Right finger.
“You can see the men now.”
She puckered her face. “Hairy Lip … other man turned around.”
“The third man is turned around. You see his back?”
Right finger.
“Can you see what the other men are wearing?”
Silence. “Father … white … down to ground.” Confused.
“Down to the ground. Long. Like a robe?”
Right finger.
“And the other men?”
“Dark … clothes.”
“Both of them?”
Right finger. “Dark outside. Too.”
“It’s dark outside and it’s hard to see. But you can see Father’s white robe and the lady’s white blouse. The other two men are wearing dark clothes.”
Another look of confusion. She pouted. “Ha-ard.”
“It’s okay, Lucy. Whatever you see is okay. Just tell me whatever you want to.”
She squinted, as if trying to focus. Tensed and sat up.
“Shovel … digging … Hairy Lip … Father holding the lady. Hairy Lip and the other man are digging. Digging fast, digging. Digging and digging. Digging. Father holding … heavy. Says ‘Heavy’ … ‘Hurry the hell up!’ Angry … puts her down.…”
She shook her head and sweat flew.
I dabbed her again. “Father put the lady down on the ground?”
Right finger.
“Digging … and digging and digging.… ‘Roll it.’ ” Her voice deepened. ‘Roll it, roll it!’ ”
“You’re watching it, Lucy. On the screen. You’re sa—”
Her fingernails dug into mine. The child’s voice returned. “Lady … gone. Lady gone! Lady gone! Lady gone!”
CHAPTER
25
She slipped into inert silence as I flipped the calendar pages back to the present.
Before I brought her completely out, I gave her posthypnotic suggestions to feel refreshed and successful and to be able to remember anything she’d seen that night while remaining relaxed.
She came out smiling and yawning. “I’m not sure what happened, but I feel pretty good.”
I had her stretch and walk around. Then I told her.
“Three men,” she said.
“You described one as having a hairy lip.”
She rubbed the rim of her water glass. “A mustache? I can’t really remember that—can’t remember anything—but that feels right. Hints of memories, distant but right. Am I making sense?”
“Perfect sense.”
“Can I go back under and try some more?”
“I think we’ve done enough.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“All right,” I said. “But promise me not to try anything by yourself before then.”
“I promise. Now can I see that picture of Karen?”
I went and got the clipping from the Shoreline Shopper.
The moment she looked at the photo her hands began to shake.
She took the paper from me, stared at it for a long time. As she began to read, her hands stilled. But the color had left her face and her freckles stood out like Braille dots.
Handing the clipping back to me, she nodded. Then she cried.
At four, I drove to the Sand Dollar. The film crew was there again and a blond beach goddess in a black thong bikini was posing on the sand with a sweating can of beer.
As I entered the restaurant, I spotted Doris Reingold at the bar. She got off her stool. “Hi, there.” After seating me near the window, she said, “Back in a jiff.”
I was the only customer in the place. The beach was unpopulated. A busboy brought me coffee and I watched the blonde smile on command, flipping her hair, turning herself slowly like a chicken on a spit.
“Good view?” said Doris, pad in hand.
“Hooray for Hollywood.”
She laughed. “Good to see you back. Early dinner? We just got in some fresh local halibut.”
“No, just a snack. What kind of pie do you have?”
“Lemme see.” She ticked her pad with her pen. “Today we’ve got apple and chocolate cream and, I think, pecan.”
“Apple with vanilla ice cream.”
She brought me a double wedge under two dollops of ice cream.
“Feel free to sit down,” I said.
She touched her gray hair. “Sure. Marvin’s not in for a while, why not?”
After pouring coffee for herself, she slid into the booth, the way she had the first time. Looking out at the blonde, she said, “Girl like that, gonna get herself one of two things: rich or in trouble.”
“Or both.” I cut into the pie.
“True,” she said. “One doesn’t eliminate the other. You have kids?”
“No, I’m not married.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. You know the definition of a bachelor? No kids—to speak of.”
We both chuckled.
I said, “You said you had two, right?”
“Two boys, both grown, both army master sergeants, both married with kids of their own. Their dad was an army man, too. I divorced him when they were little, but somehow it rubbed off.”
“Must have been tough raising them by yourself.”
“Wasn’t a picnic.” She freed her pack of cigarettes and lit up, then took in a mouthful of coffee. “Tell you what I do enjoy, being a grandmother. You buy them stuff, play with ’em, and then you go home.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Yeah, it’s great.” She smoked and stirred some sugar into her coffee.
“I’d like to have kids of my own,” I said.
“Why not, you’re young.”
“It’s a little scary. All those things that can go wrong. I used to work in a hospital, saw plenty of misery.”
“Yeah, there’s plenty of that.”
“I was over by your friends’ surf shop the other day and saw their son. Really sad.”
She appraised me, through the smoke. “What made you go there?”
“Needed some swim trunks. When I passed by I remembered your telling me about it. Nice place, but how’d they get a house on the beach with that?”
She shrugged and gave a sour look.
“Still,” I said. “That kid. No money in the world can make up for that. What is it, cerebral palsy?”
“Birth accident,” she said, but wariness had crept into her voice. “I think he twisted his neck coming out or something.”
“How old is he?”
“Sixteen or so. Yeah, it’s tough, but we’ve all got our crosses to bear, so why dwell on it?”
She kept smoking and pretending not to study me. I ate some more pie.
After dragging half her cigarette down, she put it in the ashtray and watched it smolder. “I do feel sorry for them. It’s a good example of what you just said—money and trouble.”
Looking at the film crew again, she said, “Why all the interest in Gwen and Tom, handsome?”
All friendliness gone from her voice.
“No particular interest. They just came up.”
“That so?”
“Sure. Is something the matter?”
She stared at me. “You tell me.”
I ate pie and smiled. “Everything’s fine with me.”
“You some kind of bill collector? Or a cop?”
“Neither.”
“What are you then?”
“What’s the matter, Doris?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’m a psychologist, just like I said. Are Gwen and Tom in some kind of trouble?”
She pocketed her smokes and her lighter and got up. Standing over me, one thigh pressing into the rim of the table, she smiled. To a casual observer she would have looked like a helpful waitress.
“You come on real friendly, and then you ease the conversation around to Tom and Gwen. That just seems a strange thing for a guy to talk to a gal about.”
Turning her back on me, she walked back to the ba
r. The restaurant was still empty.
I ate a few more bites of pie and then I saw her leave the restaurant. Throwing bills down on the table, I went after her.
She was heading for a shopworn red Camaro parked near the movie crew trucks. Cables were strewn across the parking lot, and one caught her heel and she went down. One of the grips picked her up, and other film people gathered around her. The blond model stopped posing.
I was within twenty feet of her when she saw me. She pointed and said something that made the people look at me as if I was slime on bone china.
A human knot closed around her, protectively.
I turned around, walking, not running, but when I made it to the Seville I was breathless.
I got in the car. No one had followed me but everyone was still looking at me. They kept on looking as I peeled out.
CHAPTER
26
I reached Milo at work and told him what had just happened. “Didn’t have a chance to get to Karen. Just talking about the Sheas—how they made their money—upset her.”
“Jealous?”
“There was some kind of hostility there. She wasn’t sympathetic about their having a kid with CP. What if she and the Sheas all got paid off to keep quiet about Karen, but the Sheas used it to build up a personal fortune and she blew it? I know it’s a big jump, but she did say she worked catering gigs for Gwen. If the Sanctum party was one of them, she could very well have been there.”
“Huge jump,” he said, “but I’ll see what I can find out about her. Meanwhile, stay away from there.”
“Something else: Lucy and I did hypnosis again, and this time there was no resistance. I age-regressed her back to four years old, and she was able to make out more details of the dream. Definitely two other men besides Lowell. One’s back was to her the whole time; the other had what she called a hairy lip, which I assume is a mustache. Trafficant wore a mustache and goatee, back then. Anything come up on him yet?”
“Haven’t learned a damn thing except he stopped filing tax returns the year he vanished. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t shown up in any major penal institutions. No death records either, but a guy like that would know how to work the system.”
“I tried to trace him through his publisher. No one seemed to remember him at all. I didn’t get the feeling they were trying to stonewall, just that he’d really faded from the scene.”
“Yeah. Well, for all we know he’s in Algeria or Cuba or something, still getting his royalty checks. Meanwhile, I’ve got something more immediate to deal with. Another copycat, discovered this morning. We’ve kept the media at bay, but you’ll see it on the eleven o’clock news. Fourteen-year-old kid named Nicolette Verdugo. Walking home from school yesterday, never showed up. Cal Trans crew found her at daybreak in a drainage ditch out in Diamond Bar, near the Orange County border.”
“Fourteen,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.”
He coughed and cleared his throat. “So now it’s a new task force, the FBI’s probably going to be called in, and guess who’s representing Angel City? When Shwandt’s lawyers find out about this, I promise you it’s war. But the whole thing stinks. Keep this confidential: Both Shannon and Nicolette were defecated on, but neither had any semen in or on or near them. Ejaculation was a major thing for Shwandt; sometimes he did it more than once on a victim. In fact, the only time he didn’t ejaculate was with Barbara Pryor, because he was too stoned to get an erection. Now why would someone pull off a first-rate copycat, cover all the details, and leave that out?”
“Someone who can’t ejaculate,” I said. “A woman? You think the Bogettes really could be behind it?”
“Who the hell knows? It’s pretty hard to imagine women butchering another woman that way, but Manson’s hags were pretty good with forks and knives. Problem is, how do we get close to them? There’s absolutely no grounds for warrants; all we can do is try to interview them, and if they say fuck you, as they did today, we say thank you, ladies, and go home. That leaves surveillance, and with their level of paranoia they’ll probably burrow deep underground. Anyway, it means eighteen-hour days for me. So do me a favor and keep an eye on Lucy. I’m not going to be much of a guardian angel.”
“Anything specific I should do?”
“Keep her away from her own apartment till I clear up that goddamn note. Given this new murder, I’d rather err by being too cautious. The turds, by the way, were of Rattus rattus origin—our little black scurrying pal. And speaking of rats, all I’ve been able to learn about Brother Puck was that he had some dealings a few years ago with a dope group from Montebello. Small-time buys and sells; then they handed him thirty grand to peddle to other junkies, and he got busted. After that they cut him off, and he’s been going to East L.A. for bits and pieces.”
“Who paid for his defense?”
“Haven’t found that out yet. If he comes back to town, I’ll have a little talk with him. Meanwhile, give Lucy my best.”
“One more thing,” I said. “I showed Karen’s picture to Lucy, and she’s sure Karen was the girl in the dream. It’s possible she’s confabulating—wishful thinking because she hates her father and is on a mission to learn the truth—but her reaction was pretty extreme: She went white, started shaking.”
“Your intuition tells you it’s genuine?”
“My intuition’s been rather quiet recently.”
“Mine, too, when it comes to her.”
“Maybe we can get corroboration of Karen’s presence at the party from someone who worked that night.”
“Someone who wasn’t paid off? You know, Alex, the more I think about it, the whole idea of payoffs doesn’t really cut it, logically. All you’ve got on the Sheas is that Best doesn’t like the look in their eyes and they were lucky enough to make some money over a twenty-year period. All you’ve got on Doris is she doesn’t like the Sheas. No indication of any collusion. If something happened that the three of them and Felix Barnard found out about, what’s the theory? The whole bunch of them put the arm on Lowell or Trafficant or whoever had something to hide? And if Barnard’s death was tied in with blackmail, why would the others be allowed to live?”
“They didn’t break the rules; Barnard did.”
“Still, to leave all those loose ends for so long? People living down the road from you knowing you were involved in killing a girl?”
“Maybe they didn’t know the gory details. Just that Karen was last seen at the party. Lowell could have told them she had a bad drug trip and left early, something like that.”
“So why pay them off?”
“To avoid bad publicity for Sanctum. Trafficant’s presence had already created controversy. Trafficant killing Karen would have finished Lowell off.”
“So who’s our corroborator, some other server? What do we have here, a whole platoon of people who knew Karen had worked the party? With Best looking for her obsessively, all those fliers he put up, cornering people at the shopping center, you mean to tell me no one came forward?”
“They might not have if they really didn’t believe she’d been harmed. What if the other servers were told she’d run off with a boyfriend and didn’t want to be found? Or that Best was an abusive father and Karen was scared to death of him? Maybe spinning that yarn was what the Sheas got paid for. Which would make them collaborators and help ensure their silence.”
“A yarn,” he said.
“Convincing young people it was true wouldn’t have been too hard. Remember the times: Don’t trust anyone over thirty.”
“Maybe,” he said doubtfully.
“Locating the other servers would help,” I said. “Especially those other women from the Dollar—Andreas and Billings.”
“Nothing on them yet, and I can’t promise you I’ll have time to do a comprehensive in the near future. So do me a favor and don’t launch Lucy on any trajectory you can’t control. Keep yourself safe, too. I’ve got enough to worry about.”
CHAPTER
27
A
warm quiet morning, lit by a primrose-yellow sun. Hypnosis session number three. Induction was effortless. Within minutes Lucy was four years old and watching herself wander through the forest.
Once again, Hairy Lip’s and Lowell’s faces were visible, but the third man kept his back to her and she could produce nothing more about him.
I questioned her more about the mustache.
“Is the hair on his lip dark or blond?”
She looked confused.
“Is Hairy Lip’s hair brown, Lucy?”
“Don’t … know.”
“Is it blond—yellow?”
Consternation.
“The hairy lip, is it just a mustache—is the hair only on the top lip? Or does he have a beard, hair all over his face?”
“Um …” Shrug. “Hairy lip.”
“Just a hairy lip?”
Shrug.
When she came out, I reviewed what she’d told me.
“Didn’t do very well this time, did I?”
“You did fine. It’s not a performance.”
She knuckled her forehead. “I know it’s all in here. Why can’t I bring it out?”
“Maybe there’s nothing else to remember. You’re seeing things the way you saw them then. Through a four-year-old’s eyes. Certain concepts wouldn’t have been available to you.”
“I was so excited about today, I thought we’d make real progress.”
“Give it time, maybe more will come out.”
I let her sit quietly for a while.
“Actually,” she said, “there was something. The trees where they buried her. I noticed something about them but you didn’t ask me so I couldn’t tell you—didn’t have the words.” Her eyes closed. “The image keeps coming back to me. Lacy.”
“Lacy trees?”
Nod.
“What kind?”
She frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Just that they were lacy.”
“And pretty. It’s like”—her eyes opened—“I guess what you said was true. I didn’t have the word ‘lacy’ when I was four, so I couldn’t put it into words. But now that I’m an adult again, it came back to me. Pretty, lacy trees. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
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