Heartbreak Hotel

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Monark and Midget.

  I studied the photo again. Made progress convincing myself. Considered calling Milo but decided not to, no sense dumping a whole lot of what-if on him, this early in the game.

  —

  At nine P.M., Robin was reading in bed and I was playing guitar in a corner chair. The Brazilian music she likes at night, lovely meld of simplicity that lulls the listener and complexity that challenges the player. I was trying some new chord inversions on “Corcovado” when the phone rang.

  Milo said, “Mr. Waters is absent no more. Oops, poor choice of words. He’s here, but he’s gone.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  The dump site was in Pacific Palisades, above Pacific Coast Highway, just past the Getty Villa and up a skinny bait-worm of a street.

  Unremarkable houses sat on too-small lots. The air was cool and salty and expensive. Between the meager space separating the homes, glimpses of ocean flashed, starlit onyx. I drove until a cop slouching against a cruiser stopped me.

  My name got me waved to the end of the block. A construction site, what looked to be the beginnings of a mega-mansion.

  Block foundation, wooden framing, fake-tile roof, all of which appeared shopworn. Heaps of trash filled most of the lot. An Andy Gump with its door agape and a poorly tended rent-a-fence completed the picture: The project hadn’t been worked on for a while.

  The drive-in gate was chain-locked but the fence, high and topped by barbed wire, sported a man-sized hole. Milo had filled me in as I drove. Discovery of the body had been accidental, a pair of lovebirds, barely thirteen, sneaking out of their houses a few blocks east, had hurried over to the site with plans of passion amid rusted rebar, warped plywood, and rotting roof shingles.

  A regular thing for the kids, as it turned out. Nice to know the girl/boy-next-door thing had durability.

  This time, a stench gave them pause, curiosity surpassing true love and hormones.

  Tracing the reek, the kids had discovered something rotted worse than the shingles. Horror-struck but fascinated, they’d illuminated the body with the flashlight the girl always brought because she was studying ballet and didn’t want to “fall down and mess up my body in the dark.”

  Romeo and Juliet stood off to the side now, near an officer absently working his cellphone. Both were blond, cute, skinny, the girl taller and surprisingly composed. The boy cowered next to her, eyes hazed by huge, red-rimmed designer eyeglasses.

  Milo said, “Sean and Shawna. Adorable, no? All four parents are M.D.’s and pals and were out to dinner. On their way back, now, and mightily irritated. I might need to offer the young’uns some police protection.”

  His smile was a grim strobe. “Little Lothario looks freaked out, no? Maybe he’ll need you, as well.”

  I said, “Nothing like ambulance chasing. It’s definitely Waters?”

  “We’ll verify with prints but, yeah, there’s enough left to say it is.”

  “Where’s the body?”

  He pointed at one of the junk heaps. I moved toward it.

  He said, “Sure, why not.”

  Gerard Waters’s naked body had been covered with objects taken from the trash, each one tagged with an evidence marker: scrap wood, broken blocks, a sheet of black plastic tarp pocked by little jagged holes that Milo assured me were the work of Mickey and Minnie. “They chewed on him a little, too. Over here. And here.”

  Indicating the ragged tips of fingers. And toes. Then a pile of vomit.

  “Courtesy Sean. After Shawna pulled back the tarp and exposed the face.”

  I said, “Tough girl.”

  Milo said, “Blood doesn’t bother her, she wants to be a surgeon like Daddy and Mommy. They run a plastic practice in Malibu. Nip and tuck won’t help Mr. Waters.”

  Another point: neck flesh flaccid and sloughing. A hunk of shoulder mottled like overripe cheese.

  I said, “He wearing anything?”

  “Stripped nude.”

  I bent and took a closer look. The face was bloated and decaying, folds and wrinkles filled with fluid and gas, straining like the seams of too-tight trousers. Crime lab pole-lights accentuated the damage but failed to clarify the precise color of the skin. I guessed gray. Maybe overlaid with purple. Maybe even some green.

  A dark patch nearly hid the tattoo on the left calf. Degraded but I could still make it out. Daffy Duck.

  I said, “A lot of decomp for how cool it’s been.”

  “C.I. guesses he was kept warm somewhere else before being moved.”

  I said, “Any idea what killed him?”

  “Single bullet, here.” Poking the back of his own skull. “No casing, no exit wound, and our chewy friends have enlarged the entry hole. But when you poke around, the tunnel’s narrow enough to say small caliber.”

  “You stuck your finger in there?”

  “After the C.I. okayed it.” He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Shake on it, buddy.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “In answer to your next question, until the pathologist weighs in, best estimate of time is the C.I.’s off-the-record guess. Days, not hours.”

  “Soon after Waters cleared out on his landlord,” I said. “He went to meet up with his partners, maybe figured they’d all be traveling, and got a surprise. If Thalia’s bungalow had given up serious cash, the pie got reduced to two slices.”

  “Miss Hotcha-Hotcha and Mr. Handsome,” he said. “That’s the scene I picture. I went back to the hotel today and showed Henry Bakstrom’s mug to Refugia and a couple of desk clerks. They all had trouble seeing past the Mohawk but no one said it couldn’t be Bakstrom. Then I showed it to Alicia Bogomil and she said ninety percent it was him.”

  “Cop eyes.”

  “Or she’s eager to please. Techs will be looking for prints on or near the body and with the bullet still in Waters’s head, maybe it’ll give up something.”

  I said, “Why dump the body here when there are trails and canyons up the coast?”

  “You’re thinking someone familiar with the neighborhood. Bakstrom and Bad Girl going high-rent?”

  “Not necessarily. There are cheap motels in Santa Monica and Venice. I’m suggesting this isn’t random because bad guys tend to stay close to home and they’ve also been known to work freelance jobs, like pickup construction.”

  “Maybe Bakstrom was here nailing or pouring concrete,” he said. “Good point, I’ll talk to the contractor. Probably the former contractor, the kids say no one’s worked here for a while.”

  “People hike in rural spots, not in junkyards,” I said. “If Mr. and Ms. Cute were in a hurry to split and knew the job was abandoned, this would be the perfect dump spot. Give them a head start while decay sets in and hinders identification. Maybe they were hoping the remains would eventually end up in some recycling facility. Unfortunately for them, Romeo and Juliet intervened.”

  “Head start,” he said. “So they’re already in the wind.”

  “I was a criminal with a windfall, I wouldn’t stick around.”

  Noise on the other side of the fence drew our attention. A quartet of well-dressed people in their forties passed through and converged on the young lovers. A rush of hugs was followed by angry adult oration and allegro finger-wagging.

  Shawna stood her ground; Sean tried to hide behind her but his mother yanked him out by the arm and worked her mouth rapidly.

  The uniform pretending to watch the kids looked over at Milo. Milo pushed his palm frontward. Permission to leave. The cop said something, the parents took the kids with them.

  As the families separated, Shawna finger-waved at Sean and Sean blew a kiss.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Milo said, “Rome and Jule save the day and now they’re gonna get grounded.”

  “Send ’em consolation prizes,” I said. “LAPD flashlights for future exploration.”

  He laughed. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  I said, “Can your ment
al state handle some purely theoretical input?”

  “I’m made of stern stuff. What?”

  I told him what I’d learned about Leroy Hoke, the LaPlante/Fred Drancy robberies, the cute young blonde at Perino’s nestling under Hoke’s arm.

  “You think she’s Thalia.”

  “What’s your opinion?” I showed him the photo on my phone.

  He said, “Could be. That’s Hoke, huh? Kinda country…who’s the hulk with them?”

  “No idea.”

  He returned the phone. “Let’s assume our gal made her fortune laundering the wages of sin. How does that help solve her murder?”

  “Hoke was never arrested for the LaPlante robbery and I haven’t found any record of the jewels being recovered. But not long after, he got sent up for tax evasion. What if he was betrayed by an insider? Not Thalia. If she’d sold Hoke out, she wouldn’t have lasted a week. But a year before he died he sent her a book about a heist gone wrong due to betrayal. ‘Hey this guy got it.’ That could’ve been a warning about another potential back-stab.”

  “Why warn her ten years after he got sent up?”

  “Maybe because it was shortly after Thalia got active financially, until then she’d been lying low. Think about it: She’d just moved into the Aventura and was buying real estate. Maybe Hoke activated her because his priorities changed. He got sick, knew he didn’t have long and wanted to take care of Thalia. Or just the opposite, he was figuring to get out and wanted to take care of himself. Either way, a tax felon sitting on an illicit fortune risked discovery and confiscation. So he used Thalia as a shadow investor. But raising her profile brought its own risk, so he sent her the book, with a coded message to be careful.”

  “Telling her to watch out for some other thug. An associate Hoke hadn’t managed to disappear.”

  “Or,” I said, “the victim of the heist, not exactly a solid citizen, himself.”

  “Count Whoever.”

  “Aka Fred Drancy.”

  He pulled out a panatela, jammed it in his mouth, unlit. As his jaws clenched and slackened, the cigar bobbed like a yardarm.

  “Thalia couldn’t have been at serious risk, Alex. She survived another sixty-plus years.”

  “Which supports what we’ve been saying: Hoke took care of the immediate threat but it crossed generations.”

  “Third-, fourth-generation bad seeds.”

  “One of whom could be lying right there. Wars have been fought based on thousand-year grudges, the same for family feuds. Maybe there’s a clan that’s passed down a story of being cheated out of a big score, and one of the offspring finally decided to do something about it. Thalia told me she chose me because I worked with you. Her plan was to make sure I could be trusted, then get you involved. Even at the risk of making herself an accessory to a whole lot of long-cold crimes. At her age, what could anyone do to her? Unfortunately, her timing was off.”

  He took out a matchbook, tore off a match, bent it, slipped it into his pocket. The cigar followed. “So all I have to do is look for some lowlife who hung with Hoke in the bad old days and trace his family tree.”

  “Or start with Waters and Bakstrom and work backward.”

  “The natural history of nasties…lemme see that picture again.”

  I retrieved the Perino’s shot.

  “The other guy,” he said, “central casting, goon, no? We find out his name was Moose Bakstrom or Biff Waters, I’ll buy you a case of Chivas. Blue, green, name your color.”

  I said, “We could start with the original case files on Hoke’s tax bust and the LaPlante robbery.”

  “Something that old won’t be computerized, and paper files are dumped in some out-in-the-boonies place the department claims is an archive.”

  “I’ll call Maxine Driver tomorrow, see if she has advice.”

  “There you go,” he said.

  As we headed for the Seville, he found the match and the panatela and lit up. “History’s peachy, but I’m kinda partial to current events.”

  —

  I reached Driver at ten A.M.

  “You have something to tell me?”

  “More like another question.”

  Silence. “I see.”

  “Once the case is resolved, you’ll be the first person I call.”

  “You remind me of a guy I dated in grad school. Very earnest, lots of promises.”

  “He keep any of them?”

  “A few.”

  “I’ll do better.”

  “Ha. What now?”

  “I’d like to email you a photo of Hoke with a man, see if you can identify him.”

  I pushed a button. She said, “Where’d you get this?”

  “Web article on Perino’s.”

  “Darn, wish I’d thought of that. Is the girl your centenarian victim?”

  “Maybe. Any idea who the bruiser is?”

  “Nope, sorry. Looks like a bodyguard.”

  “Is there anyone you can think of who’d know more about Hoke?”

  “Doubtful, gangster-research isn’t exactly a hot topic for historians,” she said. “The grant money goes to gender inequality and colonialism—wait a sec, there might be someone. Janet Pitcairn at Princeton, I see her at conferences. She’s into the East Coast mob, gets foundation dough by framing it as research on ethnic immigration patterns. Maybe she knows someone, I’ll give her a call.”

  “Ask her about Fred Drancy—Count LaPlante’s real name. He was originally from Boston but moved to New York after the robbery and got into big-time trouble.”

  I told her about the art theft.

  She said, “Same M.O., different commodity. Maybe Drancy was a co-conspirator in the jewel thing, not a victim?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that but sure, why not? With the consignors cut out, his share would’ve been larger than if he’d operated legitimately. Excellent idea, Professor. Thanks.”

  “Maxine’s fine and you know how to thank me—yes, I’m a tape loop.”

  “Persistence,” I said. “Perfect for research.”

  “A heckuva lot more productive than spending all afternoon arranging one’s shoes so they face precisely the same way. Which is not to say I wasn’t an ideal child.”

  “I really appreciate the time, Maxine.”

  “I probably shouldn’t admit it,” she said, “but this is turning out to be fun. My parents wanted me to be an orthodontist. They still have no clue why I do what I do.”

  —

  I left messages for Milo. He called in shortly after two P.M.

  I told him Driver’s conjecture about Drancy. “If it’s true, add his offspring to the bad seed list.”

  “I like it,” he said. “His being in on it woulda made the job a cinch. Alarm’s off, safe door’s unlocked. What I don’t like is an expanded suspect pool but yeah, it’s definitely worth considering. Meanwhile, I’ve got a few more facts on Hoke. He was sentenced to eleven years, came down with cancer a few months before his release date and died in the prison infirmary. Prison historian only found one visitors log, covers the last three years. One person for Hoke, Christmas, Easter, July Fourth, Labor Day. Woman who signed in as Thelma Myers, no other details. She also shows up after Hoke’s death as custodian of his body. Without her, he’d have ended up in an unmarked grave on the prison grounds.”

  “Thelma, Thalia.”

  “Myers, Mars. Everyone reinvents themselves, Alex. No records that I can find, for all we know her real name’s Lola Montez.”

  I said, “Limiting her visits to four times a year fits with keeping a low profile. So does showing up on holidays when she could get lost in a flood of visitors and wouldn’t be missed at her job.”

  “I called Vollmer—the archive—to get Hoke’s arrest file and anything on the jewel thing. Gonna take a while, only one guy handles all the requests, some wild-child who managed to slide from homicide to traffic to eating dust and mold. He said he’d search manually, maybe he even will. No luck on the dump-site contractor, eithe
r, can’t get a response from the owners, property’s under dispute in a divorce.”

  “Send me Bakstrom’s photo, I’ll go back and see if anyone recognizes him working there.”

  “Don’t waste your time, Alex, we already canvassed the neighborhood.”

  “Let me try, anyway.”

  “Persistent.”

  “Better than arranging toy soldiers so they face the same way.”

  “What?”

  “Send the picture. Anything on the bullet in Waters’s head?”

  “Too messed up for ballistics, all they can say is it’s a .22. Which is kind of like saying a hit-and-run victim encountered a car. The pathologist did say she found the decomp impressive, given the date we know Waters cut out on his landlord, so he probably was stored somewhere hot and humid.”

  I said, “Waters being killed so soon after Thalia’s murder could mean he was a pawn from the beginning.”

  “Mr. and Ms. Adorable are anything but? Maybe one of them should be worrying. Why slice the pie at all?”

  “Waters and Bakstrom were cellies. If Bakstrom already knew the woman, she could be on his visitors log.”

  “So she could…that mind of yours, who says there’s no perpetual motion machine—all right, the photo’s coming your way. A better one actually, I had a tech guy Photoshop the Mohawk into oblivion. Went back to the hotel, now Refugia says probably and Bogomil says for sure. I put a BOLO out on him.”

  The image came through.

  I said, “Perfect.”

  He said, “There you go, back to boosting my self-esteem.”

  —

  Too late that day but the following afternoon, equipped with Henry Bakstrom’s cleaned-up visage, I drove to Pacific Palisades.

  Blue skies and golden sun can prettify anything but the unfinished construction fared poorly in the daylight, wood turned ashy and ragged by glare, fissures on blocks wound-like, the gouged earth soupy and arid in equal proportions.

  No entry, the damaged section of fence had been replaced. But the spot where Waters had been tossed was obvious: a barren rectangle of dirt. I turned, ready to begin my door-to-door, when I spotted a woman descending the crest and heading my way. Fast pace, dictated by the small dog walking her.