Private Eyes

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Dressing in khakis, shirt and tie, and a lightweight tweed jacket, I drove to West Hollywood.

  • • •

  The Hilldale address Kathy Moriarty’s sister had given me was between Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset. The house was a graceless box, the color of week-old newspaper, on a thirty-foot lot, shielded nearly to the roof by an unkempt eugenia hedge. The roof line was flat, layered with Spanish tiles painted black. Flat black— it looked like an amateur job, some of the terra cotta showing through in places, the hue that of a poorly dyed brown shoe.

  The eugenia hedge ended at a short, collapsing driveway— asphalt struggling with weeds in the couple of feet not taken up by a twenty-year-old, bird-bombed, yellow Oldsmobile. I parked across the street, walked across a dry, clipped lawn packed harder than the asphalt. Four paces took me to a three-step cement porch. Three addresses in black metal letters were nailed to the right of the gray plank door. A piece of adhesive tape, now darkened to the old-paper tint of the house, covered the doorbell ringer. An index card with KNOCK in red ballpoint was wedged between the bell frame and the stucco. I followed instructions and was rewarded, seconds later, with a “Hold On!” in a sleepy-sounding male voice.

  Then: “Yeah?” from behind gray wood.

  “My name is Alex Delaware and I’m looking for Kathy Moriarty.”

  “How come?”

  I thought of Milo’s suggestions of subterfuge, decided I had no stomach for that, and opted for technical truth:

  “Her family hasn’t seen her in a while.”

  “Her family?”

  “Her sister and brother-in-law. Mr. and Mrs. Robbins, in Pasadena.”

  The door opened. A young man clutching a handful of paintbrushes in his right hand looked me up and down. No surprise, no suspicion. Just an artist’s eye gauging perspective.

  He was in his late twenties, tall and solidly built, with dark hair combed back and tied in a foot’s worth of ponytail that dangled over his left collarbone. His face was heavy and soft-featured under a low flat forehead and shelf brows. The gestalt was simian— more gorilla than chimp— helped along by black eyebrows that met in the middle and a wash of black stubble that ran up past his cheekbones, swooped down his neck till it merged with his chest hair. He wore a black polyester tank top emblazoned with the logo of a skateboard company in tomato-red letters; baggy, flowered, orange-and-green knee-length shorts, and rubber beach sandals. His arms were coated with dark, coiling hair just past the elbow. The skin above that was hairless and white and slabbed with the kind of muscle that would pump up easily but looked slack and unused. A dried patch of baby-blue paint stained one bicep.

  I said, “Sorry to disturb you.”

  He glanced at the brushes, then back at me.

  I pulled out my wallet, found the business card I’d taken from Milo last night, and handed it to him.

  He studied it, smiled, studied me, and gave it back. “I thought you said your name was Del-something.”

  “Sturgis is in charge. I’m working with him.”

  “An op,” he said, grinning. “You don’t look like one— at least not like the ones on TV. Guess that’s the point of it, though, isn’t it? TrÈs incommunicado.”

  I smiled.

  He studied me some more. “A lawyer,” he finally said. “Defense, not prosecution— or maybe some kind of professor. That’s how I’d cast you, Marlowe.”

  “Do you work in the movies?” I said.

  “No.” He laughed and touched a paintbrush to his lips. Lowering it, he said, “Though I guess I do. Actually. I’m a writer.” More laughter. “Like everyone else in this town, right? But not screen plays— God forbid screenplays.”

  His laughter rose in pitch and lingered, hovering on the brink of giddy. “You ever write one?”

  “Nope.”

  “Give yourself time. Everyone’s got a hot property—’cept me. What I do for a living is graphic art. Airbrush-photorealism to sell products. What I do for fun is art-art— sloppy freedom.” Waving the brushes. “And what I do to stay sane is writing— short pieces, post-modern essays. Had a couple published in the Reader and the Weekly. Mood-based urban fiction— how music and money and the whole L.A. experience make people feel. The different things L.A. evokes in people.”

  “Interesting,” I said, not sounding very convincing.

  “Yeah,” he said cheerfully, “as if you give a shit. You just want to do your job and go home to your lonely P.I. Murphy bed, right?”

  “Boy needs a hobby.”

  He said, “Oh, yeah,” transferred his brushes to his left hand and held out his right and said, “Richard Skidmore.”

  We shook, he stepped back and said, “C’mon in.”

  The interior of the small house was prewar budget construction: cramped dark rooms that smelled of instant coffee and takeout food, marijuana, and turpentine. Textured walls, rounded archways, tin wall sconces, all of them bulbless. A brick mantel above a fireplace was piled high with Presto logs still in their wrappers. Thrift shop furniture, including some plastic-and-aluminum-tubing outdoor pieces, was assembled randomly on worn wood floors. Art and its accoutrements— odd-shaped, hand-stretched canvases in various stages of completion, jars and tubes of paint, brushes soaking in pitchers— were everywhere but on the walls. A paint-encrusted easel sat in the center of the living room, amid a mound of crumpled paper, broken pencils, and charcoal stubs. A draftsman’s table and adjustable chair were set up in what looked to be the dining area, along with a compressor attached to an airbrush.

  The walls were unadorned, but I noticed a single piece of white construction paper nailed above the mantel. Calligraphic lettering at the center read:

  Day of the Locusts,

  Twilight of the Worms,

  Night of the Living Dread.

  “My novel,” said Skidmore. “Both the title and the opening line. The rest will happen when the old attention span kicks in— it’s always been a problem for me, but hey, it didn’t stop the last couple of presidents, did it?”

  I said, “Did you meet Kathy Moriarty through your writing?”

  “Work, work, work, Marlowe? How much does Boss Spurgis pay you to get you to be so conscientious?”

  “Depends on the case.”

  “Very good,” he said, smiling. “Evasive. You know, this is really great, your dropping in like this. It’s why I love waking up in L.A. You can never tell when some SoCal archetype will come knocking.”

  Another appraising glance. I started to feel like a still life.

  “Think I’ll use you in my next piece,” he said, drawing an imaginary line in the air. “The Private Eye: The Things He Sees— The Things That See Him.”

  He lifted several canvases covered with abstract splotches from a pool chaise and dumped them on the floor unceremoniously. “Sit.”

  I did and he lowered himself onto a wooden stool directly in front of me.

  “This is great,” he said. “Thanks for dropping by.”

  “Does Kathy Moriarty live here?”

  “Her place is in back. Garage unit.”

  “Who’s the landlord?”

  “I am,” he said with pride. “Inherited it from my grandfather. Gay old blade— ergo the Boys’ Town location. Came out of the closet twenty years after Grandma died, and I was the only one in the family who didn’t cut him off. So when he died, I got all of it— the house, the Bloatmobile, hundred shares of IBM stock. The art of the deal, right?”

  “Mrs. Robbins says she hasn’t seen Kathy for over a month. When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “Funny,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “That her sister would hire someone to look for her. They didn’t get along— at least from Kathy’s POV.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Culture clash, no doubt. Kathy said the sister was Pasadena Whitebread. The kind who’d say urination and defecation.”

  “As opposed to Kathy.”

  “Exactly.”
/>   I asked him again when he’d last seen her.

  He said, “Same time Whitebread did— about a month.”

  “When’s the last time she paid her rent?”

  “The rent is a hundred a month, which is stand-up comedy, right? Couldn’t get into the whole landlord thing.”

  “When’s the last time Kathy paid the hundred?”

  “At the beginning.”

  “Beginning of what?”

  “Our association. She was so happy to get something that cheap— and it includes utilities because everything’s metered together and it’s too much of a hassle to have it changed— she came up with ten months’ worth right at the beginning. So she’s paid up through December.”

  “Ten months. She’s been living here since February?”

  “Guess so— yeah. It was right after New Year’s. I used the garage apartments for a party— artists and writers and terrific fakers. When I was cleaning up I decided to rent one of them and use the other for storage, so I wouldn’t be tempted to throw another party next year and hear all that bad dialogue.”

  “Was Kathy invited to the party?”

  “Why would she have been?”

  “Being a writer.”

  “No, I didn’t meet her till after the party.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “Ad in the Reader. She was the first to show up and I liked her. Straight on, no bullshit, a real no-nonsense Sapphite.”

  “Sapphite?”

  “As in Lesbos.”

  “She’s gay?”

  “Sure.” Big smile. “Tsk, tsk— looks like Sister Whitebread didn’t brief you thoroughly.”

  “Guess not.”

  He said, “Like I said, culture clash. Don’t be shocked, Marlowe— this is West Hollywood. Everyone here is either queer or old or both. Or me. I’m into chastity until something monogamous and heterosexual and meaningful comes along.” Tugging the ponytail: “Don’t let this fool you— I’m really right-wing. Two years ago I owned twenty-six button-down shirts and four pairs of penny loafers. This”— another tug—“was to make the neighbors more comfortable. I’m already dragging down the property values, not letting them bulldoze and put up another Spa-Jacuzzi-Full-Security.”

  “Does Kathy have a lover?”

  “Not that I saw, and my guess would be no.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Her persona projects as profoundly unloved. As if she’s just come off something hurtful and isn’t ready to juggle with razor blades again. It wasn’t anything she said— we don’t talk too much, don’t run into each other much. I like to sleep as much as I can and she’s gone most of the time.”

  “Gone this long?”

  He thought. “This is the longest, but she’s usually on the road— I mean, it’s not weird for her to be away for a week at a time. So you can tell her sister she’s probably okay— probably doing something Miss Pasadena doesn’t really want to hear about.”

  “How do you know she’s gay?”

  “Ah, the evidence. Well, for starts, the stuff she reads. Lesbo mags. She buys them regularly— I find them out in the trash. And the mail she gets.”

  “What kind of mail?”

  His smile was a wide, white pin-stripe on wooly stubble. “Not that I go out of my way to read it, Marlowe— that would be illegal, right? But sometimes the mail for the back unit gets put in my box because the carriers don’t realize there’s a unit back there— or maybe they’re just too lazy to go back there. A lot of it’s from gay groups. How’s that for deductive reasoning?”

  “After a month you must have quite a bit of it collected,” I said.

  He stood, went into the kitchen, and returned a moment later carrying a sheaf of envelopes bound with a rubber band. Rolling the band off, he examined each piece of mail, then held on to it for several moments before passing the entire collection to me.

  I fanned it and counted. Eleven pieces.

  “Not much for a month,” I said.

  “Like I said, unloved.”

  I inspected the mail. Eight pieces were computer-addressed postcards and advertisements made out to Occupant. The remaining three were envelopes addressed to Kathy Moriarty by name. One appeared to be a solicitation for funds from an AIDS support group. So did another, from a clinic in San Francisco.

  The third envelope was white, business-sized, postmarked three weeks previously in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Typewritten address: Ms. Kathleen R. Moriarty. Return address preprinted in the upper left-hand corner: THE GAY AND LESBIAN ALLIANCE AGAINST DISCRIMINATION, MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE.

  I pulled out a pen, realized I hadn’t brought paper, and copied the information onto the back of a gasoline receipt that I found in my wallet.

  Skidmore was studying me, amused.

  I turned the envelope over several times, more for his benefit than anything else, finally gave it back to him.

  He said, “So what did you learn?”

  “Not much. What else can you tell me about her?”

  “Brown hair, butch-do. Green eyes, kind of a potato face. Her fashion statement tends to be oriented toward baggy and sensible.”

  “Does she have a job?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, but she could have.”

  “She never mentioned a job?”

  “Uh-uh.” He yawned and rubbed one knee, then the other.

  “Other than being a writer,” I said.

  “That’s not a job, Marlowe. It’s a calling.”

  “Have you ever seen anything she wrote?”

  “Sure. We didn’t talk at all the first couple of months she was here, but once we discovered we had the muse in common, we did do a little show-and-tell.”

  “What’d she show?”

  “Her scrapbook.”

  “Remember what was in it?”

  He crossed his legs and scratched a hairy calf. “What do you call this? Getting a profile on the subject?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “What kinds of things did she have in her scrapbook?”

  “All give, no take, huh?” he said, but without resentment.

  “I don’t know anything, Richard. That’s why I’m talking to you.”

  “That make me a snitch?”

  “A source.”

  “Aha.”

  “Her scrapbook?”

  “I just skimmed it,” he said. Yawning again. “Basically it was articles— stuff she’d written.”

  “Articles on what?”

  Shrug. “I didn’t look at it too closely— too fact-bound, no fancy.”

  “Any chance of my seeing the scrapbook?”

  “Like how would that be possible?”

  “Like if you have the key to her apartment.”

  He raised his hand to his mouth, a parody of outrage. “Invasion of privacy, Marlowe?”

  “How about you stand right over me while I read it?”

  “Doesn’t take care of the constitutional issues, Phil.”

  “Listen,” I said, leaning forward and putting major effort into sounding ominous, “this is serious. She could be in danger.”

  He opened his mouth and I knew he was going to crack wise. I blocked it by holding out a hand and said, “I mean it, Richard.”

  His mouth closed and stayed that way for a while. I stared at him hard and he rubbed his elbows and knees and said, “You’re serious.”

  “Very.”

  “This has nothing to do with collecting?”

  “Collecting what?”

  “Money. She told me she’d borrowed lots from her sister, hadn’t paid any of it back, and her sister’s husband was getting pissed— he’s some sort of financial type.”

  “Mr. Robbins is a lawyer,” I said, “and he and his wife are concerned about Kathy’s debt. But that’s not the issue anymore. She’s been gone too long, Richard.”

  He rubbed some more and said, “When you told me you were working for the sister, I figured it had something to do with collecting.”

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nbsp; “Well, it doesn’t, Richard. Her sister— whatever their culture clash— is worried about her and so am I. I can’t tell you more than that, but Mr. Sturgis considers this case a priority.”

  He undid his ponytail and shook his hair loose. It was thick and shiny as a cover girl’s, and fanned across his face. I heard his neck crack as he lowered it and continued fanning. When he looked up some of the hair was in his mouth and he chewed it while wearing a thoughtful expression.