Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (15 page)

“She had to live right nearby the business,” I said, slapping the map where Pan-Tastic was located. “I know she represents herself as being homeless, but she can’t be! Why would she be yelling about property taxes then? The house she lives or lived in at the time could be under Rochlin’s name alone.” I spread my fingers out from Pan-Tastic to look at the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity.

“She didn’t have to be that close,” Halloran remarked. “There wasn’t any traffic in the night to stall her.”

“Unless she happened to have a big van to do it all at once, then she was making runs. Load up, drive home, unload, drive back, load up again . . . She took a lot of shit that night in a short space of time, and all on her own unless she dragged the kid along to help or had a friend. She had to be close!” I insisted. “Jake, look up just Rochlin in Darby.”

Tap-tap-tap.

“Forty-two people pop up in Darby with the last name Rochlin.” Halloran scrolled down the results to check them out.

“Read me their street addresses.”

He read them out slowly as I stuck purple pins into the map. Once I pushed the last one in, I looked at the area around Pan-Tastic Breads. Two people named Rochlin were within a mile of it; five more were within two miles. Going out three miles added another six to the list.

“She could still be living there today,” I said. “Maybe Mr. Rocky-slash-Rochlin walked out all of those years ago and left his vehicle and house in the care of his girlfriend and their son. He can’t have been much more mentally stable than she. And when the son wants to set up a maze, perhaps he goes back to his mother’s house and helps himself to the hoards of crap she’s been collecting for decades.”

“Well, there’s still some sunlight left in this day. Let’s get the closest addresses to Pan-Tastic checked out first and see if we can’t find this creep’s mommy dearest,” Halloran said, sending a list of the names and addresses to his cell phone. We headed for the door.

Chapter Nineteen

We worked within the three-mile radius to Pan-Tastic Breads, crossing off Rochlin after Rochlin. One was a harried single mother with three children under the age of eight. They had moved to California from Minnesota only six months ago. A pair of Rochlins at another address turned out to be brothers in their early twenties, their apartment filled with New Age T-shirts they made and sold. They had lived in Darby all their lives, high school yearbooks lined up on a makeshift bookshelf and pinned there with bongs.

A third address was to a senior living center, where a very old man named Edgar Rochlin was so excited to have visitors that he ferried his walker to the kitchen and got out a bowl of candies to share. At the fourth residence, a pet sitter answered the door and welcomed us in. Jerry and Thomas Rochlin were a married couple with a child and in Florida on vacation, as they had been for the last three weeks. They were due to return the next morning. A picture on the wall was of two middle-aged black men holding an adorable little girl and a dog. Then we went to the next address on the list, the door answered by a guy in a knee brace. He’d had an ACL replacement just a week before.

None of them knew anyone named May or John Macdonald, or a man named Rocky. Halloran and I stopped for food and then pressed on, the end-of-day traffic slowing us down as we plodded on through the list. “We can expand the search tomorrow if none of these ones pan out,” he said.

Feeling a little defeated, I said, “I was so sure.”

“I already told you not to get like this. It’s only over when it’s over, and it’s not over yet. Think about something fun. Like dating.”

“Dating is only fun in retrospect when you’re married.”

He opened his mouth, prepared to argue, and sank back in his seat. “All right, I can’t say I disagree. I had a real bad date about a year before I met my wife.”

As we waited at a red light, I said, “Do tell.”

“Sure you don’t want to save this one for a stake-out? It’s a good stake-out story.”

“Now. I need it now.”

Halloran acquiesced. “It was a blind date back when I was a junior in college. A friend set us up as a joke and I didn’t catch on until it was too late. What was her name?” He paused to dredge it up from his memories. “Ingrid. Ingrid Something-or-Other. My friend showed me a picture of her and my heart about stopped. She was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. Red hair to her waist, ivory skin, green eyes, toned from tennis. I couldn’t believe she was single. So I picked up Ingrid Something-or-Other and took her out to a deli for lunch since she worked afternoons through evenings at a library. And then I proceeded to sit there in the booth for a full hour while she proselytized at me. The Lord this, the Lord that, have I been saved, how she feels sorry for Jews for missing out on Christmas, what’s my favorite Bible verse, how she was going to stay a virgin until her wedding night but I shouldn’t worry because her holy hole is off-limits but her other holes are okay. Wink-wink.”

“Her holy hole,” I said in appreciation as the light changed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“That’s what she called it. She planned out our wedding, debated venues to have it, what kind of flowers, seating arrangements and food at the reception, where to have the honeymoon. Then she selected our future kids’ names, wanted two sets of twins and for me to become a doctor so she could be a stay-at-home mother, and burst into tears because her big brother was living in sin with an agnostic lady and this would break up their eternal family. Keep in mind that this was all at the top of her lungs and with barely any input from me. By that point I wasn’t interested in her holy hole or any other holes she had. I just wanted to leave. I’ve never been so thrilled to see the check coming and I gave my friend hell when I got back to the dorm. He thought it was hysterical.”

I flailed about in the passenger seat to remove my coat. It was too hot to wear it and had been all afternoon, but I’d kept it on because inertia was a powerful thing. “Had he gone on a date with her in the past to know she’d do that?”

“No, he grew up with her living just across the street and their families hung out all the time. He said she’d always been crackers. I never let him set me up with anyone after that. The rest of the dating I did . . . well, no one ever came close to loony Ingrid, but there wasn’t much chemistry until Laila. It was just
right
with her from the moment we met. I tell my girls there are two ways to know a relationship isn’t going to go anywhere good: if you’re trying to change him, or he’s trying to change you. Then it’s a fantasy, not a relationship. People can grow if they want to, all of us should grow, but they don’t change into the fantasy you have in your head of them. Rosie said she trusts Hollywood more than me, so she’s holding out for her dark and dangerous bad boy vampire stalker soul mate who’s going to save her from herself while she teaches him how to love.”

With satisfaction at being freed, I dumped my coat into the back. “She’s got a smart mouth.”

“They both got smart mouths, Rosie and Lily.”

“Did you like JJ? You met him a few times.”

“Not really.”

“Why?”

“Seemed kind of full of himself. Wanting to know how much I paid for my house so he could tell me how much more he’d paid for his, same with the car, same with vacations. It was like a little dick-swinging contest, never too over the top but just annoying. He knew how to keep it under wraps most of the time, but then he got the money from his dead dad and the mask fell away. I wasn’t surprised when you told me that he’d run off. You’ll find someone better than him.”

“Maybe I won’t.”

“Why not?” Halloran countered, ever a half glass full temperament.

“I think dating gets harder as you get older,” I said as he turned into a neighborhood of single-family homes. “There’s so much more you aren’t willing to put up with. The stuff that you found edgy and exciting at twenty-one, it looks idiotic at forty-one. You don’t want to play games anymore. You don’t have the time or the energy.”

“What attracted you to JJ?”

“He was so settled and secure. I’d never had that before. It wasn’t until later I saw how much insecurity lay beneath.”

“You were more deferential with him than I’d ever seen you. It was what he wanted for dinner and what he wanted to see on vacation. Where did you go?”

“On hiatus, apparently.”

“Yeah, well, find a guy you can be your good old bitchy self with. And I say it with love. If Harley Grave can find someone to put up with her sour face and sailor’s mouth, for God’s sake, so can you.”

He parked in front of a tidy blue house, where a woman named Jane Rochlin-Spaner lived. The yard was fenced, and a heavy, automatic gate blocked the driveway. Bicycles and tricycles, wagons and scooters were lined up beside the house. All of it looked very well loved from years of use.

A smaller gate let us into the front yard, and we went up the stairs to the porch. Halloran knocked on the door. Nobody answered, so I peeked through the window where the curtain was parted. “Looks like a home daycare from the amount of highchairs and toys everywhere.”

“Nobody in their right mind would leave a toddler with May Macdonald,” Halloran said with absolute conviction. “I speak not even as a father but a decent human being.”

I shielded my eyes with my hands from the glare of the sun on the window. “There’s a calendar on the wall. Looks like they’re at the library for Reading Time. They’re due to be back any minute. Parent pick-up is right under that.”

From the living room I could see into the kitchen, and through the big glass door was the backyard. There was a sandbox and slide structure out there, two swings dangling from a thick wooden beam. I caught sight of a cluster of framed pictures on a high shelf in the living room. Neither May Macdonald nor John Macdonald was in any of the photos in the front row.

We waited. Within five minutes, a green minivan came down the street and pulled up to the gate. A sun visor lowered and the gate creaked open, triggered by a mechanism in the vehicle. Pulling in, the driver stopped and lowered the window as the gate shut behind her. “Hello! May I help you?”

A quick conversation with the pleasantly plump older woman revealed this wasn’t the Rochlin we wanted. “But there are plenty of Rochlins in northern California and Oregon!” she said as she released the young kids from their car seats. Laughing and shouting, they ran down the driveway to play on the slides in back. “I’m one of seven children and my father was one of ten, and his father fourteen! I don’t know anyone ever involved with a woman named May or with a son named John, but I have so many first and second and third cousins and a great many of them I’ve never met.”

Once back in the car, we headed for the last address of the day. It was on the edge of the city on its southwest side. The houses grew older as we passed from one block to the next. Not seedy but shabby, they were once proud Victorians, their heyday passed but small signs of their former attractiveness still evident. To avoid returning to the packed traffic on the main thoroughfares, I navigated through the quiet residential streets as Halloran looked with pleasure at the architecture. “These have character,” he said. “Must be a hundred years old or more, some of them. I’ve never been over here.”

I received a text. It was from Mom. “Nope,” I said, putting my phone away.

“That’s the exasperated voice you use when it’s your mother,” Halloran said.

“You know me far too well. She wants me to go to Hawaii.”

“Why in the hell would you not want to go to Hawaii, Pengram?”

“Because my mother is there.”

We turned onto a dead-end road, pasture showing in the gaps between houses. It was golden from a dry summer. I couldn’t wait for the rain to start and turn everything green again. Cattle grazed far in the distance, wind shaking the few trees in the fields. “You know what I hated about living in L.A.?” I said. “There’s no space between the cities. They just flow one into another like a concrete sea. Here there are a few miles of pasture before you hit the next place. What’s the address on this one?”

“6228 Sumner,” Halloran said. “That’s 6206 there. God, these grand old houses hurt my heart. I want to fix them up and make them shine again.”

In various stages of disrepair, the houses rested on big lots. The first families to call this neighborhood home were likely very large; these places were big enough for six bedrooms or more. “Why haven’t they been scooped up and flipped?” I wondered.

“I’ll tell you why,” Halloran said. “Work in Napa and you’ve got to cross all of Darby and then miles of farmland to get there. May as well live in Napa or Sonoma or Vallejo then, or at least on the east side of Darby. Work in San Francisco and you’ve got a long commute to battle both ways when you could just live in Novato or San Rafael. Work north or west of here and you’d pick Petaluma, Rohnert Park, or Santa Rosa. Back when Darby did bigger business in farming, there were probably people lined up to live here. But not now.”

“6228,” I said when we came to the last house on the block.

We got out of the car. This house was the worst off of them all, the white paint chipped and dingy, the windows dirty on both floors and the frames splintered. Dead grass filled the yard. A rusted mailbox at the foot of the driveway had its lid gaping open and nothing within. There were no cars parked in the driveway.

“The owner is a man named Robert T. Rochlin,” Halloran said.

A tall fence blocked our view of the backyard. Halloran went up the steps to see if anyone was home. I stood in the unkempt grass and weeds at the base of the porch, glancing at the nearest properties. The house directly across the street had a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign that looked like it had been there for a very long time. All was silent at the other houses, no kids playing in the yards or dogs barking. This neighborhood felt like it was quietly dying, the people growing old and passing on, nobody new coming in to replace them.

No one responded to the knock. Halloran came down the steps. “Nobody’s home.”

We strolled down the driveway, weeds pushing up between the concrete slabs. It ended in a garage, the corrugated metal door stuck halfway down. Figuring I was closer to the ground than Halloran, I bent and peeked in.

Boxes. Tons and tons of boxes, so many boxes that no vehicle could have fit inside with them. Not even a bicycle could have been jammed in there. But a packed garage didn’t mean a hoard. Plenty of people had full garages.

Still, a chill ran down my spine.

I walked along the garage and peeked in again, seeing dusty garbage bags among the boxes. Old shoes and purses were crammed in around them. When I straightened, Halloran saw my expression. “Let’s see if this May woman is in the back,” he said.

We walked along the fence, which exceeded height regulations and was taller even than Halloran. Finding an aged bucket in the tall grass we were stepping through, I turned it upside down and set it beside the fence. Then I climbed up, pressed onto my tiptoes, and looked into the yard.

Plastic bins were stacked up on the other side. Unable to see beyond them, I jumped off, grabbed the bucket, and moved farther down the fence line. Climbing back on, I looked over.

Oh my God
. There were legs stretched over the dirt and dead grass about twenty feet away, protruding from beyond the stacked bins. They were still. “Halloran, we need back-up,” I said in a hushed voice. “We may have a body.”