Milo said, “She give you any other details about her lifestyle?”
“Just that she was dancing, we never got into details. When she called, it was always from a club, I could hear the music going. Sometimes I thought she might’ve sounded high. I didn’t want to do anything to put distance between us. She liked the fact that I was a teacher. Sometimes she called me ‘Teach’ instead of my name.”
Marsh removed his glasses and wiped them with his napkin. Unshielded, his eyes were small and weak. “Then her calls stopped, and the club said she was gone, no forwarding. I didn’t hear from her for over a year, until I got the message in my box at school.”
“No idea what she was doing for over a year?”
Marsh shook his head. “She said she’d made enough from dancing to relax for a while, but I wondered.”
“About what?”
“If she’d gotten into other things. I put that out of my head because I had no facts.”
“Other things such as . . .”
“Selling herself,” said Marsh. “That was another thing my grandparents were always telling me about Christi. She was promiscuous. They used less-kind language. I didn’t want to hear it.”
He took hold of his cup, managed to get down some chai.
“Christi had learning problems, but I guess one thing she could always count on was her looks. She was an extremely beautiful child. Skinny as a stick when she was little, white-blond hair below her waist. It was never clean or combed and she wore mismatched clothes— Dad didn’t have a clue. Sometimes, not often, he’d drop in unannounced. My grandfather would always storm up to his room and not come down. Grandmother called Christi ‘the street urchin.’ As in, ‘Here’s the bum and the street urchin come a-knocking. Better Lysol the cups and glasses.’ Usually, I’d escape to my room, too. One time, Christi couldn’t have been more than four, so I was fourteen, she ran up the stairs, flung my door open, and threw herself on me.”
Marsh pulled at the skin around his jaw. “Hugging me, tickling me, giggling, an idiot could’ve seen she was reaching out. But it annoyed me. I yelled at her to stop. Bellowed. And she got off me, stared with this look in her eyes. And slunk out. I really crushed her.”
His eyes were dry but he wiped them. “I was fourteen, what did I know?”
I said, “What do you know about her life in L.A?”
“In L.A. she didn’t ask me for money, I can tell you that.” He nudged his teacup aside. “I guess that bothered me. Because of what she might be doing to get by. Was she involved with bad people?”
“Did she imply that?”
Marsh hesitated.
“Sir?”
“She did tell me some wild stories,” said Marsh. “The last time we spoke, over the phone—”
Milo said, “How long ago was that?”
“Three, four months.”
“What kind of wild stories?”
“More out there than wild,” said Marsh. “She talked extremely fast so I wondered if she’d gotten into drugs— amphetamines, cocaine, something that was hyping her up. Or worse, could she be ending up like her mother.”
“Tell us about the stories,” I said.
“She claimed she was working with secret agencies, doing undercover work, spying on gangsters hooked up with terrorists. Making big money, wearing expensive clothes— expensive shoes, she went on a long time about her shoes. She really wasn’t making much sense but I let her go on. Then she just stopped talking, said she had to go, hung up.”
He pulled at his hair. “That’s the last time we talked.”
Milo said, “Secret agencies.”
Marsh said, “Like I said, out there.”
I said, “And shoes were a big deal to her.”
“Spying and wearing good shoes,” said Marsh. “She even mentioned a brand, some Chinese thing.”
“Jimmy Choo.”
“That’s the one.” Marsh stared at us. “What? It was true?”
“She was wearing Jimmy Choo shoes the night she died.”
“Oh, God. And the rest—”
Milo said, “The rest was fantasy.”
“Poor Christi,” said Marsh. “Fantasy as in mental illness?”
Milo glanced at me.
“No,” I said. “She was misled.”
“By the person who killed her?”
“It’s possible.”
Marsh moaned, covered his face with his hand.
We watched his shoulders heave.
“At least,” he said, “she wasn’t going crazy.”
“That’s important to you.”
“My grandparents— they raised me well, in a pseudo-moral sense. But I came to realize that they weren’t moral people. The way they demeaned Christi, her mother. Even Dad. I hated him but I came to realize that everyone deserves grace and charity. Grandmother and Grandfather always said Christi would end up like her mother. Made jokes about it. ‘Mad as a loon.’ ‘Weaving baskets in Bedlam.’ This was a child they were talking about. My sister. I didn’t like hearing it but I never objected.”
He gathered a handful of hair and twisted it hard enough to pucker the top of his brow.
“They were wrong. That’s good.”
I said, “Did Christi mention any names of people she was working with in the secret agencies?”
“She said she couldn’t. ‘This is covert, Teach. This is the real mindfucking powerful mojo, Teach.’ ”
Marsh slid his cup closer. “Someone misled her . . . who?”
“Can’t say anything more at this point, sir,” said Milo.
Marsh’s smile was resigned, but it warmed up his face. A man comfortable being disappointed. “Running your own covert operation?”
“Something like that.”
“Can you at least tell me this: Are you feeling any optimism? About finding out who did it?”
“We’re making progress, sir.”
“I guess I have to be satisfied with that,” said Cody Marsh. “Is there anything else?”
“Not at this point, sir.” Milo took his number, and Marsh stood.
“So you’ll call the coroner for me? I really want to see my little sister.”
*
We watched him leave.
Milo said, “Secret agent mojo. Think she coulda been going off the deep end?”
“I think someone convinced a girl with learning problems that she was playing spy games. Think prepaid phones.”
“Jerry Quick.”
“He hooked her up with Gavin,” I said. “Maybe he decided to give her another assignment: spying on his fellow scamsters. What if he was pulling a con within a con and got discovered and that’s why he’s on the run?”
“Running Christi as a mole.”
“She’d be perfect for the assignment. Undereducated, gullible, low self-esteem, living on the fringe. Growing up with a neglectful alchoholic father, she would’ve craved an older man’s attention. Jerry was an operator who didn’t pay his rent on time, but he did drive a Mercedes and he lived in Beverly Hills. To girls like Angie Paul and Christi, he would seem like a sugar daddy.”
“Christi would be perfect for something else,” he said. “Partying with Hacker and Degussa and bringing Jerry back the info. Compared to those slatterns we just saw them with, Christi would’ve been a prize.”
The saried woman came over and asked if we needed anything.
“How about some mixed appetizers?” said Milo.
She walked off, beaming.
He said, “Bastard buys her Jimmy Choos.”
“And Armani perfume and various other toys,” I said.
“Parks claims he wouldn’t recognize any of the women Hacker and Degussa partied with, but I could show him Christi’s death shot. Problem with that is, he’d freak out and want to evict Hacker and Degussa, so I can’t trust him to keep quiet.”
A tray of fried things arrived.
“Want some?”
“No thanks.”
“All for me, then.�
� He dipped something round into parsley-topped yogurt. “Christi wasn’t killed just because she happened to be with Gavin. Her cover got blown— hell, maybe she was the target, not Gavin, like we thought at the beginning. That would explain the sexual overtones.”
I thought about that. “Degussa impaled men in prison, and did the same to at least three women. He didn’t impale Gavin. You could be right, he concentrated his rage on Christi. Even with that scenario, though, Gavin was more than an accidental victim. As Jerry Quick’s son, he’d be a target for revenge. Or, Degussa was replaying Flora Newsome.”
“What do you mean?”
“The jealousy scenario,” I said. “If Degussa had partied with Christi, seeing her make love to Gavin would not have made him happy.”
“Degussa was dating Flora,” he said. “Christi was a party girl. This asshole picks up floozies in bars, he’s not into emotional involvement.”
“Maybe he is. Not romantically, but in terms of ownership. You said it yourself: Christi would’ve been a step up. Young, good-looking, compliant. What if Degussa wanted her to himself? Think about the Mulholland crime scene, the way the bodies were found: Gavin’s fly was open and Christi’s top was off. Degussa followed them, watched them park, watched them engage in foreplay. If all he was after was a quick execution, he could’ve stepped in earlier and gotten it over with. Instead, he waited. Watched them. The timing was significant: no consummation. The message was: You may try, but you won’t succeed. By shooting Gavin in front of Christi, he demonstrated to her that he was the dominant male. She was shocked, terrified. Maybe she tried to flirt her way out of it. Degussa shot her, too, then had fun with his iron rod.”
Milo put his fork down. Looked as if the last thing he wanted to do was eat.
I said, “The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. This is a hypermacho, action-oriented psychopath who doesn’t take well to rejection.”
He put cash on the table, called Sean Binchy and ordered him to find two other cops and do a careful surveillance on Hacker and Degussa. “Don’t lose them, Sean.” Hanging up, he rubbed his face. “If you’re right about Jerry Quick assigning Christi to Gavin and to Degussa, he used her in ways she couldn’t imagine.”
He snatched up an appetizer. Gulped it down. Frowned.
“Bad batch?” I said.
“Bad world.”
CHAPTER 44
Roxbury Park—4:40 P.M.
The picnic tables. Shade from the Chinese elms and a declining sun turned the redwood the color of old asphalt.
This late in the afternoon, only four children occupied the play area. Two little boys roaring and running wildly, a toddling girl, hand held by her mother, making her way up the stairs of a double-hump slide and whooshing down. Over and over. Another boy, pensive, alone, sitting and scooping sand and letting it trickle through his tiny fingers. Three uniformed maids discussed something with glee and animation. Blue jays squawked and mockingbirds aped them. Traffic from Olympic was distant and hushed.
The ten-year-old ice-cream truck, once white now gray, was parked facing the fence. The truck’s flanks were decorated with hand-painted renderings of sugary delights in unlikely colors. An elaborately calligraphic statement of ownership read: GLO-GLO FROZEN DESSERTS, PROP: RAMON HERNANDEZ, COMPTON, CALIFORNIA.
On the front passenger seat was a cooler stocked with juice bars, cream sandwiches, and pop-ups. In case anyone asked.
So far, no one had. The trickle of kids and the lateness of the hour combined to discourage commerce. And the truck’s position, too, just out of sight of the play area.
Parked close enough to have a clear view of the picnic tables.
In the driver’s seat sat a detective named Sam Diaz, a technical specialist from Parker Center. Thirty-five, compact, mustachioed, Diaz wore a white sweatshirt over baggy white cotton painter’s pants. A coin dispenser hung from his waist. In his pocket was a commercial food license identifying him as Ramon Hernandez and a wallet full of small bills. Under the sweatshirt rested his holstered 9 mm.
Jerry-built into the truck’s dashboard was forty thousand dollars of long-distance, outdoor recording equipment. The kind National Geographic uses to memorialize birdcalls. The mikes were turned down, and the arias of the jays and mockingbirds were reduced to peeps. So was the noise from the play area: squeaks of high-pitched glee, the murmur of adult voices.
The equipment was hard to spot, unless you got inside the truck and saw all the knobs and the LEDs and the wires that ran under the partition separating the seats from the rear storage area. A talk hole had been cut into the partition, covered by a sliding door, now open. The truck’s doors were locked, and its windows were tinted several shades darker than the legal limit. Hasty job, some of the tinting plastic had puckered around the edges. Why anyone would go to the trouble of concealing an ice-cream truck was the obvious question, but no one was asking.
Milo and I sat in back, on two vinyl bench seats borrowed from an impounded Toyota and bolted to the floor. Another hasty job; the stiff cushions wobbled and squeaked when we moved, and keeping still was driving Milo crazy. He’d finished two ice-cream sandwiches and a peanut-studded drumstick, balled up the wrappers, and tossed them in a corner. Muttering, “Gluttony rules.”
Behind the truck was an alley, and beyond that the high-fenced backyards of the pretty view houses on South Spalding Drive. Through a tiny, tinted heart-shaped window cut into one of the truck’s rear doors, we could see fifty feet north or south. During the hour we’d been there, eight cars had driven through. No movement from the houses. That was to be expected; this was Beverly Hills.
Bolted to our side of the partition was a small, color TV monitor with a digital readout that ticked off the passage of time. The tint was off: Bright Beverly Hills green had faded to olive, tree trunks were gray, the sky was butter-yellow.
A speaker that hung from a metal hook to the right of the monitor supplied the sound effects.
The only sound, now, was Franco Gull shifting his position on the redwood bench. He fooled with his hair, gazed off into the distance, studied the top of the table. Working at being disinterested, as he tried to get down some coffee in a Starbucks cup. Big cup, grande-mega-poobah, or whatever they called it.
During our second meeting, he’d worked at friendly. Telling me he understood I had good intentions. Letting slip, midway through the interview, that he’d suspected “something wasn’t right” with Sentries for Justice, but not knowing what to do about it.
Appreciative of his deal. This was his payment.
The miniature microphone that transmitted his occasional sighs was affixed to the bottom of the picnic table.
Wiring the table was the obvious way to go. Sam Diaz had taken one look at Gull, and said, “The way he sweats, I wire him, he might just go and electrocute himself.”
Other than that, Gull’s anxiety was no problem. He was supposed to be nervous.
Now, he waited.
We all did.
*
At five after five, Diaz said, “I’ve got someone approaching from the Roxbury side— across the bocci field.”
A figure— male, anonymous— could be seen in the upper-right quadrant of the monitor. Then lower, larger, as it got closer. As the man approached Gull’s park bench, Albin Larsen’s form took shape. Today, he wore a wheat-colored sport coat, tan shirt, tan pants. At least that’s what I assumed; the monitor dulled it down to off-white.
“That’s him,” said Milo.
“Mr. Beige,” said Diaz. “I coulda used black-and-white.”
“Yeah, he’s a riot.”
When Larsen got close to the bench, he acknowledged Gull with a small nod. Sat down. Said nothing.
Diaz fiddled with a dial and the bird sounds amplified.
Therapy Page 44