Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (14 page)

“Thanks,” I said with a grimace. “I could have put that together on my own.”

“They didn’t see each other ever again after that night. She left him some cash each month in the gnome cookie jar in the yard, and he’d stop by to pick it up. A hundred a month. All of it off the books.”

I looked around the yard for a gnome cookie jar, but it had either been stolen or grass had grown over it. “So that’s her crap up there?”

“Looks like it. She stopped leaving the money between two and three years ago, Miner said, closer to three. Not long after that, he was diagnosed with cancer. He’s been battling it ever since and hasn’t felt well enough to drive out and see what’s going on here. He’s got a home in Darby and another in Napa, and it sounds like he makes enough dough off his passel of rental properties that losing money on this one doesn’t set him back. He just pays the property taxes on it and lets it rot. And crosses his fingers no one reports him for letting it fall into this state.”

“Well, it’s not like he can sue a woman without a last name for back rent,” I said.

“He doesn’t care all that much. This place hasn’t been fit for human habitation for a long time anyway, so he was lucky to get what money he did from her. Needs a new roof and paint, new windows, has plumbing and electrical problems, it’s all gone to hell.” Halloran gave the residence a critical look. “I’d say it has to be knocked down and built back up from scratch, the condition it’s in.”

What about John Macdonald?
I wanted to shout. We would alert the public, plaster the surveillance picture everywhere, see if his social security number was real, interview everyone at Checker who had ever run into him in those three months of his employment . . . But we had hit another wall.

And I couldn’t see over this one.

Chapter Eighteen

“Blue?”

Standing in the cereal aisle with my basket, I had been debating overlong between something healthy and something tasty for dinner when I heard my name. I turned to see Brendan Cavil with a half-filled cart coming down the aisle.

I was so tired. But it was still good to rest my eyes on that handsome face. “How are you?” I asked.

“I’m great. Are you okay?”

“Just some long days.” I turned back to the cereal selection. “What do I want for dinner, Brendan, Marshmallow Poppers or GMO-free granola? My brain is so fried that I can’t decide.”

“For dinner?” he repeated incredulously, glancing at the contents of my basket. So far I had achieved a bottle of milk and a bar of chocolate.

Rummaging around in his cart, Brendan pulled out a wrapped sandwich with the deli logo printed on the paper. He dropped it in my basket. “Have that, it’s a hot meatball sandwich. And these . . .” He put in a twelve-pack of string cheese, a square of cornbread, and another container from the salad bar.

“You can’t give me your food,” I argued as he did this.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll just go and get more. You have that look.”

“What look?”

“The raw look that says you need a good meal and twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep.” He put a few more items in my basket.

“You seem to have a thing for feeding me,” I said.

“You seem to need it,” Brendan retorted. “I haven’t forgot our dinner plans for when you get some free time. Any food allergies I should know about?”

I had completely forgotten about his offer of dinner. “No.”

“I’ll toss some steaks on the grill for the three of us. Baked potatoes, too.”

“Why are you single?” I blurted. “There must be something really wrong with you.”

He burst into laughter and walked with me down the aisle in the direction of the registers. “Well, I’m sure my ex-wife could pour you a drink and go on at length about my flaws. Abby will crack up when I tell her you said that.”

I liked a man who could maintain a friendship with an ex, and admit that he had had a part in the relationship breaking up, too. Brendan wasn’t a spiteful soul. That was another red flag I hadn’t seen in my years with JJ, how the failed relationships from his past never had anything to do with him. The women were nuts, one and all. And I’d just believed JJ had had rotten luck in love. Now he was undoubtedly down in southern CA telling some new woman that
I
was nuts.

That goaded me. But he still looked like a leather handbag while doing it.

“I hope you get this guy,” Brendan said once I was standing in line. “I’ve never refreshed the local news page on my cell phone hoping for updates quite as much as I have over the last few days.”

“I hope we get him, too,” I said.
God
, did I want the satisfaction and relief of pulling this asshole in.

“And then we’ll see about that steak,” Brendan said, and smiled at me before walking away.

*****

“So I’m looking at the birth certificate of one John Elliot Macdonald,” Halloran said over at his desk. “Born the sixteenth of March twenty-eight years ago in a Napa-area hospital.”

“What are his parents’ names?” I asked.

“Mother: May Macdonald. Father: none listed. I’m going to look up his mother.”

“You know what’s amazing to me?” I asked. “How few tips are coming in. He knows how to not be noticed.”

“Don’t get like this. You always get like this. The closer we get to nabbing someone, the more you start to think we never will. He’s not a mirage.”

“He’s got no address and no driver’s license and no one calling in to say, ‘oh yeah, I went to high school with him’ or ‘oh yeah, I work with him in the kitchen at the Pig Belly Diner’ or anything else,” I said.

“No driver’s license for the mother, or current address,” Halloran said after several quiet minutes. “Or any address except the one on the birth certificate, and those apartments went up in that big fire back in the summer of ‘91.”

“How do you know?”

“Had a friend at the time who lived in that area. I remember him telling me that he could see all of the Pequento Apartments going up in flames from the roof of his house. It was a huge place, low-income apartments. That fire displaced hundreds of families living in Pequento and the mobile park nearby. Two people died when they refused to evacuate. Anyway, the name stuck in my head. So May Macdonald was living there when she had her son in 1988, but she definitely wasn’t living there after July of 1991.”

Getting up, I stared at the map pinned to the wall. There was Bounce and the silk mill in the southwest region of Darby . . . the Wengly farm above it along with the place where Francisco had been abducted . . . Shady Days was further east than those locations but not by far. Macdonald had a definite area that he preferred to work.

Where are you, you sadistic creep?

“I thought he could blend,” I commented. “Regular job, girlfriend, wife and kids even. But now I think he’s a real shadow. Instead of playing the part to fit in, he holds back entirely. He doesn’t try to convince people he’s normal, hiding his real self behind a family. He made no friends at Checker. He barely even talked. He doesn’t give a shit what
anyone
thinks about him, not even using people to refill his narcissistic supply. He’s utterly and totally cut off, lost in his own head.”

“Mm-hmm,” Halloran said, tapping away at the computer.

I stared and stared at his hunting grounds.

The tapping stopped.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m looking at May Macdonald’s criminal record. It goes back decades. Small-time stuff, mostly, petty theft, drunk in public, prostitution. Napa, Sonoma, Oakland, Novato, Healdsburg, Point Reyes, San Francisco, Darby . . . But no address is ever listed for her. Was she homeless?”

“Who the fuck knows with these people?”

“Yeah, there it is in this report, she’s marked down as homeless. Says here that she was standing in a street, middle of the night in downtown San Francisco screaming her fool head off for someone named Rocky. He was her boyfriend, she claimed. Twenty-two years ago and she was drunk as a skunk, wouldn’t calm down when asked, just screamed even louder. She got put in the back of a squad car where she proceeded to go ballistic, yelling that when Mr. Rochlin got there, he was going to kick the arresting officer’s ass. Then she evacuated her bowels, it says.”

“Lovely.”

“And her stomach.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“And then she offered to blow the cop.”

“Who doesn’t want to get a blow job from a drunk woman covered in barf and shit? I’m going to get one on the way home.”

“Get in line, Blue, get in line. They put her in the drunk tank and released her the next day. And see here, another drunk and disorderly a year after that down in Novato. Screaming in random women’s faces as they left a lesbian bar that they were all whores who’d stolen her man Rocky.”

Halloran blinked at the screen. “Yeah, something tells me it wasn’t a bunch of lesbians responsible for that. She was yelling that they were taking food out of her son’s mouth; she started following them and being a nuisance. She wasn’t physically aggressive, just verbally. But she scared the piss out of those women so they called the cops. Back in the squad car she went, yelling that she needed to get back to Darby for reasons she wouldn’t explain, yelling that she was May Macdonald but they had to call her Flamingo.” He giggled and turned the screen so I could see the mug shot of May Macdonald, aka Flamingo.

The woman looked completely out of her mind, dyed blonde hair sticking out like she’d been electrocuted and her eyes popped so wide that I could see the white going all the way around the irises. Her eye shadow was bright pink and glittery, extending all the way to her temples and drawn into a point. Head cocked, her mouth was gaping in a toothless shriek of rage.

“Fun times,” I said.

Good mug shots always tickled Halloran’s funny bone. He couldn’t stop giggling at the picture. “Goddamn those man-stealing lesbians,” he wheezed.

“Christ on a cracker, who the hell was watching her son while she was off doing that?” I asked. “He would have been only a little boy at the time.”

“Maybe Gramma Flamingo or Gramma Rochlin was taking care of him. This guy could have been the father, it sounds like. She was plenty pissed.”

“Well, look up Rocky Rochlin next, I suppose.”

He tapped away. “Nothing. Maybe she got Rocky from Rochlin, and his first name is something else.” Going back to May Macdonald’s criminal record, he began at her first arrest when she was eighteen and followed a truly chaotic life while I tried to bore a hole into the map with my laser vision.

“Wow,” Halloran said. Having read from her teens to forties, her arrests continued though slowed down considerably in her fifties. Some of them still involved her desperate and fruitless quest to locate Rocky-slash-Mr. Rochlin. Her primary means of finding him appeared to involve consuming large quantities of booze and shrieking his name on street corners in various Bay Area cities, as well as accosting attractive female strangers to accuse them of luring her man away when May needed him back to pay property taxes. This woman made my mother look rational and mature, and that was no small feat.

“Why did you say wow? Don’t hold out on me,” I said when Halloran didn’t elaborate.

“She got herself a nose ring and a nice, shiny tattoo in her second-to-last mug shot here, a shooting star over her right eyebrow. Taken in for stealing food from a grocery store in Sonoma seven years ago. She said she couldn’t afford to pay because of those property taxes. And in this last one, she’s lost the nose ring but gotten another star on her cheek and a little crescent moon on her temple. Insisted at the station they had to call her Star instead of May. Guess Flamingo wasn’t working out the way she planned.”

“What was her last arrest for?”

“It was here in Darby four years ago, for creating a disturbance at a Grenol’s Drugstore. She had a meltdown when they wouldn’t let her return an item without any proof she’d bought it there. Upended two Easter candy displays in a fit and the manager called 911. She stomped out and got picked up while shrieking on the street corner that Grenol’s robbed her blind. She wasn’t drunk, just pissed off. Yelled nonsense on the drive, stuff about Rocky and money and how she was a famous tits-and-ass dancer when she was younger and on like that. She got the stars on her face because she’s a star, she said, shining bright in the night. Then she segued into dick jokes and laughing, after that she was screaming about Grenol’s again. The arresting officer must have thought she was having some kind of mental breakdown back there. Then the crazy shut off and she was pretty normal by the time they arrived at the station.”

“Are they blue? Her tattoos?”

“Yup. Two blue stars and a blue crescent. Look pretty shitty.”

“Like splotches at a distance?”

“Have a look. You’re farther away.”

I studied his screen. The cheap, poorly done tattoos could have been mistaken for bright blue stickers. Especially by someone who had compromised vision. Maybe John Macdonald hadn’t given a false address to Checker but that of a property his mother was renting for storage space.

He couldn’t have lived there in its condition, and the larger props in the first maze could not have come from that studio. There was no room left for all of those partitions; the boxes extended up almost to the ceiling and the pathway had been quite narrow.

Reuter was going to be happy to learn his theory was correct. “May Macdonald is a hoarder,” I said.

“Well, I got too much stuff in my garage,” Halloran admitted.

“That was junk at the studio, Jake,” I said. “You saw it. Pieces of metal, plywood, torn clothes covered in mouse shit, moldy books and pictures. Trash, all of it, and it has to be hers. She was the last person seen going in there.”

“She told Miner that her name was Amanda then,” Halloran said. “Just another alias. It doesn’t sound like she was using those names to stay out of trouble, not when she’d tell cops her legal name. Must be just something she does, takes on a new persona at the drop of a hat. Like a show name.”

“Hey, if I was going to shake it at a titty bar, I wouldn’t introduce myself as Bluebonnet. My porn name is Diamond Juggs,” I said.

“Thank God, I was worried for a moment there that you might have stolen my porn name.”

“No, Floppy Cox doesn’t work as well for a woman. So Amanda-Flamingo-Star-May Macdonald
had
to have been the one to take the office furniture behind the Pan-Tastic in 1997. Her son would have been too young at the time to be responsible.”

Halloran swiveled in his chair. “But she didn’t rent that studio until 2008, according to Miner.”

“No, so she took the stuff somewhere else, possibly home with her. It would have taken several trips if all she had to move it with was a pick-up.”

“A pick-up that’s not registered to her and she isn’t even licensed to drive.”