Compulsion (7 page)

“We have.”

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“His… personality.”

“He seems to be down on his luck.”

“That assumes he ever had any luck.”

“Tough life?” said Milo.

“Self-imposed.” Hochswelder’s bony forearms tightened. “I don’t want to stir anything up, but…”

“Something about Tony bothers you?”

“It’s hard to talk about family this way but you might want to look at him.”

“As the killer?”

“It’s a painful thought. I’m not saying he’d actually do anything like that…”

“But,” said Milo.

“He might
know
someone bad? I’m not saying he
does.
It’s just… this is really tough. I feel like a turncoat.” Hochswelder inhaled through his nose, breathed out through his mouth. “All I’m saying is Tony is the only one I can think of. In the family.”

“Tony told us there wasn’t much family, period.”

“Because he chooses to have nothing to do with anyone.”

“Who’s anyone?”

“Me and my wife and our kids, my brother Len and his wife and their kids. My brother’s a dentist, lives in Palos Verdes. None of the kids are close to Tony. Which, frankly, was okay.”

“Bad influence?”

Hochswelder cracked his knuckles. “I don’t want you to think I’ve got some kind of vendetta against Tony. It’s just… he called me this morning to tell me about his mother. That’s how I found out. First time I’ve heard from him in years. He said he had no energy to call anyone else, I should do it. Shunting responsibility. He also hinted that he wanted me to take care of the funeral. Financially and otherwise.”

“What was his demeanor when he called?”

“Not crying or weeping. More like… off.”

“Off, how?”

“Off in space.”

“Does Tony have a drug history?”

“He did as a kid,” said Hochswelder. “According to
my
kids. I also think – the family thinks – he might be gay, so there’s all sorts of issues here.”

“Why does the family think that?”

“He never dated any girls we ever heard about, never got married. And sometimes he – he’s not a sissy but he can get – I don’t know how to say it – all of a sudden he’ll do something pansyish, you know? A mannerism? We used to talk about it. How one second Tony would do one of those things – throw his hair, bat his eyelashes. And then
bam
he’d be just like a normal person.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“That would have to be Thanksgiving four years ago. My brother had a family get-together and Tony showed up with Ella. He looked like he didn’t wash his clothes regularly. Put on quite a bit of weight. Maybe he ate before because he didn’t eat much at Len’s table. He got up before dessert, went to the bathroom, came back announcing he’d called a cab, was going to wait outside. Ella was so embarrassed. We all pretended it never happened, just went on normally with the meal.”

“Any reason he left early?”

“That’s the thing, there was no conflict or anything.
Boom,
he just gets up and announces. Like he was mad at something, but for the life of me nothing happened to make him mad.”

“Tony have a temper?” said Milo.

Hochswelder scratched a temple. “Not really, I couldn’t say that, no. Just the opposite, he’s always been kind of quiet. No one understands him.”

“Being effeminate and all that.”

“That and just being strange – like getting up before dessert, no warning, and leaving. Like always keeping to himself. His father was like that, too, but Tony Senior would at least go to family gatherings and pretend to be social. Though, frankly, most of the time he’d sit outside and smoke – big smoker, that’s what caused his heart attack. He worked for a milk company, they delivered to the studios and Tony got Tony Junior a job at one of them. Paramount, I think. Basically a janitor job, moving stuff around, but those people pay well, lots of union pressure. Tony Junior would’ve been set up financially but he claimed he hurt his back and quit and since then he’s been doing nothing.”

“Claimed?”

“I’m sure he’s got some pain. We all do.”

“Let’s talk about his drug use.”

“All I know is what the kids said.”

“Your kids?”

“Mine and my brother Len’s. Not that Tony was a big topic of conversation, it just came up. We talk about everything in our family.”

“What did Tony’s cousins say he used?”

“It was never specific. More like Tony was stoned all the time, that’s why he bombed out in school. Which was hard for Ella, I’m sure. Education was important to her.”

“She ever mention being disappointed?”

“Ella wasn’t one to share her feelings. But everyone had a sense Tony was a
big
disappointment to her. Also, I think he gambles. In fact, I know he does. My boy Arnold saw him at one of the Indian casinos near Palm Springs. Arnold and his family were vacationing and he and Rita – Arnold’s wife – were playing the slots, just fooling around, they’re not gamblers. When they went to get the kids at the day care the casino has, Arnold spotted Tony at the blackjack table. Arnold was going to say hi, even though he and Tony weren’t close, just to be friendly. But then Tony played a hand and lost all his money and stomped away from the table cursing. Arnold didn’t think it was a good time to be social.”

“Do you have any other examples of Tony’s gambling?”

“No, but Arnold said from the way Tony was sitting – all hunched over, hiding his cards – it looked like he was used to it.”

“Drugs and gambling,” said Milo. “Anything else?”

“And gay,” Hoschswelder reminded him. “But I’m not accusing, just passing the information along. Don’t want you to think I’ve got something against Tony. I don’t, I feel sorry for him. Frankly, Tony Senior couldn’t have been easy to live with. That one
had
a bad temper, the Italian hot blood. But with what happened to Ella… I just thought I should talk to you.”

Milo said, “Let’s be theoretical, Mr. Hochswelder, and assume Tony does have some connection to Ella’s murder. What motive would you say he’d have?”

“Oh, no, Lieutenant, I couldn’t go that far.”

“Theoretically,” said Milo. “Just between us, right now, with nothing on the record.”

Hochswelder gnawed his upper lip. “Knowing Ella, she probably left everything to Tony. No reason she shouldn’t, he was her only child. Though, in my opinion, giving money to someone who doesn’t work is like flushing it down the toilet.”

“You don’t buy Tony’s injury.”

“Who knows?” said Hochswelder. “It’s between him and God.”

“How would you describe Tony’s relationship with his mother?”

“Like I said, Ella didn’t talk about her personal life.”

“Ever see any animosity between them?”

“No, I can’t say that. Except for that time at Thanksgiving.”

“Ella got mad at him?”

“They both looked tense when they arrived. Ella wore kind of a frozen smile, like she was pretending to be happy.”

“What about Tony?”

“Off in his own world.”

“Any idea what would’ve made them tense?”

“None whatsoever.”

Milo said, “Let’s switch gears for a second. Who were Ella’s friends?”

“I never saw that she had any,” said Hochswelder. “She and Tony Senior tended to keep to themselves. Every year we invited her to Christmas, told her to bring Tony Junior. Every year she showed up with a nice fruit basket. He never showed up. Frankly, we wondered if she even told him.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“She knew he was antisocial. And after that scene at Thanksgiving four years ago, maybe she was embarrassed.”

“Leaving before dessert.”

Hochswelder adjusted a bulb. “Trust me, Lieutenant, our desserts are worth sticking around for. My wife bakes and so does my brother’s wife. That year we had six kinds of pies, as well as bread pudding and compote. From the way Tony looked at the spread the girls put out, you’d think we were trying to serve him garbage.”

We left the lighting store and stepped out into a mild evening.

Milo said, “Place is Dante’s Inferno. Charming fellow, huh?”

“Not that he wants to bad-mouth Tony.”

We got back in the unmarked and he began driving. “Close-knit clan except when they’re not. Any ideas from what he said?”

“His description of the Mancusis is interesting. Asocial father with a bad temper, isolated family. Abusers are great at corralling the herd, so Tony may have had a rough childhood.”

“You see that as grounds for Junior hating Mom bad enough to have her carved?”

“Abused kids can resent the parent who didn’t save them. Moskow said when Tony did visit, Ella never walked him out, so there were issues.”

“He wasn’t worth getting off her chair for but the morning paper was.”

“And that’s when she got it,” I said. “Interesting.”

“Bit of a reach?”

“Maybe not. Getting symbolic can lead to all sorts of dark places.”

“Ol’ Tony’s sitting on a whole lot of primal anger and chronic pain doesn’t improve his disposition?”

I said, “As long as Ella helped him financially, he was able to keep his feelings under control. She turns off the tap, he views it as yet another abandonment. Comes to see her, pleads his case, she says no. He argues. She gets mad. If she really lost her cool and threatened to change the will, leave it all to the Salvation Army, that could’ve done it.”

“She told Barone she didn’t want a copy of the will at home. Maybe to shield it from Tony.”

“A million three for that house,” I said. “More than tempting. If he does have a gambling problem, he could know bad guys who’d take on the job.”

He drove for a while. “It’s as logical as any scenario, but Hochswelder labeled Tony a compulsive gambler based on a secondhand account of a single episode. And he doesn’t like Tony, so anything he says is suspect.”

A block later: “A slovenly fat guy who’s not a decorator or a florist or a choreographer being gay? Impossible.”

I laughed. “You see his sexuality as relevant?”

“You don’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something else for Mama to disapprove of,” he said. “Parents can get picky that way.”

Back at the station, he checked in with the plainclothes officer surveilling Tony Mancusi. The subject had left his apartment once to get a burrito and a soda at a stand on Sunset near Hillhurst. Walking distance but Mancusi had taken his car, which he’d used as his dining room, munching in the parking lot.

“Officer Ruiz also observed that subject tossed his junk out the car window onto the ground, rather than use a trash basket ten feet away. Officer Ruiz began a violation roster on the subject. When I pointed out to Officer Ruiz that littering private property was bad behavior but nothing citable, he was conspicuously disappointed.”

“Eager,” I said.

“Twenty-one years old, six months out of the academy. The other two are just as green. I feel like I’m running a day care center, but at least they’re motivated.”

“Mancusi go anywhere after lunch?”

“Right back home and he’s still there. I’d love to have grounds for his phone records.”

Shuffling through the message slips on his desk, he tossed the first four, read the fifth, and said, “Wonders never cease. Sean got creative.”

Binchy, though still on Auto Theft, had continued combing the crime reports for incidents coinciding with the time period the Bentley had been missing. Coming up empty on homicides, rapes, and assaults just as Milo had. But the young detective had gone further and a missing person had surfaced.

Milo phoned him, grunted approval, got the details.

“Katrina Shonsky, twenty-eight-year-old female Caucasian, blond and brown, five four, one hundred ten. Out partying that night with friends, drove home alone, hasn’t been heard from since. Mother reported it three days later. Took this long to make it into the computer.”

“Go Sean,” I said. “You run a good day care, Papa Sturgis.”

Mr. and Mrs. Royal Hedges lived in a vast, loft-like condo on the fourteenth floor of a luxury building on the Wilshire Corridor. Walls of glass opened to a southward view that avoided the ocean and stared down at Inglewood, Baldwin Hills, LAX flight paths. Altitude and a starless night transformed miles of tract housing into a light show.

Royal and Monica Hedges sat on a low, black Roche-Bobois sofa, smoking in unison. The condo’s floors were black granite, the walls white diamond plaster that threw off its own glints, the artwork big and blotchy with an emphasis on gray.

Monica Hedges was somewhere between fifty and sixty. Tiny and blond and skinny to the point of desiccation, she had heavily lined brown eyes, a face stretched past the point of reason, and great legs displayed by a little black dress.

Royal Hedges looked to be seventy, minimum, sported a red-brown toupee nearly good enough to pull off the illusion, and a Vandyke dyed to match. He wore a red silk shirt, white slacks, pink suede loafers without socks. Hid his fourth yawn behind liver-spotted hands and flicked ashes into a chrome tray.

Monica said, “Katrina’s my only child. From my second marriage. Her father’s long gone.”

“Disappeared?” said Milo.

“Dead.” Her tone said no loss.

Her third husband’s body language said this was
her
ordeal.

She said, “I’m not panicking, Lieutenant, but I am getting a little nervous. Katrina’s done stupid things before, but not like this, a week and counting. I can’t help worrying because that’s what a mother does. Though I fully expect her to walk right in with one of her
stupid
excuses.”

Royal said, “I’ll be back,” patted her knee, left the room.

“Men and their plumbing,” said Monica Hedges. “He’ll be up and down the whole time. We’ve been married two years, he doesn’t really know Katrina.”

Milo said, “Is there any friend or relative Katrina might’ve gone to visit?”

“You mean her father’s family? Never. Norm Shonsky wasn’t in her life and neither is his clan.”

Airy wave. Showing no curiosity about why someone of Milo’s rank would be doing a house call on a missing person.

At her income level, probably used to service.

“Besides,” she said, “Katrina doesn’t
visit.
She picks up impulsively and leaves.”

“Where does she go, ma’am?”

Another wave. “Wherever. Mexico, Europe. Once she even made it to Tahiti. That’s what I meant by stupid. She’ll find a cheap flight on the Internet, do no planning whatsoever, and just fly off in gay abandon.”

“By herself.”

Silence.

“Mrs. Hedges?”

“There are men, I suppose,” she said. “If she doesn’t travel with them, she’s certainly capable of finding them along the way. She makes a point of telling me when she comes back.”

“Telling you what?”

“That she behaved in a way I wouldn’t approve. She does it purely to rile me. The exceptions are those times when she neglects to take enough money for expenses and calls me in desperation. When that happens, she’s like someone from the Travel Channel. Going on about the sights, museums, quaint old churches.”

She smoked greedily. “I love my daughter, Lieutenant, but she can be trying.”

“How long has it been since you last saw her?”

Hesitation. “A month give or take. We weren’t fighting, nothing like that. But Katrina had convinced herself she needed to be
independent.
In other words, no contact with Mother until finances deem otherwise. I’d never have known she was gone if her friend hadn’t called to ask if Katrina was with me.”

“Which friend?”

“A girl named Beth Holloway. Never met her. She was out with Katrina at that club, they split up, she hasn’t heard from Katrina since.”

He read off the Van Nuys address on Katrina Shonsky’s driver’s license. “Is that current, ma’am?”

“It is.”

“Does Katrina live alone?”

“Yes. In a dump.”

“Any current men in her life?”

“Not that I know,” said Monica Hedges. Losing volume by the end of the sentence, as if she doubted her own veracity. “Katrina tends to guard her privacy.”

“How long has she been at this address?”

“Fifteen months.” She stubbed out her cigarette, watched the diminishing trail of smoke.

“In terms of guarding-”

“She kept me out of her private life.”

“Don’t be offended, ma’am, but do you think she was hiding something?”

“Could be, Lieutenant. If she was dating someone high-caliber I have no doubt she’d be showing him off just to show me I’m wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“She’s a gorgeous girl, I keep telling her she needs to elevate herself, run in a different circle. Royal and I are members of the Riviera Country Club. There are socials all the time. When I call Katrina to inform her of an event, she laughs and then her mood turns ugly.”

“She prefers doing things her own way.”

Her eyes shifted toward the front door. “I just know she’s going to run out of cash and come waltzing in any minute.”

“Do you have a recent photo we could keep?”

Reaching for a new cigarette, she marched across the living room, turned a corner. Muffled voices filtered back. Inflections that suggested tension.

She returned alone, carrying the cold cigarette in one hand, a three-by-five glossy in the other.

“This is about four years old, but Katrina hasn’t aged appreciatively.” Touching her own cheek. “Good genes. It was taken at a cousin’s wedding. Katrina served as a bridesmaid. After much complaining about the dress.”

Pretty girl with a heart-shaped face wearing a big-shouldered sateen gown the color of mortified flesh. Ill-fitting cap sleeves rode too high on smooth arms. A high, square bodice kept its promise to flatter no one. Katrina Shonsky’s fair hair was upswept and tasseled by curls that resembled brass sausages. Her lips were shaped into something resembling a smile but the rest of her face radiated disdain.

“So,” said Milo, “you’re pretty confident she’s off on one of her trips but you reported her missing just to be safe.”

“I know she didn’t travel far, because she didn’t take her passport.”

“You’ve been to her apartment?”

“Talked my way past the landlord and went through the entire place. Straightened up, while I was there, Lord knows the dump needed it. Her passport was right in a dresser drawer. If she took clothes, she didn’t take many, Lieutenant. But Katrina’s capable of hopping off with nothing but her purse and a credit card.”

“Do you co-sign for her card?”

“I do
not.
No more of that, Katrina abused my credit limit. She now has a Visa with a one-thousand-dollar-a-month maximum and is expected to pay her own bills. And I have to say for the most part, she’s done so.” Crossing her fingers.

“No passport, no clothes,” said Milo. “Doesn’t sound like much of a vacation.”

“Some of those places she goes to,” said Monica Hedges, “all you need is a bikini and a wineglass. It’s also possible she used her employee discount for a wardrobe.”

“She works in fashion?”

“She sells clothing at La Femme Boutique in Brentwood. Overpriced tacky, if you ask me. I told her I could probably get her a position at Harari or one of the places on Rodeo through Royal. He was in garment manufacturing. Owned a huge company that did contract work for some pretty big couture names.”

She played with her unlit cigarette, reached for a white onyx lighter. Milo got there first.

“Katrina’s job,” she said, between puffs, “is a dead-end position. Like every other job she’s held. If you ask me, down deep she thinks she deserves no better because she lacks formal education. She dropped out of high school, finally got her GED, did a semester at Santa Monica Community. The
plan
was to finish two years and transfer to a UC. Instead she dropped out and worked selling shoes at Fred Segal. They fired her for poor work habits. I told her to make lemonade out of lemons and return to SMC, all she needed was one and a half more years. No go.”

I said, “Sounds like Katrina’s a bit of a rebel.”

“A bit?” Raspy laughter. “Gentlemen, I love my daughter dearly but I do believe that she thinks bucking me is the key to her identity. She was always a difficult child. Colicky baby – face cute as a button but screaming twenty-four hours a day. When that finally ended, she began walking early, was into everything. She
always
hated school. Even though she’s smart. She can sing, but wouldn’t go out for chorus. Has a lovely figure, could’ve gone out for cheerleading.” She sighed. “Maybe eventually she’ll mature.”

Milo said, “Let’s go back to that night. Katrina went out clubbing with two friends. Beth Holloway and…”

“Rianna something foreign.”

“Which club did they go to?”

“Some dive in West L.A., more like a barn than a bona fide nightclub.”

“You’ve been there?”

“I went over yesterday and talked to some monstrous men – bouncers. Ugly industrial area off Pico – one of those side streets. I also talked to the manager. No one was helpful. They said the place was packed, they have no memory of Katrina or any other specific individual, and there are no security cameras on the premises. Isn’t
that
stupid, Lieutenant?”

“Not the way I’d run things,” said Milo. “What’s the name of the club?”

“The Light My Fire.”

“As in the song.”

“Pardon?”

“Do you have phone numbers for Beth and Rianna?”

“No, but I can tell you where to find them both. Beth said she sells jewelry at a place near La Femme and Rianna works the cosmetics counter at Barneys.”

“Do you have the name of the jewelry store?”

“Somewhere near Katrina’s work – San Vicente near Barrington. I’d be concerned if this was anyone but Katrina. Even with it
being
Katrina, I’m getting a bit nervous. What will you do for me, Lieutenant?”

Milo said, “What’s the longest she’s ever been gone?”

“Ten days. Hawaii – she visited all the islands, never called once, came back with the deepest tan I’ve ever seen, you’d think she was a Mexican or something. Another time she spent nine days in Cozumel, some sort of discount special.”