“West L.A.”
“I’m in Studio City, but I don’t mind coming over the hill on the weekend.”
“I can come out to the valley.”
“No, actually, I like to come out when it’s not for work. Never get a chance to enjoy the city. Whereabouts in West L.A.?”
“Near Beverly Hills.”
“Okay … how about Amanda’s, it’s a little place on Beverly Drive.”
“What time?”
“Say one p.m.?”
“One it is.”
Nervous laughter. “I know this must seem strange coming out of the blue, but maybe … oh, let’s just talk about it tomorrow.”
I gave the dog a few bites of steak, wrapped the rest in plastic, and pocketed it. Then we drove to the pet store, where I let him sniff around the food bags. He lingered at some stuff that claimed to be scientifically formulated. Organic ingredients. Twice the cost of any of the others.
“You earned it,” I said, and I purchased ten pounds along with several packets of assorted canine snacks.
Going home, he munched happily on a bacon-flavored pretzel.
“Bon appetit, Spike,” I said. “Your real name’s probably something like Pierre de Cordon Bleu.”
Back at the house on Benedict Canyon, I found Robin reading in the living room. I told her what had happened with Hurley Keffler and she listened, quiet and resigned, as if I were a delinquent child with no hope of rehabilitation.
“What a good friend you turned out to be,” she said to the dog. He jumped up on the couch and put his head in her lap.
“So what are they going to do with him—this Keffler?”
“He’ll be in jail for a while.”
“How long’s a while?”
“Probably not long. His gang’s likely to make his bail.”
“And then?”
“And then he’ll be out, but he won’t know this address.”
“Okay.”
“Want to take a drive up to Ojai and Santa Barbara, next couple of days?”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Both.” I told her about Lerner and Harrison, my wanting to speak to the Corrective School’s neighbors.
“Love to, but I really shouldn’t, Alex. Too much work down here.”
“Sure?”
“I am, hon. Sorry.” She touched my face. “There’s so much piled up, and even though I’ve got all my gear set up, it feels different here—I’m working slower, need to get back on the track.”
“I’m really putting you through it, aren’t I?”
“No,” she said, smiling and mussing my hair. “You’re the one being put through.”
The smile lingered and grew into a soft laugh.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“The way men think. As if our going through some stress together would be putting me through it. I’m worried about you, but I’m glad to be here with you—to be part of it. Putting me through it means something totally different.”
“Such as?”
“Constantly diminishing me—condescending to me, dismissing my opinions. Anything that would make me question my worth. Do those kinds of things to a woman and she may stay with you, but she’ll never think the same of you.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” she said, laughing and hugging me. “Pretty profound, huh? Are you mad at me for not wanting to go to Ojai?”
“No, just disappointed.”
“You go anyway. Promise to be careful?”
“I promise.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s important.”
CHAPTER
18
We had dinner at an Indian place near Beverly Hills’ eastern border with L.A., washing the meal down with clove tea and driving home feeling good. Robin went to run a bath and I phoned Milo at home and told him about Jean’s call.
“She has something to tell me but wouldn’t elaborate over the phone—sounded nervous. My guess is she found something about Hewitt that scares her. I’m meeting her at one, and I’ll ask her about Gritz. When were you planning to see Ralph Paprock?”
“Right around then.”
“Care to make it earlier?”
“Dealership won’t be open. I suppose we could catch him just as he comes in.”
“I’ll pick you up.”
Sunday morning I drove to West Hollywood. Milo’s and Rick’s place was a small, perfectly kept Spanish house at the end of one of those short, obscure streets that hide in the grotesque shadow of the Design Center’s blue-green mass. Cedars-Sinai was within walking distance. Sometimes Rick jogged to work. Today, he hadn’t: the white Porsche was gone.
Milo was waiting outside. The small front lawn had been replaced by ground cover and the flowers were blooming bright orange.
He saw me looking at it and said, “Drought resistant,” as he got into the car. “That ‘environmental designer’ I told you about. Guy would upholster the world in cactus if he could.”
I took Laurel Canyon up into the Valley, passing stilt-box houses and postmodern cabins, the decaying Palladian estate where Houdini had done tricks for Jean Harlow. A governor had once lived right around there. None of the magic had rubbed off.
At Ventura, I turned left and traveled two miles to Valley Vista Cadillac. The showroom was fronted by twenty-foot slabs of plate glass and bordered by a huge outdoor lot. Banners were strung on high-tension wire. The lights were off, but morning sun managed to get in and bounce off the sparkling bodies of brand-new coupes and sedans. The cars out on the lot were blinding.
A trim black man in a well-cut navy suit stood next to a smoke-gray Seville. When he saw us get out of my seventy-nine, he went over to the front door and unlocked it, even though business hours hadn’t begun. When Milo and I stepped in, his hand was out and his smile was blooming brighter than Milo’s lawn.
He had a perfectly trimmed pencil mustache and a pin-collar shirt as white as an avalanche. Off to the side of the showroom, beyond the cars, was a warren of cubicles, and I could hear someone talking on the phone. The cars were spotless and perfectly detailed. The whole place smelled of leather and rubber and conspicuous consumption. My car had smelled that way once, even though I’d bought it used. Someone had told me the fragrance came in aerosol cans.
“That’s a classic you’ve got,” said the man, looking through the window.
“Been good to me,” I said.
“Keep it and garage it, that’s what I’d do. One of these days you’ll see it appreciate, like money in the bank. Meanwhile, you can be driving something new for every day. Good lines this year, don’t you think?”
“Very nice.”
“Got those foreign deals beat hands down. Get folks in to actually test drive, they see that. You a lawyer?”
“Psychologist.”
He gave an uncertain smile and I found a business card in my hand.
John Allbright
Sales Executive
“Got a real good suspension this year, too,” he said. “With all due respect to your classic, I think you’ll find it a whole other world, drive-wise. Great sound system, too, if you go for the Bose option and—”
“We’re looking for Ralph Paprock,” said Milo.
Allbright looked at him. Squinted. Put his hand to his mouth and compressed his smile manually.
“Ralph,” he said. “Sure. Ralph’s over there.”
Pointing to the cubicles, he walked away fast, ending up in a glass corner, where he lit up a cigarette and stared out at the lot.
The first two compartments were empty. Ralph Paprock sat behind a desk in the third. He was in his late forties, narrow and tan, with sparse gray-blond hair on top and a bit more of it on the sides, combed over his ears. His double-breasted suit was the same cut as Allbright’s, olive green, just a bit too bright. His shirt was cream with a long-point collar, his tie crowded with parrots and palm trees.
He was hunched over some papers. The tip of his tongue protruded from the corner
of his narrow mouth. The pen in his right hand tapped his blotter very fast. His nails were shiny.
When Milo cleared his throat, the tongue zipped in and an eager grin took hold of Paprock’s face. Despite the smile, his face was tired, the muscles loose and droopy. His eyes were small and amber. The suit gave them a khaki tint.
“Gentlemen. How can I help you?”
Milo said, “Mr. Paprock, I’m Detective Sturgis, Los Angeles police,” and handed him a card.
The look that took hold of the salesman next—What are you hitting me with this time?—made me feel lousy. We had nothing to offer him and plenty to take.
He put his pen down.
I caught a side view of a photo on his desk, propped up next to a mug printed with the Cadillac crest. Two round-faced, fair-haired children. The younger one, a girl, was smiling, but the boy seemed to be on the verge of tears. Behind them hovered a woman of around seventy with butterfly glasses and cold-waved white hair. She resembled Paprock, but she had a stronger jaw.
Milo said, “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Paprock, but we’ve come across another homicide that might be related to your wife’s and wondered if we could ask you a few questions.”
“Another—a new one?” said Paprock. “I didn’t see anything on the news.”
“Not exactly, sir. This crime occurred three years ago—”
“Three years ago? Three years and you’ve just come across it? Did you finally get him?”
“No, sir.”
“Jesus.” Paprock’s hands were flat on the desk and his forehead had erupted in sweat. He wiped it with the back of one hand. “Just what I need to start off the week.”
There were two chairs facing his desk. He stared at them but didn’t say anything else.
Milo motioned me into the office and closed the door behind us. There was very little standing room. Paprock held a hand out to the chairs and we sat. A certificate behind the desk said he’d been a prizewinning salesman. The date was three summers ago.
“Who’s the other victim?” he said.
“A man named Rodney Shipler.”
“A man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A man—I don’t understand.”
“You don’t recognize the name?”
“No. And if it was a man, what makes you think it has anything to do with my Myra?”
“The words ‘bad love’ were written at the crime scene.”
“ ‘Bad love,’ ” said Paprock. “I used to dream about that. Make up different meanings for it. But still …”
He closed his eyes, opened them, took a bottle out of his desk drawer. Enteric aspirin. Popping a couple of tablets, he dropped the bottle into his breast pocket, behind the colored handkerchief.
“What kind of meanings?” said Milo.
Paprock looked at him. “Crazy stuff—trying to figure out what the hell it meant. I don’t remember. What’s the difference?”
He began moving his hands around, stirring the air very quickly, as if searching for something to grab. “Was there any—some sign of—was this Shipler … what I’m getting at is, was there something sexual?”
“No, sir.”
Paprock said, “ ‘Cause that’s what they told me they thought it might mean. The first cops. Some psychotic thing—using—sex in a bad way, some sort of sex nut. A pervert bragging about what he did—bad love.”
Nothing like that had been in Myra Paprock’s file.
Milo nodded.
“A man,” said Paprock. “So what are you telling me? The first cops had it all wrong? They went and looked for the wrong thing?”
“We don’t really know much at all at this point, sir. Just that someone wrote ‘bad love’ at the scene of Mr. Shipler’s homicide.”
“Shipler.” Paprock squinted. “You’re opening the whole thing up again, ’cause of him?”
“We’re taking a look at the facts, Mr. Paprock.”
Paprock closed his eyes, opened them, and took a deep breath. “My Myra was taken apart. I had to identify her. To you that kind of thing’s probably old hat, but …” Shake of the head.
“It’s never old hat, sir.”
Paprock gave him a doubtful look. “After I did it—identified her—it took me a long time to be able to remember her the way she used to be … even now … the first cops said whoever—did those things to her, did them after she was dead.” Alarm brightened his eyes. “They were right about that, weren’t they?”
“Yes, sir.”
Paprock’s hands gripped the edge of his desk and he wheeled forward. “Tell me the truth, detective—I mean it. I don’t want to think of her suffering, but if—no, forget it, don’t tell me a damn thing, I don’t want to know.”
“She didn’t suffer, sir. The only thing new is Mr. Shipler’s murder.”
More sweat. Another wipe.
“Afterwards,” said Paprock. “After I identified her—I had to go tell my kids. The older one, anyway—the little one was just a baby. Actually, the older one wasn’t much more than a baby, either, but he was asking for her, I had to tell him something.”
He knocked the knuckles of both hands together. Shook his head, tapped the desk.
“It took a helluva long time to get it set in my mind—what had happened. When I went to tell my boy, all I could think of was what I’d seen in the morgue—imagining her … and here he is asking for Mommy. ‘Mommy, Mommy’—he was two and a half. I told him Mommy got sick and went to sleep forever. When his sister got old enough, I gave him the job of telling her. They’re great kids, my mother’s been helping me take care of them, she’s close to eighty and they don’t give her any problems. So who needs to change that? Who needs Myra’s name in the papers and digging it all up? There was a time, finding out who did it was all that mattered to me, but I got over that. What’s the difference, anyway? She’s not coming back, right?”
I nodded. Milo didn’t move.
Paprock touched his brow and opened his eyes wide, as if exercising the lids.
“That it?” he said.
“Just a few questions about your wife’s background,” said Milo.
“Her background?”
“Her work background, Mr. Paprock. Before she became a real estate agent, did she do anything else?”
“Why?”
“Just collecting facts, sir.”
“She worked for a bank, okay? What kind of work did this Shipler do?”
“He was a janitor. What bank did she work for?”
“Trust Federal, over in Encino. She was a loan officer—that’s how I met her. We used to channel our car loans through there and one day I went down there on a big fleet sale and she was at the loan desk.”
Milo took out his notepad and wrote.
“She would have probably made vice president,” said Paprock. “She was smart. But she wanted to work for herself, had enough of bureaucracies. So she studied for her broker’s license at night, then quit. Was doing real well, lots of sales …”
He looked off to one side, fixing his gaze on a poster. Two perfect-looking, tennis-clad people getting into a turquoise Coupe de Ville with diamond-bright wire wheels. Behind the car, the marble-and-glass facade of a resort hotel. Crystal chandelier. Perfect-looking doorman smiling at them.
“Bureaucracies,” said Milo. “Did she deal with any others before the bank?”
“Yeah,” said Paprock, still turned away. “She taught school—but that was before I met her.”
“Here in L.A.?”
“No, up near Santa Barbara—Goleta.”
“Goleta,” said Milo. “Do you remember the name of the school?”
Paprock faced us again. “Some public school—why? What does her work have to do with anything?”
“Maybe nothing, sir, but please bear with me. Did she ever teach in L.A.?”
“Not to my knowledge. By the time she moved down here, she was fed up with teaching.”
“Why’s that?”
“The whole situatio
n—kids not interested in learning, lousy pay—what’s to like about it?”
“A public school,” I said.
“Yeah.”
Milo said, “What subjects did she teach?”
“All of them, I guess. She taught fifth grade, or maybe it was fourth, I dunno. In elementary school, you teach all the subjects, right? We never really had any detailed discussions about it.”
“Did she teach anywhere before Goleta?” said Milo.
“Not as far as I know. I think that was her first job out of school.”
“When would that be?”
“Let’s see, she graduated at twenty-two, she’d be forty this May.” He winced. “So that would have been, what, eighteen years ago. I think she taught maybe four or five years, then she switched to banking.”
He looked at the poster again and wiped his forehead.
Milo closed his pad. The sound made Paprock jump. His eyes met Milo’s. Milo gave as gentle a smile as I’d ever seen him muster. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Paprock. Is there anything else you want to tell us?”
“Sure,” said Paprock. “I want to tell you to find the filthy fuck who killed my wife and put me in a room with him.” He rubbed his eyes. Made two fists and opened them and gave a sick smile. “Fat chance.”
Milo and I stood. A second later, Paprock rose, too. He was medium-sized, slightly round-backed, almost dainty.
He patted his chest, removed the aspirin bottle from his breast pocket and passed it from hand to hand. Walking around the desk, he pushed the door open and held it for us. No sign of John Allbright or anyone else. Paprock walked us through the showroom, touching the flanks of a gold Eldorado in passing.
“Whyncha buy a car, as long as you’re here?” he said. Then he colored through his tan and stopped.
Milo held out his hand.
Paprock shook it, then mine.
We thanked him again for his time.
“Look,” he said, “what I said before—about not wanting to know? That was bullshit. I still think about her. I got married again, it lasted three months, my kids hated the bitch. Myra was … special. The kids, someday they’re gonna have to know. I’ll handle it. I can handle it. You find something, you tell me, okay? You find anything, you tell me.”
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