Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  “Lovely.”

  “And her stomach.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “And then she offered to blow the cop.”

  “Who doesn’t want to get a blow job from a drunk woman covered in barf and shit? I’m going to get one on the way home.”

  “Get in line, Blue, get in line. They put her in the drunk tank and released her the next day. And see here, another drunk and disorderly a year after that down in Novato. Screaming in random women’s faces as they left a lesbian bar that they were all whores who’d stolen her man Rocky.”

  Halloran blinked at the screen. “Yeah, something tells me it wasn’t a bunch of lesbians responsible for that. She was yelling that they were taking food out of her son’s mouth; she started following them and being a nuisance. She wasn’t physically aggressive, just verbally. But she scared the piss out of those women so they called the cops. Back in the squad car she went, yelling that she needed to get back to Darby for reasons she wouldn’t explain, yelling that she was May Macdonald but they had to call her Flamingo.” He giggled and turned the screen so I could see the mug shot of May Macdonald, aka Flamingo.

  The woman looked completely out of her mind, dyed blonde hair sticking out like she’d been electrocuted and her eyes popped so wide that I could see the white going all the way around the irises. Her eye shadow was bright pink and glittery, extending all the way to her temples and drawn into a point. Head cocked, her mouth was gaping in a toothless shriek of rage.

  “Fun times,” I said.

  Good mug shots always tickled Halloran’s funny bone. He couldn’t stop giggling at the picture. “Goddamn those man-stealing lesbians,” he wheezed.

  “Christ on a cracker, who the hell was watching her son while she was off doing that?” I asked. “He would have been only a little boy at the time.”

  “Maybe Gramma Flamingo or Gramma Rochlin was taking care of him. This guy could have been the father, it sounds like. She was plenty pissed.”

  “Well, look up Rocky Rochlin next, I suppose.”

  He tapped away. “Nothing. Maybe she got Rocky from Rochlin, and his first name is something else.” Going back to May Macdonald’s criminal record, he began at her first arrest when she was eighteen and followed a truly chaotic life while I tried to bore a hole into the map with my laser vision.

  “Wow,” Halloran said. Having read from her teens to forties, her arrests continued though slowed down considerably in her fifties. Some of them still involved her desperate and fruitless quest to locate Rocky-slash-Mr. Rochlin. Her primary means of finding him appeared to involve consuming large quantities of booze and shrieking his name on street corners in various Bay Area cities, as well as accosting attractive female strangers to accuse them of luring her man away when May needed him back to pay property taxes. This woman made my mother look rational and mature, and that was no small feat.

  “Why did you say wow? Don’t hold out on me,” I said when Halloran didn’t elaborate.

  “She got herself a nose ring and a nice, shiny tattoo in her second-to-last mug shot here, a shooting star over her right eyebrow. Taken in for stealing food from a grocery store in Sonoma seven years ago. She said she couldn’t afford to pay because of those property taxes. And in this last one, she’s lost the nose ring but gotten another star on her cheek and a little crescent moon on her temple. Insisted at the station they had to call her Star instead of May. Guess Flamingo wasn’t working out the way she planned.”

  “What was her last arrest for?”

  “It was here in Darby four years ago, for creating a disturbance at a Grenol’s Drugstore. She had a meltdown when they wouldn’t let her return an item without any proof she’d bought it there. Upended two Easter candy displays in a fit and the manager called 911. She stomped out and got picked up while shrieking on the street corner that Grenol’s robbed her blind. She wasn’t drunk, just pissed off. Yelled nonsense on the drive, stuff about Rocky and money and how she was a famous tits-and-ass dancer when she was younger and on like that. She got the stars on her face because she’s a star, she said, shining bright in the night. Then she segued into dick jokes and laughing, after that she was screaming about Grenol’s again. The arresting officer must have thought she was having some kind of mental breakdown back there. Then the crazy shut off and she was pretty normal by the time they arrived at the station.”

  “Are they blue? Her tattoos?”

  “Yup. Two blue stars and a blue crescent. Look pretty shitty.”

  “Like splotches at a distance?”

  “Have a look. You’re farther away.”

  I studied his screen. The cheap, poorly done tattoos could have been mistaken for bright blue stickers. Especially by someone who had compromised vision. Maybe John Macdonald hadn’t given a false address to Checker but that of a property his mother was renting for storage space.

  He couldn’t have lived there in its condition, and the larger props in the first maze could not have come from that studio. There was no room left for all of those partitions; the boxes extended up almost to the ceiling and the pathway had been quite narrow.

  Reuter was going to be happy to learn his theory was correct. “May Macdonald is a hoarder,” I said.

  “Well, I got too much stuff in my garage,” Halloran admitted.

  “That was junk at the studio, Jake,” I said. “You saw it. Pieces of metal, plywood, torn clothes covered in mouse shit, moldy books and pictures. Trash, all of it, and it has to be hers. She was the last person seen going in there.”

  “She told Miner that her name was Amanda then,” Halloran said. “Just another alias. It doesn’t sound like she was using those names to stay out of trouble, not when she’d tell cops her legal name. Must be just something she does, takes on a new persona at the drop of a hat. Like a show name.”

  “Hey, if I was going to shake it at a titty bar, I wouldn’t introduce myself as Bluebonnet. My porn name is Diamond Juggs,” I said.

  “Thank God, I was worried for a moment there that you might have stolen my porn name.”

  “No, Floppy Cox doesn’t work as well for a woman. So Amanda-Flamingo-Star-May Macdonald had to have been the one to take the office furniture behind the Pan-Tastic in 1997. Her son would have been too young at the time to be responsible.”

  Halloran swiveled in his chair. “But she didn’t rent that studio until 2008, according to Miner.”

  “No, so she took the stuff somewhere else, possibly home with her. It would have taken several trips if all she had to move it with was a pick-up.”

  “A pick-up that’s not registered to her and she isn’t even licensed to drive.”

  “She had to live right nearby the business,” I said, slapping the map where Pan-Tastic was located. “I know she represents herself as being homeless, but she can’t be! Why would she be yelling about property taxes then? The house she lives or lived in at the time could be under Rochlin’s name alone.” I spread my fingers out from Pan-Tastic to look at the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity.

  “She didn’t have to be that close,” Halloran remarked. “There wasn’t any traffic in the night to stall her.”

  “Unless she happened to have a big van to do it all at once, then she was making runs. Load up, drive home, unload, drive back, load up again . . . She took a lot of shit that night in a short space of time, and all on her own unless she dragged the kid along to help or had a friend. She had to be close!” I insisted. “Jake, look up just Rochlin in Darby.”

  Tap-tap-tap.

  “Forty-two people pop up in Darby with the last name Rochlin.” Halloran scrolled down the results to check them out.

  “Read me their street addresses.”

  He read them out slowly as I stuck purple pins into the map. Once I pushed the last one in, I looked at the area around Pan-Tastic Breads. Two people named Rochlin were within a mile of it; five more were within two miles. Going out three miles added another six to the list.

  “She could st
ill be living there today,” I said. “Maybe Mr. Rocky-slash-Rochlin walked out all of those years ago and left his vehicle and house in the care of his girlfriend and their son. He can’t have been much more mentally stable than she. And when the son wants to set up a maze, perhaps he goes back to his mother’s house and helps himself to the hoards of crap she’s been collecting for decades.”

  “Well, there’s still some sunlight left in this day. Let’s get the closest addresses to Pan-Tastic checked out first and see if we can’t find this creep’s mommy dearest,” Halloran said, sending a list of the names and addresses to his cell phone. We headed for the door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We worked within the three-mile radius to Pan-Tastic Breads, crossing off Rochlin after Rochlin. One was a harried single mother with three children under the age of eight. They had moved to California from Minnesota only six months ago. A pair of Rochlins at another address turned out to be brothers in their early twenties, their apartment filled with New Age T-shirts they made and sold. They had lived in Darby all their lives, high school yearbooks lined up on a makeshift bookshelf and pinned there with bongs.

  A third address was to a senior living center, where a very old man named Edgar Rochlin was so excited to have visitors that he ferried his walker to the kitchen and got out a bowl of candies to share. At the fourth residence, a pet sitter answered the door and welcomed us in. Jerry and Thomas Rochlin were a married couple with a child and in Florida on vacation, as they had been for the last three weeks. They were due to return the next morning. A picture on the wall was of two middle-aged black men holding an adorable little girl and a dog. Then we went to the next address on the list, the door answered by a guy in a knee brace. He’d had an ACL replacement just a week before.

  None of them knew anyone named May or John Macdonald, or a man named Rocky. Halloran and I stopped for food and then pressed on, the end-of-day traffic slowing us down as we plodded on through the list. “We can expand the search tomorrow if none of these ones pan out,” he said.

  Feeling a little defeated, I said, “I was so sure.”

  “I already told you not to get like this. It’s only over when it’s over, and it’s not over yet. Think about something fun. Like dating.”

  “Dating is only fun in retrospect when you’re married.”

  He opened his mouth, prepared to argue, and sank back in his seat. “All right, I can’t say I disagree. I had a real bad date about a year before I met my wife.”

  As we waited at a red light, I said, “Do tell.”

  “Sure you don’t want to save this one for a stake-out? It’s a good stake-out story.”

  “Now. I need it now.”

  Halloran acquiesced. “It was a blind date back when I was a junior in college. A friend set us up as a joke and I didn’t catch on until it was too late. What was her name?” He paused to dredge it up from his memories. “Ingrid. Ingrid Something-or-Other. My friend showed me a picture of her and my heart about stopped. She was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. Red hair to her waist, ivory skin, green eyes, toned from tennis. I couldn’t believe she was single. So I picked up Ingrid Something-or-Other and took her out to a deli for lunch since she worked afternoons through evenings at a library. And then I proceeded to sit there in the booth for a full hour while she proselytized at me. The Lord this, the Lord that, have I been saved, how she feels sorry for Jews for missing out on Christmas, what’s my favorite Bible verse, how she was going to stay a virgin until her wedding night but I shouldn’t worry because her holy hole is off-limits but her other holes are okay. Wink-wink.”

  “Her holy hole,” I said in appreciation as the light changed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “That’s what she called it. She planned out our wedding, debated venues to have it, what kind of flowers, seating arrangements and food at the reception, where to have the honeymoon. Then she selected our future kids’ names, wanted two sets of twins and for me to become a doctor so she could be a stay-at-home mother, and burst into tears because her big brother was living in sin with an agnostic lady and this would break up their eternal family. Keep in mind that this was all at the top of her lungs and with barely any input from me. By that point I wasn’t interested in her holy hole or any other holes she had. I just wanted to leave. I’ve never been so thrilled to see the check coming and I gave my friend hell when I got back to the dorm. He thought it was hysterical.”

  I flailed about in the passenger seat to remove my coat. It was too hot to wear it and had been all afternoon, but I’d kept it on because inertia was a powerful thing. “Had he gone on a date with her in the past to know she’d do that?”

  “No, he grew up with her living just across the street and their families hung out all the time. He said she’d always been crackers. I never let him set me up with anyone after that. The rest of the dating I did . . . well, no one ever came close to loony Ingrid, but there wasn’t much chemistry until Laila. It was just right with her from the moment we met. I tell my girls there are two ways to know a relationship isn’t going to go anywhere good: if you’re trying to change him, or he’s trying to change you. Then it’s a fantasy, not a relationship. People can grow if they want to, all of us should grow, but they don’t change into the fantasy you have in your head of them. Rosie said she trusts Hollywood more than me, so she’s holding out for her dark and dangerous bad boy vampire stalker soul mate who’s going to save her from herself while she teaches him how to love.”

  With satisfaction at being freed, I dumped my coat into the back. “She’s got a smart mouth.”

  “They both got smart mouths, Rosie and Lily.”

  “Did you like JJ? You met him a few times.”

  “Not really.”

  “Why?”

  “Seemed kind of full of himself. Wanting to know how much I paid for my house so he could tell me how much more he’d paid for his, same with the car, same with vacations. It was like a little dick-swinging contest, never too over the top but just annoying. He knew how to keep it under wraps most of the time, but then he got the money from his dead dad and the mask fell away. I wasn’t surprised when you told me that he’d run off. You’ll find someone better than him.”

  “Maybe I won’t.”

  “Why not?” Halloran countered, ever a half glass full temperament.

  “I think dating gets harder as you get older,” I said as he turned into a neighborhood of single-family homes. “There’s so much more you aren’t willing to put up with. The stuff that you found edgy and exciting at twenty-one, it looks idiotic at forty-one. You don’t want to play games anymore. You don’t have the time or the energy.”

  “What attracted you to JJ?”

  “He was so settled and secure. I’d never had that before. It wasn’t until later I saw how much insecurity lay beneath.”

  “You were more deferential with him than I’d ever seen you. It was what he wanted for dinner and what he wanted to see on vacation. Where did you go?”

  “On hiatus, apparently.”

  “Yeah, well, find a guy you can be your good old bitchy self with. And I say it with love. If Harley Grave can find someone to put up with her sour face and sailor’s mouth, for God’s sake, so can you.”

  He parked in front of a tidy blue house, where a woman named Jane Rochlin-Spaner lived. The yard was fenced, and a heavy, automatic gate blocked the driveway. Bicycles and tricycles, wagons and scooters were lined up beside the house. All of it looked very well loved from years of use.

  A smaller gate let us into the front yard, and we went up the stairs to the porch. Halloran knocked on the door. Nobody answered, so I peeked through the window where the curtain was parted. “Looks like a home daycare from the amount of highchairs and toys everywhere.”

  “Nobody in their right mind would leave a toddler with May Macdonald,” Halloran said with absolute conviction. “I speak not even as a father but a decent human being.”

  I shielded my eyes with my hands from the glar
e of the sun on the window. “There’s a calendar on the wall. Looks like they’re at the library for Reading Time. They’re due to be back any minute. Parent pick-up is right under that.”

  From the living room I could see into the kitchen, and through the big glass door was the backyard. There was a sandbox and slide structure out there, two swings dangling from a thick wooden beam. I caught sight of a cluster of framed pictures on a high shelf in the living room. Neither May Macdonald nor John Macdonald was in any of the photos in the front row.

  We waited. Within five minutes, a green minivan came down the street and pulled up to the gate. A sun visor lowered and the gate creaked open, triggered by a mechanism in the vehicle. Pulling in, the driver stopped and lowered the window as the gate shut behind her. “Hello! May I help you?”

  A quick conversation with the pleasantly plump older woman revealed this wasn’t the Rochlin we wanted. “But there are plenty of Rochlins in northern California and Oregon!” she said as she released the young kids from their car seats. Laughing and shouting, they ran down the driveway to play on the slides in back. “I’m one of seven children and my father was one of ten, and his father fourteen! I don’t know anyone ever involved with a woman named May or with a son named John, but I have so many first and second and third cousins and a great many of them I’ve never met.”

  Once back in the car, we headed for the last address of the day. It was on the edge of the city on its southwest side. The houses grew older as we passed from one block to the next. Not seedy but shabby, they were once proud Victorians, their heyday passed but small signs of their former attractiveness still evident. To avoid returning to the packed traffic on the main thoroughfares, I navigated through the quiet residential streets as Halloran looked with pleasure at the architecture. “These have character,” he said. “Must be a hundred years old or more, some of them. I’ve never been over here.”