Gone (4 page)

Despite that, she seemed a sad, scared, vulnerable young woman. That didn’t stop me from asking what needed to be asked.

“Michaela, the doctor found some bruising around your vagina.”

“If you say so.”

“The doctor who examined you said so.”

“Maybe
he
bruised me when he was checking me out.”

“Was he rough?”

“He had rough fingers. This Asian guy. I could tell he didn’t like me.”

“Why wouldn’t he like you?”

“You’d have to ask him.” She glanced at her watch.

I said, “Is that the story you want to stick with?”

She stretched. Blue jeans, today, riding low on her hips, midriff-baring white lace V-top. Her nipples were faint gray dots.

“Do I need a story?”

“It could come up.”

“It could if you mention it.”

“It has nothing to do with me, Michaela. It’s in the case file.”

“Case file,” she said. “Like I did some big crime.”

I didn’t answer.

She plucked at lace. “Who cares about any of that? Why do
you
care?”

“I’d like to understand what happened up in Latigo Canyon.”

“What happened was Dylan getting crazy,” she said.

“Crazy physically?”

“He got all passionate and bruised me.”

“What happened?” I said.

“What usually happened.”

“Meaning…”

“It’s what we
did.
” She wiggled the fingers of one hand. “Touching each other. The few times.”

“The few times you were intimate.”

“We were never
intimate.
Once in a while we got horny and touched each other. Of
course
he wanted more, but I never let him.” She stuck out her tongue. “A few times I let him go down on me but mostly it was finger time because I didn’t want to get close to him.”

“What happened in Latigo Canyon?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with… what happened.”

“Your relationship with Dylan is bound to—”

“Fine, fine,” she said. “In the canyon it was all fingers and he got too rough. When I complained he said he was doing it on purpose. For realism.”

“For when you were discovered.”

“I guess,” she said.

She looked away.

I waited.

She said, “It was the first night. What else was there to do? It was so boring, just sitting up there, getting talked out.”

“How soon did you get talked out?” I said.

“Real soon. ’Cause he was into this whole Zen
silence
thing. Preparing for the second night. He said we needed to cook images in our heads. Heat up our
emotions
by not crowding our heads with words.”

Her laughter was harsh. “Big Zen silence thing. Until he got horny. Then he had no trouble telling me what he wanted. He thought being up there would make things different. Like I’d do him. As if.”

Her eyes got hard. “I pretty much hate him now.”

I took a day before writing an outline of my report.

Her story boiled down to diminished capacity combined with that time-honored tactic, the TODDI Defense:
The Other Dude Did It.

Wondering if Lauritz Montez was her new acting coach, I phoned his office at the Beverly Hills court building. “I’m not going to make you happy.”

“Actually, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

“The case settled?”

“Better. Sixty-day continuance, thanks to my colleague who’s representing Meserve. Marjani Coolidge —
know her?”

“Nope.”

“She’s scheduled on a roots trip to Africa, asked to put everything off. Once the sixty days are up, we’ll get another continuance. And another. The media scrutiny’s faded and the docket’s jammed with serious felonies, no problem keeping trivial crap at bay. By the time we get to trial no one will give a shit. It’s all pressure from the sheriffs, and those guys have the attention span of gnats on smack. I’m figuring the worst the two of them will get is teaching Shakespeare to inner-city kids.”

“Shakespeare’s not her thing.”

“What is?”

“Improvisation.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure she’ll figure it out. Thanks for your time.”

“No report necessary?”

“You can send one but I can’t tell you it’ll ever get read. Which shouldn’t bother you because turns out all I can get you paid for is straight session time at forty bucks per full hour, no portal-to-portal, no write-up fees.”

I kept silent.

“Hey,” he said, “budget cuts and all that. Sorry, man.”

“Don’t be.”

“You’re okay with it?”

“I’m not much for showbiz.”

T
wo weeks after Michaela’s final session, I spotted a paragraph at the back of the Metro section.

Abduction Hoax Couple Sentenced

A pair of would-be actors accused of faking their own kidnapping in order to garner attention for their careers has been sentenced to community service as part of a plea-deal arranged between the Sheriff’s Department, the District Attorney, and the Public Defender’s Office.
Dylan Roger Meserve, 24, and Michaela Ally Brand, 23, had been charged with a series of misdemeanors that could have led to jail time, stemming from false claims of being carjacked in West Los Angeles and driven to Latigo Canyon in Malibu by a masked gunman. Subsequent investigation revealed that the duo had set up the incident, going so far as to tie themselves up and simulate two days of starvation.
“This was the best resolution,” said Deputy D.A. Heather Bally, in charge of prosecuting the duo. She cited the couple’s
youth and the absence of prior criminal record, and emphasized the benefits Meserve and Brand could provide to the “theater community,” citing two summer theater programs to which the pair might be assigned: TheaterKids in Baldwin
Hills and The Drama Posse in East Los Angeles.
Calls to the sheriff’s office were not returned.

One continuance had done the trick. I wondered if the two of them would bother to stay in town. Probably, if visions of stardom still stuffed their heads.

I’d sent my $160 invoice to Lauritz Montez’s office, still hadn’t gotten paid. I called him, left a polite message with a machine, and went about forgetting the case.

Lieutenant Detective Milo Sturgis had different ideas.

I’d spent New Year’s alone and the ensuing weeks had been nothing to warble about.

The dog I shared with Robin Castagna turned ancient overnight.

Spike, a twenty-five-pound French bulldog with fire-log physique and the discerning eye of a practiced snob, had scoffed at the notion of joint custody and gone to live with Robin. During his last few months of life, his self-absorbed worldview had faded pathetically as he’d slipped into sleepy passivity. When he started to go downhill, Robin let me know. I began dropping by her house in Venice, sat on her saggy couch while she built and restored stringed instruments in her studio down the hall.

Spike actually allowed me to hold him, rested his cement-block head under my arm. Looking up from time to time with eyes turned filmy gray by cataracts.

Each time I left, Robin and I smiled at each other for the briefest of moments, never discussed what was imminent, or anything else.

The last time I saw Spike, neither the tap-tap of Robin’s mallet nor the whine of her power tools roused him and his muscle tone was bad. Offers of food treats dangled near his crusted nose evoked no response. I watched the slow, labored heave of his rib cage, listened to the rasp of his breathing.

Congestive heart failure. The vet said he was tired but not in pain, there was no reason to put him down unless we couldn’t tolerate watching him go this way.

He fell asleep in my lap and when I lifted his paw it felt cold. I rubbed it warmer, sat for a while, carried him to his bed, placed him down gently, and kissed his knobby forehead. He smelled surprisingly good, like a freshly showered athlete.

As I saw myself out, Robin kept working on an old Gibson F5 mandolin. Six-figure instrument, heavy concentration required.

I stopped at the door and looked back. Spike’s eyes were closed and his flat face was peaceful, almost childlike.

The next morning, he gasped three times and passed away in Robin’s arms. She phoned me and cried out the details. I drove to Venice, wrapped the body, called the cremation service, stood by as a nice man carried the pathetically small bundle away. Robin was in her bedroom, still weeping. When the man left, I went in there. One thing led to another.

During the time Robin and I were apart, she hooked up with another man and I fell in and out of love with a smart, beautiful psychologist named Allison Gwynn.

I still saw Allison from time to time. Occasionally the physical pull we’d both felt asserted itself. As far as I knew, she wasn’t seeing anyone else. I figured it was only a matter of time.

New Years she’d been in Connecticut with her grandmother and a host of cousins.

She’d sent me a necktie for Christmas. I’d reciprocated with a Victorian garnet brooch. I still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. From time to time it bothered me that I couldn’t seem to hold on to a relationship. Sometimes I wondered what I’d say if I was sitting in The Other Chair.

I told myself introspection could rot your brain, better to concentrate on other people’s problems.

It was Milo who ended up providing distraction, at nine a.m. on a cold, dry Monday morning, one week after the hoax settlement.

“That girl you evaluated —
Mikki Brand, the one who faked her abduction? They found her body last night. Strangled and stabbed.”

“Didn’t know her nickname was Mikki.” The things you say when you’re caught off guard.

“That’s what her mother calls her.”

“She’d know,” I said.

I met him at the scene forty minutes later. The murder had taken place sometime Sunday night. By now, the area had been cleaned and scraped and analyzed, yellow tape taken down.

The sole remnants of brutality were short pieces of the white rope the coroner’s drivers use to bind the body after they wrap it in heavy-duty translucent plastic. Filmy gray plastic. Same hue, I realized, as cataract-dimmed eyes.

Michaela Brand had been found in a grassy area fifty feet west of Bagley Avenue, north of National Boulevard, where the streets cut under the 10 freeway. A faint, oblong gloss caught sunlight where the body had compressed the weeds. The overpass provided cold shade and relentless noise. Graffiti boasted and raged on concrete walls. In some places the vegetation was waist high, crabgrass vying for nutrition with ragweed and dandelions and low, creeping things I couldn’t identify.

This was city property, part of the freeway easement, sandwiched between the tailored, affluent streets of Beverlywood to the north and the working-class apartment buildings of Culver City to the south. A few years back, there’d been some gang problems, but I hadn’t heard of anything lately. Still, it wouldn’t be a place where I’d walk at night, and I wondered what had brought Michaela here.

Her apartment on Holt was a couple of miles away. In L.A., that’s a drive, not a walk. Her five-year-old Honda hadn’t been located, and I wondered if she’d been jacked.

For real, this time.

Too ironic.

Milo said, “What’re you thinking?”

I shrugged.

“You look contemplative. Let it out, man.”

“Nothing to say.”

He ran his hand over his big, lumpy face, squinted at me as if we’d just been introduced. He was dressed for messy work: rust-colored nylon windbreaker, wash-and-wear white shirt with a curling collar, skinny oxblood tie that resembled two lengths of beef jerky, baggy brown trousers, and tan desert boots with pink rubber soles.

His fresh haircut was the usual “style,” meaning skinned at the sides, which emphasized all the white, thick and black on top, a cockscomb of competing cowlicks. His sideburns now drooped a half inch below fleshy earlobes, suggesting the worst type of Elvis impersonator. His weight had stabilized; my guess was two sixty on his seventy-four-inch frame, a lot of it abdomen.

When he stepped away from the overpass, sunlight amplified his acne pits and gravity’s cruel tendencies. We were months apart in age. He liked to tell me I was aging a lot more slowly than he was. I usually replied that circumstances had a way of changing fast.

He makes a big deal about not caring how he looks, but I’ve long suspected there’s a self-image buried down deep in his psyche:
Gay But Not What You Expect.

Rick Silverman’s long given up on buying him clothes that never get worn. Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high-priced West Hollywood salon. Milo drives, every two months, to La Brea and Washington where he hands his seven bucks plus tip to an eighty-nine-year-old barber who claims to have cut Eisenhower’s hair during World War II.

I visited the shop once, with its gray linoleum floors, creaky chairs, yellowed Brylcreem posters featuring smiling, toothy white guys, and similarly antique pitches for Murray’s straightening pomade aimed at the majority black clientele.

Milo liked to brag about the Ike connection.

“Probably a one-shot deal,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“So Maurice could avoid a court-martial.”

That conversation, we’d been in an Irish bar on Fairfax near Olympic, drinking Chivas and convincing ourselves we were lofty thinkers. A man and a woman he’d been pretending to look for had been nabbed at a traffic stop in Montana and were fighting extradition. They’d slain a vicious murderer, a predator who’d sorely needed killing. The law had no use for moral subtlety and news of the capture led Milo to deliver a cranky, philosophical sermon. Downing a double, he apologized for the lapse and changed the subject to barbering.

“Maurice isn’t
courant
enough for you?”

“Wait long enough, and everything becomes
courant.
”

“Maurice is an artist.”

“I’m sure George Washington thought so.”

“Don’t be an ageist. He can still handle those scissors.”