by Janet Dawson
The second-floor hallway was a bustle of activity. To my right I saw a set of double doors with a light overhead. Must be the studio itself. To my left I saw a series of doors lining the corridor.
“I’m looking for Karen Willis,” I said to a man in blue jeans and a sweatshirt. He shrugged and kept walking. I worked my way down the corridor, asking my question until someone told me he’d seen Karen Willis in Wardrobe. Up on the third floor, he told me, second door on the left. I doubled back to the stairs.
In the third-floor hallway I stopped at the sight of a half-naked man examining his reflection in a full-length mirror. He was tall, about six-three, with a shaven head, a black handlebar mustache, and broad muscled shoulders. He wore baggy white trousers, riding low on his torso, and carried a black leather whip in his right hand. He preened for a moment, unaware of my presence as he tweaked the end of his mustache with the whip. Then he caught sight of me and grinned. He strolled past me to the stairs, his muscles rippling.
Second door on the left, I muttered. I walked toward it with the growing awareness that Karen Willis wasn’t making commercials, despite what she’d told her aunt. If Vee Burke wanted to see her niece work, she’d have to catch Karen’s act at the Pussycat Theater.
Two girls who looked about sixteen came out the door of Wardrobe, both brunettes in gauzy pink harem outfits that showed nipples and pubic hair. I let them pass and walked into the room, a small rectangle with costumes hanging from a bar along one wall and a cluttered counter on the opposite wall. I saw a dark-haired woman bent over a sewing machine at one end of the worktable in the middle of the room.
“Put that damn thing out,” she said in a harsh voice, looking up. She was Asian, in her thirties, her short black hair sculpted into New Wave art. She glared at the tall, long-legged blonde who’d just fired up a cigarette. The blonde, dressed in a short blue-and-white kimono and a pair of slippers, sat on the counter, a phone receiver in her hand.
“There’s a pay phone downstairs. Get off my line.”
“Jesus, Lila, you’re a bitch,” the blonde said, hanging up the phone. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you getting any? I’m sure any one of the guys would be happy to oblige.”
Lila nailed the blonde with a withering look. She finished whatever she was doing at the sewing machine and held up the costume, spangles on diaphanous muslin. Then she threw it at the blonde and glared at me.
“What do you want?”
“Karen Willis.”
“That’s her.” Lila jerked her chin in the direction of the blonde. “This isn’t a lounge. You want to talk, go someplace else.”
Puffing defiantly on her cigarette, Karen Willis jumped off the counter and strolled toward the doorway, her costume over one arm. I followed her. In the hallway we looked each other over. The kimono, barely concealing a spectacular figure, was loosely belted at the waist and stopped an inch or so below adequacy. Her long blond hair owed more to peroxide than to nature. A baby face and a pair of wide blue eyes made her appear younger than twenty-four. She didn’t look anything like her sister. Or her brother.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked.
“Jeri Howard. I’m a private investigator.”
“No shit? As in Sam Spade?”
“Something like that.”
“So what do you want?”
“I’m looking for your sister, Elizabeth. She’s missing.”
“Dizzy Lizzie? Well, well,” Karen Willis said, her full red lips curving into a smile. “That is indeed interesting.”
She led the way to a makeshift lounge, a small room with several worn sofas and a coffee urn on a table near the door. “Coffee?” she asked. I shook my head. She helped herself to a cup from the urn.
As she stirred cream into the coffee a man with dark, curly hair and a bushy mustache came through the doorway, his muscular frame clad in tight blue jeans and a knit shirt. He leaned over her shoulder and put his hand on her waist, whispering something in her ear. She shook her head and gestured toward me. His eyes met mine briefly, then darted away. He nodded quickly to Karen and disappeared into the hallway. Karen’s boyfriend, I guessed, the one who rode a motorcycle.
Karen strolled across the room to where I stood. “Have a seat.” She sprawled comfortably on an orange-flowered sofa, set her coffee mug on a box that served as an end table, and scratched one long bare leg with her red-tipped fingers. She positioned her cigarette on the side of an already full ashtray.
“How’d you find me?” she asked, picking up her coffee.
“Your aunt Vee. She said you made commercials at the Folsom Studio.”
“That’s just a little story I tell Vee. I think she knows. She just doesn’t want to admit it. So we pretend I’m respectable.”
“How long have you been in the business?”
“Five years. I make a lot of money. I suck a lot of cocks, get fucked in a variety of ways by a variety of people, and then I go home.” She stole a glance at me to see if I was shocked, decided I wasn’t, and blew smoke rings with her cigarette.
“Beats the hell out of selling lingerie at Macy’s, which is what I did when I dropped out of college. I may not be in the business much longer, though.”
“Why?”
“The flesh peddlers like young flesh, the younger the better. Fifteen-year-olds with firm boobs and tight asses.” She looked down at her breasts and legs. “I’m almost twenty-four.”
“What would you do instead?” I asked.
“I’m considering my options.” Her eyes narrowed and she didn’t elaborate about any of the options. “So what do you want, Jeri?”
“Information that might help me find your sister.”
“I haven’t seen Lizzie in years. Auntie Vee informs me she got married and produced a baby. What’d she do, walk out on the guy and leave him holding the kid?”
“Something like that. She went shopping last week and didn’t come home. Her husband hired me to look for her. I thought she might have gone to your grandfather’s funeral in Stockton, but Vee says she didn’t show.”
“Me neither. I was working.”
“You haven’t been home in a while, according to your neighbor.”
“Nosy bitch,” Karen said. “We’re at a hotel over on Ninth. We stay in town when we’re making a movie. Makes it easier to find the cast and crew at six A.M.”
“So you haven’t seen Elizabeth.”
“Lizzie wouldn’t come to see me,” Karen said, shaking her head. “We never had more than three words to say to one another.”
“She changed her name.”
“Yeah. Vee said something about that. What did she change it to, Mary Sunshine?” When I didn’t respond, Karen blinked her blue eyes and blew smoke rings.
“Bet she didn’t want her husband to know the sordid family history.” An inappropriate giggle bubbled from her, masking some other emotion. “I was only nine. From the way everyone acted, I thought the Navy had transferred my parents overseas. Can you believe it?” She shook her head and picked up her coffee mug, her long red fingernails clicking against the ceramic surface.
“It took me a couple of months to figure it out. Nobody explained it to me, that’s for damn sure. Nobody wanted to talk about it. I saw pictures of Mark in the newspapers and wondered why. Shit.” She ground out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, then fished in the pocket of her kimono, pulling out a pack of Marlboros and a butane lighter.
“When we went to school in Stockton that fall, Lizzie started acting weird. Vee and Alice hauled her to a shrink. I don’t think it did her much good. By that time some of my wonderful little classmates had informed me that my brother blew away Mom and Dad.” Karen grimaced, but she kept talking.
“Grandma Madison was crackers. She used to give a party on my mother’s birthday, even though the birthday girl was dead.” I wondered if Karen was exaggerating for my benefit. Behind the grimace I thought I saw another Karen, one who enjoyed telling this tale. She ran one hand throug
h her blond hair and leaned back against the sofa.
“Grandma was into religion. She told me God was punishing the whole family. For what, I was never sure. One week it was because Mom and Dad had to get married because Mark was on the way. The next week it was Dad’s fault for being in the Navy and moving us around so we never had a stable home. Reason of the week, you know what I mean? Grandma’s been going to some crackpot preacher for fifteen years, trying to figure it out.”
“Have you figured it out?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” she declared, her mouth turned down at the corners. “It just happened. He killed them. They’re dead, and nothing’s going to bring them back. Why should I spend the rest of my life speculating?”
“It affected your sister a great deal.”
“Oh, poor Lizzie.” Karen’s sarcasm stripped any sympathy from the words. “She was in the house when Ma and Pa got killed. So she spent the next five years having vapors and being fragile.”
“She got all the attention.”
“You bet,” Karen said with a tight smile. “And she loved it. She ate it up with a spoon.”
“Did you resent that?”
“Of course I did. Who wouldn’t?” She picked up her coffee and took a swallow. “But then I realized I could do anything I damn well pleased. They were all too busy worrying about Lizzie to notice me. She gave them a lot to worry about.”
“Such as?”
Karen considered me with a malicious glint in her blue eyes. “Lizzie had hysterics at the drop of a hat. She really honed it into an art. She fainted very stylishly, draped limbs and all. And she could produce these two perfect teardrops, one in each eye.” Karen put a finger under each of her eyes and made a face. “She accused people of talking about her behind her back. Of course they were talking about her. She was loony tunes.”
“So she used it to gain sympathy,” I said.
“Hell, yes. If Grandpa asked her why her grades were so lousy, Lizzie would put her hand on her forehead and her eyes would get teary.”
Karen’s right hand moved to her forehead, palm out, and she fluttered her long lashes in a parody of her sister’s actions. “Oh, Grandpa, I’ll do better next time. I promise. It’s just that I can’t concentrate.” Then she laughed, a raucous bawdy sound. “Shit. Worked every time. Probably still does. I’ll bet she uses it on her husband.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, fascinated by Karen’s own performance. “What about afterwards? Your aunt said something about a dance troupe.”
“If you could call it that,” Karen said, lighting another cigarette. “A bunch of leftover hippies from the Sixties. I saw them perform once. Black leotards, bare feet, and sitar music. She lived in the Haight with some guy who played the guitar. I think he was pretty heavy into drugs. He used to hit her.”
“How do you know?”
“She showed up at my high school graduation with some major-league bruises on her arm. Told everyone she’d fallen down the stairs at her apartment. Of course I didn’t buy that. Finally she told me they’d had an argument and he hit her. I said she ought to dump the creep, but she gave me this song-and-dance about how she loved him.”
“Know where I can find this guy? Or any of the other members of the dance troupe? What did they call themselves?”
“Lizzie’s old boyfriend is dead. Overdose. She took it hard, but I thought she was well rid of the creep. The troupe broke up about the same time. They called themselves Invitation or some such tiling. Anyway, that’s when Lizzie dumped the dance crapola and got into the nine-to-five routine. Nothing like a regular paycheck to make a convert. She went to Sunnyvale to work. Next thing I know Vee tells me Lizzie got married and she’s living somewhere down by San Jose. I don’t know when. I don’t keep track.”
“You haven’t seen her since?” I asked, watching her face.
“Hell, no,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “We’ve got nothing in common.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her. I switched subjects.
“What about Mark? Have you had any contact with him since he got out of prison?”
She shook her head. “Vee’s the only one of my relatives I can tolerate. And vice versa, I suppose. I don’t know where Mark is.”
“How do you feel about him?”
“My brother was nine years older than me,” she said slowly. “Sometimes he was nice, sometimes he teased me, sometimes he just ignored me. So did Lizzie. I used to feel like an only child. He and Lizzie were close, though.”
“Would she seek him out?”
Karen tilted her head to one side, running her hand through her hair. “I think so. Yes, I believe she would.”
A large, bulky man poked his head into the lounge and zeroed in on her. “Hey, Karen, we’re ready for you. Shake a leg.”
She stretched out one long leg and shook it. Then she put out her cigarette and stood up, the spangled costume over her arm.
“If she gets in touch with you, call me.” I gave her one of my cards. She barely glanced at it before tucking it into the pocket of her kimono.
“See you in the movies.” She tossed her mane of blond hair and strolled out of the lounge.
As I drove back to Oakland in the rain, I wondered about the difference between Vee’s fragile Beth, in need of nurturing care, and Karen’s Dizzy Lizzie, who manipulated the sympathy others felt for her. How did these versions of Elizabeth fit with Philip Foster’s wife, Renee? Was I looking at different pieces of the puzzle, or three different personalities superimposed on the same woman?
I thought about the Willis family and how things had turned out. One child a murderer, another a porno actress, and the third a possible child abuser.
Would things have been different if Mark Willis hadn’t shot his parents that night in Alameda? Maybe, maybe not. Something had to be terribly wrong in that family to make him pick up a gun. Random violence happens. But sometimes when you look at it long and hard, random violence isn’t so random after all.
Eleven
I WENT BACK TO MY OFFICE AND PUT OUT SOME feelers to a former theatrical colleague, asking if she’d ever heard of a dance troupe called Invitation. She hadn’t, but assured me she would ask around. That done, I picked up the phone and tried Mark Willis’s work number in Cibola. This time he answered.
“Mark Willis.” His voice was clipped, neutral.
“I’m trying to locate your sister Elizabeth.”
“My sister?” His voice turned wary as he realized this wasn’t a business call. Then the phone line crackled with tension. “Who is this? What the hell do you want?”
“Elizabeth is...” The receiver slammed down in my ear before I could get out the word “missing.” I broke the connection and dialed again. This time the line buzzed with a busy signal. I suspected Mark Willis had taken the phone off the hook.
I tried to match the harsh voice with the pleasant, self-effacing boy I remembered from high school. That’s what time and a prison sentence will do. But I wasn’t the same teenager either. Mark Willis was touchy about his past. That meant I’d have to approach him indirectly, instead of coming right out with the reason for my visit to Cibola. I planned to drive up there tomorrow. It was too late in the day now. Besides, I was feeling guilty because I hadn’t finished the work Cassie had requested. I spent the rest of the afternoon working on the background check. When I gave it to her I let her know I’d be out of town, so she could check on Abigail.
Saturday morning bits of blue sky peeked through clouds as I ate breakfast and read the newspaper. I left plenty of dry food and water for the cat, who looked huffy at the sight of my overnight bag. After filling my Toyota with gas I got on the freeway and headed east across the flat cropland of the broad San Joaquin Valley, toward the Sierra Nevada. The Bay Area and the valley were poised on the edge of spring, but as I climbed into the foothills it was the tail end of winter. I could see snow on the peaks to the east. The black oaks along the highway stretched bare branche
s toward a sky that became overcast, pale gray darkening to the east.
I stopped in Jackson for lunch, feeling a chill breeze blow through me twisting downtown streets. Over corn bread and lentil soup in a hole-in-the-wall café, I heard the waitress and a customer speculate on the possibility of snow. I sipped my coffee and watched Saturday shoppers scurrying along the sidewalk.
We used to visit Jackson when I was a kid. My Grandma Jerusha had a brother named Woodrow, an engineer at the Kennedy Mine. He lived in a log house on a back road north of town, as full of old mining equipment as his head was full of Gold Rush lore. Once he outfitted Brian and me in coveralls and miners’ hats and took us down the shaft into that dark world where men dug for gold.
I finished my lunch and paid my tab. At a nearby bookstore I checked a book on California inns to see if there was a hotel in Cibola. It listed a bed-and-breakfast place called the Murdock House, its address simply Main Street.
I headed south on Highway 49, across the Mokelumne River and into Calaveras County. The two-lane ribbon of asphalt stretches north and south along the Mother Lode. Each town along its length is really two towns, superimposed on one another, one for the locals, who need groceries and hardware, and one for the tourists, who come on the weekends and in the summer seeking contact with California’s rowdy Gold Rush past. The towns are a jumble of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Old hotels like the National in Jackson, the Leger in Mokelumne Hill and the City in Columbia coexist with art galleries and restaurants. County historical museums full of Victoriana and mining equipment sit next to gift shops that sell T-shirts and ceramic doodads and dispense ice cream and soft drinks.
Cibola was like that, set in a picturesque little valley between Mokelumne Hill and San Andreas. The twentieth century was evident in the gas station and the supermarket on the highway, but when I turned off the highway I felt the presence of the past.
