“Alsatia Junior High.”
“All right. You take the Consciewitz girl. Give him the address, Brew.” I got out a pen and wrote down the address on one of the napkins. When Ginny starts to give orders, she doesn’t kid around. “The report on her mentioned a letter. I want that letter—the letter itself, not a copy. I want to know when they got it. I want to know where it was postmarked. I want to know why they think Dottie Ann didn’t write it.
“Then go to the school. I’m not sure what I’m looking for there, so ask them about everything you can think of. Try to find out exactly where and when Dottie and Mittie left school. When you’ve got all that, call my answering service. We’ll figure out where to go from there.”
Watching him, you’d have thought that she’d just given him a transfusion. A little blood came back into his face, and some of the rigid way he held himself relaxed. It was just what he needed—somebody to give him orders, make him feel like he was doing something to help Mittie. But he had something else going on, too. There was something distant in his eyes that didn’t match the rest of him. Just for a second he gave me the distinct impression that he had ideas he wasn’t telling us. Then he left the table to pay his bill. A minute later he hurried out of the diner. The impression faded as soon as he was gone.
I turned back to Ginny. “You found out something from Alathea’s friends.”
“Maybe.” She started getting money out of her purse. “I’m not sure. I want to take another look at her school. She disappeared after fifth period, PE, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, her sixth-period class was Home Ec. Apparently she was the only kid in that PE class who had Home Ec. afterward. So she always went from one to the other alone. The gym and the Home Ec. classroom are on opposite sides of the school, and she didn’t have much time to get from one to the other, so she took a shortcut outside the buildings. As far as her friends know, she’s the only one who took that shortcut between fifth and sixth periods.”
“So whatever happened to her happened on that shortcut.”
Ginny nodded. “Seems that way. We’ll check it out tomorrow.” Then she got to her feet. “Right now I’m going to take you home. You need sleep. If your eyes sink any farther back in your head, you might swallow them.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I’d been running on nothing but nervous tension for hours now—I did need sleep. And I always have an easier time relaxing when Ginny is in one of her take-charge moods. Spares me having to make decisions for myself. I waited for her to pay the bill, then followed her out to the Olds.
By then it was after midnight, and the night was darker than ever. But that suited me, too. It’s hard to work on cases like this during the day. Sunlight makes everything about them seem unreal. At night there’s always somebody somewhere who knows the secret. It’s just a question of finding the right person and asking the right questions.
And something else kept me from feeling quite so scared for Alathea. The other girls on that list took at least three months to end up dead. Alathea had only been missing for nine days.
On the drive back to my apartment, I told Ginny how Encino had happened to change his mind about letting us see his files. That must’ve made a difference to her, because when she said good night she didn’t look anywhere near as worried as she had earlier. She looked like a woman who knew she was on the right track.
7
The next morning, the phone pounded me awake around eight. It took me a long time to get to it. As soon as I sat up in bed, I had a blinding headache and every muscle in my body hurt as if I’d just gone fifteen rounds with a brick wall. That told me something, but for a while I couldn’t remember what it was. All I could remember was the fine sharp taste of whiskey. Remember it—hell—I wanted it. For a while there it was worth more to me than love or money.
That explained why I hurt so bad. I’d slept through the first half of a crisis. My muscles ached from clenching, and my poor sodden brain was yowling, prompted by thirst. I was drenched in sweat.
The phone went on hammering at me, but I ignored it. I lumbered into the kitchen, thanking all the gods who watch over slobs like me that I’d had enough foresight to make up a jug of frozen orange juice before I went to bed. I drank about a quart of that while the phone went on ringing. Then I answered it.
“Brew?” It was Ginny. “Are you—no, forget that. Did I wake you up?”
That was an old question, and I answered it by force of habit. “No, I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.” I didn’t have enough brains with me to think of anything original.
She didn’t even pretend to laugh. “How soon can you get ready to go? We’ve got work to do.”
“Come pick me up,” I said. “I’ll be ready by then.”
“We don’t have time for that. We’ve got six sets of parents, five schools, and a school board to talk to. You’ll have to rent a car.”
“All right.” Her tone was infectious. Just listening to her made me feel like she and I actually lived in the same world. “What do you want me to do?”
“There’s no point in you going to any of the schools. If they have any sense, they won’t talk to anybody until they see a license. Why don’t you start with John and Mary Christie?”
“They’ll never forgive me.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn. I want to know more about that note. I want to know what makes them so edgy.”
I said, “They’ll tell me.” People generally tell me what I want to know—one way or another.
“They’d better,” she said. Then she went on giving me orders. “When you’re through there, go see that other family up in the North Valley, the Larsens. If you finish early, call my service. Otherwise I’ll meet you at the school board at one. We have an appointment to talk to the chairman.”
“Right.” It sounded simple enough. It even sounded good to have her give me things to do alone. A big improvement over having her worried about me. “Anything else?”
“Yes. I need the addresses of those two girls who went to Matthew Pilgrim Junior High. I’ll concentrate on the southeast—try to see the parents and talk to the school before I meet you.”
I left the phone to dig out my notes, then gave her the addresses for the Hannibals and Mrs. Swift. A moment later, she said, “That leaves two.”
“Marisa Lutt and May-Belle Podhorentz.”
“Maybe we can check them out this afternoon.”
She made sure I knew where the school board was. Then she hung up.
Work. I had work to do. I spent a minute trying to stretch some of the soreness out of my muscles. Then I got dressed.
Breakfast and the rest of the orange juice did a lot to soak the worst of the pain out of my head. By a quarter of nine I was practically functional. More out of duty than conviction, I strapped on my shoulder holster and checked over the .45. Then I made sure I had all the right papers with me—my notes and the notes—grabbed up my sunglasses, and went out to start batting my head against the morning.
As it happens, there’s a cheap rent-a-relic agency about ten blocks from my apartment. By the time I walked the distance, I felt steadier physically, and they were open for business. I ended up with a middle-aged Torino. I wasn’t very comfortable—some cars just aren’t designed to fit the human body, no matter what size it is. But it had four wheels and an engine, which was all I needed. Before long I was on my way out toward the North Valley again.
I avoided what was left of rush hour traffic by taking old roads up along the river, but still it took me quite a while to reach the horsy area where the Christies lived. By then I was sweating in the heat. And the sun beat down on me in an almost insulting way—which didn’t do anything for my mood, either. When the Torino bounced into the parking lot of the Christies’ riding stables, I was ready to be as tough as necessary.
I went through the office door fast, aiming to take John and Mary by surprise. But the only one I surprised was Mrs. Christie. Her husb
and wasn’t there.
When she saw me, she almost jumped out of her shirt. But she didn’t yell for John. Instead she asked, “What do you want?” and her voice trembled. Which told me that Mr. Christie was somewhere out of range—maybe on one of the trails or doing business in town. In a way, that was unfortunate. I was primed to throw my weight around, and it wouldn’t take any weight at all to make Mrs. Christie talk. Nerves or fear or whatever already put enough pressure on her.
So I sat down in a chair by the desk, crossed my legs, and said in the least threatening voice I could muster on such short notice, “I want to ask you a few questions about Carol.”
“Go away.” She had to hug herself to keep from shouting. “I can’t talk to you. John doesn’t want me to talk to you. He’ll be back any minute. I’ll call the police.”
The way her eyes groped around the room as if she were praying for some kind of miracle told me that she was lying about her husband coming back. I countered with a lie of my own. “The cops know I’m here. They know we’re working on this case.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.” Somewhere she found the determination to sound defiant. “I don’t have to talk to you.”
I said, “That’s true, Mrs. Christie.” Calm, unthreatening. “But if you’ll listen to me for a minute, I think you’ll find you want to talk. You’re afraid of something, and it isn’t going to go away until this case is solved. This may be hard for you to believe, but I’m trying to help you.
“You see, I know what happened to Carol. I know she died from an overdose of heroin. I know how she earned the money for her drugs.” Abruptly Mary Christie dropped into a chair and put her hands over her face. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t answer my questions.”
I gave her a minute to absorb that. Then I went on.
“Carol isn’t the only one, Mrs. Christie. For two years now, the same thing has been happening to twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls everywhere in the city. Right now it’s happening to my niece. That’s why I need to talk to you.”
She didn’t look up, but slowly she took her hands away from her face. I could tell by the way her shoulders sagged that she was giving in. She was under too much strain to fight me and her fear at the same time.
Very gently, I eased her into it. “How long after Carol disappeared did you get her note?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It was three days. We were worried sick.”
“I can believe it. Did you happen to notice the postmark?”
“John did. It surprised him. It was mailed here in town.”
“Why did that surprise him?”
“He—we both thought Carol had gone somewhere else. She has a lot of friends living in other parts of the state. We thought she must have gone to visit one of them.”
“I understand. Mrs. Christie, did anything about the note bother you? Was there anything that didn’t sound like her?”
“No,” she said. Then, a moment later, “Yes—sort of. Carol didn’t write letters. We used to send her to camp every summer, and she never wrote to us. And when she got back she didn’t write to her friends. She didn’t like to write. She liked to use the phone—she liked to call people. But she wouldn’t write. One year she got in trouble at camp because the counselors wanted her to write a letter home like the rest of the girls, and she wouldn’t.” Finally she looked up at me. Her face was full of distress. “She loved us, that wasn’t it. She didn’t write to anybody. She didn’t like to write.”
I wanted to tell her that I understood, that I believed her. But the way she was looking at me gave me an opening I couldn’t afford to miss. “Mrs. Christie,” I said softly, “what’re you so afraid of?”
“I—we—” For a moment she choked on it. But by now it was too late. She couldn’t stop herself. “John says we might lose our business. He says if people find out what happened to Carol, they’ll think we had something to do with it and stop coming here. They won’t want their children to associate with us. But he’s just saying that. He doesn’t care about it. Carol was a good girl. He wants people to remember her the way she was, before—before she ran away.”
I waited a moment, then said, “But that isn’t it, either.”
“No. No. We’re both so—so ashamed. We don’t want anybody to know. We failed her somehow. There must’ve been some way we could’ve been better parents. So she wouldn’t have had to run away. That hurts. I keep wanting it to go away, and it doesn’t.
“And that—that policeman. Detective Acton?” She looked at me, expecting me to recognize the name. “He th-threatened us. He said somebody is supplying drugs to young girls—all through the city—and the parents are the first suspects. He said he wanted to believe we were innocent, but he needed to keep what happened quiet, out of the papers and everything so nobody would know about it, and if we told anybody, talked to anybody, he would know we were deliberately interfering with his investigation. He was—awful. He looked like he liked hurting us.
“I haven’t been able to sleep for nights. I keep having this nightmare that Carol is drowning and screaming for help, and I’m running frantically to try to get to her, but before I can get there Detective Acton comes out of the water and pushes her head down, and all the time he has the most terrible grin.” Again she covered her face. “Oh, my baby!”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing I could say. The world is full of pains no stranger can comfort. The only thing I could do for her was find out the truth about Carol.
And keep my eyes open for a chance to give Detective-Lieutenant Acton what he had coming.
I left the trailer, closed the door quietly behind me, and went back to my rented Torino.
When I eased myself into the seat, I almost scalded my back on the vinyl upholstery. The sun had made it hot enough to fry eggs. I spat a few curses, but that didn’t accomplish anything. The heat was just another item on a long list of things I couldn’t do anything about. I started the engine, then tramped down on the accelerator and slewed out of the parking lot onto the road. For a few minutes I concentrated on speed, trying to build up enough wind to ventilate the car. Then I settled back, got a better grip on myself, and began to look for the Larsens’ address.
It shouldn’t have been hard to find, but I didn’t know the North Valley very well, and for some reason Lujan Street didn’t seem to be where I thought it was. Finally I had to stop at a small corner grocery store—the kind of glittering artificial place you find in moneyed neighborhoods, the kind that stocks more caviar than macaroni—to ask directions. Sure enough, Lujan Street turned out to be just about where I thought it was. However, I wasn’t where I thought I was.
It was late in the morning when I finally parked in front of the Larsen mansion. It wasn’t new. In fact, it had the Victorian look of a converted funeral home. But it sure as hell was big. I had to trek half a dozen blocks to reach the porch and ring the doorbell. Along the way, I passed five or six kids’ bikes standing to one side.
About that time, the name Bjorn Larsen began to sound vaguely familiar.
A solid matronly woman—who turned out to be Magda Larsen answered the doorbell and invited me into the house. The front hall was only twice the size of my apartment, and it was decorated, if that’s the right word, with four massive iron sculptures as tall as I am. Two flanked the door, one stood beside the staircase, and one guarded the entrance to the living room. That explained it. Ruth Ann Larsen’s father was Bjorn Larsen, the famous sculptor—one of Puerta del Sol’s few certifiable claims to being an “art center.”
Magda Larsen steered me into the living room, and a few moments later we were joined by her husband. He was as thickly built as she was, and as brawny as a steeplejack. He had a pair of welding goggles pushed back on his head and wore an asbestos apron over his T-shirt and jeans. The contrast between his clean hands and grimy forearms showed that he’d just taken off his work gloves.
“This is Mr. Axbrewder,” Mrs. Larsen said. “He wants
to talk to us about our daughter.” Virtually a repeat of what I’d told her at the door. Her tone was noncommittal, almost distant, but her husband stuck out his hand as if he were prepared to welcome anybody she let into the house. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Axbrewder. Have a seat?” He waved me toward an overstuffed sofa that looked like it ate people for lunch. All the furniture in the room was like that—deep, sturdy, and made to last.
I sat down at one end of the sofa. Magda joined me at the other, and Bjorn took a chair near her, unself-consciously courteous about placing himself so I could talk to both of them at once. “Which daughter did you have in mind?” he asked directly, “Risa or Natalie?”
Their openness made me hesitate. Neither of them had the vaguest notion what I had to say—and neither of them was the least bit afraid of it. I had a sudden desire to just tell them that I’d made a mistake and walk away. Somehow the complete frankness in their eyes made me feel like a child molester—me with all my grim, guilty secrets. I had to make an effort to say “Ruth Ann.”
In a way, that announcement didn’t make any difference. Mrs. Larsen gave a faint gasp and went pale. Blood flushed through her husband’s face. But neither of them tried to hide their reactions—or to attack me with them. When Larsen spoke, he didn’t sound either embarrassed or hostile.
“Ruth Ann died a miserable and senseless death. Magda and I will never understand it. What is your interest in her?”
Now that I was started, it was easier to go on. “I’m a private investigator. My niece has disappeared, and I’m trying to find her. It’s possible she’s going through the same thing that happened to your daughter. If you’d answer some questions for me, it might help me find her.”
Bjorn Larsen looked at his wife. She was shaking her head. He turned back to me. “Ruth Ann has been dead for more than a year. Fifteen months now. What do you think our daughter and your niece have in common?”