Red Light (16 page)

She wrote:
Nobody
cared . . . let it slide . . . you let it slide when it's going your way . . .
whose way is unsolved? Who benefits?

She called both home
and office to retrieve messages. Mike had called her at home before she left
for Arrowhead, but she'd turned the recorder down when she heard his voice. The
upshot was that Mike was sorrier and more ashamed than he could express to her.
He left a message on her work machine, then two more at home. He sounded like
he was about to cry. Listening to them, Merci felt pity and fury vying inside
her. But beneath these predictable emotions, she felt something even worse. She
felt her respect for Mike sliding away in huge masses, like earthslides after
weeks of rain.

She made me feel
like doing all the things I wanted to do with you. But I had them totally, one
hundred percent under control.

Then
how did you make such a mess of things, she wondered.

Evan O'Brien, the CSI, had
left one message on her work machine: He wanted to talk. Important.

• •
•

Cheryl Davis was Patti
Bailey's twin sister. She was fifty-five years old, brown and brown, pretty
face and pretty heavy.

"The problem
with the cops," said Cheryl, "was they didn't realize Patti had
changed."

Merci
asked how.

"She wasn't
riding with the Hessians anymore. That was the year before. She wasn't hanging
with the drug people in Laguna because all they'd pay with was dope. She didn't
want dope—she wanted money. That's why the detectives never got very far. They
were asking the wrong people. She was in with a different clientele when she
was killed."

"Who?"

"Higher class.
Businessmen. Politicians."

Merci considered.
"That's quite a change."

"Patti
was ambitious. She was . . . Sergeant Rayborn, Patti was an absolute
bullshitter, but sometimes the things she said were true, she told me she was
servicing powerful men. The elite, the mover shakers. It made her feel
important. No, she didn't give me names. She wasn't loose . . . that way. I
wouldn't have recognized them anyway because I was living down in Key West
then. That's a whole other story but we wrote back and forth a lot. She liked
to write. So did I."

Cheryl
Davis sighed quietly and looked down at her hands. She was wearing a big knit
sweater against the cold. The house was a tract home off of Tyler; built, Merci
guessed, about the time Cheryl's sister was shot. Builders didn't bother much
with insulation back then. There three cardboard boxes overflowing with
Christmas decorations in the corner of the living room. Nothing up yet, Merci
noted.

"What
was frustrating for me," Cheryl said, "was I might have helped. I had
the letters. By the time I realized the police had interviewed the old crowd,
it was a year later. I gave the detectives copies of them, but to be honest, I
think they were onto other things by then. Her letters were always grandiose,
and kind of vague anyway. Just like she was.”

Merci
looked at the woman. "I'm sorry about what happened, I feel bad for
you."

Hess
would have liked that, she thought: feeling what someone was feeling, or at
least trying to.

Cheryl
Davis wiped a tear with a tissue that had been balled in the pocket of her
sweater. Prepared, thought Merci.

"Give me
something," Merci said. "Anything I can run with."

"Okay."

Cheryl
got up and went out. A few minutes later she came back an old-fashioned
briefcase, the ones with the expandable sides and multiple dividers that would
just get fatter the more you put in it. A big handle. It was worn.

"Oh,"
said the woman, catching Merci's eyes. "This was Dad's, I put all the
stuff in here about the investigation. Thought it might bring me luck, you
know. Anyway, you can borrow it."

"Thank
you."

Cheryl Davis unlocked
the flap and pulled it open. Then she shut it again and locked it. "No. I
just can't go there again. Not now. Please take it."

She set the case in
front of Merci and remained standing. So Merci did, too. Interview over.

"I'll give you
something else. I gave it to Rymers and his partner but never heard anything
more about it. Patti wrote me in one of those letters that's in there, she
said she knew who beat up a farmer named Jesse Acuna. I guess he was a real
family man, lots of kids and grandchildren, lots of friends. Did good things
for people. It was a big mystery, who'd do such a thing to him. I didn't
recognize his name back then, but I guess it was big news in Orange
County—somebody beating up a farmer who'd never committed a crime in his life.
He almost died. Anyway, Patti says in there she knew who did it. Said she had
it 'documented.' That's the word she used. I'm not sure what she meant by
that."

"How'd
she find out?"

"I
think he was, you know, one of her customers."

Merci put Thornton's
and Cheryl Davis's statements together and shook them up. "Was Patti
servicing cops?"

"She
never said that, no."

Merci wondered if the
highway between the Hessians and the power brokers might have been cleared and
paved by the law. There had to be connective tissue. Anything could happen.
Just look at Mike.

"I'll
return this," said Merci, hefting the case. It was heavy.

"I hope it helps
you." Cheryl Davis was dabbing her cheek again as she walked Merci to her
door. "You know what Patti was, Sergeant?"

"Tell me."

"She was bright
and funny and cute. So loyal. She and I couldn't have taken more . . .
different paths. But she loved me the whole way. No matter how far down she
got. You know what one of her best features was, her prettiest parts? Her
neck. It was slender and graceful, just beautiful. She'd wear necklaces just to
show it off. I'll never forget this string of faux pearls she wore to the prom
in high school.
So ...
elegant and so
. . . humble. And for someone to do what he did is a sin. It's just a crime,
it's a sin."

"It's the ugliest sin
there is, Ms. Davis."

C
olin
Byrne, reference desk assistant for the UC Irvine Library, had everything ready
for Merci when she got there. It was almost three o'clock. Byrne, whom she had
talked to on the phone only an hour earlier, had set her up with a private
study room in the archives section of the building.

He was a lanky blond
with innocent blue eyes and a necktie with pictures of hounds on it. His
trousers were held up by suspenders with designs of magnifying glasses on them.

"You caught me
in my Doyle gear," he said when she noticed the magnifiers. "Glad I'm
not wearing the bullet-hole tie. That's the hard-boiled look."

"Not
real bullet holes, I hope."

"No. But it's
nice to meet a real detective. I'd never ask, but I wonder if you're working
the case of the murdered escort, down in San Clemente."

"I'd
never answer, but no, it's something else I'm after."

He
smiled. "You name it, you got it.
Anything."

He rolled out the
chair for her, then tutored her through the search features on the computer.
She could search by topic or specific name for any period of time from
1887—when the county's first newspaper went into regular publication—to the
present. All county papers were contained in the program: the smallest and
most temporary weeklies, college and junior college student papers, members'
newsletters of yacht clubs, professional journals, the three major dailies that
now circulated in Orange County. Even some of the corporate newsletters.

"We're
missing three months of the old Huntington Beach
Watch.”
said Byrne,
"because they lost their archival copies in a fire. Same some early copies
of the Newport
Ensign,
but that was flood. Other that, it's all here.
You'll be amazed how fast you can get around the century of newspapers with
this computer. It's usually best to go big-to-small. Let me know if you get
stuck."

"Patti
Bailey" got her seventy-two hits in eight publications, most of them in
the Los Angeles
Times
and the Santa Ana
Register.

Reading
through the stories from the bigger papers, she didn't find anything she hadn't
already learned from the case file. The
Times
printed a polite request
for greater police action on the case, on the year anniversary of her death.

The
Tustin
News
had a feature story on the boy who had discovered the body.
He'd been looking for lizards in the grove, thought Bailey asleep when he first
spotted her. They ran a picture of him pointing the side of the culvert.

They
also had a police blotter notice of Bailey's arrest on charges almost a year
before her death. It was only one line, mixed in with the car stereo rip-offs
and drunken driving arrests:
Patti Bailey of Santa Ana, was arrested by
Orange County Sheriffs on suspicion of possession of barbiturates after being
pulled over on 17th St. for erratic driving Wednesday night. . .

After the murder they also
ran a two-part investigative piece about prostitution out of the De Anza Hotel,
which was up on Fourth Street, just out of the Tustin city limits. The article
said that Patti Bailey was "known as a tenant," but was rarely seen
at the De Anza. The reporter wrote:

It is easy to picture
this happy-go-lucky 23-year-old among the inebriated celebrants in the De Anza
Lounge on a rowdy Friday night Here, the scent of illicit activity mixes with
the perfume of tequila Beautiful women come and go, with eyes that are at once
inviting and challenging.

The accompanying
photo spread showed the De Anza on a "fabled" night. The three
pictures were from the newspaper's photo file, taken at a New Year's Eve party
eight months before the murder: a hacienda-style room with a fountain and
potted plants, a long bar staffed by Latin men in bow ties, plenty of drunk-looking
men and young women in miniskirts. It was a big room with exposed ceiling
timbers, a wrought-iron chandelier draped with paper streamers, the background
fading to black around crowded tables of men and women.

The hotel owner
denied knowing of anything illegal transpiring on his property, so most of the
information came from the prostitutes themselves. "Patti had very
high-class friends," said "Blossom." "She came here mostly
to eat and drink." The reporter confirmed that Bailey was a permanent
resident of room number 245. He was not permitted to see it.

The article went on to
quote some enlisted men, regulars at the De Anza, who said they came for the
atmosphere and cheap margaritas. High class, all right, Merci thought.

Santa Ana Police Chief Ed
Simpson called the place a "trouble spot," and said they could
enforce the law there but they couldn't shut it down. City hall would have to
do that. One week after Bailey's death, it did.

A Tustin News editorial
that ran four months after Bailey's murder contained an interesting nugget.

Rumors of prostitution at the De Anza Hotel
circulated widely long before it was shut down by the City of Santa Ana. Rumors
of law-enforcement personnel frequenting the hotel circulated for almost as
long. The News can only hope that there was no connection between the longevity
of a house of sin and its alleged popularity with some elements within the law.
Where police are involved in crime, no citizen can be safe. Perhaps the murder
of Patti Bailey helped to illustrate this tragic truth.

Merci
rolled back in the wheeled chair, stretched her legs. What was wrong in '69?
she thought. Cops beating up farmers, cops hanging with whores?

She
went back to the New Year's Eve photo of the De Anza and enlarged it to
full-screen, half expecting to find someone she recognized at one of the
tables.

No
luck.

She hit the print command
to make copies of it all.

• • •

The name Jesse Acuna got
238 newspaper hits in 1969, 135 the year after, and an even 50 the year after
that. Last year, he'd still been referred to 16 times in the local press. He
was ninety-five years old, living in San Juan Capistrano down in the southern
part of the county.

Merci
remembered hearing about him in elementary school.

She
scanned the articles that came out immediately after the beating.

Acuna was found
unconscious and bleeding by his grandson, Charlie, at sunrise on the Fourth of
July. Jesse Acuna had just come from chicken coop, collecting eggs as he'd done
every morning for as long as anyone could remember. He was sixty-four. His
grandson was seven

Intensive care for a
week. Hospital for a month. Left eye destroy Slurred speech for the rest of his
life. Ninety stitches in his scalp face. Eight teeth knocked out. Two fingers
crushed beyond meaningful repair.

It pissed off Merci
Rayborn immediately and immensely, what happened to this old man. To the boy,
too. Merci wondered how Fourth of July picnic pictured on Sally Thornton's TV
trays stacked against the Fourth of July surprise that Jesse Acuna and his
grandson got.