Where Love Has Gone (1962) Read online

  HAROLD

  ROBBINS

  “To date, this incredible man,

  who became a star author with

  Never Love a Stranger,

  has sold a staggering 685 million

  books. Every single day at least

  40,000 human beings buy

  one of his novels.”

  --Liz Smith, New York Newsday

  WHERE LOVE HAS GONE

  THE MOST SCANDALOUS,

  MOST RIVETING NOVEL FROM

  AMERICA’S MASTER STORYTELLER . . .

  HAROLD ROBBINS

  “HAROLD ROBBINS IS A MASTER!”

  --Playboy

  “ROBBINS’ BOOKS ARE PACKED

  WITH ACTION, SUSTAINED BY A STRONG

  NARRATIVE DRIVE AND ARE

  GIVEN VITALITY BY HIS

  OWN COLORFUL LIFE.”

  --The Wall Street Journal

  HAROLD ROBBINS

  IS ONE OF THE

  “WORLD’S FIVE BESTSELLING AUTHORS . . .

  EACH WEEK, AN ESTIMATED

  280,000 PEOPLE . . . PURCHASE A

  HAROLD ROBBINS BOOK.”

  --Saturday Review

  “ROBBINS GRABS THE READER

  AND DOESN’T LET GO . . .”

  --Publishers Weekly

  Where Love Has Gone

  by

  Harold

  Robbins

  AuthorHouse, Inc.

  Books by Harold Robbins

  The Adventurers

  Descent from Xanadu

  The Dream Merchants

  Dreams Die First

  Goodbye, Janette

  The Inheritors

  The Lonely Lady

  Memories of Another Day

  Never Love a Stranger

  The Pirate

  Spellbinder

  Where Love Has Gone

  AuthorHouse™

  1663 Liberty Drive

  Bloomington, IN 47403

  www.authorhouse.com

  Phone: 1-800-839-8640

  © Copyright 2010 Jann Robbins.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

  First published by AuthorHouse 6/23/2010

  isbn: 978-1-4520-4133-9 (sc)

  isbn: 978-1-4520-4134-6 (hc)

  isbn: 978-1-4520-4559-7 (e)

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Bloomington, Indiana

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  LUKE’S STORY

  Friday Night

  PART TWO

  The Part of the Book

  About NORA

  PART THREE

  LUKE’S STORY

  The Weekend

  PART FOUR

  The Part of the Book

  About DANI

  PART FIVE

  LUKE’S STORY

  The Trial

  THE PURPOSE OF JUVENILE COURT LAW.

  “To secure for each minor under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court such care and guidance, preferably in his own home, as will serve the spiritual, emotional, mental and physical welfare of the minor and the best interests of the State; to preserve and strengthen the minor’s family ties whenever possible, removing him from the custody of his parents only when his welfare or safety and protection of the public cannot be adequately safeguarded without removal; and when the minor is removed from his own family, to secure for him custody, care, and discipline as nearly as possible equivalent to that which should have been given by his parents.”

  Section 502, Chapter 2 of the Welfare and Institute Code of the State of California.

  PARTONE

  LUKE’S STORY

  Friday Night

  _______________________________________________

  1

  __________________________________________

  It was a day for losers.

  In the morning I blew my job. In the afternoon Maris hit the long ball, and as the television cameras followed him around the bases you caught glimpses of the expressions on the faces of the Cincinnati Reds and somehow you felt the Series was over even if there were four more games to play. And that night the telephone rang, getting me out of the sleepless bed where I’d been lying staring at the gray-black ceiling, trying to be very quiet as I listened to Elizabeth pretending sleep in the next bed.

  The impersonal voice of the long-distance operator sang hollowly, “Mister Luke Carey, plee-uhz. Long distance calling.”

  “Speaking,” I said.

  By now Elizabeth had her light on. She was sitting up in bed, her long blond hair tumbling down over her bare shoulders. “Who is it?” she mouthed silently.

  I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Don’t know,” I said quickly. “Long distance.”

  “Maybe it’s that job in Daytona,” she said hopefully. “The one you wrote about.”

  A man’s voice came on the phone. It had a faint Western twang. “Mr. Carey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Luke Carey?”

  “That’s right,” I said. I was beginning to get a little annoyed. If this was someone’s idea of a joke, I wasn’t having any of it.

  “This is Sergeant Joe Flynn of the San Francisco Police.” The twang was more noticeable now. “You have a daughter named Danielle?”

  A sudden fear clutched at my insides. “Yes, I have,” I said quickly. “Is anything the matter?”

  “I reckon there is,” he said slowly. “She just committed murder!”

  Reactions are funny things. For a moment I almost laughed aloud. I’d had visions of her broken bleeding body lying torn up on some lonely road. I bit my tongue to suppress the words, “Is that all?” Instead, aloud I asked, “Is she all right?”

  “She’s okay,” the sergeant’s voice came back.

  “May I talk to her?”

  “Not until morning,” he replied. “She’s on her way to Juvenile Hall.”

  “Is her mother around?” I asked. “Can I talk to her?”

  “Nope,” he said. “She’s upstairs in her room, having hysterics. Reckon the doctor’s about giving her a shot now.”

  “Is there anyone there I can talk to?”

  “Mr. Gordon’s on his way to Juvenile Hall with your daughter.”

  “Is that Harris Gordon?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he replied. “The lawyer man himself. He was the one asked me to call you.”

  Harris Gordon. The lawyer man. That was what they called him out there. The best there was. And the most expensive. I ought to know. He had represented Nora in our divorce and had made a monkey out of my lawyer. I began to feel a little better. At least Nora wasn’t so hysterical if she had called him.

  A curious note came into the policeman’s voice. “Don’t you want to know who your daughter killed?” The way he said it, it sounded like “kilt.”

  “I don’t believe it yet,” I said. “Danielle couldn’t hurt anyone. She’s not even fifteen.”

  “She killed him all right,” he said flatly.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Tony Riccio,” he said. Something nasty came into his voice. “Your wife’s boyfriend.”

  “She’s not my wife,” I said. “We’ve been divorced eleven years.”

  “She hit him in the stomach with one of them sculptor’s chisels your wife has in her studio. Sharp as a razor it was. Ripped him apart like a bayonet. There was blood all over the place.” I don’t think he’d even heard what I’d said. “Looks like one a them cases where the man’s been making out with both of them and the kid got jealous.”
>
  I could feel the nausea coming up in my throat. I swallowed hard and pushed it back down. “I know my daughter, Sergeant,” I said. “I don’t know why she killed him or even that she did, but if she did, I’d stake my life on it that that wasn’t the reason.”

  “It’s been more’n six years since you seen her,” he persisted. “Kids have a way of changing in six years. Growing up.”

  “Not to murder,” I said. “Not Danielle.” I hung up before he could say another word and turned on the bed.

  Elizabeth was staring up at me, her blue eyes wide.

  “You heard?”

  She nodded. She got out of bed swiftly and slipped into her robe. “But I can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t either,” I said dully. “She’s still a kid. She’s only fourteen and a half.”

  Elizabeth took my hand. “Come on out to the kitchen. I’ll make some coffee.”

  I sat there in some kind of a fog until she placed the cup of hot coffee in my hand. It was one of those times when a person thinks about everything and yet really thinks of nothing. Nothing that is remembered anyway. Maybe little things. Like a little girl’s first time at the zoo. Or laughing at the spray coming up from the sea at La Jolla. And the small voice of a child.

  “It’s so much fun to live on a boat, Daddy! Why can’t Mommy come down here and live in a boat with you instead of the big old house on top of the hill in San Fwancisco?”

  There was a kind of smile inside me as I remembered the way Danielle had of saying San Francisco—San Fwancisco. It used to annoy Nora. Nora always spoke so properly. Nora was always proper in everything. Everything that people could see. She was a lady on the outside.

  Nora Marguerite Cecelia Hayden. In her flowed the proud blood of the Spanish dons of old California, the hot Irish blood that laid track on the Western Railroads, and the ice-water that circulated through the veins of the New England bankers. Stir them all together and they made a lady. With wealth and power and land. And a strange wild kind of talent that lifted her high above everyone else.

  For whatever Nora touched, stone or metal or wood, it took on a shape, a life, of its own. And whatever she touched that had a shape, a life, of its own, she destroyed. I knew. Because I knew what she had done to me.

  “Drink your coffee while it’s hot.”

  I looked up. Elizabeth’s eyes looked at me steadily. I sipped at the coffee. I could feel its warmth creeping into the cold that had been my belly. “Thanks.”

  She sat down opposite me. “You were far away.”

  I forced my mind back to her. “I was thinking.”

  “Of Danielle?”

  I nodded silently, feeling a guilt creeping up inside me. That was another thing that Nora had. A way of creeping into your mind and pre-empting thoughts that should be of someone else.

  “What are you going to do?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

  Her voice was warm and gentle. “The poor kid.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “At least her mother is with her.”

  I laughed bitterly. Nora was never with anybody. Only herself. “Nora was having hysterics. The doctor was knocking her out for the night.”

  Elizabeth stared at me. “You mean Danielle is alone?”

  “Their lawyer went down to Juvenile Hall with her,” I said.

  Elizabeth looked at me a moment longer, then got to her feet and walked over to the cabinet. She took down another cup and picked up a spoon from the drainboard next to the sink. Her hand was shaking. The spoon clattered to the linoleum floor. She started to pick it up and then she stopped. “Damn!” she swore. “I feel so clumsy.”

  I picked it up as she took another spoon from the rack. She filled her cup with coffee and sat down again. “What a hell of a time to be pregnant.”

  I smiled at her. “You’re not the only one to blame. I had something to do with it.”

  Her eyes didn’t waver from mine. “I feel so stupid and useless. Like a clod. Especially now.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly,” she said. “You didn’t want this baby. I wanted it.”

  “Now you are being silly.”

  “You had a daughter,” she said. “That was enough for you. I wanted to give you a child, too. I was jealous of her, I guess. I had to prove that at least in one way I was just as good as Nora.”

  I walked around the table and sat down beside her. She was still looking at me. I took her face in my hands. “You don’t have to prove anything. I love you.”

  Her eyes still didn’t leave mine. “I saw the expression on your face when you talked about Danielle. You missed her. I thought if we had a baby you wouldn’t miss her so much.”

  Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. She caught at my hand and moved it down to her full, hard belly. “You’ll love our baby, won’t you, Luke? Just as much as you love Danielle?”

  I bent and pressed my face against the life within her. “You know I will,” I said. “I love her now.”

  “She may be a boy.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I whispered. “I love you both.”

  Her hands raised my head to her breasts. She held me tight against her. “You’ve got to go out there.”

  I twisted out of her arms. “Are you nuts? With you two weeks from the hospital?”

  “I can manage,” she said quietly.

  “And what’ll we use for money? I lost my job this morning, remember?”

  “We’ve got almost four hundred in the bank,” she said. “And you still have your last week’s paycheck in your pocket.”

  “A hundred and sixty bucks! We’ll need that to live on. It may be weeks before I can get another job.”

  “It’s only three and a half hours by jet from Chicago to San Francisco,” she said. “And roundtrip tourist is less than a hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “I won’t do it. I can’t. We need that money for the hospital.”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” she said. “You’re going. I know that’s the way I’d want it if Danielle were our baby.”

  She reached up for the wall telephone. “You go upstairs and pack while I call the airport. And wear your charcoal-gray flannel. It’s the only decent suit you’ve got.”

  2

  __________________________________________

  I was staring down at the open suitcase spread on the bed when Elizabeth came into the bedroom. “There’s a plane out of O’Hare at two thirty,” she said. “It makes one stop and gets you into San Francisco at four in the morning, Coast Time.”

  I just stood there looking down at the small canvas bag. I felt kind of numb. The news was still sinking in.

  “Grab a quick shower,” she said. “I’ll pack.”

  I looked at her gratefully. Elizabeth never had to be told. Somehow she always knew. I went into the bathroom.

  I looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes had deep hollows under them and seemed sunken far into their sockets. I reached for my razor. My hand was still shaking.

  “There was blood all over the place.” The sergeant’s words leaped into my mind. The hell with the shave. I could do that in the morning. I went into the shower and turned on the water full force.

  When I came out the bag was already packed and closed. I went to the closet.

  “I packed your suit,” Elizabeth said. “Wear your slacks and sport jacket on the plane. There’s no sense wrinkling your suit.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I had just finished knotting my tie when the telephone rang. Elizabeth picked it up. “It’s for you,” she said, holding the receiver out to me.

  “Hello.”

  I didn’t have to be told who was on the other end of the line. I’d recognize that quiet voice anywhere. My former mother-in-law. As usual she wasted no time on preliminaries. “Mr. Gordon, our attorney, thinks it would be a good idea if you came out here.”

  “How is Danielle?”

/>   “She’s all right,” the old lady said. “I’ve taken the liberty of reserving a suite for you and your wife at the Mark Hopkins. When you pick up your tickets at the airport, wire your flight number and I’ll have a limousine at the airport.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “This is no time to be proud,” she said testily. “I know your financial position, but it seems to me your daughter’s welfare is more important.”

  “Dani’s welfare has always been more important.”

  “Then why aren’t you coming?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t coming. I merely said no to your offer. I can pay my own way.”

  “Still the same, aren’t you?” she asked. “Will you ever change?”

  “Will you?” I retorted.

  There was a moment’s silence, then her voice came back—a little cooler, a little clearer. “Mr. Gordon wants to speak with you.”

  His voice was rich and warm. It would fool you if you didn’t know him. There was a mind like a steel trap working behind that friendly sound. “How are you, Colonel Carey? It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes,” I said. Like eleven years in divorce court. But I didn’t have to remind him of that. He probably knew the time down to the minute. “How’s Dani?”

  “She’s fine, Colonel Carey,” he said reassuringly. “When the judge saw the state of shock the poor child was in, he remanded her into my custody. She’s upstairs, here at her grandmother’s, asleep. The doctor gave her a sedative.”

  Like him or not, I was glad he was on our side.

  “She has to be returned to Juvenile Hall tomorrow morning at ten,” he said. “I think it would be a good idea if you were here to accompany her.”