Convicted (2 page)

Illegal and dangerous.

“Did you see anything in the van itself? Furniture?”

“I didn't get a good look at the back. The angle was wrong.”

I looked at my notes. What hadn't I asked?

“What about the van itself—Bekins? Allied? North American?—what moving company?”

She was shaking her head before I finished. “Not a moving company. It was a rented van. Las Piernas Rentals.”

“Well—that's a lucky break.”

“Why?”

“Local rental company with three locations, all within town. If it had been one of the nationals, the truck could have come from anywhere. License-plate number?”

“No, again, I couldn't see it from that angle.”

“How big was the van?”

“Big. I don't know.”

I tried to come up with vehicles to compare it with, which didn't work with her, but when I got her to say how much of the Mickelsons' house the van had blocked, I had a reasonable idea. Another idea struck me.

“Did you see a number on it? Most rental companies paint numbers on their trucks, to keep track of which ones they're renting, I suppose.”

“I looked for one, but it had a big piece of paper taped over it—like butcher paper, maybe?”

I hesitated, telling myself that I needed to separate late-nineteenth-century fiction from the present problem. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it out of my mind.

“Cokie, are there any banks or businesses on the other side of the alley?”

“There's a row of homes, that's all.”

“Anybody doing any kind of business out of a house that you know of?”

“No.”

“I mean
any
kind of business. Any pot growers? Drug dealers?”

“No! We did have a problem when Auggie and Andrea Sands lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, but their mom kicked them out. That was about three years ago.”

“She kicked them out for selling drugs?” Lydia asked.

We had known the Sands twins in high school. Always in trouble.

“Kicked Auggie out for selling drugs, and Andrea for banging her boyfriend in the living room. Their mom came home early with a friend from work. Guess that was the last straw.”

“How did their mom find out that Auggie was dealing?”

“One of the neighbors told her.”

“You?”

“No. I didn't want to mess with those people.”

“Do Andrea and Auggie know you weren't the one?”

She frowned. “They should. They have no reason to think I would tell on them.”

I exchanged a glance with Lydia and moved on.

“Anyone in the neighborhood angry with you?”

“You think singing clowns is a sign of aggression?”

“A possibility, anyway.”

She smiled. “I'm so glad you see it that way. My parents think it was something fun, as if I have a secret admirer. But it doesn't feel that way to me. It seemed to me that someone wanted . . . well, to ridicule me.”

I bent my head over my notes and hoped my hair hid my blush. I certainly felt ashamed of my meaner thoughts about her.

“It seems crazy to think that,” she went on, “but . . . it didn't make me happy, it made me feel as if I had been targeted, and someone went to a lot of trouble to do it. I'm a little scared by that. But I can't think of anyone who would feel that mad at me. I get along with my neighbors. I'm one of the last young people still living on our street, and I try to help my older neighbors. I visit them. I run errands for them.”

A passage in “The Red-Headed League” came to mind:

“As a rule,” said Holmes, “the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.”

Easy for him to say. But was there some commonplace crime hiding beneath all that clown makeup?

“Cokie, what would you normally be doing on a Wednesday morning at about that time?”

“Normally, I'd be playing canasta with the widows.”

“I hate to admit it, but I don't understand.”

“You know, the card game.”

“Yes, I even know how to play it. Who are the widows?”

“Oh. Three of my neighbors. One day Mrs. Redmond—she's across the street and one house down—mentioned to me how much she loved the canasta parties that used to be held on the street. I talked to a couple of people about it, and long story short, we started playing canasta at her house on Wednesday mornings.”

“Who are the other players?”

“Just two, Mrs. Harding and Mrs. Lumfort.”

“Who knows that you do this?”

“Everyone on our street.”

“So because of the clowns, you arrived late?”

“No, we didn't have a game that day. Mrs. Harding was  . . . out of town. Mrs. Lumfort had a doctor's appointment. Mrs. Redmond's beautician had asked her to move her hair appointment to that morning, so because it was just going to be the two of us, she asked me if I'd mind just canceling. I told her it wasn't a problem.”

“You hesitated about Mrs. Harding. What was going on with her?”

“Nothing. She went to a lawyer's appointment with one of her granddaughters. Kayla just moved in with her.”

That name was vaguely familiar. Why did I know it?

“Kayla Harding?” Lydia asked. “My brother Gio used to date her.”

Gio was five years older than Lydia, and the list of girls he dated in high school was only slightly shorter than the list of female students in his graduating class. The fact that he hadn't been burned in effigy years ago spoke to his abundant charm. Lydia claimed he genuinely cared about all of them, which seemed unlikely.

“Kayla ended up in prison, didn't she?” Lydia went on. “Stole a car.”

“Yes,” Cokie said, “but she's been out for a couple of weeks now.”

“Friend of yours?” I asked.

“No. I know her sister better than I know her.”

“Mindy,” Lydia said. “She's our age.”

“Yes. I'm not close friends with Mindy, either. I just see her when she visits her grandmother.”

“Kind of a Goody-Two-Shoes, isn't she?” I said.

“That can happen when you're trying to show the world you aren't like your troublemaking sister, right?” Lydia said.

Cokie and I shrugged.

“Think of your sister, Barbara,” Lydia said to me.

“I'd rather not,” I said.

“Mindy is Kayla's half sister,” the ever-informative Cokie said. “Their father is on his third marriage. Widowed once, divorced once, and the third seems to be the charm. So Mindy just claims that she's ‘only' a half sister when she gets annoyed at Kayla.”

“Told you she was a bitch,” I said.

“Not exactly,” Lydia said.

“Yeah, well . . .” I glanced at my watch. “We've got a couple of hours to try to find the Las Piernas Rentals location that rented out the van.”

I used the Yellow Pages in the phone book to get the three addresses and phone numbers of the rental places, then opened the
Thomas Guide
, a book of detailed maps of Los Angeles County that only a fool would try to live without. A lost fool.

Cokie readily agreed to come along with me, but Lydia, thinking of the discomfort associated with being the third person in a Karmann Ghia, opted out.

WE DROVE TO THE ALLEY
behind Cokie's house, where I spent some time looking around as if I thought I'd see something. I'm sure the streets of London and other locations that may have required Holmes's attention also had a lot of meaningless debris spread over them.

I didn't go so far as to pull out a magnifying glass. I hadn't owned one since I was nine, when my father caught me lighting discarded cigarette butts in the backyard by using focused solar power. He seemed to think I was a hairsbreadth away from burning down the house. I'm not saying he was wrong.

It didn't look as if there was much I could learn there, two days after the singing clowns had come and gone. So I got back into the car, wrote down my odometer reading, and took the shortest route to the closest rental place. The energy crisis had caused the cost of gasoline to skyrocket, so I thought that location would be my best bet.

Although the geezer behind the counter didn't seem averse to talking to two young women about his customers, we struck out. The only van that had been rented on Wednesday was still out—not due back in until Saturday. Rented by a young couple. The husband's parents were giving their old house to the couple and moving to San Diego; the van was being used to move the parents out and the couple in. This might have been a complicated cover story, but I doubted it.

Owing to said fuel crisis, I asked the manager if he would call the other locations to see if anyone had handled a same-day rental of a moving van on Wednesday.

Fortunately, midmonth, autumn weekdays were not popular moving days, and we learned that the next-closest location had rented a van that day.

Unfortunately, the manager at that location was an unhappy woman of middle years who was not so forthcoming. She did say a van had been rented on Wednesday for a few hours, but didn't see how it was any of our business.

“I think someone was trying to play a mean trick on my friend,” I said. “Or maybe worse.”

She was skeptical. There was no alternative, it seemed, to having Cokie tell her story. The woman laughed—before that moment, I wouldn't have betted on her capacity to do so—and remained skeptical.

“The person who rented from us was very nice,” she said. “We didn't rent our van to a person who might do something so immature.”

“We know it was a man, so don't bother with the ‘person' stuff,” I said, and saw her mouth prim up and a look of self-satisfaction come into her eyes. So—a woman rented the van. “It would have been illegal for the renter to put two people in the back and let them roll around between here and Cokie's house, right?”

“You're just trying to worm information out of me, and I won't tell you a thing,” she said. “Next time you make up a story, try to come up with something better than a tall tale about clowns.”

She was convinced of that. I heard it in her voice, and wondered why she was so sure. When I realized the answer, I wanted to kick myself in the pants. Of course no one had shown up at the rental place with five people dressed as clowns.

I walked outside the office, Cokie trailing me. I walked past rototillers, a forklift, lawn spreaders, and post-hole diggers. I walked until I came to the place where the trailers and vans were parked. I pointed to two moving vans that were positioned next to each other. “Which one is closer to the size you saw?”

Cokie pointed to the larger of the two. I walked toward the back of it.

By now the manager had noticed that we hadn't returned to the Karmann Ghia, as she had expected, and began marching toward us. “Hey, you!” she called out, attracting the attention of a couple of her workers.

I wasn't dressed for this kind of action, I thought ruefully, but at least I was wearing flats. I stepped onto the wide, flat back bumper, grabbed on to a handhold, and swung myself up to have a closer look at the big black numbers stenciled on one of the side panels.

“Get down from there this instant!” the manager said.

“Look,” I said, running my fingers along a sticky line. “Tape marks. The identification number was covered up, just like Cokie said it was.”

The helpers who had joined her were nodding as I pointed at the places where you could see adhesive. That, or they were looking up my skirt.

“Get her off that truck!” the woman ordered them, and since they seemed way too eager to obey her, I hopped down.

“You know no one hides the numbers on a truck unless they are up to no good,” I said.

“Get out of here. Leave this property before I call the police.”

I considered calling her bluff, and then asking her to explain to the police why she was covering up for someone engaged in criminal activity, but that presented two problems. One was I had no proof that there had been any criminal activity or idea of what the crime was. The other was I'd have to tell the police the clown story.

So we left.

I BEGAN TO SEE THAT
this case was and was not like “The Red-Headed League.” Like Jabez Wilson, Cokie was being pulled away from some action on the street. Not a bank robbery, but something.

Back at the apartment, I took out a piece of paper and sketched a diagram of Cokie's street. I had her tell me who lived in each house and what they were usually doing on Wednesdays at ten o'clock. She was able to provide an almost scary number of details, and while the Sandses were likely baddies, no one in the family seemed to have his or her act together, let alone the wherewithal to plan and sponsor “alley theater.”

Someone had a goal, a goal that required Cokie's attention at a certain time. I kept coming back to the members of the canasta group, the only ones with a fixed schedule.

“Let's say someone knows of your interest in the activities of your neighbors.”

“My snoopiness?”

“Your keen powers of observation. Someone wanted to make sure you wouldn't look out a front window, or see something at that time of day. The day was different from most Wednesdays because there would be no canasta game. And . . .”

“And what?”

“Process of elimination. Do you know the name of Mrs. Redmond's beautician?”

“Yes. She gets her hair done at Lola's Snip and Curl. She's been getting it cut there since 1953.”

“And hasn't changed her hairstyle in two decades, right?”

“Just about.”

“Kayla's father is still living, right?”

She kept up with the apparent change in subject. “Yes. Mindy lives with him and her mom.”

“Why isn't Kayla living with them, instead of her grandmother?”