California Girl

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “What do you mean?”

  Nick waited but she didn’t offer anything.

  “Creeps like Dirk can be hard on a girl,” he said.

  “Anything beats home, Mr. Detective.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Pacific Palisades.”

  “Big dollars.”

  “Plastic.”

  “I grew up in Tustin,” he said. Then he took a chance. Figured it would open a door or not. “Have you tried the Orange Sunshine air freshener?”

  She smiled and colored. Prettiest skin Nick ever saw.

  “I sprayed myself by accident,” said Nick. “Tripped for a whole day and slept like a baby.”

  “I stayed high for two days once,” she said.

  “I found the bottle in Janelle’s car.”

  Gail shuddered inside her coat.

  “What have you heard?” asked Nick.

  “Heard?”

  “About Janelle.”

  “Everybody says it was someone from Tustin.”

  “And?”

  “Something to do with her old life there. Being Miss Tustin and the magazine picture and her brothers. Her mom committed suicide with rat poison.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  Gail looked down at the walkway. Nick did, too. Two-by-sixes with alyssum and lobelia growing up through the spaces.

  “I went to the Troubadour to hear Jesse play about a week before the murder. She was there. We sat together with some other people. Jesse took her home.”

  Nick waited. Felt like Gail had something to say.

  “You think Cory knows something about Janelle?” she asked.

  “He’s dangerous,” said Nick. “She was hanging out with him. She liked the danger. See, she was helping us. Telling us things, for money. If Cory found out about that, he’d do something bad.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Keep it to yourself, Gail. I trust you.”

  “The night she died, Cory and I were supposed to go see the Doors. He was going to pick me up at seven. He called me at quarter to and said he didn’t feel good, was staying home. I said I’d come over and he said no. That meant he was with someone else. He knew I knew. I figured, screw him. So I drove up to Hollywood myself and saw the band.”

  “Was he with Janelle?”

  Gail shrugged. “Probably. She was his new thing.”

  New thing, thought Nick.

  “I knew Janelle when she was little,” said Nick. “Just a girl. I need to find out who did this to her.”

  “Was it really, actually, all the way cut off?”

  Nick nodded. “Completely off. You going to let me have a look around here, Gail? Or shall I just come back with a warrant?”

  “You can’t go in his house. It’s got alarms and everything.”

  “Then how about the grounds? The pool house and the garage and the property? Whatever’s open and in plain sight?”

  Gail nodded. “Yes. Okay.”

  Dirk cussed her when she told him they could look around. Lobdell cuffed him to a eucalyptus tree and told him to shut up or he’d arrest him for trespassing, assault, and disturbing the peace.

  Dirk looked puzzled and pleased when Gail said she’d bring around a couple of chairs and beers and keep him company.

  THE POOL HOUSE had a small living room, and a short hallway with two rooms in the back. A bar with stools. A dinette. Dishes piled in the sink. Beer cans on the counters. Pretzels and canned nuts.

  The fruit bowl on the little table contained two bananas, an orange, and a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum with a two-inch barrel. Nick used a tissue to pop the cylinder for a look at the serial number. Six magnum loads, six shiny primers looking at him. He balanced the gun on the fruit and wrote the numbers in his notebook.

  “That’ll blow a hole in you,” said Lobdell. “There ought to be some way to keep creeps from having things like that.”

  “Too many of both,” said Nick. Closed the cylinder.

  They walked through the bedrooms but nothing looked unusual. Cory was big on stereos and televisions and posters from John Wayne westerns.

  Back outside Lobdell smoked and Nick finished up his notes on what they’d seen in the pool house.

  “The garage was open,” said Lobdell. He ground out the cigarette with his wing tip, kicked it under a cottonwood.

  Nick stepped into the big garage and hit the lights. Two rows of good fluorescents flickered on. Shimmering into focus below were a white late-model Cadillac Coupe Deville and a new black Porsche 911S.

  “Nice coupe,” said Lobdell.

  Nick remembered what the Lemon Heights Sporting Goods owner had seen that night in the parking lot. And what Terry Neemal had seen later that same night outside the SunBlesst packinghouse.

  “Maybe it met Janelle and her Beetle in the Sav-On parking lot,” said Nick. “And left with her in it.”

  “I like that idea.”

  It had bothered Nick that Cory Bonnett disappeared two days after the murder. Now it bothered him more.

  “That’s eight thousand dollars’ worth of German sports car,” said Lobdell. “I had an uncle that marched into Auschwitz. I don’t buy anything Kraut.”

  Nick walked around the vehicles. One wall had shelves with boxes on them. The other had a long workbench with two vises, a table saw, a circular saw, a jigsaw, a band saw, a grinder, and two industrial sewing machines. There were a dozen leather punches hung from the pegboard behind the bench. Knives and scissors and handsaws, too. Ten different shapes and sizes, Nick saw. Gave him a weird feeling even though they were only tools.

  No Trim-Quick, but plenty of other saws and shears and knives for cutting skin.

  Nick still had the funny feeling inside as he looked at a stack of catalogues for leather apparel. And the little eight-shot .22 on top of them.

  …artist or craftsman…terrific pride…and that is what she insulted…

  An old wooden armoire sat open along the wall beside the workbench. Nick saw the leather hanging inside. Black and brown and tan and red and blue. Scraps in boxes at the bottom. Good smell. A Winchester Model 12 leaning back in one corner behind the leather like it was trying to hide.

  On the wall by the office closet was a calendar with a woman in a yellow bikini standing next to a small airplane. Beside it another calendar with a woman in a red bikini standing next to a black Porsche.

  “Pretty girls, guns, and shiny machines,” said Lobdell. “Fun hobbies. What kind of plane does he have?”

  “Cessna,” said Nick. “Out at Orange County Airport.”

  “You wonder how a little plane like that can carry enough drugs into the country to pay for a place like this. For cars and pools.”

  “He just flies down to Mexico to negotiate and buy,” said Nick. “The drugs come north later. Some in cars. Some in bigger planes. They say Bonnett doesn’t even look at what he imports. Disgusted by everything about it, except for the money.”

  “These hippies, you watch,” said Lobdell. “By the time they’re my age they’ll be carrying briefcases and wearing suits like their daddies. They’ll all want to work for IBM again, drive overpriced German cars. They’ll cut their hair for the dough. Tell their kids they never used dope or wore those dumbass clothes or called us pigs. You watch.”

  Lobdell lit a cigarette. Nick smelled the butane, then the tobacco. Loved those smells. Liked the happy shear of metal on metal when the Zippo opened and closed. He missed the smokes. Just once in a while now. To bribe a subject, like Neemal. Build their trust in you and relax them.

  Nick used his pen to prowl through the tools and containers on the workbench. Good stuff, well cared for. Some metal dust had mounded up on the grinder housing, but no clue as to what it had come from. Something for his plane? Nick thought of Bonnett’s white-handled Mexican switchblade, wondered if he sharpened it here.

  Why would a guy with leather-cutting tools use a garden pruner?

  He stood before the shelves an
d read the white labels on the boxes: pots and pans, extra blankets, pictures, trophies, sports gear, lantern and stove, sleeping bags, tent. Max had always used stick-on labels, too.

  Then something grabbed his eyes. The loose bundle of material on top of the tent box. One corner of it dangling down over the cardboard. Didn’t fit with Cory Bonnett’s garage at all. Like a fly in a glass of milk.

  “I’ve been looking at that for the last thirty seconds, too,” said Lobdell. “I’ve seen it before.”

  White bedsheets with little pink roses.

  “The curtains in Janelle’s yellow cottage,” said Nick.

  “Yep,” said Lobdell.

  Nick stepped up closer, leaning in. “I swear I’m looking at a bloodstain.”

  Lobdell’s big head lowered over Nick’s shoulder. Nick smelled Old Spice aftershave and cigarette smoke. “Looks like blood to me.”

  Nick just stared at the sheets. And the small drop of what looked like blood. It most definitely looked like blood. For the first time since he’d left the packinghouse he believed he’d found something that truly mattered.

  “This isn’t the cleanest search here, Lucky. We could lose this stuff in court if we don’t see a judge and get a warrant.”

  “The sheets are in plain sight, Nick. The blood, too. We came here to question someone in connection with a murder. We got permission. The garage door was wide open so we looked around. How can Bonnett expect privacy in his garage with his door wide open and a bloody sheet in plain sight?”

  “No. I want it right. Let’s get a warrant.”

  Nick couldn’t take his eyes off the sheets and that little stain. Damn. It was like throwing in your line hour after hour, day after day. And you finally catch a big fish you only half believed was there.

  “See?” asked Lobdell. “My luck is rubbing off on you.”

  “Yeah. But I still got a problem, Lucky.”

  “I think I got it, too.”

  “Say these are Janelle’s sheets,” said Nick. “Say she had two sets because she liked the pattern, got them on sale. Okay. I can believe that. One for the bed and one for the windows. But what are these doing here? What, Bonnett met her in Tustin, drove her back to Laguna to her place, killed her in her own bedroom, then changed the sheets and messed up the bed? Then drove back and dumped her at the packinghouse? Then brought evidence back to his own home?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No kidding.”

  No planning and unnecessary work.

  “Except bringing back the evidence,” said Nick. “I’ve been doing some reading. Heard this FBI guy up in L.A. And they got this new kind of killer out now. They’re not dumb. They’re more weird than dumb. They like doing what they do. And sometimes they’ll take stuff from their victims, stuff that isn’t worth anything. It helps them remember. Neemal likes fire. These guys like keepsakes of what they did. Maybe Bonnett’s one of those. And the sheets turned him on.”

  Would he take something from her as a reminder, like you talked about?

  No. But unpracticed killers surprise us by what they remove from the scene simply to keep the police from finding it.

  “Or maybe,” said Lobdell, “he brought them back here to get rid of them. Panicked or forgot.”

  Nick grasped for the logic in the sheets but couldn’t find it. No method to the madness. “Let’s get some paper and toss this place,” he said.

  “I’ll call deputies to seal it off,” said Lobdell. “I’d hate to see Tarzan and Gidget clean this all up while we’re gone.”

  IT TOOK three hours to get the search warrant and back to Bonnett’s home. Nick typed the supporting affidavit while Lobdell filled in the statutory page and dictated a “hero paragraph” that made Nick sound like a seasoned murder investigator rather than the first-time lead detective he was. Lobdell kept harping on the “training and experience” that led Nick to the “strong opinion” that felony evidence would be found in Cory Bonnett’s home. Lobdell said the secret was not to overstep the warrant once you were inside. If you had a doubt, like could you open a locked chest, or could you stick your head up into the attic, then you went back to the magistrate and got another warrant. That way, nothing got thrown out of court.

  Just as Nick was ready to leave the homicide room his phone rang. It was Roger Stoltz, who said he was sorry that Nick had missed today’s four o’clock appointment. He had been looking forward to talking with Nick. Was everything okay?

  Nick apologized. Felt like a school kid without his homework. Told himself it’s easy to forget appointments when evidence starts falling into your lap.

  Stoltz asked him not to worry, said he was just in from D.C. a few hours ago and ready to go home.

  “I’m looking forward to the weekend with Marie,” he said. “Now Nick, look. My secretary here says you wanted to talk about Janelle. Anytime. Anywhere. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Nick, do you have a suspect?”

  “Possibly.”

  Silence for a moment. A very deep sigh from the other end.

  “I would still like to know about the Newport Beach apartment,” said Nick.

  “Anytime and anywhere.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Regards to Max and Monika. And to your brothers. We’ll see David in church Sunday.”

  “We’ll be there, too,” said Nick.

  By the time they got back to Cory Bonnett’s house the afternoon had gone cool. A stiff breeze rattled yellow leaves off the cottonwoods. A raven tore across the sky with a mockingbird after him.

  The blue and white pickup truck was gone. Two deputies stood near the garage, two more in a unit blocking the driveway.

  “Good to have the troops,” said Lobdell. “I had my hand in the cookie jar once, the guy comes home. I’m in the kitchen checking the cutlery box for a missing carving knife and he jumps me. Never heard him. Didn’t see him. I got him under control, but he could have shot me or stabbed me easy.”

  Superior court judge Wes Dickinson had thrown them a loose one, good for the main house, the pool house, the garage, and both vehicles in the garage. Even the trunks of the cars. It specified not only the bloodstained sheets but “evidence of the subject’s presence at the SunBlesst packinghouse on October 1 or 2 of this year; evidence of the subject as party to or having knowledge of the murder of Janelle Vonn; evidence that the subject had prior knowledge that this murder had been planned or would or was about to happen.”

  “My kinda judge,” said Lobdell.

  The Porsche was locked but the Cadillac wasn’t. Nick used a flashlight and magnifying glass to examine the Coupe Deville’s floorboard carpet and the red leather seats. Plenty of sand, dirt, fiber, bits of paper. Strands of what looked like human hair. Some light like Bonnett’s and some dark like Janelle’s. Probably latents all over this interior. Good stuff, he thought, but he’d get the ID boys on it later.

  He popped the trunk. Saw the lid rise in the rearview. Heard Lobdell.

  “Hmmm, Nick.”

  Nick jumped out, walked back to Lobdell. Looked down into the spacious trunk. A small toolbox. A set of jumpers, some car wax, and rags in a box.

  And a sleeping bag. Black plastic bottom outside for moisture. Yellow-and-black-checked flannel inside. Not rolled up. Not folded. Just crammed back in the far corner of the trunk.

  Nick pulled it out and set it beside the box. Spread it out a little. Found the head end, began unzipping it. Big enough for two. Stubborn zipper and a musty smell.

  Debris inside. Black stuff. Flecked and fragile. Like burned paper, thought Nick. Or soot. Some dark hairs. Easy to see on the yellow flannel. Blood. Crate label for SunBlesst packinghouse, pretty brunette with the orange again. Blood on that.

  A saw blade. Swivel bolt still attached to a shard of wood. Blood all over them, too.

  By four-thirty they’d tossed the house, too, but hadn’t come up with much else.

  By six-thirty
they had a warrant for the arrest of Cory Bonnett.

  By seven they’d talked to Don Rae of Laguna PD. Rae’s source had confirmed that afternoon that Cory Bonnett was at his place near Ensenada. Kind of a compound, said Rae. People around him. Gringos and Mexicans. Unfriendly people. A compound in the hills.

  Rae said he’d let Nick know the second Bonnett was headed stateside.

  “Janelle Vonn,” said Rae. “Incredible. No wonder he hit the road.”

  Nick thanked him and hung up.

  “Ensenada,” said Nick. “A little out of our jurisdiction.”

  “There’s a way to bring him back here,” said Lobdell. “You just gotta have the nerve for it.”

  29

  THAT SUNDAY DAVID SAT in the first row of the Grove Drive-In Church of God to watch Darren Whitbrend deliver his guest sermon.

  The young minister looked fuller in his robes. More authoritative. David had noted Whitbrend’s elevator shoes earlier in the vestry where they had enrobed. David could feel the worry coming off Whitbrend. Downcast eyes, tight jaw, few words.

  Which was fine with David, who felt his own body on the verge of falling apart.

  Barbara held one of his clammy hands. Wendy the other. Rachel lay on Barbara’s lap wrapped in a blanket. Two-year-old Matthew sat beside his mother, frowning his way into a bowel movement.

  David watched with envy. He hadn’t had one since talking to Hambly, then Howard, on Thursday. Nothing would stay down long enough. He had drunk half a coffee mug of pink antacid earlier, trying to keep down his breakfast of white sandwich bread. Pretty much the same for dinner the night before. Almost no sleep. Hours of wideawake worry that the cops would see through Linda Langton’s words. That Howard would face a lineup and hang his final alibi on David. Then more hours of sweat and stomach pain, right on the cusp of sleep, as his conscience wriggled back into its deepest crannies to retrieve his most trivially shameful moments and present them to him for…what? These were things he hadn’t even thought about for years. The time he slugged Clay for breaking a gallon mustard jar he wanted for butterflies. The time he told Lydia Maxwell she was the ugliest girl he’d ever seen. The time he purposefully overcooked Barbara’s steak because she liked it rare and had called him a coward for not standing up to a drunk evangelist who had pawed her at a church mountain retreat two summers ago.