by Ava Barry
When we finished, Thierry wiped his hands with a napkin and pointed at me. “It’s back by tonight,” he said. “Or you never ask me for a favor again.”
I raised my hands. “You got it.”
“My client by the reservoir asked me to stop by early,” he said. “Gotta go soon.”
I cleared my throat. “You still going to take me to see that collector today?”
“You think that’s still on the table? After that shit you pulled?”
“C’mon, T.”
“I can’t take you anywhere. You got sticky fingers.”
I raised my hands. “Think of this as getting me out of your hair,” I said. “I make the connection between Theo and Eleanor’s death, you’ll never have to do me a favor again. I’ll be doing you favors.”
He looked at me skeptically.
“Otherwise I’m going to be some unemployed would-be writer, always knocking on your door and asking for handouts—”
He waved the comment away. “Jesus,” he said. “Wait for me in Silver Lake. I’ll call you when I’m heading over. Gotta go see this other client first.”
* * *
Two hours later, I was hunched over a lukewarm cup of coffee in a cute little café in Silver Lake, still waiting for Thierry. I was itching to meet up with Thierry’s lead, but when Thierry made up his mind to go at his own pace, there was no rushing him.
I didn’t know how much money Thierry’s lead wanted for their information, but I had stopped at the ATM to get some cash, just in case. The machine had outright rejected my request to take out three hundred dollars, then balked as I dropped down in increments of twenty. A line of people formed behind me as I took my card out and inserted it again and again, and finally managed to take out two hundred dollars.
Not wanting to spend more than five dollars while I waited for Thierry to show up, I had ordered an eight-ounce drip coffee and mentally calculated how I was going to afford to eat for the next two weeks.
I was idly scrolling through the list of Leland’s Ben contacts when a text message appeared on my phone. It was from a number I didn’t recognize, but I opened it anyway.
Call me as soon as you get this - Petra
My thumb was over the “call” button when the door of the coffee shop opened and Thierry came bursting in. He glanced around and then spotted me.
“Come on, let’s go, what are you waiting for?” he said, coming over to clap a hand on my shoulder. “I told this guy we’d be at his house an hour ago.”
“You mind if I make a quick call?”
“Yes, I mind,” he said. “Let’s get going. I’ll drive, you can’t navigate for shit.”
“T, this is important.”
“I’m not your fucking secretary, waiting around for you to make phone calls. Either we’re leaving or I’m leaving.”
“What does this guy have, anyway?” I said, getting to my feet. “I don’t want to buy crockery or pillowcases.”
“Nah, it’s not pillowcases,” he said. “The guy’s wife was some kind of crime fanatic. She had some stuff that came from the crime scene, that’s what the guy said on the phone.”
The house was only a few blocks away, in a quiet neighborhood of sloping streets and comfortable, sagging Craftsmans. Thierry parked outside a narrow brick building in a row of shops touting vintage wear. The building’s bottom floor was a little coffee shop with gold lettering in the window, and there was a community garden next door.
“Try to be sensitive,” Thierry said, as we walked toward the building. I could see that he was still irritated with me, but I knew that he would cool off in an hour or so. “This guy’s wife just died. He’s selling off some of their stuff.”
An upstairs window opened, and someone whistled.
“Up here,” called a man, and I looked up to see a waving hand. “Come up the stairs in back.”
At the top of the stairs we were met by a thin blond man with a bow tie. His outfit was straight out of the 1950s: suspenders, knit tie, vest tucked into gray wool pants. There was something a bit disheveled about him, though, and I wondered if he had fallen asleep in his clothing. He shook hands with Thierry, and then with me.
“Kent.”
“This is Max Hailey,” Thierry said.
“Thanks for meeting with us,” I said.
“Not a problem.”
The apartment was small and cozy. Old hardwood floors stretched the length of the space, and a bookshelf was decorated with narrow, wooden shoes. Kent saw me looking at them and nodded.
“Lasts,” he said. “For shoes.”
The home had a warm feeling about it, and it was also slightly anachronistic, in a very pleasing way. The sound of ticking clocks filled the air, and framed vintage maps decorated the walls. There were no television screens or modern gadgets available, not even a microwave.
“You make shoes?”
“This whole building belonged to a cobbler,” he said. “Very successful business in the early days of Hollywood, but he ran out of clients in the eighties. Nice old man.”
“And he lived up here?”
“It’s sad, you know? People want to buy cheap these days. They just go to the mall and buy Adidas, things that will wear out in a year’s time. You want something that will last, you have to pay good money for it.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your wife,” I said.
He nodded and looked out the window. Then, “I hear you’re interested in Langley stuff?”
“Always have been.” I thumbed my phone anxiously, wondering what Petra wanted to talk about. “So, what do you have? Thierry said your wife had something from the crime scene?”
“I think so, but I’m no expert,” he said. “My wife was into all those murder stories, loved to collect crazy deaths and ghost stories. She would take rocks and stuff from murder scenes. Kept them labeled in jars. I have a box of stuff. I want to get rid of it. Too many creepy memories. It was one of her hobbies I never understood.”
Thierry and I followed Kent through the apartment, which was nicely illuminated in the afternoon sunlight. I discreetly looked at my phone again, in case Petra had texted, but there were no new messages. We emerged in a cramped office at the back of the apartment.
“Here it is,” Kent said, lifting the flap of a cardboard box. “The silver’s gotta be worth something, but I don’t know about the rest of this junk.”
I picked up a salad fork and tilted it under the light. The tines were mottled with age, but the W etched into the bottom was unmistakable. A slight chill ran through my fingertips, and I could imagine a dinner party at Windhall from years before.
“How did your wife get this stuff?” I asked.
“She was a collector,” Kent said, and shrugged. “She had some of Nicole Simpson’s old shirts, too. She got a lot of it on eBay, thought it was all going to be worth a fortune someday.”
“And this is all from Windhall?” I asked, looking into the box. There were some more pieces of silverware, a pair of cups and saucers, even a few broken-up pieces of wood.
“You bet. My wife always thought Theo was innocent, though. Thought he was framed. She had all these theories about how the film industry was changing and the old players were getting thrown under the bus.”
I thought about telling him that his wife was wrong, but it seemed cruel under the circumstances: the man was clearly still grieving. I had also been having trouble shaking the feeling of doubt that lingered in my mind since watching the magician’s film reel.
Under a set of empty frames was a teapot and matching saucers. I skipped over the tea set and pulled out a tarnished locket. “What’s this?”
“Oh, that’s kind of creepy,” he said. “There’s a lock of Eleanor’s hair in it. Some kind of old Victorian custom.”
Another box of worthless stuff. “I appreciate you taking the time to show us this stuff,” I said. “It’s not really what I’m looking for, though.”
Thierry scratched his head and appealed to the man. “Don’t you h
ave a bloody knife, something a bit more crime-scene related?”
“Not that I know of,” Kent replied.
“Thierry, I can’t use this,” I told my friend.
“These are good teacups,” Kent offered, then looked stumped. His face brightened, and he snapped his fingers. “Oh! There’s one more thing.”
He vanished from the room, and Thierry turned to look at me.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I shrugged, uncomfortable, then scratched my neck. “Most of this looks like mementos.” And I’m fucking broke.
Kent returned, carrying a beat-up leather satchel. “This belonged to Theo,” he said. “Who knows what it might contain? An unfinished screenplay, perhaps some important papers.”
“Open it up, let’s see what’s inside,” I said.
“I’ve got no idea where the key is. You can take it home and cut the thing open.”
The leather was stiff and damaged with mold, and the lock was rusted shut.
“If there’s a key, it’s in the box with the teacups,” Kent went on. I could tell that he was starting to get impatient.
“How do you know it was Theo’s?”
“What else does T.L. stand for?” He took the satchel and pointed to a tiny, faded monogram on the front of the satchel. “Theo Langley. Theodore, whatever his name was.”
The idea was probably too good to be true. But if Theo had left Los Angeles very quickly, there was a possibility that he had left a lot of valuable stuff behind. An unfinished script might not be enough material for a front-page article, but it could at least be enough to get a conversation started with Theo.
“You’re selling everything together?” I asked.
“Sure, the bag, the silverware, you can take it all,” Kent said. “Let’s call it three hundred.”
“Dollars?” I glanced at Thierry, who shrugged.
“It’s probably worth more than that,” he said. “I’m eager to get rid of all this stuff. A lot of bad energy I don’t need.”
“Let’s call it two hundred.”
“Ahh… two fifty.”
“I don’t have a cent above two hundred,” I said.
“Right, they never do.” Kent rolled his eyes and then gave me an impatient gesture. “All right, two hundred. It’s yours.”
* * *
I waited until we were in the driveway before I turned to look at Thierry. He was shaking his head and grinning in disbelief.
“You’re a shit hard bargainer,” he said. “Nice bluff.”
“It wasn’t a bluff, but thanks.” I thought wistfully of my last two hundred dollars, and the unpaid mortgage popped back into my head.
“You know those are Meissen teacups, right? A whole set could be worth something like three grand. Your boy Theo has taste.”
“Tell you what,” I said, lifting the cups from the box. “Take the cups and we’ll call it even. Thanks for your lead.”
“You’re ripping yourself off, you have to know that.”
“I could care less about cups,” I said. “I’m after a big fish, and this time, I’m not going to let him go.”
SEVEN
As soon as I got home, I called Petra.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m just leaving the office.”
“What was that text about?”
“You know about the second dead girl?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “What does that have to do with me?”
I could hear her shifting something, and then a car door closed. “Brian met with Alexa Levine today,” she said. “He’s going to write the story himself.”
“Which story?”
“The Langley story,” she said. “Brian’s going to write about the connection between Eleanor’s murder and the murder of these two girls.”
“Like hell he is! That was my angle!”
“I’m sure a lot of people have drawn the same conclusion, Hailey.” I could hear the sounds of Hollywood in the background, cars and arguing. A snatch of music played. “He did say something about Theo returning to Los Angeles, though. Weren’t you the one who told him that?”
I rubbed my eyes. “What did Alexa say?”
“She’s interested. I only heard part of their conversation.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Windhall has always fascinated me,” she said. “And I’ve been following your pieces for a few years. When I got a job working for the Lens, I didn’t think it would be quite like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like the rest of Hollywood,” she said.
“Is this your first job in Los Angeles?”
“Not even close.”
“Look, I appreciate the call,” I said. “Thanks for looking out for me. I’m not really in a position to help you, though. I’m on my way out. My contract’s almost up.”
“Maybe I could help you. We could research this story together.”
“Thanks, but no. I always write my stories alone.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
After hanging up with Petra, I went to my office in the greenhouse out back, taking the box of artifacts with me. When I inherited the house, one of my first orders of business had been to clean out the greenhouse and convert it into my office. It held some fond memories for me, because after my time in the hospital, I had moved in with Gran, and she would potter around in the greenhouse, smoking cigarettes and poking at various plants. She didn’t have any real talent for gardening, and most of the time, plants would grow for an inch or so before withering and dying. But her lack of talent didn’t seem to bother her. She’d go on watering plants that had died months before as though she never even noticed their shriveled stalks.
As such, the greenhouse had been filled with clutter when I inherited it. The shelves were lined with cracked terra-cotta pots, the tables in the back held one or two dusty urns, and half a dozen broken lattices were leaned up against the walls. I had spent three days emptying pots filled with dirt and scabbed algae, then lost a week scrubbing mold off the windows. I’d salvaged one or two glazed pots, which I’d repurposed for Kentia palms.
With Madeleine’s help, I’d taken out the old flagstone floor and replaced it with brick, then removed all the cracked panes of glass and moved my grandmother’s kilim rug collection into the newly renovated space. From then on, it was my office, and I spent more time in there than in any other part of my house.
Settling in at my desk, the large wooden table that had once held my grandmother’s plants, I thought about how it wasn’t the first time I had seen things from Windhall. But if everything had really come out of Theo’s house, then it was the biggest single collection that I had come across so far. Most of the items I had seen in the past were offered like illicit goods, because that’s what they were: a pilfered fork, a napkin stitched with the Windhall monogram, a book discreetly tucked into the pocket of a onetime dinner guest. Each item was interesting in its own right, but they were all one-dimensional: none of the items did anything to illuminate the bigger picture, or give me an idea of what life at Windhall was like.
I should have been more excited about the haul, but the news about Brian stealing my story had taken the wind out of my sails. Now, sitting at my table in the greenhouse, staring at a pile of lifeless objects, I felt hopeless. I had been chasing a fantasy for years, and I had finally run out of time. If losing my writing contract didn’t signify that, then the crumbling roof and the rotten foundations of my grandmother’s house certainly did.
I picked up one of the Windhall forks and then reached over and picked up the locket. Keeping hair in a necklace was definitely a spooky old Victorian custom, but it wasn’t the first time I had seen it. There was a store on Melrose that specialized in strange old memorabilia, and they had drawers full of them. As I picked up items and set them out on my desk, I remembered the satchel. I had left it in my car.
It was unlikely that the satchel would contain an
ything of value. Working with Thierry had taught me all the old tricks: a con artist, some distant member of the family, would arrive before Thierry and his team got in. He’d slip a decent knockoff of a lesser-known work of art in with the rest of the garbage, and he’d materialize just as Thierry and his team were discovering it. One of the crew might notice it and estimate some value, but the con artist would insist that it wasn’t worth anything. This denial would only make Thierry’s guy more certain, and he’d work himself up into a state of excitement, thinking of the commission. Sometimes, there was even a headline to go along with it: LOST WORK OF ART FOUND IN HOARDER’S BASEMENT. You can imagine what the auction would be like.
Since Thierry knew his Caillebottes from his Morisots, he was always able to nip these scams in the bud, but he hadn’t examined the satchel. And he didn’t know that much about Theo, so I was going to have to rely on my own judgment about the provenance of the satchel.
Once I returned to the desk in my office, I brought the lamp over and examined the bag. It was good-quality leather, probably bespoke, and still intact, despite all the mold and ill treatment. I tested the seams. It was a solid piece of workmanship, which meant that I was going to have to force the lock if I didn’t want to destroy it to get inside.
Before I turned my attention to the lock, I rooted around in the box to ensure that the key was really missing. My search didn’t turn anything up, and I doubted that a key would have made a difference anyway: the lock was so rusty that it seemed unlikely that a key would have been able to open it.
The satchel had a leather flap held down by twin buckles. The lock holding it shut was in between them, stitched into the main flap and the base underneath. After picking at the lock for a few minutes with a screwdriver, I abandoned the project and grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors.
I cut a small section from the top flap and freed the satchel from its lock. The buckles on either side of the lock were rusted shut, but I was able to get them open without destroying the bag further. I gently opened the main flap, then looked inside.
There was a bit of ink on the inside edge of the flap, as though a pen had leaked on the leather and the owner had never managed to get it out. I picked through the rest of the satchel—it was filled with writing implements, pens and a moldy pad of paper, some personal memorabilia, and a few coins. I took out an old set of keys and put them to the side; I would try to figure out what they opened some other time.