“Thanks again, Del.”
“Hey, you’d do the same for me.”
Hardy left and Milo read the slip. Sat up and punched air and said, “Welcome back, Teach. Backer’s sister Ricki is home from Yosemite and wishes to talk.”
I said, “Recess is over.”
Ricki Flatt’s voice said she was expecting bad, but not that bad.
Milo tried to be gentle but there’s no easy way and she wept for a long time. He stretched to turn the volume down on the conference setting, but it was already on low.
She said, “Oh, God, Desi. I don’t understand. Was it a mugging? Some random thing?”
Tensing up, I was sure, on “random.”
Milo heard it, too; his eyebrows climbed. “We’re still trying to sort things out, Ms. Flatt, so anything you can tell us would be helpful.”
“You’re in L.A. What could I tell you?”
“Did your brother have any enemies, ma’am?”
“Of course not.”
Ratcheting up her pitch on “not.”
“Ms. Flatt, your brother didn’t die alone. A woman was with him and we still haven’t identified her. If we knew who she was, it would speed up the investigation. I know this is a tough time for you, but if I could scan her photo and e-mail it to you, that would help.”
“Of course, do it,” said Ricki Flatt. “I’m sitting here and not moving. Not even to unpack.”
Ten minutes later: “Oh my God, that’s Doreen!”
“Doreen who?”
“What was her last name... Doreen... Fredd. Two d’s, I think. Though how I remember that I couldn’t tell you. She and Desi knew each other back in high school. When we lived in Seattle, that’s where Desi and I grew up. Her nose is different—smaller—but it’s definitely her.”
“Anything romantic between them?”
“They were more like friends, but I really can’t say. I’m three years older than Desi, didn’t get into his personal business.”
“Doreen Fredd.” Milo entered the name into the databases. “What else can you tell me about her, Ms. Flatt?”
“She and Desi used to go hiking together. They all did—a group of kids, they liked the outdoors. One time, I was already in college, visiting home for midsemester break, Desi and his hiking group came in and Doreen had poison ivy, or some bad rash. Our dad tended to her, he was firefighter with paramedic training—but you don’t care about that. You’re saying Desi was dating her in L.A.?”
“There appears to be a romantic connection.”
“Doreen,” she said. “And she’s also... my God.”
“Anything else you want to tell us, Ms. Flatt?”
“Not really.” Tight voice, for the third time.
“Nothing at all, ma’am?”
Silence.
“Ms. Flatt?”
“What happened to Desi, was it in any way political?”
Milo sat up. “Political, how?”
“Forget that, I’m not making sense. Do you need me to identify the body, Lieutenant?”
“No, ma’am, we know it’s your brother and verification can be made using photos, but I would like to talk to you some more—”
“I’ll come out,” she said. “To handle ... arrangements. I’ve done it before. My parents. I never thought I’d be doing it for my baby brother—how did you connect Desi to me?”
“Phone messages, ma’am.”
“Oh. That must’ve been the times Desi called to talk to Sam—my daughter. If I can catch a flight, I’ll leave tonight, Lieutenant ... I’ll have to make sure Scott’s okay with that ... oh God, I’m going to have to explain to Sam. This is unreal.”
“Ms. Flatt, could you please clarify that remark about it being political?”
Silence.
“Ma’am?”
“Let’s talk in person, Lieutenant. I’ve got so many things to do.”
NCIC had nothing to say about Doreen Fredd. Neither did DMV, Social Security, any other port in cyberspace.
“Still a phantom.” Milo logged off. “And Sister Ricki gets all squirrelly about ‘something political.’ This is starting to smell real bad, Alex.”
Turning to his phone, he punched numbers so hard the apparatus jumped. “Hal, this is Milo. For the third time. Is it my breath or are you on some sort of overpriced taxpayer junket and can’t be bothered to help the locals? I’ve got a name for my Jane Doe, no thanks to you. Doreen Fredd.” Spelling it with exquisite, enraged enunciation. “And guess what, Hal, even with that, she’s a ghost, not even an SSN. So now I’m thinking your not calling back isn’t negligence, it’s proactive deception. Which is bullshit, Hal. You owe me big-time on that Aeromexico thing and I need you to come through. All in the name of God, Country, and my ready access to the chief, Hal. Who will not be happy to learn that no good deed has, yet again, gone unpunished.”
Slam. He slumped. “Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”
I said, “Ready access to the chief?”
“The federal government understands entitlement. Ends justifies the means. Political ... the obvious link is Teddy but what the hell would a newly graduated architect have to do with Sranil?”
“Maybe he had a previous life.”
“As what, a super-spy?”
“As something political,” I said. “Or maybe, given his libido, he’d partied with Teddy’s alleged victim, whom he met through Doreen. The two of them cooked up the blackmail scheme, leaned too hard and paid for it.”
“Pretty damn stupid to think they could go up against someone that powerful.”
“How much of your job revolves around smart people, Big Guy? And Backer being involved could explain how Brig—Doreen ended up at Masterson. Teddy’s name doesn’t appear on any of the Borodi paperwork, but that design journal listed the firm’s involvement in a ‘pied-à-terre’ for a foreign owner. Backer was an architect, that’s his type of reading material.”
“He does background, Doreen worms her way in to get the details. The two of them somehow send a message to Tariq or the sultan, one of them makes a call and a local pro is hired.”
“Or even someone flown in for the job.”
“Morons,” he said. “Thinking they could play in that league. Then they have the nerve to go up there again for fun under the stars. Fouling the rich bastard’s nest in the process. Freud’s probably got a name for that, huh?”
“Der payback.”
Tight lips parted slightly, emitting something close to a smile. He pressed psychic delete and turned grim again. “Desi and Doreen, hugging a tree. P-L-O-T-T-I-N-G.”
CHAPTER 18
At six twenty, just as we were leaving for dinner, John Nguyen dropped in.
The deputy D.A. was dressed for court in a navy pinstripe, white shirt, blue tie, American flag lapel pin. Four evidence boxes were stacked on a wheeled luggage rack. Nguyen’s posture was as straight as ever, but his eyes drooped.
“John, what’s up?”
Nguyen unclasped the top case, pulled out a sheaf of printouts, and dropped it on Milo’s desk. “Mr. and Mrs. Holman’s financials. You owe me.”
Milo scanned the face page. “How’d you pull it off?”
“Been doing a robbery-gangbang trial for three days running, brand-new judge, absurdly biased toward our side so I figured she might go for your spurious logic.”
Licking a finger, Nguyen slashed air vertically. “Score one, J. N. I got one of my eager new interns to push everything through with the banks. Which, I’d like to point out, is normally your responsibility, not mine, not to mention significantly below my pay grade. But you put in the time on the marsh murder trial, so consider it an advance Christmas gift.”
Milo flipped pages. “Your stocking stuffer’s on the way, John ... don’t see anything interesting.”
“That’s ’cause there isn’t any,” said Nguyen. “He’s a retired professor, she’s an unfamous architect, their income, expenditures, retirement fund, et cetera, are all commensurate with a cauti
ous, mature lifestyle. Meaning they can probably keep their house and continue to have health insurance if they don’t get really sick or go out to eat too often.”
“This is definitely all of it, John?”
“What, some secret bank account for paying hit men? They budget tighter than my ex-wife’s—never mind.” Nguyen moved toward the door. “I can lead a judge to warrant, dude, but I can’t stop the stink.”
We walked a couple of blocks to Café Moghul, the Indian place that serves as Milo’s supplementary office. He tips huge, is dramatically omnivorous, and the owners are convinced his grumpy-mastiff demeanor wards off danger. The bespectacled woman who works the front always beams when he lumbers through the door, begins piling on the food before his chair warms.
Tonight was lamb, beef, turkey, lobster, three kinds of naan, a garden plot of vegetables.
He bore down, as if tackling a massive culinary puzzle.
I said, “Hail to the sultan of West L.A.”
He wiped sauce from his face. “Keep your geography straight, Rajah. For one brief Cinderella moment.”
“Then the pumpkin appears?”
“Then it’s back to Untouchable.”
Midway through his fourth bowl of sweet kir rice pudding, Sean Binchy strode in, bright-eyed and cheerful as ever.
“Give me some good news, kid, then you can eat.”
“No, thanks, Loot, Becky’s cooking tonight and that’s always a treat. More like good news and bad news. I got lots of names of construction workers but no Montes or anything close.”
“What’s the good news?”
“I’m going to analyze it super-carefully.”
Uttered with absolute sincerity.
“That’s great, Sean.”
Binchy said, “Anything with an M for starts, and if that doesn’t produce, I’ll just check every single name for felony records. Like you always say, tortoise beats hare.”
He left.
Milo said, “Tortoise sometimes gets squashed in the middle of the highway by an eighteen-wheeler, but sure, keep the faith, kid.”
He phoned me at eight the following morning. “Sister Ricki’s due in my office in an hour.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Thought you might also want to know that Doreen Fredd is, indeed, a real person. I searched genealogy sites last night, found a distant cousin living in Nebraska, e-mailed the photo. Family hasn’t seen Doreen for years but verified that she got sent to Seattle when she was a teenager. Naughty girl, ended up in a group home.”
“Why Seattle?”
“The family originally hailed from Tacoma, where Doreen’s daddy worked at a gas station and mommy clerked at a food store. Nice people, according to the cousin, but major alkies, no ‘parental supervision.’ Doreen started running away at an early age. Finally, the court declared her incorrigible. The home worked out for a while, but Doreen split from there, too. She stepped off the map, no one’s heard from her in all this time, she was an only child and both parents are dead.”
“Is the group home still in business?”
“It is but there’s been half a dozen changes of ownership, no staff remains from when Doreen was there, all the old records have been destroyed. Her hooking up with Des Backer makes sense, though: I back-traced his parents’ residence. South Seattle, only a few blocks from the home. Cute girl, cute guy, chemistry, kaboom.”
“Chemistry reignited years later,” I said. “The wrong kind of explosion.”
I showed up for the meet with Ricki Flatt on time, found her talking to Milo.
Des Backer’s sister was faded by grief and fatigue. Long curly hair was tied back carelessly. She wore a baggy gray sweater unsuitable for the weather, mommy jeans, white tennis shoes. A huge canvas purse the color of smog lowered her right shoulder. An overnight bag of matching hue sat on the floor.
Milo lifted the suitcase and escorted her to the same room we’d used to powwow with Moe Reed. He offered her coffee, something to eat.
She touched her belly. “I couldn’t hold anything down. Please tell me what happened to my brother.”
“Mr. Backer and Doreen Fredd were found murdered in an unfinished house in a neighborhood called Holmby Hills. Ever hear of it?”
“I haven’t.”
“Your brother never mentioned Holmby Hills?”
“Never. Where is it?”
“It’s an extremely high-end area, just west of Beverly Hills. There’s an indication your brother and Ms. Fredd had been to that location before.”
“An unfinished house?”
“A construction project.”
“Something Desi was working on?”
Instead of answering, Milo said, “So your brother and Ms. Fredd hung out in high school?”
Nod. “And during the plane ride, I remembered something else. One time, when she was at our house, my dad made a comment to Mom about her being troubled, it was good she was aiming for wholesome activities. You didn’t say if the project was one of Desi’s.”
“It doesn’t appear that way, ma’am. This was what you’d call a super-mansion.”
“Then for sure it wouldn’t be Desi’s.”
“Not into that kind of thing.”
“He would’ve considered it grotesque. But if he wasn’t working on it, why would he be there?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, Ms. Flatt. This hiking group Desi and Doreen had, how many people are we talking about?”
“Just a few other kids, I really wasn’t paying attention.”
“And to your knowledge Desi and Doreen weren’t romantically involved.”
“I thought about that,” said Ricki Flatt. “Maybe, I really can’t say. Desi had so many girls who liked him. They were always calling him. Dad used to joke he needed a personal secretary.”
“Do you have any knowledge of his other recent girlfriends?”
Head shake. “Sorry, I wasn’t involved in my brother’s personal life back then and that didn’t change after we grew up.”
“Did you know that Doreen lived in a group home not far from your house?”
“No, but you must mean Hope Lodge. That place was the talk of the neighborhood. My friends joked about it, called it ‘Ho Lodge’ because the girls were wild. I’m not saying they were, but you know how kids talk. That’s probably why my dad said she had problems.”
“Was he worried about her being a bad influence on Desi?”
Ricki Flatt smiled. “My parents made a big thing about Desi and me developing our own sense of right and wrong. But even if they had tried to rein Desi in, it wouldn’t have worked. My brother did exactly as he pleased.”
Milo said, “Did Desi’s strong will lead to any—I have to ask this—iffy behavior?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anything out of the ordinary.”
“If you consider leaving home after high school and hitting the road for ten years out of the ordinary, sure.”
“Ten years,” said Milo.
“Ten lost years,” said Ricki Flatt. “Basically Desi disappeared. Once in a while we’d get postcards.”
“From where?”
“All over the country. National parks, that kind of thing.”
“Not overseas?”
“No.”
“What did Desi do to support himself?”
“He said odd jobs, temporary stuff that gave him time to explore nature, figure life out.”
“Postcards,” said Milo. “No visits back home?”
“Once, twice a year he’d pop up—Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays. He looked great, really happy and that reassured my parents. He was reviving the whole sixties thing—long hair, beard, hemp sandals. But always clean and well groomed, Dad said he looked like Hollywood’s idea of Jesus.”
“You mentioned handling your parents’ affairs, so I assume—”
“Gone, Lieutenant. Four years ago. They were vacationing near Mount Olympia, decided to explore and drove onto a dirt acc
ess road that passed through a heavy logging area. A load of huge pines came loose from a truck bed and crushed their car. We wanted to sue—Scott and I and Des—but the lawyers said our case was weak because the road was chained and warning signs were all around, Dad had lifted it and driven through, anyway. In the end we settled for a hundred thousand. The lawyers took forty percent and we split sixty with Des. He’d cleaned up his act and started architecture school, said it would help with tuition and living expenses. What made it horribly ironic is we’re from an old logging family, four generations. My grandfather was a master sawyer and Dad did some logging before he became a firefighter.”
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