Night Night, Sleep Tight (14 page)

Read Night Night, Sleep Tight Online

Authors: Hallie Ephron

BOOK: Night Night, Sleep Tight
11.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

 

Chapter 26

C
ity Hall was nearby, but just a little too far for Deirdre to walk there and back with her bad leg. So she drove the few blocks over and parked in a handicapped spot in front. This time no news crews were there filming.

She climbed the long, broad front staircase, though there was probably a handicapped entrance at ground level. She caught her reflection in the glass of the door just before she pushed it open. The hair was cute and bouncy, the shirt elegant and casual, the sneakers a hint that she wasn’t taking herself too seriously.

Cool air oozed out as she stepped into the lobby, a magnificent Spanish Renaissance two-story entryway with terrazzo floors, white marble walls, and a coffered ceiling. The vast space hummed with a steady flow of uniformed officers, men and the occasional woman in business suits carrying thick briefcases, and lost-looking citizens who were probably there to file for tax abatements, report for jury duty, or, like her, request a copy of an official document.

It was past noon, and the soy bacon and eggs seemed a long time ago. Deirdre bought a granola bar from a newsstand tucked incongruously in the corner under a massive California state flag and wolfed it down. She chased it with a stick of Dentyne, hoping to dispel the miasma of perfumed conditioner and hair gel that felt as if it were floating in a thick cloud around her head.

She had no desire to run into Detective Martinez, so she made her way quickly down the hall, following the signs to Public Records. The room had linoleum, not terrazzo, on the floor, and its walls were painted mustard yellow. Six rows of folding chairs took up half the space, most of the seats taken. A man wearing a bright green golf shirt and sunglasses on top of his bald head brushed past her on his way to the door. “Good luck,” he said. “Effing incompetence. An hour and a half wasted.”

The number 110 flashed over a counter with a bank of clerk’s stations. Deirdre took a number from the feeder—
142
. She found the Request for Records form on one of the shelves, stood in the back, and started to fill it out. Her name. Address. She checked the box beside “Incident Report,” then wrote in the date and time of the fire, the address, and a description. When she finished, the number counter had crept up to 112. Two harried clerks seemed to be actually serving customers. Several others were on phones, another hunched over his desk, all of them studiously avoiding eye contact with the thirty-plus impatient citizens sitting and standing beyond the safe barrier of the counter.

Clearly, she had plenty of time to kill. Tyler had said his office was next to some kind of lab in the basement. Deirdre left the waiting area and wandered back through the hall to the atrium lobby. There she found the elevators, their outer sliding doors elaborate wrought-iron grillwork. She stepped inside one and pressed B. The elevator descended two floors and slid open to reveal a basement hallway.

Paint the color of wet sand peeled on the walls. Two rows of Wanted posters—all men—hung on the bulletin board across the hall. The air was cooler and clammier than on the main floor, and Deirdre wondered if that was a whiff of formaldehyde under a layer of Pine-Sol. Signs pointed one way to Maintenance and the elevator, the other way to the restrooms, Arson Investigation, Crime Lab, and Records Storage.

Deirdre followed the sign pointing toward Arson Investigation, continuing to a door with a pebbled glass inset stenciled with the words
ARSON UNIT
. She was about to reach for the knob when the door opened. A man she didn’t recognize came out. He held the door for her.

The Arson Unit was a single room, mostly bare with a half-dozen desks crowded in, surrounded by shelves and file cabinets. A folding table against a wall was loaded with pamphlets. On the side wall was pinned a massive gray-and-green topographic map with colored pushpins stuck in it.

Tyler was sitting at a desk under a high window by the back wall. He was engrossed in some typewritten pages, switching between writing in pen and highlighting with a yellow marker. Deirdre headed his way. When she was within reaching distance, she said, “Tyler?”

He looked up. “Deirdre!” He shoved the papers he’d been working on into a file folder and stood, grazing his head on one of the pipes that ran overhead. “Hey. I was just thinking about you.” His eyes widened. “You look . . . different.”

Deirdre felt a flush creep up her neck. “I hope it’s an okay different.”

“Very okay. I was”—he shot a guilty look at the closed file folder—“just working on your case. Report’s almost finished.”

“I thought it takes weeks.”

“Who told you that?”

“Our claims adjuster.”

“I guess it can take that long to get processed once I file it. But the analysis—well, we know pretty much what we’re dealing with. Most of the time, anyway.”

“As in now?”

He nodded.

“So? Tell me. You can tell me, can’t you? What started the fire?”

Tyler sat. Deirdre could feel herself trembling as she waited for his answer.

“I can tell you what we know,” he said. “The fire started right where we originally thought it did. In a bag of potting mix.”

“Right. Probably left over from years ago when Mom was still living there.”

Tyler gave her an uneasy look. “You said your mother grew geraniums?”

“Scented geraniums,” Deirdre said, wondering where this was going.

“The thing is, the concentration of ammonium nitrate in that potting mix is much too high. It would have burned the roots of her plants. Even amateur horticulturists know that. Maybe your father bought it?”

“Not likely,” Deirdre said. There was only one way her father messed around with potting mix. “Were there any cigarette butts in it?”

“There were. But they’re not what started the fire.”

Deirdre took a deep breath. “So what are you saying?”

“It looks like someone tried to make it appear as if the fire was caused by careless disposal of smoking materials. So we’d find the cigarette butts and stop looking for what really fueled the fire.”

“Which was?”

“Good old-fashioned kerosene.” Tyler gave her a long, somber look.

Arson.
Deirdre dropped into the chair opposite his desk. It wasn’t unexpected, but still the certainty of the verdict knocked the air out of her. Someone had set fire to her father’s garage. Someone had killed her father. “Who? Why?”

“Those are questions for the police.”

Deirdre tried to put it together. Cigarette butts stuck into kerosene-laced potting mix that her mother never would have purchased. Whoever did that knew her father was a smoker who stubbed out his cigarettes wherever happened to be convenient. “Could it have been set up in advance?” she asked.

“Probably was. It would be simple. Lace the mix with kerosene. Wait till there’s no one around, sneak in, and put the bag in the garage. Poke a few burning cigarettes into it and let nature take its course. Might have taken a few minutes or a few hours to really get going, but it was a pretty sure bet that eventually it would.”

Only whoever it was had miscalculated. The house might have been empty, but their mother was in the garage’s second-floor office. While Deirdre was pulling the alarm, Gloria must have bolted and then tried to hide the fact that she’d been there. Deirdre never would have known if she hadn’t found the prayer beads.

“So there’s no way it could have been an accident?” Deirdre said. She knew she was grasping at straws.

“An accidental kerosene spill at just the right moment? How likely is that?” Tyler paused. “You can be sure that the insurance company will bring in a professional investigator to see if the fire was set for financial gain.”

Deirdre groaned. “Here we go. They’ll think one of us did it.”

“Maybe. But fire damage doesn’t add value to a property you’re about to sell. So what would you have stood to gain?”

Deirdre thought about it. If the fire wasn’t set for financial gain, then why? Pure malice? Why target just the garage? Unless that was the point, maybe to destroy what was in the garage, including whatever her mother was up there trying to keep Deirdre and Henry from finding.

“Well, thank you for telling me,” Deirdre said. She started to get up.

“Deirdre, there’s more. I found your accident report.” Tyler’s solemn tone and grave expression dropped her back into the chair. She swallowed hard and waited for him to go on.

“The records from 1963 are all on microfiche, so it should have been easy to find. And it would have been . . . if the accident had been in Beverly Hills. But it wasn’t.”

Not in Beverly Hills. That meant that her father hadn’t been driving her home from Joelen’s house. He’d been driving . . . where? Deirdre sat back and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Once I was sure the report wasn’t in our records, I called a buddy over at the LAPD. They’ve got a huge repository. Good thing there’s not many Austin-Healey convertibles out there to get into traffic accidents. He found it and sent me a copy.” He opened his desk drawer, drew out two grainy faxes, and laid them on the desk in front of Deirdre.

She leaned forward. Across the top in capital letters were the words
P
O
L
I
C
E
I
N
C
I
D
E
N
T
R
E
P
O
R
T
. Below that:

Crash investigator: TROOPER MITCHELL

Vehicle
#
[1] Year [1957] Make [AUHE] Model [CV]

Deirdre ran her fingers across the letters. This was the footprint she’d been sure she’d never find.

Then she read the next line.

Driver [DEIRDRE UNGER] [F] [15] of [BEVERLY
HILLS, CA]

It felt as if the floor had opened up under her and she was in free fall. There had to be some mistake. “This has my name as the driver.” When Tyler just nodded, she said, “But how could that be? I remember riding in the
passenger
seat. The top was down. I was thrown from the car. It was cold. I . . . I can remember all kinds of details.”

“You thought you were in Beverly Hills.”

“I did . . . and I didn’t. I wanted to believe that, but it never made any sense. Even with a detour in the wrong direction, it just wasn’t right. But this? This is completely insane.”

“I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you expected.”

Deirdre gripped the arm of the chair.
She’d driven the car off the road. Not her father.
“I’m just trying to understand.”

For a minute, Tyler didn’t say anything, giving her time to absorb the shock. Then he said, “You wanted to know where it happened.” He turned to the second stapled sheet and pointed to a paragraph in the middle of the page.

Deirdre pulled the faxed sheets closer and read.

Narrative: V1
driver was driving east on Mulholland. V1 crashed into a guardrail located at approximately 10536 Mulholland Drive. Driver ejected from the car. Driver transported to Northridge Hospital. The crash remains under investigation and charges are pending.

Deirdre shook her head, and then shook it again.
Mulholland Drive?
It was at least five miles from the Nichols’ house, and in the opposite direction from home.

Tyler went over to the map on the wall. He stuck a white pushpin at a curve on a road highlighted in yellow, a road that snaked along the crest of the finely drawn, crenellated landscape that was the Santa Monica Mountains. “You’re not the only one who’s wiped out there. There’s a reason they call that spot Suicide Bend.”

Deirdre read aloud the final line of the report. “ ‘The crash remains under investigation and charges are pending.’ What does that mean?”

“You were never charged?”

“I don’t remembering being charged. But I don’t remember driving, either.” Maybe this was what Sy had meant when he said he’d kept her out of trouble
then
. No charges.

She walked up to the map and stared at the white pushpin. She hadn’t driven that stretch in many years, but she knew it well. After she’d mastered driving in the flats between Santa Monica and Sunset, her father had taken her into the canyons for serious driving lessons. There, she’d learned to start from a dead stop on a steep incline without rolling backward. To take curves, downshifting first, judging how well the road was banked to determine how much to decelerate going in and how fast she could accelerate coming out. Always, always, her father reminded her,
stay in control and stay in your goddamned lane.

Driving Mulholland was the ultimate test. In her mind’s eye Deirdre could run the curves and straightaways of the infamous road that was known as “the snake,” catching glimpses of the vast and usually smog-skimmed San Fernando Valley unfurling to the northwest.

With her finger she traced the yellow-highlighted road. She tried to envision the spot, right at a sharp elbow. Was this where her father had always cautioned her to respect the signage and slow the hell down? Where he’d once made her pull over and hike twenty minutes down a steep embankment until they reached a Dodge Dart lying in the scrub, its blue paint nearly rusted away? Nearby, in a dry streambed, a red Porsche had lain on its back, looking like the empty carapace of a stranded beetle. Deirdre had peered into the car through the broken windshield, fully expecting to find a skeleton sitting at the wheel. But the car’s interior had been stripped, filled only with a tangle of vines and what she later realized was poison oak. Surely her father had been trying to convey a lesson about the dire consequences of reckless driving, but what stayed with Deirdre, even now, was the brutal beauty of the landscape and the power of time.

Maybe she’d been going too fast that night. Maybe she’d been blinded by oncoming headlights. Swerved to avoid another driver? Skidded on a gravel spill?

But why had she been there at all, and where on earth had she thought she was going?

Other books

Toward the Sunrise by Elizabeth Camden
Mitch and Amy by Beverly Cleary
Safe Harbor by Judith Arnold
01 - Playing with Poison by Cindy Blackburn
Bound to Moonlight by Nina Croft
True Love by Wulf, Jacqueline
Hat Trick! by Brett Lee