California Girl (17 page)

But two good comparison points was a start. You couldn’t bring them to court, but you could eliminate.

Nick looked at the lock print with his magnifying glass. A nice bifurcation. Clear and unambiguous. Almost certainly a thumb. The criminalists had done a good job on the lift.

Leary was a bust. He had the wrong basic pattern: a loop instead of a whorl. Leary the loop, thought Nick. It figured.

The ID examiner pointed out that Fowler’s booking deputy had used a little too much ink. Some of the spaces were muddy and confused. Nick wondered why they’d let something like that pass. On Fowler’s thumb, Nick couldn’t really tell if he was looking at a ridge ending or a bifurcation or an ink bridge. It looked like a bifurcation more than an ink bridge. The pore pattern was totally obliterated.

Price Herald was a bust, too. A whorl, but a much tighter pattern than the lock print.

The examiner showed Nick that Bonnett had a similar bifurcation on his right thumb whorls, but Nick remembered that Bonnett was left-handed. His left thumb, on the hand he’d logically use to pull off a lock, contained not a bi- but a
tri
furcation. Still, they had found a comparison point. The distribution of sweat pores was similar but most examiners wouldn’t bring the pore patterns into court.

So Bonnett, maybe. But he hadn’t been seen since the day after Nick had stood in the SunBlesst packinghouse and looked down through the slanting sunlight at Janelle Vonn. Maybe the Laguna cops could give a hand finding him.

Nick had already eliminated the Talon Security guards, Terry
Neemal, Jonas Dessinger—who’d been printed on a DUI arrest ten years ago, and brothers Casey and Lenny Vonn.

Jesse Black had never been fingerprinted but his alibi was good.

The trouble was, Janelle’s killer may never have even touched that lock. Nick had no solid connection between the print and what happened that night. Someone could have pulled open that lock hours earlier. Days earlier. Someone with reasons unrelated to Janelle Vonn.

Nick sighed and sat back. Tapped the magnifying glass on the palm of one hand. Thought they should put all the prints on a big computer someday and let it match them up.

Two weeks into my first case, Nick thought. And no suspect.

“TWO WEEKS AND
no suspect in the Vonn murder,” said sleek Jonas Dessinger. He touched his forehead. “That’s Thursday’s lead story, all editions. And I want to know why our illustrious Sheriff’s Department is holding the Wolfman Neemal but won’t charge him in the murder.”

“You got it,” said Teresa Dessinger. “Yours, Andy.”

Andy nodded. “I’m interviewing Janelle’s sister tonight. Lynette. If it goes well, I’ll have that for Thursday, too. She told me on the phone she had some letters from Janelle.”

Letters she should have given to Nick when he interviewed her, thought Andy. He felt slightly guilty about keeping them a secret from Nick until he read them.

“Ask her how she feels about two weeks and no suspects,” said Jonas. “And I also want a tough editorial on whether or not a homicide detail rookie is the right man to be heading up this case. Laud the O.C. Sheriff’s Department all you want, but isolate the dick and put the floodlights on him. All editions.”

“Wrongheaded,” said Andy. “I won’t touch it.”

Jonas chuckled and snugged his silk suit coat. Then sat back. “Actually, Andy—you have to touch it. You’re going to write it and you’re
going to sign it. It will mean something, coming from the
Journal
’s best crime reporter.”

“And the dick’s brother.”

“Exactly.”

You prick, Andy thought, but held his tongue. Jonas had been even more abrasive than usual since early last week, when Nick and Lobdell had written Janelle’s age in black ink on the associate publisher’s forehead. When Nick told him, Andy had laughed with grand satisfaction. Then seriously cussed out Nick for complicating his job. Nick had seemed more worried about it than he was. Around Jonas, Andy had played deaf and dumb.

“Jone,” said Teresa. “Maybe Andy could write both but leave the editorial unsigned? No reason to set brother against brother like that. Nick gives Andy extra info. He’s valuable to us.”

Jonas eyed his cousin with contempt. Then turned his gaze to Andy. Same gray eyes as Teresa, Andy thought. How could one pair be so brightly beautiful and the other so brutally stupid? He glanced at the associate publisher’s forehead, then away. Wasn’t there still some sign of abrasion, and the dark outline of 19? Almost biblical. Could ask David about it.

“I’ve made my decision, Teresa,” said Jonas. He fiddled with a gold cuff link. “Andy’s writing both and signing both and that’s final. Now, onto ‘Nation,’ then the local editions…”

Andy sank down in his chair a little. Listened to Jonas and the editors and reporters argue whether to lead the “Nation” page with Buzz’s upcoming space walk or Cong artillery pounding Saigon. Watched Teresa take notes and make comments, puzzled that such a smart and organized woman could also be sexually qualmless and practically insatiable. Since they had worked the Oaxacan grass into the routine, their nightly sessions had gone from an hour to two, sometimes three hours. They were going through rubbers and ice cream at an astonishing pace. He was constantly sore and occasionally exhausted. He had begun to wonder if he was satisfying her. And she had said something yesterday evening on the phone to Chas Birdwell that was still bothering him.
Something about “Seven Seas time.” Seven Seas was a salad dressing. But the Seven Seas was also a motel in Newport not far from the
Journal
building. Andy pondered this as Teresa carried the vote for Cong artillery.

The Newport Beach edition decided to lead locally with a review of the opening of the French farce
Let’s Get a Divorce
at South Coast Repertory theater.

Chas read his proposed lead:

“The South Coast Repertory production of
Let’s Get a Divorce
opened yesterday, and though brightly performed, it can’t compare with such diversions as playing poker or fighting with your wife.”

“Hmmm,” said Jonas.

“Change ‘wife’ to ‘spouse,’” said Teresa. “More than half our readers are female.”

“Do it,” said Jonas. “Huntington Beach? What do you have?”

The Huntington Beach reporter read:

“You can move the oil derricks out of the small town but you can’t move the oil, too.”

“Tight,” said Jonas. “Becker?”

Andy sat up and tried to bring some force to his voice.

“A tough new city ordinance that jitterbugged into law last month will bounce the monkey, twist, frug, and mashed potato right off three Laguna nightclub stages.”

“Wordy,” said Jonas.

“I think it’s bright and amusing,” said Teresa.

Huntington liked it; Newport didn’t.

Andy stared at Chas.

“Tie goes to the runner,” said Jonas. “We’re done. Becker, stay here. I want to talk to you.”

When the others had filed out Jonas told Andy to close the door to the editorial conference room. Then he told him to sit down.

“You know what Nick did and his partner did to my forehead,” said Dessinger.

Andy nodded but said nothing.

“I won’t forgive or forget that,” said Jonas. “Ever.”

“I wouldn’t, either.”

“Bet you two had a laugh over it, though. Didn’t you?”

Andy nodded again. “But I’m not writing a
Journal
editorial humiliating my brother.”

Jonas’s smiling gaze went right through him. “I thought about Nick. I made some inquiries. Made some more. Got what I needed. It wasn’t hard.”

Andy saw it coming. Tried to look anticipatory and clueless.

“A lonely district attorney receptionist. A widow. Pretty eyes.”

“You lost me.”

“This will bring you back.
Sharon Santos.
You carried little friendly greetings back and forth between them in the beginning, remember? He’s giving her more than greetings now. I’ve got witnesses at her apartment complex. I’ve got a statement she signed for my promise to keep it out of my paper.”

“Which you’ll happily break.”

“I don’t have to break it. I’ve got a better audience than the public.”

Then the sudden awareness of disaster, the first stomach-dropping loss of altitude. “You’ll just dump it all on Katy Becker.”

“Now you understand why you have to write the op-ed piece.”

Andy stood and Dessinger flinched. Then stood, too. He pulled his cuffs right.

“What do you want?” asked Andy. “You want him off the case? Fired?”

Dessinger looked at Andy in what appeared to be genuine astonishment. “I want him ruined.”

“You’re not ruined. No one even knows. Nick did something stupid and felt bad. Forget about it.”

“I can’t.”

Dessinger backed away from Andy, toward the door. “You probably haven’t noticed this because you’re sleeping with my hot little cousin, but there hasn’t been a Dessinger born on earth who possesses one grain of forgiveness in his heart. Or hers.”

“Be the first,” said Andy. “Start a fad.”

“Have some fun with that editorial.”

“Look, Jonas, if you drop your bomb on Katy, Nick’s going to drop you back on the
Times
and the
Register
. They’d love to know you were sleeping with Janelle Vonn.”

Dessinger frowned and shook his head. “They’ve known it for months. I went out of my way to show her off. She was an absolute trophy, in every way. I can take that heat. I can use it to my advantage. I’m the single guy who dated the beauty queen that got her head sawed off. That makes me interesting. Nick has three children and a loyal wife and a widow girlfriend from work. That makes him rotten to the core.”

Andy considered his options. One came to mind. “Not many people can make the hair stand up on the back of my neck like you can.”

Jonas cocked his head. “That makes me proud. Let me know if you want some guidance on the article or the op-ed piece. And don’t even think of going easy on Detective Becker.”

“What if I write a resignation letter instead?”

“I’ll make someone else do them. And I’ll get in touch with fat Katy. Your name on the articles is the only thing that’s keeping me from doing that.”

TWO HOURS
later Andy had written both pieces. He had never written lies before and the words sat oddly on the paper. It left him tired, like the ribbon ink was blood that had come out of his body.

He put the originals and two sets of carbons in his briefcase, locked it, and headed out for Millie’s.

Nick read them in the poor light of a red vinyl booth. He finished, rubbed his chin. “It’s these or Katy?”

Andy nodded.

“Oh man,” whispered Nick.

ANDY PLACED
the original articles in Jonas Dessinger’s in-basket just after six that evening. Carbon number one went to his editor, Teresa. Carbon number two went into his top desk drawer.

Jonas called at 6:10 to say he loved the pieces. He wanted to substitute the words “bogged-down” and “overmatched” for “lengthy” and “less experienced.”

Andy told him to take it up with Teresa.

Teresa called at 6:15 to say she couldn’t believe her overbred cousin was putting him through this. She demanded to know what the cause of all this animosity was, but Andy wouldn’t say. She thought “overmatched” was speculative and untrue.

“Listen to what you wrote,” she said. “‘After two agonizing weeks, we at the
Journal
have begun to wonder if the evidence that has stumped the rookie detective might be better evaluated by a more seasoned investigator.’”

“Orders from your overbred cousin.”

“I can bad-mouth my family. You can’t.”

“I have to bad-mouth my own.”

“Andy, what’s going on?”

“Talk to the associate publisher. He’s the psychopath fashion model on the third floor.”

“I’m going to.”

Andy called Verna and got a home number for Sharon Santos. It cost him drinks and maybe dinner. Sharon confirmed that she’d talked to a man identifying himself as Jonas Dessinger of the
Orange County Journal
. She had signed a “kill statement” about her liaison with Nick Becker in order to prevent a story about it in the paper. She allowed that her neighbors had probably seen Nick more than once, and “could possibly have heard some things.” Nick had helped this one neighbor jump her car, so she’d remember him, no problem. Sure, Nick knew all this. But Sharon was on his side all the way. She loved him and didn’t want to ruin his marriage.

“Andy,” said Sharon, “I’d kill myself before I’d hurt Nick.”

A chill shivered up Andy’s back. “Avoid both,” he said.

“All right.”

He left the building through the display advertising department back
door. Couldn’t face Teresa, whom he loved, or Jonas, whom he hated. Or the owlish copy editors or surly night-beat photogs.

Andy gunned his ice blue Corvair down Newport toward Coast Highway. Police band radio loud as always, top down, and the air cold on his face. Lynette’s address in his reporter’s notepad on the seat beside him.

He couldn’t believe Jonas could make him screw over Nick like this. Make him screw himself over. Like a bad dream. All he ever wanted to do was write a decent book someday and stick by the people he loved. Not accomplishing either of those, he thought. Writing lies to hurt Nick was all he was doing. Either do that, or destroy Nick and Katy. He had the idea of getting Jonas off somewhere quiet to talk to him, maybe Jonas would get rational. Like maybe the end of the Newport Pier, and when they were done talking Andy could push him off.

LYNETTE VONN LIVED
up in Huntington Beach. She let Andy in without a smile. Straight black hair, early twenties, thin. Bell-bottoms made her look thinner. Barefoot. Yellow halter top with a work shirt over it. Big eyes. Andy saw in her none of her sister Janelle’s casual radiance.

Lynette made them coffee and they sat in the den. Green shag carpet, a TV with rabbit ears, and a Magnavox hi-fi on a rolling stand with clear wheels. Andy smelled marijuana and incense. The house was a small craftsman cottage with a chain-link fence around the backyard and an oil pumper beyond the fence. Through the den window the pumper looked like a monstrous steel grasshopper gnawing away. The night was cool and the windows were open. Andy smelled ocean and crude oil. The neighbors had the radio on, “Sunshine of Your Love” riding in with the smells.

Lynette told him she had left the Tustin home when she was fourteen. Run off with one of her brother Lenny’s friends, Preach. Preach was twenty-five, drove a chopped black Harley with the words
God’s Outlaw
painted on the tank in white. He could cook crank you wouldn’t believe, clear as glass, keep you high for days and a tolerable crash. Taught other Hessians how to do it. Preach also had a religious streak,
carried around a bag of rattlesnakes tied to the top of the sissy bar of his hog, and that bag would swing up against her back if they slowed down fast, a creepy feeling but she never got bit. Preach had devised this kind of religious service for Sunday mornings where you’d listen to him sermonize and take the snakes out of the bag and wave ’em around, but Preach had sewn their mouths shut with a big needle and dental floss and when they started starving he’d toss them out and get new ones. Which was easy when you’re riding your Harley all around the desert giving lessons on crank production. But Preach had the other Hessians freaked out with those snakes and his own weird eyes—dark brown with blue around the edges. It was all rough sex, drugs, and fights until she ran out on him in Colusa, picked up a bus down to San Francisco, and moved in with a musician/heroin dealer. That lasted a year, coldest of her life, couldn’t ever thaw out in that town.

“Wow,” said Andy.

Lynette shook her head and sighed. “Pure crazy. I hitchhiked down here last year. Liked it and stayed. Had some money saved. I’m waitressing over at the Bear. I can’t get you in free but I can get you good seats once you pay your way in.”

Andy had been to the Golden Bear a lot. Seen the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary, and Pete Seeger and Dylan and all the folkies, but now they were doing almost all rock and roll, thank God.

“Did you and Janelle stay in touch?”

“It turned out that she wrote me a lot of letters but didn’t know where to mail them. I pretty much dropped out. When I got this place and got clean I called her and she came over. Brought the letters in a box. It was kinda funny seeing her for the first time in six years. My sister was two years younger than me and we weren’t very much alike.”

Andy looked at Lynette.
My sister,
he thought. “Maybe you were more alike than you think.”

Lynette stared at Andy with her big brown eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, you both had a talent for what most people would consider trouble.”

“No question it was trouble.”

“The same kind of hunger for something,” said Andy. “But for what? To get to something better?”

“Just to get away, I think. Did you know her well?”

“No, not really. I admired her, though. Something about her.”

“She was pretty,” said Lynette.

“But more than pretty. Remember the guitar and tutu?”

“That tutu was mine.”

Andy looked out the window to the big oil pumper. It chomped away at the ground, drawing up the crude. He thought of Lynette throwing the rocks at them after the rumble by the packinghouse. And Janelle with the oranges she didn’t throw. And Janelle on the porch of the Holt Avenue house, shaking her curls and rasping out that song. And Janelle coming out of the White House nightclub in Laguna that night. With Jesse Black and the surf movie guy and Cory Bonnett the leather store owner. The way the streetlight cast her face in the fog.
I’m so sorry what happened to Clay. Call me sometime.

For the millionth time in his life, Andy’s inner boot kicked his heart, hard, for never calling Janelle Vonn.

“Tough to explain,” he said.

“I’ll get the letters.”

When Lynette came back into the room she had a cardboard box half full of letter envelopes. She tilted it so Andy could see. A hundred, he guessed. She set it on the floor at her feet and sat back down.

“You should have told Nick about these,” he said.

“I don’t dig pigs.”

“Nick’s not a pig. He helped Janelle way back when the trouble started.”

She stared at him. Andy felt sized up. “I’m showing them to you,” she said. “If there’s something important, you tell him.”

Andy watched the oil pumper for a second. Heard the far-off hiss of cars out on Coast Highway. Then Hendrix on the radio.

“I never wrote back to my sister,” she said. She looked down at the
box. Guided a strand of lank black hair behind her ear. “Maybe that’s why she wrote so much. It was kind of like she wrote and told me things because she knew I wouldn’t judge. Like she was writing only for herself. But I did love her. She knew that, before the end.”

“When did she write the first one?”

“Early sixty-one. After Mom killed herself and I hooked up with Preach. She—my sister—was eleven. She knew what I’d done. Said in the letter she wanted us to come get her.”

My sister.

“Her brothers were molesting her by then.”

“Just starting. They’d done it to me, too. That was one of the reasons I split.”

“You were afraid to tell?”

Lynette turned her face from Andy. Looked out at the oil pump or the moon. “Lenny’d hit you. Then Dad would hit Lenny. A week later, the same thing all over again with Casey. It was scary. You blocked it out. Ethan was okay.”

Andy moved and sat on the couch with Lynette. He looked down into the box and picked up an envelope.

“That’s an old one,” said Lynette. “From her birthday in sixty-two.”

It was pale green and square. Andy ran his finger over the four-cent stamp with a rose on it. Lynette’s name on the front but no address. He worked out a greeting card with a picture of a misty forest and the words
Love Speaks in Moments of Silence.

He read out loud:

“My sister was optimistic then,” said Lynette.

Andy put the card in the envelope and the envelope back in the box. “Can I see a more recent one?”

Lynette leaned forward. Held her hair back with one hand and worked the other through the letters. She handed him a white legal-size envelope. It had Lynette’s name and a five-cent stamp with Madonna and child, but that was all.

“Did she always put a stamp on?” asked Andy.

“Every one. For six years,” she said quietly. “And always wrote the day’s date, even though she never mailed one. Eighty-six letters and cards. She spent three dollars and ninety-eight cents on postage. Imagine what that would cost today.”

Andy nodded and looked into Lynette Vonn’s earnest brown eyes.

He opened the letter, which was handwritten in black ink on a standard sheet of typing paper, and read out loud again:

“Roger Stoltz, the congressman?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew he helped her out when I wrote that article,” said Andy, “but I didn’t know he gave her money and a car.”

Lynette nodded. “In one of the letters she said he went nuts for her.”

“Nuts for her,”
said Andy. Felt a tingle in his fingertips.

“I can find the letter pretty easy.”

“Do that.”

Andy watched Lynette take a handful of envelopes, fan through them and then set them aside. She stopped midway through the second batch and handed him another legal-size white envelope.

“You’ve read them a lot,” he said.

“I didn’t get them till late last year. Had some catching up to do. I can tell by the envelopes what’s inside. The way she wrote my name, the kind of ink, the kind of envelope and stamp.”

“How many times have you read them?”

“Fifty, maybe.”

Andy opened the envelope. Lynette leaned over and read out loud with Andy:

“Stoltz,” said Andy. He thought of the telegram Stoltz had sent from Washington when his first article about Janelle and the Wolfman had
come out. He’d always thought there was something odd about it. No mention of Janelle, really. No acknowledgment of her death and what it might mean to Andy or anyone else. Even himself. Something brief and military, like:
Commendable article. Well done.

“You’re surprised,” said Lynette.

“A married man giving money and gifts to a girl who gets murdered? Yeah. I’m pretty damned surprised.”

“He rented her an apartment in Newport Beach. She wrote about going over there with him to see it. Big and sunny and right on the harbor. Expensive.”

Andy tried to shake the surprise out of his head so he could think straight. “How long did she live there?”

“Not long. It was off and on. She only wrote one letter from that address. She wanted to live in Laguna. Get a place that was hers. Not someone else’s.”

“That must have disappointed our Good Samaritan.”

“I can see right through him,” said Lynette. “Even in the letters I can tell he wanted her for the same things any man would want her for. But she never did it with him. At least that’s what she wrote, and I believe her.”

Stoltz!

“Did she keep writing after you moved here?”

Lynette shook her head. “No. We spent plenty of hours together, though. And on the phone.”

“Good times?”

“Yeah. She was in love with this singer. Jesse Black, down in Laguna.”

“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

Lynette opened her mouth but didn’t speak at first. Finally she shook her head. “No. She died that way?”

“Eight weeks,” said Andy.

Lynette ran her long black hair behind her ears. Gathered the ponytail to one side and brought it forward over her left shoulder. Stared at the shag carpet. In this light her face looked Cherokee, like this girl he’d gone to high school with.

“Did you know that she was on the Sheriff’s Department payroll?” asked Andy. “As an informant?”

“She told me,” said Lynette. “They were after the Laguna Beach acid heads, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. And that Cory Bonnett cat. Guy that owns the leather store? I heard about him from some people at work one night. Bad dude. Not even the Hessians mess with him.”