City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  “The thing about you is, you don’t look sleazy,” Todd, who is blond and oversize and freckled and goofy-looking, says.

  “Tact, Todd, nice,” Ben, who is very dark and slight of build and short, maybe five four, says. “What Todd means is—”

  “I thought we had a guillotine on the expression ‘What Todd Means,’ like I’m some moron in need of an interpreter—”

  “We had a moratorium on that expression. But that was in Ireland. And we’re no longer in Ireland.”

  “We’re in Irish airspace.”

  “Whatever. What Todd Means is, Hollywood PIs tend toward the slick and the sleazy—”

  “I wasn’t a Hollywood PI. I just did some work for Jack.”

  “Back in the day,” Todd says excitedly. “My dad—”

  “We were trying to keep that expression to a minimum also,” Ben says drily. “‘My dad.’ On account of its somewhat less than cool flavor. My dad is picking us up from swimming. My dad owns a beach house.”

  Todd shrugs.

  “So I’m not cool. So I got this job because of my dad. You did, too.”

  “Did not.”

  “Forgive me, your mom.”

  “Boys,” I say.

  “Back in the day, my dad told some great stories about Jack and his crew,” Todd says. “The Irish guys, the famous Gang of Four. So many stories. So it was just unbelievable to meet them all tonight.”

  “Hard to get to know Mark and Conor,” Ben says.

  “Mark’s all right. You can talk to Mark. Impossible to get to know Conor,” Todd says.

  “I never managed it.”

  “It’s weird, though,” Ben said. “I mean, a good first—and Conor is, right, he works with other people, too, he’s in demand—at some stage, they tend to move up, they want to direct. And from what we’ve been told, he never has.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid his natural charm will get in his way,” Todd says, and laughs at his own joke.

  “Maybe it’s just a lack of ambition,” Ben says. “And all that boozing can’t exactly help.”

  “I think there’s also the Jack factor,” I say. “I mean, he is unusually charismatic, he’s a phenomenon, a force of nature. It must be hard to feel you can measure up to that. And maybe there’s a magnetism about it, that you would never want to pass up a chance to be in his presence. Maybe Conor is happy to be where he is. It doesn’t have to be a lack of ambition. It’s just, he has his place on the team and he’s content. And he is, I find him a surly cuss and no mistake, but if Jack says jump, Conor is still, how high?”

  “Of course, Mark is a totally other kettle of fish,” Todd says. “My dad—forgive me, O Gods of Cool—my dad was at the studio for A Terrible Beauty and Ocean Falls, and he said Mark was really champing at the bit, trying to set up shots and even talk to actors. And I mean, some DPs do set up the shot. But Jack just wouldn’t have it.”

  “There was also a thing where Mark was writing his own scripts, and suggesting to Maurice that the next project they do should be one of his.”

  “Like a drummer joke: hey guys, why don’t we do one of my songs?”

  “It’s the Jack Donovan show, dummy.”

  “All that.”

  “I never knew that,” I say.

  “Oh yeah,” Todd says. “Because then Mark went off in a huff around the time of Armageddon Factor. And Jack shot that with someone else.”

  “Jack shot it with two people, he got these Brits in, and they have a different system, where the DP is like a lighting director, and then the camera operator handles the framing. And each was competing with the other, and Jack had real trouble getting his way,” Ben says.

  “The Armageddon Factor is not A Jack Donovan picture, it’s a…hate to say this, but it’s a studio picture, it’s product. Efficient product—”

  “Very profitable product—”

  “No denying. But it’s not a hundred percent Jack proof, even if he gets his little incest thing and his older-younger woman thing in, but they’re like, so oblique, like, did that just happen?”

  “So Jack was more than happy for Mark to come back on Dain Curse. And they’ve worked together ever since.”

  “No one knows what Mark did during the time; for a while he seemed to just slip off the radar. There were rumors he did some porno in the valley. And of course, the fact that Armageddon was so different, that opened a whole kettle of worms.”

  “Fish.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Kettle of fish. Barrel of worms.”

  “Keeper of the clichés. Whatever. To the effect that because Mark worked on all the true Jack Donovan pictures, he’s like the power behind the throne.”

  “That used to be just industry gossip, but like every other piece of insider knowledge, it’s now the talk of the backblogs.”

  “It’s funny,” I say. “I was around during that whole time. I was in The Dain Curse.”

  “We know!” Todd and Ben carol in unison. “Irish Man in Bar.”

  “But I never picked up on any of that. I guess it’s not surprising, though. I mean, Jack just…has no time for any point of view other than his own—”

  “You say it as if it’s a bad thing!” Ben says.

  “So he either wouldn’t have noticed or wouldn’t have cared. Being Jack Donovan is a thousand-yard stare of a job, and it doesn’t require a great deal of peripheral vision. And I wasn’t really interested in anyone else but Jack at that stage.”

  “Well, the story is, Mark’s done what he had to do for Jack, but the resentment hasn’t diminished. And he’s tried to get scripts going himself, but nothing’s ever happened,” Todd says.

  “It’s weird,” Ben says. “It’s like, he’s not content to be a DP anymore. Never works with anyone else now. But he can’t take the step up as a director. He’s in this…career limbo.”

  “The Curse of Jack Donovan!” Todd says.

  “Can he afford not to work?” I ask.

  “The Gang of Four were all on gross points from early on,” Ben says. “I mean, Jack and Maurice got more, but Conor and Mark made a truckload of bread for themselves. So unless they developed big gambling or coke habits, they can afford to do as they please.”

  “It’s just unusual for a DP not to work,” Todd says. “Those guys are so driven, they’re obsessed with what they do. Mark could work year-round. That he chooses not to…is strange.”

  We talk a little longer, but start to double back on what we’ve already said, and I can tell they’re working up to asking me about the case, and I don’t want to talk about that yet. I plead tiredness; each of them as if by reflex produces a satchel of bound scripts and begins to work their way through them, and I sit back and think about what they’d just said, and about what had happened in the restaurant that night, and what it all might mean.

  It isn’t difficult to follow Todd and Ben’s car, and to insinuate himself into Loy’s backyard. It’s one of the things he knows about: light, and the absence of light. You could say he’s dedicated his life to it. He watches Loy talk to Tommy, Tommy Owens. He feels sure Tommy is the key to finding Jenny Noble. And in the absence of Madeline, he insists on making Jenny his last, his best of three. He realizes, too, he can’t lie to himself, he can’t break a pattern in the middle, he simply cannot be inconsistent in that way. It would undermine everything he has ever tried to do, set it at naught.

  Loy leaves, and Tommy returns to his place in the shadows. Tommy will be armed, but there is no need for confrontation: shadows will see to that. And only the minimum violence required. That, he believes increasingly, in terms of moral force, stands to him—that he has never succumbed to brutality or sadism, never felt the slightest desire to see blood, or inflict excessive suffering—which is as much to say, he isn’t some kind of freak or psycho, he has relatively normal wiring, there is no sense in congratulating himself for simply being the way he is.

  Mind you, he does have his eccentricities.

  Mustn’t laugh.
<
br />   Time to make a move.

  He lobs the small weight through the window of the car nearest Tommy Owens and then feints to the blind side by the Nissan truck, and as the alarm squeals and Owens runs in the direction from which the weight came, he crosses the patch of yard illuminated by the building’s stairwell light, where it’s not too difficult to catch him firmly on the back of the head with a Maglite. He hopes he has got the force of the blow right; he has no wish to kill. Apart from anything else, he would be at a loss to know how to balance a dead man in his forties; who else would he have to murder to round that out? He goes through his pockets and takes his phone. The blow and the fall have knocked a handgun onto the ground. He doesn’t like guns, and has no idea what type this is, but in light of the new phase he is about to enter, with the need to control and discipline three in one at the same time (even if two out of three are children), he feels it might be prudent to take it with him. He is in the car before the residents of the apartment block are out of their beds.

  He checks his phone.

  He sent a text immediately before he stepped into the yard, informing Jenny that Jack has rescheduled for an emergency night shoot, that Nora and Kate are on their way, that a car had been sent but she was not at her address, signing the text Geoff Keegan. He also sent backup texts from Nora and Kate’s phones.

  He knew Jenny would check her moves with Tommy Owens first.

  On Tommy’s phone, there is one missed call from Jenny, and a voice message.

  Hi, Mr. Owens, I’m just checking, they’ve rescheduled on the move for a night shoot, and they want to send a car to pick me up, so I just really, is it cool to tell them where I am, let me know soon, thanks. This is Jenny, Naomi’s friend, by the way.

  He texts her back on Owens’s phone:

  Can’t talk am at work that’s fine if film crew are in touch go for it Tommy

  Jenny Noble texts him immediately with an address in Enniskerry. He can’t use a Nighttown car, for obvious reasons, so he arranges for a cab to pick Jenny up and bring her to his house, using Geoff Keegan’s name. Jenny Noble evidently has the jitters, however; minutes later, she calls him.

  “Hi, Geoff? This is Jenny Noble?”

  He is no mimic, but he has a similar vocal timbre and accent to Geoff Keegan.

  “Hi, Jenny. Glad we found you. I’ve just arranged a car.”

  “That’s great. Only I was kind of wondering, isn’t it all a bit last minute?”

  “Well, it’s all pretty spur-of-the-moment, hands-on stuff tonight, we’re working with an absolute skeleton crew, no assistants or ADs, just HODs all mucking in, doing each other’s jobs. It’s like the old days, just the Gang of Four and a camera or two in the great outdoors. Guerrilla style!”

  “Oh, right. Sounds exciting! Just, also, I tried to get in touch with Madeline King, too, but she’s not answering her phone.”

  “Sure Madeline barely has time to turn around. You have to hand it to Jack—when he gets an idea, he really runs with it. Wrote a new sequence set in a garden at night. Madeline’s had her hands full copying it and marking it out for the various departments. She’ll be there, you’ll see her soon enough.”

  “And Nora and Kate—”

  “And Nora and Kate. It’ll be one big reunion. So anyway, thing is, when you get here, the cab won’t be taking you to the set, it’ll drop you at a house in Milltown, old house with a long driveway, we’re using it as a location. A bit spooky, but don’t be frightened—there’s nothing scary about the person who lives there.”

  “Why, who lives there?”

  “I do.”

  CHAPTER 23

  My plan is to settle back and review the case, but since I don’t have enough in the way of concrete new evidence, or even substantial conjecture, to add, sleep overtakes me. I awake to find the plane on the ground, and mistakenly think we’ve arrived, but we’ve only stopped in Teterboro, New Jersey, to refuel. Ben and Todd find this hilarious, and kick into a movie trailer routine:

  “After The Exorcist came The Omen. After The Omen came…New Jersey!”

  “He thought there could be worse fates than waking up in Jersey…He was wrong.”

  I fall asleep again, waking slowly as we make our descent into Burbank. Gathering my thoughts, I find an extra item of information in the shape of a phone message I didn’t pick up in Dublin. Inspector Dave Donnelly of the Serious Crime Review Team ran the Gang of Four through Garda criminal record files, and, apart from two not very surprising drunk-and-disorderlys and a dangerous driving-while-under-the-influence on Jack’s part, the only other item of note is that Conor Rowan has twice had charges of violent behavior and assault laid against him by two separate females, one of whom subsequently sought and received a barring order forbidding Rowan to come within two hundred meters of her home. So Conor Rowan has been violent toward women; he has a famously bad temper, and overreacted to my questioning him tonight: he could be a killer. Although, would the killer be so uncool and draw so much attention to himself simply because he was asked a second time if he remembered anything about the Point Dume girls?

  Jack has been violent toward women as well, or at least, a woman, and he has a complicated relationship with them at the best of times, which may have its roots in an abusive relationship with his sister. And he has a temper, and he’s volatile and unpredictable.

  Mark Cassidy said he didn’t remember the girls, but then changed his story to say he does remember one of them, Janice Holloway. Would the killer have corrected himself? Why would he draw attention to a minor conversation like that, unless it was simply the truth? The fact that Mark has apparently become disenchanted with his career is interesting, as is the contradiction between his alleged resentment of Jack and his refusal to work with anyone else.

  Maurice Faye is a hail-fellow-well-met family guy, hard to rouse to anger. On the other hand, he got very worked up over Derek Doyle’s column in the Irish Times, and he has unusually large hands for a man of his slight build—the kind of hands that could fit easily around a woman’s neck.

  It all adds up to nothing. Not even a hunch. I guess if I had to plump for one likely killer above the other three, based on what I know of their backgrounds, I’d choose Jack. But I can’t believe Jack did it either. From what I know now, he did not go easy on himself after he was violent toward Amanda Cole—indeed, he claims the fear he might strike a woman again has kept him from his children and their mother. The idea that he might kidnap and murder young women is grotesque.

  Perhaps it is so for them all. You can’t extrapolate from someone’s childhood and background that he would step over the edge and act in this particular way. That’s what I find so problematic about criminal profiling: it’s magical thinking, when you boil it down, a kind of elaborate system of guesswork and hunch-playing. Nothing wrong with that, I operate pretty much the same way. Every detective does. Reading the runes and going with your gut are part of the job, along with gathering evidence. We just don’t dress it up the way the criminal profile boys do, calling it behavioral science and making claims for its near infallibility. If an abusive father or a sadistic mother or an inappropriately young exposure to pornography contribute to the formation of a serial killer, how come so many kids survive these experiences and live harmless, peaceful adult lives?

  Reading the runes and going with your gut and gathering evidence, and the greatest of these is evidence. Evidence is what I just don’t have. Evidence is what I need.

  It’s been a while since I was in Burbank Airport—Bob Hope Airport, to give it its other name—the last time was with Jack Donovan—but its thirties country-club dimensions feel as instantly familiar as the stands of palm and yucca spread about like Californian landing beacons, part of a Los Angeles that dug deep into my bones and has never left me. Even at dawn, the heat of the Valley is intense; I feel a Santa Ana wind on my brow and on the back of my neck, serving notice that the normal rules have ceased to apply.

  Ben and Todd grab copies of th
e Los Angeles Times, where the case is the main story; they look at me expectantly and I reassure them that I’ll holler well in advance if things are looking bad for any of their employees, past or present. There’s a Town Car waiting to take them to their homes; they offer it to me for the rest of the day, courtesy of the studio. It’s tempting, but I reckon, for however long I’m going to be back, I had better drive myself; in any case, I don’t like the idea that my movements can be monitored. I thank them, and take their cards, and wish them well. Maurice Faye is paying for car hire, so I rent a black Chevy Camaro. Before I pick it up, I call Don Coover’s cell and leave a message; then I buy an L.A. Times myself and get a cup of coffee and sit and read my way into the latest developments in the Three-in-One Killer case.

  The headline reads:

  MASS MURDER IN LOS ANGELES

  THREE-IN-ONE TIMES SIX

  Beneath that, there’s a map with the six burial sites marked on it. As well as Point Dume in Malibu, the sites are in the Sierra Mountains on the Californian banks of Lake Tahoe; in the garden of a house in Venice by the canals; in the garden of a house on Mulholland Drive by Laurel Canyon; in waste ground by the Los Angeles River where Ventura Boulevard meets the Hollywood Freeway; and beneath the floor of a house near Coldwater Canyon. On the second page there’s a montage of photographs of every secured location with LAPD technical and forensic teams examining the scenes, each with an accompanying photograph of Detective Donald Coover. It’s starting to look like I might have a better chance of meeting Harrison Ford for a beer than getting an audience with Don Coover. I call again, and leave a message that I hope might be a little more persuasive. He calls me back within five minutes.