The Detective & the Pipe Girl (19 page)

He put his nose back in
Popular Mechanics
.

I grabbed my copies of the reports and left.

32

I
went to a bar in Culver City near my office, called Ford’s Filling Station. Nice place, dark wood, brass touches, big windows. It was four-thirty. Probably the best time to go to a bar. The day still has promise, yet, at this time of year anyway, the light is dimming. The sun is low. The rays slanting into windows. And usually, bars aren’t too crowded at this hour. And that was true here. Just a few people chatting. Some good jazz playing. Mellow and relaxing. I ordered a cold Budweiser.

“Sorry, only big domestic we have is PBR.”

PBR. The beer places like this offer strictly to be ironic. I don’t drink it on principal.

The bartender said, “We’ve got a nice honey wheat you might like. It’s really popular. Really robust flavor.”

I closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose, and sighed.

Then, without speaking, I methodically got up and, my face paralyzed in a trancelike annoyed smile, walked out of the bar. I went left and staggered into a restaurant a couple doors down. It was California fusion or something. I beelined it to the bar.

“Bud, Bud Light, something like that.”

“We have Amstel Light and Heineken.”

I stared straight ahead and blinked a few times. I then closed my eyes and pointed my head toward the floor for about forty-five seconds. When I looked up, the bartender was still waiting for me to order. I shook my head disgustedly, got up, and left.

I skulked up the street to a rough-looking dive I’d seen a lot but had never been into. Mary’s. I walked in. “Bud please.”

“You bet.”

“Thank god.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Also, a shot of Jack.”

The bartender nodded, and brought both back instantly.

I took a sip of the beer; it was freezing. I nailed the shot; it was warm and delicious. Is it that difficult? Honey wheat? What? I marveled at how good the beer and the shot were, both individually and as a combination. I finished the beer, got another round; this one I took a little easier. I looked around the bar. A dive. But great. Possessing fully that late-afternoon calm-before-the-storm vibe.

I sipped the second shot and took a nice, relaxed pull of the cold beer. Oftentimes on a case you have to reset. You begin to get more and more information and if you follow everything you suddenly find yourself too far away from the center. From the eye. You begin to start processing all these possibilities, too many to control, and
way
too many to all be true.

So: Was Allison Tarber a Pipe Girl? Think so, don’t you? And the cut that Elliot Watt pointed out? What was that? Well, maybe it was
her
tattoo. Maybe it was
her
PG symbol cut out of her before she got pushed over a cliff by Neese or one of those baboons I ran into in the very same canyon.

Maybe because of the way they had decided to rid the world of Allison Tarber, banging her off rocks filled with sharp edges, they could go one step further to dodge suspicion by removing her Pipe Girl stamp.

So: Did Jenny know that Tarber was dead? Did she know that Tarber and Suzanne were in the same business? And if so, doesn’t that mean that someone broke
the promise
and told her the big secret?

And: If Tarber was indeed one of Neese’s girls, whether or not Jenny Bickford knew, does that connect her to Suzanne Neal? Does that help me put Suzanne’s murder on Neese?

Well, sure. Because it was another girl in his ring who was now dead. It makes the notion, the silly notion of his business plan, seem not so crazy. And, shit, maybe Allison Tarber was the one who died to make the whole thing work. That’s what Marlon the Marlin had said. Kill one of them and the rest of them shut up forever.

I left Mary’s, went back to my office, called Jenny Bickford. It was 6 p.m. I sat at my desk, listening to her cell phone ring.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi, Jenny. It’s John Darvelle.”

“Yeah, it said so on my phone.”

She sounded nervous. She kept talking.

“But I still always just say hello rather than just start right into a conversation, you know?”

She laughed. Sweetly. Awkwardly.

“Yeah. Listen. I’d like to talk to you again. In person.”

“Sure, I guess, yeah. Hey, did that Allison Tarber thing help?”

She wasn’t a good liar. Which to me is a good quality. A good thing.

“Maybe. I really don’t know yet.”

“Well, it’s Friday, so Monday I guess?”

“I was hoping for tonight.”

“I’m about to leave for the day.”

“Where do you live?”

“Santa Monica.”

“How about coming by my office? It’s in Culver City, and from Manhattan Beach you can hop right off the freeway.”

“Well . . . I was going to go home.”

“It’s not too far out of your way. Please. Come by.”

“Okay. Culver City? Where exactly?”

I told her.

“Okay. Okay. Give me about an hour.”

One hour later, she came
peering around the corner of my big, and still open, sliding door. It was almost dark now. The last bit of light hanging in the air. The streetlights just coming on, giving the lot in front of my warehouse a yellow glow.

Her face, then her body appeared in the doorway. I could see vulnerability on her face. She couldn’t hide that was she was hiding something. And she couldn’t hide that she knew we were about to talk about it.

“Hi,” she said, arms crossed.

“Hi. Come in. Have a seat.”

She did, at one of the chairs in front of my desk.

“Thanks for telling me about Allison Tarber. I looked into it.”

“Yeah, what did you find out?”

“I found out that Allison is dead.”

This time Jenny didn’t feign massive surprise.

“I knew that. I thought . . . I thought . . . that might help you. I’m not sure why.”

I got up and walked over to the slider. Appearing to be trapped in thought, pondering the great questions of the case. But that’s not what I was doing. What I was doing was scanning the lot. Looking for the two guys who had remodeled my face. Nothing. Nobody. Hadn’t seen those two since. My thought was: They and Neese don’t know what I’m up to
exactly
. So they’re probably waiting to see what I do next. Waiting to see if I was going to cause any more trouble. Which I was.

But, at this point, I had to do whatever I was going to do
fast
. Or else I would surely hear from them again. And soon.

I thought: Are they out there? Are they watching? Just. Don’t. Know.

I thought about shutting the slider. No. Leave it open. Business as usual.

I walked back over to my desk, sat down, and said to Jenny, “Jenny, I believe Suzanne was a prostitute. A special kind of prostitute called a Pipe Girl.”

Jenny was about to speak.

“Hang on,” I said. “If you’re a Pipe Girl, you make a lot of money. Much more than the regular kind of prostitute. However, the catch is, if you tell anyone,
anyone
, what you do, outside of the pimp for lack of a better word, and the customer of course, you are killed. That’s what it means to be a Pipe Girl. That’s the deal you make to become a Pipe Girl. It’s a prostitution system meant to totally protect the customer by guaranteeing that the use of the service will never, ever get out. I know, it sounds absurd. How many holes can you see in this business plan, right? But take all the problems out of the equation for a moment and you can see genius in the idea. Which is: Imagine the money you could make if you were able to provide rich men with beautiful women who would never say a word.”

Jenny looked at me. Not nodding, but indicating somehow that she wanted me to continue.

“Jenny, Suzanne told you she was a Pipe Girl, didn’t she?”

She said, very calm now, “I can’t talk about this, John.”

“I think you can. And I think you should. Did she tell you she was a Pipe Girl?”

Quickly. “Yes.”

So there it was. Suzanne had told. Had done the thing she was forbidden to do.

Jenny continued. “But, I have to tell you this. I’m the only person she ever told. I’m close to positive of that. And I know her . . . boss, or whatever you want to call him, didn’t know she had told me. So that’s not why she . . . got . . . killed.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m just sure of it. Suzanne and I had gone out the night she told me. We had dinner. And too many drinks. And she came back to my apartment to spend the night. You know, so she didn’t have to drive. We were drunk. We were very drunk. And she told me she had to tell me something. And she did. In a very straightforward way she told me the arrangement she was in. And it was like this huge relief for her. I’ve never seen anything like it. Her telling me was like this catharsis. She began to cry. To sob. And she hugged me, for a long time. But then . . . the next morning I woke up and she was already awake, sitting in my kitchen. And she was so serious. No, she was scared. She was scared. That’s what it was. And she told me that she’d never told anyone that. And then she apologized to me for telling me. And I remember saying: It’s okay. And then she explained why she was apologizing. She said that I couldn’t repeat it ever. Ever. To anyone. Because if anyone ever found out she could be in danger. That’s what she said, that she could be in danger. She had a look in her eye that I’ve never seen anyone have. So intense. So focused. I said, of course, Suzanne, I’ll never say a word. And then she just kept saying that she was sorry. So sorry. But, but, the truth is, I never did repeat it. Not even back to Suzanne. We never once spoke about it again. It truly was like it had never happened. And so . . . And so . . .”

“And so what?”

“And so that can’t be why she was killed. Because it’s like she never told me. It really is like she never told me.”

I was thinking: Maybe she told Neese she told you. Doubtful. I mean, why would she do that? But maybe.

Jenny said, “I think you should talk to Danny. Danny Baker.”

“I did.”

Without really hearing me she said, “He loved her. But she loved him too. That was the thing. Lots of people fell for Suzanne, but with Danny, she loved him too.”

A man appeared in my doorway.

Jenny sensed it, jerked around, saw the man, and froze. She looked back at me. True fear in her eyes. But there was nothing to be afraid of. It was Jim Douglas. I had asked him to come, and he had showed up right on time. As always.

He walked in. He was wearing a maroon leisure suit. And not in an ironic way. He was really wearing it—wearing it with pride. Also: Leather dress boots with a zipper up the inside ankle. He had big glasses on that tinted automatically when you entered the sun. They were at about a quarter tint, having adjusted to the light in my space. He had a freshly lit Benson & Hedges 100 sticking out of his mouth. It slanted across his face and popped against his black skin.

“Hi, Jim,” I said.

He smiled.

I walked over and gave him a hug.

I introduced him to Jenny. She got up and he walked over and shook her hand.

I said to Jenny. “Jenny, this story is coming to an end. Now, I don’t think you’re in danger. Especially if what you told me is true. And I believe it is. But I want to make sure you’re safe. If you want to take your story to the police, you can. But I wouldn’t. Not yet. Just go home for the weekend. Stay home, or around your house, all weekend. Jim here is my very old friend and mentor. You won’t know he’s watching you. But you will be very safe. Nothing,
nothing
will happen to you when you’re on Jim’s watch. Right, Jim?”

“That’s right, boss.”

“Jim, how long is that cigarette? Is it a 120? Or is it a 130?”

“They don’t make 130s, my boy.”

“What’s it like? Is it good? Describe it to me.”

He took a drag and blew two plumes of bluish-white smoke out his nose.

“Listen. Is it good? Yeah, it is. Is it making me tingle all over? Well, yeah. But don’t start again. Okay. Don’t start. They kill you. I’m just lucky.”

I looked at Jenny. “Not even cigarettes can kill this guy.”

She didn’t react. She just said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to visit Danny Baker.”

33

I
got Jose Villareal to tell me Danny’s address, then made it to his house in forty minutes. Not terrible for a Friday night. These days the Friday five o’clock traffic lasts until nine, sometimes ten. That’s not a joke. But tonight I got a bit of break and cruised relatively unscathed into Hancock Park. We’ve talked about this neighborhood. It’s nice. And I’m noticing now, quiet on a Friday night. Nice dark streets, the houses set back on big lawns.

Danny’s house was one of those houses in nice neighborhoods where the whole property sits up on a little hill about four feet from the sidewalk. Just a little hill. You just have to walk up a small little embankment from the sidewalk in front of it, three, four feet, to get
up
to the yard. Not sure why they do that. It makes the whole structure maybe just a touch more grand. It’s like the house is wearing heels for a night out on the town.

I sat right in front of his house in the Cobalt. Again, to passersby I was the maid or the employee. Yeah, I was the help in the beat-up Tercel with the blue body and the brown replacement door sitting in front of a Hancock Park mansion. Except I was in a Cobalt. And the Cobalt was in top shape. And I wasn’t a maid. I was a P.I. that was about to see just what Danny Baker knew.

Would Danny be home? We’ll see. Looking at 9 p.m. on a Friday. Maybe. Real professionals don’t go out on Friday night. They chill. Wind down from the week. Then hit it Saturday and even Sunday. So maybe he was home. And why was now the time to see what Danny knew, as opposed to before at the park by the deli? Because now
I
knew more. I had more, so I could use it to push him further. To push him to the limit. If he knew more than Jimmy Yates, I thought now was the time to pull it out of him.

I dialed him up. Ring. Ring. Ring. And then he answered. And he wasn’t coy like he didn’t have caller ID, didn’t know who I was.

“The detective calls.”

“Hi, Danny.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I want to talk to you some more about Suzanne Neal. I don’t think you’ve been totally forthcoming with me. And I need you to be.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Listen, Danny. I will make you tell me the truth. Whether you like it or not.”

I was surprised at my tone. Surprised that my heart was beating as hard as it was. But I thought about Jim Douglas, the lessons he’d taught me. I was committed to this one. I was all in. If I threw a punch it would be at the throat.

“Hang on a second,” he said. “I need to walk outside. Going to go out on the balcony . . . Hang on . . .”

I thought: Maybe for some privacy from his wife? Can’t say I blame him, given the circumstances.

I heard him, fumbling in his house, heading toward the balcony. “Is your wife home?”

“Actually, no. Just going out to have a smoke before we get into this.”

Through his phone, I heard a door open. But he didn’t appear on the front doorstep or the front balcony that I was looking at through the Cobalt’s windshield. So I exited the car, walked quickly down the little alley next to his house. Slid in the shadows next to some trees that created a wall between his house and his neighbor’s. And now I was in Danny Baker’s backyard. Beautiful backyard. Big, lit-up pool. Lots of well-groomed grass, hedges, flowers.

I looked at the back of the house. And there he was up on the balcony, looked to be off the bedroom, holding a smoke in one hand and his cell in the other.

“So,” he said. “What do you want to talk about? What didn’t I tell you?”

I looked at him up on the balcony, the light from inside the house behind him. He cast a shadow, big and misshapen, across the pool next to me. I looked at him standing there, pulling on his smoke. His shirt was untucked, and he was barefoot. Relaxing on a Friday night. His hair was messed up, he wasn’t sporting the ready-to-go-to-air TV personality do. The light from the house put him in silhouette and it caught a curl in his hair that had been flattened out when I’d seen him in person. And then he moved his left hand and the light caught the face of his watch, and a quick little flash, a quick little sparkle, shot off his wrist.

And I knew the figure I was looking at was the figure who had come up behind Suzanne Neal the night she was murdered. Danny had told me he hadn’t seen Suzanne in a while. I had suspected that he was lying—now I knew it for sure. Hadn’t seen her? Danny had been in her apartment mere hours before she was killed. I’d come over here with the intention of using the new information I had to scare Danny into telling me something I didn’t already know. But, without saying anything, I now had something that I didn’t have before. And now, right now, Danny was going to tell me what he was doing, what exactly he was doing, at Suzanne’s that fateful night.

I stepped out from the shadows and stood in front of the pool. I clicked off my phone and said, “Danny?”

“Jesus Christ!” he shrieked. “Jesus. My god, you scared me. What are you doing?”

“Come down here Danny. Let’s talk.”

“I’m calling the police. You’re trespassing.”

“Please do. I know the police well. I’m sure they’d love to know that you were in Suzanne Neal’s apartment the night she died. Right before she died.”

Danny looked at me. “I’ll be down in a second.”

And then: We were sitting by his pool at a lovely table under a parasol as if it were a beautiful, sunny afternoon. But it wasn’t. It was dark. And it was about to get ugly.

“You were at Suzanne’s the night she died. You know how I know that? Because I saw you.”

Danny was being very calm. Putting on quite a show. He’d had an initial moment of panic when I’d hit him with the information. But on his way down the stairs and out the door he’d gotten his shit together.

He said, “What are you talking about? I already told you, yes, I knew her. But I hadn’t seen her in a couple months. Much less the night she died.”

“I saw you. You were on her balcony. You came up behind her and pulled her back into the apartment.”

He said, part smart ass, part curious, “You were watching her apartment the night she died?”

“Yes, I was.”

“One might ask why
you
were there.”

“What happened, Danny? Tell me. You want me to pull you out of that chair and put your head in the pool until you think for sure you’re going to die or you’re already dead? We can do that if you want.”

And I was getting there in my head. I was ready to pull a move like that. I needed some answers. I had to stop guessing about everything.

I had to release the stress.

This—this I knew to be true.

Danny looked at me, scared. He didn’t say anything.

I pulled out my camera. And found the picture. The picture of him. I looked at it. Impossible to make out who it was up on that balcony but
I
knew it was him, and once I showed it to him,
he
would know it was him and with a little luck he wouldn’t surmise that neither the police nor anybody else could really make out, for sure, who it was in the shot. I turned around my camera and showed him the picture.

“See that, Danny? That’s you. With your arms wrapped around a woman who was a few hours away from being dead. Now, you want to talk to me? You want to tell me something.”

“Why do you have a picture of that? How could you have known . . . Why were you looking into Suzanne?”

“Danny, did you kill Suzanne Neal?”

“What? What? I’m calling my lawyer.”

Time for the Jimmy Yates treatment. Time to see if Danny Baker’s vanity would control him.

“Danny, this picture is on the Web within the hour if you don’t answer some questions.”

He looked at me. Still. Silent. I had him—I thought.

“You knew Suzanne was a Pipe Girl and you used the service, yes?”

“I will never admit to talking to you.”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what happens to a Pipe Girl if she reveals what she does or who her clients are?”

He didn’t answer.

“Answer me, Danny.”

He looked at me. A defeated energy overtook him. He said, “I think I do, yes.”

“To your knowledge, did Suzanne tell someone she was a Pipe Girl? Did she break Neese’s trust?”

“I don’t think she did, John. I really don’t.”

I believed that he didn’t know the truth—that Suzanne had slipped up with Jenny Bickford.

“Well if that’s true, then Neese wouldn’t kill her. But you? You were right there the night she went down. And you know what else I know? There was more between you and Suzanne than sex, Danny. Somebody’s heart was involved. Hers, for sure. Yours? Well, probably. And when that’s the case, murder becomes a lot more likely.”

I stood up. I pulled Danny out of his chair and put him on the ground next to his pool. He looked scared. I wasn’t sure that he did it. But I wasn’t sure that he
didn’t
do it either. I was about to put him in serious pain.

And then: He began to cry.

I hadn’t done anything yet. Just scared him. But his tears weren’t from physical pain. They were coming from somewhere else. They were coming from his heart. “What are you crying about, Danny?”

Through his tears he said, “Suzanne didn’t tell anyone she was a Pipe Girl.”

Jenny Bickford was quite possibly right on the money. Suzanne’s secret appeared to be contained between the two of them, like it never happened.

“What are you talking about?”

Still on the ground, he sat up and leaned against an enormous clay pot that housed a plant. Rich people seem to have a lot of enormous clay pots.

“I think I really screwed up, John.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “What do you mean?”

It started to rain. Lightly. An L.A. rain where it doesn’t seem like it’s ever really going to start, to fully break through, to dump down. A rain where it takes a while before you even realize you’re getting wet.

We both moved back under the parasol, back to the chairs where we’d begun. Once again I was across a table from Danny Baker. But now he was on my show.

He said, “I mean, I made a mistake that I didn’t know I was making. Suzanne loved me. And I her. And she was going to leave Neese, stop being a Pipe Girl, to be with me. But when she told Richard, well, he didn’t want her to go. Obviously. She made him a lot of money. So he asked her not to make such a quick decision. And he’s very persuasive. So Suzanne agreed to stay for a little longer, which I didn’t like. I knew that his whole business was about the girls not telling anyone what they did. I just . . . I just didn’t know the consequences of talking—at that point. I thought, naïvely, that Richard would just kick them out if he found out that they’d talked. So I told Richard that Suzanne had told someone what she did for a living. Even though she hadn’t. I told him she told a friend of mine, a fellow journalist. I just made it up out of thin air. Right on the spot. But it
felt
very real. I said she’d done it accidentally-on-purpose. Over a dinner with too many drinks, she’d let it slip, because she was upset about it. I said not to worry, it was an off-the-record conversation. I thought it was the perfect way to anger Richard because he was so proud of the control he had over these women. I thought it would force his hand. Would get Suzanne fired. And then a few days later she gets shot. And I thought . . . And I thought in a horrible moment of realization
that’s how
he ensures silence.”

I could tell he was relieved to get it off his chest, to expose to
someone
the turmoil that was in his head.

So Danny Baker was there the night of the killing. But according to him, sitting defeated across from me, he didn’t kill Suzanne. Instead he
got
her killed by inadvertently telling Richard Neese something that would trigger an automatic murder. But Danny Baker needed to tell me more. There were still gaps in his story, and, of course, in mine.

“So what were you doing there that night? Was it just a run-of-the-mill night between the two of you?”

“I was reassuring Suzanne that everything was going to be okay. I had told her what I’d done. And she had gone over to Richard’s earlier in the night to try and clear up the situation. To try and tell Richard that I had made the whole thing up. That I was the one who had lied. That I had no idea what it really meant. Which, of course, I didn’t. So she was scared. She said Richard believed her, but that you never knew with Richard. That she could be in real trouble and not even be aware of it.”

Danny, his cheeks wet with tears, managed a laugh. “It’s ironic, because it was the exact
wrong
thing for me to say to Richard. You know? I didn’t know it, but I said the one thing that I shouldn’t have. It’s almost like divine intervention or something. Like, I just made up some random thing to try and help my situation, but it was the one thing that would ruin it forever. Like some kind of twisted fate. Do you believe in that stuff, John?”

“Yeah, I do.”

His story tracked. I’d seen Suzanne go to Richard’s house that night. And come back to her condo to be embraced by a man I now knew to be Danny Baker.

I looked at him. The handsome TV anchor shattered by shame. And now he was in a double jam, because, sure, no married public figure wants to be associated with a prostitution ring, but Danny Baker had a bigger problem on his hands. Was he a marked man? Was Richard Neese after him now too?

“Why would you leave Suzanne’s house that night, Danny? Why would you leave if there was even a chance she was in danger?”

“She told me to. She was going to leave right after me. She said she knew where she could hide. Until she was sure Richard wasn’t going to do anything crazy.”

“Has Richard Neese ever threatened you?”

“He wasn’t happy to see me the night I went over there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, at first I just tried to persuade Richard to let Suzanne go. I even offered to pay him. Pay him a lot of money. And then when it wasn’t working, I told him the lie—that Suzanne had told people what she did. Richard’s tone instantly shifted. He almost calmed down. He very slowly and directly asked me what I was talking about. Once I finished telling him the story, he asked me if she had told others. I very cavalierly said I didn’t know, I doubt it. Then, he quickly made me leave. And he said, very directly and calmly: Keep this to yourself, Danny. And he looked at me in a way. In a way that I definitely found frightening. And that’s why I felt I had to tell Suzanne what I’d done.”