Never Fear (11 page)

Cross's dull eyes appeared to focus.

“Manning,” he said without hesitation.

“You remember?”

The corners of his mouth turned as if he had stepped on something sharp. “Do you fish, Lieutenant?”

“No.”

He looked at Harrison, who responded without hesitation. “The one that got away.”

Cross nodded. “The one you never forget . . . no one forgets.”

“Was there a reason you were at the interrogation?”

“I was a cop before I became a prosecutor.”

Cross closed his right hand into a fist and flexed the muscles of his forearm. Then he got up from his desk and walked over and closed the door to the office.

“Victoria Fisher worked in my office. I demanded to be there.”

“You knew her?” Harrison asked.

Cross nodded. “I didn't know her well. She was clerking for us during summer break from law school.”

“What can you tell us about Manning?”

He started to answer then stopped. “Why is Pasadena PD interested in this?”

“We're investigating another crime that may be linked to the River Killings.”

Cross stood up from his desk, started to walk across the room, then paused mid-stride. He put his hand on the back of his neck and began to massage the thick muscles. “He's alive, isn't he?”

I didn't answer.

“Manning's alive, that's why you're here?”

“We don't know that for certain,” I said.

“But you think he's killed again, otherwise you wouldn't be here.”

“Has anyone else questioned you about this recently?”

Cross looked at me suspiciously and shook his head. “You have someone in mind?”

“His son may have been investigating the River Killings and was possibly murdered.”

“He didn't talk to me.” Cross appeared to replay the words in his head several times. “My God, you want to know if I think it's possible he could kill his own son, don't you? That's why you're here?”

Cross walked over to a filing cabinet, pulled out a set of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the drawer. He rummaged through it for a moment, then removed a videotape.

“He's a monster. It's all here. You want an answer, all you have to do is look and listen.”

He gripped the tape tightly, as if trying to protect it. “Who else have you talked to?”

“The detective who led the investigation.”

“Hazzard?”

I nodded.

“No one else, no one from the DA's office? Not City Hall? You're very certain about this?”

“Just Hazzard,” I said.

He stepped around his desk and gently set the tape and an envelope down in front of me. “You don't make a copy, and I want it back.”

I agreed, then reached over and picked up the tape. I noticed Cross's eyes follow it until I slipped it safely into the envelope and closed it tight.

Outside a fine coating of sand from the desert covered my Volvo. I got in out of the wind and set the envelope with the tape of my father's interrogation on the seat next to me.

“Cross is in a windowless office. Why do I feel like he's still watching us?” I said. “He's afraid of something, and it isn't just this tape, otherwise he wouldn't have given it to us.”

Harrison looked around as the blowing dust obscured the surrounding landscape. The tiny particles of sand hitting the windows began to sound like rain.

“A former DA who's now working as a low-end investigator on the edges of the county.”

Harrison thought for a moment.

“Maybe he's afraid of falling completely off the map,” Harrison said.

I picked up the envelope containing my father's interrogation tape. “Or being pushed.”

15

On the day Victoria Fisher was murdered my father spent the afternoon rehearsing a play at a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. The street had changed little in the eighteen years since the murder. For a few hours every night a crowd of well-dressed theatergoers visit the half dozen or so small theaters in what is known as the theater district. When the stage lights are turned off, and the patrons retreat in their BMWs and Saabs, the street is taken back by transvestite prostitutes and crack junkies on the prowl for a fix.

An assistant to the director of the theater met us at the door and led us onto the stage, where we waited. It was a small auditorium that seated perhaps a hundred and fifty. I walked back to the wings. A door marked EMERGENCY EXIT was just twenty feet beyond the wings. A short hallway led to dressing rooms farther back past the stage manager's office.

I heard the sound of the director's voice greeting Harrison and started back out through the wings, but froze.
This is the place
, I said silently to myself. I replayed the actress's words in my head. Her descriptions matched everything around me as if it had happened just days ago.

I looked out through the curtains. The light from a single spot illuminated the dark stage. I heard his voice in my head.

Take off your blouse
.

I stepped onto the wood floor of the stage. As I reached center stage I realized it was here where his hand had come around and covered her mouth and he ripped open her shirt. When she stepped on his foot and he released her she would have started crawling stage left toward the steps that led up into the darkness of the seats. I looked over the boards of the stage. She would have gotten a dozen feet, no more, before he grabbed her ankle and started to drag her back. I knelt down and placed my hand on the wood. It was worn and marked from countless productions. I imagined she tried to find the smallest crack or raised seam to take hold of with her fingers and stop him, but there was nothing that would help.

“Lieutenant.”

I looked up and Harrison and the theater director were standing at the front of the stage, looking at me.

“What is it exactly you want to know?” the director asked. His name was Moore. He looked to be nearing sixty and holding on for everything he was worth to his youthful looks.

I let my hand linger on the cool wood for another moment, then stood up.

“You were interviewed by the police eighteen years ago about an actor named Thomas Manning.”

“I remember it very clearly.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it was the last day I ever saw Tom. He vanished after that. I had to take over the acting class he was teaching.”

I had never heard my father referred to as Tom; I couldn't even remember my mother ever using the name.

“He was accused of molesting several actresses?”

Moore nodded. “I didn't learn about those things until he vanished.”

“Did you believe them?”

The director paused dramatically, as if it were written in stage directions and we were working on a scene.

“I believe Tom was capable of anything, including greatness.”

“You liked him?”

He shook his head. “Envied his talent. The rest of him . . .”

“What?”

Moore looked over the stage as if replaying a moment in time. “With a look he could make you feel as if you were nothing.”

“According to the arrest report, you were the last person who could corroborate his whereabouts on the night of the murder.”

Moore shook his head. “No, he left the theater after class with one of his students, an actress.”

Harrison looked over the notes he had taken from Hazzard's files, then shook his head. “There's no mention of that.”

“I told the detective.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes. I don't know if they went any farther together than the parking lot, but they walked out of here together.”

“Do you know her name?” I asked

He thought for a moment, shook his head.

“I'll have to make some calls, see if anyone remembers.”

Moore disappeared into an office and returned ten minutes later. “I think this is her, but no guarantees.” He handed me a piece of paper with a name and address.

“Has anyone else talked to you about this recently?”

“No.”

I handed Moore my card as we left, the picture of my father gaining more, if not better, detail.

“Doesn't make sense that Hazzard would have missed a detail like that,” Harrison said.

“Moore could be right—maybe they didn't get any farther than the parking lot.”

“You want to talk to Hazzard?”

“Not yet. If he left something out, let's find out if there was a reason.”

I handed Harrison the paper with the name and address. “Let's talk to her first.”

I glanced back toward Pasadena. The smoke from the fire that was threatening my house now completely obscured the mountains to the east.

“What time was it my father left here?”

Harrison checked his notes. “Shortly after seven.”

“About the same time Victoria Fisher was starting dinner at the restaurant on Melrose.”

“Two miles from here.”

The address was a small bungalow in Eagle Rock just west of Pasadena. A boy of about ten was rushing down the steps of the house carrying a backpack to a sedan parked out front. As the car drove away his mother appeared at the front door, waved, then glanced in our direction before stepping back inside. Candice Fleming was or had been her name on the day she walked out of the theater with my father eighteen years before.

“Did you see that?” Harrison said.

I nodded; it was a look familiar to any cop, but not in this kind of a neighborhood, or from a woman in a robe sending a son on a sleepover.

“It looked like she made us,” Harrison said.

I opened the door and stepped out. “She did make us, but why?”

We walked across the street and up the steps to the front door. It was a small Spanish home. A large arched window was barely visible behind a bougainvillea that had climbed up the front of the house. As I reached for the bell, the door opened and the woman appeared behind the barred security door.

“Why don't you leave me alone,” she said before I could identify us. “I've answered all your questions. I've always . . .” She let the rest go.

I held up my ID.

“I think you've made a mistake,” I said.

She stared at the ID for a moment and silently mouthed
Pasadena
.

“Candice Fleming?” I asked.

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded and smiled as if she were selling toothpaste or hair products. “I'm sorry, I thought you were real-estate agents.”

“I'd like to ask you some questions,” I said.

She hesitated for a moment, then unlocked the door. We followed her into the small kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table. I noticed there was no wedding band on her left hand. I guessed her age at about forty. If she was still acting, I doubted she had had much success.

“What is this about?” she asked.

“Eighteen years ago you took an acting class from a Thomas Manning.”

She looked at me as if I had just thrown cold water on her face. “That was a long time ago. What do you want to know?”

“He was a suspect in a murder.”

She nodded. “I remember.”

“On the night of the murder you walked out of the theater with him after class. I'd like to know what happened. ”

“Nothing happened. I got in my car and went home. I told the police this years ago.”

“And that was it? You didn't see him after that?”

“No. I got in my car and went home.”

“Has anyone else asked you about this?”

She shook her head. “All I did was take a class. Is there something wrong with that?”

She glanced at her watch. “I really have to be somewhere,” she said and walked back to the front door.

As we stepped out I hesitated in the doorway and held out a card to her.

“If you remember anything else about Thomas Manning, I'd like to talk to you about it.”

She glanced at the card before slipping it from my fingers. “Why would I remember anything about him?”

She looked into my eyes for a moment, then closed the door. We walked back to the car and stopped before getting in.

“Why is she lying to us?” Harrison said.

I looked back at the house. Through the vines of the bougainvillea I thought I saw her standing in the window watching us. “She sounded like she's protecting someone.”

“Or hiding from them.” Harrison looked at me. “There's a big difference between the two.”

I opened the car door. “Not to her.”

I glanced at my watch. It was nearing seven. Just about the same time my father and Candice Fleming would have been walking out of the theater.

The restaurant Victoria Fisher had eaten at with colleagues from the DA's office had changed names and ownership at least three times. We drove up and down the block, as my father was supposed to have done when he searched for a victim. This stretch of Melrose was unchanged in that respect. For a predator stalking beautiful young women, it was a candy store.

Harrison pulled to a stop on the 800 block of Martel, and I stepped out.

“Her car was found about here,” I said.

It was a residential street, lined with trees and one streetlight between where her car had been found and the walk she had taken from the restaurant.

“A block-and-a-half walk from Melrose and the restaurant,” Harrison said. “People in these houses would be used to the noise of people heading to their cars after too much tequila. It would take something out of the ordinary for anyone to look outside. You could step out of a car, or from behind one of these trees, before someone could react.”