We were at the gate. Tan men standing still, like oversized chess pieces. The faraway machine continued to grind.
Dollard flicked a hand back at the yard. "I'm not saying these guys are harmless, even with all the dope we pump into them. Get these poor bastards delusional enough, they could do anything. But they don't kill for fun-from what I've seen, they don't take much pleasure from life, period. If you can even call what they're doing living."
He cleared his throat, swallowed the phlegm. "Makes you wonder why God would take the trouble to create such a mess."
2.
Two CORPSES IN car trunks. Claire Argent was the second.
The first, found eight months earlier, was a twenty-five-year-old would-be actor named Richard Dada, left in the front storage compartment of his own VW Bug in the industrial zone north of Centinela and Pico-a warren of tool-and-die shops, auto detailers, spare-parts dealers. It took three days for Dada's car to be noticed. A maintenance worker picked up the smell. The crime scene was walking distance from the West L.A. substation, but Milo drove over to the scene.
In life, Dada had been tall, dark, and handsome. The killer stripped off his clothes, bisected him cleanly at the waist with a tooth-edged weapon, dropped each segment in a heavy-duty black plastic lawn bag, fastened the sacks, stashed them in the Volkswagen, drove to the dump spot, most probably late at night, and escaped without notice. Cause of death was loss of blood from a deep, wide throat slash.
Lack of gore in the bags and in the car said the butchery had been accomplished somewhere else. The coroner was fairly certain Dada was already dead when cut in half.
"Long legs," Milo said, the first time he talked to me about the case. "So maybe cutting him solved a storage problem. Or it was part of the thrill."
"Or both," I said.
He frowned. "Dada's eyes were taken out, too, but no other mutilation. Any ideas?"
"The killer drove Dada's car to the dump spot," I said, "so he could've left on foot and lives close by. Or he took the bus and you could interview drivers, see if any unusual passengers got on that night."
"I've already talked to the bus drivers. No memory of any conspicuously weird passengers. Same for taxi drivers. No late-night pickups in the neighborhood, period."
"By 'unusual' I didn't mean weird," I said. "The killer probably isn't bizarre-looking. I'd guess just the opposite: composed, a good planner, middle-class. Even so, having just dumped the VW, he might've been a little worked up. Who rides the bus at that hour? Mostly night-shift busboys and office cleaners, a few derelicts. Someone middle-class might be conspicuous."
"Makes sense," he said, "but there was no one who stuck in any of the drivers' memories."
"Okay, then. The third possibility: there was another car ready to take the killer away. Extremely careful planning. Or an accomplice."
Milo rubbed his face, like washing without water. We were at his desk in the
Robbery-Homicide room at the West L.A. station, facing the bright orange lockers, drinking coffee. A few other detectives were typing and snacking. I had a child-custody court appearance downtown in two hours, had stopped by for lunch, but
Milo had wanted to talk about Dada rather than eat.
"The accomplice bit is interesting," he said. "So is the local angle-okay, time to do some footwork, see if some joker who learned freelance meat-cutting at San
Quentin is out on parole. Get to know more about the poor kid, too-see if he got himself in trouble."
Three months later, Milo's footwork had unearthed the minutiae of Richard Dada's life but had gotten him no closer to solving the case.
At the half-year mark, the file got pushed to the back of the drawer.
I knew Milo's nerves were rubbed raw by that. His specialty was clearing cold cases, not creating them. He had the highest solve rate of any homicide D in West L.A., maybe the entire department for this year. That didn't make him any more popular; as the only openly gay detective on the force, he'd never be invited to blue-buddy barbecues. But it did provide insurance, and I knew he regarded failure as professionally threatening.
As a personal sin, too; one of the last things he'd said before filing the murder book was "This one deserves more. Some felonious cretin getting bashed with a pool cue is one thing, but this... The way the kid was sliced-the spine was sheared straight through, Alex. Coroner says probably a band saw. Someone cut him, neat and clean, the way they section meat."
"Any other forensic evidence?" I said. "Nope. No foreign hairs, no fluid exchange.... As far as I've been able to tell, Dada wasn't in any kind of trouble, no drug connections, bad friends, criminal history. Just one of those stupid kids who wanted to be rich and famous. Days and weekends he worked at a kiddie gym.
Nights he did guess what."
"Waited tables."
His index finger scored imaginary chalk marks. "Bar and grill in Toluca Lake.
Closest he got to delivering lines was probably 'What kind of dressing would you like with that?' " We were in a bar, ourselves. A nice one at the rear of the Luxe
Hotel on the west end of Beverly Hills. No pool cues, and any felons were wearing
Italian suits. Chandeliers dimmed to orange flicker, spongy carpets, club chairs warm as wombs. On our marble-topped drink stand were two leaden tumblers of Chivas
Gold and a crystal pitcher of iced spring water. Milo's cheap panatela asserted itself rudely with the Cohibas and Churchills being sucked in corner booths. A few months later, the city said no smoking in bars, but back then, nicotine fog was an evening ritual.
All the trim notwithstanding, the reason for being there was to ingest alcohol, and
Milo was doing a good job of that. I nursed my first scotch as he finished his third and chased it with a glassful of water. "I got the case because the Lieutenant assumed Dada was gay. The mutilation when homosexuals freak, they go all the way blah blah blah. But Dada had absolutely no links to the gay community, and his folks say he had three girlfriends back home."
"Any girlfriends out here?"
"None that I've found. He lived alone in a little studio place near La Brea and
Sunset. Tiny, but he kept it neat."
"That can be a dicey neighborhood," I said.
"Yeah, but the building had a key-card parking lot and a security entrance; the
landlady lives on the premises and tries to keep a good clientele. She said Dada was a quiet kid, she never saw him entertain visitors. And no signs of a break-in or any burglary. We haven't recovered his wallet, but no charges have been run up on the one credit card he owned a Discover with a four hundred dollar limit. The apartment was clean of dope. If Dada did use, he or someone cleaned up every speck."
"The killer?" I said. "That fits with the clean cut and the planning."
"Possibly, but like I said, Dada lived neat. His rent was seven hundred, he took home twice that a month from both jobs, sent most of his money back home to a savings account." His big shoulders dropped. "Maybe he just ran into the wrong psychopath."
"The FBI says eye mutilation implies more than a casual relationship."
"Sent the FBI the crime-scene data questionnaire, got back double-talk and a recommendation to look for known associates. Problem is, I can't locate any friends
Dada had. He'd only been out in California for nine months. Maybe working two jobs prevented a social life."
"Or he had a life he hid."
"What, he was gay? I think I would've unearthed that, Alex."
"Not necessarily gay," I said. "Any kind of secret life."
"What makes you say that?"
"Model tenants just don't walk out on the street and get sawed in half."
He growled. We drank. The waitresses were all gorgeous blondes wearing white peasant blouses and long skirts. Ours had an accent. Czechoslovakia, she'd told Milo when he asked; then she'd offered to clip his cigar, but he'd already bitten off the tip. It was the middle of the summer, but a gas fire was raging under a limestone mantel.
Air-conditioning kept the room icy. A couple of other beauties at the bar had to be hookers. The men with them looked edgy.
"Toluca Lake is a drive from Hollywood," I said. "It's also near the Burbank studios. So maybe Dada was trying to make acting connections."
"That's what I figured. But if he got a job it wasn't at a studio. I found a want ad from the Weekly in the pocket of one of his jackets. Tiny print thing, open casting call for some flick called Blood Walk. The date was one month before he was killed.
I tried to trace the company that placed the ad. The number was disconnected, but it had belonged at that time to some outfit called Thin Line Productions. That traced to a listing with an answering service, which no longer serviced Thin Line. The address they had was a FOB in Venice, long gone, no forwarding. No one in
Hollywood's heard of Thin Line, the script's never been registered with any of the guilds, no evidence a movie ever got made. I talked to Petra Connor over in
Hollywood. She says par for the course, the industry's full of fly-by-nights, most casting calls go nowhere." "Blood Walk," I said.
"Yeah, I know. But it was a full month before, and I can't take it any further."
"What about Richard's other job? Where's the kiddie gym?"
"Pico and Doheny."
"What'd he do there?"
"Played games with toddlers. Irregular work, mostly birthday parties. The gym owner said he was great-patient, clean-cut, polite." He shot back whiskey. "Goddamn Boy
Scout and he gets bisected. There has to be more."
"Some homicidal toddler who resented waiting in line for the Moon Bounce."
He laughed, studied the bottom of his glass.
"You said he sent money home," I said. "Where's that?"
"Denver. Dad's a carpenter, Mom teaches school. They came out for a few days after he was killed. Salt of the earth, hurting bad, but no help. Richard played sports, got B's and C's, acted in all the school plays. Did two years in junior college, hated it, went to work for his father."
"So he's got carpentry skills-maybe he met the killer at some woodworking class."
"He never went to classes of any type that I can find."
"A carpenter's kid and he gets band-sawed," I said.
He put down his glass, careful to do it silently. His eyes fixed on me. Normally startling green, they were gray-brown in the tobacco light. His heavy face was so pale it looked talced, white as his sideburns. The acne pits that scored his cheeks and chin and brow seemed deeper, crueler.
He pushed black hair off his forehead. "Okay," he said very softly. "Besides exquisite irony, what does it mean?"
"I don't know," I said. "It just seems too cute."
He frowned, rolled his forearm along the edge of the table as if rubbing an itch, raised his glass for a refill, thanked the waitress when he got it, sipped his way through half the whiskey, and licked his lips. "Why are we even talking about it?
I'm not gonna close this one soon, if ever. I can just feel it."
I didn't bother arguing. His hunches are usually sound.
Two months later, he caught the Claire Argent homicide and called me right away, sounding furious but sparked by enthusiasm.
"Got a new one, some interesting similarities to Dada. But different, too. Female vie. Thirty-nine-year-old psychologist named Claire Argent-know her, by any chance?"
"No."
"Home address in the Hollywood Hills, just off Woodrow Wilson Drive, but she was found in West L.A. territory. Stripped naked and stashed in the trunk of her Buick
Regal, back of the loading dock behind the Stereos Galore in that big shopping center on La Cienega near Sawyer."
That side of La Cienega was West L.A.'s eastern border. "Barely in your territory."
"Yeah, Santa loves me. Here's what I know so far: the shopping center closes at eleven, but there's no fence at the dock; anyone can pull in there. Real easy access because an alley runs right behind. West of the alley is a supplementary indoor lot, multiple levels, but it's closed off at night. After that, it's all residential.
Private homes and apartments. No one heard or saw a thing. Shipping clerk found the car at six A.M., called for a tow, and when the driver winched it up he heard something rolling around inside and had the smarts to worry about it."
"Was she cut in half?" I said.
"No, left in one piece, but wrapped in two garbage bags, just like Dada. Her throat was slashed, too, and her eyes were mangled."
