Gone

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Where were you last night, Mr. Peaty, say between eight p.m. and two a.m.?”

  “Home.”

  “Your place on Guthrie.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Eating,” said Peaty. “Chicken fingers.”

  “Takeout?”

  “Frozen. I heat ’em up. I had a beer.”

  “What brand?”

  “Old Milwaukee. I had three. Then I watched TV, then I went to sleep.”

  “What’d you watch?”

  “Family Feud.”

  “What time did you pop off?”

  “Dunno. The TV was goin’ when I woke up.”

  “What time was that?”

  Peaty curled a muttonchop. “Maybe three.”

  One hour past the bracket Milo had given him.

  “How do you know it was three?”

  “You asked so I said something.”

  “Anything special about three?”

  “Sometimes when I get up I look at the clock and it’s three, or three thirty. Even if I don’t drink a lot, I gotta get up.” Peaty looked at the floor again. “To piss. Sometimes twice or three times.”

  “Let’s hear it for middle age,” said Milo.

  Peaty didn’t answer.

  “How old are you, Mr. Peaty?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  Milo smiled. “You’re a young guy.”

  No answer.

  “How well did you know Michaela Brand?”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Peaty.

  “I didn’t ask you that, sir.”

  “This other stuff you’re asking. Where was I.” Peaty shook his head. “I don’t wanna talk no more.”

  “Just routine,” said Milo, “no reason to get— ”

  Shaking his head, Peaty backed away, toward the door.

  Milo said, “Here we were having a nice conversation, then I ask you how well you knew Michaela Brand and all of a sudden you don’t want to talk. That’s only gonna make me wonder.”

  “It ain’t,” said Peaty, groping for the door handle. He’d left the oak panel slightly ajar and the handle was inches out of reach.

  “Ain’t what?” said Milo.

  “Right. Talking like I did something.” Peaty edged back, found the handle, and shoved, revealing oak floors and walls, a glimmer of stained glass. “I had a beer and went to sleep.”

  “Three beers.”

  No answer.

  “Listen,” said Milo. “No offense intended, but it’s my job to ask questions.”

  Peaty shook his head. “I eat and watch TV. That don’t mean nothing.”

  He stepped into the house, started to close the door. Milo checked it with his shoe. Peaty tensed but let go. His grip on the broom handle swelled his knuckles. He shook his head and stray hairs floated free, landing on thick, rounded shoulders.

  “Mr. Peaty— ”

  “Leave me alone.” More whimper than demand.

  “All we’re trying to do is get some basic facts. So how about we come in and— ”

  Peaty’s hand grabbed the door’s edge. “Not allowed!”

  “We can’t come in?”

  “No! The rules!”

  “Whose rules?”

  “Ms. Dowd’s.”

  “How about I call her? What’s her number?”

  “Dunno.”

  “You work for her but don’t— ”

  “Dunno!”

  Peaty danced backward and shoved the door hard. Milo let it slam.

  We stood on the porch for a few moments. Cars drove up and down the street.

  Milo said, “For all I know he’s got rope and a bloody knife in there. But no damn way to find out.”

  I said nothing.

  He said, “You could argue with me.”

  “There is the fact that he’s weird,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Guy lives on Guthrie off Robertson. You visualizing the same map I am?”

  “Blocks from Michaela. Not much farther to the crime scene.”

  “And he’s weird.” He glanced back at the door. Rang the bell several times.

  No response.

  “Wonder what time he got to work this morning.” Another bell-push. We waited. He put his pad away. “I’d love to check this place out but I’m not even gonna think about heading round back and giving some lawyer an illegal entry angle.”

  He grinned. “One day in and I’ve got trial fantasies. Okay, let’s see what we can do within the boundaries of The Law.”

  We descended the porch and headed for the car.

  “It’s probably no big deal,” he said. “Not getting inside. Even if Peaty is the bad guy, why would he bring evidence to work? What do you think of him probability-wise?”

  “A definite maybe,” I said. “Talking about Michaela clearly made him nervous.”

  “Like he had a crush on her?”

  “She was a beautiful girl.”

  “And way out of his league,” he said. “Working around all those starlet wannabes could be frustrating for a guy like that.”

  We got into the Seville.

  I said, “When Peaty shook his head, stray hairs fell out. Fellow that hirsute and unruly, you’d think he’d have left some trace on the body, or at least at the scene.”

  “Maybe he had time to clean up.”

  “Guess so.”

  “There was some wind last night,” he said. “The body coulda been there a while before the poodle came by. For all we know, the damned dog licked up trace evidence.”

  “The owner let it nose the body?”

  Milo rubbed his face. “The owner claims she yanked it away the minute she saw what it was. Still...”

  I started up the car.

  He said, “I need to be careful not to tunnel in on anyone too quickly.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Sometimes I do that.”

  CHAPTER 9

  A DMV check revealed no vehicles currently registered to Reynold Peaty. No California driver’s license. Ever.

  “Hard to transport a body without wheels,” I said.

  Milo said, “Wonder how he gets to work.”

  “The bus. Or a stretch limo.”

  “Your attempt at humor is refreshing. If he bears further watching, I’ll check out the bus routes, see if he’s a regular.” He laughed.

  I said, “What?”

  “He comes across dumb and weird but think about it: He sweeps up at an acting school.”

  “He was playing us?”

  “The world’s a stage,” he said. “Sure be nice to have the script.”

  “If he was performing, why would he put on a weird act?” I said.

  “True...let’s head back.”

  I drove toward the West L.A. station as he phoned the MTA and learned which buses Peaty would’ve taken from Pico-Robertson to the PlayHouse. Transfers and the need to cover several blocks on foot stretched a half-hour car trip to at least a ninety-minute journey.

  I said, “Michaela’s Honda show up yet?”

  “Nope...you’re thinking Peaty coulda jacked her?”

  “The hoax might’ve given him ideas.”

  “Life imitating art.” He punched numbers on his cell, talked briefly, hung up. “No sign of it yet. But we’re not talking conspicuous. A Civic, black no less. If the plates are off or replaced, it could take a long time to spot it.”

  “If Peaty is the bad guy,” I said, “maybe he decided to drive to work this morning and ditched it within walking distance of the PlayHouse.”

  “That would be pretty damned stupid.”

  “Yes, it would.”

  He chewed his cheek. “Mind turning around?”

  * * *

  We cruised the half-mile radius surrounding the acting school, peering up and down streets and alleys, driveways and parking lots. Taking more than an hour, then expanding to another half mile and spending another hundred minutes. Spotting lots of Civics, three of them black, all with plates
that checked out.

  On the way back to the station, Milo tried the coroner’s office and learned that Michaela’s autopsy was scheduled in four days, maybe longer if the body count stayed high. “Any way to prioritize? Yeah, yeah, I know...but if there’s anything you can do. Appreciate it, this one could get complicated.”

  * * *

  I sat in the spare chair of Milo’s tiny, windowless office as he tried to plug Reynold Peaty into the data banks. His computer took a long time to sputter to life, even longer for icons to fill the screen. Then they disappeared and the screen went black and he started all over again.

  Fourth PC in eight months, yet another hand-me-down, this one from a prep school in Pacific Palisades. The last few donated machines had enjoyed the shelf life of raw milk. In between Clunkers Two and Three, Milo had paid for a high-priced laptop with his own money, only to see some glitch in the station’s electrical system fry his hard drive.

  As the disk drives ground on, he sprang up, muttering about “advanced middle age” and “plumbing,” and left for a few minutes. Returning with two cups of coffee, he handed one to me, drank his, snatched a cheap cigarillo from his desk drawer, unwrapped it, and jammed the unlit cylinder between his incisors. Tapping his fingers as he stared at the screen, he bit down too hard, splintered the cigar, wiped tobacco shreds from his lips. Tossing the Nicaraguan pacifier, he got himself another.

  Smoking’s prohibited anywhere in the building. Sometimes he lights up, anyway. Today he was too antsy to enjoy the fruits of misdemeanor. As the computer struggled to resuscitate, he sorted through his messages and I reviewed the prelim on Michaela Brand, studied the crime scene photos.

  Beautiful golden face turned a familiar green-gray.

  Milo grimaced as the screen flashed and dimmed and flashed. “If you want to translate War and Peace, feel free to do so.”

  I tasted the coffee, put it aside, closed my eyes, and tried to think of nothing. Sound came through the walls, too murky to classify.

  Milo’s space is at the end of a hall on the second floor, set well apart from the detectives’ room. Not an overcrowding issue; he’s set apart. Listed on the books as a lieutenant, but he’s got no administrative duties and continues to work cases.

  It’s part of a deal he made with the former police chief, a cozy bit of politics that allowed the chief to retire rich and unbothered by criminal charges and Milo to remain in the department.

  As long as his clearance rate stays high, and he doesn’t flaunt his sexual preferences, no one bothers him. But the new chief’s big on drastic change and Milo keeps waiting for the memo that will disrupt his life.

  Meanwhile, he works.

  Whir-whir, burp, click-click. He sat up. “Okay, here we go...” He typed. “No state record, too bad...let’s try NCIC. C’mon baby, give it to Uncle Milo...yes!”

  He pushed a button and the old dot-matrix printer near his feet began scrolling paper. Yanking out the sheets, he tore on the perforated line, read, handed them to me.

  Reynold Peaty had accumulated four felony convictions in Nevada. Burglary thirteen years ago in Reno, a Peeping Tom three years later in that same city pled down to public intoxication/disturbing the peace, two drunk driving violations in Laughlin, seven and eight years ago.

  “He’s still drinking,” I said. “Three beers he admits to. A long-standing alcohol problem would account for no driver’s license.”

  “Booze-hound peeper. You see those tattoos?”

  “Jailbird. But no felonies on record since he crossed the border five years ago.”

  “That impress you mightily?”

  “Nope.”

  “What impresses me,” he said, “is the combination of burglary and voyeurism.”

  “Breaking in for the sexual thrill,” I said. “All those DNA matches that end up turning burglars into rapists.”

  “Booze to lower inhibitions, young sexy girls parading in and out. It’s a lovely combination.”

  * * *

  We drove to Reynold Peaty’s place on Guthrie Avenue, clocking the route from the dump site along the way. In moderate traffic, only a seven-minute traverse of Beverlywood’s impeccable, tree-lined streets. After dark, even shorter.

  On the first block east of Roberston the neighborhood was apartments and the maintenance was sketchier. Peaty’s second-floor unit was one of ten in an ash-colored two-story box. The live-in manager was a woman in her seventies named Ertha Stadlbraun. Tall, thin, angular, with skin the color of bittersweet chocolate and marcelled gray hair, she said, “The crazy white fellow.”

  She invited us into her ground-floor flat for tea and sat us on a lemon-colored, pressed-velvet, camelback couch. The living room was compulsively ordered, with olive carpeting, ceramic lamps, bric-a-brac on open shelves. A suite of what used to be called Mediterranean furniture crowded the space. An airbrushed portrait of Martin Luther King dominated the wall over the couch, flanked by school photos of a dozen or so smiling children.

  Ertha Stadlbraun had come to the door wearing a housecoat. Excusing herself, she disappeared into a bedroom and came back wearing a blue shift patterned with clocks, matching pumps with chunky heels. Her cologne evoked the cosmetics counter at some midsized department store from my Midwest childhood. What my mother used to call “toilet water.”

  “Thanks for the tea, ma’am,” said Milo.

  “Hot enough, gentlemen?”

  “Perfect,” said Milo, sipping orange pekoe to demonstrate. He eyed the school pictures. “Grandchildren?”

  “Grandchildren and godchildren,” said Ertha Stadlbraun. “And two neighbor children I raised after their mother died young. Sure you don’t want sugar? Or fruit or cookies?”

  “No, thanks, Mrs. Stadlbraun. Nice of you.”

  “What is?”

  “Taking in a neighbor’s kids.”

  Ertha Stadlbraun waved away the praise and reached for the sugar bowl. “My glucose level, I shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to, anyway.” Two heaping teaspoons of white powder snowed into her cup. “So what is it you want to know about the crazy fellow?”

  “How crazy is he, ma’am?”

  Stadlbraun sat back, smoothed the shift over her knees. “Let me explain why I pointed out he was white. It’s not because I resent him for that. It’s because he’s the only white person here.”

  “Is that unusual?” said Milo.

  “Are you familiar with this neighborhood?”

  Milo nodded.

  Ertha Stadlbraun said, “Then you know. Some of the single houses are going white again but the rentals are Mexican. Once in a while you get a hippie type with no credit rating wanting to rent. Mostly we’ve got the Mexicans coming in. Waves of them. Our building is me and Mrs. Lowery and Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, who’re really old, on the black side. The rest are Mexican. Except for him.”

  “Does that pose problems?”

  “People think he’s strange. Not because he raves and rants, because he’s too quiet. You can’t communicate with the man.”

  “Never talks at all?”

  “Person won’t look another person in the eye,” said Ertha Stadlbraun, “makes everyone nervous.”

  “Antisocial,” I said.

  “Someone walks your way, you say hello because when you were a child, you learned proper manners from your mama. But this person didn’t learn and doesn’t have the courtesy to reply. He lurks around— that’s the word for it. Lurk. Like that butler on that old TV show. He reminds me of that fellow.”

  “The Addams Family,” said Milo. “Lurch.”

  “Lurch, lurk, same difference. The point is, he’s always got his head down, staring at the ground, like he’s looking for some treasure.” She pushed her head forward, turtlelike, bent her neck sharply and gawked at her carpet. “Just like this. How he sees where he’s going is a mystery to me.”

  “He do anything else that makes you nervous, ma’am?”

  “These questions of yours are making me nervous.”

&nb
sp; “Routine, ma’am. Does he do— ”