Bad Love (35 page)

Her back was to Sixth Street, but I had a three-quarter view of her body. Around sixty-five. Her collar was a snowy Peter Pan job, her slacks olive wool, much too heavy for the weather. She had hair dyed as black as the tar, cut in a flapper bob with eyebrow-length bangs. Her face was crinkled and small. Arthritic hands curled in her lap. Red tennis shoes covered her feet, over white socks, folded over once. A big, green plastic purse hung from her shoulder. If she weighed a hundred pounds, it was after Thanksgiving dinner.

The ground was covered with dry leaves and I made noise as I approached. She kept gazing out at the lawn and didn’t look back. Children were playing there, mobile dots on an emerald screen, but I wasn’t sure she saw them.

The random trees had been trimmed to form a canopy, and the shadows they cast were absolute. Several other benches were scattered nearby, most of them empty. A black man slept on one, a paper bag next to his head. Two women of Rolanda Basille’s approximate age sat on another, strumming guitars and singing.

I walked in front of her.

She barely looked up, then slapped the bench.

I sat down. Music drifted over from the two guitarists. Some sort of folk song, a foreign language.

“The Stepne sisters,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “They’re here all the time. They stink. Did you ever see a picture of my daughter?”

“Just in the paper.”

“That wasn’t a flattering one.” She opened the big purse, searched for a while, and took out a medium-sized envelope. Withdrawing three color photographs, she handed them to me.

Professional portraits, passable quality. Rebecca Basille sitting in a white wicker chair, posed three different ways in front of a mountain-stream backdrop, wearing a powder-blue dress and pearls. Big smile. Terrific teeth. Very pretty; soft, curvy build, soft arms, a trifle heavy. The dress was low-cut and showed some cleavage. Her brown hair was shiny and long and iron-curled at the ends, her eyes full of humor and just a bit of apprehension, as if she’d been sitting for a long time and had doubts about the outcome.

“Very lovely,” I said.

“She was beautiful,” said Rolanda. “Inside and out.”

She held out her hand and I returned the photos. After she’d replaced them in the purse, she said, “I just wanted you to see the person she was, though even these don’t do it. She didn’t like having her picture taken — used to be chubby when she was little. Her face was always gorgeous.”

I nodded.

She said, “There was a wounded bird within five miles, Becky’d find it and bring it home. Shoeboxes and cotton balls and eyedroppers. She tried to save anything
— bugs —
those little gray curly things?”

“Potato bugs?”

“Those. Moths, ladybugs, whatever, she’d save ’em. When she was
real
little she went through this stage of not wanting anyone to cut the lawn because she thought it hurt the grass.”

She tried to smile, but her lips got away from her and began trembling. She covered them with one hand.

“You see what I’m saying?” she said, finally.

“I do.”

“She never changed. In school, she went straight for the outcasts — anyone who was different, or hurting — the retarded kids, harelips, you name it. Sometimes I think she was
attracted
to hurt.”

Another forage in the purse. She found red-framed sunglasses and put them on. Given the ambient shade, they must have blacked out the world.

I said, “I can see why she went into social work.”

“Exactly. I always figured she would do something like that, always told her nursing or social work would be perfect for her. But of course when you tell them, they do something else. So it took her a while to know what she wanted. She didn’t want to go to college, did some waitressing, some file clerking, secretarial. My other kids were different. Real driven. Got a boy practicing orthopedic medicine in Reno, and my older girl works in a bank in St. Louis — assistant vice president.”

“Was Becky the youngest?”

She nodded. “Nine years between her and Kathy, eleven between her and Carl. She was — I was forty-one when I had her, and her father was five years older than me. He walked out on us right after she was born. Left me high and dry with three kids. Sugar diabetic, and he refused to stop drinking. He started losing feeling in his feet, then the eyes started going. Finally, they began cutting pieces off of him and he decided with no toes and one arm it was time to be a swinging bachelor — crazy, huh?”

She shook her head.

“He moved to Tahoe, didn’t last long after that,” she said. “Becky was two when he died. We hadn’t heard from him all that time, suddenly the government started sending me his veteran’s benefits. . . . You think that’s what made her so vulnerable? No — what do you people call it? — father role model?”

“How was Becky vulnerable?” I said.

“Too trusting.” She touched her collar, smoothed out an invisible wrinkle. “She went straight for the losers. Believed every cock-and-bull story.”

“What kind of losers?”

“More wounded birds. Guys she thought she could fix. She wanted to fix the world.”

Her hands began to shake and she shoved them under her purse. The Stepne sisters were singing louder. She said: “Shut up.”

“Did the losers mistreat her?”

“Losers,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard. “The great poet with no poems to show for it, living off welfare. Bunch of musicians, so-called. Not men. Little boys. I nagged her all the time, all the dead-ends she was choosing. In the end, none of that mattered a whit, did it?”

She lifted her sunglasses and wiped an eye with one finger. Putting the shades back, she said, “You don’t need to hear this, you’ve got your own problems.”

I saw faint reflections of myself in her black lenses, distorted and tense.

“You seem like a nice young fellow, listening to me go on like this. Ever save any bugs yourself?”

“Maybe a couple of times.”

She smiled. “Bet it was more than a couple. Bet you punched those holes in the top of the jars so the bugs could breathe, right? Bet your mother loved that, too, all those creepy things in the house.”

I laughed.

“I’m right, aren’t I?
I
should be a psychologist.”

“It does bring back certain memories,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Out to save the world, all of you. You married?”

“No.”

“A fellow like you, same attitude as my Becky, you would have been okay for her. You could have saved the world together. But to be honest, she probably wouldn’t have gone for you — no offense, you’re just too . . . put-together. That’s a compliment, believe me.” She patted my knee. Frowned. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through. And be sure to take good care of yourself. Something happens to you, your mother’s going to die, over and over. You’ll be gone but she’ll be left dying every
day —
understand?”

The hand on my knee clawed.

I nodded.

“Something happens to you, your mother’s going to lie in bed and think about you, over and over and over. Wondering how much you suffered. Wondering what you were
thinking
when it happened to you
— why
it happened to her kid and not someone else’s. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I do.”

“So be careful.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “To protect myself.”

She whipped off the sunglasses. Her eyes were so raw the whites looked brown. “Gritz — no, she never said a word about anyone named that. Or Silk or Merino.”

“Did she ever talk about Hewitt?”

“No, not really.” She seemed to be deliberating. I didn’t move or speak.

The raw eyes moistened. “She mentioned him once — maybe a week or two before. Said she was treating this really crazy person and thought she was helping him. She said it respectfully — this poor, sick fellow that she really wanted to help. Schizophrenic, whatever — hearing voices. No one else had been able to help him, but she thought she could. He was starting to trust her.”

She spat on the ground.

“She mentioned him by name?”

“No. She made a point of not talking about any of them by name. Big point of following the rules.”

Remembering Becky’s sketchy notes and lack of follow-through with Jean, I said, “A real stickler, huh?”

“That was Becky. Back when she was in grade school, her teachers always said they wished they had a classroom full of Beckys. Even with her loser boyfriends, she always stayed on the straight and narrow, not using drugs, nothing. That’s why they wouldn’t . . .”

She shook her head. Put her glasses back on and showed me the back of her head. Between thin strands of dyed hair, her neck was liver-spotted and loose-skinned.

I said, “Why they wouldn’t what?”

No answer for a moment.

Then: “They wouldn’t stick with her
— they
always left
her
. Can you beat that? The ones who were going to get divorced, always went back to their wives. The ones who were on the wagon, always fell off. And left
her
. She was
ten
times the human being any of them were, but
they
always walked out on
her
, can you beat that?”

“They were the unstable ones,” I said.

“Exactly. Dead-end losers. What she needed was someone with high standards, but she wasn’t attracted to that — only the broken ones.”

“Was she in a relationship at the time she died?”

“I don’t know — probably. The last time I saw her — couple of days before she stopped by to give me some laundry — I asked her how her social life was and she refused to talk about it. What that usually meant was she was involved with someone she knew I’d nag her about. I got upset with her — we didn’t talk much. How was I supposed to know it was the last time and I should have enjoyed every minute I had with her?”

Her shoulders bowed and quivered.

I touched one of them and she sat up suddenly.

“Enough of this — I hate this moping around. That’s why I quit that survivor’s group your friend Sturgis recommended. Too much self-pity. Meanwhile, I haven’t done a damn thing for you.”

My head was full of assumptions and guesses. Learning of Becky’s attraction to losers had firmed up the suspicions left by her notes. I smiled and said, “It’s been good talking to you.”

“Good talking to you, too. Do I get a bill?”

“No, the first hour’s free.”

“Well, look at that. Handsome, a Caddy, and a sense of humor to boot — you do pretty well, don’t you? Financially.”

“I do okay.”

“Modesty — bet you do better than okay. That’s what I wanted for Becky. Security. I told her, what are you wasting your time for, doing dirty work for the county? Finish up your degree, get some kind of license, open up an office in Beverly Hills and treat fat people or those women who starve themselves. Make some
money
. No crime in that, right? But she wouldn’t hear of it, wanted to do
important
work. With people who were really
needy
.”

She shook her head.

“Saving the bugs,” she said, almost inaudibly. “She thought she was dealing with those potato thingies, but a scorpion got into the jar.”

Her description of Becky as a stickler for the rules didn’t fit with Jean Jeffers’ recollections. A mother’s vision could be overly rosy, but she’d been frank about Becky’s chronic attraction to losers.

Had Becky finally been attracted to the ultimate loser? How loose had things gotten between her and Hewitt?

And what twisted dynamic bound the two of them to G?

Bad love.

Blaming the victim bothered me, but revenge seemed to be the fuel that powered the killer’s engine, and I had to wonder if Becky had been a target of something other than random psychosis.

I drove home straining to make sense of it. No strange vehicles within a hundred yards of the gate, and last night’s anxiety seemed silly. Robin was working, looking preoccupied and content, and the dog was chewing a nylon bone.

“Milo just called from Santa Barbara,” she said. “The number’s on the kitchen counter.”

I went into the house, found an 805 exchange that wasn’t Sally Grayson’s, and punched it. A voice answered, “Records.”

“Dr. Delaware returning Detective Sturgis’s call.”

“One minute.”

I waited five.

“Sturgis.”

“Hi. Just got through talking to Becky’s mother. Becky never mentioned anyone by name, but she did talk about helping a poor unfortunate psychotic who could very well have been Hewitt.”

“No mention of Gritz?”

“Nor of Silk or Merino. One thing that was interesting, though: she said Becky liked to mend broken wings and had a penchant for losers — guys who involved her in dead-end relationships. If you think of Hewitt as the ultimate loser, it supports what we suspected about things getting unprofessional between them. Having said all that, I don’t know that it
leads
us anywhere.”

“Well, we’re not doing much better here. No school records at Katarina’s house, so either she never kept them or the killer made off with them. We do have confirmation that Myra Evans was Myra Paprock, but it’s a no-go on Rodney Shipler. His tax records show him working for the L.A. Unified School District for thirty years — right after he got out of the Army. Never up here — and I verified it with the S.B. district. No connection at all to the de Bosch school.”

“What about summer vacations?” I said. “School personnel sometimes take part-time jobs during the off-season.”

“Summers he worked in L.A.”

“How long was he in the Army?”

“Fifteen years — staff sergeant, most of it over in the Philippines. Honorable discharge, no blots on his record.”

“He made somebody mad.”

“It doesn’t look like it was someone at the school. In fact, we can’t find any records of
anything
fishy happening out at the school. No fires or felonies or anything anybody would want to avenge, Alex. Just a few complaints about noise from Bancroft and one vehicular accident that did occur when Myra Evans was teaching there — May of seventy-three — but it was clearly an accident. One of the students stole a school truck and took a joyride. Made it up to the Riviera district and spun off a mountain road. He died, Santa Barbara PD investigated, found no foul play.”