by Rex Burns
One generation older than Dori. A mere couple of decades. And what might have happened to us if one of our gang had been Vengley?
“Hey, Jack—you’ve been chewing your knuckles for five minutes. What’s bothering you?”
“It’s this job for Admiral Combs, Tommy. The missing girl is only part of it now. And I don’t like what I’m digging into.”
“Hey, you can’t shovel shit without raising a stink.”
“For a philosopher, it’s a good thing you run fast. Ever hear of Alef Distributing Company?”
Tom frowned, head wagging no. “You want information on them?”
“Any way I can get it?”
“If they’re local, I can help. I subscribe to this new business data bank. It’s mostly for restaurant owners—you know, restaurant supply companies, food wholesalers, cleaning equipment and supplies, that kind of thing. Gives you the specialty, a record of service, comments from people they deal with. The kind of stuff you want to know before you sign a contract.” He turned to the small p.c. on a stand beside his desk. “Let me punch it up, see if it’s in the bank.”
I watched him type a series of commands on the screen and enter answers to the queries that came back. Then I spelled the name for Tom. A few seconds later, the machine beeped irritably and flashed “No Information Available,” followed by a menu of suggested alternatives.
“Let’s try the general directory.”
A happier beep heralded the brief entry.
“Yeah, what I thought. But the stuff here’s from public records, is all. Corporation officers, BBB rating, that kind of thing.” He shrugged. “What the hell, it’ll save you a trip over to the county building.”
I noted the entry under Alef Distributing as Tom explained that the data people, to fill out their files and make them look impressive, dumped all sorts of crap into the memory bank, even stuff anybody could get from the various public records offices. “That’s where they get it themselves.”
Alef was licensed to undertake any legal business. Its stock was privately held and the major stockholder was a holding company, Mesa and Mountain Investments. The president of Alef was Ralph Lyles, business address supplied, and the corporation treasurer and secretary weren’t listed, which wasn’t that unusual, Tommy told me. The address was the familiar National City street. Under the heading for type of business was noted “General distribution services.” About as enlightening as the purpose for incorporation.
“Can you look up Mesa and Mountain Investments?”
“Sure.”
Again the rattle of the keyboard and the tweedle of machines talking to each other through the modem. Then the entry. The president of the holding company was Arthur Iacino. Their address was a post office box in downtown San Diego. The type of business was general investments.
“Do you any good?”
“Maybe. Do you subscribe to a credit information service?”
“Hell, yes, a couple services. Got to—plastic money, checks, that’s all people use anymore. I’m on the A plan. Costs a little more, but it’s worth it in the long run.”
“ ‘A’ plan?”
“Complete credit display. ‘B’ plan just lists the names or card numbers that have been flagged. Most retailers use an issuer-approval system. You know, you hand them your card, they run it through a reader. A few seconds later they stamp your purchase. It’s okay for most retail stuff. But I got to tell you, Jack, customers come in here, some of them run up bills that make even my bunghole pucker. I need more than somebody saying the card’s good—I need to know how much the card or check’s good for, and where to call if it bounces.”
“Try Ralph Lyles and Arthur Iacino.”
Tom started rattling keys. “They might not be here. Somebody deals in cash, they don’t have an entry. Like the mob.” The screen flickered, the lights blinked from green to red and back, a beep said the Lyles request was answered. “Bingo.”
Ralph Lyles had a good credit rating. His established bank references were a checking account in First National of San Diego and a savings account in Great Western S & L. He’d recently bought a Datsun 280Z from All-American Auto Sales and completed the payments early. His mortgage payments to Nichols and Nichols were regular. His employer was Alef Distributing, and his home address was 403 Chestnut Court, Chula Vista.
“See what I mean, Jack? Anybody that borrows money or gets a loan fills out a form—employment history, residence, income, closest relatives, bank account numbers, debts, credit history, references. The whole bit. Information from the form ends up in the data bank. Guy like this bounces a check on me, I know where to find him, where to go to garnish his wages.” Tom added, “Of course, with Lyles’s record, he’s not likely to do that. I’d take his paper.” The keys rattled again. “Let’s see what’s on Iacino.”
Three Arthur Iacinos were listed and the computer wanted additional information to sort them out. Tom typed in Iacino’s employer. The screen flickered and brought back a brief entry. The date of record was several years old; the man had taken out a house loan but no other transactions. His home address was on Hilton Head Road in San Diego County. “Probably a pretty big house,” said Tom. “That’s prime real estate up there.”
“Try Dwayne Vengley.”
The only response was the disgusted beep.
I thanked Tom and promised again that I’d be ready to party in two weeks. It was a good thing to look forward to, and if I hadn’t other things on my mind at the moment, I might have enjoyed the prospect even more.
The San Diego regional map led me to Lyles’s home. It was on a short street, the last of a series of wandering lanes carved into the hills overlooking Telegraph Canyon. Beyond the street’s dead end, brown manzanita and rocks covered hills that might have been city open space. More likely, it was private land waiting for the developers. The view was to the southwest. Over a series of lower, smoggy ridges crenellated with roofs, the Pacific made a coppery glint through the city’s haze. I swung around in the empty street. The stucco house was new and sprawled under a bright red tile roof whose gables tilted up in a vaguely Oriental manner. A key-shaped portal of long bricks framed doors carved with Spanish motifs: California’s own style of Hong Kong hacienda. The doorbell was a soft brassy chime.
A faint scratch behind the bullseye mounted in the door told me someone was peering out. I must have looked almost harmless; a moment later one of the twin doors opened to the end of a short chain. “Yes?”
“Afternoon, ma’am. I’m looking for Mr. Lyles.”
A pause. “Does he know you’re coming?”
“No ma’am. His assistant at the shop told me I might find him at home, though.”
“Oh. Just a minute. I’ll call him.”
The woman left the door open on its chain. I heard her voice call “Ralph.” A few seconds later the slap of loose sandals came to the doorway. Lyles closed the door briefly. The chain rattled and then he reopened it. “You want to see me?”
“Jack Steele.” I shook hands with the man whose paunch pressed against the bathrobe. A towel hung around his neck. Water marks traced from his thongs across the tile entry to the living room rug and out sliding glass doors to a pool beyond. “I’m looking for Dwayne Vengley. I understand he’s your sales representative.”
“Dwayne? Yeah—sales, marketing. Why?”
“He’s acquainted with a girl who was missing. I’d like to talk to him about her.”
“A girl? Who?”
“Dorcas Wilcox.”
“Never heard of her.” The man scratched at his chest. “When—ah—where’s she missing from?”
“Her parents live in La Jolla. She has a place up in Julian.”
“Oh. You mean a grown girl. An adult.”
“Yes.”
The balding head with its tufts of gray hair sprouting over the ears wagged. “Don’t know anything about it.”
“What kind of products does Alef distribute?”
“What kind? Novelti
es, advertising circulars. General distribution. Why?”
“You don’t do photography?”
The man’s eyelids dropped a fraction and he tugged at a fold of whiskery skin under his jaw. “Sure. We do a lot of photograph work. Advertising sheets, illustrations for the circulars, photoduplicating. Why?”
“I’m having trouble finding Dwayne.” I smiled. “Maybe if I know more about what he does, it’ll help me.”
“Yeah? Well, you tried his home? You know where he works, you got to know where he lives.”
“Lived. He apparently moved a couple months ago.”
“Oh, yeah? News to me. He spends a lot of time on the road. Tell you what. Give me your name and number. Next time he phones in, I’ll tell him to get in touch with you.”
I wrote the information on another slip of paper. “Do you know Steven Glover or Shelley Aguirre?”
The balding head shook again. “Who’re they?”
“Friends of Dwayne.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Thank you.”
I wasn’t certain where the questions had taken me or if they had taken me anywhere at all. I had learned in counterintelligence that you kept trying, first one avenue then another, even if the direction of inquiry seemed to lead away from what you expected. “You can think of some of the things all of the time, and all of the things some of the time. …” A parody of Lincoln’s phrase that had been popular folklore during those situations when none of the leads seemed to go anywhere and all of the painstakingly gathered details seemed to be just that: details without meaning or pattern.
CHAPTER 23
I GUIDED THE car down through the sandy hillsides and then northwest on 94 for El Cajon where Shelley Aguirre’s parents lived. Theirs was an older stucco home that looked dated and out of place surrounded by the waves of condos and apartments. A small black bow and a white cross were tied to the screen door. In the welcome shade of the deep front porch, I smelled the odor of cooking oil and spices. An Hispanic man with cropped black hair and baggy eyes answered my knock.
“Are you a relative of Shelley Aguirre?”
“Her father. Are you with the police?”
“No.” I explained a bit about Dori, stretching a point here and there.
“I remember her. Shelley brought her here a couple times when they were in college. A real pretty girl.”
“I’m very sorry about Shelley, Mr. Aguirre. And I know this is a painful time for you. But perhaps Shelley mentioned something—a name, an address—that might lead me to Mr. Wilcox’s missing daughter.”
The light brown eyes, a shade similar to Shelley’s, blinked and Aguirre swallowed quickly. “That poor man. Sure—come on in. I’ll help if I can.”
The living room, too, had an old-fashioned quality to it. A large wood-framed arch linked it to a formal dining room with its heavy table. Set off behind stubby wooden pillars that rose from a waist-high divider was a parlor where doilies spotted a large couch and a matching pair of overstuffed chairs. The room felt little used. The television set was in the dining room. Above a mantel over the clean fireplace, Christ looked toward a glow in the sky and pulled his robe open to show a bleeding heart radiating love. On the mantel, votive candles flickered in front of a framed photograph of Shelley. A small silver crucifix was draped with a rosary.
“Shelley was a practicing Catholic?”
The brown eyes glanced at the candles. “She was when she lived at home. When she moved away. …” Aguirre flapped a hand. “Have a seat. My wife’s in the kitchen. I’ll see if she feels like talking.”
Maureen Aguirre was the source of Shelley’s blond hair. Heavyset, she had lank, red-blond hair, recently permed.
“I told her what you wanted,” said the man. “She says she’ll try to help, too.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” I had been looking at the family portrait gallery arranged on the paneled wall. Shelley was the youngest of four—three boys and her—who had close family resemblances. “Shelley’s brothers?”
The woman nodded. “Paul’s in the navy, now. He’s the oldest. Then Bradley, then Jerry. Shelley was the youngest.”
“She was the only one went to college,” said the man. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the window. “We sold off a lot of the ranch to give the kids their start in the world, you know? Ranching, you can’t make a living from that no more, and this isn’t good land for orchards. Not with the price of water these days. So we finally gave in to the developers.”
Mrs. Aguirre stared at the picture on the wall. “Shelley really wanted to attend college. She was that way—always wanted to know about things. We wanted her to attend a Catholic college.” A sigh. “Still, she liked Occidental. We went up there a lot. You know, on parents’ day and all. It was such a nice graduation—outside in a kind of bowl at night and everybody wearing these robes and cheering.” The voice faded.
“Did she like her work at the design office, Mrs. Aguirre?”
“Oh, yes. But it was just her first job. Something to get experience with, you know?”
“She was good at it,” said the father. “We got a lot of her drawings.” He leaned as if to get them.
“How about her friends?” I asked quickly. “Did she get along with her coworkers all right?”
“Oh, sure! They closed the office so everybody could come to her funeral. A lot of people came.”
“Was there anyone she was particularly friendly with? Anyone she might have confided in?”
They looked at each other, waiting for the other to say a name. Finally the woman answered. “Us, I guess. She’d tell us when something funny happened at work, like that. But she didn’t talk a lot about it. We just didn’t know the people that well.”
“How about friends outside work? Anyone she was seeing?”
“Steve,” said Aguirre.
“Steve Glover. They went to college together. She dated him a lot. I think they were thinking of getting married maybe.”
“He never talked to me about it.”
“Well, he’s just getting started, too, you know.” She turned back to me. “He’s in real estate. A real nice young man.”
“Did Shelley have any photographs of him in her apartment?”
“Sure! There was that one, the two of them standing in front of the waterfall. Remember, Aurie? The big one on the wall.”
The father nodded. “Took it last spring. They went up to Yosemite.”
“Did she keep a photo album, too?”
The mother slowly shook her head. “I don’t think so. A few pictures maybe, but never a whole album full.”
“Letters? An address book?”
“I … I guess. That officer, he didn’t ask us these things.”
Aguirre nodded. “Is it something we need to know about?”
I smiled. “I’m just looking for names that might lead to Dori Wilcox. That’s the way these things are done: you start with one person and talk to his friends. Then to their friends and so on.”
“Well, she talked about Dwayne. He was another friend from college.”
“Dwayne Vengley?”
“You know him? Shelley talked a lot about him. He was nice to Maureen at the funeral. You could see he … cared.”
“Anyone else?”
“Tim Gifford. But he moved away a few months ago.”
I made a show of writing the name. “Any others?”
They waited for each other to come up with more. Finally Aguirre said, “That’s all we can remember. Maybe later. …”
“I appreciate what you’ve told me.” I jotted down my name and telephone number. “If you do remember any others, please call.”
Montgomery Freeway to State 75 and across to the south end of Silver Strand Boulevard. This late in the afternoon, even the side streets were clogged with homeward-bound traffic. Between ads for men’s clothing, home furnishings, automotive painting, and grocery chains, the radio gave updates on road conditions. The vague temptation I f
elt about heading out to Iacino’s home had been easily overcome. All the freeways were jammed, the San Diego north was gridlocked, and 94 was stop-and-go as far east as Lemon Grove. A telephone call could probably do the job, and I wasn’t sure right now if I even needed to talk to the president of Mountain and Mesa Investments.
But there were more questions I had wanted to ask Lyles. The man wouldn’t have answered, though. As I followed the Strand up through the fenced, grassy fields of the Naval Communications Station, I tried to figure ways to get the information.
Turning out of traffic, I wound through the short streets to my driveway. Mrs. Gruening across the street had set up a plastic water slide for her two kids and, it seemed, the rest of the neighborhood as well. The screams of excitement and joy rattled dimly against my front windows. Children had more room to play in the front yards than in the back where docks and boat slips took the place of grass. I poured myself a beer and checked the day’s mail, then the telephone answerer. Buried among buzzing blank spaces and electronic voices selling this and that to electronic ears, a voice whose tension made it almost unrecognizable said, “Dad, it’s Karen. Call me as soon as you can.”
She knew Jerry had loved her. That knowledge brought both an excitement and a sense of power because he was someone from whom that kind of emotion hadn’t been expected. It had even made her feel a kind of love for him. Well, if she was terribly honest, a refreshing love for herself through him. Growing aware of his eyes on her, she began to see herself through the lens of his estimation, and gradually she regained some of the self-value that had once been hers so long ago. It wasn’t that other men hadn’t wanted her—Dwayne, in his own tortured way, also loved her. Had loved her since high school and, she guessed, in the core of her heart she loved him. How else to explain the magnetism that drew them together again and again? And there were other men who stared at her hungrily, too, even when she tried her best to efface herself. Dwayne had told her a long time ago about what he called the burden of a woman’s beauty. It had puzzled her why some boys wanted to force their longing on her as if they looked at someone who really wasn’t her. “They do,” Dwayne had said. “You’re a dream made flesh for them—a living symbol of what they want. They think if they’re lucky enough or persistent enough or sexy enough, they can own that dream.”