Scavenger Hunt (23 page)

“You
assumed
it was him.” Katz wasn’t really annoyed—she was pleased. The realtor’s assumption fit in with Zarinski’s theory. She would never have thought to contact the professor if it hadn’t been for Jimmy’s doubts about Boone, so score one for the reporter. She didn’t understand half of what Zarinski was talking about—all she knew was that the professor said that Walsh had died at least two days
before
Boone did. There was a problem with that. Her initial interview with the realtor had merely corroborated Boone’s findings—she had seen Walsh on the afternoon of the seventh, the same day that Boone pegged his time of death. According to Zarinski, however, Walsh had already been dead two days when the realtor spotted him.

If Zarinski was right, the realtor had seen
someone
on the property that day, but it wasn’t Walsh. It wouldn’t have been Harlen Shafer either—that two-bit ex-con would have been gone as soon as he realized Walsh was dead. It wouldn’t have been kids—they would have trashed the place then, not later. No, the realtor had seen someone else strolling the grounds, someone who had unfettered access to the trailer, someone who had plenty of time to look for the screenplay and notes that Jimmy was so interested in.

“Detective?” The realtor tapped her foot on the hardwood floor. “Are we finished?”

Katz slammed the door on the way out.

Chapter 39

The street sign at the intersection had been knocked down and lay half in the street. Jimmy got out of his car, walked over, and checked the sign. The broken stump gave no indication which of the streets was N.E. 47th Court; he got back into his car and picked one, checking addresses on the houses as he drove slowly past. Heat waves rose from the pavement, blurring the numbers.

Jimmy glanced at the Christmas card tucked above the car’s visor. He saw a tired woman in a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sweater and a little girl dressed as an elf standing beside a blue Christmas tree.

Victorville was a small windblown town on the edge of the Mojave Desert—about ten years ago it had been touted as a bedroom community for L.A. and Orange County, the two-hour commute a trade-off for clean air and affordable housing. The town had boomed for a while, tripling in population as housing developments with names like Desert Rose, Sunset Estates, and Tumbleweed Valhalla were thrown up as fast as nonunion carpenters could work. The recession changed everything. When business soured, Victorville’s eager commuters were the first fired, their hours cut or outsourced to Mexico. The new housing developments were ghost towns now, whole blocks foreclosed and abandoned, the yards reverting to sand and weeds.

Jimmy peered through the windshield, checking numbers, when a bee bumped against the glass. He thought of Saul Zarinski and his flesh flies and beetles at the koi pond. To the entomologist, the overlapping life cycles of the insects that had made a condominium of Garrett Walsh’s corpse were a marvel of precision. Jimmy was impressed with the man’s research, but bugs still creeped him out. He glanced at his files on the floor of the Saab, notes to himself strewn across the seat, with Zarinski’s postmortem timeline highlighted in yellow. There was something there, something nagging at him. Right now, though, he wanted to talk with Stephanie Panagopolis.

Jimmy slowed. The blue rambler across the street had a Barney pup tent on the dry lawn, the bright purple fabric flapping in the constant wind. It was the only sign of children he had seen since he got off the freeway. The address on the house matched the Christmas card.

The doorbell rang the theme from
Zorba the Greek.

The woman who answered the door looked like the one on the Christmas card, wearing jeans and an untucked white blouse instead of a reindeer sweater. She was even more tired-looking now than in her photo, her skin sallow, her dark hair dry and flyaway. She peered out at him from the far side of the security chain. “Can I help you?”

“Mrs. Panagopolis, my name is Jimmy Gage. I’m a reporter.” Jimmy showed her his photo ID from SLAP. “I’d like to talk with you for a few minutes, if it’s all right.”

“I see. Well, I’m busy now. Maybe you could come back—”

“I need to talk to you about April McCoy.”

She nodded. “Of course you do.” She didn’t move.

“I’ve come a long way to see you.” Jimmy waited while she slowly slid the chain off the door, then followed her into the small living room. “Were you expecting me?”

“Yes . . . for a very long time.” Stephanie sat on the sofa, knees together, and placed her hands in her lap. She was plain, with a long face and the wrong shade of makeup, but her eyes were pretty, and she had a generous mouth. Photographs of her daughter hung on one wall: pictures of her in a Brownie uniform, in a bathing suit hurtling down a water slide, in pajamas. The daughter looked just like her mother. The yellow floral-print couch was faded, but the arms were covered with bright knitted squares, and there was a knitted afghan across the back too. The house was clean and quiet, the only incongruous bit of decor the cardboard boxes stacked in the far corner of the room. No radio, no TV, no stereo—just the sound of the wind outside. “Can I get you a glass of water? It’s filtered.”

“Ah, sure.”

She didn’t move. The question had been mechanical, and his response didn’t trigger any action. “I sell water-filtration systems. The unit screws right into the faucet. It’s more economical than bottled.”

“Mrs. Panagopolis—”

“Call me Stephanie. There’s no Mr. Panagopolis anymore, there’s just me and my daughter—and that stupid doorbell. I hate that song. It was my husband’s idea. Only thing he ever did around the house was install that doorbell.” She plucked at the collar of her blouse. “I sell Amway products. Business used to be better. If you need laundry detergent or hand cream or shaving lotion, if you need anything, you just ask me.”

Jimmy glanced at the cardboard boxes.

“The bath gel, the apricot bath gel, is quite nice. I carry a full line of vitamins too. You can never get enough vitamins. Our food is dead. They don’t tell you that, but it is.”

“I’m here to talk to you about Heather Grimm.”

“You said you wanted to talk about April.”

“You’ll be an unnamed source. You have my word.”

Her eyes focused on him, and she saw him clearly. “An unnamed source? Oh my,
that’s
a relief. That will fix everything.”

“I talked to a man—he used to be a photographer. His name then was Willard Burton.” Jimmy saw Stephanie grimace. “Burton told me about April McCoy’s sideline.”

“Sideline?” She tugged idly at her hair, a few strands drifting toward the carpet.

“Burton said he used to steer underage girls and boys to April.”

“How is Willard Burton? Is he well? Has life been kind to him?”

“Heather Grimm was one of April’s clients.”

“I get a mammogram twice a year. I feel myself for lumps every day. My mother used to say that cancer was God’s judgment. Do you think that’s true?”

“No, I don’t.”

She smiled, and her relief made her pretty. “I think you must be right, Mr. Gage. If Willard Burton is alive and well . . . you
must
be right.”

Jimmy moved onto the couch beside her. “Heather Grimm didn’t end up at Walsh’s beach house by accident—April sent her. But it wasn’t April’s idea. Whose idea was it?”

Stephanie shook her head.

“You worked for April McCoy for years.”

“I worked at a desk.” Stephanie’s whole body was shaking. “I sat behind a desk. I answered the phone. I made coffee and went out for sandwiches. That’s all.”

“Maybe sitting at your desk you saw something. Maybe answering the phone you heard something. I’m just asking for your help. I’m not trying to blame you.”

“If I had known what she was doing, if I had known for sure—”

“What did you see?”

“Willard Burton was an
awful
man. I knew that the first moment he showed up in the office, digging his hands into my candy dish on his way into April’s office, not even waiting for me to announce him.”

“When did he first start coming around?”

“It was a few years before—before Heather Grimm became a client. He didn’t come in very often after that first time. I think April must have said something to him.”

“So when he stopped coming by the office, he called?”

“Yes.”

“You handled the incoming calls.”

Stephanie fidgeted. “That was my job.”

“If it was
my
job, I would have listened in once in a while.”

“I could have gotten fired for doing that.”

“A man like Burton calling my boss—I would have done it anyway. I would have worried for her, wondered what she had gotten herself into. I think you’re the same way.”

Stephanie stared out the picture window at an empty Bucket-o-Chicken blowing down the street. “This used to be a lovely place to live. Lots of young families, plenty of kids for my daughter to play with. Some of the fathers put up a playground in a vacant lot down the street—slides and swings. It just sits there now. When we had block parties, everyone turned out. People used to love my pasta salad. They would ask me for the recipe, and I always gave it to them. Some women don’t share recipes, or they deliberately give you the wrong ingredients, but I can’t do that.”

Jimmy put his hand on her wrist and felt her pull back. “Pimentos, that was the secret to my pasta salad. Pimentos and Del Monte tartar sauce.”

“I bet Burton flirted with you when he called. I’ve met him. He calls himself Felix now, Felix the Cat. He thinks he’s a charmer.”

“He used to call me Porkchop.
Porkchop.
” Stephanie watched the brown grass across the street. “Burton talked in code to April. ‘I’ve got a guppy for you,’ he would say. I didn’t even know what he was talking about for a long time. Not until it was too late. I had read somewhere that there was a black market for tropical fish. The article said that collectors paid big money for rare ones, fish that were endangered; sometimes for fish that weren’t even pretty, just dangerous. That’s what I thought he was doing.”

Jimmy didn’t argue with her. “So Burton supplied guppies to April; I already know that. What I’m interested in was who April sold the guppies to. Who paid her to send Heather Grimm to the beach house?”

Stephanie twisted a strand of hair between her thumb and forefinger. “Heather wasn’t a guppy.”

Jimmy stared at her. “What was she?”

Stephanie twirled her hair faster now. “A goose.” She nodded. “A goose that laid the golden egg. There were plenty of guppies, but Heather was the only goose. She was
very
special.”

Burton had described her the same way to Jimmy at the porn shoot.

“My daughter is seven years old now. I look at her sleeping sometimes, and I wonder how I could have been so stupid.” Strands of hair floated in the quiet room. “I
was
stupid, wasn’t I? Not something worse?”

“You just didn’t put it all together until it was too late, that’s all. It’s happened to me before. You think you know what’s going on, but you don’t.”

“You’re a kind man.”

“No, I’m not. I just know what it’s like to fuck up.”

Stephanie clasped her hands. She looked like she was trying to catch her breath. “I sell ozone generators that are supposed to reduce stress. I can’t . . . I can’t guarantee—”

“You never overheard April on the phone talking to someone about Heather?”

Stephanie shook her head.

“You never heard Garrett Walsh’s name mentioned?”

“I left the office at six o’clock, but April always stayed late. I don’t think she liked going home. Whoever you’re looking for, they must have called after I left.”

Jimmy sat beside her for a long time thinking. “What exactly made April special? Because she was so young, and yet so mature—”

“Heather was the only one April ever put under contract.
That’s
why she was special.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The other guppies, I never even met them. I would hear April and Burton talking, and a week or two later April would have a new designer outfit, something from Rodeo Drive. She was a big girl, but she was a clotheshorse. Stylish. I admired that.”

“You never met the guppies. Did you meet Heather?”

“Heather was a goose.” Stephanie smiled at the memory. “April was so proud. She kept telling Heather about this big part she had locked in for her, a ‘star vehicle’ she called it, not just a walk-on, a real break-out role.”

“April never promised a specific part to one of her clients?”

“Oh my, no.”

“What was the part April had locked in for Heather? It’s very important.”

Stephanie concentrated, then shook her head.

“April was
sure
that Heather had the part nailed?”

“She said it was a done deal.”

Jimmy nodded. April had never expected Heather to be killed that night; Heather’s rape was to ruin Garrett’s career, and his arrest would make Heather a household name, a player. A high-profile film role could turn Heather into a star, and a contract would guarantee that April got taken along for the ride. Even Mick Packard at the height of his power couldn’t have opened that many doors to Heather. Neither could a jealous coke dealer or a software king. No, that took
real
juice.

Stephanie sniffed. “You okay?”

“It’s like I said before, sometimes it takes a while to put things together, and when you finally do, you wonder what took you so long.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s not healthy. I think that’s why April committed suicide—she must have blamed herself for what happened to Heather.”

“You think April committed suicide?”

“April—underneath it all, she was a very spiritual person.”

“Willard Burton thinks she was murdered.”

Stephanie was very still, a rabbit trying to blend into the background. “Willard Burton is a man who doesn’t understand guilt,” she said at last. “April knew about guilt. Just like me. That’s why we both overate.” She looked at Jimmy. “If the thing with Heather had worked out the way it was supposed to, April wasn’t going to have anything more to do with Willard Burton. I’m sure of that. She disliked that man as much as I did.” Her eyes were downcast now, remembering. “The afternoon Heather signed with the agency was
such
a good day. Heather was going on about buying a Corvette, a pink Corvette, and April was talking about getting a new office, and maybe one of those ergonomic chairs for me. A wonderful day. My hand actually shook when I notarized the contract.”

Jimmy stared at her. “How could Heather sign a contract? She was a minor.”

“Her mother was there. She signed too. We were all so happy, and then Garrett Walsh ruined everything. Me and Burton, we’re the only ones left alive. It kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” She looked at Jimmy. “That sounded bad, didn’t it? Should I be worried?”

“Just stay put. I’ll be back in touch soon. If you remember the name of the movie April had promised Heather, let me know.”

Stephanie glanced out the window and checked the street. “I knew I shouldn’t have answered the door.”