Guilt (5 page)

“I think, sir, that you’re still at the top of your game.”

“Always have been. Okay, good, now you have to get out of here, got a hot date and at my age getting ready is a production.”

A
s I drove back to the city, Milo called a DMV supervisor to find out how far back car registrations ran.

“Inactive records are deleted after a few months, Lieutenant.”

“What about paper archives?”

“Nothing like that, sir.”

“No warehouse in Sacramento?”

“No such thing, Lieutenant. What exactly are you looking for?”

Milo told her.

She said, “With a subpoena, we could give you a list of currently registered Duesenbergs. That German?”

“American,” he said.

“Really? I lived in Detroit, never heard of them.”

“They haven’t been manufactured for a long time.”

“Oh,” said the supervisor. “A historical vehicle. Would a list of current regs help?”

“Probably not, but if it’s all I can get, I’ll settle.”

“Send me the proper paper and it’s all yours, Lieutenant.”

He hung up. I said, “Auburn, Indiana.”

“What about it?”

“It’s where Duesenbergs were built. Back in the day, cars were manufactured all over the country.”

“My home state,” he said. “Never knew that. Never saw anything exotic.”

“You wouldn’t unless you had rich friends. When Duesenbergs came out, they cost the equivalent of a million bucks and Father Eddie was right, they’re prime candidates for the greatest car ever made. We’re talking massive power, gorgeous custom coachwork, every screw hand-fashioned.”

“Listen to you, amigo. What, you were once a gear-head?”

“More like a fantasizing kid.” Who’d memorized every make and model because cars represented freedom and escape. Mentally cataloging all that information was a good time-filler when hiding in the woods, waiting out a drunken father’s rage.

Milo tapped the tucked-leather passenger door. “Now that I think about it, this is kind of a classic buggy.”

My daily ride’s a ’79 Seville, Chesterfield Green with a tan vinyl top that matches her interior leather. She rolled out of Detroit the last year before GM bloated the model beyond recognition, is styled well enough to help you forget she’s Caddy froufrou over a Chevy II chassis. She loves her third engine, is dependable, cushy, and makes no unreasonable demands. I see no reason to get a divorce.

I said, “Bite your tongue. She thinks she’s still a hot number.”

He laughed. “So how many Duesenbergs were made?”

“I’d guess hundreds, not thousands. And chrome pipes means it was supercharged, which would narrow it down further.”

“So getting that subpoena might be worthwhile … but then I’d need to backtrack the history of every one I find and the most I can hope for is some guy who visited the woman who lived in the house maybe at the time the baby was buried.”

I said, “There could be a more direct way to identify her. If Father
Eddie noticed the car, other neighbors probably did. Anyone who was an adult back then is likely to be deceased, but in nice neighborhoods like Cheviot, houses get passed down to heirs.”

“A kid who dug cars,” he said. “Okay, can’t postpone the legwork any longer. You have time?”

“Nothing but.”

We began with properties half a mile either way from the burial site, encountered lots of surprise but no wisdom. Returning to the Ruche house, Milo knocked on the door, rang the bell, checked windows. No one home.

I followed him to the backyard. The yellow tape was gone. The holes where air-sniffing tubes had been inserted were still open. The chair where Holly Ruche had sat yesterday had been moved closer to the felled tree sections and a woman’s sweater, black, size M, Loehmann’s label, was draped over one of the massive cylinders. A few errant blond hairs stood out on the shoulders. Beneath the chair, a paperback book sat on the dirt. What to expect during pregnancy.

I said, “She came back when everyone left, wanting to check out her dream.”

He said, “Location, location, location … okay, let’s ask around some more about the car. Haystacks and needles and all that.”

Expanding the canvass another quarter mile produced similar results, initially. But at a house well north, also Tudor but grander and more ornately trimmed than Holly and Matt’s acquisition, a small, mustachioed man in his sixties holding a crystal tumbler of scotch said, “A Duesie? Sure, ’38 SJ, blue over blue—navy over baby.”

His mustache was a too-black stripe above a thin upper lip. The few hairs on his head were white. He wore a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket, gray pin-striped slacks, black slippers with gold lions embroidered on the toes.

Milo said, “What else can you tell us about it, sir?”

“Gorgeous,” said the man. “True work of art. I saw it in … ’50, so
we’re talking a twelve-year-old car. But you’d never know. Shiny, kept up beautifully. Those chrome supercharger pipes coming out the side were like pythons on the prowl. All that menace and power, I’m telling you, that was one magnificent beast.”

“Who owned it?” said Milo.

The man shook his head. “I tried to get her to tell me, she’d just smile and change the subject.”

“She?”

“Eleanor,” said the man. “Ellie Green. She lived there—that brick place pretending to be this place, that’s where the Duesie used to park. Right in the driveway. Not often, just once in a while. And always at night but there was a porch light so you could see it. Down to the color. Looking back, it had to be a boyfriend of hers, but I was a kid, five years old, it was the car that interested me, not her personal life. I’d never seen anything like it, asked my father about it. He knew everything about everything when it came to cars, raced at Muroc before the war.”

He grinned. “Then he married my mother and she civilized him and he went to work selling Packards downtown. He’s the one who filled me in on the Duesie. That’s how I know it was a true SJ. Because he told me it wasn’t one of those where someone retrofitted the pipes, this was the real deal.”

“He never mentioned whose it was?”

“Never asked him,” said the man. “Why, what’s up? I saw all the commotion yesterday. What happened at that place?”

“Something was found there. What can you tell us about Ellie Green, sir?”

“She babysat me. Back before I started school, I was always sick. My parents got tired of never going out, so they hired her to watch over me. Couldn’t have been fun for her, I was a runty piece of misery, had scarlet fever, bad case of the mumps, measles even worse, could throw up at will and believe me, I did when the devil told me to.” He laughed. “At one point they thought I had diphtheria but it was just some nasty flu. But Ellie was always patient.”

“How old was she?”

“Hmm … to a kid everyone looks old. Probably thirty, give or take? Why’re you asking about her? What was found over there? I asked one of your guys in uniform but all he said was
an incident
.”

Milo said, “Some bones were dug up in the backyard. It was on the news, Mr.—”

“Dave Helmholtz. I avoid the news. Back when I was a stockbroker I had to pay attention, now I don’t. Bones as in human?”

“Yes, sir. A complete human skeleton. A baby.”

“A baby? Buried in the backyard?”

Milo nodded.

Helmholtz whistled. “That’s pretty grotesque. You think Ellie had something to do with it? Why?”

“We don’t know much at all at this point, Mr. Helmholtz, but there’s indication the bones were buried during the early fifties. And the only information we picked up about that period was that a Duesenberg was sometimes parked at the house.”

“Early fifties,” said Helmholtz. “Yup, that could certainly fit when Ellie was here. But why in the world would she bury a baby? She didn’t have any kids.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. And I never saw her pregnant. Just the opposite, she was skinny. For back then, I mean. Today she’d be what’s expected of a woman.”

“How long did she live there?”

“She babysat me for close to a year.”

“Did she have a day job?”

“Sure,” said Helmholtz. “She was a nurse.” He smoked, tamped, smoked some more. “Mom made a big deal about that—‘a trained nurse.’ Because I pulled a snit about being left with a stranger. I was a cranky runt, mama’s boy, afraid of my own shadow. Trained nurse? What did I care? The first time Ellie came over, I hid under the covers, ignored her completely. She sat down, waited me out. Finally I stuck my head out and she was smiling at me. Bee
-yoot
iful smile, I’m talking movie-star caliber, the blond hair, the red lips, the smoky eyes. Not that
I care much about that, I kept ignoring her. Finally I got hot and thirsty and came out and she fetched me something to drink. I had a fever, that year I always had a fever. She put a cold compress on my forehead. She hummed. It soothed me, she had a nice voice. She was a nice person. Never tried to force anything, real relaxed. And a looker, no question about that.”

I smiled. “You didn’t care about her looks, you were concentrating on the Duesenberg.”

Helmholtz stared at me. Broke into laughter. “Okay, you got me, I had a crush on her. Who wouldn’t? She was nice as they came, took care of me, I stopped being upset when my parents went out.”

“Obviously, someone else thought she was nice.”

“Who’s that?”

“The owner of the Duesenberg.”

“Oh,” said Helmholtz. “Yeah, Mr. Lucky Bastard.” He laughed some more. “That’s what Dad called him. Looking back it makes sense. Some rich guy wooed her, maybe that’s why she left.”

I said, “She never gave you any indication at all who he was?”

“I asked a couple of times, hoping maybe she’d figure out I loved the car, was angling for a ride. All she did was smile and change the subject. Now that I think about it, she never talked about herself, period. It was always about me, what I wanted, what I needed, how was I feeling. Pretty good approach when you’re working with a spoiled little brat, no? I can see her doing great as a nurse.”

He brightened. “Hey, maybe Lucky Bastard was a rich doctor. Isn’t that why girls became nurses back then? To hook up with M.D.s?”

Milo said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about her?”

“Nope. I turned six, got miraculously better, went to school, made friends. Don’t know exactly when Ellie moved out but it wasn’t long after and instead of the Duesenberg we got a Plymouth. Big family with a Plymouth station wagon the color of pea soup. Talk about a comedown.”

I said, “Could you estimate how many times you saw the Duesenberg?”

“You’re trying to figure out if she was entertaining some regular visitor, something hot and heavy going on? Well, all I can say is less than a dozen and probably more than half a dozen.”

“At night.”

“So how did a five-year-old see it? Because that five-year-old was a disobedient brat who’d sneak out of the house through the kitchen in the middle of the night and walk over to see the car. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t. The last time I tried it, I ran into my father. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of Ellie’s house, looking at the car, himself. I turned to escape, he saw me, caught me. I thought he’d whack me but he didn’t. He laughed. Said, yeah, it’s fantastic, Davey, can’t blame you. That’s when he told me the model. ’Thirty-eight SJ. And what the pipes meant, the advantage of supercharging. We stood there together, taking in that monster. It was one of those—I guess you’d call it a bonding thing. But then he warned me never to leave the house without permission or he
would
tan my hide.”

Helmholtz smiled. “I always felt he thought I was a sissy. I guess he didn’t punish me because he assumed I was out there being a guy.”

We continued up the block. No one else remembered Ellie Green or the Duesenberg.

Back at the station, Milo ran her name. Nearly two dozen women came up but none whose stats fit the slim blonde who’d lived at the bone house in 1951. He repeated the process with
Greene, Gruen, Gruhn
, even
Breen
, came up empty. Same for death notices in L.A. and the neighboring counties.

I said, “She worked as a nurse and the box came from the Swedish Hospital.”

He looked up the defunct institution, pairing it with
Eleanor Green
and the same variants. A few historical references popped up but the only names were major benefactors and senior doctors.

He said, “Helmholtz could be right about Lucky Bastard being a medical honcho. Maybe even someone George Del Rios or his two
M.D. kids knew and Ellie Green came to rent the house through personal referral.”

“Rich doctor wanting a stash pad for his pretty girlfriend,” I said. “For partying or waiting out her pregnancy.”

“Helmholtz never saw her pregnant.”

“Helmholtz was a five-year-old, not an obstetrician. If she moved in before she started babysitting him, she could have already delivered.”

“Rich doctor,” he said. “Insert ‘married’ between those two words and you’ve got one hell of an inconvenience. Problem is, Ellie seems to have disappeared.”

“Like her baby,” I said.

“Lucky Bastard making sure to clean up his trail?”

“The baby was only found by chance. If her body was concealed just as skillfully, there’d be no official death notice.”

“Nasty … wish I could say it felt wrong.”

He got up, paced. “You know anyone who’d remember Swedish Hospital?”

“I’ll ask around.”

“Thanks.” He frowned. “As usual.”

M
ilo’s request to find an old-timer got me shuffling the reminiscence Rolodex. The first two people I thought of turned out to be dead. My third choice was in her late eighties and still training residents at Western Pediatric Medical Center.

Salome Greiner picked up her own phone.

“Hi, Sal, it’s Alex Delaware.”

“Well, well,” she said. “What favor does Alex Delaware need?”

“Who says I need anything?”

“You don’t write, you don’t call, you don’t even email or text or tweet.” Her cackle had the dry confidence of someone who’d outlived her enemies. “And yes, I am still alluring but I don’t see you asking me on a hot date. What do you need?”