Chasing Darkness

by Robert Crais

  “I wish you could talk.”

  I went behind my desk to right my chair, but the chair was wet and smelled of urine. I left it in place. The file I had on Lionel Byrd was scattered on the floor with everything else. I gathered it together, then went down to the car for my camera and took pictures for the insurance. After the pictures, I called Lou Poitras, who told me he would send a radio car. I had to use my cell, what with Mickey being broken.

  While I waited for the police, I called Joe Pike.

  He said, “You think it ties in with the calls you were getting yesterday?”

  “The timing’s too perfect for anything else.”

  “Something with Byrd?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not sure that was the point. The file is still here, and the way it was dumped with everything else it’s likely they didn’t read it. They slashed the couch and kicked out the glass in the French doors. It looks more like vandalism. Somebody pissed on my chair.”

  “Maybe they want the vandalism to cover the search.”

  “Maybe. I’ll go through everything, see if anything’s missing.”

  “You want me to come over?”

  “There’s nothing to do. The police are on the way.”

  “Maybe I should sit on your house. Make sure nobody pisses on your couch.”

  “That might be a good idea.”

  I called my insurance agent, then the building manager to let him know about the break-in and arrange for the doors to be fixed. We ended up shouting at each other. After the shouting, I went across the hall to ask my neighbors if they had seen or heard anything. None of them had, but everyone wanted to see the damage, so I let them. Two patrol officers arrived while they were looking, questioned me, then set about writing up the complaint. While the officers surveyed the damage, one of the women from the insurance office told us she had worked until almost eight-thirty the night before, so whoever did this had come after she had gone.

  The senior officer, a sergeant-supervisor named Bristo, said, “You work late like that, ma’am, make sure you lock your door.”

  She patted a little handbag.

  “Don’t think I sit up here alone.”

  Bristo said nothing. Everyone packs.

  When the police and the women from across the hall were gone, I took a soap dispenser and paper towels from the bathroom at the end of the hall. I cleaned the urine off my chair, piled the debris on the couch so I could move without stepping on things, then went back to work. You let something like a vandalized office screw your day, pretty soon you’re calling in sick for a pimple.

  Three minutes later I was speaking with Angel Tomaso’s aunt, Mrs. Candy Lopez. I explained my relationship with her nephew, and told her it was urgent I speak with him.

  She said, “Give me your name and number. I will tell him you called.”

  “It would be faster if I call him directly.”

  “It might be faster, but I’m not going to give you his number. I don’t know you. For all I know you’re a nut.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  She said, “And please note the idiot who called last night has given my number to you without my permission, and here you are—a person completely unknown to me—invading my privacy. He gives my number to strangers, he might as well write it on a bathroom wall.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lopez. I wouldn’t interrupt your day if it wasn’t important. Angel was a witness in a criminal investigation three years ago, and now some conflicting evidence has surfaced.”

  “I understand. I will tell him all this when we speak.”

  “Did you tell him that Jack Eisley called?”

  “I left a message on his machine. You call him, that machine is all you get. I am sure he is busy rehearsing.”

  She pronounced “rehearsing” with a snooty theatrical accent.

  “So Angel is back here in Los Angeles?”

  “He is. And, by the way, Angel is no longer Angel. He is now Andy.”

  She pronounced Andy without a trace of her Spanish accent, as if it were the most boring name in the world.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Angel Tomaso was too ethnic, he says. He is now Andy Thom. As if Hollywood has been waiting for the one and only Andy Thom!”

  Angel probably hadn’t gotten much artistic support back home.

  I said, “Please call him right away. He’ll remember my name. Tell him I need to speak with him as soon as possible.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re Steven Spielberg. You’ll hear from him more quickly that way.”

  I put down the phone, thinking about Angel’s new name and the likelihood of hearing back from him in the foreseeable future. I decided it wasn’t likely.

  I checked the L.A. area codes for an Andy Thom, found nothing, then called a casting agent I knew named Patricia Kyle. Pat Kyle had worked for every major studio and network in town, along with most of the commercial and video producers. She was currently successful, prosperous, and happy, which was much different from the day she hired me to help with an abusive ex-husband who thought it within his rights to shatter her windshield and terrorize her at work. I convinced him otherwise, and Pat Kyle has thought well of me ever since. If Angel Tomaso aka Andy Thom was serious about being an actor, three months was plenty of time to enroll in acting classes, pound the pavement for auditions, and send headshots to casting agents.

  Pat Kyle said, “Never heard of him.”

  “His real name is Angel Tomaso. Out of Austin.”

  “Latin?”

  “Yeah. Does it matter?”

  “Only in how you search. Actors are faces and a face is what you look like. Some of the smaller agencies specialize in ethnic actors. Do you know if he’s SAG or AFTRA?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Ever had a paid acting job?”

  “The way his aunt was talking, I doubt it. First time he was out here didn’t work out. That’s why he went back to Austin. He’s only been back for three months.”

  Pat told me she would ask around, then we hung up and I settled back in my broken office to read over Chen’s reports. I thought about the Mexican oxycodones. If Byrd was in so much pain he couldn’t walk or drive, he probably needed a steady supply. If he couldn’t walk or drive, someone might have delivered, and maybe that same someone might know how he came by the pictures. I decided to ask his neighbors.

  At one-fourteen that afternoon I packed up the file on Byrd, locked the office as best I could, and went down to my car. When I pulled out of my building, a black Toyota truck with tinted glass fell in behind and followed me.

  12

  THE BLACK Toyota turned toward Laurel Canyon with me, but so did half a dozen other cars. No one shot at me or behaved in an overly aggressive manner, so I told myself I was being paranoid. Your office gets trashed, it’s easy to imagine you’re being followed.

  But two blocks later I slid through a yellow. The driver of the Toyota busted the red to keep up, then jammed on his brakes as soon as he was clear of the light. So much for my imagination. Two men appeared to be in the cab, but I couldn’t be sure with the heavily tinted glass.

  I took an abrupt right turn without using my blinker, and the Toyota turned with me. When he came around the corner, I saw a sticker on his front bumper. It was a promotional sticker for a chick band called Tattooed Beach Sluts.

  I turned again and pulled to the curb, but the Toyota didn’t follow. When it still hadn’t appeared five minutes later, I continued on into Laurel Canyon. If I didn’t watch myself, I would become the new Chen.

  Broken branches and leaves littered the streets in the canyon and were piled against parked cars and curbs like drifting snow. The big cedars and eucalyptuses hung motionless for the first time in days, drooping now as if resting from their fight with the wind. The smell of their sap was strong.

  When I reached Byrd’s house, the police and the crime scene tape were gone, but a news crew and a short-bed moving van were at the bottom of
the steps. The news crew was up on the porch, interviewing an older man with dyed-black hair and liverish skin. A white Eldorado was parked behind the van. The Eldo probably belonged to the interviewee, who likely owned the house and had been Byrd’s landlord. While they talked, two Latin guys lugged pieces of furniture down to the truck.

  I was waiting for the reporter to finish when I saw the woman in the vine-covered house across the street. She was back at her window, watching the interview, so I decided to start with her.

  I climbed her steps, but before I reached the top, she opened the window.

  “Go away. I’ve had enough of this.”

  “I’m with Easter Seals. Don’t you want to help dying children?”

  She slammed the window.

  I continued to her door, then leaned on the bell until she answered. She had seemed older from across the street, with her grey hair up and frizzy.

  “I’m not really from Easter Seals. I just said that.”

  “I know you’re not, and I know you know I know. You’re with the police. I saw you here yesterday, and you saw me.”

  Her name was Tina Isbecki. I introduced myself, letting her think what she thought. Operators like me are trained to go with the flow. This is called “lying.”

  I glanced across at the interview.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Sharla Lee. She’s on the news.”

  “Not the reporter. The man she’s interviewing.”

  “That’s Mr. Gladstone. He owns the house.”

  The police had released the house, and now Mr. Gladstone was dumping the furniture. He would have to clean the house, paint it, and hope he could find a tenant who wouldn’t mind living where a multiple-murderer blew out his own brains.

  I turned back to Tina Isbecki.

  “Saw you on TV last night, saying now you could sleep easy. You looked very natural.”

  The Detective, buttering up the hostile subject.

  She scowled.

  “That isn’t at all what I said. I told’m now I could sleep because all the goddamned cops were out of the neighborhood. They made it look like I meant Mr. Byrd.”

  “Did you know him very well?”

  “I tried to avoid him. He was crude and offensive. The first time we met, he asked if I enjoyed anal sex. Just like that. Who would say something like that?”

  Welcome to Lionel Byrd.

  “Was he close to anyone here in the neighborhood?”

  “I doubt it. A lot of these people are renters and boarders, and most are just kids. They come and they go.”

  Which was pretty much what Starkey had told me.

  “You must have been asked these things a hundred times.”

  “A thousand. Let me answer your other questions to save us both time—”

  She ticked off her answers, bending each finger back so far I thought it might snap.

  “No, I never saw anything suspicious. No, he never threatened me. No, I did not know he had been arrested, and I did not hear the gunshot. And yes, I am surprised he killed all those women, but this is Laurel Canyon.”

  She crossed her arms with a smugness indicating she had answered every question I could possibly ask.

  I said, “Did he have many visitors?”

  “I never saw anyone.”

  “Do you know how he got his drugs?”

  The smugness vanished.

  “A quantity of nonprescribed oxycodone was found in his home. Do you know what that is?”

  “Well, of course I know, but I barely knew the man. There’s no reason I would know he was a drug addict.”

  “I understand. But we’re wondering where he got the pills.”

  “He didn’t get them from me.”

  Defensive.

  “On the day of the evacuation, it was you who told the officers he was housebound?”

  “That’s right. I was concerned. He hadn’t been driving, what with his foot. He couldn’t press the brake.”

  “When was the last time you saw him driving?”

  “Believe it or not, I have more to do than watch my neighbors.”

  “This isn’t a test. I’m trying to get an idea how difficult it was for him to get around.”

  “Well, I don’t know. A few weeks, I guess. I know his foot had been getting worse. Some days he couldn’t even come for the mail, and it would pile up.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so I thanked her and went down to the street. Gladstone was still being interviewed, so I knocked on the neighboring doors. No one was home at most of the houses, and the few people who were either had never met Byrd or had seen him only in passing. Only one person I interviewed had exchanged words with him, and she described him as crude, vulgar, and offensive, just like Tina Isbecki. Nobody had witnessed anyone visiting his house.

  By the time I finished knocking on doors, the news crew was leaving. I squeezed around the movers’ truck and climbed the steps just as Gladstone emerged from the house.

  Gladstone was locking the front door, and scowled when he saw me approaching.

  “Cut me some slack, all right? I didn’t know the sonofabitch was a maniac.”

  “I’m not a reporter. I’m investigating the case.”

  I showed him the ID, but he had been looking at IDs all week. He waved me off.

  “I got nothing to say. The man paid his rent and never made trouble. Now I got a house with brains on the ceiling and people like you wasting my time. I gotta get this place cleaned out by the end of the day.”

  He ducked past me and hurried after his movers.

  I returned to my car, but didn’t leave. The moving crew locked their truck, then rumbled away with Gladstone behind them. When they were gone, I got out of my car and pushed past low-hanging cedar boughs onto the walkway alongside the garage. A black plastic garbage can blocked the walk, but a flight of stairs led up to a door.

  The can was filled with towels, bedding, old clothes, and plastic grocery bags bulging with discarded food and kitchen supplies. Gladstone had tossed things that would spoil—apples and oranges, a cantaloupe, hamburger patties and chicken, and all the usual things that accumulate in a refrigerator. I was probably the fifth or sixth person to go through these things, so I didn’t expect to find anything useful.

  I squeezed past the garbage can, climbed to the door, let myself in, and walked through the house. Not much was left.

  A few small pieces of furniture remained in the living room, but the couch, the television, and the suicide chair were missing. The bathroom was even worse. Nothing remained on or around the vanity, in the medicine cabinet, on in the cabinet under the sink. So much for checking prescriptions. The bedroom and bedroom closet had been emptied. The bed, Byrd’s clothes, and everything else was gone. All that remained was a single cardboard box filled with shoes, belts, and personal possessions like old cigarette lighters, pens, and a broken watch. I went through it, but found nothing. A note would have been nice: For free home delivery, call Friendly Neighborhood Dope Dealer.

  I walked through the house again, searching for a telephone. I found three phone jacks, but the phones were gone. The police would have taken them to check their memory chips.

  I ended up back in the kitchen, finding a jack above the counter beside a small corkboard. Business cards and take-out menus were pinned to the board. Alan Levy’s card was pinned at the top for easy reference. It looked greasy and dark, as if it had been there a while. The rest of the board was cluttered with discount coupons and flyers.

  Even with everything Gladstone had discarded, the kitchen counters were crowded with cartons and cans and other food waiting to be tossed. It was a lot of food for someone who hadn’t been able to leave his house, and much of it looked pretty fresh.

  I went back downstairs to the garbage, and dumped the fruit and other things out of the grocery bags. They were the thin plastic bags that people keep to line their wastebaskets. Most people get home from the market, they take out their groceries but lea
ve the receipt in the bag.

  Byrd had kept plenty of the bags, and Gladstone had used them when he cleaned out the house. I dumped fourteen bags and found five receipts. The receipts were all from the Laurel Market at the bottom of the canyon, and all showed the date of purchase. Lionel Byrd’s body was discovered eight days ago, and the M.E. determined his death had occurred five days earlier. I did the math. The date of the most recent receipt was two days before Lionel Byrd died. If he was in too much pain to drive, I wondered how he had gone shopping.

  I put the bags and the trash back into the can, then headed down to find out. Tina Isbecki watched me go. I waved. She waved back. We were getting to be friends.

  13

  THE RURAL vibe of Laurel Canyon set the sixties stage for crossover folk-rockers like David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Joni Mitchell to write about peaceful easy feelings, cocaine cowboys, and very nice houses with two cats in the yard. The high, tight trails wrapped through the ridges were only a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard, but, separated from the city by steep canyon walls, felt as if they were miles in the country. That rural sensibility was preserved and sustained by a small encampment of shops, markets, and restaurants at the base of the canyon.

  I pulled into the tiny parking lot, then ambled into the market. You get a peaceful easy feeling, amblin’ is how you walk.

  The market was larger than it looked from the outside, with a high ceiling and narrow aisles jammed with goods, supplies, and candy. A pretty young woman was seated behind the register. An older man wearing a Lakers cap was behind a nearby deli counter, mixing a large bowl of tuna salad.

  I took out a picture of Lionel Byrd I had clipped from the paper and showed it to the woman.

  “Could you tell me if you recognize this man? His name was Lionel Byrd. He was a regular customer here.”

  She blinked at the picture with wide, curious eyes.

  “Are you a policeman?”

  “Nope. Elvis Cole. I’m a private investigator.”

  She smiled, the smile making her even prettier.

  “Is that really your name?”