Mystery (5 page)

At West L.A. station, we climbed the stairs and passed the big detective room. Milo’s closet-sized office is well away from the other D’s, at the end of a narrow hall housing sad, bright interview rooms where lives change.

Closet-sized allotment; he claims the privacy makes it worthwhile. Grow up in a large family, you appreciate any kind of space.

His lone-wolf status began years ago, when he was the only openly gay detective in the department, and continued as part of a deal cut with a previous police chief, a man with a media-friendly demeanor and slippery ethics. Working a long-cold murder case handed Milo enough info to ruin the boss. The barter got the chief honorable retirement with full pension and earned Milo promotion to lieutenant, with continuation as a detective and none of the desk work that went with the rank.

The new chief, brutal and statistics-driven, learned that Milo’s close rate was the highest in the department and chose not to fix the unbroken.

When he closes the door to the office, it starts to feel like a coffin but I’m getting used to that. I’ve been slightly claustrophobic since childhood, a souvenir of hiding from an enraged, alcoholic father in coal bins, crawl spaces, and such. Working with Milo has been therapeutic on many levels.

I wedged into a corner as he wheeled his desk chair inches from my face, swung long legs onto the desk, loosened his tie and suppressed a belch. A sudden reach for a pen knocked a pile of papers to the floor. On top was a memo from Parker Center marked
Urgent
. When I moved to pick up the sheaf, he said, “Don’t bother, it’s all trash.”

He pulled a panatela out of a desk drawer, unwrapped, bit off the end and spit it into the wastebasket. “Any additional wisdom?”

I said, “Mr. Walkie-Talkie intrigues me. Not a friendly sort. And his being gone doesn’t mean much, he could’ve ducked somewhere.”

“Bodyguard turns on his charge?”

“Or his charge was the person she was waiting for and he’d slipped away to attend to the boss. Someone she was eager to be with from the way she kept looking at her watch. Someone she was intimate with.”

“Girl in designer duds and a diamond watch wouldn’t hang with Joe Sixpack. Some rich guy confident enough to keep her waiting.”

“And Black Suit could’ve chauffeured the two of them—his clothes would fit a driver, too. Or he followed them in a separate vehicle. At some point, the date went really bad and the two of them shot her. Or the plan all along was to kill her. Either way, finding him might help and I got a good look at him.”

“Lots of private muscle in town, but sure, why not.”

Booting up, he searched, printed a list of L.A. security firms, made a few calls, got nowhere. Plenty of companies left to contact, but he swung his feet back to the floor. “Wanna see the crime scene?”

On the way out, he picked up the fallen papers, checked the urgent message, tossed everything.

“Chief’s office keeps bugging me to attend ComStat meetings. I’ve dodged most of them, including the one today, but just in case they bust me, let’s take separate cars.”

He drove me home, where I picked up the Seville and followed him back to Sunset. We sped west and after a brief ride north on PCH, he hooked east and climbed toward the northwestern edge of the Palisades.

He turned onto a street lined with stilt-houses defying geology. The residences thinned, vanished as the road narrowed to chasm-hugging ribbon furling the green mountainside. The sky was clear. The world was as bright and pretty as a child’s drawing.

It took a while for him to stop. I parked behind him and we crossed the road.

He stretched, loosened his tie. “Nothing like country air.”

I said, “The ride from your office was thirty-eight minutes, allowing for the stop at my place. Beverly Hills is farther east, so even with less traffic at night, we’re talking about that much time. If Mutter was accurate about her leaving the Fauborg around ten and the time of death was closer to midnight than two, she was done quickly. That could indicate a premeditated abduction and execution. If, on the other hand, the TOD’s closer to two, the killer had plenty of time to be with her and we could be looking at something drawn-out and sadistic. Any ligature marks or evidence she was restrained?”

“Not a scratch, Alex. If there was any disabling it wasn’t hard-core. Wanna get closer?”

Like movie sets, crime scenes are elaborate but short-lived creations. Scrapings are taken, plaster casts harden, shells are searched for, bagging and tagging and photography ensue at a steady pace. Then the vans drive off and the yellow tape is snipped and the blood’s hosed away and everyone goes home except the flies.

No flies, here, despite lingering blood on the dirt, dried to rust-colored dust. But for a slight depression where the body had rested and stake-holes for the tape, this was lovely California terrain.

Under last night’s skimpy stars, it would’ve been ink-black.

I recalled Princess’s face, the carefully crossed legs. The posturing, the blinding sunglasses. Smoking with aplomb.

The spot where Princess had been found was a plateau just steps off the road, invisible to motorists. You’d have to walk the area to know about it. Maybe fifteen feet by ten, dotted with low scrub, pebbles, twigs.

I said, “Not a scratch also means she wasn’t rolled or dumped, more like laid down gently. That also points to a prior relationship.”

I paced the area. “It was a warm night, love under the stars might’ve sounded like a good idea. If she got out of the car ready to play, there’d be no need to restrain her.”

“Instead of kissy-poo, she gets boom? Nasty.”

“Nasty and up close and personal,” I said. “The darkness could’ve shrouded the gun, she might never have known what hit her. Can I see your phone again?”

He loaded the pictures. I endured every terrible image. “The way she’s lying, she was definitely positioned. And except for that spillover on top, she’s pristine below the face. This was no robbery, Big Guy. Maybe the watch was taken because her hot date gave it to her in the first place.”

“Bad breakup,” he said.

“The worst.”

Milo sniffed the air like a hound, jammed his hands into his pockets, and shut his eyes. A pair of raptors, too distant to identify, circled high above. One swooped, the other continued surveillance. The first bird shot up and nosed its mate with
Look-what-I’ve-got
exuberance and the couple glided out of sight.

Something else had died; brunch was on.

He said, “Robin also get a look at Black Suit?”

I nodded.

“And she’s an artistic girl. Think she could do me a drawing?”

“I suppose.”

“There’s a problem?”

“She’s better than average but drawing’s not her thing.”

“Ah.”

“Also,” I said, “I haven’t told her anything.”

“Oh.”

Up on the road, I said, “I’ll have to tell her eventually, so sure, let’s ask her.”

“If it’s gonna upset her, Alex, forget it. If you can describe him in enough detail, I can get Petra or one of our other sketch-demons. And if one of those rent-a-goon outfits gives me a lead, I might not need any talent at all. Let’s get outta here.”

I walked him to the unmarked.

“Thanks for the cogitation,” he said. “The whole intimacy thing, that’s feeling right.”

“Ask Robin to draw.”

“You’re sure.”

“Go for it.”

He shrugged. “Whatever you say. I know you like to protect her.”

“She’s on a project with a deadline, I didn’t want to distract her.”

“Sure,” he said. “That was it.”

I followed him back to the station, where he called a few more security companies with no success. I used the time to check for messages.

Despite the joys of mechanization, I keep an answering service because I like talking to actual people. Lucette, one of the more durable operators, said, “Hey, Dr. Delaware. Looks like I got … five for you.”

A family court judge I’d never heard of wanted to confer about a custody case. His surname had lots of consonants and I had her spell it.

The second call was from a Glendale pediatrician who’d interned at Western Pediatric back when I was a psych fellow. She wanted advice on a failure-to-thrive infant that might be Munchausen by proxy.

Lucette said, “The other three are all from the same person, came in starting at nine, half an hour apart. And I’m talking thirty minutes precisely. Ms. Gretchen Stengel.” She read off the number. “The first two were just her name and number, the third was kind of a strange conversation. If you don’t mind my saying.”

“Strange, how?”

“She sounded pretty nervous, Dr. Delaware, so I asked her if it was an emergency. She went quiet, like she had to think about that, finally said she couldn’t honestly say it was an emergency and nowadays she needed to be honest. To me that sounded like some kind of twelve-step thing, you know? But you know me, Dr. Delaware, I’m just here to help, never put my two cents in.”

The last time—the only time—I’d met the Westside Madame was almost a decade ago.

Restaurant on the trendoid stretch of Robertson just below Beverly Boulevard. A few storefronts north of Gretchen Stengel’s short-lived boutique.

Her play at legitimacy. Lack of crime did not pay.

I’d been tagging along with Milo as he worked the death of a beautiful young woman named Lauren Teague who’d once been part of Gretchen’s call girl stable. Gretchen had just finished serving two-thirds of a thirty-two-month sentence for tax evasion. Still in her thirties, she’d come across prematurely aged, sullen, unkempt, quite likely stoned.

Her arrest and trial four years previous had been nectar for the media and every wrong turn in her life had been retracted, probed, and aspirated like a surgical wound.

She’d grown up rich and privileged, the daughter of two high-powered lawyers at Munchley, Zabella, and Carter—a firm since diminished and eventually destroyed by malfeasance and corruption, so maybe character issues had laced the family’s chromosomes.

Education at the Peabody School, summers in Venice and Provence, frequent-flier status on the Concorde, socializing with celebs and the people who created them.

All that had distilled to drug and alcohol abuse by adolescence, six abortions by age fourteen, dropping out of college to take on self-abasing roles in bottom-feeder porn loops. Somehow that had led to a seven-figure income running beautiful, fresh-faced girls, some of them Peabody alumnae, out of the better lounges and hostelries of prime-zip-code L.A.

Gretchen’s trick-book was rumored to be hours of fascinating reading but somewhere along the line it vanished and despite rumors of LAPD enmity, her eventual plea bargain was a sweetheart deal.

Now she was calling me. Three times in one morning. On the half hour precisely; shrinks and hookers are both good at sticking to time-tables.

Not an emergency. I need to be honest
.

That did sound like rehab-talk.

Milo slammed the phone down, studied the single-spaced list of rent-a-cop outfits. The place his finger rested said he’d barely made a start.

“This is gonna take time.”

“If you don’t need me—”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, go have a life, someone should.”

On the way home, I phoned the judge and the pediatrician. The custody case sounded ugly and probably futile and I begged off. The failure-to-thrive lacked any hallmarks of Munchausen by proxy and I gave the doctor some differential diagnoses and suggested she get gastro and neuro consults on the baby but continue to keep an eye on the parents.

That left Gretchen Stengel.

Eager to talk to me. But no emergency.

I shut down the hands-off, put on music, took the long way home.

Wonderful sounds filled the car. More than music; Oscar Peterson doing impossible things with a piano.

L.A. rule number one: When in doubt, drive.

obin cried.

Wiping away tears, she laid her chisel down, stepped away from her workbench. Laughed, as if that would reverse the emotional tide. “No sense staining a nice piece of Adirondack.”

A finger traced the edge of the spruce slab she’d been shaping. The beginning of a guitar top. Spec job, no deadline.