Valley of Shadows

by Paul Buchanan

  Keegan walked over and took the drink from him. The glass, whatever it was made of, felt surprisingly leaden in his hand. He raised it to his nose and sniffed. “Is it scotch?”

  “Is it scotch!” the nephew said. “Moray by way of Glen Haggis. You can practically taste the tartan.” He picked up his own glass and raised it to his lips, looking over it at Keegan, like he was waiting for him to do the same.

  “Cheers,” Keegan said and took a sip. It was smoky and mellow. He’d emptied a lot of whiskey bottles over the years, but he’d never tasted anything like this. It was warm caramel and seawater on the tongue. He looked around the room, glass in hand. A constellation of billiard balls dotted the pool table, with a cue angled across the green felt. A newspaper lay on the floor next to a wingback chair. A few empty glasses occupied one end of the fireplace mantel. The nephew had been making himself at home, and he was clearly used to someone picking up after him.

  Church set his glass on the bar. He pivoted to face Keegan and took a drag from one of his French cigarettes. “So, James,” he said, watching Keegan through the rising smoke. “As a comrade, what light can you shed on my situation? I can’t help but feel that the old dear has been avoiding me.”

  The old dear had, in fact, disappeared completely—but how much did the kid already know? Keegan took another sip of the scotch and savored the flavor on his tongue. He needed time to measure his words. He looked at the nephew, trying to gauge what he did or didn’t know. “I’m sure she’ll get in touch with you when she’s ready,” he said carefully. “You have to appreciate the situation I’m in.”

  Church tilted his head forward a little and looked up at Keegan from under a pair of dark, sculpted eyebrows. “I don’t want to read too much into your words,” he said. “But I get the impression you’ve spoken to her since we last met. Am I wrong?”

  Keegan didn’t answer. He took another long, slow sip of the scotch.

  Church nodded. He swiveled suddenly and picked up his own glass. He downed what was left in a single gulp and clinked the heavy glass down on the bar top. He then made a slow pivot back around to face Keegan. Was that a sly smile on his face? “It’s almost as if the old dear vanished into thin air,” he said, dark eyes glinting.

  OUTSIDE THE MANSION, Keegan paused, his hand on his MG’s door handle. He glanced back at the big house. There was no sign of the nephew at any of the dark front windows. The kid was probably still back in the billiard room, smoking another Gauloise and further depleting his late uncle’s store of fine spirits.

  Keegan walked around to the front of the red Jaguar. He pressed his palm on the car’s long hood and drew it quickly away. It had been parked out here nearly half an hour, but the hood was still scalding. There was no way Church had only driven a quarter mile back from a restaurant on Stone Canyon. Wherever he’d been before Keegan arrived, it was a good many miles away, far enough to get the engine good and hot. Keegan saw a small rectangle of paper tucked under the base of the driver’s side windshield wiper. He tugged it loose. It was smaller than a postage stamp, heavy white paper with a number stamped on it in red ink: 213.

  Keegan looked up at the blind, dark windows of Ida Fletcher’s mansion. The nephew was lying—that much was clear—but where had he really been tonight? And what did it have to do with the old lady’s disappearance?

  KEEGAN PULLED INTO the Bouzy Rouge’s parking lot on his way back down to Santa Monica Boulevard. The mullioned windows were all dark, and there were no other cars in the parking lot. The light from his headlamps bounced across the red-painted facade and the ivy trellis. He put on the parking brake and pushed open the door of his MG. He left the car idling and went up to the entry alcove. A menu was posted, under glass, next to the paneled front door—all French script, with no prices listed. Along the top were listed the restaurant’s hours of operation.

  The Bouzy Rouge was closed on Sundays—a Catholic blue-law family, no doubt.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE BEDSIDE PHONE woke Keegan from a deep sleep. It was daylight. He rolled over and looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. Nine-twenty. He picked up the receiver.

  It was Lieutenant Moore on the line. “Nursing a hangover, Jimmy?” Moore asked. “I called the office—thinking this was a workday—but your secretary said you weren’t in. Hell, I’ll bet half the baseball fans in town called in sick today.”

  Keegan yawned and sat up. “No hangover,” he said. “I had just the one scotch last night, but it was a hell of a good one.” He swung his feet down to the cold wooden floor. “So, did you find my old lady and her sailboat?”

  The Lieutenant didn’t answer right away. Keegan could hear typewriters and phones ringing in the background. He held the phone to his ear, waiting.

  “That bodyguard you told me about,” Moore said. He paused, like he was searching his desk for something he’d written down. “Frank Romano?”

  Keegan nodded. Frank the Boxer. “What about him?”

  “You think you’d recognize him?”

  “Like in a lineup?”

  The Lieutenant paused again. “Like on a morgue slab,” he said.

  Keegan looked at the bright bedroom window. The curtains were drawn, but the morning slat of light lit up the whole room. “Shit,” Keegan said. “Really?”

  “Yeah, a body washed up this morning. Playa del Rey. I haven’t been down to see him, but he sounds like he’s your guy. They say he’s got the cauliflower ears. A lot of tattoos. Doesn’t look like he’s been in the water long.”

  Keegan thought of Frank, jogging after him with that last envelope of cash. Think of it as a bonus, he’d said. Just keep the kid at bay a while until you hear from her. Keegan had liked the guy. His good humor had helped round off the old lady’s sharp corners. Could the man really be dead?

  “The thing is, Jimmy,” Moore went on, “since we don’t know where Ida Fletcher is, we’re going to need someone to make a provisional ID on the body. Think you’d be up for that on a Monday morning?”

  Keegan thought of the nephew last night at the big house in Bel Air. Where had he been? What the hell had he done? It’s almost as if the old dear vanished into thin air.

  “Yeah,” Keegan said. “I could do that. I mean, I didn’t know him well, but I know what he looks like. You at the morgue now?”

  “Not at the moment,” the Lieutenant said. “I just got the call a few minutes ago, and there are one or two other crimes going unsolved in Los Angeles at the moment. Think you could meet me down there in an hour?”

  BACK WHEN HE covered crime for The Times, Keegan had pretty much held an all-access pass to the LAPD. The brass loved him, from Parker on down. The truth was, Keegan had made the department look pretty good after a few decades of bad press—the Black Dahlia, Brenda Allen, Bloody Christmas. For years, Keegan typed up article after article about beat-cop heroes whisking muggers or murderers off the southland streets. Each story had been a fresh salve for the LAPD’s healing wounds.

  As far as the cops were concerned, Keegan could do no wrong. He was free to go anywhere, talk to anyone. File cabinets and evidence lockers were thrown open. Crime-scene tape was lifted, and he was invited to duck under and take in the gore to his heart’s content. He’d be shown to a chair behind the two-way mirror and handed a Styrofoam cup of weak coffee to witness interrogations.

  All of which meant he knew the old building on First Street inside out. But—by chance or by design—he’d never been down to the morgue before. The prospect of going there this morning had him feeling more unsettled than he would have guessed. Before he left the house, he’d brewed a pot of coffee and then didn’t pour himself a cup. He took Wilshire Boulevard on the drive over, though Beverly would have been quicker. He parked his MG in a downtown lot and rolled a window down a crack for the dog. She’d be fine; he’d only be gone a few minutes. At least he hoped it would only be a few minutes. He locked the car and took his time heading up Temple Street.

  When he climbed the steps
and came through the old building’s big, heavy doors, Lieutenant Moore was already waiting for him, sitting on an ornate wooden bench in the grand marbled lobby. When he saw Keegan, the Lieutenant rose and walked in his direction with his signature smooth and carefree stride. Gray bodies on steel tables were all in a day’s work for the man.

  “Jimmy.” The Lieutenant’s voice echoed along the high-ceilinged colonnade. “Thanks for coming down.” He held out his hand, and Keegan shook it.

  “You know me, Lou,” Keegan said bleakly. “Always happy to ID the bloated corpse of someone I know.”

  THE MORGUE WAS below street level, down an austere steel staircase, where the public wasn’t welcome. Here the marble floors and ornate coffered ceilings gave way to worn linoleum tile and long racks of fluorescent lights that held a sickly flicker. The two of them fell silent as they approached the battered steel doors at the end of the hallway. The scuffle of their feet echoed in a way that seemed impossibly loud to Keegan. The beating of his heart also seemed too loud.

  The feeling of foreboding surprised Keegan. After all, he was no stranger to crime scenes. He’d seen plenty of dead bodies in his day. Why did this moment, as the Lieutenant pushed back the steel door for him, feel so—well—so portentous?

  Inside, three of the six steel tables were occupied, human shapes lurking under threadbare, graying sheets. The chemical sting of antiseptics in the air burned at his eyes and made it unpleasant to breathe. The coroner on duty led them down to the farthest table, looking all the while at his steel-cased clipboard of curling forms.

  “Haven’t got far with this one,” he said, eyes still on his paperwork, “but there’s water in the lungs, so I doubt it’s much of a mystery.” He flipped a page. “There’s a contusion on the back of his head, but no corresponding skull fracture, so…” He finally looked up from his forms and seemed to catch something in Keegan’s expression. He stopped talking and stood straighter. He closed the lid on his clipboard and hugged it to his chest. “Sorry,” he told Keegan. Though he didn’t make it clear what he was sorry about.

  Keegan looked down at the cloth-covered shape on the table and steeled himself. He knew—before he’d set foot in it—that the room would be cold. But he was unprepared for the rawness of it. He felt the chill in his bones. It made his face tighten and his legs shiver. Keegan had liked Frank. The man had seemed down to earth, unfazed and unaffected—the kind of guy you’d be happy to meet at Cole’s some afternoon for a French dip and a glass of beer. The coroner seemed to be waiting for a signal from Keegan, so Keegan took a steadying breath and nodded grimly.

  The man pulled back a corner of the sheet to reveal a head propped up with a crescent-shaped wooden block. The skin was blue-gray and the eyelids were swollen, but there was no doubt who the dead man was.

  There was Frank the Boxer’s twisted nose, the one notched eyebrow, the crumpled ears. Keegan felt a bit lightheaded, so he looked at Lieutenant Moore instead. “Yeah,” he said, his voice sounding thin in his own ears. “That’s him. That’s Frank Romano. I can get you his details when I go to the office. It’s all in the old lady’s will.” It struck him that he was staring at the Lieutenant too long. He didn’t want to look again at the dead man’s inert face.

  Moore gave the coroner a nod and, in Keegan’s peripheral vision, the man pulled the sheet back up over Frank the Boxer’s ruined face. It seemed to break the spell. Keegan looked down again at the blockish human shape under the sheet. “The guy was strong as a bull,” he told the Lieutenant. “If he didn’t survive whatever happened to him, I don’t suppose there’s much hope for the old lady.”

  Moore shrugged and put a hand on Keegan’s back, steering him towards the door. “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  Keegan turned back and nodded a thanks to the coroner—he was just doing his job—then let the Lieutenant usher him to the double doors. “Think we’ll find her body?”

  Again, Moore shrugged. “It’s a big ocean, Jimmy,” he said.

  As they climbed the staircase, Keegan still felt the cold tremor in his legs. It would be good to get back out on Temple, into the sun and the traffic and all the living world. “What happens if the old lady’s body never washes up?” he asked the Lieutenant.

  “She’ll have to be declared dead.”

  Keegan nodded. “Doesn’t that take seven years?” he said, his voice echoing in the stairwell. “What happens to all her money until then?”

  The Lieutenant stopped at the top of the stairs and pushed open the door. “It can be done pretty quickly in a case like this,” he said.

  They were back in the high-ceilinged ground-floor portico now. Orange light angled in through the arched windows, lighting up dust motes in the heavy, sluggish air.

  Moore dug his hands in his pockets and jingled the loose change there. “If the old lady had pulled a Judge Crater and just up and vanished—sure, we’d have to wait around. But in a case like this—where it seems obvious there was an accident—it can be done in a few weeks. Somebody needs to file a petition.” He looked at Keegan and then looked a little harder—like he’d read some apprehension in his face. “It won’t be a major problem, Jimmy,” he said. “And it shouldn’t be your headache. Just leave it to the lawyers.”

  WHEN KEEGAN CAME in the office, Mrs. Dodd watched him coyly as he unclipped the dog’s leash and hung it on the hat rack. It was only then that Keegan remembered Helen Stark and the ambush date Mrs. Dodd had engineered. That was only two days ago, but their afternoon at Dodger Stadium already seemed like the distant past. Mrs. Dodd wasn’t up to speed. She didn’t know there was an extra three thousand dollars sitting in the office safe. She didn’t know that Ida Fletcher had gone missing on a sailing trip over to Catalina or that Keegan had just come from seeing Frank the Boxer on a morgue slab. She didn’t know that the nephew was hiding something about where he was the day it all happened. Hell, Keegan had a lot more on his mind at the moment than his afternoon with Helen Stark, attractive though she had been.

  Mrs. Dodd pretended to hunt in one of her desk drawers for something, careful not to make eye contact with Keegan. “Apparently, you made a good impression,” she said offhandedly, with that nasal Queens accent. “Which, honestly, surprised me a little.”

  Keegan didn’t even bother taking off his jacket. He dropped down onto the wooden bench against the wall, where clients waited to be let into the inner office. He leaned back and crossed his legs. “Remember Frank?” he said.

  His abrupt tone made Mrs. Dodd look up from what she was pretending to do.

  “I told you about the guy,” Keegan said. “He was the old lady’s bodyguard. I met him up at the Chateau Marmont.”

  “The boxer?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that one,” Keegan said. “Well, I just came from identifying his body in the morgue. Looks like the old lady had a boating accident over the weekend. So, I’ve got a lot on my mind this morning.”

  Mrs. Dodd abandoned her pretense of searching her desk. She sat up straight and looked at Keegan, eyebrows raised. “Wait,” she said, “the old lady and the bodyguard are dead?”

  “It certainly looks that way,” Keegan said. “They set sail for Catalina Saturday and never arrived there. And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion the nephew had something to do with it.”

  “With the boating accident?” she said. “How?”

  Keegan sighed and leaned his head back to rest on the wall. That was the real question, wasn’t it? “Hell, I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I saw him the night after the two of them went missing. He was in a big hurry to get into the house. He was talking a mile a minute, and he lied to me about where he’d been.”

  “Holy crap,” Mrs. Dodd said. It was the closest Keegan had ever heard her come to cussing. “So, what do we do?”

  Keegan sat straighter and looked back at her from the bench. There were a lot of loose ends, and he’d have to start tying them up right away. First, he’d have to head out to the Chateau Marmont. That much was certain. Z
innia needed to hear what had happened—and it was the kind of news that should be delivered in person. After that, he’d call the lawyers, he supposed.

  It was all so sudden. He’d just started working for the old lady, and already everything had fallen apart into a grand, unholy mess. He’d been paid a year’s salary to run interference for Ida Fletcher, and the old lady was dead inside a week. Even old Donovan couldn’t have screwed up the situation so badly.

  “I need to go to the hotel and let the old lady’s companion know what’s happened,” he told Mrs. Dodd. He groaned as he got up from the bench. “Keep an eye on the dog for me?”

  Mrs. Dodd, he noticed, had gone a little pale. He’d sucked all the fun out of her Monday morning. She nodded. “Of course,” she said. “Anything you need.”

  Keegan went and opened the door. “Oh,” he said, turning back, “if the nephew calls, give him some line. Tell him I’m out of town for a few days. Tell him I can’t be reached. Just make something up. I don’t want to talk to him again until I’ve figured a few things out.”

  WHEN KEEGAN CAME through the Chateau Marmont’s lobby door, the bow-tied concierge was on duty behind the front desk. He was bent over the phone book yellow pages, probably hunting something down for a hotel guest—a stand-by chauffer, perhaps, or a poodle groomer who made house calls. Keegan must have groaned audibly because the man looked up from his work and scowled. The last thing Keegan needed this morning was more runaround from the hotel sycophant. He trudged up to the desk.

  The concierge regarded Keegan dourly though his little round glasses. The tiny smudged lenses magnified his glower.

  “I need to see Miss Zinnia,” Keegan told him, resignedly. “She’s in Ida Fletcher’s bungalow.”

  “I’m afraid—”

  Keegan held up his hand like a traffic cop, cutting the man off. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’ve heard your spiel before. You can’t tell me who’s staying in this dump, and there’s a phone outside Schwab’s.” He nodded over at the glass French doors that led out to the hotel’s courtyard. “With all the alcoholic screenwriters you’ve got holed up in here, you should get someone to write you some fresh material.”