Midnight Baby

by Wendy Hornsby

  “When did they move?”

  He thought about it, playing the water in a crystal arc. “Not long after they lost the little one. ‘Bout Christmas, as I recall. My wife used to make them girls all a big gingerbread boy for Christmas, all frosted up with their names on them. That year she didn’t bake nothin’. She just sat in her big old chair and bawled.”

  “May I speak with your wife?”

  “Yes you may.” He smiled slyly. “But I wouldn’t be in no hurry to do it, if I was you. You’ll find her sittin’ up there next to Jesus.”

  “My condolences,” I said.

  He had liked his joke. “Next time I talk to Jesus, I’ll have him send them along.”

  “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  “Come by again.”

  I chuckled to myself all the way back to the car.

  Ten minutes later, I found the second Metrano house. I had been expecting something on the same economic level as the duplex. Modest though it was, the Metranos seemed to have made a step up from Sixty-eighth Way. Perhaps with the help of friends, I thought.

  The new house was in a tract built around a large green park, down the street from Jordan High School. It was a good location for a family with two girls of high school age. The house wasn’t large, three, perhaps four bedrooms, with a yard behind. I thought it must have been a great relief for all of them to have some space, some privacy. They had more room and one fewer family member.

  George Metrano hadn’t told us when he had mortgaged his house to pay the detective. Maybe it was this one.

  I videotaped the front for a few seconds, and then went on. What if the extra loan had been too much? What if they had lost this house?

  On that depressing thought, I searched out house number three.

  My concern, it turned out, had been groundless. The third house was a giant leap up, a large, lovely custom-built home with a brick wishing well in front. The neighborhood was well established, big trees, lush broad lawns. An air of graceful living.

  From hardscrabble to blue-collar to House and Garden in ten years. Upward mobility, the American dream, come to full flower.

  I thought about what the old neighbor had said. So, maybe someone or something had lit a fire under George. Maybe all he had needed was a hand up. Still, the dream was sustained by two paychecks, his business, her job.

  I had a jolt trying to visualize Leslie coming home in her Bingo Burgers blazer. It didn’t work. Unless…

  I needed to know who owned the burger franchise.

  In some parts of the world, I hear, when times are hard and nothing brings relief, in desperation folks have been known to throw the occasional virgin into the volcano.

  CHAPTER 12

  I got back to the sports bar in the Shore during the midafternoon lull. There were only a few diehards drinking at the tables next to the windows. Oprah was on the big TV screens talking about how to hang on to a man once you get one. Her token shrink was saying that knowing how to strip was rule number one. A couple of waitresses sat at the bar with coffee mugs and talked back to her, offered advice of their own.

  I found Lacy at a back table, alone, refilling catsup bottles.

  Lacy was very young and very pretty, with a heart-shaped face framed by soft light brown hair. She looked like a wholesome, straightforward young woman. Not at all what I had expected. When I pulled out a chair next to her, she looked up at me with eyes that were red and puffy from crying.

  “May I talk with you?” I asked, not waiting for an answer before I sat down.

  “Are you police?”

  “No. My name is Maggie MacGowen.”

  She wiped the neck of a bottle and screwed a cap on it. “This is not a very good time. Maybe another day.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it was a double blow for you, both Hillary and your fiance.”

  “My fiance?” She was aghast. “You mean Randy? Jesus Christ, Randy was never my fiance.”

  “I thought he gave you a ring.”

  “He tried, anyway. I turned it down every way I knew how, but he kept getting it back to me. God, he was such a pain.”

  “I’m lost,” I said.

  Her face was now more angry than sad. “You heard all the gossip, right? That I was Randy’s new babe? Well, I wasn’t. I didn’t want anything to do with him. I know it’s not nice to say mean things about dead people. But he was a pig. I wish people would just shut their mouths.”

  “You’ve been crying.”

  “It sure as hell isn’t for Randy,” she seethed. Then her shoulders sagged and her face softened. “Hilly was a sweet girl. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

  “How did you know Hillary?”

  “I was her math tutor. Now and then she used to come in just to talk. She really didn’t have anyone else.”

  “She needed a tutor? Was Hillary having problems at school?”

  Lacy shook her curls. “Not really. She was such a smart little girl. They had her involved in so many things — music and sports, dance. It was a lot of stress. She got behind a little, that’s all.”

  “Would her father come in with her to visit you?”

  “No. Who are you? Are you a reporter?”

  “Not exactly. I’m asking as a friend. I met Hillary last week, up in Los Angeles.”

  “Oh, my God.” Her voice caught. “I heard about that. It’s not true what they’re saying, is it?”

  I pulled out Guido’s pictures and showed them to Lacy. “When I met her, she had been living on the streets for a while. She called herself Pisces.”

  Lacy smiled sadly. “Hillary loved to swim. I used to tell her she was born under the wrong sign. She should have been a Pisces. You know, the sign of the fish.”

  “When was her birthday?” I asked.

  “Sometime in the fall. She was a Scorpio.”

  The date on Amy Metrano’s birth certificate was March 10. I didn’t know what the sign was for March 10.

  Lacy had the pictures lined up on the table in neat rows. In most of them Hillary looked like a Central Casting teen hooker, very hard and brassy. Except for maybe one or two. There was one shot of her when she was looking at me over her shoulder. The way the light hit her face, the expression I caught, she seemed vulnerable and frightened. It was my favorite among the pictures, because it was most like the child Guido and I had talked to at Langer’s Deli. Lacy had set that shot aside when she handed back the others. She ran her finger along the contours of the pale face.

  “May I have this?” she asked. “I don’t have any pictures of Hilly.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Maybe I can find you something better.” She shook her head. “I want this one.”

  “Lacy,” I said, leaning in toward her, “tell me what happened. Help me understand how a kid like Hilly ended up the way she did. Was she abused at home? Was it so awful for her?”

  Lacy took a stiff napkin from the holder on the table and dabbed at her nose. “No, she wasn’t abused. I mean, not in the way I think you mean. No question, Randy loved Hillary. Maybe he loved her too much. Randy was like this big spoiled brat. And she was one of his toys.”

  “In what way?”

  She thought about it. “I guess what I mean is, she was like his favorite toy and he overwound her. You know how kids will do?”

  “That’s a good description. He put a lot of pressure on her?”

  “Definitely.” She nodded. “I told him that he should lighten up on her, let her quit some of her extracurricular things. But Randy said, oh no, Hilly can handle it. He paid me a lot of money to help Hilly get A’s. With Randy, anything he wanted, one way or another, he got it.”

  “Did Elizabeth push, too?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never met Elizabeth. I think she basically pretended Hilly didn’t exist.”

  “I was told that you and Randy planned to run away together. Where did the story come from?”

  “I think Randy started it. And I think he kind of believed it. I don’t mean
to sound conceited, but he really was obsessed with me. He told me he thought I would make a better mother to Hilly than Elizabeth did. He said I was more of a family person than his wife was. Like he was Ozzie but she was no Harriet.

  “Then he shows up here one night when I was in the middle of a dinner shift, and tries to give me this big diamond ring. I wouldn’t accept it, so he Fed Ex’d it to me. I did everything I could to get that ring back to him. I mean, it got ridiculous. Everyone kept telling me I should just keep it, or sell it. But I knew that if I did accept it, he would think he had paid my price and I was his. To Randy, everyone had a price.”

  “I spoke with the jeweler across the street,” I said. “He told me you tried to sell the ring back to him. What changed your mind about keeping it?”

  “He just would not take it back. Then there was Hilly.”

  “She wanted you to marry her father?”

  “No, of course not. I didn’t try to sell the ring until after Randy was long gone. Hilly came to me and she was just desperate. It was awful between Elizabeth and her. She wanted to talk to Randy, but no one would tell her how to reach him. He never called and he never wrote. I think she was getting real scared about him. He left awfully suddenly.” She looked up at me. “I guess now we know why.”

  “You said Hilly was scared.”

  “Randy was on her all the time. I think I would have been relieved to have some space. She wasn’t. She missed him. I guess he had sort of protected her from Elizabeth. What a bitch.”

  “Did she call family? Aunts, uncles, grandparents?”

  “There was no one for her to turn to. All she had, she told me, was a godfather somewhere. She didn’t even know his name, just that sometimes he sent her presents. I told her to go through her father’s files and things and see if she could find a name or something. She did it. She didn’t find a name, just some old cards addressed to her, no return address. And some other little things. We looked up a private investigator in the phone book. His ad said he specialized in finding missing persons. No lead too small. Hilly liked that, so we went to see him. He said maybe he could help, but he was expensive. So I sold the ring and gave Hilly the money.”

  “I heard it was a big ring. How much did this investigator cost?”

  “A couple of hundred dollars. I got a lot for the ring. Thousands. I put the rest of the money aside in case Hilly needed it.

  I think the future hit her all of a sudden. Lacy looked as if she was going to break down on me.

  “What is the investigator’s name?” I asked.

  She pulled herself together enough to manage a wry smile. “Smith. Can you believe it? John Smith. Are you going to call him?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  Lacy’s eyes were glassy with tears. She must have seen me as a bright blur in my parrot shirt. Yet her gaze was intense. She pushed aside the tray of catsup bottles she had filled so that she could move closer to me.

  “What are you after?” she asked. Not a challenge. More an offer.

  “I want to know Hillary. I want to know how she got lost. I’ve talked to a lot of homeless kids over the years. Most of them come from horrible, abusive backgrounds. Rich and poor. Sometimes you can save the kid from the street, help him heal. The thing you usually cannot do is send him home again. The streets are too often better.

  “Right from the beginning, I knew Hillary was different. It wasn’t abuse that exiled her. It was something traumatic. After we found Randy, I began to wonder if she was afraid for her life.”

  “Why didn’t she come to me?” Lacy hissed through clenched teeth.

  “Maybe to protect you.”

  “Oh, Hillary.” She folded her hands, but it didn’t stop them from shaking. I covered her hands with mine and held them tight.

  “You said you put the money from the ring aside,” I said. She nodded.

  “Is there very much?”

  Again she nodded, with some vigor this time. “More than I earned all last year working here. Why?”

  “There’s something you can do for Hillary.”

  “Like what?”

  “Take the money and go away until this is over. Until we find out what Hillary knew.”

  The suggestion startled her. “I can’t go away. I’m in the middle of my last college semester.”

  “Think about it. But don’t think too long, Lacy. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Just go farther away than Hillary did.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Mike’s car sat at a funny angle, as if the front end had fallen into a sinkhole. Holes open up all the time in California — earth tremors, leaky water pipes, oil-land subsidence. They regularly swallow up bigger things than borrowed cars.

  Thinking enough already, I muttered something that wasn’t a Hail Mary and started to jog across the public lot behind the sports bar to see what had happened. The Nikon in my bag bounced against my side.

  I don’t know which I saw first, the long clean cuts in the front tire or the bill of a dark cap poking out from under the back bumper. I took a quick hit of adrenaline.

  “You there,” I shouted, and opened my stride to sprint. I was maybe five car lengths away. “Get away from that car!”

  The rear tires blew then, pop, pop, in quick succession. A man scuttled away like a crab running from under a rock, a big man with a cap pulled low over his face, a loose Dodgers windbreaker, jeans. He must have been a good runner once, the way he was pumping, but he was long past his prime. I lit out after him.

  We played cat and mouse among the cars in the lot, then he broke into the open and jackrabbited down a side residential street. He opened a lead, stretching fifteen yards to twenty before I turned it on some more. I wanted to keep him in sight, but I didn’t want to catch him. I hadn’t seen him drop his razor.

  He was already breathing hard. My strength is endurance, not speed. So I kept a space between us and let him wear himself out. As long as I didn’t lose sight of him before he ran out of gas, I knew I could run him down.

  He sidestepped a convention of tricycles on the sidewalk. I vaulted over them, gaining maybe six yards on him. He looked back a couple of times, but I was too busy to catch his face.

  I had my bag slung in front. As I ran, I attached a long zoom lens to my Nikon. Focus is tricky with telephoto lenses. You need to be very steady, because the exposure has to be relatively slow. When I had a clear stretch of sidewalk in front of me — no lawn mowers, no Rollerbladers — I said a Hail Mary in atonement, never knowing how much help I might need, and raised the camera to my eye.

  I whistled my Candlestick Park earsplitter. Startled, he turned, and I snapped. To make sure he had seen what he saw, he looked again, the jerk. And I got him again.

  By then I was gaining on him. I had to drop back, because the only way I wanted to catch him was on film. I slowed to keep the distance between us at a safe fifteen yards. I photographed his back, zoomed in on the Dodger jacket, got the label on his jeans. When he turned into an alley, he gave me a beautiful profile. Barrymore couldn’t have been more cooperative.

  I got to the mouth of the alley, and I stopped. There had been people on the street watching us, gawking. Some of them had talked to me, but I was too involved to hear them. As long as we were in the open, I felt sufficiently safe. The alley was a different equation.

  With the camera in front of my face, holding my breath, holding my hand steady, I finished the roll on his retreating back. He looked back at least one more time for me. Bless his heart.

  By the time he got halfway down the alley, he was really puffing, dragging his left leg a little. He ducked between two houses and I let him disappear. I had what I needed: smoking gun, smoking camera, same thing.

  On my way back to the parking lot, I rewound the film, took it out of the camera, and reloaded. I felt good. I wasn’t even breathing hard. There were a few sticky details waiting for me in the parking lot, but overall, I thought things were looking up.

  I know how to chan
ge a tire. My father taught me before I got my driver’s license. There really is nothing to it, once you get the spare out of the trunk and figure out which part is the jack and which is the handle. I have changed a few tires since. One time in a jungle in Honduras. At night. No big deal.

  When I looked at Mike’s car, though, changing a tire was not the problem. The problem was, where did I begin when I had one spare and four flats?

  I called the Long Beach police. Then I paged Mike.

  “I think it’s a sex thing with this guy,” I said when Mike returned the call. I was at a public phone next to a dry cleaner’s, watching the police hoist Mike’s Blazer with its slashed tires onto a flatbed tow truck. “He’s impotent, so he has to deflate anything that’s blown up bigger and harder than he is. Rafts, tires, whatever.”

  “Uh huh,” Mike growled. “I think it’s your balloon he wants to burst.”

  “He just wants to scare me.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s doing just fine. I’m scared. He was so close to me, Mike. If I hadn’t seen his hat, I might have tripped over him. Now I’m afraid for Lacy. He followed me. He must know I talked to her.”

  “Stay with the local cops until I come and get you.”

  “Don’t come. Everything’s under control. The helicopters are still circling overhead, the neighborhood is sealed off. Maybe they won’t catch him this time, but they’ll force him to lie low for a while.”

  “How will you get home?”

  “Sergeant Mahakian from last night? He told me about a cheapy car-rental place just up Pacific Coast Highway. He’ll drop me by there as soon as they’ve finished tagging and loading your car. Then he’s taking Lacy to the airport. She’s really shaken.” I paused.

  “Do me a favor?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Find out what George Metrano does for a living.”

  “He’s a restaurateur. As in he has a couple of Bingo Burgers franchises.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”

  “Why should you care?”

  “It might be worth your while to find out where he got the money to buy his franchises. And when.”