The Detective & The Pipe Girl: A Mystery

by Michael Craven

  I heard more of New York behind him. It had been a while since I’d been there.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  Before he could remind me that he was in New York City I said, “I mean where in the city? It just sounds . . . good.”

  “Yeah, it’s nice to be here. I’m at Pete’s Tavern near . . .”

  “Gramercy Park.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great place.”

  “Yep. Dinner with some friends. It always amazes me . . . It’s 1 a.m. here and every table’s taken.”

  “Right. People still arriving for dinner.”

  And then he said something that surprised me—in a good way. He said something that a friend would say to another friend. He jumped topics and just kind of gave me an observation.

  “John, I’ve been all over the world many, many times and I think the most beautiful women, if you had to pick one city, are in New York.”

  “Paris,” I said. “Los Angeles? Buenos Aires?”

  “All full of beautiful women, but they don’t beat NYC for my money. Here in New York you have samplings from all over the world. You have the best from all over the world. Europe. Asia. America. Listen. I think L.A. is underrated. People always say that L.A. is just blond bimbos, and that, of course, is absurd. Look, there are beautiful women in big cities everywhere, but New York, I don’t know . . . There’s something about it. The fashion. The sophistication. The unspoken competition created by the crème de la crème from all over the world crammed onto a little island.”

  “It sounds like you’ve put some thought into this.”

  “I’ve made graphs! I’ve made charts!” he joked.

  Arthur had a buzz on.

  “Gotta go, John. Let me know when the eagle has landed.”

  Yeah, he had a buzz on. Speaking in P.I. terms now. A little cheesy.

  And for the record, it always bothers me when people say “Gotta go” or “I’ll let you go” when they called you.

  I blew it off. “I’ll call you when she has the note.”

  “Good night,” he said, and I could hear the sounds of the city disappear as he hung up.

  I had another beer, then took a long swim in my pool. It was quiet and still outside and I lay on my back in the water, floating, looking up at a black sky. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and got in bed. I closed my eyes and began to think about how exactly I’d deliver the letter the next day. In minutes I was out.

  The next day when I woke up Suzanne Neal was dead.

  11

  Here’s how I found out. I got up early, went for a five-mile-run around lovely Mar Vista. Then: Showered, slid over to Starbucks for an enormous, nerve-wrenching coffee, and headed to Suzanne’s condo, the letter from Vonz still riding shotgun.

  When I arrived I could not immediately see that a crime had taken place. I parked, put a baseball hat on, and walked into the building. Immediately, trouble. Two police detectives talking to the condo security guard. I had to think fast. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but you know that feeling when you just know the thing you’re seeing is the thing that’s a part of your story even though you don’t actually know it yet? You know that feeling? You know that feeling.

  I know a lot of cops. But I didn’t recognize the two talking to the security guard. Head down, I walked straight by, toward the two condo elevators. The security guy didn’t bother me. Instead, he just kept talking to the police, a stunned, almost contrite look on his face.

  Another resident was getting on the elevator at the exact time I was. He pressed seventeen, then looked at me.

  Head down, hat bill blocking me from elevator cameras, I said, “Twenty-one.”

  I had no confirmation that the two cops were part of my story. Yet. So I was proceeding as planned.

  “You’re on her floor,” the guy with me in the elevator said.

  Her floor? Was he talking about Suzanne? Of course he was. And I’d estimated her floor correctly. I went with it.

  “Well, I don’t live here in the building, but my friend does.”

  “Pretty crazy, huh?”

  “I didn’t hear the details, but yes, for sure.”

  “Shot.”

  “Yeah, I heard that.”

  “She fell all that way.”

  We got to the seventeenth floor, the doors opened, I wanted to confirm what I somehow already knew was true. So I said, awkwardly, “She was a beautiful girl.”

  He looked back at me on his way out. For a split second I thought I’d taken my swing and missed. But he nodded and turned out of view.

  The doors shut and I stood still, thinking. The elevator headed toward twenty-one. There were probably some cops in her apartment, on her floor. I wasn’t ready to see them. Especially if I knew them. Which I might. I hit twenty. Shit, I was too late. Shit. It got to twenty-one. The doors opened up. I moved over to the side wall of the elevator, still keeping my head down.

  I heard, down the hall: “Someone’s coming off.”

  The doors couldn’t be closing any goddamn slower. I heard footsteps nearing. Nearing. Nearing. The doors shut. The elevator headed to twenty. The cops maybe thought there was no one on the elevator, but I doubt it. I pressed twenty-one again, then twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five to send the elevator I was exiting first back to Suzanne’s floor, then to a bunch of other floors above her. I got off on twenty and quickly hit the down button to get elevator two to take me the hell out of there. The other elevator came and I rode it down to the ground floor. I was hoping either the cops blew off elevator one when it came back to twenty-one, or got on it to take it to the ground floor to ask security who had gotten on—and now he, she, or they were stopping at a bunch of floors he, she, or they didn’t want to go to.

  Lobby. I walked back past the cops and security guard. I never saw elevator one reach the lobby floor again. If it had indeed come back down.

  Outside. Unscathed. I got in the Cobalt and drove to my office.

  Now, I wanted some answers but I had to be careful who I asked, how I got them, and how much I told them about what I knew. You give away too much now and it screws you later. Trust me. Related side note: Dispensing information properly and processing information properly are two of the most important things in life. And very few people do either one right.

  I called the L.A. Times, a reporter I know named Larry Frenette.

  “Larry, John Darvelle.”

  “Darvelle! What’s up, buddy?”

  “Have a question. Any murders reported last night? Actually, of course there were murders last night, we’re in L.A. But supposedly an old friend . . . an old client of mine may have gotten it. Name was Christine Logan.”

  I heard typing. Checking the paper’s news feed.

  “Nope.”

  “Hmm. I wonder if someone is fucking with me.”

  “With you, John? No way.”

  Sarcasm was his native tongue.

  “Was there a murder last night? A woman? Westside. Venice. Santa Monica maybe.”

  I heard slurping and eating. Newspaper guy. And then he said, “A woman named Suzanne Neal.”

  I already knew it, but for some reason it hit me in the chest.

  “Hmm,” I said. “Don’t know her. Well, thanks, Lar.”

  “Anytime, slime.”

  I hung up and called Vonz. Got his cell’s voice mail. Left a message, simply to call me when he could. I got out my MacBook Pro and typed out the whole story—so far. From the moment Vonz hired me to right now. I wrote it out exactly. Everywhere I went, every observation I had made, and everyone I had come in contact with. It took me eighty minutes. I pressed the command for print on my keyboard and my cell rang at the same time. Like my pressing the button made my phone ring. Vonz.

  “Arthur,” I said.

  “So, you gave Suzanne the letter?”

  “I did not.” This time I didn’t hear the sounds of New York in the background. It was quiet on his end. But I did f
eel something in the silence: Vonz just slightly losing his cool.

  “Listen, John,” he said. “I’m in my hotel now, Gina and Paul stepped out, but they’ll be back shortly. So I do have a quick second, but when I’m traveling with Gina it’s not that easy to talk to you.”

  “Arthur. I don’t know how to say this other than to say it. Suzanne has been killed.”

  Now there was silence on the other line, but a different kind of silence. After an interminable ten seconds or so: “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know much about what happened. Her murder is not my case. I went to her apartment today to give her the letter and there was a crime scene. A neighbor of hers told me that a beautiful girl had been killed the previous night. Then I was able to find out it was Suzanne by calling a newspaper reporter who is a friend. I can tell you everything I saw, everything I know, but it’ll take some time. Do you want to do that now?”

  He said, calmly, with no irritation, “I’ll be back in L.A. in two days. Paul will call you to arrange a meeting. Okay?”

  I thought about saying, “I’m sorry for your loss” or some trite sentiment, but I really didn’t know anything about this man, or Suzanne, or much about how the two of them related to each other. I just knew she was dead. That was the one thing I knew for sure.

  I said: “Okay.”

  We hung up. I looked at the printout of my notes. I took another pass at them and condensed down what I had written to crisp bullet points. It took forty minutes. I printed two copies of my new, shorter version. I drove to a pay phone seventeen minutes away from my office. I called the LAPD. I told some cop who answered some of the things I knew. The information I thought the police needed to know to investigate her murder. I said I lived in the building, but didn’t give my name. I told him Suzanne went to a house on Mulholland the night of the murder, and I gave him the address. How did I know that? Um, she had shown me the house at an earlier time, that’s how. I told him there was a man in Suzanne’s condo at approximately 8 p.m. How did I know that? I just did. I told him that, curiously, I had seen the actor Jimmy Yates in our building earlier in the day, don’t know if that helps. The cop on the line started pressing me for who I was. I hung up on him and went back to my office.

  12

  Two days later I was back in the Cobalt heading to the Vonz estate. I went through mostly the same routine. Through the gate, then guided by Mountcastle through the house. But this time, Mountcastle didn’t guide me into the Vonz study. Because after exiting the back of the house he didn’t have to guide me anywhere—I spotted Vonz sitting outside, to the left of the study entrance, underneath a parasol by his pretty blue pool.

  He gestured to me. I walked over and sat down across from him. Mountcastle disappeared back into the main house.

  Vonz was reasonably decked out. Crisp dress shirt, blazer, handkerchief. And today, outside in the sun, blue-tinted shades. He seemed calm, or actually, deflated.

  “Thanks for coming back,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “And . . . I know you’re still on the clock. I’m paying you for this time.”

  I nodded again.

  He pulled out a pack of Parliament Lights. “I started smoking these before they somehow entered popular culture as a fashionable choice. Bizarre how that happens.”

  Yet again, I nodded.

  He held out the pack for me. I wanted to take one. I used to smoke. But I had to quit. One, it kills you. Two, during my time as a smoker, all I wanted to do was smoke. Just sit somewhere and smoke. One after the other. I loved it that much. I remember I used to go to restaurants and mid-dinner, instead of enjoying the atmosphere, not to mention the food, I’d be standing out back by the Dumpster taking a big drag off a smoke, thinking: I’ve never been happier. I was a cigarette’s bitch, plain and simple. So I had to quit. I wasn’t free when I smoked. I was the slave of a little tube of tobacco. So I just stopped. Took it day by very difficult day. That was four years ago.

  I declined his offer.

  Vonz took a big drag and said, “So what happened?”

  I told him my story. Didn’t need my notes. First I told him that I’d seen Jimmy Yates leaving Suzanne’s building when I initially got her picture. But that I wasn’t certain then, or now, that he was a part of the story. Then, I took it from the moment I left him at the Santa Monica airport. That I had followed Suzanne to a house in the Hollywood Hills. That later that evening there was a man with her on her balcony. A man I believe was not Jimmy Yates, but that in reality could have been. And that I didn’t give her the letter because of seeing the man.

  I didn’t give Vonz any theories, or any maybes, that had passed through my mind. I’d learned, the hard way, that possibilities only rarely turned into proof.

  Finally I told him that I had gone back to give her the letter the next day and discovered, and confirmed, that Suzanne was dead.

  DEAD.

  It’s a strange, fascinating concept when you allow yourself to think about it. When I was a child I used to think about what it meant to be dead all the time. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t fully grasp the notion of being dead. Gone. Zapped into the infinite. Forever. I used to say to my parents and my friends, “But what happens after you die? Because time is still happening, so where are you?”

  No one ever gave me a proper answer and that always annoyed me. Truth is, they just didn’t know.

  I stopped thinking about it as I grew older. But now, now that I have a job that brings me close to death often, I think about it almost as much as I used to.

  Vonz looked at me. Lit another cigarette. And then he took off his sunglasses and looked me dead in the eye. You could see fatigue surrounding his bright eyes. He didn’t speak for what seemed like a long time. And then he said, “This hurts.”

  He was talking about her death, sure, but was he also talking about discovering the other man, or men, in her life? Didn’t know. Probably. Yes.

  After another long pause Vonz said, “I loved her.”

  I continued to simply listen. I looked at Vonz. He looked much older. He looked exhausted. And that charm, that Cheshire pop in his face, had momentarily vanished. I instinctively looked over toward his house.

  “She’s not here, it’s okay,” he said. “But thank you for looking out for me.”

  “Maybe I was looking out for her, not you.”

  “Either way, it means you have a soul.”

  He took another long pull off the Parliament and then said, “You know, when you’re really honest with yourself—about who you love—it’s a very interesting conversation. How often—really—does it strike? You know?”

  It was rhetorical, he wasn’t looking for an answer.

  “Suzanne and I had more than a casual affair. That was a lie. Probably an obvious one. I hope you aren’t insulted.”

  “I’m a detective. People rarely tell me the truth.”

  He nodded. “The rest of it was true. How we met. Where we would meet up.”

  I didn’t respond.

  Vonz, after a moment, continued. “She was so alive. At least I felt that way. And consequently that’s how I felt when I was around her. Alive. But she felt it too. You can’t deny it, you can’t lie, when it’s real. It’s just there. The feeling. After our first few encounters, I thought about her all the time, and I quickly realized I was in love with her. But I also thought about her because our relationship stirred me up in another way. It made me look at my wife, the mother of my children, in a new light. And sadly, I guess maybe tragically, it made me admit to myself that I wasn’t in love with my wife. And that I never had been. As hard as I tried to be, as hard as I tried to be in love with her, as much as I really do care for her, I’m just not. And that made me think. Made me say to myself: How often are you really in love? How often in an entire lifetime does it happen? That energy. That lightning. That mystery. It’s magic. And, I’m sure of this, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than that mysterious c
onnection. It’s not logical. It’s not scientific. It’s not about background, or intellectual connection, or age. We tell ourselves it is, but that’s a lie. That’s a way for the conscious mind to keep you safe. And put you in a situation that works. So you can create a life with a house and children and social options. Truth is, people fall in love in seconds. With people who don’t speak the same language as they do. With people from wildly different backgrounds. It’s amazing really. It’s one of the truly amazing things about life. And like I said, you can’t fake it. It’s like a real laugh or a real feeling of surprise. It just is. And that’s what makes it so special.”

  I knew what he was talking about. And like a lot of things I believed to be true, it hurt a little to admit it.

  “It fucked with me, John. I thought about it a lot. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I concluded the thing about love, the thing that makes it so special, is that it makes you feel like you’re not alone. I don’t mean in a simplistic way, a physical way. I mean it makes you feel like you’re not alone in the universe. That’s really what it is. The sex, the passion, all that stuff, is great. But it’s the realization that you are not alone in the universe that makes it so powerful. When you fall in love, you have connected with another person in a higher way that is nothing short of life-affirming. It makes everything make sense. It makes you want to keep living.”

  Another drag. Another pause. And then, “The irony. The irony is, when you’re in a relationship or a marriage where the love isn’t truly there, take mine with Gina for example, yes, you are physically together, you are physically not alone. And that can help to keep you distracted enough to not be lonely on a surface level. But if you dare to dig a little deeper, you still feel alone. And if you really look at it, you realize you’re more alone than ever. Because that real light isn’t there. And in your heart, whether you like it or not, you’re looking for it. It’s why there have been a million stories, songs, poems, on and on, about it. And it’s why there will be a million more.”