Gone

by Jonathan Kellerman

  I’d sent my $160 invoice to Lauritz Montez’s office, still hadn’t gotten paid. I called him, left a polite message with a machine, and went about forgetting the case.

  Lieutenant Detective Milo Sturgis had different ideas.

  * * *

  I’d spent New Year’s alone and the ensuing weeks had been nothing to warble about.

  The dog I shared with Robin Castagna turned ancient overnight.

  Spike, a twenty-five-pound French bulldog with fire-log physique and the discerning eye of a practiced snob, had scoffed at the notion of joint custody and gone to live with Robin. During his last few months of life, his self-absorbed worldview had faded pathetically as he’d slipped into sleepy passivity. When he started to go downhill, Robin let me know. I began dropping by her house in Venice, sat on her saggy couch while she built and restored stringed instruments in her studio down the hall.

  Spike actually allowed me to hold him, rested his cement-block head under my arm. Looking up from time to time with eyes turned filmy gray by cataracts.

  Each time I left, Robin and I smiled at each other for the briefest of moments, never discussed what was imminent, or anything else.

  The last time I saw Spike, neither the tap-tap of Robin’s mallet nor the whine of her power tools roused him and his muscle tone was bad. Offers of food treats dangled near his crusted nose evoked no response. I watched the slow, labored heave of his rib cage, listened to the rasp of his breathing.

  Congestive heart failure. The vet said he was tired but not in pain, there was no reason to put him down unless we couldn’t tolerate watching him go this way.

  He fell asleep in my lap and when I lifted his paw it felt cold. I rubbed it warmer, sat for a while, carried him to his bed, placed him down gently, and kissed his knobby forehead. He smelled surprisingly good, like a freshly showered athlete.

  As I saw myself out, Robin kept working on an old Gibson F5 mandolin. Six-figure instrument, heavy concentration required.

  I stopped at the door and looked back. Spike’s eyes were closed and his flat face was peaceful, almost childlike.

  The next morning, he gasped three times and passed away in Robin’s arms. She phoned me and cried out the details. I drove to Venice, wrapped the body, called the cremation service, stood by as a nice man carried the pathetically small bundle away. Robin was in her bedroom, still weeping. When the man left, I went in there. One thing led to another.

  * * *

  During the time Robin and I were apart, she hooked up with another man and I fell in and out of love with a smart, beautiful psychologist named Allison Gwynn.

  I still saw Allison from time to time. Occasionally the physical pull we’d both felt asserted itself. As far as I knew, she wasn’t seeing anyone else. I figured it was only a matter of time.

  New Years she’d been in Connecticut with her grandmother and a host of cousins.

  She’d sent me a necktie for Christmas. I’d reciprocated with a Victorian garnet brooch. I still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. From time to time it bothered me that I couldn’t seem to hold on to a relationship. Sometimes I wondered what I’d say if I was sitting in The Other Chair.

  I told myself introspection could rot your brain, better to concentrate on other people’s problems.

  It was Milo who ended up providing distraction, at nine a.m. on a cold, dry Monday morning, one week after the hoax settlement.

  “That girl you evaluated— Mikki Brand, the one who faked her abduction? They found her body last night. Strangled and stabbed.”

  “Didn’t know her nickname was Mikki.” The things you say when you’re caught off guard.

  “That’s what her mother calls her.”

  “She’d know,” I said.

  * * *

  I met him at the scene forty minutes later. The murder had taken place sometime Sunday night. By now, the area had been cleaned and scraped and analyzed, yellow tape taken down.

  The sole remnants of brutality were short pieces of the white rope the coroner’s drivers use to bind the body after they wrap it in heavy-duty translucent plastic. Filmy gray plastic. Same hue, I realized, as cataract-dimmed eyes.

  Michaela Brand had been found in a grassy area fifty feet west of Bagley Avenue, north of National Boulevard, where the streets cut under the 10 freeway. A faint, oblong gloss caught sunlight where the body had compressed the weeds. The overpass provided cold shade and relentless noise. Graffiti boasted and raged on concrete walls. In some places the vegetation was waist high, crabgrass vying for nutrition with ragweed and dandelions and low, creeping things I couldn’t identify.

  This was city property, part of the freeway easement, sandwiched between the tailored, affluent streets of Beverlywood to the north and the working-class apartment buildings of Culver City to the south. A few years back, there’d been some gang problems, but I hadn’t heard of anything lately. Still, it wouldn’t be a place where I’d walk at night, and I wondered what had brought Michaela here.

  Her apartment on Holt was a couple of miles away. In L.A., that’s a drive, not a walk. Her five-year-old Honda hadn’t been located, and I wondered if she’d been jacked.

  For real, this time.

  Too ironic.

  Milo said, “What’re you thinking?”

  I shrugged.

  “You look contemplative. Let it out, man.”

  “Nothing to say.”

  He ran his hand over his big, lumpy face, squinted at me as if we’d just been introduced. He was dressed for messy work: rust-colored nylon windbreaker, wash-and-wear white shirt with a curling collar, skinny oxblood tie that resembled two lengths of beef jerky, baggy brown trousers, and tan desert boots with pink rubber soles.

  His fresh haircut was the usual “style,” meaning skinned at the sides, which emphasized all the white, thick and black on top, a cockscomb of competing cowlicks. His sideburns now drooped a half inch below fleshy earlobes, suggesting the worst type of Elvis impersonator. His weight had stabilized; my guess was two sixty on his seventy-four-inch frame, a lot of it abdomen.

  When he stepped away from the overpass, sunlight amplified his acne pits and gravity’s cruel tendencies. We were months apart in age. He liked to tell me I was aging a lot more slowly than he was. I usually replied that circumstances had a way of changing fast.

  He makes a big deal about not caring how he looks, but I’ve long suspected there’s a self-image buried down deep in his psyche: Gay But Not What You Expect.

  Rick Silverman’s long given up on buying him clothes that never get worn. Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high-priced West Hollywood salon. Milo drives, every two months, to La Brea and Washington where he hands his seven bucks plus tip to an eighty-nine-year-old barber who claims to have cut Eisenhower’s hair during World War II.

  I visited the shop once, with its gray linoleum floors, creaky chairs, yellowed Brylcreem posters featuring smiling, toothy white guys, and similarly antique pitches for Murray’s straightening pomade aimed at the majority black clientele.

  Milo liked to brag about the Ike connection.

  “Probably a one-shot deal,” I said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “So Maurice could avoid a court-martial.”

  That conversation, we’d been in an Irish bar on Fairfax near Olympic, drinking Chivas and convincing ourselves we were lofty thinkers. A man and a woman he’d been pretending to look for had been nabbed at a traffic stop in Montana and were fighting extradition. They’d slain a vicious murderer, a predator who’d sorely needed killing. The law had no use for moral subtlety and news of the capture led Milo to deliver a cranky, philosophical sermon. Downing a double, he apologized for the lapse and changed the subject to barbering.

  “Maurice isn’t courant enough for you?”

  “Wait long enough, and everything becomes courant.”

  “Maurice is an artist.”

  “I’m sure George Washington thought so.”

  “Don’t be an ag
eist. He can still handle those scissors.”

  “Such dexterity,” I said. “He should’ve gone to med school.”

  His green eyes grew bright with amusement and grain alcohol. “Couple of weeks ago, I was giving a talk to a Neighborhood Watch group in West Hollywood Park. Crime prevention, basic stuff. I got the feeling some of the young guys weren’t paying attention. Later, one of them came up to me. Skinny, tan, Oriental tats on the arm, all that cut muscle. Said he dug the message but I was the stodgiest gay man he’d ever met.”

  “Sounds like a come-on.”

  “Oh, sure.” He tugged at a saggy jowl, released skin, took a swallow. “I told him I appreciated the compliment but he should be paying more attention to watching his back when he cruised. He thought that was a double entendre and left cracking up.”

  “West Hollywood’s the sheriff,” I said. “Why you?”

  “You know how it is. Sometimes I’m the unofficial spokesman for law enforcement when the audience is alternative.”

  “Captain pressured you.”

  “That, too,” he said.

  * * *

  I walked over to where Michaela had been found. Milo remained several feet back, reading the notes he’d taken last night.

  A flash of white stood out among the weeds. Another nub of coroner’s rope. The drivers had trimmed the bindings because Michaela had been a slim girl.

  I knew what had happened at the scene: her pockets emptied, her nails cleaned of detritus, hair combed out, any “product” collected. Finally, attendants had packaged her and lifted her onto a gurney and wheeled her up into a white coroner’s van. By now she’d be waiting, along with dozens of other plastic bundles, stacked neatly on a shelf in one of the large, cool rooms that line the gray hallways of the basement crypt on Mission Road.

  They treat the dead with respect at Mission Road, but the backlog— the sheer volume of bodies— can’t help but leach out the dignity.

  I picked up the rope. Smooth, substantial. As it had to be. How did it compare to the yellow binding Michaela and Dylan had purchased for their “exercise”?

  Where was Dylan now?

  I asked Milo if he had any idea.

  He said, “First thing I did was call the number on his arrest form. Disconnected. Haven’t located his landlord. Michaela’s, either.”

  “She told me she was running out of money, had a month’s grace before eviction.”

  “If she did get evicted, be good to know where she’s been crashing. Think they could’ve moved in together?”

  “Not if she was leveling with me,” I said. “She blamed the whole thing on him.”

  I scanned the dump site. “Not much blood. Killed somewhere else?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “Woman walking her poodle. Dog sniffed it out, pronto.”

  “Strangled and stabbed.”

  “Manual strangulation, hard enough to crush the larynx. The follow-up was five stab wounds to the chest and one to the neck.”

  “Nothing around the genitalia?”

  “She was fully clothed, nothing overtly sexual about the pose.”

  Strangulation itself can be a sexual thing. Some lust killers describe it as the ultimate dominance. It takes a long time to stare into the face of a struggling, gasping human being and watch the life force seep out. One monster I interviewed laughed about it.

  “Time goes quickly when you’re having fun, Doc.”

  I said, “Anything under her nails?”

  “Nothing overly interesting, let’s see what the lab comes up with. No hair fibers, either. Not even from the dog. Apparently, poodles don’t shed much.”

  “Any of the wounds defensive?”

  “No, she was dead before the cutting started. The neck wound was a little stick to the side, but it got the jugular.”

  “Five’s too many for impulse cuts but less than you’d expect from an overkill frenzy. Any pattern?”

  “With her clothes on, it was hard to see much of anything except wrinkles and blood. I’ll be at the autopsy, let you know.”

  I stared at the glossy spot.

  Milo said, “So she blamed Meserve for the hoax. Lots of love lost?”

  “She said she’d come to hate him.”

  “Hatred’s a fine motive. Let’s try to locate this movie star.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Dylan Meserve had cleared out of his Culver City apartment six weeks ago, failing to give notice to the company that owned the place. The firm, represented by a pinch-featured man named Ralph Jabber, had been more lax than Michaela’s landlord: Dylan owed three months back rent.

  We encountered Jabber walking through the empty flat and jotting notes on a clipboard. The unit was one of fifty-eight in a three-story complex the color of ripe cantaloupe. The Seville’s tripometer put it three miles from where Michaela’s body had been found. That placed the murder scene roughly equidistant from the couple’s respective apartments and I said so to Milo.

  “What, the two of them reaching some kind of common ground?”

  “I’m pointing out, not interpreting.”

  He grunted and we walked through unguarded double glass doors into a musty-smelling lobby done up in copper foil wallpaper, pumpkin-colored industrial carpet, and U-build Scandinavian furniture made of something yellow that yearned to be wood.

  Dylan Meserve’s unit was on the far end of a dark, narrow hallway. From ten yards away I could see the open door, hear the supercharged whine of an industrial vacuum cleaner.

  Milo said, “So much for trace evidence,” and walked faster.

  * * *

  Ralph Jabber motioned to the dark little woman pushing the vacuum. She flipped a switch that quieted but didn’t silence the machine.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Milo flashed the badge and Jabber lowered his clipboard. I caught a glimpse of the checklist. 1. FLOORS: A. Normal Wear B. Tenant Liability 2. WALLS...

  Jabber was sallow, short, and sunken-chested, in a shiny black four-button suit over a white silk T-shirt, brown mesh loafers without socks. He had nothing to offer about his former tenant, other than the outstanding rent.

  Milo asked the woman what she knew and got an uncomprehending smile. She was less than five feet tall, sturdily built, with a carved-teak face.

  Ralph Jabber said, “She doesn’t know the tenants.”

  The vacuum idled like a hot rod. The woman pointed to the carpet. Jabber shook his head, glanced at a Rolex too huge and diamond-encrusted to be genuine. “El otro apartmente.”

  The woman wheeled the machine out of the apartment.

  Dylan Meserve had lived in a rectangular white room, maybe three hundred square feet. A single aluminum window set high on one of the long walls granted a view of gray stucco. The carpeting was coarse and oat-colored. The vest-pocket kitchenette sported orange Formica counters chipped white along various corners, prefab white cabinets smudged gray near the handles, a brown space-saver refrigerator left open.

  Empty fridge. Bottles of Windex and Easy-Off and a generic brand of disinfectant sat on the counter. Scuff marks bottomed some of the walls. Little square indentations compressed the carpet where furniture had sat. From the number of dents, not much furniture.

  Ralph Jabber’s clipboard lay flat against his thigh now. I wondered how he’d scored the scene.

  “Three months back rent,” said Milo. “You guys are pretty flexible.”

  “It’s business,” said Jabber, without enthusiasm.

  “What is?”

  “We don’t like evictions. Prefer to keep the vacancy rate low.”

  “So you let him ride.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyone talk to Mr. Meserve about it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “How long would Mr. Meserve have had to go before you threw him out?”

  Jabber frowned. “Every situation is different.”

  “Mr. Meserve asked for an extension
?”

  “It’s possible. Like I said, I don’t know.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t handle the rents. I’m the termination-transition manager,” said Jabber.

  That sounded like a euphemism for mortician.

  Milo said, “Meaning...”

  “I fix the place up when it’s vacant, get it ready for the new tenant.”