The Murder Book (20 page)

The night I’d blown it, she’d left the house for a recording studio, full of trust. The moment she was gone, I left for a meeting with a beautiful, crazy, dangerous young woman.

I’d screwed up royally, but hadn’t my intentions been noble? Blah blah blah.

Two tickets to Paris; pathetic. A sudden rush of memories took hold. Exactly what I’d worked hard at forgetting.

The other time we’d separated.

Ten years ago, nothing to do with my bad behavior. That had been all Robin, needing to find her own way, forge her own identity.

Lord, rephrased that way it sounded like a pop-psych cliché, and she deserved better.

I loved her, she loved me. So why wasn’t she calling?

Grow up, pal, it’s only been two days and you weren’t exactly Mr. Charming the last time she tried.

Had I failed some kind of test by letting her go too easily?

Ten years ago she’d come back but not before…

Don’t get into that.

But at that moment, I wanted nothing but punishment. Opened the box, let loose the furies.

The first time, she’d stayed away for a long time and eventually I’d found another woman. Then that had ended well before Robin returned.

When we reunited, Robin had seemed a bit more fragile, but otherwise everything seemed to be fine. Then one day, she broke down and confessed. She’d found someone, too. A guy, just a guy, a stupid guy, she’d been stupid.

Really stupid, Alex.

I’d held her, comforted her. Then she told me. Pregnancy, abortion. She’d never told the guy — Dennis, I’d blocked out his name, goddamn Dennis had gotten her pregnant, and she’d left him, gone through the ordeal alone.

I kept holding her, said the right things, what a sensitive guy, the essence of understanding. But a nagging little voice in my head refused to let go of the obvious:

All those years together, she and I had waltzed around the topic of marriage and kids. Had been
careful
.

A few months away from me, and another man’s seed had found its way—

Had I ever really forgiven her?

Did she wonder about that, too? What was she thinking about, right now?

Where the hell
was
she?

I picked up the phone, wondered who to call, swept the damn thing off the desk and onto the floor — screw you, Mr. Bell.

My face was hot and my bones twitched and I began pacing, the way Milo does. Not limiting myself to one room, racing around the entire house, unable to burn off the pain.

Home smothering home.

I headed for the front door, threw it open, threw myself into the night.

I walked the glen, north, up into the hills. Did it the stupid way — with the traffic to my back, undeterred by the rush of approaching engines, the flash-freeze of headlights.

Drivers sped by honking. Someone yelled,
“Idiot!”

That felt right.

It took miles before I was able to conjure up Janie Ingalls’s corpse and relax.

When I got back to the house, the front door was ajar — I’d neglected to shut it — and leaves had blown into the entry. I got down on my knees, picked up every speck, returned to my office. The phone remained on the floor. The answering machine had tumbled, too, and lay there, unplugged.

But the machine in the bedroom was blinking.

One message.

I ignored it, went to the kitchen, got the vodka out of the freezer. Used the bottle to cool my hands and my face. Put it back.

I watched TV for hours, ingested hollow laughter, tortured dialogue, commercials for herbal sexual potency remedies and miracle chemicals that attacked the most hideous of stains.

Shortly after midnight, I punched the bedroom machine’s
PLAY
button.

“Alex?… I guess you’re not in… we were supposed to fly to Canada, but we’ve been held over in Seattle — doing an extra show… there were some equipment modifications that needed to be done before the concert, so I was tied up… I guess you’re out again… anyway, I’m at the Four Seasons in Seattle. They gave me a nice room… it’s raining. Alex, I hope you’re okay. I’m sure you are. Bye, honey.”

Bye, honey.

No
I love you
.

She always said
I love you
.

A
t 1
A.M.
, I called the Four Seasons in Seattle. The operator said, “It’s past the time where we put calls through, sir.”

“She’ll talk to me.”

“Are you her husband?”

“Her boyfriend.”

“Well… actually, it looks like you’re going to have to leave a message. I’ve got her as out of her room, her voice mail’s engaged, here you go.”

She put me through. I hung up, trudged to bed, fell into something that might’ve been called sleep had it been restful, found myself sitting up at 6:30
A.M.
dry-mouthed and seeing double.

At seven, I phoned Milo. His voice was fuzzy, as if filtered through a hay bale.

“Yo, General Delaware,” he said, “isn’t it a little early for my field report?”

I told him what I’d learned about Caroline Cossack and Michael Larner.

“Jesus, I haven’t even brushed my teeth… okay, let me digest this. You figure this Larner did a favor for the Cossacks by stashing Caroline and they paid him back — what — fifteen years later? Not exactly immediate gratification.”

“There could’ve been other rewards along the way. Both Larner and the Cossacks were involved in independent film production.”

“You find any film link between them?”

“No, but—”

“No matter, I’ll buy a relationship between Larner and Caroline’s family. She was a screwy kid, and Larner ran a place for screwy kids. It says nothing about what got her in there in the first place.”

“The behavioral warning on her chart says plenty. My source says Caroline was the only one tagged. Anyway, do what you want with it.”

“Sure, thanks. You all right?”

Everyone kept asking me the same damn question. I forced amiability into my voice. “I’m fine.”

“You sound like me in the morning.”

“You rarely hear me this early.”

“That must be it. Behavioral warning, huh? But your source didn’t know why.”

“The assumption was some kind of antisocial or aggressive behavior. Add to that Dr. Schwartzman’s dead Akita, and a picture starts forming. A rich kid doing very bad things would explain a cover-up.”

“Your basic disturbed loner,” he said. “What would we homicide folk do without them?”

“Something else,” I said. “I was thinking maybe the reason Caroline never got a social security card was because eventually she did act out and ended up in—”

“Lockup. Yeah, I thought of that right after we talked. Stupid of me not to jump on that sooner. But, sorry, she’s not in any state penitentiary in the lower forty-eight, Hawaii or Alaska. I suppose it’s possible she’s stashed at some Federal pen, or maybe you were right about them shipping her to some nice little villa in Ibiza, sun-splashed exterior, padded walls. Know of anyone who’ll fund a fact-finding Mediterranean tour for a deserving detective?”

“Fill out a form and submit it to John G. Broussard.”

“Hey, gosharoo, why didn’t
I
think of that? Alex, thanks for your time.”

“But…”

“The whole thing is still dead-ending, just like twenty years ago. I’ve got no files, no notes to fall back on, can’t even locate Melinda Waters’s mother. And I was thinking about something: I gave Eileen Waters my card. If Melinda never returned home, wouldn’t she have called me back?”

“Maybe she did, and you never got the message. You were in West L.A., by then.”

“I got other calls,” he said. “Bullshit stuff. Central forwarded them to me.”

“Exactly.”

Silence. “Maybe. In any event, I can’t see anywhere to take it.”

“One more thing,” I said. I told him about Willie Burns, expected him to blow it off.

He said, “Willie Burns. Would he be around… forty by now?”

“Twenty or twenty-one, then, so yeah.”

“I knew a Willie Burns. He had a baby face,” he said. “Woulda been… twenty-three back then.” His voice had changed. Softer, lower. Focused.

“Who is he?” I said.

“Maybe no one,” he said. “Let me get back to you.”

He phoned two hours later sounding tight and distracted, as if someone was hovering nearby.

“Where are you?” I said.

“At my desk.”

“Thought you were taking vacation time.”

“There’s paper to clear.”

“Who’s Willie Burns?” I said.

“Let’s chat in person,” he said. “Do you have time? Sure, you do, you’re living the merry bachelor life. Meet me out in front of the station, let’s say half an hour.”

He was standing near the curb and hopped into the Seville before the car had come to a full stop.

“Where to?” I said.

“Anywhere.”

I continued up Butler, took a random turn, and cruised the modest residential streets that surround the West L.A. station. When I’d put half a mile between us and his desk, he said, “There is definitely a God and He’s jerking my chain. Payment for old sins.”

“What sins?”

“The worst one: failure.”

“Willie Burns is another cold one?”

“Willie Burns is an old
perp
on a cold one. Wilbert Lorenzo Burns, DOB forty-three and a half years ago, suspicion of homicide; I picked it up right after I transferred. And guess what, another file seems to have gone missing. But I did manage to find one of Burns’s old probation officers, and he came up with some old paper and there it was: Achievement House. Willie’d finagled a summer placement there, lasted less than a month, and was booted for absenteeism.”

“A homicide suspect and he’s working with problem teens?”

“Back then he was just a junkie and a dealer.”

“Same question.”

“Guess Willie never told him about his background.”

“Who’d he kill?”

“Bail bondsman name of Boris Nemerov. Ran his business right here in West L.A. Big, tough guy, but he sometimes had a soft heart for cons because he himself had spent some time in a Siberian gulag. You know how bail bonds work?”

“The accused puts up a percentage of the bail and leaves collateral. If he skips trial, the bondsman pays the court and confiscates the collateral.”

“Basically,” he said, “except generally the bondsman doesn’t actually pay the initial bail with his own money. He buys a policy from an insurance company for two to six percent of the total bail. To cover the premiums and make a profit, he collects a fee from the perp — usually ten percent, nonrefundable. If the perp goes fugitive, the insurance company shells out to the court and has the right to collect the collateral. Which is usually a piece of property — Grandma letting her beloved felon offspring tie up the cute little bungalow where she’s lived for two hundred years. But seizing the cottage from poor old Grandma takes time and money and gets bad press and what do insurance companies want with low-rent real estate? So they’d always rather have the perp in hand. That’s why they send out bounty hunters. Who take
their
cut.”

“Trickle-down economics,” I said. “Crime’s good for the GDP.”

“Boris Nemerov made out okay as a bondsman. Treated people like human beings and had a low skip rate. But he sometimes took risks — forgoing collateral, discounting his ten percent. He’d done that for Willie Burns because Burns was a habitual client who’d never let him down before. Last time Burns presented himself to Nemerov, he had no collateral.”

“What was the charge?”

“Dope. As usual. This was after he was fired at Achievement House and didn’t show up at his probation appointment. Up till then, Burns had been nonviolent, as far as I could tell. His juvey record began at age nine and it was sealed. His adult crime career commenced the moment he was old enough to be considered an adult: one week after his eighteenth birthday. Petty theft, drugs, more drugs. Yet more drugs. A whole bunch of plea bargains put him back on the street, then he finally had to stand trial and got probation. The last bust was more serious. Burns was caught trying to peddle heroin to some junkies on the Venice walkway. The junkie he picked was an undercover officer and the arrest came during one of those times when the department claimed to be fighting The War On Drugs. All of a sudden, Burns faced a ten-year sentence and the court imposed a fifty-thousand-dollar bond. Burns went to Boris Nemerov, as usual, and Nemerov posted for him and accepted Burns’s promise to work off the five grand. But this time, Burns skipped. Nemerov called around, trying to locate Burns’s family, friends, got zilch. The address Burns had listed was a parking lot in Watts. Nemerov started to get irritated.”

“Started?” I said. “Patient fellow.”

“Cold winters on the steppes can teach you patience. Eventually, Nemerov put the bounty hunters on Burns’s trail, but they got nowhere. Then out of the blue, Nemerov got a call from Burns. Guy claimed to want to give himself up but was scared the hunters were gonna shoot him in his tracks. Nemerov tried to put his mind at ease, but Burns was freaking out. Paranoid. Said people were after him. Nemerov agreed to pick up Burns personally. East of Robertson, near the 10 East overpass. Nemerov set out late at night in this big old gold Lincoln he used to tool around in, never came home. Mrs. Nemerov went crazy, Missing Persons prioritized it because Boris was well-known at the station. Two days later, the Lincoln was found in an alley behind an apartment on Guthrie, not far from the meeting place. Those days, the neighborhood was serious gang territory.”

“Meeting Burns alone there didn’t worry Nemerov?”

“Boris was self-confident. Big, jolly type. Probably thought he’d seen the worst and survived. The Lincoln was stripped and gutted and covered with branches — someone had made a half-baked attempt to conceal it. Boris was in the trunk, bound and gagged, three holes in the back of his head.”

“Execution,” I said.

“No good deed goes unpunished. Del Hardy and I got the case and worked it all the way to nowhere.”