The last photo showed only Lt. Frost, in uniform this time, and the two boys, looking about nine years old, but no Mom. Each of their faces wore a glum expression, but not so much so that I could not easily recognize the kids I knew as Burton and Taylor Frost.
This was the proof of Alan Kleinbach’s suspicions; there were two sets of twins. Kleinbach was the father of one set, and Randall Frost was the father of the other set.
I flipped the picture over to see if there was any kind of notation on the back. Nothing was written there, but something was printed in tiny lettering. It proved to be the developer’s notation of the date: AUG 96.
Whoa…that couldn’t be right.
I turned the photo over again, and then back to the date. August, 1996 was what it said; fifteen years ago. Yet the boys looked about eight or nine. How was that possible?
Anything’s possible in Hollywood, a strange high-pitched voice said in my head. Even though I recognized it, it took a few seconds for the meaning to register. “Oh, sheez,” I uttered to the empty house. “Oh, no!”
But yes, that explained everything. What was that old Sherlock Holmes wheeze about how if you get rid of every impossible explanation, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, had to be the solution? What I was thinking now was improbable, to be sure, but it was not impossible. Proof of that was the voice that had clued me in, that of perennial child actor Willy Lipton, the guy who Mac at Edendale Video discovered had played a role in The Mummy, but whose regular gig was playing adolescents, even into his sixties, because of his physical condition. That took care of the impossibility. This photo proved the probability.
I picked the paperwork back up from the private hospital in Sierra Madre, and studied it more closely, now searching for words like hormone or growth treatment. That was only possible way those two kids could look twelve today and only slightly younger fifteen years ago…they were really adults. They were adults with some sort of affliction that kept them looking like kids, like Willy Lipton or Gary Coleman. This also explained why a porn producer would dare to use them in a film. It was because they were legal adults who looked like children; which while squirm-inducing, was not illegal. It also potentially answered the question of Burton and Taylor’s abduction: they had not been abducted at all; they simply took off, because they were really old enough to drive. But if that were the case, it could mean.…
“Ohhh,” I moaned, no longer simply chilled, but frozen.
Go ahead, shamus, say it, Bogie taunted. Say it out loud.
“It means they could be driving a car and shooting at people,” I replied. “It means it might have been the twins who took a shot at me, and who clubbed Marcy, and who.…”
Finish it.
“…Killed Elena and Nora.”
NINETEEN
Could it be that Burton and Taylor Frost were behind everything?
No, it didn’t scan. I remembered Elena Cates saying she had picked the boys up at Nora’s house at nine-thirty, and took them away for the day, so they would not have had a chance to kill Nora…at least not without Elena’s knowledge.
You’re not thinking improbably enough, old boy, said a very distinctive voice. It was Nigel Bruce, who played Dr. Watson in the classic series of films opposite Basil Rathbone as Holmes. While I really preferred the hard boiled genre to backlot Baker Street, at this point I was willing to accept help no matter from which part of my subconscious it came. Okay, fine, I’ll think improbably: how could Burton and Taylor, one or the other or both of them, have murdered Nora without Elena knowing it?
“Oh, sheez,” I uttered. There was only one way: they shot her before Elena arrived at nine-thirty to pick them up. Elena had told me that the last time she had heard Nora’s voice was when Nora was screaming at her over the phone the night before, which meant she never saw her the next morning. What if the boys had simply pretended like they were saying goodbye to their mother in another room, and then came out and left with Elena, who would have been grateful not to be confronted by her employer?
Then the other shoe dropped inside my brain. What if the two little freaks pulled the same trick on Marcy and me? I thought back to their arrival at Marcy’s house, ostensibly having been dropped off by Elena, yet at no time did I see or hear Elena. Instead the twins waved into the distance as though they were saying goodbye to her. What if they had already killed her and drove themselves to Marcy’s house?
The sane part of my mind—the chunk that did not speak to me through the voices of old Hollywood actors—was playing devil’s advocate, trying hard to tell me that this theory was just nuts. But that part was drowned out by a voice in my head that said: Are you willing to risk Marcy’s life on the theory that it’s insane?
It was my own voice I heard, and the answer was no.
Pulling out my cell phone, I dialed her number, but got the machine again. That was an ominous sign, since it was getting a little late for her to still be at work. She could be at the store, of course, or somewhere else perfectly mundane, but I a little cold ball of fear was forming in the pit of my stomach as I heard the beep after her phone machine greeting. “Marcy,” I said softly, “it’s Dave. This is going to sound nuts, but you have to believe me. It’s the twins. They’re not kids, they’re adults. I think they’re behind this. You have to protect yourself. Call me as soon as you get this message.” I cut the call and put my cell back in my shirt pocket, so I’d hear it immediately if it rang.
After replacing the stacks of cash and locking the drawer again with my handy-dandy homemade pick (and locking things with it is a lot more difficult than unlocking things, for some reason), I made my way downstairs and prepared to leave the way I came. Creeping to the low wall, I scaled over and headed up the driveway, until I saw the police car slow down on the street. The lights were not flashing and there was no siren, meaning it was probably on patrol rather than responding to a call, but that didn’t make the situation any better for me.
If they get out of the car and find you here, you’re done, sonny, Robert Mitchum said inside my head.
Tell me something I don’t know, I thought back, dashing behind a tree trunk.
You mean like how to be a detective?
Funny, Mitch; har-de-har-har. You’re a laugh riot.
The car sat there on the street for what seemed like an eternity, and then one of the uniformed officers got out and walked to the front of the house. If he decided to come in back, I was as dead as Nora. But he didn’t. After a minute, he got back into the cruiser, which took off. My pulse pounding through my temples sounded like a drum solo and my legs became watery. I sank to the ground behind the tree, forcing myself to breathe slowly and evenly, and not hyperventilate.
Sometimes I suspect I’m in the wrong business. But then there are other times when I’m convinced of it.
After resting a moment and finally putting the cuffs on my wind, I was able to return to my car without incident. Then I got out of Nora’s neighborhood, and hoped I’d never have to come back.
The proper thing to do, of course, would be to call the police and tell them what I had discovered, and send them down to make certain Marcy was safe. The problem with that was that I had gleaned the information while in the act of breaking and entering, which would most likely not endear me to Detective Colfax, let alone Mendoza. The practical thing to do (as opposed to the proper thing) was to find some sort of corroborating evidence that the boys were not boys, which would absolve me of having to confess that I had ransacked Nora’s desk illegally. As much as I wanted to race down to San Pedro, I knew I had to have some sort of legally-obtained justification before getting further involved, so I headed back home.
Once there, I immediately powered up my computer. The evidence to back up my theory was out there somewhere. All I had to do was find it. But that was why God made computers. Or was it the Devil? While waiting to connect, I noticed my phone message line was flashing. Please be Marcy! I thought as I punched the playback button.
&
nbsp; It wasn’t Marcy.
“Hey, Dave, this is Walt Westermann,” the voice of my former teacher said. “I had a free moment so I ran that license plate through for you and got a hit. It’s registered to someone named—”
“Elena Cates,” I said, speaking in unison with the recorded voice on the chip. That must have been what Kleinbach tried to tell me before my machine cut him off, that he recognized Elena’s car, which he had followed earlier.
“If you’re going to continue in this business,” Walt’s voice went on, “don’t forget what I said about getting the DMV database yourself.” Then the message cut off. Of course, this was not proof that it was the twins who were driving Elena’s Taurus, but clearly somebody other than Elena was. I still had to dig some more.
The laptop was connected online now so I typed the name Natalie Strange in the search engine, figuring that was the easiest place to start. Dozens of entries popped up, but I settled on a newspaper obituary, which reported that she had died of an accidental overdose of medication in 2007, and even though her former maid had implied it was somewhat less than accidental, there was no proof for that. There was one strange thing about the obituary, however: it listed Nora Kleinbach as her only survivor. There was no mention of Richard Burton or Robert Taylor Kleinbach.
Next I typed in Lieutenant Randall Frost, and while the pickings were obviously much smaller, because of his status as a fallen soldier it was not hard to come across his obituary. It stated that he had been deployed in the summer of 2009 and was killed in combat with insurgents in October, 2010, at the age of thirty-nine and was survived by his wife of three years, Nora, and two sons, Burton and Taylor. That meant that Frost and Nora had been married in 2007, the same year that Natalie Strange had died. Was there a connection? It would be possible of course to search the databases and try to obtain death, birth and marriage certificates, but it would take weeks, if not months, to get the information back. I did not have that much time.
If only I knew the name of Frost’s first wife.
“Think,” I ordered myself, and the command must have worked, because I thought to type in Brothers Alpha and saw their home page pop up. Most of the shots of the two boys I had seen in Nora’s house, but there was a “Biographies” page, to which I linked. There I saw photos of the boys as genuine children. In one shot they appeared to be about two. In the others they looked maybe five or six, and even at that age it was easy to see they were not identical. Nora must have gotten these photos after she married Frost and used them on the site, because they were pretty generic candid shots. But shot of a couple of kids still proved nothing.
Then I saw it.
In one of the photos the boys were standing outside of a movie theatre. There was a poster in the background, which would have gone unnoticed to anyone other than someone obsessed (okay, I’ve said it) with movies. Examining it closely, I recognized it as the poster for an indie kids move called Gordy, which was about a talking pig. I quickly linked over to the Internet Movie Database and punched the title in. Like the similar, but far more successful film, Babe, Gordy had been released in 1995, but unlike Babe it had quickly disappeared from theatres. If you wanted to see it on the big screen, you had to be there on opening weekend. I knew now that the boys shown in the picture would have been six or so, even though they looked younger. That was not the point, however: had the boys really been twelve today, there is no way they could have been standing in front of a movie theatre in 1995. More pertinently, this proof was obtained online, not through an illegal break-in and search. I could now safely go to the police.
But there were still plenty of loose ends, including what had happened to Nora’s real children. I started by Googling the names “Robert Taylor Kleinbach” and “Richard Burton Kleinbach,” just to see if there were any news stories or obituaries for them, but it turned up nothing. Then on a whim I typed in the name San Gabriel Valley Private Hospital. That took me straight to their site, where I learned that it was not a clinic for face lifts or anything else, but rather a hospice for terminally ill. That left one way to find out the truth. The website had a phone number, so I called.
“Hello, I’d like to speak with whoever is in charge of your accounts,” I said to the woman who answered the phone.
“You mean the billing office?” she asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
“I’m sorry, they’re gone for the day.”
“This is rather important, is there anyone in charge I can talk to?”
“Our head physician is here, but he can’t—”
“Fine, I’d like to speak to him, please.”
“Hold on.”
While waiting I was subjected to about thirty seconds of really dreadful, elevator music, and then a man’s voice came on. “This is Dr. Maxwell, how can I help you?”
“Dr. Maxwell, my name is William Pratt,” I lied. “I’m an attorney representing the estate of Mrs. Nora Frost.”
“Attorney? Are we being sued?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I’m calling regarding the children of Nora Frost.”
“I don’t know a Nora Frost.”
“How about Nora Kleinbach?”
“Oh, god, the mother of Thing One and Thing Two,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, Mr. Pratt, that’s what we’ve taken to calling them here. But you said you represented an estate, didn’t you? Is Mrs. Kleinbach dead?”
“I’m afraid so. The reason I’m calling about is to work out the details of continuing the funding of care for the boys through the estate,” I lied.
“You need to talk to our financial people about that.”
“Yes, I suppose I do, but as head physician, can you at least tell me roughly how long you think treatment is going to last.”
There was a pause, and then Maxwell said: “Until someone pulls the plug, I imagine.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Mr. Pratt, the Kleinbach twins have been in a permanent vegetative state for six years. They are being kept alive through feeding tubes. This is why, as awful as it may sound to a lay person, they have come to be known as Thing One and Thing Two, because it’s a way of dealing with their situation. Nobody here ever knew them as living children. They were already comatose when their mother checked them in here. Apparently they ate a bottle of prescription medicine between them. We are not offering treatment, per se. We are keeping them alive.”
“Oh…I see,” I muttered. “I had not been made aware of the severity of their conditions.”
“Quite frankly, Mr. Pratt, the death of their mother might turn out to be a blessing. These two are never going to recover. They are never going to have lives, only unconscious existences. Whoever it is that is now their legal guardian would probably be doing them a favor by removing the feeding tubes. Again, this may sound awful to you, but the people here spend each day with these poor helpless, wasted youngsters, and after a while, you can’t help but think that there has to be a more merciful resolution.”
“Well,” I said, my voice cracking, “thank you for your time, Dr. Maxwell.” I hung up and rubbed my temples. For years Nora had kept the boys alive in a private hospital, all the while pretending that Frost’s natural kids were her own. Had she expected that they would someday recover? Or had the boys’ tragedy, combined with the vengeance she enacted on her own mother, taken away her ability to think rationally?
I had everything I needed to pass the case on to Dane Colfax and let him find the missing boys, but I owed it to Marcy to fill her in first. I punched in her number again. If I couldn’t get her by phone, I would go down there. Once more I got the machine, and started to leave another message, but this time she cut it off by picking up the line.
“Dave,” she said, “I was about to call you. I got your earlier message, and if was anyone else but you, I’d say you were drunk or high.”
“I wish that were the case, Marcy,” I said.
“You really think the boys are d
oing all this?”
“Yes.”
“You think they’re the ones who hit me over the head?”
“Yes, and I’m afraid they might come back and try to finish you off.”
“What should I do?”
“I’m coming down. Don’t do anything until I get there. Don’t answer the door and keep screening calls, okay?”
“Okay.”
“If you see any sign of the boys, if they try to get in the house, call the police immediately. I’ll be down there about seven-thirty, traffic willing.” I hung up and took off.
As it turned out, traffic was not willing. Because of a wreck on the 110 South, it took me more than ninety minutes to get down to San Pedro. I did not get to Marcy’s place until a little past eight. Racing to her door, I knocked, and was gratified to hear her voice demanding my identity before opening it. “Sorry I’m so late,” I said as I raced in.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, embracing me. Sitting her down on the sofa, I gave her a detailed rundown of most of what I had discovered, including the parts of the puzzle I’d found inside Nora’s house, where I didn’t belong. I left out the porn connection, but even so, I could tell from her expression that she was having a hard time believing it. “You’re telling me they’re in their twenties?” she said, when I finished. “They look twelve, max. Do they have something like hypogandism?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a condition that keeps you looking like you’re barely out of childhood. It’s more common in girls than boys, but it’s not unknown in boys.”
She worked in the medical industry, so I guess she would know.
“God,” Marcy said. “Why would they keep up the pretense that they were really adolescents?”
“It had to be Nora’s doing,” I said. “She wanted them to be young so they could be child stars, though from what I saw of them, they were not happy. Why they went along with it is anyone’s guess, though they must have gotten something out of the deal. Maybe it was just their connection to Elena.”
Kill the Mother! Page 20