by Sue Grafton
“Let me do that. I can go this afternoon,” I said.
“Good. Meanwhile, what else? What about sizes?”
We spent several minutes working through those details. This time Dolan flipped back through the pages, looking for the list of clothing booked into property. “Here we go. Shoe size—7½. Panty size—medium. Bra size was 38A.”
I said, “That means she’s got a fairly large torso, but a small cup size. Barrel-chested. Girls like that tend to look top-heavy, even if they’re thin.”
Dolan turned a page. “Says here her ears were pierced. ‘Through the left earlobe is a gold-colored wire of a “horseshoe” configuration. Through the right earlobe a gold-colored wire with a bent clip in its lower end.’ People might remember that, too.”
Stacey added that to the list and then said, “Is that it?”
I raised my hand. “She wore nail polish. Silver.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Not that I remember.”
Dolan got to his feet. “In that case, if you’ll excuse me. I gotta have me a smoke.”
At lunchtime, I volunteered to make a trip to the nearest market and pick up the makings for sandwiches, but they’d apparently gotten wind of my peanut-butter-and-pickle fetish and voted to go out for Chinese. We took Con’s car and made the crosstown trip to the Great Wall, with its pagoda facade and a gilded statue of the Buddha sitting over the front door. In the parking lot, I waited while Stacey and Con tucked their guns in the trunk of Con’s car. The three of us went in.
The interior walls were painted the requisite Chinese red with red Naugahyde banquettes and round white paper lanterns strung like moons around the perimeter. Stacey didn’t have much appetite, but Con seemed more than willing to make up for it. I was starving as usual. We ordered pot stickers and spring rolls, which we dunked in that pale Chinese mustard that cleans out your sinuses. We moved on to Moo Shu Pork, Kung Pao Chicken, and Beef with Orange Peel along with a dome of white rice. Con and I drank beer. Stacey had iced tea.
While we ate, the guys speculated about the killer, a matter in which I deferred to them: I have no formal training in homicide investigation, though I’ve encountered a few bodies in the course of my career. Given the nature of the murder, they theorized that the perpetrator was most likely male, in part because women tend to be repelled by close-contact blood-and-gore killings. In addition, the multiple stab wounds suggested a brutality more commonly associated with men.
“Hey, these days, women can be brutes,” Con said.
“Yeah, but I can’t see a woman hefting that body into the car trunk and hauling it out again. A hundred twenty-five pounds is a lot of dead weight.”
“As it were,” Dolan said. “You think this was planned?”
“If it was, you’d think he’d’ve worked out a plan for disposing of the body. This guy was in a hurry, at least enough of one that he didn’t stop to dig a grave.” He was making notes on a napkin and the pen made occasional rips in the paper while the ink tended to spread.
Con opened his packet of chopsticks and pried the two wooden sections apart, rubbing one on the other to smooth away any tiny wooden hairs. He doused both his chicken and his beef with enough soy sauce to form a shallow brown lake in which his rice grains swam like minnows. “I’m surprised he didn’t pick a dump site more remote.”
“That stretch of road looks isolated if you don’t know any better. No houses in sight. He probably didn’t have a clue about the quarry traffic running up and back.”
“I’m with you on that. Forensics says the wire he used to bind her wrists was torn off something else so he must have grabbed whatever came to hand. Guy was making shit up as he went along.” I watched as Dolan formed a pincer with his chopsticks and tried picking up a chunk of chicken, which he couldn’t get as far as his mouth.
“Question is, did he target that girl in particular, or was he trolling for a victim and it was just her bad luck?”
Con said, “I think it was a fishing expedition. He might’ve tried five or six gals and finally one said yes.” He shifted to a scooping technique, using his chopsticks like a little shelf onto which he pushed the bite of chicken. He got the hunk as far as his lower lip. Nope. I saw him shake his head. “I don’t think we’re dealing serial. This feels like a one-off.” He tried again, this time lunging, his lips extended like an anteater’s as he lifted his chopsticks. He captured a snippet of orange peel before the rest fell back onto his plate.
I grabbed a fork from the next table and handed it to him.
Stacey made a doodle on the napkin, which by now was completely tattered. “Hang on. Let’s back up a second. Age-wise, it seems to me like she’s bound to be closer to the high end—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and up, instead of the twelve, thirteen end of the spread. Young girl like that, somebody’s going to report she’s gone, regardless of whether she leaves voluntarily or stomps out in a huff. You’re a parent, you might shrug and not think too much about it, but when she doesn’t come home, you’re going to worry. You call around and find out her friends haven’t seen her either and you’re going to call the cops. If she’s twenty and disappears, it might not raise any flags at all.”
“Right. She could’ve had a history of taking off. This might have been one more in a long string of disappearances.”
Dolan pushed his plate aside. “As long as we’re making wild-ass guesses, here’s another one. I don’t think she’s local. Killer didn’t get into any facial mutilation so he must not’ve been worried someone would know who she was. He didn’t know how long she’d be lying there. Suppose she’s found the same day and they run a description of her in the paper? She’s local, somebody’s going to add two plus two and figure it out fast.”
I said, “What if she’s from another country altogether? England or Spain. There are probably plenty of places where dental care didn’t rank that high in those days. It might also explain why she wasn’t reported missing.”
Dolan said, “A missing-persons report might’ve gone through Interpol and never reached us. It’s worth checking. Maybe they have something on file.”
“There’s a note in there somewhere—woman claims she saw a hitchhiker who fit the girl’s description outside of Colgate. This was a couple of hours before the clerk in the Gull Cove minimart saw that hippie girl on August 1. Could be she was working her way up the coast,” Stacey said.
Dolan reached for his black binder with its incident reports already marked with torn scraps of paper. He turned a few pages and checked the marginal notes he’d written in a surprisingly wee hand. “You’re thinking about Cloris Bargo. She says July 29, four-thirty in the afternoon, she saw a young white female, five foot two to five foot three, age sixteen to seventeen, navy blouse, flowered slacks, long blondish hair, leaning against the base of the Fair Isle overpass. Bargo saw a vehicle stop and pick her up, heading north on the 101.”
“That’s worth another look. If Jane Doe was thumbing rides, we might backtrack and see if we can figure out her point of origin, maybe rough out a timeline.” Stacey reached for his map of California and unfolded it, flapping and spreading the unwieldy sheet across the tabletop. “If she came from the south, she’d have traveled the 405 as far as the 101,” he said. “The main arteries from Arizona into California are Highways 15 from Las Vegas, Nevada, the 40 from Kingman, Arizona, the 10 from Phoenix, and 8 coming up from Yuma. Starting from anywhere else, she’d have taken a different route.”
Dolan pushed his plate away. “You’re never going to pin that one down. She could have come from anywhere. On the other hand, you talk about July 29. That’s the same day Frankie Miracle killed his girlfriend and hit the road. If Jane Doe was thumbing rides, he could’ve picked her up.”
We left the subject at that point and moved on to other things.
After lunch, Con dropped me at the office, where I caught up with the notes on my index cards and then spent a few minutes doing digital research, which is to say, walki
ng my fingers through the telephone book. My job was to verify reports about the young hippie girl, hitching rides in the period between July 29 and August 1. Con was going to hit the phones and track down the whereabouts of Frankie Miracle’s former cellmates, while Stacey searched out his legal skirmishes in previous years. We agreed to meet that night at CC’s to share what we’d learned.
I had a prior address for Roxanne Faught, but nothing for Cloris Bargo. As it turned out, luck was on my side and starting with the obvious paid off for once. A check of the white pages revealed one Bargo, not Cloris, but a sister who didn’t even bother to quiz my purposes before she gave me the current phone number and the Colgate address. Shame on her. I could have been a stalker or a bill collector.
I checked my city map and drew a bead on my destination—a tract of middle-class homes just beyond the Fair Isle off-ramp, where Cloris Bargo had seen the girl. I locked the office, fired up the VW, and took Capillo Avenue as far as the 101.
The day was mild and hazy, the landscape muted, as though washed with skim milk. I rolled down my car windows and let the speed-generated wind blow my hair to a fare-thee-well. Traffic was light and the trip to Colgate took less than six minutes.
I took the off-ramp at Fair Isle and headed toward the mountains, counting the requisite number of streets before I turned left on York. The house I was looking for was halfway down on the left side of the street. This was a neighborhood of “starter” homes, but most had undergone major renovation since the sixties when the area had been developed. Garages had become family rooms; porches had been enclosed; second stories had been added; and the storage sheds in the rear had been enlarged and attached. The lawns were well established and the trees had matured to the point where the sidewalks buckled in places where the roots were breaking through. The children, mere toddlers when their parents had moved in, were grown and gone now, coming back to the neighborhood with children of their own.
I pulled up in front of a two-story white stucco house with a frame addition on the left and an elaborate new entrance affixed to the front that involved arches, a rustic wooden gate, climbing roses, and a profusion of hollyhocks, hydrangeas, and phlox. I let myself through the gate and climbed the porch steps. The front door stood open and the screen was on the latch. From the depths, I could smell something simmering; fruit and sugar. The radio in the kitchen was tuned to a call-in show, and I could hear the host berating someone in argumentative tones. I placed a hand on the screen, shading my eyes so I could see the interior. The front door was lined up exactly with the back door so my view extended all the way to the rear fence that separated two yards. I called, “Hullo?”
A woman hollered, “I’m out here! Come around back!”
I left the porch and trotted along the walkway that skirted the house on the right. As I passed the kitchen window, I glanced up and saw her standing at the open window. She must have been near the sink because she leaned forward and turned off the tap as she peered down at me. Through the screen, she looked thirty-five, a guess I upgraded by ten years once I saw her up close.
I paused. “Hi. Are you Cloris Bargo?”
“Was before I got married. Can I help you with something?” She turned on the water again and her gaze dropped to whatever dish or utensil she was scrubbing.
“I need some information. I shouldn’t take more than five or ten minutes of your time.” It was weird having a conversation with someone whose face was two feet higher. I could nearly see up her nose.
“I hope you’re not selling anything door-to-door.”
“Not at all. My name’s Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private detective. Your name came up in connection with a case I’m working for the Sheriff’s Department.”
She focused on me fully, her gaze sharpening. “That’s a first. I never heard of the Sheriff’s Department hiring outside help.”
“This guy’s a retired north county detective reactivating an old murder case—that young girl stabbed to death back in 1969.”
She put something in the dish rack, dried her hands on a towel, and then reached for the radio and turned it off. When she made no other comment, I said. “Mind if I come in?”
She didn’t extend an invitation, but she made a gesture that I interpreted as consent. I continued down the walkway to the rear of the house, where the concrete drive widened, forming a parking pad. On the right, a clothesline had been strung between a wooden pole and a bolt secured to the side of the garage. White sheets flapped lazily in the breeze. The backyard was nicely landscaped; the flower beds bordered with prefabricated foot-high sections of white picket fence. Someone had recently put in flats of pansies and petunias, now drooping from the transplant process. A sprinkler head attached to a hose sent a fan of water back and forth across the grass. The outdoor furniture had seen better days. The hollow aluminum frames were pitted in places, and the woven green-and-white nylon webbing was faded and frayed. In the far corner, I could see a large expanse of tilled ground with several young tomato plants, a row of newly planted peppers, and five empty bean poles, like teepees, waiting for the emerging tendrils to take hold. I saw no sign of kids or pets.
I climbed six steps to the porch. She was waiting at the back door, holding it open for me. She stepped back and I entered. Her attitude had shifted in the brief time it’d taken me to circle the house. The set of her jaw now seemed stubborn or tense. There was something in her manner that made me think I’d best provide concrete proof of my identity. I handed her a business card.
She took it and placed it on the counter without reading it. She was trim and petite, in tan Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt, no makeup, bare feet. Her dark hair was chin length and anchored behind her ears with bobby pins.
“Nice flowers,” I said.
“My husband takes care of those. The vegetables are mine.”
The heat in the kitchen felt like South Florida in June—not yet oppressive, but a temperature that made you think seriously about leaving the state. Two big stainless steel pressure cookers fitted with racks sat on burners over matching low blue flames. The lids were lined up on the counter nearby, their little pressure cooker caps resting on the windowsill. Freshly sterilized lids, seals, ladles, and tongs were laid out on white sackcloth towels like surgical instruments. A third kettle contained a dark red liquid, as viscous as glue. I picked up the rich, hot perfume of crushed strawberries. I counted twelve pint-capacity Mason jars lined up on the kitchen table in the middle of the room. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“That’s all right.” She returned to the sink. Everything about her smacked of Midwestern farm values—the canning, the sheets on the line, the truck garden, the unadorned face.
“You remember the case?”
“Vaguely.”
I noticed she didn’t ask to have her memory refreshed, so I volunteered the help. “A sheriff’s deputy took a report from you. According to his notes, you spotted a girl hitchhiking near the Fair Isle off-ramp July 29, 1969.”
“You mentioned the date before.”
I ignored the minor reprimand. “You indicated seeing a vehicle stop and pick her up. Turns out she fit the description of the murder victim found in Lompoc a couple of days later.”
Cloris Bargo’s expression was modified by the appearance of two swatches of pink, like blusher applied by a department store cosmetologist. “You want iced tea? I can fix you some. It’s already made.”
“That’d be great.”
She opened one of the kitchen cabinets and took down a burnished blue aluminum tumbler, which she filled with ice cubes. She poured the tea from a fat glass pitcher she kept in the refrigerator. I knew she was stalling, but I wanted to give her room to declare herself. Something was going on, but I wasn’t sure what. She handed me the glass.
I murmured, “Thanks,” and took a big healthy swallow before I realized it was heavily presweetened. I could feel my lips purse. This was equivalent to that noxious syrup you have to drink before blood draws designed to diagnose con
ditions you hope you don’t have.
She leaned against the counter. “I made it up.”
I set the tumbler aside. “Which part?”
“All of it. I never saw the girl.”
“No hitchhiker at all?”
She shook her head. “I’d met the deputy—the one who wrote up the report. I was new in California. My family hadn’t been here six months. I hardly knew a soul. There’d been a prowler in our neighborhood, and this deputy was sent out to talk to us. He’d gone house to house, asking if anyone had seen anything strange or unusual. I was off work. I’d just had an emergency appendectomy and I was still recovering. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been home. We ended up having a long talk. I thought he was cute.” She stopped.
“Take your time,” I said.
“A week later, the paper mentioned his name in reference to the murder investigation. I’d never told a lie in my life, but I picked up the phone and called the Sheriff’s Department and asked for him. Once he got on the line, I said the first thing that came to mind.”
“Your claim that you’d seen a girl whose description matched the victim’s was completely false,” I said, hoping I’d misunderstood.
“I just said that. A lot of people must have called in with information that didn’t pan out. All I wanted was a chance to talk to him again.”
I was silent for a moment, thinking, Shit, shit, shit. “Did it work?”
She shrugged. “I married him.”
“Well, that part’s good, at any rate.”
Her eyes strayed to the window. I saw a car pass along the driveway, cruising toward the rear. I looked back at her.
She lowered her voice. “Do me a favor.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t mention this to my husband. I never told him the truth.”
“He doesn’t know?”
She shook her head.
“Would it really matter to him after eighteen years?”
I heard the car door slam shut and her husband’s hard-soled shoes tap-tapping across the pavement between the garage and the back porch. There was a pause while he checked his pansies and petunias. In my opinion, they needed watering. He apparently agreed. I heard the shriek and squawk of the faucet handle when he turned off the water, moved the sprinkler, and turned the water on again. He continued toward the back door while she went on rapidly. “Every time someone asks how we met he tells them the story of how I took the time to call in the report. He admired I was such a conscientious citizen. Says it’s one of my best traits. He claims he fell in love with me on the phone. Then he said it seemed like fate since he’d seen me in person just the week before. He thinks I’m different. A cut above, he says.”
