“Any idea who would steal the dog?” he asked.
“No, but surveillance said Hector was hanging round my neighborhood at a coffee shop I go to. And the prowler was Hector.”
“Surveillance failed you, wasn’t your fault. They’re scouring the city looking for your Hector right now.”
“That’s fine sir, but it doesn’t help me…”
Satch put his hand up to stop me right there. “We’re having trouble getting the Tylers to tell us where the bodies are. You think you could help with that?”
“Sure, what do you need?”
“Which one do you think would give it up?”
“Neither, but the woman, she and I had a thing. I might be able to get under her skin.”
“Why don’t you pay her a visit, say your farewell?”
“Yes, sir. I’d like to talk with her. I’ll do it today.”
“That would be good. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m cool. Don’t worry ‘bout me.”
“We have one dead porno star, eighteen missing bodies, one missing woman, one missing boy, and now a missing dog. You’re hip-deep in it, Joan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll call Missings and explain about the dog. You think if we find Hector, we’ll find the dog and the boy, right?”
“I do.”
“I’ll put all the resources I can on it. We have to figure out this mess and fast.”
“I couldn’t agree more, sir. I’ll do everything I can. I put in a call to Presnell, the French language lady. She should be here soon.”
Satch gave me a look. I didn’t know what it meant. I got this odd feeling of disapproval.
“I want a written summary from you and Gus,” he said.
“I’ll get right on it.”
He nodded and I was dismissed.
Gus came into Specials while I was writing up my notes for the murder book. When I told him about the dog being nabbed, it took the whistle right out of his walk.
“I have to go visit Mary Tyler and we have to use Tia, our waitress friend, as bait,” I informed him.
“Whoa, hold on here,” he protested.
“She’s an obvious target, it’s probably why The Barb and Autumn went to the diner and made a point of telling Tia about the photo shoot, then gave her a copy of Autumn’s and Dani’s raspberry photo.” I was talking fast. “She’s next anyway, Gus. Have her be informed and wired.”
“She’s been warned and I’ve got some people watching her. But forget about using her as bait. You don’t look so good, Joan.”
“So who cares? What did surveillance pick up on Hector Cardona?”
“Nothing, so far. He was clean, except for the steroids.”
“Not if he stole that dog. We’ve got to use Tia as bait, we have no choice.”
“It’s not enough that you got kidnapped, no, you have to pull in some sweet young thing and put her up as a target?”
“I’m not the one targeting them, Gus. Come on. It’s the best way to protect Tia. Is she working today?”
“Yes, but…”
“Lunch at the diner, it is.”
“I don’t believe you’re thinking right, Joan. That traumatic experience must be affecting your judgment. You can just turn down the volume right now.”
“Bonjour? Bonjour?” a voice came from the hallway.
“In here!” I yelled.
“What the…” asked Gus.
Nicole Presnell’s high heels clicked suggestively when she walked in. She was a petite and feisty woman with tawny skin, a pointy feral look, and shapely legs in black stockings. She wore a blue skirted suit, which I’d bet a dollar to a broomstick was Chanel, and carried a slim black briefcase.
“‘Ow is ever’buddy doing toe-day?”
“Great, Nicole. This is my partner, Gus.”
Gus nodded in a gentlemanly fashion and pulled a chair out for her.
“Nice to meet youuu,” she purred.
“And this is the nine-one-one tape.” I shoved the recorder toward her and pressed play. “I’d like you to tell me if you can identify any regional accent in this voice.”
Nicole immediately became business-like and listened to the tape several times. Finally, she looked up and pursed her lips in what I thought must be her version of a frown.
“Thees persan is not Texan. It’s an Australian man. He is impersonating an American, using a voice, like, you know, ummmmm, Jean Wayne. Oui, that’s eet, Jean Wayne.” Gus and I exchanged looks.
“How do you know he’s Australian?” asked Gus.
“You can tell by the emphasis on the words. It is the type of emphasis that an Australian would use.” She played the tape again.
“It is not so obvious as he did a fairly good job, just barely discernible.”
“Thanks, Nicole,” I said, and whispered to Gus, “See?”
“Oh, you are so welcomed,” she said and wrote out a bill for two hundred bucks.
“Excuse me,” I said, “just give that to Gus. He’ll make sure it gets paid, won’t you Gus?”
“You bet,” he agreed and engaged Nicole in private flirtation while I went to the ladies’ room.
After I finished my business and was washing my hands in the washbasin, I took a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. Granted, the blinking florescent light was not so flattering, but I was not quite up to par. I had a partial black eye and some bruises on my face from the hard slaps and punches I took off Mary Tyler and I looked tired, worn. I felt the back of my head and found a big bumpy knot. Maybe I shouldn’t have rushed back to work. Maybe I should have gone to the hospital as Gus suggested. But what was I gonna do? Get some rest? Lie in bed?
When I got back to my desk, Nicole Presnell was gone. Gus was sitting in my chair.
“Joan, don’t get any funny ideas that you’re going to run your program on this case. It’s too dangerous to let you go off half-cocked.”
“Okay.” I said.
“Don’t shine me on, here. I mean it. Plus, what’s this with Mary Tyler?”
“Gus, please stop talking to me like I’m some dumb rookie. What do you want from me? I am a crime solver. I solve crimes.” I pointed to my commendation, still on my desk, unframed. “Some people think I’m good at it. I do tend to get the bad guys.”
“I just want to make sure they don’t get you.”
“Satch wants me to get a line on where the bodies are and I’m thinking my only chance is to irritate the hell out of Mary Tyler.”
“I’m senior detective, he should’ve cleared it through me.”
“Oh, okay. Satch glitched the protocol, so sue him.”
The phone on my desk rang. Gus and I both stared at it. It rang again and I picked it up. Kunda’s voice came through in a frantic rush. “Detective Lambert, please, I keep hearing music, loud horrible music. Then I see Autumn’s face and she’s dead. Dead! The music keeps crashing in my mind and there’s screaming. Someone screaming and screaming, over and over again.”
“Hello, Kunda, you’re right on time. I’m starting to think maybe you really are psychic.”
“What?”
“I’m glad you called, Gus and I want to ask you some more questions.”
“Joan, her spirit is fading, fading. You have to save her.”
“Yes, I’d like to do that. Kunda, can you meet with us in Beverly Hills for lunch? We would like to talk to you in person, okay? Do you know the diner over on Beverly? Say, about noon? See you then.” I hung up.
“What are you doing?” Gus asked.
“I’m gonna need a new cell.”
“Okay, here we go. This is the part where I kick your ass,” Gus said, following right behind me.
We both walked at a fast clip down the hallway to the elevator. I pressed the down button.
“We’re gonna find The Barb, Gus. The Barb. That’s who it was on the phone and he must have thought he’d killed Autumn with an overdose and called nine-one-one. Plus, he’s the one who picked up Au
tumn on Melrose. Coastal Eddy said they were together right in front of that store, Wacko, like Kunda said.”
“And how’d he know?”
“He was there, he saw them. The Barb, Gus. We find him, we find Autumn. Simple.”
The elevator arrived and we got in, interrupting a conversation between two secretaries. We nodded politely and they continued in lowered voices as did we.
“How’s it this Coastal Eddy is always on the scene? What’s up with that?” Gus asked.
“Eddy is an environmental activist, you know, and he enlisted Autumn in one of his organizations. That’s where she met Addams. I think he felt responsible when the whole Autumn situation went down. Basically, Eddy is an ecoinvestigator.”
“Eddy, huh? Has he investigated your eco?”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s a question.”
“You’re not going to tell me to call Carl, are you?”
“No, I wasn’t thinking about Carl.”
“What are we talking about?”
“The fact that you were almost dead last night.”
“Yeah,” I said, “so what?”
The elevator landed, we exited and walked through Parker’s lobby but continued in a conspiratorial whisper.
“I repeat, you were almost dead last night,” said Gus
“Except luckily, I’m alive, unlike eighteen kids and one porno star.”
“You’re lucky, all right.”
“Gus, Mason Jones is taking an acting class. It’s the same acting class that three of the missing girls took, not to mention Autumn Riley. He met some soap star in jail, a Johan Beaks, who plugged Mason into this acting guru lady.” We were about to walk out the entrance.
“Hold up,” said Gus. I slowed, stopped, and turned to Gus. “Where did you get this information?”
“I went to see Mason Jones after Anthony in surveillance informed me about Mason taking the acting class. Then I went and interviewed the acting teacher.”
“There’s a connection between O’Malley’s missing girls and Autumn Riley and you didn’t bother to mention it to me?”
“I wrote down some notes for the murder book and I’m telling you now.”
“Bullshit.”
“Gus, come on, gimme a break.”
“You need to make sure you don’t dis me or I’ll put your ass in a sling. I’m the D-three here. I’m your superior.”
“Okay. I won’t dis you. Come on, Gus. You know I respect you.”
“Make sure you act like it. From now on, I want to know every goddam move you make, you hear me? You wouldn’t even be on the job if it weren’t for me. Shit. You think anybody else on this force wants to be your partner? You’re a fucking nightmare.”
“Okay, Gus. Can we go now?”
I pushed through the door, Gus right behind me. The heat of the day hit us like a furnace blast. I checked my watch. It was nine in the morning and already suffocating.
“Where to, may I ask?” Gus insisted.
“Beverly Hills. You heard me.”
“I guess I still can’t believe my ears. This Johan Beaks, you mentioned? He’s in a drug rehab, up in the Malibu mountains. We should go see him.”
“You know him?’
“I interviewed him last month while you were on sabbatical.”
“Whadja interview him for?”
“Because of a dead girl found in the Hyperion sewage plant. Johan Beaks had plenty of good information. The girl was involved in a bad drug deal.”
“This soap star had something to do with a dead girl found in the sewage?” Gus nodded. “That’s disgusting.”
“Anywhere you find a dead girl it’s disgusting, Joan.”
“I know, but God. Okay, well… Let’s go talk to him.”
We exited the building and walked down the wide sidewalk, two classic examples of hard-assed detectives outside Parker Center on a mean LA day. The smog was thick and the heat was hot. Traffic filled the streets and pedestrians in office-wear tromped on toward their offices with blank faces. I thought of that old movie, Metropolis, and decided that Gus and I were in the heart of some version of that. One thing the movie never depicted was the children, the young people victimized in such a society.
“You want to tell me your plan for Kunda?” asked Gus.
“Sure, I’d love to, only I don’t have one.”
“So, why is she meeting us in Bah?”
Gus uses this word, Bah. It’s short for Beverly Hills. I think it’s pretentious but I let it slide.
We were standing on the side of the building at the gray sedan that Gus drives, department issue, an obvious cop car, especially in gray. He unlocked the doors and we got in. It was even hotter in the car.
“Too bad we can’t use that Kunda for a target,” he snorted as he powered down the windows and put the air-conditioning on full blast.
“Really, huh?”
“What’s her wise word for the day?” Gus asked.
“She says she sees a vision with loud music, Autumn appears, and she looks dead.’
“Maybe she’s channeling MTV.”
I had to laugh at that one. “Gus, really? MTV was million years ago.”
He started the car and pulled out of the parking spot. “Don’t fuck with me, Joan. I meant every word I said back there. Just keeping track of you is a full-time job. Can’t do your job if your ass is dead, now can you? You’re really pissing me off.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do the right thing.”
“Make sure that you do. I really feel for Carl right about now. You must have driven him completely crazy. Plus, he’s so in love with you.”
“Oh, no please. Let’s not go there.”
“Fine. So, you’re going to tell Tia your great idea,” Gus insisted.
“Okay, and then you’ll tell her repeatedly that she doesn’t have to do it. Am I right?”
“Something like that.”
He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket.
“Give me one of those, goddammit,” I said.
Gus grinned, handed me a smoke, and lit it with his ray gun lighter, smooth as a cat.
“Is surveillance still on Autumn’s bungalow?” I asked.
“Nobody’s gone in or out for a week now and we’re gonna have to pull it, seeing as she isn’t dead. But you’d think she’d want her clothes or something. And Hector really gave them the slip. They feel bad about the dog.”
“Oh, well that’s good, I have comfort in that, them feeling so bad.”
Gus grunted.
“You got any more of those aspirins?” I asked.
Gus reached inside his breast pocket and handed me the little tin. Having a partner like Gus was one of the great things in my life. The tin had been refilled. I looked at the six pills and dumped them all into my mouth, then chewed. I had to force it down. Gus looked at me like I had swallowed a frog.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about that acting class thing,” I said.
“It was a serious act of negligence on your part. You know better. We’re partners, Joan. We’re in it together. Always remember that I’m your superior. I’m responsible for you. I must know everything.”
He reached in the back seat and came up with bottled water.
“You look like you need a drink.”
I cracked open the water and drank. When I was done, the bottle was empty. Gus frowned and shook his head.
“Don’t frown at me like that. Why did you give Carl the cell number?”
“He asked me for it.”
“I gotta cut it off with him, Gus. I’m done.”
“These things take time.”
“His time is up.”
“Did you even have coffee this morning?”
I shook my head. “Captain wants us to write up a full summary and have it on his desk ASAP.”
“I bet he does.”
“Someone stole the dog. It was Hector. Hector stole Pancho. I know it like I know my name.”
“Y
es, I know. I see it’s got you upset. You tell the captain?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, well. This Hector is all over the place.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE DRUG REHAB WAS a gorgeous estate in the Malibu mountains. The air was scented with orange blossoms and jasmine. Birds of paradise sprouted up around a sign at the gated entrance that said, TRANSITIONS. We drove up a road with Jacaranda trees in full yellow bloom. It was like pulling into heaven. The Spanish colonial structure had a modern slant to it and it was vast. I followed Gus up the stairs to the front door in a state of wonder. He pressed a buzzer and a beautiful Latin woman answered the door. I recognized her as the daughter of a famous comedian well known for his drug problem. He had died from a drug overdose. We asked for Johan Beaks and she offered us a seat on one of several white Italian couches in a large living room. The floors were white marble with a coral vein running through it.
In the center of the room was a massive wood and beveled glass coffee table with big picture books. I read the titles out of standard curiosity. Hollywood: The Pioneers, Pictorial History of the Silent Screen, also Film Directors. As I sat there, I thought of a few nonfiction books on Hollywood that I’d like to write.
Before I had formulated catchy titles for each of my books, Johan Beaks appeared with a mug of coffee and a croissant. He put his goodies down on the glass coffee table. Johan had a certain aristocratic flair even though he was barefoot, wearing sweats and a Lakers T-shirt. I’d say he was in his late twenties. I figured he must play the rich guy in the soaps, a romantic lead. His blond streaks were swept back and held in place with gel.
“Hi Gus, who’s your friend?”
I stood and shook his hand. “Joan Lambert,” I said.
“Detective Joan Lambert, I take it.”
“That’s right.”
He gave me the once-over.
“Hope the other guy looks worse. What can I do you for?”
“Did you know that Mason Jones is a child molester?”
Johan looked at me askance. I guess he thought my question was rude. I waited for his answer.
“Give me a moment to think about that. Let’s get comfortable here. Take a load off. Wow, that’s some question.”
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