Bad Love (27 page)

When Milo cleared his throat, the tongue zipped in and an eager grin took hold of Paprock’s face. Despite the smile, his face was tired, the muscles loose and droopy. His eyes were small and amber. The suit gave them a khaki tint.

“Gentlemen. How can I help you?”

Milo said, “Mr. Paprock, I’m Detective Sturgis, Los Angeles police,” and handed him a card.

The look that took hold of the salesman next
— What are you hitting me with this time? —
made me feel lousy. We had nothing to offer him and plenty to take.

He put his pen down.

I caught a side view of a photo on his desk, propped up next to a mug printed with the Cadillac crest. Two round-faced, fair-haired children. The younger one, a girl, was smiling, but the boy seemed to be on the verge of tears. Behind them hovered a woman of around seventy with butterfly glasses and cold-waved white hair. She resembled Paprock, but she had a stronger jaw.

Milo said, “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Paprock, but we’ve come across another homicide that might be related to your wife’s and wondered if we could ask you a few questions.”

“Another — a
new
one?” said Paprock. “I didn’t see anything on the news.”

“Not exactly, sir. This crime occurred three years ago—”

“Three years ago? Three
years
and you’ve just come
across
it? Did you finally get him?”

“No, sir.”

“Jesus.” Paprock’s hands were flat on the desk and his forehead had erupted in sweat. He wiped it with the back of one hand. “Just what I need to start off the week.”

There were two chairs facing his desk. He stared at them but didn’t say anything else.

Milo motioned me into the office and closed the door behind us. There was very little standing room. Paprock held a hand out to the chairs and we sat. A certificate behind the desk said he’d been a prizewinning salesman. The date was three summers ago.

“Who’s the other victim?” he said.

“A man named Rodney Shipler.”

“A man?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A man — I don’t understand.”

“You don’t recognize the name?”

“No. And if it was a man, what makes you think it has anything to do with my Myra?”

“The words “bad love’ were written at the crime scene.”

“ ’Bad love,’ ” said Paprock. “I used to dream about that. Make up different meanings for it. But still . . .”

He closed his eyes, opened them, took a bottle out of his desk drawer. Enteric aspirin. Popping a couple of tablets, he dropped the bottle into his breast pocket, behind the colored handkerchief.

“What kind of meanings?” said Milo.

Paprock looked at him. “Crazy stuff — trying to figure out what the hell it meant. I don’t remember. What’s the difference?”

He began moving his hands around, stirring the air very quickly, as if searching for something to grab. “Was there any — some sign of — was this Shipler . . . what I’m getting at is, was there something sexual?”

“No, sir.”

Paprock said, “ ’Cause that’s what
they
told me they thought it might mean. The first cops. Some psychotic thing — using — sex in a bad way, some sort of sex nut. A pervert
bragging
about what he did — bad love.”

Nothing like that had been in Myra Paprock’s file.

Milo nodded.

“A man,” said Paprock. “So what are you
telling
me? The first cops had it all
wrong
? They went and looked for the
wrong
thing?”

“We don’t really know much at all at this point, sir. Just that someone wrote “bad love’ at the scene of Mr. Shipler’s homicide.”

“Shipler.” Paprock squinted. “You’re opening the whole thing up again, ’cause of him?”

“We’re taking a look at the facts, Mr. Paprock.”

Paprock closed his eyes, opened them, and took a deep breath. “My Myra was taken
apart
. I had to identify her. To you that kind of thing’s probably old hat, but . . .” Shake of the head.

“It’s never old hat, sir.”

Paprock gave him a doubtful look. “After I did it — identified her — it took me a long time to be able to remember her the way she used to be . . . even now . . . the first cops said whoever — did those things to her, did them after she was dead.” Alarm brightened his eyes. “They were right about
that
, weren’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

Paprock’s hands gripped the edge of his desk and he wheeled forward. “Tell me the truth, detective — I
mean
it. I don’t want to think of her suffering, but if — no, forget it, don’t tell me a damn thing, I don’t
want
to know.”

“She didn’t suffer, sir. The only thing new is Mr. Shipler’s murder.”

More sweat. Another wipe.

“Afterwards,” said Paprock. “After I identified her — I had to go tell my kids. The older one, anyway — the little one was just a baby. Actually, the older one wasn’t much more than a baby, either, but he was asking for her, I had to tell him something.”

He knocked the knuckles of both hands together. Shook his head, tapped the desk.

“It took a helluva long time to get it set in my mind — what had happened. When I went to tell my boy, all I could think of was what I’d seen in the morgue — imagining her . . . and here he is asking for Mommy. “Mommy, Mommy’ — he was two and a half. I told him Mommy got sick and went to sleep forever. When his sister got old enough, I gave
him
the job of telling
her
. They’re great kids, my mother’s been helping me take care of them, she’s close to eighty and they don’t give her any problems. So who needs to change that? Who needs Myra’s name in the papers and digging it all up? There was a time, finding out who did it was
all
that mattered to me, but I got over that. What’s the difference, anyway? She’s not coming back, right?”

I nodded. Milo didn’t move.

Paprock touched his brow and opened his eyes wide, as if exercising the lids.

“That it?” he said.

“Just a few questions about your wife’s background,” said Milo.

“Her
background
?”

“Her work background, Mr. Paprock. Before she became a real estate agent, did she do anything else?”

“Why?”

“Just collecting facts, sir.”

“She worked for a bank, okay? What kind of work did this Shipler do?”

“He was a janitor. What bank did she work for?”

“Trust Federal, over in Encino. She was a loan officer — that’s how I met her. We used to channel our car loans through there and one day I went down there on a big fleet sale and she was at the loan desk.”

Milo took out his notepad and wrote.

“She would have probably made vice president,” said Paprock. “She was smart. But she wanted to work for herself, had enough of bureaucracies. So she studied for her broker’s license at night, then quit. Was doing real well, lots of sales . . .”

He looked off to one side, fixing his gaze on a poster. Two perfect-looking, tennis-clad people getting into a turquoise Coupe de Ville with diamond-bright wire wheels. Behind the car, the marble-and-glass facade of a resort hotel. Crystal chandelier. Perfect-looking doorman smiling at them.

“Bureaucracies,” said Milo. “Did she deal with any others before the bank?”

“Yeah,” said Paprock, still turned away. “She taught school — but that was before I met her.”

“Here in L.A.?”

“No, up near Santa Barbara — Goleta.”

“Goleta,” said Milo. “Do you remember the name of the school?”

Paprock faced us again. “Some public school — why? What does her work have to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing, sir, but please bear with me. Did she ever teach in L.A.?”

“Not to my knowledge. By the time she moved down here, she was fed up with teaching.”

“Why’s that?”

“The whole situation — kids not interested in learning, lousy pay — what’s to like about it?”

“A public school,” I said.

“Yeah.”

Milo said, “What subjects did she teach?”

“All of them, I guess. She taught fifth grade, or maybe it was fourth, I dunno. In elementary school, you teach all the subjects, right? We never really had any detailed discussions about it.”

“Did she teach anywhere before Goleta?” said Milo.

“Not as far as I know. I think that was her first job out of school.”

“When would that be?”

“Let’s see, she graduated at twenty-two, she’d be forty this May.” He winced. “So that would have been, what, eighteen years ago. I think she taught maybe four or five years, then she switched to banking.”

He looked at the poster again and wiped his forehead.

Milo closed his pad. The sound made Paprock jump. His eyes met Milo’s. Milo gave as gentle a smile as I’d ever seen him muster. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Paprock. Is there anything else you want to tell us?”

“Sure,” said Paprock. “I want to tell you to find the filthy fuck who killed my wife and put me in a room with him.” He rubbed his eyes. Made two fists and opened them and gave a sick smile. “Fat chance.”

Milo and I stood. A second later, Paprock rose, too. He was medium-sized, slightly round-backed, almost dainty.

He patted his chest, removed the aspirin bottle from his breast pocket and passed it from hand to hand. Walking around the desk, he pushed the door open and held it for us. No sign of John Allbright or anyone else. Paprock walked us through the showroom, touching the flanks of a gold Eldorado in passing.

“Whyncha buy a car, as long as you’re here?” he said. Then he colored through his tan and stopped.

Milo held out his hand.

Paprock shook it, then mine.

We thanked him again for his time.

“Look,” he said, “what I said before — about not wanting to know? That was bullshit. I still think about her. I got married again, it lasted three months, my kids hated the bitch. Myra was . . . special. The kids, someday they’re gonna have to know. I’ll handle it. I can handle it. You find something, you tell me, okay? You find
anything
, you tell me.”

I headed for Coldwater Canyon and the drive back to the city.

“Public school near Santa Barbara,” I said. “Lousy pay, so maybe she moonlighted at a local private place.”

“A reasonable assumption,” said Milo. He lowered the Seville’s passenger window, lit up a bad cigar, and blew smoke out at the hot valley air. The city was digging up Ventura Boulevard and sawhorses blocked one lane. Bad traffic usually made Milo curse. This time he kept quiet, puffing and thinking.

I said, “Shipler was a school janitor. Maybe he worked at de Bosch’s school, too. That could be our connection: they were both staffers, not patients.”

“Twenty years ago. . . . Wonder how long the school district keeps records. I’ll check, see if Shipler transferred down from Santa Barbara.”

“More reasons for me to drive up there,” I said.

“When are you doing it?”

“Tomorrow. Robin can’t make it — all for the best. Between trying to find remnants of the school and looking for Wilbert Harrison in Ojai, it won’t be a pleasure trip.”

“Those other guys — the therapists at the symposium — they worked at the school, too, right?”

“Harrison and Lerner did. But not Rosenblatt — he trained with de Bosch in England. I’m not sure about Stoumen, but he was a contemporary of de Bosch, and Katarina asked him to speak, so there was probably some kind of relationship.”

“So, one way or the other, it all boils down to de Bosch. . . . Anyone seen as being close to him is fair game for this nut. . . . Bad love — destroying a kid’s sense of trust, huh?”

“That’s the concept.”

I reached Coldwater and started the climb. He drew on his cigar and said, “Paprock was right about his wife. You saw the pictures — she
was
taken apart.”

“Poor guy,” I said. “Walking wounded.”

“What I told him, about her being dead when she was raped? True. But she suffered, Alex. Sixty-four stab wounds and plenty of them landed before she died. That kind of revenge — rage? Someone must have gotten fucked up big-time.”

I made it to Beverly Hills with five minutes to spare for my one o’clock with Jean Jeffers. Parking was a problem and I had to use a city lot two blocks down from Amanda’s, waiting at the curb as a contemplative valet decided whether or not to put up the
FULL
sign.

He finally let me in, and I arrived at the restaurant five minutes late. The place was jammed and it reeked of Parmesan cheese. A hostess was calling out names from a clipboarded list and walking the chosen across a deliberately cracked white marble floor. The tables were marble, too, and a gray faux-marble treatment had been given to the walls. The crypt look, nice and cold, but the room was hot with impatience and I had to elbow my way through a cranky crowd.

I looked around and saw Jean already seated at a table near the back, next to the south wall of the restaurant. She waved. The man next to her looked at me but didn’t move.

I recalled him as the heavyset fellow from the photo in her office, a little heavier, a little grayer. In the picture, he and Jean had been wearing leis and matching Hawaiian shirts. Today, they’d kept the Bobbsey twins thing going with a white linen dress for her, white linen shirt for him, and matching yellow golf sweaters.

I waved back and went over. They had half-empty coffee cups in front of them and pieces of buttered olive bread on their bread plates. The man had an executive haircut and an executive face. Great shave, sunburnt neck, blue eyes, the skin around them slightly bagged.

Jean rose a little as I sat down. He didn’t, though his expression was friendly enough.

“This is my husband, Dick Jeffers. Dick, Dr. Alex Delaware.”

“Doctor.”

“Mr. Jeffers.”

He smiled as he shot out his arm. “Dick.”

“Alex.”

“Fair enough.”

I sat down across from them. Both their yellow sweaters had crossed tennis-racquet logos. His bore a small, gold Masonic pin.

“Well,” said Jean, “some crowd. Hope the food’s good.”

“Beverly Hills,” said her husband. “The good life.”