The First Cut (30 page)

“That would be great.” Vining wrote her name and cell phone number at the bottom of the flyer. She then showed her the photographs of the Lesleys.

“Remember them?”

“Indeed I do. Especially him. He has that George Clooney thing going on. I walked into the ballroom with him. I thought he was there to act as the emcee. You know how they always get a local TV personality to be the master of ceremonies? Turned out he was getting an award for helping a police officer arrest some guy.”

“You walked in with him. Where was he coming from?”

“The pool café. I was checking on another reception we were setting up there. He was walking inside and he held the door open for me.” Angeloff’s expression showed she was impressed.

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Small talk. Looks like the rain is finally over and such.”

“Can you show me where you saw him?”

Angeloff took her down the corridor and they walked outside. The café was busy with the breakfast crowd. Tourists were looking over maps or staring dreamily into the distance. Businesspeople sat stiffly, checking BlackBerrys, nattering into cell phones or at each other.

“At what point during the luncheon was this?”

“I think people were still eating their entrées. That’s right. No one had taken the podium yet, so it was before dessert and coffee.”

“Why was he out here?”

“I might have smelled smoke on him, but that was two months ago. I can’t say for sure.”

“Was it raining that day?”

“No, it was beautiful. I do remember that because the people having the reception out here were terrified it was going to rain.” Angeloff held her hand toward a man who was passing. “Hector, can you come over here, please? This is Hector, the café manager. He was here that day.”

Angeloff explained the situation and Vining showed him the photographs of the Lesleys and Frankie Lynde.

He conscientiously examined them. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember seeing them. That was at the start of our high season. A couple hundred people have lunch here every day.”

He flagged down a waitress. “Laura, do you have a second? Laura’s here most weekdays.”

She was wearing brown slacks and a beige shirt, an apron tied around her waist. Vining thought she was in her thirties. She was trim and tall with blunt-cut black hair. She had several piercings down each ear, but wore diamond studs only in her earlobes. The remainder she likely adorned on her days off. Her eyes brightened when she saw the photograph of John Lesley.

“Oh yeah. I remember.”

Vining thanked the others and walked with Laura outside to where she had served John Lesley a beer.

“He said he had escaped the luncheon. They weren’t serving alcohol there.”

“Why do you remember this?”

“He was a fox.”

“I’m sure lots of good-looking men come through here. People who have the kind of money for this place know how to clean themselves up.”

“This was more than grooming.”

“He flirted with you.”

“Maybe he did.”

“What about her?” Vining held up the Frankie Lynde flyer.

“I walked away for a second to check on a table and she showed up. Next thing I see, he’s lighting her cigarette. She’s holding his hand, guiding the flame.” Laura rolled her eyes.

“Did they act like they knew each other?”

“No. But she was totally coming on to him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Took his beer out of his hand and finished it. Then she walked back, strutting, flaunting attitude. Nearly shoved me out of the way going through the door. She was big and she was not feminine.”

“Police uniforms, Kevlar vests, and thirty-pound equipment belts do that to women.”

Chastened, Laura said, “I wasn’t talking about all policewomen.”

Vining moved past it. “He didn’t walk in with her.”

“No. I went over to see if he wanted anything else and he was still watching her walk away. He handed me twenty bucks for a six-dollar beer, and left.”

“She messed it up for you.”

“She did. Women like men in uniforms. Maybe it’s the same thing in reverse. I still say that she wasn’t all that. If that’s what he was after, that is not me.”

“We found her body by the bridge earlier this week. Maybe you heard.”

Laura blanched. “That was her?”

“That
was
her.”

Vining handed Laura her card and told her to call if she thought of anything more. She left, satisfied with the waitress’s reaction to the bomb she’d dropped. She felt protective over Frankie Lynde and was tired of people talking trash about her.

John Lesley and Frankie had met at the luncheon and flirted. Flirting seemed second nature to him. Frankie was at the end of one bad relationship and was heading into a worse one. She already heard Kissick’s response. “So what, Nan?”

T W E N T Y - S I X

V
INING HEADED WEST ON THE
210
FREEWAY THAT TRAVERSED THE
foothills. It was sparsely traveled compared to the always clogged arteries to the south. She was doing eighty and piqued drivers still passed her. The haze the locals called June gloom hung in the air, muting the edges of the rolling Santa Susana Mountains that had not fully recovered from the last series of fires. She found the barren hills beautiful, their sparseness calming, having the same effect on her as the ocean.

The freeway demographics changed the farther from L.A. she drove. There were fewer imported sedans and more pickups. Flatbed trucks were piled with bales of hay. Craggy sandstone outcroppings appeared in the soft hills. The landscape looked like the background in a western movie, as it should, since many were filmed here. Science fiction, too, the rugged landscape standing in for Mars or the moon.

In Simi Valley, she took the 118, the Ronald Reagan Freeway. Thousands of people had lined that winding road to watch the hearse carrying the body of President Reagan pass by. She’d never been to the library. One Sunday, Wes and Kaitlyn had taken Emily, followed by lunch at an old stagecoach stop that had been turned into a restaurant.

They’d invited Vining to go with them, but she’d used the day to collect overtime. She remembered indulging in reverse arrogance at the thought of Wes and Kaitlyn playing while she had to work. Truth was she didn’t have to work. The extra money had probably gone to pay a bill or to buy something Emily wanted that Vining would have managed to take care of somehow.

Why did she have to be so tough all the time? Why couldn’t she relax? If she hadn’t worked overtime that day, T. B. Mann wouldn’t have attacked her. She wouldn’t have started on this bizarre path where corpses spoke and strange houses reduced her to an infantlike state. Emily wouldn’t have taken on her unhealthy hobby of tracking ghosts. None of it would have happened if she’d been able to enjoy life. If she’d puttered in the yard that day or cleaned out a closet or just taken a walk.

It’s not your fault.

With one hand on the steering wheel, she pulled the pearl necklace over her head, opened the glove compartment, and chucked it inside. “T. B. Mann, to hell with you. I’m done. You have no power over me anymore. It’s over. Finished. Kaput.”

She felt freer. She guessed the feeling wouldn’t last, but it felt sweet for that moment.

She exited the freeway. Signage gave directions to both the Reagan Library and the landfill.

Maybe she’d have to accept that T. B. Mann might always be out there. She imagined his face on a helium-filled balloon, a caricature drawn in black marker. She mentally released the balloon and watched as it rose into the sky, higher and higher, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

It was done.

You think it’s that easy.

“It is. It is because I say it is.”

She opened the glove compartment again, grabbed the necklace, rolled down the car window, and threw it into the meridian, losing it among mounds of oleander abundant with white blooms, thriving in the arid soil.

S
IMI VALLEY WAS A COP-AND-FIREFIGHTER TOWN. MANY LIVE IN THE QUIET
communities to the north and east of metropolitan L.A. where housing prices are more in line with their means. For the cops, affordability wasn’t the only motivation. There they were less likely to run into scum they knew from the streets, people they’d arrested or jacked up, while shopping at Home Depot with their families in tow.

Big-box shopping centers lined both sides of the thoroughfare. She crossed Easy Street and after a mile found the development where Lieutenant Kendall Moore lived. It was a long-established neighborhood of ranch-style homes and cul-de-sacs, built for families, bicycles, and unleashed dogs. The street names were Greek-inspired—Socrates Street, Hercules Court, Plato Court, Aristotle Street—in that oddball juxtaposition that Southern California had mastered. Old glory was everywhere—painted with house numbers on curbs, decorating pinwheels stuck inside flower beds, hoisted on full-size flagpoles in front yards. Powerboats and RVs were parked in extra-wide driveways.

She turned onto Sparta Court and found Moore’s home near the end. The driveway held a new SUV, a powerboat draped with a tan tarp, and a motorcycle. A bicycle lay on the small lawn of St. Augustine. Daylilies bloomed across the front, yellow flowers brightening the green spears. A hibiscus bush as tall as the gutter bloomed pink. An American flag drooped from a post on the front porch. Beneath the flag was another printed with bright flowers that said “Welcome Friends.” The porch was furnished with a pair of rocking chairs and a small table of plastic woven to look like wicker. An ashtray had no cigarette butts but retained a residue. A wreath of bent twigs entwined with ribbon and fake berries decorated the front door.

As soon as Vining stepped onto the cement path that led to the porch, two large dogs of indeterminate breed bayed from behind a gate across a side yard. She rang the doorbell.

There was sufficient cuteness to put Vining in mind of Wes’s wife Kaitlyn, who had to hold a record for the greatest number of cloyingly adorable decorative items per square foot. Vining didn’t detect any obvious themes here. Kaitlyn collected replicas of frogs. They were everywhere inside and outside her and Wes’s manse. Emily once threatened to buy Kaitlyn a real frog as a gift. A disgusting horned toad. Vining would have liked to have seen that, but talked her daughter out of it.

The eyelet curtains moved over the windows off her right shoulder.

Vining held her shield toward the window and then to the peephole in the door.

When a woman opened the door, the fear in her eyes conveyed she expected Vining had come to deliver bad news about her husband.

“Mrs. Moore?”

“Is Ken okay?”

Vining temporarily put her at ease. “Nothing’s happened to your husband. At least as far as I know.”

She exhaled with relief.

She was not Lolita, although Vining never really thought she would be. Rhonda Moore was three or four inches taller than the strip club description of Lolita and likely fifty pounds heavier. Her hair was done in a curly bob with a reddish rinse, probably to cover gray.

“I’m Detective Nan Vining with the Pasadena Police Department. Do you have a couple of minutes?”

“What’s this about?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions. May I come in?”

“Does this have to do with Frankie Lynde?”

“Yes.”

She nodded, as if expecting the visit. “Come in.”

Those innocuous two words. The generous gesture of opening one’s house to a stranger. This would be the second home Vining would enter since she’d returned to work. Her first, Iris Thorne’s home, didn’t go well, but that house had put her in mind of the place on El Alisal Road. This house was like the ones she’d grown up around. She understood this house and its people. She felt okay. Had she been in control the entire time? Was that all she had to do to release T. B. Mann and set herself free?

Houses have karma. Lives have karma.

She was going to be fine.

Her conscience again taunted her.
You think it’s that easy?

She stepped over the threshold and looked around, noting the doors and windows, places where people could hide.

“By the way, I’m Rhonda. I was so startled to see you there I forgot my manners. It’s never good news when a police officer shows up on your doorstep, especially when you’re the wife of one.”

She was friendly but not warm.

Breakfast smells hung in the air. Fried eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“That sounds great. Thank you.”

The kitchen opened onto a family room dominated by a huge television. It was tuned to a talk show in which four female hosts were badgering a male guest. Rhonda must have been sorting laundry as piles of linens, towels, and clothing were on the floor.

Vining was sure Rhonda cared less about being hospitable to her, but it gave her something to do while she postponed the purpose of Vining’s call.

She went about making coffee while Vining strolled around the family room.

There was a coating of dust on an exercise bike near the television. Family photographs covered the walls and flat surfaces. The Moores appeared to have two boys and a girl. There was a wedding photograph. Moore was in a tuxedo, looking about the same but younger and with more hair. Rhonda was in white lace and considerably thinner.