Self-Defense (27 page)

Mo Barnard was looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Quite a shock when it happened,” she
said, “but it’s been a long time. Strange to be hearing about it after all
these years, but you never know, do you?”

Despite living at the beach, her skin was
white and putty-soft. Her eyes had the flat, dark cast of a Grant Wood
matriarch. She fingered the remote control and looked at the blank TV screen.

Milo gave me the candy bowl.

As I unwrapped a Hershey bar, he said,
“Felix’s killer was never found. He was shot in a motel on La Cienega near
Pico. West side of the boulevard.”

La Cienega was the border between Wilshire
Division’s jurisdiction and West L.A.’s. The west side of the street made it
Milo’s territory.

Mo Barnard sighed. Milo smiled at her, and
the way she reciprocated it let me know he’d been here with her for a while.

“Strange,” she said. “All these years. I
thought he was with a whore, didn’t know whether to be sad or mad. After a
while, I forgot about that part of it. Now you come and tell me it could have
been something else. You just never know, do you.”

“Just a possibility,” Milo reminded her.

“Yes, I know, it’ll probably never be
solved. But just the chance that he wasn’t with a whore cheers me up a bit. He
wasn’t a bad guy—lots of good qualities, really.”

Milo told me, “The motel was one of those
places rented by the hour. So you can see why Mo assumed that.”

“The
police
assumed it,” she said.
“Even though the motel clerk said he hadn’t seen any woman go in with Felix.
But of course, he could’ve lied. Felix was once a policeman himself. Just for a
short time, in Baltimore; that’s where he grew up. I met him in San Bernadino.
He was working for an insurance company, investigating accident claims. I was a
records clerk at city hall. He got let go right after we got married, and we
moved to L.A.”

“Did you work for the city here, too?” I
said.

“No, I got a job doing the books for Fred
Shale Real Estate, over in Pacific Palisades. I did that for thirty-one years.
Felix and I lived in Santa Monica, near the Venice side. Felix’s office was out
here in Malibu, but this last year’s the first time I’ve actually
lived
in Malibu. My sister and her husband own this place, but he’s got bad lungs so
they moved over to Cathedral City, near Palm Springs.”

Milo said, “The interesting thing is, Mo
feels Felix may have come into some money about a year before he was killed.”

“I’m pretty sure of it,” said Mo. “He
denied it but the signs were there. I thought he was keeping someone on the
side.” Her cheeks colored. “Truth be known, he’d done that before, more than
once. But in his younger days. He was sixty-three by then—ten years older than
me, but when I married him I thought he was mature.” She chuckled and said,
“Hand me a Krackel bar, will you?”

Milo did.

“What signs did you notice?” I said.

“First of all, his retiring. For years
he’d talked about it, but he always complained he couldn’t get enough money
together—always griped about my having health benefits and a pension from San
Berdoo and from Shale, and he was out on his own with nothing. Then, all of a
sudden, he just walks in and announces there’s enough in the kitty. I said,
“What pie dropped out of the sky, Felix?’ He just smiled and patted my head and
said, “Don’t you worry, Sugaroo, we’re finally going to get that place in
Laguna Niguel.’ We were always talking about buying a condo down there, but we
didn’t have the money. We might have been able to afford one of those
retirement communities, but Felix never saw himself as old. When he turned
fifty, he bought himself a
too
pay and contact lenses. I guess he figured being so
much older than me—I used to look like a kid, people would sometimes mistake me
for his daughter—he should do something about it. The other thing he did that
made me suspicious was get a new car, a cherry-red Thunderbird, the Landau
model, the vinyl top. Which was their top of the line. We had a big fight over
that, me wanting to know how we could afford it and him saying it was none of
my business.”

She shook her head. “We fought a lot, but
we stayed together thirty-one years. Then he got himself killed and there was
no big money in his bank account, just a little over three thousand dollars,
and I figured he’d spent whatever he had on the car. And whores. I drove that
car for fifteen years, finally junked it.”

“Did he leave any business records
behind?” I said.

“You mean his detective files? No, I told
Mr. Sturgis he wasn’t much for keeping records—truth is, he was pretty
disorganized in general. After he died, I went through his things and was
surprised how little there was—just scraps of paper with scrawls. I figured,
his line of work, there might be things there that would embarrass people. I
threw everything out.”

“What kind of cases did he work on?”

She looked at Milo. “Same questions—no, I
don’t mind. I don’t really know what kind of cases. Felix didn’t talk about his
work. Truth is, I don’t think there were too many cases, toward the end. I know
he did some work for lawyers, but for the life of me I can’t remember the names
of any of them. I wasn’t part of his work, had my own job to do. I’m no
feminist but I always worked. We never had kids, both of us just went and did
our own job.”

I nodded.

She said, “I don’t mean to paint him as
some kind of bum. Basically, he was a nice guy, didn’t raise his voice, even
when we fought. But he could be a little... easy around the edges, know what I
mean?”

“Cutting corners.”

“ ’Zactly. The first time I met him he
tried to pay me five dollars to release an accident record to him without
filling out the proper forms and paying the county fee. I turned him down and
he was real good-natured about it. Laughed it off—he had a great laugh. I was
only nineteen, should have known better anyway, but I didn’t. He came back the
next day and asked me out. My parents hated his guts. Six months later we were
married. Despite all the problems, he was a pretty good husband.”

“So he never discussed Karen Best?”

“Never,” she said. “Truth is, we didn’t
discuss much, period. We kept different hours. I’d be up at six, walking the
dogs—we used to have miniature poodles—in the office at eight, back by five.
Felix liked to sleep late. He claimed a lot of his work had to be done at
night, and maybe it was true. He was gone a lot when I was home and vice
versa.” She grinned. “Maybe that’s how we stayed together thirty-one years.”

The grin dropped from her face.

“Still, his being killed was the worst
thing ever happened to me after my parents passing away.” To Milo: “When you
first called, I didn’t want to talk about it. But you were a gentleman, and
then you told me maybe Felix didn’t die because of whoring around. That would
be nice to know.”

She showed us two pictures of herself and
Felix, saying, “These are the only ones I have. When you go mobile, you keep
things to the minimum.”

The first was a wedding portrait, the
young couple posed in front of a painted backdrop of the Trevi Fountain. She’d
been a pretty dark-haired girl, but even at nineteen her eyes had been wary.
Felix wasn’t much taller than his bride, a spare man with slicked hair and
Clark Gable ears. He’d worn a pencil mustache, like Gable, but had none of the
actor’s strength in his face.

The second snapshot had been taken two
years before Barnard’s murder. The mustache was gone and the PI was stooped,
his face lined, the toupee embarrassingly obvious. He wore a gray sharkskin
suit with skinny lapels and a white turtleneck and held a cigarette in a
holder. Mo’s hair was bleached blond and she’d put on some weight, but despite
that she did look young enough to be his daughter. The picture had been taken
in a back yard, their faces shaded by a big orange tree.

“Our place in Santa Monica,” she said. “I
rent it out now. The income along with my pension’s what keeps me going.”

Milo asked to borrow the more recent
photo, and she said, “Sure.” We thanked her and left. As we stepped out of the
trailer, she said, “Good luck to you. Let me know if you find out anything.”

“Nice lady,” I said, as we walked down to
our cars.

“She fed me dinner,” said Milo. “Beans and
franks and potato chips. I was ready for camp songs. Before she really opened
up, we watched
Jeopardy.
She knows a lot about presidents’ wives.”

“How long were you there?”

“Since six.”

Four and a half hours. “Dedication.”

“Yeah, beatify me.”

“How’d you learn about Barnard’s murder?”

“Social Security said he was deceased, so
I checked county Death Records and it came up homicide, which needless to say
surprised me. According to the autopsy report, he got shot in the back of the
head in that motel, just like she said. What she doesn’t know is that his pants
were down around his ankles, but there was no evidence of sexual activity and
he hadn’t ejaculated recently.”

“Was the place an outright bordello?”

“More of an anything-goes place. I knew it
well from when I used to ride Westside patrol. Drugs, assaults, all-around
obnoxious behavior. The detectives on the case assumed Barnard was a john who
got in trouble.”

“He was shot,” I said. “Wouldn’t a hooker
have been more likely to stab him?”

“There are no rules, Alex. Some of the
girls pack fire, or a pimp could have killed him; lots of them carry.”

“Did anyone hear the shot?”

“Nope. Clerk discovered his body, cleaning
up. By the time he called it in, place was empty.”

“Deaf clerk?”

“It’s a busy street, he had the TV
blasting, who knows? There was no reason to think it was anything more than
Barnard picking the wrong time and place for a blowjob.”

“And now?”

“Maybe still. I called you because the
fact that he was murdered knocks the Karen Best case up another notch on the
Intrigue Scale. As does Mo’s feeling that he came into dough.”

“Best told me Karen was Barnard’s last
case,” I said. “And Barnard was killed a year after Karen disappeared. You
think he could have been blackmailing someone about Karen and they finally got
tired of paying?”

“Or he got too greedy. On the other hand,
he could have been blackmailing someone about another case totally
unrelated
to Karen. Or maybe he got the T-bird by saving pennies behind his wife’s back.
Or at the track. She said all he left her was three thousand bucks—how much
would a T-bird have cost back then?”

“Probably six, seven thousand.”

“Not major-league blackmail. We’re still a
long way from evidence. Barnard could have been shot simply because some whore
did
get mad at him.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“I’ll see if I can turn up anything more
on him. Then I guess the logical thing is to try to find those Sand Dollar
people and see if they remember anything about Karen.”

He looked through the trees at the
restaurant. No cars in the lot and only a few lights were on.

“I went in there tonight looking for Doris
Reingold, but she’s off for a couple of days.... The thing that bothers me
about Barnard’s investigation is if Karen was hired by the Sheas to work the
Sanctum party, why wouldn’t anyone at the Dollar have mentioned it?”

“You think someone told Barnard and he
left it out intentionally?”

“Who knows? Like you said, maybe he was
just an incompetent boob and didn’t ask the right questions. Or he got answers
and didn’t think they were important.”

“Malibu Sheriffs interviewed the same
people,” I said. “If Karen was working the party, why wasn’t it in their
reports?”

“Maybe she never was at the party. Or
could be the sheriffs found out she was and didn’t think it was important
either.”

“The last place she was seen wasn’t
important?”

“Her serving hors d’oeuvres to five
hundred people isn’t much of a lead, Alex. She could have been picked up by
some party animal and run into trouble later. What reason would anyone have to
suspect she was somewhere on the grounds, six feet under?”

We reached the bluff and I walked him to
the Porsche. He opened the driver’s door and fished for car keys.

“I told Lucy about Karen,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I’m still not sure it was right, but I
followed
my
instincts. It was either continue to hold back information
from her, and take the chance it would destroy our rapport, or be straight.”

“How’d she react?”

“Initial shock. Then she warmed to the
idea that the dream might actually mean something. Learning the truth’s become
her mission.”

“Great.”

“I’m doing my best to keep the lid on. So
far, she’s being reasonable. She asked for hypnosis to enhance her memory, and
I agreed to try some basic relaxation. I thought she’d be really susceptible,
and at first she seemed to be. Then she fell asleep. Which means she’s
resisting strongly. She slept very deeply and her dream pattern’s fragmented. I
actually watched her go in and out of several phases. I’m not surprised she’s a
sleepwalker and has chronic nightmares. She’d like to believe she sleepwalked
her way into the kitchen and put her head in the oven, and I guess it’s
possible. Sleep’s her great escape. She blocks things out by dozing off.”