely surviving with the money he sends and can’t maintain any kind of image without it. Mark promises to send her more money, and a few months later is arrested again for embezzlement, and takes another two-to-five hit.

Elizabeth is now alone and essentially broke, and has to move to a small apartment court in West Hollywood. She knows now she is never going to make it in show business. She knows she must think about the future, toys with the idea of going back to college to finish her B.A., but decides she is already too old to go that slow route, and thinks about who among all her L.A. acquaintances might offer a faster way. That is when she remembers Mark’s old aerospace boss, the wheeler-dealer who had him arrested the first time. Remembers the way he stared at her all through Mark’s trial.

With the help of TU friends she contrives to run into him at a Beverly Hills party given by another TU grad. He is more than pleased to see her again, has often wondered what happened to her after he had to charge Mark.

“Don’t ask.” She smiles.

“I’m not surprised,” the ex-boss, whose name is Eric Martin, says. “Mark’s a loser, he always will be. Small-time. You’re better than that. Where is he now?”

“Back East in jail.”

“Christ!” He shakes his head. “How did you ever get mixed up with him?”

“It seemed a good idea at the time.”

“I suppose it did. But things change, and if you’re as smart as I think you are, you look for new horizons.”

“Did you have some specific horizon in mind?”

“Let’s talk about it over dinner.”

A month later she moves into Eric Martin’s big house in Sherman Oaks. He buys her Porsche back for her. When Mark gets out of jail and writes to say he thinks he has a job in Atlanta where they need his skills enough to not care about his record, she says how happy she is for him, but she can’t come to Georgia, and maybe it would be best to get a divorce. He calls and is sad, protests mildly, but it is clear that under it all he is relieved. Their life, the big ambition, has worn him down. Besides, he has met a woman in Atlanta, and, well, “Hey, I hope you hit it big, Elizabeth, real big.”

“And I hope you get everything you want, Mark,” she says, and means it. In a different world, at another time, they might have been happy.

* * * *
The theater owner put me off until the next day. I checked into the best hotel in Austin, had a few cold Sierra Nevada ales in the bar, and called John Jeffries. Lead lawyer for the fleeced investors, he was not pleased.

“Nothing?”

“Only the slap on the wrist for the drug bust.”

“She can make that look like all her first husband’s idea.”

“That’s all there is, John. Sorry.”

“Damn it, Dan, she and James swindled thousands of poor bastards out of their life savings. She’s living high in Beverly Hills on more than her smile.”

Next morning, the movie man relaxed in the comfort of his own theater. “Best two years’ business I ever had. Okay, so I slipped them some extra bucks under the table to keep ‘em away from the competition, and they skimmed the tickets. It was worth it, I made out like a bandit. A smart cookie, that girl. Nobody’s made a go of anything like it around here since.”

I jumped on it. “Can you prove it was all her idea?”

“You mean in court? Hell, no. On paper, everything was in both their names.”

“Did you keep in touch with either of them after they left Austin?”

He shook his head. “But if you see the girl, tell her she can come back to work for me anytime.”

* * * *
Elizabeth Todd becomes Elizabeth Martin in the high-roller world of Eric Martin. The aerospace company in Van Nuys is only a part of his holdings. There are pieces of two more engineering firms, a low-rent real-estate empire where his marginal and illegal tenants don’t complain about violations or rats; chancy but highly profitable investments in the chimeric universe of Hollywood; and even a minority stake in a pair of hotel-casinos in Las Vegas.

He tentatively suggests he bring her into his business. She demurs, points out that his business is very much hands-on, and based on his personal reputation. She would only water down that trust. He is relieved, he didn’t really want a partner, and decides to make her his office manager. She learns all about the world of deals, kickbacks, inflated estimates, padded accounts, shrewd lawyers, and how to take care of important contacts. She learns the angles. There are good and bad days, but Eric Martin always wins more than he loses, and his holdings and bank account expand.

She loves the comforts and perks, but mostly the rarefied air of being in the know, of making the world work for her benefit. Having and taking. Everything you want. And there is the flaw, the rub: In the world of play hard and loose, and a little over the edge if necessary, to want is to need. For the Eric Martins and Elizabeth Henzes too much is never enough.

Some years pass. Mark Todd reappears in L.A. with Norberg Dynamics, the aerospace giant, who also doesn’t care about his past mistakes. He calls Elizabeth, there are no hard feelings. Mark has his Georgia girl in tow, and, after Eric Martin learns that Mark’s job includes awarding contracts to subcontractors, the couples see quite a bit of each other. Mark is, of course, wary. But Eric is persuasive. If you don’t take every angle, you get left behind. With a little “unofficial” help from Elizabeth, a deal is struck.

Mark will award contracts to Eric’s aerospace companies at a price lower than Eric would charge on the open market. Eric will inflate costs and expenses, but not excessively. There will be “problems” and “delays.” Vital but costly “changes.” All the extra profit these engender will be split with Mark. A sweet deal, and the padding will be so restrained Norberg will never notice.

Alas, unknown to them, Norberg is under pressure to cut costs from a Pentagon that is itself under pressure from new faces on Capitol Hill, and spots the fraud. By now Mark has learned a few things about how it’s done, so he quickly cooperates. When the dust clears, Eric Martin ends up going away for ten years. Mark gets off with three, one suspended.

Elizabeth appears nowhere on the books, has no legal part in the deal, and cannot be charged. So what she gets from the disaster, California being a community-property state, is fifty percent of Eric’s entire estate in her divorce proceeding.

* * * *
The California Men’s Colony stands on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo, close to where the Cuesta Grade and the horseshoe curves of the Southern Pacific Railroad cut through the coast mountains. Passengers on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight to Seattle look directly down into the exercise yard of the minimum-security prison.

In the visitors’ room, Eric Martin snarls, “If I knew anything about what she was doing with James besides screwing him, I’d tell you, believe me.”

He had obviously not come to any kind of adjustment to prison. A jailhouse lawyer, the warden told me, a troublemaker who was on track to serving his full sentence. A whiner and complainer, outraged every second that a man of his stature had to live in such a place. “I’d give a year’s pay to transfer him to Soledad,” the warden told me, “but Sacramento won’t let me. It’s a white-collar world.”

Martin glared at me. “There’s a lot of money involved?”

“A lot of money,” I agreed. “But he already had a wife somewhere, no community property.”

“Then she got the bucks some other way, believe me.”

“No one’s been able to find anything except what she made on the investments he put her into, including his own company. But all that’s legal.”

He scowled. “I thought James’s company was selling phantom stocks and running a pyramid scheme.”

“That’s what the Feds convicted him for after it all collapsed and he skipped. But she doesn’t appear anywhere on his books except as an early investor.”

I thought he would have a stroke on the spot. “That bitch! She played me. She had it all worked out from the start! ‘Don’t make me part of your business, dear, it’s you they trust.’ If anything went wrong, she was in the clear. Damn her. A wife’s supposed to help her husband, not go into the marriage covering her ass and fixing to bail if the going gets rough.”

The week was getting longer every second.

* * * *
In an American movie someone once said, “To go from zero to a million dollars is hard work. To go from a million to ten million is inevitable.”

Eric Martin and Mark Todd in prison, Elizabeth is now financially secure, but she is not wealthy, and the spotlight does not shine on her. She doesn’t play with the rich and famous, still drives herself. She begins to make fairly large charitable donations, inquire about investment brokers, and accept invitations to parties in Beverly Hills, Pasadena, and Palm Springs. It isn’t too long before she meets J. James, Esq., Financial Advice, Investment Opportunity.

Gray-haired, distinguished, considerably older than Mark Todd and even Eric Martin, smooth as cream and sharp as Saladin’s scimitar. Banker’s pinstripe and black shoes shined to a high polish. The pink face of a barber shave every day. A man who counsels. Advises. Allows you to share his financial knowledge and acumen.

“I don’t usually take on individual accounts, Mrs. Martin, but I will make an exception in your case, and also offer you a position in my new company.”

“What new company?”

“J. James and Company. I have finally been persuaded to offer my experience and modest knowledge to the public. At least, to that part of it with equity to invest in an extremely high-yield but high-risk investment. Ordinarily high-risk, that is. With what I have in mind, the yield will remain high while the risk will diminish to all but nothing. Does it sound like it will attract people?”

“Like flies. If you can convince them, and if it isn’t too illegal.”

J. James laughs. “You are the perfect woman for the job, my dear. I sensed it from the moment I heard of you, and I am only more certain now that I’ve met you.”

“What do I do?”

“You will be my investment executive. We will operate coast-to-coast, but concentrate on Southern California for now. There should be enough equity here to keep us busy for the first few years while we shake out the inevitable kinks.”

“You’ve checked my background? Experience?”

“Indeed I have.” J. James smiles. “Indeed I have.”

She smiles too. “Then I accept. But only as your private client and close friend. Sort of a goodwill ambassador. No direct connection to your company.”

James’s smile broadens. “I think that can be arranged, my dear.”

It is the big time for Elizabeth Henze from the small town near Amarillo, Texas. She takes to this new world as if she’s waited for it all her life. Which, of course, she has. Houses in Indian Wells, Telluride, and the Hamptons. A Los Angeles condo in a high rise convenient to the financial center. Limousines. A company jet. Offices and rented mansions in La Jolla, Montecito, Coronado, Malibu, wherever and whenever needed. Country clubs, tennis clubs, and yacht clubs. Seminars and investment luncheons. Parties and cruises and private beach houses. Political campaigns on behalf of those candidates favorable to investment and growth.

Not marriage; he has an estranged wife who refuses to divorce him, but she is a big girl, and what J. James offers her coast-to-coast is enough.

Feature articles in The San Diegan, California Magazine. A financial advice series in Forbes, a roundup article in Fortune. An interview in Vanity Fair. Constant mentions in People. Interviews on Good Morning America and The Today Show. A three-part feature in Ms. The new successful woman.

Fred and Hildy Henze, back in the small town near Amarillo, are a little bewildered by all that has happened to their only daughter, but they smile for the cameras and say, “We’re real proud of our Liz.”

* * * *
Except for the enclaves of the truly wealthy, Orange County was a giant housing tract of varying levels of middle-class affluence set in a landscape of strip malls, storefronts, and wide, sterile boulevards where no one walked. But change was in the air. For the first time Orange had a majority made up of ethnic minorities. Little Saigon would soon be joined by Little Bangkok, Little Beijing, and Little Bombay, and the Balboa Yacht Club would never be the same.

Mark Todd, out of jail some years, was now consulting freelance for small aerospace contractors while running a TV talent agency and acting class in Anaheim. The Georgia girl had decamped, saying she couldn’t compete with a memory, and he was alone at the dim midafternoon sports bar near Disneyland watching Elizabeth Henze Todd Martin on TV when I sat down on the next stool.

“Tell me about her and J. James.”

He nodded toward the TV and smiled, both fondness and admiration in his voice. “Isn’t she something?”

“She’s something,” I agreed.

He continued to watch the screen. Elizabeth was talking to reporters on the steps of the federal courthouse in L.A. “A travesty, Karl, what else can you call these ridiculous charges? First they malign poor Jimmy over some unfortunate reverses in his business, and force him to leave the country to escape their lies, and now they want to put me in jail without a shred of evidence.”

A woman TV reporter pushed her microphone into Elizabeth’s face. “Can you tell us what you told the court?”

“What could I tell them, Sandra? I was merely a friend and ambassador eager to spread the word of such a great opportunity for those who would otherwise never be able to enter the world of higher finance where the greatest rewards are. I still feel the same, and don’t believe a word of what they say Jimmy did. They simply need to blame someone for what was plain misfortune, turned into disaster by the panic of inexperienced investors.”

“The U.S. attorney says you and James were partners.”

“Well,” a dazzling smile, and a small laugh, “perhaps in one sense, my dear, but that is no one’s concern but my own. I knew nothing of the details of his business.” Another small, self-deprecating laugh. “I’m afraid I’m a poor role model for the modern woman, but I’ve always been content to leave business and finance matters to my men. And I’ll tell you that, no matter what others claim, Jimmy’s advice and counsel made a great deal of money for me.”

On that note she ended the interview, and was helped into the rear of a black limousine to be whisked regally away.

“Liz always liked limos,” Mark Todd said, smiling at the screen.

“What about her claim to have known nothing of the nuts and bolts of James’s operation?”

He thought about it for a time. “When me and Martin got busted she could have testified the scheme was all Martin’s idea and maybe got me off the hook. But that would have shown she knew all about the caper, and sent her to prison again.” He took a long pull of his Red Tail. “That answer your question?”

“Yet you still love her, don’t you?”

He stared into his ale, and then shrugged. “What’s that got to do with the price of cheese? I’ll always love her, and maybe she’ll always love me. But love just got in the way of everything we ever learned.”

* * * *
The adobe hacienda built by Pedro Ibarra, a Spanish shepherd boy who ran off to Mexico in the middle of the eighteenth century, still stands behind the Montecito mansion of retired stockbroker Harold Ibarra Jones. Sometime along the path from a shepherd’s hut in Castile to Alta California, Pedro became Don Pedro, with lands stretching from modern Santa Barbara to modern Santa Maria.

The mansion itself was built in 1847 by Morgan Jones, a Welsh-American adventurer who made a fortune dealing, or some said stealing, horses and hides. He married Alicia Maria Ibarra, and inherited part of the ranchero where today Mixtecs from distant Oaxaca have replaced the local Indians and Mexicans to care for the remaining two or three hundred acres Harold Jones lives on in baronial comfort.

The barony was inherited; the comfort came from Harold’s forays in the stock market. Forays that eventually landed him in prison charged with insider trading, price manipulation, falsifying records, filing false reports, racketeering, and defrauding customers. He pleaded guilty to a handful of minor securities violations, was fined a few hundred million dollars of the billions he had pocketed, sentenced to ten years in prison—of which he served 18 months.

That was all I knew about Jones when I drove through the high iron gates of the ranchero. What I didn’t know was why Elizabeth Henze had told me to meet her there if I wanted to talk. But once through the dense screen of trees that hid the mansion, I saw the tents, pavilions, flower-decked arbor, and long linen-covered tables set up in the shade of oaks and Brazilian pepper trees. I didn’t have to see the tall ten-tiered cake in the dining room to know a wedding was being prepared, or read the printed program to guess who the happy couple were.

Elizabeth Henze waved me to a comfortable modern designer armchair in the cool and sunny sitting room, its French doors wide open onto an inner patio.

I said, “My congratulations to both of you.”

“Thank you,” she said, and laughed aloud. A carefree laugh. “You don’t mean that for a second, Mr. Fortune, but that’s fair enough.”

I studied her where she sat on a white modern-art couch, and realized I had been carrying in my mind a picture of her as a steely young woman with quick, sharp eyes looking for an advantage that could be exploited. She was none of those things. Tall, her long legs crossed in sleek gray slacks, she wore a pale beige blouse that set off her perfectly groomed dark hair. There was no jewelry beyond a large emerald and diamond engagement ring, and her dark brown eyes were more amused than anything else. She had acquired the style, poise, and confidence that comes with the privileges status and money buy in our world.

“Kind of sudden, isn’t it?” I said.

“You never know when love will strike.” She smiled. “Perhaps you’d like to come to the wedding? You probably know me better than Harold does by now.”

“Too much pomp, too many bangles, too many cameras.”

“A man of the people,” she said with an edge of mockery.

I suppose, in a way, I deserved the mockery.

“You were as much a part of the whole scheme as James was.”

Her smile did not change. “You know, and I know. The U.S. Attorney knows and the FBI. Your lawyers know. The problem is that little annoyance called proof. A paper trail, a money trail, an evidence trail.”

I nodded. “How did you get James to go for it? I mean, he’s left holding the whole bag.”

“He knew if it went wrong too soon it would all come down on him. I was his insurance policy. He’d pay his debt to society, I’d have plenty of legitimate money, and we’d live happily ever after.”

I glanced out through the French doors at wedding preparations on the patio. “Doesn’t look to me like his ‘insurance’ is going to pay off.”

“That was the risk he took.” There was neither irony nor sympathy in her voice.

Outside on the patio a scrub jay complained. “Doesn’t any of it bother you? Bobby Travis, Mark Todd, Eric Martin? The ruined lives? The murders?”

“We all took our chances, and I have no idea what you mean by murders.”

“Six suicides, a dozen heart attacks, and no telling how many shortened lives because of you and James. You killed them as sure as if you’d used a gun.”

Her smile was still untroubled. “I used the system. I learned how it worked, and I used it. They could have done the same thing. It’s hardly my fault they didn’t.”

She sat there with her smile and her sense of entitlement, of what was her due. An aura of aristocracy, above the mundane, untouchable.

* * * *
Jeffries scowled out the window of his Los Angeles office. “For God’s sake, I send you out after a smoking gun, and you bring me her life story.”

“Her life story,” I said, “is the smoking gun.”

After a time he sighed, and swiveled back to look at me. “We’re not going to win this one, are we, Dan?”

“No, counselor,” I said. “I don’t think we are.”

Copyright 2006 Michael Collins

* * * *

DENNIS LYNDS REMEMBERED by GAYLE LYNDS

Seldom does an author change a genre once, let alone twice. It humbles me to know that Den, my wonderful husband, is credited with bringing the detective novel into the modern age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then twenty years later introducing literary techniques that propelled it into its current dynamic form.

A titanic intellect and talent, he wrote under several pseudonyms, publishing some eighty novels and two hundred short stories, many of the latter in the pages of EQMM. As Michael Collins, his most famous pen name, he created the indelible P.I. Dan Fortune, the star of one of the longest-running of all private-eye series. The first book in that series, Act of Fear, became a best first novel Edgar winner. According to Private Eyes: 101 Knights by Robert Baker and Michael Nietzel, “Many critics believe Dan Fortune to be the culmination of a maturing process that transformed the private eye from the naturalistic Spade (Dashiell Hammett) through the romantic Marlowe (Raymond Chandler) and the psychological Archer (Ross Macdonald) to the sociological Fortune (Michael Collins).”

From his youth, Den also published literary stories—five of which were honored in Best American Short Stories—and mainstream novels. In the late 1980s, his second period of pioneering work in the detective form began, when he introduced into his detective novels the sort of literary techniques he’d been using in his other work—such as creating novels alternating first- and third-person points of view, and lacing short stories into his books. “Powerful and memorable,” wrote critic Richard C. Carpenter in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers. “[These works] indicate Collins has embarked on a new course after some sixty books. Truly, he is a writer to be reckoned with.” Den’s experiments have now become commonplace techniques in crime fiction.

Over the course of his career, Den was nominated for many prizes and received the PWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Marlowe Lifetime Achievement Award. In its yearly round-up, The New York Times consistently named his books among the top ten mysteries in the nation. One year, it included two of his pseudonymous titles in the top ten, without realizing that he was the author of both. More recently, in regard to the story collection Fortune’s World, the L.A. Times commented, “To spin tales as intriguing and thought provoking as these for three decades is a remarkable enough achievement. Even more remarkable is the sustained quality.... It takes style to bring that off. Bravery, too, of course.”

This issue’s Michael Collins story was one of the last Den created and the first to be published since his death on August 19, 2005, at the age of 81. He was iconoclastic, witty, and generous. He would have loved the many notes from readers saying he will be missed.