“It’s more gray than red,” Decker grumped.
“It’s still has plenty of red in it. So does your mustache. And you’ve got a lot of it…head hair. What you really need to look hip is a soul patch.”
“I’m beyond trying to look hip. All I want is to look appropriate so I don’t embarrass my teenage daughter.”
“I thought that was the purpose of parents of teenagers, to embarrass them.”
She had a definite point. Nothing was as much fun as to see his kids squirm at his misbehaviors. “So what’s going on with the graffiti and the looting?”
“We’ve gotten calls about homes being tagged.”
“How did that happen with units patrolling the area twenty-four/ seven?”
“The taggers are wily guys. They’re also not afraid of heights. We found signatures on the 405 Freeway overpass, and a couple of twenty-foot-high billboards. There’s also one on the top of the Parker/Doddard building, which has to be seven stories high.”
“Criminal Sherpas. Send them out to Everest where they can do some good.”
“I don’t think we’d like to see their signature in the snow, especially if we think what they might use to write with.”
Decker let go with a deep laugh. It felt good. “Not a pretty image. So what’s going on with the looting? Who’s reporting the activity?”
“Anonymous phone calls.” Marge laughed. “Since the residents aren’t back in the area to substantiate the claims, I’m thinking that may be thieves reporting on other thieves.”
“Any arrests?”
“A few for burglary, but that hasn’t deterred the felons. You know how it is, Loo. If houses are left unattended, crime is going to happen even with a strong police presence. The bad boys love to take chances. It’s like the tented houses when the owner fumigates for termites. There are always one or two yutzes who think they can beat the system and make it out before poisonous gas renders them unconscious.”
“How many looting complaints have been called in?”
“About a dozen.”
“Okay. Assign someone to call up the owners of the looted houses and have someone meet them there. Do a quick search inside to see if something is missing. That way if something has been stolen, they can contact their insurance agency right away.”
“I’ll get to it right away.”
“Thanks, Marge.”
“Leave the door open?”
“Absolutely.”
After she left, Decker looked around his private space. It was small, with used furniture, but it had walls that reached the ceiling and a door that made it an office as opposed to a cubicle. He was even lucky enough to have an outside window, although it didn’t open. It wasn’t big, but it usually let in enough light to add a pinch of cheer. Today the sash framed a gunmetal-gray sky. Ash had collected on the sill. He ran his hands through his gray-yet-still-red-according-to-Marge hair. He was still tired, but didn’t dare bitch about it, not when he looked down at all the message slips.
His fingers dialed the first number. A young male voice answered the call. Decker introduced himself and asked for Estelle Greenberg. The voice told him to hold on a second and then it called out, “Ma, police are on the phone.”
The woman who came on the line spoke before he uttered a word. “You found her!”
“Mrs. Greenberg, this Lieutenant Peter Decker of the Los Angeles Police—”
“Yes, yes…did you find my daughter?”
“And your daughter is…”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Why are you calling me if you don’t even know why I called?”
So much displaced anger. Decker rode with it. “I was just given a message. I’m sorry to upset you. Believe me, that isn’t my intention.”
“Did you find my daughter?” She was yelling over the phone.
“We haven’t recovered any bodies from the affected area,” Decker explained. “It’s just too hot and dangerous to search.”
“Then why are you wasting my time?” The fury in her voice barely overlay her desperation.
“First of all, I want to tell you how sorry I am. Second, I want to explain why I called you. I’m trying to gather information so that when the investigators do go into the area, they’ll know who they’re looking for. From this conversation, am I correct in assuming that your daughter lived in the affected building?”
The answer didn’t come right away. When it did, it was laced with tears. “Yes.”
“All right. May I please have her name?”
“Delia Greenberg. Apartment 3C.”
“I know the next couple of questions are going to sound moronic and insensitive, but I have to ask them anyway. So please forgive me if I upset you. I take it you haven’t heard from Delia since the incident.”
“No.”
“Does she have a cell phone?”
“I tried it a thousand times…” She was weeping. “It goes directly to her voice mail.”
“Okay. Did Delia live with anyone?”
“Alone.”
“So there was no one with her when it happened?”
“I don’t know! There might have been. She had friends stay over sometimes.”
“All right. Do you have any names, perhaps?”
“I don’t know! I can’t think right now!”
“You’re really helping me a lot, Mrs. Greenberg. Thank you for talking to me. One more thing regarding Delia. Do you think that you could obtain a copy of her dental records for identification purposes?”
The request was met with a long, long pause. “Probably,” she whispered.
“They can be sent directly to me or you can bring them in person. You are welcome to come in to the station house at any time or any hour and talk to one of us. There will always be someone here who’ll be familiar with your situation. I’m going to give you my cell number. Feel free to call it at any time.”
“Thank you,” she said without emotion.
Decker rattled off several sets of numbers. Whether the woman was writing any of it down was anyone’s guess. “Is there anything you want to ask me?”
“Who am I talking to again?”
“Lieutenant Peter Decker.”
“You’re a lieutenant?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your captain couldn’t have given me a call?”
“He’d be happy to call you, Mrs. Greenberg.”
“But he didn’t. You did.”
“Yes. If you want to set up an appointment with Captain Strapp—”
“Why should I want to set up an appointment if the man doesn’t have the decency to call me?” She was sobbing. “When do you want the X-rays?”
“How about if I come to your house and we’ll go to the dentist together?”
The woman didn’t answer. All Decker heard was weeping. Then she said, “All right. Do you know where I live?”
“No, but I can take down an address.”
“I don’t live so close to my daughter. She wanted her privacy. I’m all the way in the city.”
“I have a car, I can drive. What’s the address?”
She gave him the street address. “When can you come?”
“How about tomorrow morning around eleven?”
“Eleven would be all right. What do you look like?”
“I’m very tall and have red hair.” That’s turning gray very quickly. “I’ll show you ID at your door. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I know you’re trying to be nice. It’s just…”
She was crying again. Decker could have said, “I know…” Decker could have said, “I understand.” But he didn’t know and he didn’t understand.
Thank God.
3
IT WAS A hard time for the West San Fernando Valley. Even the news that the crash had likely been caused by mechanical failure didn’t stave off the increase in emergency calls, of reported heart attacks, asthma attacks, and fainting spells.
The week of the crash,
Decker had worked on casino time, never seeing the light of day, never knowing what time it was. He never made it to Rina’s parents’ for Friday-night dinner, nor did he make it over the hill for Shabbat Saturday lunch. There was just too much to do. He did manage to cram in a phone call to his married daughter. Cindy was a grand-theft-auto detective over the hill in Hollywood, and had been doing double duty because so many of the uniformed officers had been diverted to the crash area.
But all things must pass, and eventually the terrible incident that had grabbed headlines in the local papers for two weeks running became old news. Coverage faded and fell to page three, then to page five, then to the back of the front section. Eventually it was relegated to local news until it became yesterday’s news. With the coroner’s investigators working nonstop on the body recoveries, and the NTSB working nonstop on plane and fuselage recovery, the police were permitted to go back to doing police work.
No one would have definitive answers for many months. Maybe it would even be years before the total puzzle was put back together. The nature of the beast required time and patience. Rina had told him that immediately after the crash, people in the area had seemed to move a bit slower, taking more time to smile and say hello. Traffic had been sparser and much more polite. And despite the initial looting and break-ins that had happened directly after the crash, overall monthly crime had actually taken a drop.
A temporary aberration it seemed, because the statisticians reported that the following month, life and crime in the San Fernando Valley had returned to their precrash status.
FORTY-SIX DAYS AFTER the crash, as Decker was looking over the upcoming court cases of his detectives, his extension rang. It was Marissa Kornblatt, one of the three department secretaries who manned the front desk for the squad room. Over the intercom, her voice sounded tentative.
“Excuse me, Lieutenant. I have someone on the line who is demanding to speak to the head honcho.”
“Head honcho?”
“His words, Lieutenant, not mine. His name is Farley Lodestone, and as far as I could make out, he’s ranting about his missing daughter.”
“How old is his daughter?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-eight?”
“I told him our standard policy is thirty-six hours before we file a report, but then he said he’s been waiting over a month and he has had enough.”
The man sounded like a nutcase. Decker said, “Why don’t you patch the call to Matt Thurgood and have him take a missing-persons report—”
“Lieutenant, Mr. Lodestone is screaming that it’s a homicide. I don’t think he’s going to be happy with an MP report…sir.”
“I’ll take it.” Decker punched the blinking light. “Lieutenant Decker.”
“Lieutenant?” The voice was surprised. “Finally! Now we’re getting somewhere! You know how many phone calls I’ve made over the last few days?”
“How can I help you, sir?”
“Farley Lodestone is the name and you certainly can help me, Lieutenant Deckman. My stepdaughter’s missing. Me and her mom haven’t heard from her in forty-six days. We thought about it and thought about it and came to the same conclusion. That sumbitch husband of hers finally went out and did it.”
“Did it?”
“You know what I mean, Deckman. The sumbitch finally killed her!”
Decker looked at the phone monitor and took down the calling number. It appeared to be a cell phone and was from an out-of-the-city area code. “Mr. Lodestone, why don’t you come in to the station house and we can talk about this? Things that are this serious shouldn’t be discussed over the phone.”
There was a long pause. “You think so?”
“Yes, sir, I do. I could see you in about an hour. How does that sound?”
“Too quick! It’ll take time for me and the missus to get over there.”
“Where are you calling from, Mr. Lodestone?”
“Fresno.”
One hundred and eighty-six miles away as the crow flies. “And you’re calling this station house because your stepdaughter lives in this area?”
“Two-three-one-one-six Octavia Avenue. That’s where you’ll find the sumbitch.”
“And who is this sumbitch?”
“Ivan Dresden. He’s a broker for Merrill Lynch in Porter Ranch. My stepdaughter’s name is Roseanne. Roseanne Dresden.”
Decker tucked the receiver under his chin as he wrote it down. As he saw Roseanne’s name in print, he realized he wasn’t reading it for the first time. “Her name is familiar. Would there be any reason that I might know her?”
“Well, you mighta probably read her name in the papers saying she was on that WestAir flight that crashed down on the apartment building.”
That was it! Decker’s mind was racing, trying to understand the purpose of the call. “Mr. Lodestone, are you saying that your stepdaughter wasn’t on that WestAir flight?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“But the papers reported her as one of the victims.”
“Young man, I’m sure someone somewhere musta told you that you should never believe what you read in the papers.”
THEY MATERIALIZED AT the station house at ten minutes to five in the afternoon. Farley and Shareen Lodestone were dressed in their Sunday finest, the man in a decently fitting gray suit with a white shirt and a tie, and Shareen in a flowered dress and low heels. She had taken the time to put on rouge and lipstick. Blond and blue-eyed, with good skin, at one time the woman had been attractive, but grief had deepened her eyes and depressed their light, giving her face a beetle brow.
Farley was thin and of average height with a mop of white hair. Yet Decker had seen enough of these guys to know that they were deceptively strong and wiry. He knew that beneath that jacket and shirt were some stringy arms with good grip strength. The man looked more mad than upset, but that was often a man’s way of coping with heartache.
Decker got them both cups of coffee and settled them into two seats opposite his desk. After closing the door, he sat down and took out a notepad, although he suspected that what they were going to tell him was a case of extreme denial. He said, “Before we get started, Mr. and Mrs. Lodestone, I want to express my condolences. I am very sorry for your loss.”
“Yeah, I am, too,” Lodestone grunted out. “So if you want to help, you’ll put that sumbitch behind bars.”
“I always had a queasy feeling about him,” Shareen added.
“Him…meaning your son-in-law?”
“That’s right,” Shareen said. “Ivan Dresden.”
Decker wrote down the name. “And you suspect…what?”
“That Ivan killed her.”
“Didn’t I already tell you that?” Lodestone butted in.
“Yes, you did.” Decker paused. “Before you came in, I called up WestAir. They verified that Roseanne had been on the flight.”
“Yeah, verified in what way?” Lodestone said. “They haven’t found her body.”
“They haven’t finished all the recovery, Mr. Lodestone.”
“They finished most of it,” Shareen added. “They got thirty-eight so far.”
“Then maybe we should wait until they have all forty-seven.”
“They aren’t gonna find forty-seven bodies, Lieutenant,” Farley said. “Besides, it don’t matter if they do find everyone on the passenger list because WestAir didn’t issue her a ticket.”
That threw Decker momentarily off guard. “They didn’t?”
“No, they didn’t!” Farley said triumphantly. “So how the hell did they know she was on the flight?”
Decker didn’t answer. He wrote down no ticket? while stalling for time.
Shareen rescued him. “Let me start from the beginning, Lieutenant. Roseanne was a flight attendant for WestAir. After the crash, when we couldn’t get hold of Roseanne, we called up the airlines. But WestAir told us she wasn’t working on flight 1324. Then the company called us up a couple of days later and
backtracked. No, she wasn’t working 1324, but she was on the plane, hopping a ride to San Jose to work the route up there for a couple of nights…which is why they claimed they didn’t issue her a ticket.”
“Wait a minute.” Decker started to take notes in earnest. “I thought every passenger who flew on an airline had to be issued a ticket.”
“That’s what I thought,” Shareen said. “But I was wrong. This was told to me by one of Roseanne’s friends, so I hope I’m getting this right.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. Here we go. I think if you work for the airlines and you’re flying to work at a destination, you don’t have to be issued a ticket even if you’re not working the flight.”
Decker nodded. “So it was possible for her to be on the flight and for the airlines not to have a record of it. But then they’d have a record of the assignment, wouldn’t they?”
“They should have a record,” Shareen said. “But they’re not telling me yes, they have one, or no, they don’t have one.”
“Right now they’re not saying nothing without their lawyer,” Lodestone said.
Shareen said, “Roseanne used to work San Jose. So I figure that maybe WestAir was shorthanded in San Jose. So I called up San Jose, and asked if Roseanne was scheduled to work some routes up there. First they tell me no, then they tell me yes, then they tell me that if I want to talk to them again, they’ll put me in contact with their attorneys.”
“Same old, same old,” Lodestone said.
Shareen patted her husband’s knee. “Their hemming and hawing was making us very suspicious.”
Decker nodded. It did sound funny on the surface, but the airline was probably in disarray.
“I talked to Ivan,” Shareen said. “I just didn’t like what he told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That at the last minute, Roseanne changed her plans to work in San Jose. He told me emphatically that she was on the plane and he was upset enough without me making up stories about her not being on the plane. Then he said, in the long run, we were hurting not helping and that he and several other people had lawsuits pending, so we should kindly shut up.”
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