“I was seeing her on the street, like Pisces.”
“Never happen.”
Mike coughed and I felt him turn onto his side to face me.
“Casey’s a good kid,” he said. “You just have to tell yourself that she’s at one of those ditty ages and roll with it. Give her a couple of years and she’ll be a normal human again. Like Michael. Now he’s seventeen, the worst is over. He can pretty well be trusted to take care of himself.”
“Michael left a message for you.” I was glad he couldn’t see my face in the dark, the smug grin. “He left his calculus book in your car and he needs it before school tomorrow.”
Mike laughed softly. “What I just said?”
“Yes?”
“Cancel it.”
Mike left before sunrise. He had to deliver Michael’s book, then go home and dress for work. His shift officially began at seven-thirty.
I remember kissing him goodbye, I think. The kiss may have been part of the dream I had about swimming with the Ramsdales, Randy and all of his women. Pisces was there, and so was Hillary, dressed in a stiff party frock. The water was red and full of fish. I was glad when I woke out of it and found myself in Martha’s bright, flowered guest room.
When I went downstairs — showered, hair brushed, teeth brushed, but wearing day-old clothes — Martha was in the living room chatting with a fresh team of Long Beach detectives. They were both very good-looking, sharp in suits and ties. I thought she was flirting again. I hated to interrupt her.
“Good morning,” I said, hovering near the door.
“Good morning, Maggie. There’s coffee in the kitchen. Are you hungry?”
“Not yet. I need to go tend to business, but I’ll check in on you before I leave town this afternoon.”
“Lovely, dear.” She dismissed me with a cheery wave and went back to her detectives.
It was another beautiful, clear morning, full of newly washed sidewalk smells. Wind whipped the empty sail lines of boats at anchor, snapping their metal lanyards against mast poles, making music like wind chimes. A very zen and soothing music. Filled with a longing to stay, I walked back to the yacht club where I had left Mike’s car. I wished for my running shoes.
I wiped heavy dew off the Blazer’s windshield and got in. First thing, I checked Sly’s bundle of stuff to make sure it was still intact — it was. Then I drove into Belmont Shore, following the scent of fresh cinnamon rolls. I had several bakeries to choose from, so I settled on the first one with an open parking space in front.
Fortified with rolls and coffee, I walked down the street to The Gap for a change of clothes. According to the sign on the door, I had ten minutes to wait until opening. I found a news rack and used the time to scan the local paper, the Press-Telegram.
There was a brief stop press on the front page about Randy and Hillary. Grisly murders, they were labeled. A cliche, but apt. The salient point the paper passed over was that even though both of them had their throats slashed, there was perhaps a two-month space between them. And not a word about Elizabeth Ramsdale.
When The Gap opened I went in and found a shirt on the sale rack, a loose-fitting thing with green-and-red parrots all over it. Casey would like it. I changed in the fitting room, paid, and was back in Mike’s car before my half-hour investment in the meter had expired.
As I drove along the waterfront toward downtown, I began to think that I had a handle on how Hillary had been misplaced.
Nothing I had learned came even close to explaining how she had ended up on the street, but it was clear enough that long before reaching that point, she had dropped into the crack between what she needed and what the adults around her wanted. A big crack.
She had a wicked stepmother. So what? A lot of kids do. My Casey says she does. Very few stepchildren end up trolling for tricks.
As I put the sequence together, after Randy supposedly went abroad, Hillary had been at home, alone, with Elizabeth from around Valentine’s Day until perhaps St. Patrick’s Day. About a month.
I tried to imagine what would happen to Casey if she were stuck with Linda for a month or so. I felt an old rage begin to bubble up from its hiding place. Linda — and Scotty — had lost Casey after only two days. And not for the first time. A year or so earlier, Casey had been so upset by the situation at her father’s house that she had put herself on a plane and come home. I figured that this back-and-forth-to-Denver routine now had two strikes against it. Strike three and we were headed to the judge for an amended custody agreement.
As hard as everyone tried to make things work, Casey had never lasted more than seven days with her stepmother. Hillary had lasted over thirty.
The first pay phone I came to, I stopped and called Lyle. “How are things this morning?” I asked.
“Status quo. And what do you mean, I skimped on the pineapple? I don’t put pineapple in my bran muffins.”
“No wonder,” I said. “Did Casey get off to school okay?”
“Oh yeah. She’s one repentant little tyke. Even made her bed before school.”
“Lyle, did she tell you why Scotty dropped her at the airport so early?”
“If I tell you, are you going to scream in my ear?”
“Probably.”
“Just be gentle. According to Casey, it seems that Linda was done in by the baptism party, pooped. So she talked old Scotty into taking her out for dinner to some special place. They could only get an early reservation, so…”
“So they dumped Casey.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Thanks, Lyle. I’ll call Casey after school.”
“How come you’re not yelling? What’s the matter?”
“I have to think about it. When I’m ready to yell, I’ll call back.”
“Lookin’ forward to it,” he chuckled. “The grant administrator on your film called a couple of times. She wants a progress report before she releases the next check. We haven’t paid bills yet this month.”
“I’ll get in touch with her.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Take care of yourself, Mag.”
“You, too. I’ll bring you home a pineapple. Bye, Lyle.”
I got back into the Blazer and rejoined the stream of Monday-morning traffic.
Amazing, I was thinking, how easily an intelligent, normally careful, affectionate father like Scotty could be yanked around. As if Linda were magnetic north and his dick were a compass. All evidence suggested that Randy had also been a pushover in that department.
My plan was to do some research in the local library, find out what I could about Amy Elizabeth Metrano. According to my map, the city’s main library was in the Civic Center. It took me a couple of passes to get myself oriented on the right one-way street, but I managed to find the entrance of the public lot. And a parking space.
When I walked up out of the lot and into the sunshine, I was in a brick courtyard between City Hall and the library. There were a few homeless types sunning themselves on benches, but for the most part the people I saw were city workers going about their business, and schoolchildren with picture books under their arms. No one panhandled me.
Once inside the library, I asked for directions to the periodicals section. I found the shelves of newspaper indexes and looked up Amy Elizabeth Metrano in both the Los Angeles Times and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
Through October 1983, when Amy disappeared, and continuing well into November, there was at least one, and frequently several, Amy Metrano stories daily in the first section of both papers. Around Thanksgiving the frequency of the stories began to taper off and move toward the back pages. I found irregular listings, a month or so apart, over the next year. Progress updates.
I made a list of the newspaper editions I wanted to check. By the time I had pulled all of the pertinent spools of newspaper on microfilm from the files, I needed a basket to carry them.
Reading newspapers on microfilm i
s a bitch. The image on the projection screen quivers constantly and wears out the eyes in a hurry. I learned a long time ago that it’s best to make hard copies of the text I want and then read it all later. I staked out a working projector, went out to the circulation desk for a couple of rolls of quarters, then set to the dismal task in the dim light of the reading room.
After two hours, I had a thick sheaf of slick photocopies on the table beside the spools of microfilm. In the process, I had also gleaned a fair outline of the major events surrounding the disappearance of little Amy Elizabeth Metrano and the comprehensive, heartbreaking search that went on for months afterward. And I had a massive headache.
I boxed the spools of film, put them in the basket for refiling, gathered up my notes and copies, and went back out into the light.
It seemed to me that the press had been hung up on the details of the search and the questioning of a legion of possible witnesses. Most of the ink was spent on speculation, covering a huge range: all the way from the kid got lost in the woods to she was snatched by aliens. I saw sparks of creativity, but very little hard information.
The reportage was space-filling puffery and human-interest sidebar because, in the end, the only facts were these: Amy Elizabeth Metrano, age four and a half, on a family outing to Lake Arrowhead, vanished during a game of hide and seek with her four older sisters. Period.
I went downstairs to the city directories and looked up George Metrano. In 1983, the year Amy disappeared, the Metranos lived on Sixty-eighth Way in Long Beach, George and Leslie and five minor children. Mr. Metrano’s occupation was listed as pipefitter, hers as waitress. The house was rented.
Over the following nine years, the Metranos moved three times. Their last listed address was on Cartagena Street. He was listed as self-employed, she as homemaker. They owned the house.
I found a table in a quiet corner of the stacks and sorted through my copies, looking for Metrano biography. Anything suggestive.
According to the Press-Telegram, at the time of Amy’s disappearance her father was an unemployed shipworker, laid off when the Long Beach shipyards cut back. Money was tight. The patrons of Hof s Hut, “a popular local eatery” where Leslie Metrano worked, had contributed to the search fund. The management had given her time off at full pay to tend to her family. The pipefitters’ union was helping with old bills. The community, it seemed, had embraced the grieving Metranos in a number of decent and generous ways. People can be good. It was nice to be reminded.
While I had the directories out, I had looked up Randall Ramsdale, too. There was no city listing until late 1984 when Randall, Hanna, and minor daughter were in residence at the address in Naples. The occupation listed for him was investments. I interpreted that to mean coupon clipping.
Usually when people talk about a man, his job is maybe the second or third thing mentioned about him, after his marital status. No one yet had even suggested that Randy was inconvenienced by the need to work. If the way he lived was a fair indication, Randy had money. Lots of it. Ergo and to whit, a sluggard scion of the idle rich, as my father would have defined him.
I walked across the library to the government documents section and looked up birth certificates for both Amy and Hillary. Amy’s I found. Hillary’s I didn’t. But only births in California are recorded. No one had said where the Ramsdales lived before they moved to Long Beach. Could have been anywhere.
As I walked back out toward the parking lot I felt I had made some progress. I at least had some interesting avenues to pursue.
Back in the car, I took the list I had made of Metrano family addresses and looked them up on the map. Sixty-eighth Way, where Amy had last lived with her family, was in North Long Beach. Using that address as a starting point, I charted the Metrano family’s moves, a jagged line heading south, toward the water.
In California cities generally, the closer to the ocean, the higher the rent. I was increasingly bothered by something George Metrano had said that day at the morgue. If he was renting and out of work when Amy disappeared, how had he acquired the house he’d said he’d mortgaged to hire a private detective? The implication of that story was that they had spent every nickel, and then some, looking for their little girl.
The average house in Long Beach sold for nearly two hundred thousand dollars. I had read that gem while waiting for The Gap to open. I didn’t know when they might have bought a house, but I calculated on the assumption that housing prices had not risen very much since the late eighties, and in some areas had actually gone down. So, I was thinking that even at a meager 10 percent down, with the double-digit interest rates that prevailed during the last decade, the monthly payments on a modest starter house would still have to run maybe two thousand dollars a month. Principal and interest only.
Not to mention that somewhere along the way, the unemployed pipefitter and the waitress had become self-employed.
I supposed that could mean anything from running a catering truck to, well, anything. The point was, it takes money to start a business. Had the community been that generous? Had there ever been an accounting of donated funds?
My destination was a straight shot up the freeway from downtown. As soon as I left the narrow coastal strip, the scenery changed in a hurry. The new high rises were like a ridge that dropped suddenly into the ugly, flat gray industrial sameness that spreads north from the harbor to Los Angeles. The neighborhoods that slid by on my right were worn-out, ticky-tacky tracts and low-rent apartments covered with indecipherable graffiti. I decided I should have held off before I speculated on the low-end cost of the Metrano house.
The Sixty-eighth Way address turned out to be a tiny duplex tucked up against the freeway, almost in Compton. The construction was early postwar, a single-story stucco rectangle with a flat white rock roof. Some time ago, it had been painted lime-sherbet green and the small front yard had been paved over.
Every house on the street had bars on the windows. Ten years ago, when the Metranos lived there, it might have been a safer neighborhood. But never, even when the small houses had been new, could it have passed as a nice neighborhood. What I saw was fast, cheap construction, the barest possible amenities provided. Rentals for the profit of absentee landlords.
The Metrano family had numbered seven in 1983. If there were even two bedrooms in either half of the duplex, they would be minuscule. My mind boggled at five little girls living in such tight quarters.
Working-class families expect, I think, to start out in simple circumstances. But Amy’s eldest sister had been sixteen back then. The Metranos were not just starting out.
I unpacked a videocamera, and, through the car window, aimed it at the house. Then I drove away slowly with the camera still hanging out the window, getting some of the rest of the neighborhood and the cars zinging by on the elevated freeway that marked the end of the street. I had no idea what I would do with it, but it looked like I was working. If I had to report to the grant administrator, at least I wouldn’t have to lie too egregiously.
At the corner house, an old man lugged a green garden hose out into the middle of his small yard and aimed a puny stream of water at the grass, holding it low in front of him in parody of exaggerated manhood. He wore Sears-blue work pants and a white T-shirt that had been washed so many times it was little more than gauze draped over his concave chest. The politically correct label for him would be Dust Bowl refugee. He would call himself an Okie.
When I waved, he waved back. Taking that as a good sign, I parked at his curb and got out.
Shielding his eyes from the sun, he watched me approach. “You a reporter or the police?” he asked in a tobacco-ravaged rasp.
“Neither one,” I said. “Exactly.”
“I just bet you want to ask me about the little girl, though, don’t ya?”
“Amy Metrano? Did you know her?”
“Sure did, her and her family.” A gentle breeze lifted the fine wisps of his white hair, standing them like feathers. He had red skin-cancer bl
otches on his face. “Pretty little thing, she was. Used to ride her trike over with her sisters to borry a cup of sugar or an egg from my wife. Real polite little girls, every one of them.”
“George and Leslie were good parents?”
“Well now.” He gazed down the street toward the Metranos’ duplex. “If I was to tell you the God’s honest truth, I’d say Leslie was a real hardworking woman. Kept her kids clean. Kept them out of trouble. There was a passel of kids in that family, and things was pretty tight. But she did her best by them.”
“You said she did her best. What about him, George?”
The old neighbor gave me a canny leer. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you?”
“I can hold my own.”
“You said you wasn’t a reporter.”
“I used to be,” I said. “Now I make films. It’s different from reporting news.”
“Films, huh? There was another fella asking about Amy just the last week or so. Not many folks is interested in the little girl anymore, but now and then someone comes askin’. But I start to think something is happening when two people come peckin’ around. I never thought someone was makin’ a movie about it.”
“Who was this man?”
“Didn’t say. ‘Course, I didn’t ask, neither. Like I didn’t ask you.”
“Can we back up to the question about George? What sort of father was he?”
The neighbor raised a bony shoulder. “He didn’t use the belt, never heard him raise his voice. I guess you would say he was easy. Real easy.”
“Easy meaning calm?”
“Meaning that.” He nodded, shifting his hose to dribble over another spot of lawn. “And meaning it was hard to light a fire under him for anything, including picking up his lunch bucket and heading out the door for work in the morning. He was a nice enough fella. But he sure let the little woman carry a full share.”
“Do you ever see them anymore?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not since they moved out. Place has too many bad memories, by my calculation.”
Midnight Baby Page 14