The Disappearance

by J. F. Freedman

  “And tell him about you and her, too?” Luke scoffs. “Doug Lancaster not only would’ve fired you, he’d have blackballed you from the business. You’d be doing the weekend weather in Nome, Alaska, if you got lucky.”

  “I know,” Allison admits.

  “You’re lying to me again. You didn’t try to talk her into coming clean with her old man. You talked her out of it, didn’t you?”

  Allison’s no-answer says everything Luke needs to know.

  “Did Nicole know?” he asks.

  Allison shakes his head. “She wasn’t concerned that I might have slept with Glenna a few times. That wasn’t the problem.”

  “She’d had enough to pull the plug once you decided to move south and give her the out, didn’t she?”

  An unhappy nod. “It was our close friendship she didn’t like. Time taken away from her. And that’s the truth.”

  Luke takes a deep slow-down breath. This is too surreal. “How did Glenna take your leaving town?” he asks. “Losing her favorite—it sounds like only—confidant?”

  “She was upset.”

  “Upset? She wasn’t angry? She didn’t think you’d led her on? She wasn’t harboring any romantic fantasies?”

  Allison shakes his head emphatically. “We hadn’t slept together for a long time—not since Emma’s murder. Besides, she knew how careers like mine work.”

  “She may have known in her head, but that doesn’t mean she took it okay, does it?”

  Allison nods. “All right—she took it badly.”

  “Was she planning on coming down and seeing you once you were set up in L.A.?”

  Allison shakes his head. “I told her we had to end it—our friendship. We both had to start anew.”

  “That’s pretty callous. You’re a prince, Joe.”

  “No,” Allison says sharply. “My behavior with Glenna was anything but callous. She had no one to turn to. I was a lifesaver for her for a long time, believe me.”

  Luke gets up and paces around. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. You’ve put us in a terrible position, Joe, I’m sure you understand that.”

  “Because I lied to you.”

  “Yes.” Luke sits back down. “I’ve got to think about all this. I may not be able to work with you as I have.”

  Allison goes pale.

  “What about this divorce deal? Did she actually go so far as to discuss it with a lawyer, to your knowledge?”

  “Check it out if you don’t believe me,” Allison says. “Her lawyer was Walt Turcotte. He handled Glenna’s side of the divorce when it finally happened. Ask him.” He pauses. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but Emma’s death was a liberation for Glenna. A horrible way for it to happen, but she did get her freedom out of it.”

  Luke looks away. What’s freedom from a bad marriage going for these days, he wonders? The price Glenna Lancaster paid was way too high for what she got in return.

  Walt Turcotte, attorney-at-law, distinguished graduate of Stanford Law School, has for twenty years been the city’s preeminent divorce attorney. He sits behind his large rosewood desk, smiling warily at Luke Garrison, a friend and boon companion in the good old days. “You’re the second most unpopular man in this city right now,” Turcotte quips, after they exchange greetings and sit down. He goes on, “Seriously, it’s been too long a time, Luke. I’d assumed you’d resurface someday, but not under these auspices. Friend to friend—why the hell are you doing this?”

  Luke gives Turcotte the short version. His fellow lawyer is under-impressed with the validity of the reasons, but accepts them at face value. “Around my second year in law school I made the decision not to moralize about my work,” he tells Luke. “Everybody else saw the law as some kind of political tool, but to me it was the foundation that held up the building, solid and unswayable. I don’t judge, and I try to hold my own biases in check.” Pressing a button others might shy away from, he says, “Ralph Tucker was a victim of a fallible system that’s better than any of the other fallible systems we’ve tried, so I could sleep with what happened.”

  “I thought I could, too,” Luke says, “but it turned out I couldn’t.”

  Turcotte leans back in his chair. “You want to talk to me about Glenna Lancaster?”

  “Yes.”

  Turcotte thumbs open a file resting on the corner of his desk. “This is attorney-client privilege, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “I talked to her this morning, after you called. She’s okay about me talking to you about her looking into getting a divorce from Doug before Emma was killed. Which surprised me, since you’re Joe Allison’s lawyer, but it’s her decision.”

  He doesn’t know, Luke realizes with a start. That Glenna and Allison were lovers. He has to be wary here, it isn’t his place to tell Turcotte about that. Turcotte would kick him out of his office if he knew about the affair.

  “Maybe she doesn’t think Allison did it,” Luke says carefully. “They were close friends, according to him. I’m sure she wants her daughter’s murder avenged, but not at the expense of the wrong man.”

  A cloud comes over Turcotte’s face. “I doubt that. But she has agreed to let me brief you on some of her history. So shoot—what’re you looking for?”

  “Did Glenna Lancaster discuss divorce with you before Emma was kidnapped?” The affair is going to stay hidden, at least for now.

  Turcotte nods. “Yes, she did.”

  “Seriously, or was it an exploratory thing?”

  “It was serious. She wanted to nail his scalp to the wall. Given their financial situation, she would’ve scored mightily. She did anyway, when they finally split.”

  “Did she have a specific reason? Or reasons?”

  Turcotte hesitates a moment before answering. “Adultery.”

  “Doug was involved with someone else?”

  “Elses. Plural.”

  “Any names you could throw my way?”

  Turcotte thinks about that request. “We’re getting in over our heads here, Luke,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t see how this relates to your defense strategy.”

  Luke wants this information, so he makes a decision. “If I tell you a deep, dark, juicy secret, will you tell me some of yours?”

  “Depends on the quality of the information,” Turcotte answers, intrigued.

  “This is me and you, Walt. Strictest confidence.”

  Turcotte hesitates. “Okay.”

  “Doug Lancaster made me a substantial offer to turn down Joe Allison.”

  Turcotte gapes at him. “No way!”

  “He did. In the interest of justice, of course.” Luke leans back, having played his hole card. “Now, what’re you going to give me in return?”

  “What do you want?” Turcotte asks cautiously.

  “Did Glenna have a P.I. on Doug’s case?”

  Turcotte nods. “Several.”

  “Did they come up with anything?” He leans closer to Turcotte. “Here’s why I ask. If Doug Lancaster was screwing around, who knows what kinds of people could be attached to it? He’s screwing some bimbo who knows he’s richer than God and she’s got a whacked-out boyfriend who thinks the daddy will pay big bucks for the baby, so the boyfriend goes in and snatches Emma and it turns to shit and somehow Joe Allison gets framed.” He sits back. “Stranger things have happened. I’m going to turn over every single rock in California, if I think there’s something under one of them.”

  Turcotte exhales, impressed at the passion of Luke’s wild thinking. “Okay,” he agrees. “I can help you. Not that it’ll help your case, but I have information for you.”

  “Thanks. By the way,” Luke says, remembering the other part of this expedition, “did Glenna Lancaster ever talk to you about someone she might be seeing? Since she didn’t have her husband’s attention as much as she wanted? Some secret love interest she was hatching?” He has to nail down whether or not Turcotte knows about Glenna and Joe, America’s favorite clandestine couple.


  Turcotte nods slowly. “There was someone.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. Why?” he asks. “Do you think whoever it was might be connected? A parallel track to the Doug Lancaster theory?”

  “No,” Luke lies. “I was just wondering.” When Turcotte finally finds out about this, it’ll be the end of the friendship, one of the few he has left.

  Turcotte picks up the file folder he’s been pushing around his desk. “The detective reports Glenna Lancaster compiled. I want them back and I don’t want anyone to know you have them. I don’t want my reputation sullied, even with my client’s permission.” He finger-riffs through the reports. “Most of them didn’t check out—Doug was good at covering his tracks.” He hands the files across the desk.

  Luke sticks them in his briefcase. “No one’s going to know.”

  Turcotte walks him to the door. “Like I said, it’s good to see you again. Take care of yourself. And don’t be a martyr to the cause. It isn’t worth it.”

  The files Glenna Lancaster’s sleuths compiled are okay. They show a pattern of screwing around on Doug Lancaster’s part that’s steady and consistent over a period of years. But they go back several years—the most recent are more than a year old—and to Luke’s practiced eye, the trails seem cold. One thing they do trigger in his mind, however, is that screwing around on his wife was the man’s m.o. for a long time. According to these reports, almost every time Doug Lancaster was out of town he was seeing a lover, alongside whatever legitimate business he was attending to. So it seems logical that on the night Emma was abducted, when her father was out of town on business, he would be seeing someone too.

  One thing is certain, Luke wants to know where Doug Lancaster was that night. Luke can’t conceive of a man being involved in his own daughter’s kidnapping and murder—that would be horrendous—but it’s happened before. If Doug was catting around though, he’d have an alibi for his time that night. It would be ugly and messy and he’d lose sympathy points, but better that than the alternative.

  He has another reason to check this out, too—the personal reason, the one that’s been festering—Doug Lancaster’s crude, insulting move to try to buy him off. The more he thinks about it, the more dismissive he realizes it was: the act of a superior to an inferior, a boss to an employee. King to serf is the best analogy, to be brutally honest.

  He appreciates that the man lost the most precious thing in his life, that his life will be damaged forever. He’d feel for anyone in that situation, friend or foe. But the idea that he or any lawyer could be bought off a case with the stroke of a pen on a check is outrageous. And what makes this particularly outrageous is that Doug Lancaster thought—not thought, assumed—he’d go for it. That Luke Garrison has become such a loser in the eyes of this community.

  The drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, especially from Oxnard to Malibu, is one of the great motorcycle runs in California. The ocean on one side, the Santa Monica mountains on the other, you pass beach after glorious beach of surfers, campers, hikers, volleyballers, the sun a golden mantle shining off the water, the air fresh, clean, bracing, smelling of salt and sea life, and the bodies stunning, women and men, California sun worshipers all buffed and sleek, moving on the sand, lying on it, swimming in the water. Golden beaches of the golden people of the Golden State.

  On a motorcycle, like a vintage Triumph, you feel a part of the life you’re riding through, a piece of the completeness. Luke knows—he’s done this route many times over the years. This, along with the ride up Highway 1 to Big Sur, is his favorite.

  But some coward put his machine in the ground, and he hasn’t gotten around to buying another one. He wants the right bike, and finding the right motorcycle takes time. Besides, he’s still in mourning for the late, lamented Triumph. He can’t desecrate its memory by replacing it so soon after its demise. So he’s driving a rental Toyota. All the windows are down, he feels the air rushing by on his face, but it isn’t the same thing.

  The one benefit of being in a car instead of on a motorcycle is that on a motorcycle you’re engaged in the ride one hundred percent; you have to be, or you can become a statistic lickety-split. In a car you can think, let your mind wander.

  Which is what Luke’s doing. He’s evolving a hypothesis, which is a reason why he’s driving down to L.A. this morning.

  It’s a risky scenario. Buying into it means believing, much more than he has previously, Joe Allison’s assertion that he was framed by someone else, the real kidnapper/killer. And it involves doing something he’s always detested—putting the victim on trial. Only a desperate defense attorney would be thinking along these lines. But as of this moment, he has nowhere else to go.

  His hypothesis goes as follows:

  1. The kidnapper and Emma Lancaster knew each other. (And he wasn’t Joe Allison. Unless Luke, Allison’s lawyer, buys that, he’s dead.) She let him wrap her up in a blanket and carry her away without struggling. In fact, the abduction wasn’t a kidnapping at all. In Luke’s mind, this point is unquestionable.

  2. Emma Lancaster was pregnant; this much is in the record. It stands to reason that whoever carried her away got her pregnant.

  3. The gazebo was a fuck pad. A reasonable deduction is that Emma and her lover had some of their trysts there.

  Here’s where the big leap comes:

  4. Emma’s lover didn’t know she was pregnant. She tells him that night. Maybe she’s going to go public with it, bust him. He panics and kills her.

  That’s his number one scenario. He has a number two as well.

  1. Again, Emma knew her “abductor,” but he wasn’t her lover.

  2. Whoever carried her out of her bedroom knew Emma was pregnant.

  3. The abductor was taking her to get an abortion, with “kidnapping” to explain her absence.

  4. Something unexpected happened, with or without reference to her pregnancy. The “abductor” kills her, etc.

  They both make sense, meaning they could have happened, although they seem pathetic stretches to Luke, thinking about them on his sunny drive down the coast. The idea that Emma was being taken to get an abortion is particularly messy, since she had friends sleeping over. But maybe the abortion had been planned, and the friends were an afterthought; too late not to go through with it.

  That, however, is not the most serious problem. The real problem with these scenarios is that all the criteria could easily fit Joe Allison, literally her mother’s lover.

  In the first scenario, Joe Allison, despite his denial, could have been Emma Lancaster’s lover too. Joe Allison could have knocked her up—the drugstore was out of pink rubbers one day, so he went bare-back, with dismal results. He didn’t know she was pregnant, that night she told him, and furthermore she was going to tell daddy, his boss. He freaked and killed her and did the rest.

  Or, in a combination of the scenarios, he did know she was with child, took her to get rid of it, bad results, same bad ending.

  And if scenario number two is real, it still could be Joe. Emma is too ashamed and frightened to tell her parents she’s pregnant. She confides in Joe, who agrees to help her. Something terrible, beyond an abortion, happens, he panics, and so forth.

  Her key ring was found in Joe Allison’s car. Incontrovertible. The same brand of condoms found on the Lancaster property was found in his house, also without question. That he didn’t use rubbers with Nicole, his woman, only makes things worse.

  Allison and Emma knew each other. They spent time in each other’s company. He was desirable, she was a fruit too ripe and tempting not to pluck. Nature took its course. Humbert and Lolita. A match made in tabloid heaven.

  Was Emma Lancaster ever at Allison’s house by herself, without her mother present? He has to get straight with Allison on that. He should have asked the Wilsons that question. He’ll have to go back and do that.

  Scenario number two presents its own set of problems for Allison. If he wasn’t Emma’s lover,
then who was? Who would she know and trust well enough to let the mystery man carry her out of her bedroom with her friends present?

  The list is frightening. Men who worked at the house? A minister? A sports coach?

  Her father?

  Doug Lancaster knows she’s pregnant and is taking her to get an abortion? That feels completely wrong, and unnecessary. He wouldn’t sneak her out of her bedroom while others are present, with the possibility of being seen, when they could go out of town, to L.A. or San Francisco, have it done without fear of being discovered, come home, and no one’s the wiser. And then he’s going to hide the corpse of his own daughter miles away, letting her lie there and rot, rather than properly burying her? Only a complete monster could do that, and Doug, whatever else Luke thinks of him, is no monster. Is he? He has to know where Doug was that night.

  Palms is a working-class enclave in West Los Angeles, tucked between the tonier areas of Westwood, Cheviot Hills, and the movie studios in Culver City. An old section as far as L.A. goes, it’s been stagnating for decades, not going up, not getting worse. A place to live and work, nothing special.

  The restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, is on a side street in the seedier section of the area. It does just enough business to stay open.

  The owner’s brother, the man Luke drove down to see, is sitting at a table at the rear of the small room. The lunchtime crowd, whatever it was—people who work nearby and want a fast, cheap meal—has come and gone. No one’s in front now except the owner’s brother, who sits hunched over a Tecate in a can. From the way he’s dressed—white shirt unbuttoned, the clip-on bow tie askew, black slacks, black shoes—he’s the waiter. His thick black hair starts a couple inches above his eyebrows, flamboyantly styled with a generous helping of gel.

  Luke introduces himself. “You’re Ramon Huerta?” he asks, slipping into a chair opposite the man.