Four Classic Alex Delaware Thrillers 4-Book Bundle

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Probably in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium.”

  “No doubt. I left the drywallers there, figured I’d get some work done here, and then maybe you and I could go out and have some fun.”

  “Fun? What’s that?”

  “I think it’s something the Chinese invented. They invented everything, right?”

  She put her arms around my waist and her face against my chest.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’m glad the turkeys flaked out. I’ve been thinking about how little we’ve seen of each other lately.”

  “When it’s all done,” I said, “let’s go away somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Some remote island without phones or TV.”

  Something bumped my ankle. I looked down and saw Spike staring up at us. He cocked his head and snorted.

  “But with air-conditioning for the pooch,” I said.

  Robin laughed and bent to pet him.

  He began breathing hard, then rolled over on his back, paws up, offering his beer gut. As Robin scratched him, he grumbled with pleasure.

  Once in a while, things are simple.

  CHAPTER

  22

  At nine-thirty that evening they got complicated.

  We were watching a bad old movie, laughing at the dialogue, when the phone rang and Milo said, “There’s someone I thought you might like to meet. Right in the neighborhood, actually.”

  “My neighborhood?”

  “Must be. I see the ocean.” He gave me a name, then an address in Paradise Cove.

  “Oh.”

  “Trailer park, right near the Sand Dollar.”

  “Are you there now?”

  “Actually, I’m at the Sand Dollar bar—is this a bad time?”

  Robin sat up and mouthed, “Patient?”

  “Milo,” I told her. “He’s got someone he’d like me to meet.”

  “Now?”

  I nodded.

  “Go,” she said. “But definitely no phones on the island.”

  The road down to the cove was unlit and hemmed in by hillside and sky. The guardhouse was empty and the gate was up. Beyond the Sand Dollar lot, the ocean was a tight stretch of black vinyl. The lot was nearly empty, and the restaurant’s neon sign was suspended in the darkness.

  I turned right and drove up a short steep road to the trailer park. The mobile homes were stuck into the sloping terrain like metal studs in leather. To the left was a small flat parking area atop a low bluff. Rick’s white Porsche 928 was parked there and I pulled in next to it, under the grasping branches of a huge pittosporum tree.

  The units were numbered in a system that defied logic, and it took a while to find the address Milo’d given me.

  I climbed nearly to the top of the park, walking on asphalt paths lined with rock and seashell borders. Most of the trailers were dark. Blue TV light seeped from behind a few curtained windows.

  The address I was looking for matched a white Happy Tourister with aluminum siding and a bolt-on carport. A barbecue sat in the port. Geranium ivy grew around the wheel wells.

  Milo answered my knock. A short, solid-looking woman in her mid-sixties stood behind him. Her hair was tinted the color of ranch mink and permed, and she had a small square face and searching dark eyes. She wore a pea-green sleeveless blouse and stretch jeans. She wasn’t fat but her arms were heavy. Eyeglasses hung from a chain around her neck.

  Milo stood aside. The trailer’s front room was a gold-stained pine kitchen with a brown linoleum floor and white Formica counters. It was sweet with the smell of baked beans.

  The woman met my smile with one of her own, but it seemed obligatory.

  Milo said, “Mrs. Barnard, this is Dr. Delaware, our psychological consultant. Doctor, Mrs. Maureen Barnard.”

  “Mo,” said the woman holding out a hand. We shook.

  Milo said, “Mo was married to Felix Barnard.”

  The woman acknowledged the relationship with a sad look and led us into the living area. More pine, gold carpets, a quilted white sofa specked with gold, and a matching recliner. Big TV and a very small stereo. The place was immaculate.

  Mo Barnard took the recliner and Milo and I shared the couch. The ceilings were very low, and Milo’s bulk made the room look even smaller than it was. On the coffee table was a year’s worth of Reader’s Digest along with a thick bound stack of supermarket coupons and a sandpiper carved out of driftwood. Next to Mo was an octagonal pressed-wood table bearing a remote control and a cut-glass bowl of miniature candy bars: Hershey’s, Mr. Goodbar, Krackel. She picked up the remote and put it in her lap, then handed the bowl to Milo.

  Unwrapping a Mr. Goodbar, he said, “As I told you, it was Dr. Delaware who got us involved in the case that led us to look into your husband’s death.” To me: “Mr. Barnard was murdered a year after Karen Best disappeared.”

  Mo Barnard was looking at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Quite a shock when it happened,” she said, “but it’s been a long time. Strange to be hearing about it after all these years, but you never know, do you?”

  Despite living at the beach, her skin was white and putty-soft. Her eyes had the flat, dark cast of a Grant Wood matriarch. She fingered the remote control and looked at the blank TV screen.

  Milo gave me the candy bowl.

  As I unwrapped a Hershey bar, he said, “Felix’s killer was never found. He was shot in a motel on La Cienega near Pico. West side of the boulevard.”

  La Cienega was the border between Wilshire Division’s jurisdiction and West L.A.’s. The west side of the street made it Milo’s territory.

  Mo Barnard sighed. Milo smiled at her, and the way she reciprocated it let me know he’d been here with her for a while.

  “Strange,” she said. “All these years. I thought he was with a whore, didn’t know whether to be sad or mad. After a while, I forgot about that part of it. Now you come and tell me it could have been something else. You just never know, do you.”

  “Just a possibility,” Milo reminded her.

  “Yes, I know, it’ll probably never be solved. But just the chance that he wasn’t with a whore cheers me up a bit. He wasn’t a bad guy—lots of good qualities, really.”

  Milo told me, “The motel was one of those places rented by the hour. So you can see why Mo assumed that.”

  “The police assumed it,” she said. “Even though the motel clerk said he hadn’t seen any woman go in with Felix. But of course, he could’ve lied. Felix was once a policeman himself. Just for a short time, in Baltimore; that’s where he grew up. I met him in San Bernadino. He was working for an insurance company, investigating accident claims. I was a records clerk at city hall. He got let go right after we got married, and we moved to L.A.”

  “Did you work for the city here, too?” I said.

  “No, I got a job doing the books for Fred Shale Real Estate, over in Pacific Palisades. I did that for thirty-one years. Felix and I lived in Santa Monica, near the Venice side. Felix’s office was out here in Malibu, but this last year’s the first time I’ve actually lived in Malibu. My sister and her husband own this place, but he’s got bad lungs so they moved over to Cathedral City, near Palm Springs.”

  Milo said, “The interesting thing is, Mo feels Felix may have come into some money about a year before he was killed.”

  “I’m pretty sure of it,” said Mo. “He denied it but the signs were there. I thought he was keeping someone on the side.” Her cheeks colored. “Truth be known, he’d done that before, more than once. But in his younger days. He was sixty-three by then—ten years older than me, but when I married him I thought he was mature.” She chuckled and said, “Hand me a Krackel bar, will you?”

  Milo did.

  “What signs did you notice?” I said.

  “First of all, his retiring. For years he’d talked about it, but he always complained he couldn’t get enough money together—always griped about my having health benefits and a pension from San
Berdoo and from Shale, and he was out on his own with nothing. Then, all of a sudden, he just walks in and announces there’s enough in the kitty. I said, ‘What pie dropped out of the sky, Felix?’ He just smiled and patted my head and said, ‘Don’t you worry, Sugaroo, we’re finally going to get that place in Laguna Niguel.’ We were always talking about buying a condo down there, but we didn’t have the money. We might have been able to afford one of those retirement communities, but Felix never saw himself as old. When he turned fifty, he bought himself a toopay and contact lenses. I guess he figured being so much older than me—I used to look like a kid, people would sometimes mistake me for his daughter—he should do something about it. The other thing he did that made me suspicious was get a new car, a cherry-red Thunderbird, the Landau model, the vinyl top. Which was their top of the line. We had a big fight over that, me wanting to know how we could afford it and him saying it was none of my business.”

  She shook her head. “We fought a lot, but we stayed together thirty-one years. Then he got himself killed and there was no big money in his bank account, just a little over three thousand dollars, and I figured he’d spent whatever he had on the car. And whores. I drove that car for fifteen years, finally junked it.”

  “Did he leave any business records behind?” I said.

  “You mean his detective files? No, I told Mr. Sturgis he wasn’t much for keeping records—truth is, he was pretty disorganized in general. After he died, I went through his things and was surprised how little there was—just scraps of paper with scrawls. I figured, his line of work, there might be things there that would embarrass people. I threw everything out.”

  “What kind of cases did he work on?”

  She looked at Milo. “Same questions—no, I don’t mind. I don’t really know what kind of cases. Felix didn’t talk about his work. Truth is, I don’t think there were too many cases, toward the end. I know he did some work for lawyers, but for the life of me I can’t remember the names of any of them. I wasn’t part of his work, had my own job to do. I’m no feminist but I always worked. We never had kids, both of us just went and did our own job.”

  I nodded.

  She said, “I don’t mean to paint him as some kind of bum. Basically, he was a nice guy, didn’t raise his voice, even when we fought. But he could be a little … easy around the edges, know what I mean?”

  “Cutting corners.”

  “ ’Zactly. The first time I met him he tried to pay me five dollars to release an accident record to him without filling out the proper forms and paying the county fee. I turned him down and he was real good-natured about it. Laughed it off—he had a great laugh. I was only nineteen, should have known better anyway, but I didn’t. He came back the next day and asked me out. My parents hated his guts. Six months later we were married. Despite all the problems, he was a pretty good husband.”

  “So he never discussed Karen Best?”

  “Never,” she said. “Truth is, we didn’t discuss much, period. We kept different hours. I’d be up at six, walking the dogs—we used to have miniature poodles—in the office at eight, back by five. Felix liked to sleep late. He claimed a lot of his work had to be done at night, and maybe it was true. He was gone a lot when I was home and vice versa.” She grinned. “Maybe that’s how we stayed together thirty-one years.”

  The grin dropped from her face.

  “Still, his being killed was the worst thing ever happened to me after my parents passing away.” To Milo: “When you first called, I didn’t want to talk about it. But you were a gentleman, and then you told me maybe Felix didn’t die because of whoring around. That would be nice to know.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  She showed us two pictures of herself and Felix, saying, “These are the only ones I have. When you go mobile, you keep things to the minimum.”

  The first was a wedding portrait, the young couple posed in front of a painted backdrop of the Trevi Fountain. She’d been a pretty dark-haired girl, but even at nineteen her eyes had been wary. Felix wasn’t much taller than his bride, a spare man with slicked hair and Clark Gable ears. He’d worn a pencil mustache, like Gable, but had none of the actor’s strength in his face.

  The second snapshot had been taken two years before Barnard’s murder. The mustache was gone and the PI was stooped, his face lined, the toupee embarrassingly obvious. He wore a gray sharkskin suit with skinny lapels and a white turtleneck and held a cigarette in a holder. Mo’s hair was bleached blond and she’d put on some weight, but despite that she did look young enough to be his daughter. The picture had been taken in a back yard, their faces shaded by a big orange tree.

  “Our place in Santa Monica,” she said. “I rent it out now. The income along with my pension’s what keeps me going.”

  Milo asked to borrow the more recent photo, and she said, “Sure.” We thanked her and left. As we stepped out of the trailer, she said, “Good luck to you. Let me know if you find out anything.”

  “Nice lady,” I said, as we walked down to our cars.

  “She fed me dinner,” said Milo. “Beans and franks and potato chips. I was ready for camp songs. Before she really opened up, we watched Jeopardy. She knows a lot about presidents’ wives.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Since six.”

  Four and a half hours. “Dedication.”

  “Yeah, beatify me.”

  “How’d you learn about Barnard’s murder?”

  “Social Security said he was deceased, so I checked county Death Records and it came up homicide, which needless to say surprised me. According to the autopsy report, he got shot in the back of the head in that motel, just like she said. What she doesn’t know is that his pants were down around his ankles, but there was no evidence of sexual activity and he hadn’t ejaculated recently.”

  “Was the place an outright bordello?”

  “More of an anything-goes place. I knew it well from when I used to ride Westside patrol. Drugs, assaults, all-around obnoxious behavior. The detectives on the case assumed Barnard was a john who got in trouble.”

  “He was shot,” I said. “Wouldn’t a hooker have been more likely to stab him?”

  “There are no rules, Alex. Some of the girls pack fire, or a pimp could have killed him; lots of them carry.”

  “Did anyone hear the shot?”

  “Nope. Clerk discovered his body, cleaning up. By the time he called it in, place was empty.”

  “Deaf clerk?”

  “It’s a busy street, he had the TV blasting, who knows? There was no reason to think it was anything more than Barnard picking the wrong time and place for a blowjob.”

  “And now?”

  “Maybe still. I called you because the fact that he was murdered knocks the Karen Best case up another notch on the Intrigue Scale. As does Mo’s feeling that he came into dough.”

  “Best told me Karen was Barnard’s last case,” I said. “And Barnard was killed a year after Karen disappeared. You think he could have been blackmailing someone about Karen and they finally got tired of paying?”

  “Or he got too greedy. On the other hand, he could have been blackmailing someone about another case totally unrelated to Karen. Or maybe he got the T-bird by saving pennies behind his wife’s back. Or at the track. She said all he left her was three thousand bucks—how much would a T-bird have cost back then?”

  “Probably six, seven thousand.”

  “Not major-league blackmail. We’re still a long way from evidence. Barnard could have been shot simply because some whore did get mad at him.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “I’ll see if I can turn up anything more on him. Then I guess the logical thing is to try to find those Sand Dollar people and see if they remember anything about Karen.”

  He looked through the trees at the restaurant. No cars in the lot and only a few lights were on.

  “I went in there tonight looking for Doris Reingold, but she’s off for a co
uple of days.… The thing that bothers me about Barnard’s investigation is if Karen was hired by the Sheas to work the Sanctum party, why wouldn’t anyone at the Dollar have mentioned it?”

  “You think someone told Barnard and he left it out intentionally?”

  “Who knows? Like you said, maybe he was just an incompetent boob and didn’t ask the right questions. Or he got answers and didn’t think they were important.”

  “Malibu Sheriffs interviewed the same people,” I said. “If Karen was working the party, why wasn’t it in their reports?”

  “Maybe she never was at the party. Or could be the sheriffs found out she was and didn’t think it was important either.”

  “The last place she was seen wasn’t important?”

  “Her serving hors d’oeuvres to five hundred people isn’t much of a lead, Alex. She could have been picked up by some party animal and run into trouble later. What reason would anyone have to suspect she was somewhere on the grounds, six feet under?”

  We reached the bluff and I walked him to the Porsche. He opened the driver’s door and fished for car keys.

  “I told Lucy about Karen,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m still not sure it was right, but I followed my instincts. It was either continue to hold back information from her, and take the chance it would destroy our rapport, or be straight.”

  “How’d she react?”

  “Initial shock. Then she warmed to the idea that the dream might actually mean something. Learning the truth’s become her mission.”

  “Great.”

  “I’m doing my best to keep the lid on. So far, she’s being reasonable. She asked for hypnosis to enhance her memory, and I agreed to try some basic relaxation. I thought she’d be really susceptible, and at first she seemed to be. Then she fell asleep. Which means she’s resisting strongly. She slept very deeply and her dream pattern’s fragmented. I actually watched her go in and out of several phases. I’m not surprised she’s a sleepwalker and has chronic nightmares. She’d like to believe she sleepwalked her way into the kitchen and put her head in the oven, and I guess it’s possible. Sleep’s her great escape. She blocks things out by dozing off.”