She had been hiking very near where I’d almost done my last hike ever. Where I’d gotten the shit kicked out of me by two mouth breathers. Where I’d been face-to-face with a black-eyed rattler.
The article didn’t indicate any foul play, any investigation at all. It was pure information.
It was cold-feeling. Clinical. Heartless.
So instead of now going to Ken Booth or Larry Frenette or Linda Robbie, it was back to Elliot Watt. Back to drawers of the dead. Back to the morgue.
I called Elliot. He wasn’t glad to hear from me. He didn’t say, “Hey, John! What’s up, homey?! How’s the Darv doing? Yeah, come on by!”
However, because it was an old case, with no heat on it, he didn’t give me too much attitude. Not a single put-upon sigh. Not a single guilt-trippy speech. He just said, in a flat, bored tone, “Yeah, come by and I’ll give you the file.”
I got to the morgue. Quiet that day. Elliot was sitting behind his desk, hollow-eyed, blue veins showing beneath his clammy alabaster skin. He was reading Popular Mechanics.
“Popular Mechanics, huh? What is that magazine, Elliot?”
He looked at me with disgust. “Darvelle, what does that even mean?”
“I just mean, I bet if you asked twenty people what the content of Popular Mechanics is, like what a typical article might be about, nineteen of them would have no clue and the one who did know would be some kind of criminal or degenerate or twisted basement-dwelling weirdo who’s like forty-eight and lives with his mom.”
He said, “I’m sorry, didn’t you come here to ask for my help? To have me do you a favor? And your way of buttering me up is to blatantly insult me? Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense, John.”
“Right. You have a point. You absolutely have a point. But, seriously. What are you reading? I mean, what article are you reading right now? What’s it about?”
He looked at me, fed up. His big blue bug eyes were half closed. And he conveyed a mixture of boredom, exhaustion, and confusion. He said, “I’m reading an article about a new kind of self-inflating tire.”
“Why?” I yelled. “Why would you read that?”
He didn’t respond. He just put the magazine down, then picked up the case file and autopsy reports for Allison Tarber.
“Here you go,” he said.
“Is this my copy?”
“Yeah, but it’s quiet today. And nobody cares about this case. You can read it here if you want to, in case you have any questions for me.”
See, I told you. Elliot Watt’s cool. Good guy. Wants to help. Fighting the good fight. He’s in the you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-your-back ring of trust—you already know that. But here’s why, specifically, he helps me out. Because one time I helped him in a way that he seems to really appreciate. He came to me some years ago and said, in his words, “I have a favor of the large variety to ask.”
Elliot had this girlfriend. Tracy. I’d met her randomly once. Ran into Elliot and her at a movie theater in Culver City. This girl was very attractive. I know, hard to believe. Now, she was of the goth, pale-skinned, tattoo-on-her-back-of-a-snarling-rabid-hyena variety, but she was legitimately, objectively attractive. Elliot broke up with her because he said she was, again his words, “Fucking nuts, John. Fucking nuts.” So, after he broke up with her, she wouldn’t let it go. Called him and texted him constantly. Stalked him. And eventually threatened to kill him. Now, it sounds maybe even kind of amusing. But as I learned through a quick investigation, Elliot was right about this girl. She was mentally tweaked. And she hated Elliot for leaving her.
Obviously, Tracy didn’t kill Elliot. But she did get a friend of hers named Ollie to further harass him and beat him up. Ollie was tough and mean and he loved Tracy. So he’d take his anger out on anyone she asked him to. Ollie kicked the shit out of Elliot. And afterward, hung around his house and neighborhood and, anytime he had the chance, antagonized him and terrorized him and pushed him around and scared him. Ollie was like a schoolyard bully, but in adult life. And much, much more dangerous.
So, I have this friend who I’ll tell you about at another time in more detail. His name is Clete. That’s actually his name. Clete. He’s from Arkansas. He’s six-four and wiry-strong. He has probably five percent body fat. Maybe less. He’s the toughest person I’ve ever met. Once I was at his house, and he was on the roof of it, actually leaning off the roof of it, to reach over and saw a dead limb off a tree that bordered the house. He slipped and fell, and on the way down crashed very hard into several branches and brick window ledges and then THUMPED on the ground. He got right up, unscathed. He had no injuries. He literally was not hurt at all.
I said, “You all right, dude?”
And he said, “Yep.”
And walked into his house.
Anyway, Clete and I went and found Ollie and, mostly with Clete’s unique use of force, we quickly fixed the Elliot Watt situation.
Ollie walks the earth these days with a scared look in his eye—not to mention a permanent twitch.
Elliot never heard from Ollie, or Tracy, again.
But let’s get back to the story.
I sat down in Elliot’s bleak morgue office and looked at the Allison Tarber case files. The “case” never became a case. Nobody ever suspected anything. It was just a really bad accident that resulted in a really bad head wound that resulted in the worst news there is.
A young person dying.
I looked at the pictures of the corpse. Another dead, naked, and, before the fall, beautiful young woman. Half her head was caved in. And she had cuts and bruises and slices and gashes down the left side of her body. The other side of her, the right side, was surprisingly unharmed. Amazing in a way—the randomness of a violent fall.
Elliot peered at me from behind his Popular Mechanics. He had a look in his eye that said: Would you like my opinion?
So maybe that’s why he’d told me to stick around. Not necessarily out of the goodness of his heart. More: I’ve got a POV on this. I thought, hey, whatever, once again, I’ll take it.
“Yes?” I said to him.
“What?” he said coyly.
“Do you have some thoughts on this? What does the expert say?”
He walked over to me and his demeanor changed from twisted, pale Popular Mechanics reader to twisted, weird, but highly confident professional.
“Well, this girl was obviously very banged up. The head injuries killed her almost certainly. Actually the head injuries did kill her.”
“Okay.”
“Look, I took a look at this file before you came over. I’m not going to ask why you’re looking into this girl, or how it might be related to the other girl, I’m just going to tell you what I thought back when she first came in. Basically it’s like this: I always look very carefully at the bodies, because I do my job unbelievably well.”
He said this with no irony. Which I appreciated. False modesty is so boring.
He continued. “Basically I wasn’t just being a nice guy when I said stick around here to read the report.”
I didn’t mention that that had occurred to me. I just listened. Sometimes that’s best.
Elliot continued, “Because I want to tell you what I found, that nobody at the time seemed to think was important or even necessarily accurate. In fact, my boss wouldn’t let me put it into the report because he said it was just a theory. And theories don’t fly here because then the cops spend all this money looking into something that may not even be real when they should be doing other things. You get my fucking drift?”
“I do,” I said. “Let’s hear it. What is it?”
“So I found this one cut right on her left front hip. A gash really. A small chunk of her body missing.”
He pointed to the picture. The cut he showed me was just inside her left hip bone. In a sort of sexy area of the female body. It looked to me a whole lot like all the other cuts on the left side of her body. Indistinguishable from the others as far as I could tell.
Ellio
t continued, “See, this cut just wasn’t consistent with the rest of her injuries. Now, she had slices and gashes and tears all over her body from falling down into that goddamn gulch. Why people like to hike is beyond my ability to comprehend, by the way. It’s like, walking around on a trail at ten thousand feet with scorpions and mountain lions and cliffs that you can fall all off everywhere. It’s like, are you stupid?”
I thought, not to mention rattlesnakes and subhuman guys who want to kill you.
“But, anyway,” Elliot said. “This cut, this one right here that I’m showing you, was too clean. It was like the fall didn’t cause it. It was like she’d been stabbed with a knife that had a very sharp but not serrated edge. Now, I couldn’t, can’t, prove this and you could possibly come to the conclusion that it was just a weird, knifelike rock that stabbed her and took out a chunk of her. That is possible in that it’s not impossible. But it seemed to me like she had been cut prior to her fall.”
“What do you mean? What are you saying?”
Sometimes my questions weren’t exactly genius.
“I’m saying one way to look at this is that someone cut her before she fell off the cliff. And that someone wisely thought that falling hundreds of feet down a canyon bouncing off rocks and trees would both kill her and cover up the cut. Which for all intents and purposes it did. Not even my boss bought my theory. Which is why I said it could have been a one-in-a-million cut that sliced out a section of her body perfectly. It’s just doubtful. Or let me put it to you better, John: It didn’t happen. Now, why cut her here? What would that really do other than hurt like a motherfucker? No clue. Seems pretty random. Maybe somebody trying to scare her by stabbing her in a pretty, you know, private area. No clue.”
I looked at him. Then I looked at the pictures again. Then said, “Thank you for your professional opinion, my friend.”
He nodded. “You bet.”
He put his nose back in Popular Mechanics.
I grabbed my copies of the reports and left.
32
I went to a bar in Culver City near my office, called Ford’s Filling Station. Nice place, dark wood, brass touches, big windows. It was four-thirty. Probably the best time to go to a bar. The day still has promise, yet, at this time of year anyway, the light is dimming. The sun is low. The rays slanting into windows. And usually, bars aren’t too crowded at this hour. And that was true here. Just a few people chatting. Some good jazz playing. Mellow and relaxing. I ordered a cold Budweiser.
“Sorry, only big domestic we have is PBR.”
PBR. The beer places like this offer strictly to be ironic. I don’t drink it on principal.
The bartender said, “We’ve got a nice honey wheat you might like. It’s really popular. Really robust flavor.”
I closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose, and sighed.
Then, without speaking, I methodically got up and, my face paralyzed in a trancelike annoyed smile, walked out of the bar. I went left and staggered into a restaurant a couple doors down. It was California fusion or something. I beelined it to the bar.
“Bud, Bud Light, something like that.”
“We have Amstel Light and Heineken.”
I stared straight ahead and blinked a few times. I then closed my eyes and pointed my head toward the floor for about forty-five seconds. When I looked up, the bartender was still waiting for me to order. I shook my head disgustedly, got up, and left.
I skulked up the street to a rough-looking dive I’d seen a lot but had never been into. Mary’s. I walked in. “Bud please.”
“You bet.”
“Thank god.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Also, a shot of Jack.”
The bartender nodded, and brought both back instantly.
I took a sip of the beer; it was freezing. I nailed the shot; it was warm and delicious. Is it that difficult? Honey wheat? What? I marveled at how good the beer and the shot were, both individually and as a combination. I finished the beer, got another round; this one I took a little easier. I looked around the bar. A dive. But great. Possessing fully that late-afternoon calm-before-the-storm vibe.
I sipped the second shot and took a nice, relaxed pull of the cold beer. Oftentimes on a case you have to reset. You begin to get more and more information and if you follow everything you suddenly find yourself too far away from the center. From the eye. You begin to start processing all these possibilities, too many to control, and way too many to all be true.
So: Was Allison Tarber a Pipe Girl? Think so, don’t you? And the cut that Elliot Watt pointed out? What was that? Well, maybe it was her tattoo. Maybe it was her PG symbol cut out of her before she got pushed over a cliff by Neese or one of those baboons I ran into in the very same canyon.
Maybe because of the way they had decided to rid the world of Allison Tarber, banging her off rocks filled with sharp edges, they could go one step further to dodge suspicion by removing her Pipe Girl stamp.
So: Did Jenny know that Tarber was dead? Did she know that Tarber and Suzanne were in the same business? And if so, doesn’t that mean that someone broke the promise and told her the big secret?
And: If Tarber was indeed one of Neese’s girls, whether or not Jenny Bickford knew, does that connect her to Suzanne Neal? Does that help me put Suzanne’s murder on Neese?
Well, sure. Because it was another girl in his ring who was now dead. It makes the notion, the silly notion of his business plan, seem not so crazy. And, shit, maybe Allison Tarber was the one who died to make the whole thing work. That’s what Marlon the Marlin had said. Kill one of them and the rest of them shut up forever.
I left Mary’s, went back to my office, called Jenny Bickford. It was 6 p.m. I sat at my desk, listening to her cell phone ring.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi, Jenny. It’s John Darvelle.”
“Yeah, it said so on my phone.”
She sounded nervous. She kept talking.
“But I still always just say hello rather than just start right into a conversation, you know?”
She laughed. Sweetly. Awkwardly.
“Yeah. Listen. I’d like to talk to you again. In person.”
“Sure, I guess, yeah. Hey, did that Allison Tarber thing help?”
She wasn’t a good liar. Which to me is a good quality. A good thing.
“Maybe. I really don’t know yet.”
“Well, it’s Friday, so Monday I guess?”
“I was hoping for tonight.”
“I’m about to leave for the day.”
“Where do you live?”
“Santa Monica.”
“How about coming by my office? It’s in Culver City, and from Manhattan Beach you can hop right off the freeway.”
“Well . . . I was going to go home.”
“It’s not too far out of your way. Please. Come by.”
“Okay. Culver City? Where exactly?”
I told her.
“Okay. Okay. Give me about an hour.”
One hour later, she came peering around the corner of my big, and still open, sliding door. It was almost dark now. The last bit of light hanging in the air. The streetlights just coming on, giving the lot in front of my warehouse a yellow glow.
Her face, then her body appeared in the doorway. I could see vulnerability on her face. She couldn’t hide that was she was hiding something. And she couldn’t hide that she knew we were about to talk about it.
“Hi,” she said, arms crossed.
“Hi. Come in. Have a seat.”
She did, at one of the chairs in front of my desk.
“Thanks for telling me about Allison Tarber. I looked into it.”
“Yeah, what did you find out?”
“I found out that Allison is dead.”
This time Jenny didn’t feign massive surprise.
“I knew that. I thought . . . I thought . . . that might help you. I’m not sure why.”
I got up and walked over to the slider. Appearing
to be trapped in thought, pondering the great questions of the case. But that’s not what I was doing. What I was doing was scanning the lot. Looking for the two guys who had remodeled my face. Nothing. Nobody. Hadn’t seen those two since. My thought was: They and Neese don’t know what I’m up to exactly. So they’re probably waiting to see what I do next. Waiting to see if I was going to cause any more trouble. Which I was.
But, at this point, I had to do whatever I was going to do fast. Or else I would surely hear from them again. And soon.
I thought: Are they out there? Are they watching? Just. Don’t. Know.
I thought about shutting the slider. No. Leave it open. Business as usual.
I walked back over to my desk, sat down, and said to Jenny, “Jenny, I believe Suzanne was a prostitute. A special kind of prostitute called a Pipe Girl.”
Jenny was about to speak.
“Hang on,” I said. “If you’re a Pipe Girl, you make a lot of money. Much more than the regular kind of prostitute. However, the catch is, if you tell anyone, anyone, what you do, outside of the pimp for lack of a better word, and the customer of course, you are killed. That’s what it means to be a Pipe Girl. That’s the deal you make to become a Pipe Girl. It’s a prostitution system meant to totally protect the customer by guaranteeing that the use of the service will never, ever get out. I know, it sounds absurd. How many holes can you see in this business plan, right? But take all the problems out of the equation for a moment and you can see genius in the idea. Which is: Imagine the money you could make if you were able to provide rich men with beautiful women who would never say a word.”
Jenny looked at me. Not nodding, but indicating somehow that she wanted me to continue.
“Jenny, Suzanne told you she was a Pipe Girl, didn’t she?”
She said, very calm now, “I can’t talk about this, John.”
“I think you can. And I think you should. Did she tell you she was a Pipe Girl?”
Quickly. “Yes.”
So there it was. Suzanne had told. Had done the thing she was forbidden to do.
Jenny continued. “But, I have to tell you this. I’m the only person she ever told. I’m close to positive of that. And I know her . . . boss, or whatever you want to call him, didn’t know she had told me. So that’s not why she . . . got . . . killed.”
The Detective & The Pipe Girl: A Mystery Page 18