“Excuse me,” I said, “was the Corrective School once across the street?”
Scowl. “That’s right.” He turned to leave.
“How long has it been gone?”
“Quite a while. Why?”
“I just had a few questions about it.”
He put his briefcase down and peered into the car. “Are you an … alumnus?”
“No.”
He looked relieved.
“Do alumni come back frequently?” I said.
“No, not frequently, but … you do know what kind of school it was.”
“Troubled children.”
“A bad lot. We were never happy with it—we were here first, you know. My father broke ground thirty years before they came.”
“Really.”
“We were here before most of the houses. This was all agricultural back then.”
“Did the students from the Corrective School cause problems?”
“And what’s your interest in that?”
“I’m a psychologist,” I said, and gave him a card. “I’m doing some consulting to the Los Angeles Police Department, and there’s some evidence one of the alumni is involved in something unpleasant.”
“Something unpleasant. Well, that’s not much of a surprise, is it?” He scowled again. His eyebrows were bushy, low-set, and still dark, giving him a look of perpetual annoyance. “What kind of unpleasantness?”
“I’m sorry but I can’t go into detail—is it Mr. Bancroft?”
“It certainly is.” He produced a card of his own, white, heavy stock, a heraldic shield in one corner.
The Bancroft School
Est. 1933 by Col. C. H. Bancroft (Ret.)
“Building Scholarship and Character”
Condon H. Bancroft, Jr., B.A., M.A., Headmaster
“By unpleasant do you mean criminal?” he said.
“It’s possible.”
He gave a knowing nod.
I said, “Why did the place close down?”
“He died—the Frenchman—and no one was left to run it. It’s an art, education.”
“Didn’t he have a daughter?”
His eyebrows arched. “She offered me the place, but I turned her down. Error on my part—I should have done it for the land alone. Now they’ve come and built those.” He cast a glare at the stone wall.
“They?”
“Some sort of foreign group. Asians, of course. She offered me all of it, lock, stock. But she wanted an outlandish amount of money and refused to negotiate. For them, money’s no object.”
“She’s still here in town, isn’t she?”
“She’s in Santa Barbara,” he said.
I wondered where he thought he was, then I answered my own question: Montecito wannabee.
“This unpleasantness,” he said. “It isn’t anything that would—impinge upon my school, is it? I don’t want publicity, the police traipsing around.”
“Did de Bosch’s students ever impinge?”
“No, because I made sure they didn’t. For all practical purposes, this property line was as impermeable as the Berlin Wall.” He drew a line in the gravel with the toe of one wingtip. “Some of them had been to reform school. Fire setters, bullies, truants—all sorts of miscreants.”
“Must have been difficult being this close.”
“No, it wasn’t difficult,” he reprimanded. “If they chanced to wander, I sent them hopping right back.”
“So you never had any problems?”
“Noise was a problem. There was always too much noise. The only untoward thing occurred after they were gone. One of them showed up and made quite a nuisance of himself.” Smile. “His condition didn’t speak well of the Frenchman’s methods.”
“What condition was that?”
“A tramp,” he said. “Unwashed, uncombed, high on drugs—his eyes had that look.”
“How do you know he was an alumnus?”
“Because he told me he was. Said it in those words: ‘I’m an alumnus.’ As if that should have impressed me.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Quite a while—let’s see, I was interviewing the Crummer boy. The youngest one, and he applied around … ten years ago.”
“And how old was this tramp?”
“Twenties. A real churl. He barged right into my office, past my secretary. I was interviewing young Crummer and his parents—a fine family, the elder boys had attended Bancroft quite successfully. The scene he created dissuaded them from sending the youngest lad here.”
“What did he want?”
“Where was the school? What had happened to it? Raising his voice and creating a scene—poor Mrs. Crummer. I thought I’d have to call the police, but I was finally able to convince him to leave by telling him the Frenchman was long dead.”
“That satisfied him?”
The eyebrows dipped. “I don’t know what it did to him but he left. Lucky for him—I’d had my fill.” A big fist shook. “He was insane—must have been on drugs.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Dirty, uncombed—what’s the difference? And he didn’t have a car, he walked away on foot—I watched him. Probably on his way to the highway. God help anyone who picked him up.”
He watched me leave, too, standing with his arms folded across his chest as I drove away. I realized I hadn’t heard or seen any children at his school.
Bullies and fire setters. A tramp in his twenties.
Trying to dig up the past.
The same man who’d called Harrison?
Merino.
Silk. A thing for fabrics.
Hewitt and Gritz, two tramps who would have been in their twenties back then.
Myra Paprock was killed five years ago. Two years after that, Shipler. Then Lerner. Then Stoumen. Was Rosenblatt still alive?
Katarina was, just a few miles up this beautiful road. That gave us something in common.
I was ready to talk to her.
Cabrillo Boulevard swept up past the ocean, cleansed of the weekend tourist swarm and the bad sidewalk art. The wharf looked depopulated and its far end disappeared in a bank of fog. A few cyclists pumped in the bike lane and joggers and speed walkers chased immortality. I passed the big new hotels that commandeered the prime ocean views and the motels that followed them like afterthoughts. Passed a small seafood place where Robin and I had eaten shrimp and drunk beer. People were eating there now, laughing, tan.
Santa Barbara was a beautiful place, but sometimes it spooked me. Too much psychic space between the haves and the have-nots and not enough geography. A walk up State Street took you from welfare hotels and mean bars to custom jewelers, custom tailors, and two-bucks-a-scoop ice cream. The fringes of Isla Vista and Goleta were as hard as any inner city, but Montecito was still a place where people ate cake. Sometimes the tension seemed murderous.
I pictured Andres de Bosch trolling lower State for day laborers. His daughter listening and laughing as he dehumanized those he’d found.…
Cabrillo climbed higher and emptied of pedestrians, and I caught an eyeful of endless Pacific. Sailboats were out in force at the marina, most of them floundering as they searched for a tailwind. Nearer to the horizon, fishing scows sat, still as artist’s models. The boulevard flattened once again, turned into Shoreline and got residential. I began checking the numbers on the curb.
Most of the houses were fifties rancheros, several of them in renovation. I remembered the neighborhood as well planted. Today, lots of the plants were gone, and the ones that remained looked discouraged. The drought had come hard to this town kissed by salt water.
The lawns were suffering the most, most of them dead or dying. A few were vivid green—too green.
Spray paint.
Santa Barbara, trying to free itself from dependence on Sierra snowpack, had declared mandatory rationing long before L.A. Now the town was returning to desert, but the addiction to emerald was hard to shake.
I reached Katarina�
�s house. Older than its neighbors and considerably smaller, a pale blue, English country cottage with two turrets, a slate roof that needed mending, and a big dirt expanse in front. A privet hedge rimmed the plot, uneven, and picked apart in spots. What had once been a rose garden was now a collection of trellised sticks.
An old-fashioned wire-link gate was fastened across an asphalt driveway, but as I pulled up I could see it was unlocked. I got out and pushed it open and walked up the drive. The asphalt was old and cracked, stretching a hundred feet to the tail end of a small, Japanese car.
Drapes whited all the windows of the house. The front door was paneled oak, its varnish bubbling, a NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sticker affixed just below the lion’s head knocker. Below that was another one, bearing the name of an alarm company.
I rang the bell. Waited. Did it again. Waited some more. Used the lion. Nothing.
No one was around. I could hear the ocean.
I went around the side, past the little white car and a high-peaked garage with sagging swivel doors left half open. The backyard was twice the size of the front plot and denuded. The borders with its neighbors were obscured by thick plantings of dead citrus and dead avocado. On the ground were shapeless patches of lifeless shrubbery. Even the weeds were struggling.
But a couple of giant pines toward the back had survived nicely, their roots deep enough to tap into groundwater. Their trunks yearned for the ragged cliff that overlooked the beach. Through their boughs, the ocean was gray lacquer. The property was at least a hundred feet up, but the tide was a drum roll, loud enough to block out every other sound.
I looked at the rear of the house. Buttoned up and curtained. Near the cliff was an old redwood table and two chairs, guano specked and faded to ash. But half of the table was covered with a white tablecloth, and on the cloth were a cup and saucer and a plate.
I walked over. Coffee dregs in the cup, crumbs on the plate, and an orange smear that looked like ossified marmalade.
The ocean grumbled and seabirds shrieked in response. I walked to the edge of the cliff. To the spot where Katarina had photographed her father, slumped in his wheelchair.
Dry dirt. No fence, easy fall. I peered over and a splinter of vertigo pierced my chest. When it subsided, I looked over again. The hillside was gouged with erosion—giant fingermarks that traced a dead drop down to the rocky beach.
The gulls screamed again—a reprimand that reminded me I was trespassing.
The coffee and crumbs said Katarina was in town. Probably gone out for an errand.
I could wait here, but the more efficient thing would be to call Milo and catch him up on Becky Basille’s notes, Harrison, and Bancroft.
As I started to leave, I passed the garage once again and saw the rear end of another car, parked in front of the little white sedan. Bigger and darker—black. The distinctive vertical slash taillights of a Buick Electra. Same car I’d seen at the front of the hospital, in seventy-nine.
Something near the rear tire.
Fingers. White and thin. A hand, the top speckled by an eczematous rash.
No, another kind of speckling.
Darker than eczema.
She was lying on the cement floor, faceup, parallel to the Buick, nearly concealed under the chassis. The other hand was over her head, palm exposed, gouged with deep cuts. Tendons looped from some of the wounds, limp as tired elastic bands.
Defense cuts.
She had on a pink housedress under a white terry cloth robe. The robe was splayed open and the dress was pushed up past her waist, nearly reaching her chin. Her feet were bare, the soles grimed by garage dirt. Her eyeglasses were a few feet away, one of the sidepieces twisted nearly off, one of the lenses cracked.
Her neck was cut, too, but most of the damage had been done to her abdomen. It was black and red—ripped apart, a jumble of viscera—but oddly bloated.
The vertigo returned. I wheeled around, then checked my back. I faced the body again and felt myself grow weirdly calm. Time slowed and an internal rush and roar filled my head, as if the ocean had been transplanted there.
Something missing. Where was the inevitable message?
I forced myself to look for red letters.
Searching for two words … nothing. Nothing in the garage but the car and Katarina and a small metal workbench off to one side, backed by a pegboard panel.
A workbench like Robin’s, but cluttered with paint cans, tools, gluepots, jars of shellac. Hanging from the pegboard, hooks bearing hammers, gouges, chisels—one of the chisel hooks empty.
A knife on the table, its blade glazed red.
Birchwood handle. Wide tapered blade. Everything glazed … the bench stained, but no words, just a spatter of stains.
Old paint blotches. New ones. All mixed in with the telltale red-brown.
Dribs and droplets but no proclamation.
Something white underneath the handle of the killing tool.
A scrap of paper. Not white—almost white, beige. A nice, classy shade of ecru.
Business card.
Confident-looking brown letters said:
SDI, Inc.
9817 Wilshire Boulevard
Suite 1233
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
Something else.
In the upper right.
Tiny.
Hand printed by ballpoint.
Printed neatly, the characters identical to the lettering on my tape package.
So much pressure on the pen that the stiff paper had been torn through in spots.
BL!
CHAPTER
22
I ran down the driveway, threw myself into the car, and sped down to the marina. There was a pay phone on the boat moorings, near some trash cans. The stench was welcome.
I tried Robin again. Still no answer.
A detective at West L.A. Robbery-Homicide said, “He’s not in.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“Sorry, don’t know where he is.”
“Maybe he’s out in his car,” I said. “Could you try radioing him?”
His voice hardened: “Who is this?”
“Assistant Chief Murchison,” I said without thinking, marveling at the ease of the lie.
Second of silence. Something that might have been a gulp. “One moment, sir.”
Thirty seconds later: “Sturgis.”
“It’s me, Milo—”
Pause.
“Alex,” I said.
“You palmed yourself off as Murchison?”
“Katarina’s dead. I just found her body.” I gave him the details, describing the crime scene in a rapid word storm. The card with the “bad love” message.
“Same printing as the package the tape came in.”
“SDI,” he said.
“It’s right there in Beverly Hills. Maybe he chose to use it for the message for a reason.”
“SDI … sure as hell not the Strategic Defense Initiative.”
“Could you check on Robin? I know the place is secure, but the killer’s picking up speed, and the idea of her being alone up there … I tried calling her twice, but she’s not in.”
“Probably went out to do some shopping, but I’ll stop by.”
“Thanks. What do I do now? I haven’t even called the local police yet.”
“Where are you?”
“Pay phone, a few minutes from the house.”
“Okay, go back there. Stay away from the actual crime scene and just wait. I’ll call Santa Barbara PD, tell ’em you’re kosher, then I’ll head up there myself—what time is it?—three-thirty … I should be there by six, the latest.”
I waited near the cliff, as far from the garage as I could be. Staring at the ocean, inhaling brine, and trying to make sense of things.
Two young uniforms showed up first. One stayed with the body and the other took a superficial report from me—name, rank, serial number, time and place—listening courteously and just a bit suspiciously.
Twenty minutes lat
er, a pair of detectives arrived. One was a woman named Sarah Grayson, tall, slim, attractive, in her forties. Her eyes were slightly slanted, colored an even brown. They moved slowly but frequently. Taking things in. Reserving judgment.
Her partner was a big, heavy man named Steen, with a bushy dark mustache and not much hair on top. He went straight into the garage and left me to Grayson.
Somehow we’d ended up back near the cliff edge. I told her tape recorder everything I knew, and she listened without interruption. Then she pointed at the water and said, “There’s a seal flipping around out there.”
I followed her arm and made out a small black dot, ten breaststrokes from the tideline, cutting a perpendicular line through the breakwaters.
“Or a sea lion,” she said. “Those are the ones with the ears, right?”
I shrugged.
“Let’s go over it again, doctor.”
When I finished, she said, “So you were looking for Dr. de Bosch to warn her about this revenge nut?”
“That, and I wanted to find out if she could tell me anything about why he’s out for revenge.”
“And you think it has something to do with this school?”
“She and her father ran it. It’s the only thing I can come up with.”
“What was the exact name of the school?” she said.
“The de Bosch Institute and Corrective School. It closed in eighty-one.”
“And you thought she’d know what happened because she was the owner’s daughter.”
I nodded and looked at the rear of the house. “There could be records in there. Therapy notes, something about an incident that traumatized one of the students enough to set him off years later.”
“What kind of students went to this school?”
“Emotionally disturbed. Mr. Bancroft, the owner of the school across the street, described them as antisocial—fire setters, truants, and other miscreants.”
She smiled. “I know Mr. Bancroft. So when do you think this traumatic episode might have occurred?”
“Some time before nineteen seventy-nine.”
“Because of that conference?”
“That’s right.”
She thought for a while. “And how long was the school around?”
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