Gone (30 page)

B
illy had been attached to Peaty. And Billy had a temper.

Was he too dull to realize the implication of a relationship with Reynold Peaty? Or
was
there no implication?

One thing was likely: The janitor’s visits had been more than dropping off lost articles.

As I drove Sixth Street toward its terminus at San Vicente, I considered Billy’s reaction. Shock, anger, desire for vengeance.

Another sib defying Brad.

A child’s impulsiveness together with a grown man’s hormones could be a dangerous combination. As Milo had pointed out, Billy had begun living on his own right around the time of Tori Giacomo’s murder and the Gaidelases’ disappearance.

Perfect opportunity for Billy and Peaty to take their friendship to a new level? If the two of them had become a murder team, Peaty was certain to have been the dominant one.

Some leadership. An outwardly creepy alcoholic voyeur and a dullard man-boy didn’t add up to the kind of planning and care that had stripped Michaela’s dumpsite of forensic detail, concealed Tori Giacomo’s body long enough to reduce it to scattered bones.

Then there was the matter of the whispering phone call from Ventura County. No way Billy could’ve pulled that off.

Iago-prompt, courtesy of the phone lines. It had worked.

I’d hypothesized about a cruel side to the Gaidelases but there was another pair of performance buffs worth considering.

Nora Dowd was an eccentric dilettante and a failure as an actress, but she’d been skillful enough to fool her brother about breaking off with Dylan Meserve. Toss in a young lover with a penchant for rough sex and mind games and it cooked up interesting.

Maybe Brad had found no sign of struggle in Nora’s house because there’d been none. Travel brochures in a nightstand drawer and missing clothes plus Dylan Meserve’s skip on his rent weeks ago said a long-planned trip. Albert Beamish hadn’t seen anyone living with Nora but someone entering and exiting the house after dark would have escaped his notice.

A woman who thought private flying was a nifty idea.

Her passport hadn’t been used recently and Meserve had never applied for one. But he’d grown up on the streets of New York, could’ve known how to obtain fake paper. Getting through passport control at LAX might be a challenge. But jetting from Santa Monica to a landing strip in some south-of-the-border village with payoff cash would be another story.

Brochures in a drawer, no real attempt to conceal. Because Nora was confident no one would broach her privacy?

When I stopped for a red light at Melrose, I took a closer look at the resorts she’d researched.

Pretty places in South America. Maybe for more than the climate.

I drove home as fast as Sunset would allow, barely took the time to look for Hauser’s brown Audi. Moments after logging on to the Internet I learned that Belize, Brazil, and Ecuador all had extradition treaties with the U.S. and that nearly all the countries without treaties were in Africa and Asia.

Hiding out in Rwanda, Burkina Faso, or Uganda wouldn’t be much fun, and I couldn’t see Nora taking well to the feminine couture of Saudi Arabia.

I studied the brochures again. Each resort was in a remote jungle area.

To be extradited you had to be found.

I pictured the scene: May-December couple checks into a luxury suite, enjoys the beach, the bar, the pool. Nighttime’s the right time for al fresco candlelight dinners, maybe a couple’s massage. Long, hot, incandescent days allow plenty of time to search for a leafy suburb hospitable to affluent foreigners.

Nazi war criminals had hidden for decades in Latin America, living like nobility. Why not a couple of low-profile thrill killers?

Still, if Nora and Dylan had escaped for the long run, why leave brochures anywhere to be discovered?

Unless the packets were a misdirect.

I looked up jet leasing, air charter, and time-share companies in Southern California, compiled a surprisingly long list, spent the next two hours claiming to be Bradley Dowd experiencing a “family emergency” and in dire need of finding his sister and his nephew, Dylan. Lots of turndowns and the few outfits who checked their passenger logs had no listing of Nora or Meserve. Which proved nothing if the couple had assumed new identities.

For Milo to get subpoenas of the records, he’d need evidence of criminal behavior and all Dowd and Meserve had done was disappear.

Unless Dylan’s misdemeanor conviction could be used against him.

Milo would be tied up right now with “boring police stuff.” I called him anyway and described Billy Dowd’s behavior.

He said, “Interesting. Just got Michaela’s full autopsy results. Also interesting.”

We met at nine p.m., at a pizza joint on Colorado Boulevard in the heart of Pasadena’s Old Town. Hipsters and young business types feasted on thin crust and pitchers of beer.

Milo had been scoping out BNB buildings in the eastern suburbs for evidence of Peaty’s unofficial storage, asked if I could meet him. When I left the house at eight fifteen, the phone rang but I ignored it.

When I arrived, he was at a front booth, apart from the action, working on an eighteen-inch disk crusted with unidentifiable foodstuffs, his own pitcher half full and frosted. He’d doodled a happy face on the glass. The features had melted to something morose and psychiatrically promising.

Before I could sit, he hoisted his battered attaché case, took out a coroner’s file, and placed it across his lap. “When you’re ready. Don’t ruin your dinner.” Munch munch.

“I ate already.”

“Not very social of you.” He massaged the pitcher, erased the face. “Wanna glass?”

I said, “No, thanks,” but he went and got one anyway, left the file on his chair.

At the front were routine forms signed by Deputy Coroner A.C. Yee, M.D. In the photos what had once been Michaela Brand was a department-store manikin taken apart in stages. See enough autopsy shots and you learn to reduce the human body to its components, try to forget it’s ever been divine. Think too much and you never sleep.

Milo returned and poured me a beer. “She died of strangulation and all the cuts were postmortem. What’s interesting are Numbers Six and Twelve.”

Six was a close-up of the right side of the neck. The wound was an inch or so long, slightly puffed at the center, as if something had been inserted in the slot and left there long enough to create a small pouch. The coroner had circled the lesion and written a reference number above the ruler segment used for scale. I paged to the summary, found the notation.

Postmortem incision, superior border of the sternoclavicular notch, evidence of tissue-spreading and surface exploration of the right jugular vein.

Twelve was a front view of a smooth, full-breasted female chest. Michaela’s implants spread as if deflated.

Dr. Yee had pointed to the spots where they’d been stitched up and noted, “Good healing.” In the smooth plain between the mounds were five small wounds. No pouching. Yee’s measurements made them shallow, a couple were barely beneath the skin.

I returned to the description of the neck lesion. “‘Surface exploration.’ Playing around with the vein?”

“Maybe a special type of play,” said Milo. “Yee wouldn’t put it in writing but he said the cut reminded him of what an embalmer might do at the start of a body prep. The location was exactly what you’d choose if you wanted to expose the jugular and the carotid artery for drainage. After that, you spread the wound to expose the vessels and insert cannulas in both of ’em. Blood drains out of the vein while preservative’s pumped into the artery.”

“But that didn’t happen here,” I said.

“No, only a scratch on the vein.”

“A would-be embalmer who lost his nerve?”

“Or changed his mind. Or lacked the equipment and knowledge to follow through. Yee said there was an ‘immature’ quality to the murder. The neck stuff and the chest lacerations he called dinky and ambivalent. He wouldn’t put that in writing, either. Said it was for a shrink to decide.”

He extended a palm.

I said, “Better find yourself a decisive shrink.”

“Fear of commitment?”

“So I’ve been told.”

He laughed and drank and ate. “Anyway, that’s the extent of the weird stuff. There was no sexual penetration or fooling with the genitalia or overt sadism. Not much blood loss either, most of it settled, and the lividity showed the body was on its back for a while.”

“Manual strangulation,” I said. “Look in her eyes and choke the life out of her. It takes time. Maybe it’s enough to get you off.”

“Watching,” he said. “Peaty’s thing. With him and Billy being a couple of arrested-development losers —
immature —
I can see them fooling with a body but being afraid to dig too deep. Now you’re telling me ol’ Billy’s got a temper.”

“He does.”

“But?”

“But what?”

“You’re not convinced.”

“I don’t see Billy and Peaty being clever enough. More important, I don’t see Billy setting up Peaty with that call.”

“Maybe he’s not as stupid as he comes across. The real actor in the family.”

“Brad can obviously be fooled,” I said, “but he and Billy lived together so I doubt to that extent. Learn anything new about the stolen cell phone?”

He flipped the attaché case open, got his notepad. “Motorola V551, Cingular wireless account, registered to Ms. Angeline Wasserman, Bundy Drive, Brentwood. Interior designer, married to an investment banker. The phone was in her purse when it got stolen the day of the call —
nine hours before. Ms. Wasserman was shopping, got distracted, turned her head, and poof. Her big concern was the whole identity theft thing. The purse, too —
four-figure Badgley-something number.”

“Badgley Mischka.”

“Your brand?”

“I’ve known a few women.”

“Ha! Wanna guess where she was shopping?”

“Camarillo outlets,” I said.

“The Barneys outlet, specifically. Tomorrow, when it opens at ten, I’ll be there showing around pictures of Peaty and Billy, the Gaidelases, Nora and Meserve, Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, anyone else you wanna suggest.”

“Nora and Meserve may be cavorting as we speak.” I told him about the travel brochures, my calls to the private jet outfits.

“Another subpoena called for, if I had grounds,” he said. “The paper for Ms. Wasserman’s cell came in fast because it’d been reported stolen but I’m still waiting on the phone booth trace. Hopefully I’ll have it in hand tonight.”

“Night owl judge?”

His smile was weary. “I’ve known a few jurists.”

I said, “Meserve’s hoax conviction won’t help with the passenger logs?”

“Misdemeanor offense pled down to community service? Not hardly. You’re liking him and Nora better now? Nor more Andy and Cathy as psychos?”

“Their leaving town puts them in my radar.”

“Nora and Mr. Snow Globe. He hid his own car in Brad’s treasured space, just like Brad assumed, left the globe there for a screw-you.”

“If he and Nora targeted Peaty, they could’ve learned about Peaty’s unregistered van. Left the second globe as a misdirection.”

“Rape kit too?”

“Why not?” I said. “Or it
was
Peaty’s. Everyone at the PlayHouse seems to have known about Peaty’s staring and Brad knew about Peaty’s arrest record, so it’s not a big stretch to assume Nora could’ve found out. If Nora and Dylan wanted a scapegoat, they had a perfect candidate.”

“Years of picking off the weak ones and then they just decide to leave for the tropics?”

“Been there, done it. Time to explore new vistas,” I suggested.

“Brad told you that Nora would have to come to him for serious dough.”

“Brad’s been wrong about lots of things.”

He took the coroner’s file back, leafed through it absently.

I said, “Dylan had Michaela bind him tight around the neck. He pretended to be dead so effectively it scared the hell out of her. She also said pain didn’t seem to be an issue for him.”

“The old psychopath numbness,” he said.

A young, black, cornrowed waitress came over and asked if we were okay.

Milo said, “Please wrap this to go, and I’ll try that brownie sundae.”

Closing the file. The waitress caught the
Coroner
label.

“You guys in TV?” she said. “
C.S.I.
or something like that?”

“Something like that,” said Milo.

Deft fingering of cornrows. Eyelid flutter. “I’m an actor.” Big smile. “Shock of shocks.”

“Really?” said Milo.

“
Extremely
really. I’ve done a ton of regional theater in Santa Cruz and San Diego —
including the Old Globe, where I was a main fairy in
Midsummer.
I’ve also done improv at the Groundlings and a nonunion commercial in San Francisco, but you’ll never see that. It was for Amtrak and they never ran it.”

She pouted.

I said, “It happens.”

“It sure does. But, hey, it’s all good. I’ve only been in L.A. for a few months and an agent at Starlight is just about ready to sign me.”

“Good for you.”

“D’Mitra,” she said, extending her hand.

“Alex. This is Milo. He’s the boss.”

Milo glared at me, smiled at her. She sidled closer to him. “That’s a great name, Milo. Pleased to meet you. Can I leave you my name and number?”

Milo said, “Sure.”

“Cool. Thanks.” Leaning in, she rested a breast on his shoulder and scrawled on her order book. “I’ll bring your brownie sundae right now. Totally on the house.”

W
e set out for the outlets at nine a.m.

Taking the Seville because “you’ve got leather seats.”

Beautiful day, sixty-five, sunny —
if you had nothing on your mind you could pretend California was Eden.

Milo said, “Let’s do the scenic route.”

That meant Sunset to the coast highway and north through Malibu. When I approached Kanan Dume Road, I lifted my foot from the gas pedal.

“Keep going.” Slouching, but his eyes had fixed on the odometer. Imagining the trip from a killer’s perspective.