Good Morning, Killer ag-2

by April Smith

  Yes, said the girl, all the time. Once in a park in Manhattan Beach.

  The next upcoming photo day, according to the website, would take place in a Japanese tea garden in Glendale.

  They couldn’t bust me for going to a park on a sunny day.

  Twenty-four

  The Japanese tea garden was located in a recreation center in Glendale, at the end of a palm-lined street in a neighborhood of nicely landscaped older cottages. The park was tucked up against the Verdugo Mountains, in a shady oasis that included a public library. A table had been set up, blocking the Shinto gate. You had to sign in.

  “I’m looking for Moose,” I told the wiry fellow on guard.

  “Who’s Moose?”

  “One of the organizers.”

  “I’m the organizer,” he claimed. He was about fifty, rugged, too-tanned features and shoulder-length hair, wearing a water bottle belt and short shorts to show off his developed legs — one of those deeply California characters whose past would probably read like a parody of West Coast fads: hot tub installer, dope dealer, surfer, yoga teacher.

  “Moose said he’d be here.”

  There was a beat of numbskull silence, and then a mountainous person who had been standing nearby said in a deep announcer’s voice, “I’m Moose.”

  “Great!” shaking his hand enthusiastically. “Just as great as you said it would be.”

  So was he. About six foot four, three hundred pounds.

  “See, we’re fenced in here,” said Moose, indicating the manicured garden. “No looky-loos.”

  “Are all these photographers full-time professionals?”

  “Amateurs. The word for this is amateurs,” he admitted reluctantly and sighed.

  “They all have other jobs?”

  “Like me. I have another job.”

  “What’s your line of work?”

  “Cleaning supplies.”

  “Ahh. So, Moose, how do you become a member?”

  “The models get in free. The photographers pay twenty dollars at the door.”

  I had seen them in the parking lot unpacking their equipment, overweight middle-aged men wearing fishing hats and elaborate vests with dozens of pockets. Some were sporting lenses the size of the Mount Palomar telescope, others had tiny digitals. Half were white, half Asian, and they all seemed to know one another in the forgiving, easygoing way of hobbyists.

  “Anybody can walk in here with twenty dollars and a camera?”

  “We are totally legal,” interjected Mr. California. “We have never had an incident. Who are you?”

  “She just wants to look around,” mumbled Moose.

  Mr. California became distracted by trouble with a barbeque and I took the opportunity to lose myself in the strangely peaceful garden. I had already picked up flyers for other photo days from other clubs and saw there was a circuit. You could find one of these shoots every weekend at some public location somewhere in the Southland. Although that expanded Brennan’s hunting field considerably, it brought the comfort of a plan: I would go to every single shoot. I would show Brennan’s picture to everybody there. If someone turned up a credible lead, I would pursue whomever I had to pursue, at the Bureau or the local level, I didn’t care, in order to set up surveillance for the next time Brennan showed. I would do this meticulously, until my trial was over, until the last appeals were spent, until they put me in jail.

  The photographers lumbered slowly and with prerogative along the winding paths, while the female models — young made-up faces bright as flowers — waited under the ginkgo trees, with their mothers, to be picked. They were all picked. This was a dance where everybody danced. Someone would position a girl and half a dozen men would shoot over his shoulder, paparazzo-style.

  “Give me that laugh again!”

  “Would you guys mind if I moved her into the shade?”

  For twenty bucks you could get a sixteen-year-old to bend over a pagoda and stick out her butt.

  It was supposed to be clean family fun. A young lady with seductive eyebrows, wearing a cheap strapless evening dress, was wrapping and unwrapping a shawl around her body, liking the attention, while a bunch of sad sacks stood around snapping. One of them, who wore a dirty baseball cap and a big bushy beard, slipped her a pair of mirrored sunglasses and shyly asked that she put them on.

  I could picture Hugh Akron, all right. He would ace these geezers, a pro amongst the clueless. Ray Brennan? He’d do just fine, sidewinding through the innocent façade. And Arlene Harounian thought she could handle anything.

  If I had my credentials, I could have worked the situation in fifteen minutes. As it was, all I could do was saunter around smiling and engaging folks in casual conversation, asking if they’d seen the man in the photo, using the ruse that Ray Brennan owed me some prints, occasionally taking a picture with my Ricoh to look authentic, but I was the only woman with a camera and kept getting apprehensive looks from the moms. I was not liking civilian status one bit.

  “Photo day is a handy place to test out your technique,” a retired engineer named George told me.

  “Great to test your equipment,” added his friend, who had an automatic camera with no settings.

  “Do the models and photographers get to know each other?” I asked dully.

  “Oh no, not at all,” insisted George. “This is a very safe place. There’s no direct contact. We only go by first names. We e-mail their pictures to them, but usually to a friend’s computer. You have to be careful.”

  “In this day and age,” intoned his pal.

  They were gray in the face with thin sloping shoulders, wearing closely related plaid shirts.

  “I’m looking for Ray,” showing the picture once again. “Met him out in Riverside,” another location on the circuit. “Ray Brennan? Or he could be using another name.”

  Like everybody else, they shook their heads. By now there were maybe fifty hobbyists and half as many models clustered in little groups near flowering trees and stone shrines. It was becoming sultry and humid in the tea garden. Maybe that is why the photographers were moving so languorously. Or perhaps they were all about to drop dead.

  No, wait, there was some excitement by the pond, where a narrow girl in a red cowboy hat, short denim jacket and low-riding jeans was placing one red high heel on the lower rung of a bridge, causing a reaction amongst the photographers like goldfish to crumbs.

  “Smile, honey! Pose!” shouted a strained woman’s voice.

  “Are you the mom?”

  Of course she was the mom, who else would have laid out a blanket piled with head shots?

  She looked not much older than her daughter, ruddy face, wide at the hips, an infant over one shoulder, a toddler wearing a butterfly costume prancing along the path.

  Like they said: family.

  “I’m Sonoma’s mother,” she said self-importantly. “Sonoma has her own website.”

  She gave me a card. Her nails were long and white and sparkled. The only sparkly thing about her.

  “I tell my girls, use your looks while you have them. You won’t have them forever.”

  The butterfly had scrambled onto a rock, hands clasped to her chin, flashing a demented smile at a guy with a mustache and a tripod.

  “You don’t mean the little one,” I couldn’t help saying. “Losing your looks at three?”

  “Oh no,” said the mother, “Sonoma and Bridget. That’s what I say to them.”

  She pointed with the toe of her running shoe at the glossies on the blanket. Sonoma was blonde. Bridget had long dark hair, like Juliana’s. There were dozens of shots of them in halters and short skirts. It made you appreciate actual models.

  “Bridget is Sonoma’s sister?”

  “Eighteen months apart. I have to be careful they don’t get competitive. They like to dress the same, but I tell them, you should each develop your own look.”

  “The cowgirl look.”

  “They do it different every time. They love it,” she assured me. “W
e all the time go on a shopping spree before we come to one of these.”

  It turned out they lived in the desert, three hours away. The drive was no problem. This was, according to her, how the actress Heather Locklear got started.

  “Last week Bridget earned a hundred fifty dollars.”

  “Really?”

  “Through an agency on the Internet. They get paid twenty-five dollars an hour, two hours minimum. I make sure I’m always at the photo shoot,” she said firmly. “And it has to be nonglamour, not lingerie.”

  “Is Bridget here?”

  “No, she’s working with one of the gentlemen.”

  I looked around for another doll in a cowboy hat.

  “Where?”

  “She went with him for a little while,” the mom explained, shifting the infant to the other shoulder.

  “Where did they go?”

  “To his studio.”

  “You said you’re always present at a photo shoot.”

  My heartbeat had kicked up to a hundred thirty.

  “I am,” she said haughtily, “but I have the babies.”

  I was angry enough to nail her to a tree. She never went on shoots. And you know Bridget never got the hundred fifty bucks; it’s how mom kept the girls tied up inside her own spandex dreams.

  “Is this the photographer?”

  The lady peered at Ray Brennan’s picture.

  “That kind of looks like him, but this man’s name is Jack.”

  “Kind of, or is it? He might have changed his hair color, or his facial hair. He’s six feet tall, weighs about two hundred, in good shape.”

  I might not have the creds, but I had the attitude, and it was rattling her.

  “Let me ask Sonoma.”

  I stood there, knowing. It was like suddenly being encased in ice.

  Sonoma minced over, walking on toes to keep the high heels from sinking into the sweating grass. She was the older one, not so pretty close up.

  “What is the problem, Mom?” she snapped, looking at the picture. “That’s Jack. Who else would it be?”

  “Don’t use that mouth,” the mother whined. “I just wasn’t sure.”

  “It’s chill,” the girl told me. “My sister knows him really well.”

  “How well?”

  “He’s come here before.” Then, less certain, “I know she’s talked to him …”

  I realized why the other photographers claimed not to have seen the hard face of Ray Brennan in their garden. They had not wanted to see him. He was forty years younger, stronger, pumped with male vitality, capable of getting real girls to do the real thing.

  “Bridget left with this man? How long ago?”

  “Half an hour. Forty minutes.”

  “They’ll be right back,” the mother assured me.

  “Where is the studio?”

  They looked at each other.

  “—Somewhere close.”

  “—Five minutes away.”

  “—He said it was at his mother’s house.”

  It was not supposed to be this way. Not without an arrest plan, or a warrant, for God’s sake. Not without backup. I sped down the 134 Freeway while punching the address book on my personal cell phone.

  Donnato.

  Jason.

  Barbara.

  Galloway.

  Vernon.

  Eunice.

  Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail.

  Donnato was at a wedding with his Nextel turned off, but where the hell was everybody else? What did they do on Sunday afternoons? Damn, they were probably all at the ceremony — it was Vicki Shawn and Ed Brewster, the firearms instructors who had posed for Hugh Akron in their wedding clothes. I roared out loud with frustration. It would take too long to go through the rigmarole with some rookie on the switchboard. I needed to connect in the next two minutes with somebody who knew the Brennan case.

  Fingertips on the wheel, I reached back with my other hand and felt around the rear seat for the envelope of files concerning the preliminary hearing. The files were in folders, which took the finesse of a bomb squad expert to extract from the envelope at eighty-five miles per hour in a convertible. Glancing from the gyrating road to the pages flapping in the open air, I located the list of witnesses, and there was Kelsey Owen’s home phone number.

  I guess she was not invited to the wedding, either, because she picked up on the first ring.

  I explained as concisely as I could: Ray Brennan had taken a teenage Juliana look-alike from a photo shoot less than an hour before.

  “Where are you?” she shouted.

  “Almost to the Ventura Freeway. They said he took her to a studio in his mother’s house. I’m guessing his mother’s house is somewhere around Culver City or the park—”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I didn’t mean for it to go down like this—” I was yelling.

  “It’s okay, Ana. Calm down. You’re doing good. I’m here and I’m going to help you. Tell me, clearly and slowly, what you want me to do.”

  “Go to Rapid Start. Either on his military record, or on one of the three-oh-twos, it’s going to say his mother’s maiden name. You’ll need it when you run the title search because the parents were divorced—” “I can’t go to Rapid Start from here!” she interrupted, trying to stay calm. “I’m home, remember? You called me at home!”

  “—He’s got this girl, and he’s at the killing house. He has to finish the ritual—” The cell was cutting out. “How fast can you get to the office?”

  Her reply was garbled.

  “What?” I said. “What did you say?”

  “—West. Keep going west.”

  Twenty agonizing minutes later Kelsey called from the office, just as I was curving onto the 405.

  “Look,” she said, “I need to say that I take responsibility for what’s been going on—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, the tension between us — I’m wondering if you’ve been feeling it too — I’ve been sad about it, and I just wanted to say—”

  “Screw that! We are so past that!”

  “Are we, really? Because I need you to know I was never going to testify, no way. You see, I do understand about loyalty, and if they called me, I was going to be a hostile witness and they—”

  “Yes, yes, we are totally cool. I’m sorry, too!” I bellowed over the screaming wind. “I really, really am. Just give me what you’ve got!”

  His mother’s maiden name was Connors. Lilly Connors. The title to the house was in her name. It had taken Rapid Start about a half a second to retrieve it.

  Step by step, I walked Kelsey through the procedure, while simultaneously accelerating the Barracuda over an overpass like a toy race car that defies gravity on the loop-the-loop. By the time I was peeling off at National, she had run an emergency property search and come up with the address in Mar Vista. His mother’s house. Where Ray Brennan had grown up.

  The moment I pulled up, I wanted to bang my head against the dashboard.

  It was a house I had seen before, when Jason and I were on surveillance. I just didn’t know what I was looking at.

  It is like that, often.

  It was the house on the corner, across from the Montessori school, a small stucco bungalow sun-scorched to indiscriminate gray, with a porch supported by thin white posts — a suggestion of a porch really — and rotted concrete steps. A rusted TV aerial was perched on top of a sloping roof. The lawn was dead, the place had looked abandoned, but there was a bright green AstroTurf doormat. I remember thinking when Jason and I were there the first time that something was not right.

  I have noticed when the hairs go up on the back of your neck, and you think something is not right, something is not right.

  There were two windows on the porch side, two on the left where a front bedroom might be. The windows were not boarded up, as I had hastily assumed, but blackened in, with paint.

  I had been looking at Ray Brennan�
��s darkroom.

  His roving abduction-mobile was parked out front.

  “I see the van. I’m at the address,” lifting the latch on a chain-link gate. “I’m going in.”

  “Wait!” cried Kelsey over the phone in my ear. “Culver City police are responding!”

  “He’s got a girl in there, now.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “They took my gun, remember?”

  I was heading up the weedy path.

  “If he’s into it and you interrupt him, he’ll go into a rage and he’ll—”

  “Where are the cops? The cops aren’t here! He’s doing her, you think I’m going to stand outside and wait? I’m going to distract him,” and cut it off.

  I pulled back the creaking screen door and knocked on the peeling wood until my knuckles hurt, then picked up a piece of cinder block and banged. Finally there were footsteps.

  “Who’s there?”

  I said: “Do you believe the Bible is only a book?”

  “What the hell?”

  The door opened.

  It was Brennan. He was wearing clear oval glasses, a studious look that went with the dimples you could not see in the photographs. His light brown hair was military-short, and he wore a tank top and baggy camouflage shorts and the polished boots. Hunting. Behind the glasses, his lucent eyes went to the curb, where a unit from Culver City police had just pulled up, siren whupping quietly.

  “What’s going on?”

  I did not turn. I tried to maintain eye contact and just stay still until he could be subdued.

  “Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.”

  I heard the latch on the gate unlock behind me.

  “Ray?” someone called.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Culver City police. We just want to talk to you.”

  “Bullshit!” he shouted. “This is CIA harassment!”