Dougan and Smalls signed us into the coroner’s office and followed an attendant to a room Dougan casually referred to as the meat locker. Pull drawers lined the far wall, each drawer labeled with a case number: file cabinets for the dead. The assistant gripped the handle of a drawer one up from the bottom and braced his feet. The drawer rolled out its contents: a zippered bag made from thick green plastic, filled at the head of the drawer but flat toward the back. The body inside was a short one. The attendant drew down the zipper. The cold white face of my sister emerged from the cocoon of her body bag like a stillborn butterfly.
“It’s her,” I said.
“This is your sister, born Sharon Baker?” Dougan asked for the record.
“Yes,” I said. Since the last time I’d seen her she had dyed her hair black and trimmed it to match the cut in the photo on my license. We looked enough alike, I suppose, to fool an inattentive bank teller. I turned my head from side to side, looking for bruises. A slim cut bisected the brow above her right eye—far too thin an injury to be fatal. “I thought you said she’d been beaten to death.”
Dougan tilted his head sharply to one side, cricking his neck. “We found her at the base of the steps leading down to the memorial. Her neck was broken.”
“You think someone hit her, knocked her down the stairs?”
“We think a couple of things,” he said.
I waited for him to continue. He didn’t.
“Can I touch her?” I asked.
Dougan glanced at Smalls.
“Not allowed,” Smalls said.
I wanted to smooth the parallel furrows that scored the skin above her brows. She looked worried about what awaited her in the hereafter. I tried to work up sufficient emotion, if not to cry, then at least to have the decency to regret what had happened to her. Whatever her crimes, she had not deserved to be murdered.
“You poor fool,” I said.
The attendant sealed my sister in darkness and rolled the drawer shut again, where she awaited the brutal indignity of the coroner’s scalpel and sternum saw. With little mystery as to the cause of her death and no family clamoring to bury her body, she’d been placed near the bottom of the pile of corpses awaiting autopsy.
As we walked through the county morgue parking lot Smalls said, “Your sister left a child behind.”
“A stepdaughter,” I said.
“The records say it’s her own flesh and blood.”
I nodded. Everything my sister told me was a lie. It wasn’t until they guided me into the Chevy’s rear compartment that I thought to ask, “My niece, where is she?”
“Records say foster care in Arizona,” Smalls said. “Family name is Micklin. Social services in Phoenix should be able to help you find her.”
I thought back on what little I knew about Sharon’s life. “The kid is from her first marriage? The one to the killer?”
“Don’t know the details, but the dates line up.”
The engine sparked and the car rocked forward.
“What is she, twelve, thirteen?”
Smalls was looking out the window, already thinking about something else. “Something like that,” he said.
What moral obligation did I have toward a niece I’d never met, borne of a sister I’d seen once, with disastrous consequences, in twenty-four years? She wasn’t my responsibility. I didn’t like my family and the thought of having to deal with an unseen niece disturbed me. If experience was any guide, we wouldn’t be good for each other. But I was being selfish and narrow-minded, family traits I’d tried to escape. It may have been too late to develop love for each other but I still owed her respect. If I didn’t make a sincere effort my indifference might contribute to the considerable damage already done to her. I wondered what I might tell her about her mother’s final days, whether I’d lie or tell the truth. I remembered the sheet of paper I’d signed the day before my sister had been murdered. “Did you find a will with the body?” I asked.
“In her purse,” Smalls said.
My niece would learn about me through the will. I’d have to meet her sooner or later. I asked, “Anything else you can tell me about the daughter?”
“Nothing specific, but I can tell you one thing.” Smalls looked at me over the seat. “A convicted murderer for a father and a con woman for a mother, the kid must be well adjusted.”
Thirteen
TWO SECURITY guards stood sentry at the entrance to Hollywood Forever Cemetery when I pulled into the drive, the wrought-iron gates securely closed behind them. The older of the two ambled over to greet me, gun belt clinging precariously to the southern slope of his pear-shaped torso. “We’re closed for the morning,” he said, bending to peer into the car.
“What’s going on?” I asked, curious what he’d say.
“Just a little unscheduled maintenance. We hope to have everything cleared away by noon, if you want to come back then.” He glanced up, his eye drawn by something across the canvas top of the Cadillac. The passenger door clicked open and Frank Adams settled his considerable girth into the passenger seat, next to my camera bag. “Thanks for your help, Don,” he said, leaning across my shoulder. “Don’t forget to look for yourself in next week’s issue.”
The security guard touched his thumb and forefinger to his cap, said, “Anytime, Mr. Adams.”
Like Frank was some kind of big shot.
“How much you pay him?” I asked.
“Twenty bucks and a couple of compliments.” Frank pointed to the right, told me to go down one block and turn right again. “He gave me a name from one of the apartments overlooking the cemetery, said the guy saw the whole thing.”
Frank had buzzed my cell phone after I’d walked out of the police station, telling me to meet him at the front gates of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He didn’t know I’d been picked up that morning. “What whole thing?” I asked.
“Somebody staged a raid on the cemetery last night, broke into Rudolph Valentino’s crypt. Looks like one of them was killed too, a woman. We’re still waiting for the police to contact next of kin, release a name.”
“The victim’s name was Sharon Bogle,” I said.
Frank half turned in the seat, asked, “How do you know?”
“I was the next of kin they notified.”
“No shit?”
“None at all,” I said, and told him about it.
The eyewitness lived in a third-floor apartment on the avenue bordering the cemetery to the east. Frank buzzed the name on the building directory with the eraser end of his pencil and dipped the leaded tip back to his notebook, intent on taking down my story without missing a single relevant detail. As the elevator doors opened to the third-floor landing he said, “Duplicity, theft, murder, and scandal—I only write about this stuff but you live it.”
“Not by choice.”
He lifted a ham-sized arm and knocked on the door. “I wish my family would do something interesting, like rob banks and get murdered. All they do is sell used cars and sit around the porch, getting fat and drunk.”
The door snapped open to a sixty-something man with a wild spray of gray hair curving around a polished, bald pate and glasses so thick an average-sighted person could have used them for bird-watching. Frank flashed a business card, said, “Frank Adams, Scandal Times,” and pointed a thumb toward me. “This is our staff photographer.”
The man held the card above the top rim of his glasses and ran it past his eyes a letter at a time, then slipped the card into the ink-stained pocket of his off-gray pocket T-shirt. “The whole thing happened beneath my balcony window. C’mon, I’ll show you.” He led us from the hallway into a studio with broad windows and a sliding glass door overlooking the cemetery. Movie posters and macabre, cartoonish drawings hung haphazardly on the walls and leaned against a drafting table. Frank stopped at the first drawing we passed, depicting a ghoul standing over the body of a woman, an ax in one hand and her head in the other. The drawing looked pulled from the pages of a comic book.
/> “Tales from the Crypt,” Frank said.
The witness tapped a long, yellowed fingernail against the frame and peered at Frank above the rim of his glasses. “You know it?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve read ’em all. When’s this one from, 1950?”
“Fifty-four.”
“Don’t tell me you’re the artist?”
“Tales from the Crypt was my first major gig.”
Frank slapped his forehead, lurched forward, and shook the man’s hand. “Of course! You’re Joe Harvest! You drew for EC and Marvel. I should have known right away by the drawing.” Frank generally yawned in the face of celebrity, so I first suspected he was being obsequious, hoping to wheedle information from the witness, but genuine excitement surged through his voice as the two discussed the fine points of comic-book illustration. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed starstruck.
I jiggled the latch at the sliding glass door and stepped onto a balcony not much larger than a door laid flat, the lushly tended grounds of the cemetery laid out before me like paradise. The cityscape between downtown Los Angeles and the ocean was a little short on parkland—not counting the six country clubs restricted to private members—and so by default Hollywood Forever Cemetery was the largest tract of green on the West Side open to the public, even if its chief public was a dead one. The grass rolled to a small lake rimmed by headstones, monuments, and palm trees, and from the center of the lake rose an emerald-green island topped by a columned white temple that could have housed the remains of ancient Greeks—but didn’t. Across the lane from the lake an imposing mausoleum done in a more stodgy Greek Revival stood amid the palms, and beyond that, weeping willows, lush Bermuda, and granite markers stretched to the warehouse-like soundstages of Paramount Studios looming over the southern wall.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, focusing on the island.
“A great place to live if you’re dead,” Frank said, stepping behind me to the balcony’s threshold. “You see that building there?” He pointed to the mausoleum near the lake, its massive, black iron doors festooned with yellow police tape. Two beige sedans blocked the steps to the gates and a black van emblazoned with the LAPD logo straddled the grass to the side of the lane. “Valentino was buried behind those doors.”
I framed the scene and took a shot just as a crime-scene investigator stepped under the tape, a white surgical mask strapped across his mouth. “That whole building was his?”
The illustrator snorted and peered around Frank’s shoulder. “Just a crypt no bigger than the size of his coffin. They stack them away like boxes in that building, five or six crypts high. Valentino doesn’t even have the top bunk. He’s hidden away in the corner, about chest-high.”
“But he was a major star.”
“The most popular leading man of his time, the Sheik of Araby and all that,” Frank said. “You’d think he rated more than a shoe-box.”
“Valentino died in a hurry, kinda like he lived.” The illustrator stepped onto the balcony and gripped the railing for balance, as though afraid of pitching over the edge. “It was probably a good thing he died when he did.”
“Why’s that?”
“You hate to see the great ones fade away, don’t you? You hate to see all that youthful beauty corrupted. Valentino died in his thirties but still, he bloated up like a corpse his last few years and died so broke a friend of his had to donate the crypt. James Dean had the right idea. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.”
That, I thought, was an easy thing for an ugly old man to say.
“You were home last night?” Frank asked.
“Sure was.” The illustrator’s glasses slipped down his nose when he nodded and he returned them to their rightful place with a deft, one-fingered push. “I like to work late so I was more or less awake when it all happened.”
“What time was that?”
“About two in the morning. I’d just settled into bed when I heard the first noises, big bangs, like somebody whacking something with a sledgehammer, so I jumped up and looked outside.” He pantomimed his movements as he spoke, craning his neck left and right. “This part of town, we get a lot of street crime, not all that unusual to hear gunshots, people screaming at each other, sirens, tire screeches, a whole city nightscape of sound.” He pointed toward the cemetery. “But the neighbors on this side, at least they’re quiet.”
Frank and the illustrator flashed ghoulish smiles.
“Who’s down there?” I asked. “Other than Valentino?”
“Mostly the early pioneers of cinema, the silent and early talkie stars, like Peter Lorre, Marion Davies, Douglas Fairbanks. Directors like Cecil B. DeMille and John Huston. The stars of the post-silent-film period are mostly in Forest Lawn, near Glendale. That’s the real mother lode of celebrity graves.”
“So when you looked outside, what did you see?” Frank asked.
“Hardly anything.” The illustrator’s eyes blinked behind their thick glass shields, as though he couldn’t understand it. “Too dark, I guess.”
Frank glanced at me. Some eyewitness.
“Okay, then, what else did you hear?”
“Two screams. Terrified, female screams.” He opened his mouth to imitate the expression of a woman screaming, then whirled as though reacting to the sound. “So I ran to the balcony again, because the screams sounded like they came from the cemetery.” He gripped the railing and leaned his head over the edge, listening in memory to the sounds from the night before. “But that was it, just two screams, and then all kinds of noise, people running, whispers loud as shouts—hurry, come on, that sort of thing—clangs and bangs like tools being thrown into a van.”
“Van?” Frank asked. “Any idea about color or make?”
The illustrator shook his head. He didn’t know.
“How do you know it was a van?”
“It wasn’t completely dark. I could make out the shape. But mostly it sounded like a van, you know the ratcheting sound the side doors make when they open and close.”
“Hear anything after that?”
“The sirens, of course,” he said. “Took the cops a half hour to respond.”
“Screams in a cemetery probably didn’t worry them all that much,” Frank said. “I mean, everybody in there’s dead already.”
Fourteen
SOMETHING THAT looked suspiciously like compassion glimmered in Frank’s eyes, veiled by the steam rising from the bright yellow Winchell’s Donut House coffee cup he held just below his lips. The baker’s dozen box of donuts he’d bought on entering the coffee shop lay reduced to crumbs just beyond his elbows. I’d eaten two to his eleven. The consistency of the dough was light as air, and he’d simply inhaled them. “I’m sorry if I sounded flip about your sister,” he said. “If you don’t want any part of this story, if you want to back out for personal reasons, I understand.”
“I’m not crying about what happened to my sister.” I shook my head, hearing how callous I sounded. “It’s a shame. I’m sorry it happened. But I didn’t love her.”
Frank’s eyes widened fractionally. I’d shocked him.
“She was a con artist. She ripped me off. Why should I care?”
“What about the old saying, blood is thicker than water?”
“Shit is thicker than water too, but that doesn’t mean you should value it.”
Frank laughed, said, “And I thought I was unsentimental.”
“I am too sentimental. Just not about my family, not anymore, not after they’ve abandoned and beaten the crap out of me so often. The blood in my family is bad. I care more for my dog, and frankly, I care more about you. You know why?”
“Because we’re so good-looking?”
“Exactly.” I sipped at my coffee, said, simply, “Because you care back.”
Frank rolled his eyes. “You are sentimental.” He wet the tip of his thumb with his tongue, mopped up the crumbs still scattered in the box. “Do you care about finding out who did this to your sist
er?”
“That’s different. Maybe I sound cold and uncaring to you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t seriously damage the creeps who killed her if I get the chance. Okay, so I didn’t love my sister. It’s still personal, particularly because they were probably thinking it was me they killed.”
Frank’s thumb stilled en route to his mouth, a fat crumb clinging to the skin. “How so?”
“I think she took a phone call meant for me.” I told him about the call from the girl in the lavender-colored glasses.
“Say your sister answered the phone, talked to this girl.” Frank remembered the donut crumb and licked it off his thumb. “Let’s say the girl tipped her about the action last night at the cemetery. That still doesn’t answer the question, why would she go?”
“Money.”
“You mean blackmail?” Frank thought about it while he dipped his thumb into the corner of the box for more crumbs. “She wanted to blackmail the grave robbers? Was she that stupid?”
“Stupid in a different way. I told her that I’d made twenty grand on a photograph a couple months ago.”
He sucked the crumbs off his thumb. “I get where you’re going now. You think your sister wanted something to sell to the tabs.”
“Like I said, she was stupid in a different way. Probably thought if I got twenty grand for a photograph, so could she, particularly with a hot tip from one of my contacts.”
“That doesn’t mean whoever did this was gunning for you. Just means your sister was unlucky or stupid enough to get caught.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But I still get the feeling she took a death meant for me. What if I’d taken the call instead of her?”
Digging James Dean Page 9
