“She said that she still loves him in a funny way.”
“That’s the word she used? Funny?”
“She said odd. Do I think that she killed people and dug up their heads? Honestly, I don’t see it.”
“And Nigel?”
“Nigel has a temper and he’s not subtle. If he was going to kill someone, he would just freakin’ kill him. And I think first up would have been Mr. Chandler.”
Perez showed us the gate that opened onto a narrow concrete walkway on Ellsworth Place and he showed us the lock for the gate. He said that he had the only key.
It was a simple lock, could have been picked, but there was no evidence to show that it had been tampered with.
I took out the sketch of Jane Doe.
“Do you know this woman?”
Perez took the drawing, looked at it for a long few seconds.
“Is she one of the victims?”
“Yes.”
“Her head was cut off?”
“Do you recognize her?”
“She looks familiar, but I don’t know her. It’s like, maybe I saw her in a coffee shop or something like that.”
He handed the drawing back to me, then said, “You know who you should talk to? Tom Oliver, Mr. Chandler’s driver. He’s been with Mr. Chandler for about twenty years. He’s gonna be your expert on Harry Chandler. And maybe he’ll recognize this woman.”
Chapter 41
I PRESSED THE bell marked T. L. OLIVER at number 4, one of the four identical six-story brick houses on Ellsworth Place that bounded the mansion on its west side.
“Mr. Oliver?” Conklin said into the intercom. “This is the police.”
T. Lawrence Oliver buzzed us in and we climbed the flights of stairs up to the top floor and found Harry Chandler’s driver waiting for us at his front door.
He was forty-something, white, looked like he could bench-press three hundred pounds. He wore jeans and a print shirt, earring in his left ear, which in the nineties would have meant he was straight. Now it only meant that he liked earrings.
We took seats in the run-down apartment with no view of the back garden, and Conklin started asking the questions. Oliver answered, but he was edgy. He fidgeted with a watch; it looked like a gold Rolex.
“I take time off when Mr. Harry is away,” he told us. “So I dropped him and Kaye off at the boat on Thursday afternoon, then I drove to Vegas. I was gone the whole weekend.”
“Where’d you stay?” Conklin asked.
“The Mandalay Bay. I played a lot of blackjack. I didn’t win and I didn’t lose, but I did get lucky,” he said.
“Write down the name of that lucky person for me, will you?” Conklin said.
“Aw, jeez. Her name was Judy Lemon or Lennon, something like that. She’s a cocktail waitress at the casino. Oh. Wait. I have her phone number.”
He wrote down the number for Conklin, then said, “Anything else?”
“Relax, Mr. Oliver. We’ve got a lot of questions.”
“Can I get you a beer? Mind if I have one?”
Oliver was drinking at nine in the morning. What did he know? What had he done? He dragged a kitchen chair into the living room, and Conklin and I took turns throwing questions at him.
He told us that he had worked for Chandler since long before the trial. While Chandler was in the system, Oliver had taken a job in LA driving for a friend of Chandler, a TV producer. He’d come back to the Ellsworth compound when Chandler was acquitted.
He said he knew nothing about the severed heads except that it was creepy, and his vote for Most Likely to Commit Murder was Nigel Worley, although he couldn’t come up with a motive.
He also didn’t recognize our Jane Doe.
Oliver said good things about Chandler, how generous he was, how there was no way the movie star had ever killed anyone. He said Chandler’s only vices were women and nice things.
“He gave me this watch when he got tired of it,” Oliver said, showing off the seven-thousand-dollar Rolex.
I didn’t like Oliver, but was he a killer? I told him we’d be checking out his alibi and I gave him my card. He wanted us to leave so badly that I pushed back one more time.
“Mr. Oliver, if you had anything to do with this crime, you should tell us now, before it goes any further. My partner and I can help you. We can say that you came to us voluntarily.”
“No, no. I haven’t done anything like that. I came back from Vegas and saw all the cop cars outside the main house and thought, Aw, shit.
“Listen, I drove Mr. Chandler’s Bentley to Vegas. I’m not allowed to. I don’t want to get fired. Please don’t tell him. Check it out with the garage at the hotel. There’s a time-stamped record of the Bentley going in and out all weekend.”
I told Oliver we’d check out his story and that I wasn’t making any promises about what I would say to Chandler. I told him that if he had any thoughts about what happened inside the walled garden to call me any time.
“I have a thought right now. Do you know LaMetta Wynn?”
Chapter 42
LAMETTA WYNN WAS HARRY CHANDLER’S personal assistant. She lived in a small Victorian house in Golden Gate Heights, a residential neighborhood where everyone had his or her own patch of lawn and a porch overlooking the street.
Ms. Wynn was fifty or so, white, a fading redhead with sharp, pale eyes.
She asked us to come in, and we sat down in her living room. There were watercolor landscapes on the wall and a shotgun in a rack over the sofa. She answered our questions about her whereabouts, saying that she’d been alone all weekend.
“I got some sleep, caught up on e-mail, and was in touch with Harry Chandler. You know, he pays me a lot. He expects me to answer the phone when he calls.”
“Did he call you over the weekend?”
“In fact, he did. He was in Monterey. Wanted to get the names of some restaurants where he could take Kaye.”
“I understand that Mr. Chandler has an active social life.”
“I’m not going to tell you the names of Harry’s old girlfriends,” Wynn said. “Take it from me, there have been a lot of women, but Harry will be happy to give you names and dates, if you just ask him. I want to help you if I can. But I don’t know who could have done this — whatever this is.”
“All of the heads that were exhumed from the garden were female,” I said.
LaMetta Wynn sat back in her seat. She seemed to be thinking about that, then she said, “You’re the homicide detectives, so help me to understand. If Harry Chandler is the killer, why would he bury his victims’ heads in his own backyard?”
“I guess you’re assuming that killers are logical,” I said. I pulled out the drawing of Jane Doe, a drawing that was getting rumpled from handling.
Wynn got a glimpse, then seized the drawing from my hand.
“I know her,” she said. “I know this woman. Is she one of the people who was killed?”
“Yes. Who is she?”
“Her name is Marilyn. Varick, I think. She lives on the streets. Occasionally she sleeps in a doorway.
“I’ve given her spare change. She comes from Oregon,” said LaMetta Wynn. “I didn’t get into any long conversations with her. I mostly brought her soup.”
“Did Harry Chandler know her?”
“Impossible. He couldn’t have. And I want to be perfectly clear. I know Harry Chandler well. He isn’t a violent man. He’s a scamp, but, apart from breaking hearts, he’d never hurt anyone.”
Chapter 43
CONKLIN AND I took the fifteen-minute drive to the yacht club. I wanted my partner’s opinion of Harry Chandler. And I wanted to see Chandler’s face when I showed him the drawing of the girl whose head had been unearthed from his garden.
As before, Chandler was sitting in a deck chair at the foot of his gangway when we arrived. He had a big smile for me, shook Conklin’s hand, and said, “I hope you have some news for me.”
“We do, Mr. Chandler.”
“Co
me aboard,” he said.
I think Conklin’s jaw dropped a little bit when Chandler showed us to the sitting room on the aft deck. I guess my jaw had dropped the same way when I saw it the day before.
I said, “Mr. Chandler, the remains found in your garden were all examined, and none of them are a match to Cecily Chandler.”
“Oh, thank you, Sergeant,” he said, his expression full of relief. “I don’t think I was ready to hear that she’d been buried in the backyard all these years.”
“But this woman was buried in your garden,” I said. I unfolded the drawing of Marilyn Varick and showed it to Chandler.
He took the paper, looked it over. I stopped breathing for the time it took him to scan that drawing. Then Chandler looked up at me.
“She was killed and her head was buried in the garden?”
“That’s right. Do you recognize her?”
“Not at all. I’m sorry. Sorry that she’s dead. Sorry I can’t help.”
I returned the drawing to the inside pocket of my blazer. I had seen nothing in his face that told me Chandler was lying.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Are you involved with Janet Worley?”
“Now? No, and not for at least ten years. Why would you ask me that?”
“But at one time, you were intimately involved.”
“We had a couple of trysts, that’s all,” Chandler told us. “She was very pretty and delightful, and we both knew it was just for fun. I was in love with my wife.”
I didn’t like a definition of love that included trysts with someone else while you were living with your beloved spouse.
I thought about how Worley had spoken disparagingly of Chandler’s womanizing while crashing stove parts in the kitchen. He had made his accusations sound personal. In fact, Janet had left the room.
The people we had spoken with said that Nigel was brutish, that he didn’t have a flair for fine details. But if he was involved in the murder and in digging up those heads, maybe he hadn’t been working alone.
Chandler was saying, “Janet is a fine person. I care about her. I don’t love her, but I really do care about her. Until I met Kaye, I hadn’t been in love since Cecily disappeared.
“You know why I still live in San Francisco when I could live anywhere in the world? Because maybe Cece wasn’t murdered. Maybe she was abducted. Or maybe she just wanted to get away from me. Maybe she’ll come home, and if she does, I’ll be waiting for her.”
Conklin and I left Chandler on the Cecily. As we walked across the dock toward the parking lot, my partner said to me, “Janet Worley has been holding out on us.”
“Just spitballing now, but try this on for size,” I said. “Say Nigel Worley does the killings because he’s angry that his wife had an affair, plus he’s crazy. Janet goes along with it. And she’s the one who does the decorating with numbers and flowers.”
“And they put the heads on the back step? Why?”
“Because it makes Harry Chandler a suspect. If he gets accused of murder again, then maybe this time, he doesn’t get off.”
“All because of a fling ten years ago.”
“Maybe neither Janet nor Nigel got over the insult,” I said. “Maybe hatred of Harry Chandler is what keeps those two together.”
Chapter 44
“I’VE GOT HER,” I said to Conklin.
He looked up from his computer.
“Marilyn Varick,” I said. “Google shows a dozen pages on her. She was something special about five years ago.”
Our former Jane Doe had saturated the local surfer news and blogs. Many of the articles about her had photos of her in a Speedo standing next to her surfboard, and there were links to YouTube. I clicked on one, played a video of Marilyn riding enormous waves at Pillar Point.
I turned the monitor so Rich could see.
“Jane Doe was a surfer,” I said. “A champion.”
Rich had been doing his own research as I looked up Marilyn Varick on the Web. He said, “She’s got priors for possession, loitering, panhandling, all in the last two years. She was always picked up in Pacific Heights. I guess that was her home base.”
“LaMetta Wynn said that she was sleeping in doorways. LaMetta gave her money. Maybe other people did too,” I said to Rich. “Our drawing doesn’t look much like these younger pictures of her in real life. It’s like comparing a plum to a prune.”
I did a search for Marilyn Varick on Facebook, found more beauty shots of a graceful young woman daring the waves off Ocean Beach, but she hadn’t updated her page in two years.
“Something happened to her a couple of years ago,” I said. “She dropped out.”
Rich said, “Wynn said there was no way Harry Chandler knew Marilyn Varick. Chandler also said that he didn’t know her. But then we have Nigel Worley saying Chandler had a wide range of types. Maybe a pretty surfer girl would have been one of those types.”
“Speculating now,” I said. “Say Chandler meets her, dates her, breaks her heart. Marilyn goes downhill. Starts living on the street near Chandler’s house.”
“She’s not in missing persons,” Richie said. “But she’s got parents living in San Rafael.”
“Someone’s got to do the notification,” I said.
“It’s my turn,” said Rich.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I want to.”
Chapter 45
I SAT BY the indoor swimming pool in a lovely modern house in San Rafael, nineteen miles north of San Francisco. The walls were glass and the morning sun made beautiful swirling patterns in the water. An English springer spaniel slept in a dog bed, his legs running in a dream.
Richard and Virginia Varick were a handsome couple in their sixties, dressed in tennis shorts and sweaters. Mrs. Varick couldn’t sit still. Her husband leaned back in a metal-frame webbed chair and looked at me suspiciously.
I thought he knew why I had come.
When I first saw Jane Doe’s remains, I thought that once we knew who she was, the rest of the puzzle would fall into place; we’d learn the nature of the crimes and the motive, and from there we’d have a good shot at figuring out who had killed her and the others.
Now, as I sat with the Varicks, my only thought was that I was about to shatter the final happy moment in their lives.
“When was the last time you spoke with your daughter?”
“Is Marilyn in trouble?” Virginia Varick asked me.
“I’m not sure, Mrs. Varick. Could you look at this drawing?”
I had printed out a clean copy of the sketch that had been drawn from the partially decomposed head of Jane Doe. I handed it to Mrs. Varick.
“Who is this person?” she asked me.
“Does she resemble your daughter?” I asked. “She doesn’t look anything like my daughter. Why? Who is she? I thought you had news of Marilyn. Don’t you? Dick? I don’t understand.”
She handed the sketch to her husband, who held it with both hands, then drew back from it, turned it over, and put it facedown on the table in front of him.
“Mrs. Varick, this is a drawing of an unidentified woman whose remains were found a few days ago in San Francisco. I’m sorry to have to bring this sad news to you —”
“Don’t worry, it’s not my daughter,” Mrs. Varick said, her voice getting high. “Wait here. I’ll show you my daughter.”
Virginia Varick left the room, and I said to her husband, “When was the last time you saw Marilyn?”
“We haven’t seen her in two years.”
“And why is that?”
“She didn’t want to see us,” Dick Varick told me. He was clasping his hands tightly together. His knuckles were white, his complexion gray. “I think she was doing drugs. She called from time to time and my wife and I would talk to her for ten or fifteen minutes, although Ginny and I did most of the talking.
“Marilyn said she was fine. And she asked us not to try to find her. We looked for her anyway, but she’d gone underground. None of her old friends had
seen her or knew where she lived.”
I said, “Did something happen at about the time she stopped seeing you? An incident or trauma?”
“Nothing that I know of,” Varick said to me.
“I need something of hers that might contain her DNA. Hairbrush, toothbrush. Maybe a hat.”
“We don’t have anything like that. She never lived here.”
Virginia Varick returned to the room carrying an enormous blue-leather-bound scrapbook. She sat on a footstool, opened the book, and turned it so that I could see the pages.
I recognized many of the photos, but others were new to me; family photos with her parents, her dog, boyfriends, all of which made me wonder how it was that no one had identified her when the Chronicle had run the sketch.
Had Marilyn changed so much?
Was the sketch a poor likeness of Marilyn Varick?
Or had Harry Chandler’s assistant been wrong when she identified the person in this sketch as Marilyn Varick?
I scrutinized the photos Ginny Varick showed me, and I was convinced they were of the same person as the one in the drawing. Virginia Varick just didn’t want to face the truth.
“She was a beautiful young woman,” I said.
The anguished woman stood up and snarled at me, “Don’t say was. She is a beautiful woman. I told you, whoever this person is, she’s not my Marilyn.”
Chapter 46
DICK VARICK REACHED OUT for his wife, but she drew away. He said, “Ginny, you haven’t seen Marilyn in a long time. Listen, I brought her some money about eight months ago. She didn’t want me to tell you.”
“You saw her? And you didn’t tell me?”
“She was in bad shape, dear. She was high and talking crazy. She wouldn’t come home. I pleaded with her, but she wouldn’t let me get her any help. She said all she needed was a loan. I gave her a thousand bucks. She called us twice after that, so I knew she was okay.”
Ginny Varick put her hands to her mouth and then ran from the room.
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