“Melvin said it’d be my job if I sent them on another wild goose chase. Says I’m too soft, believe anything. You know how the mayor and the sheriff are crawling all over him about the budget.”
“Melvin’s got no right to say that. It’d be your job if you missed an important call. Yours and Melvin’s.”
“You’re right,” Wanda agreed. “I’d better let someone know.”
“But do it low priority,” Desiree advised, picking up another call. “That way Melvin can’t get too mad.”
CHAPTER 35
Windy looked around the fake flagstone piazza, noticing how different the quality of light was in L.A. from in the desert. In Vegas things seemed to have sharp angles. Here it was more subdued, the afternoon shadows almost lazy. A young man in a gray uniform was diligently cleaning one of the Cartier windows, this one containing a pair of earrings and three watches worth more than the man would make in ten years at his job. What kept him from one day reaching around and taking them, Windy wondered. Was there something good inside people or was it just the alarm system? She moved her eyes back to Trish.
Trish was saying, “What do you mean, Eve is missing?”
Eve. The one who gave in to the snake’s temptation and left us all with a legacy of sin and death. But who could really blame the woman for being curious? Wasn’t forbidding something the best way to guarantee people wanted it? Just ask any six-year-old.
Cool it, Windy told herself, stop stalling. She said to Trish, “Eve is gone. Disappeared. We think it might have something to do with her childhood in Vegas, so we are trying to learn as much about that as we can. For starters, the addresses of the houses where she grew up.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you much with that. I met Eve at Sunday school—or rather ditching Sunday school. We both snuck out for a smoke and found each other. We’d draw caricatures of all the people inside, make fun of them. And we saw a ton of one another, but not at her house. Her mother didn’t like visitors so we mostly hung out at my place.”
Windy took a minicassette recorder out of her pocket. “Do you mind if I tape this?” Trish looked curious, mildly amused, but shook her head. Windy said, “So you never saw Eve at home?”
“A few times I went to this big place they had, practically a mansion. Looked like Versailles and it was big enough that her mom wouldn’t even know if the French army was stationed there. But after that they moved to an apartment uptown, in North Las Vegas, and Eve didn’t want anyone going there, said she was embarrassed and besides there wasn’t room. The building had a funny name, something like the Sun Block. Sun Shield.”
“The Sun-Crest?”
“Yes.”
Versailles had to be the Johnsons’ house, and the Sun-Crest was the Waterses’ apartment, the two they already knew about. Windy said, “Her family lived somewhere else between the big house and the Sun-Crest.”
“They moved around all the time for a while.”
Windy’s stomach tied itself into a knot. “This was three months, including the summer of 1985. Do you have any idea where that was?”
“Nineteen eighty-five. That was the summer my mom shipped me off to Nebraska to become wholesome with my cousins. Didn’t realize, apparently, how strapping corn-fed farm boys could be.” Trish smiled to herself at the memory. “Let me think, though. I’m pretty sure Eve wrote to me—that’s right. They were living in a mobile home park, at least for the summer. Eve complained that it was foul, but I don’t think she ever said where it was. Someplace in the desert. And they had some neighbor who liked to spy on Eve when she was naked in the bathroom. She drew pictures of him and sent them to me.”
“Do you know which mobile home park they were living in?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“What about where she lived before the Versailles place? Did you ever see her there?”
“No. That was where she was living when we met—I think it’s where she grew up—but she moved to the big fancy house pretty soon after.”
“You said you got to know each other during Sunday school. Could they have been living near the church that sponsored it?”
“I doubt it. It wasn’t like a local church you go to because it’s in the neighborhood. It was Father Elmore’s Spiritual Mission Church. People drove from thirty, fifty miles away to see Father Elmore. I’m sure it had nothing to do with him looking like a suburban Cary Grant. Anyway, the ministry was out in the desert, no one lived near there. By now I’m sure there’s a mini-mall on the spot and a thousand houses, but at the time it was pretty remote.”
Back to square one. “Okay, what about after the apartment in North Las Vegas? Do you know where they moved then?”
Trish put out her cigarette in the plastic lid of her coffee cup. “Not the family, but I can tell you about Eve. She somehow convinced her parents to let her move to L.A. and live with her aunt. Man, was I jealous.”
Ash had already talked to the cops in L.A. and they knew there hadn’t been any killings like the Home Wrecker’s anywhere in California, and Eve’s aunt had succumbed to cancer four years earlier, so that was a dead end.
Windy decided to go in another direction. “How did her parents get along?”
“Not great. They fought all the time.” Trish stirred her café latte for a moment then gave Windy a straight look. “Why do you care about her parents’ relationship? This isn’t really about Eve being missing, is it?”
“Yes and no. Eve really is missing. But we think there may be something else going on as well.”
“Something you’re not going to tell me.”
Windy nodded. She said, “Any insight you can give me into Eve would be a huge help, especially into her childhood. Why did the family move around so much?”
“You don’t know? Her father, Eddie? Slippery Sebastian they called him because his fingers were so slippery money just fell out of them. He was a gambler.”
“A professional gambler?”
“A professional loser. A gambling addict would be more apt. Almost a textbook study. The way I’ve pieced it together, around Eve’s ninth birthday he started playing blackjack several nights a week, maybe more. Eve’s mother nagged him for being out so often, and Eve and her father formed this bond against her. He told Eve she was his special helper, his good luck charm. She used to wait up for him at night to hear how he had done. That was how she first learned to cook, making him breakfast late at night when he came home from the casino so he could turn around and go to work.”
“He worked?”
“He ran a shoe factory with his brother.”
“A shoe factory? You’re sure?”
“Yes. But he lost that gambling. Anyway, after a while he stopped coming home for breakfast or came home irritable and even though Eve knew it was because he had lost a lot of money, she blamed herself, thinking that she was no longer his lucky charm.” Trish took a sip of coffee and went on. “Then, when we were about fifteen, out of the blue Eddie wins the lottery. Not just a small jackpot, either, several million dollars. So, just like magic—which both Eve and her father believe in—everything was great again, and they moved into that big Versailles place.”
Windy frowned. “Why do I feel like this is one of those VH1 Behind the Music documentaries where everything was going great until the addiction brought it all crashing to the ground?”
“Ah, you’ve heard this story before. Yes, snapshot of the Sebastians, rich as can be again, big house in the background, everyone smiling and happy. Then cut to less than a year later, all sepia tones now, and they’re living in a trailer park.” Trish looked into her coffee cup and shook her head.
“A real Hollywood tale,” Windy said, maybe a little too flip, because Trish’s eyes shot up and bored into her.
Windy frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“No. I’m sorry.” Trish was shaking her head now, settling back against her chair. “It’s just sort of eerie. You look a lot like Eve, some of your expressions especially
and the tone of your voice when you are being sarcastic, but then your face changes and you’re not her at all.” She twisted her red stirring stick around her index finger, then let it unravel. “I guess I miss her. This time of year makes me think of her.”
“The fall?”
“Well, Halloween mainly. She loved Halloween, would start getting excited about it at the beginning of October. She loved carving pumpkins, dressing up, all that stuff. She was kind of immature that way. I think it was like an escape from her real life, getting to pretend she was someone she wasn’t. One year she dressed up as a nun.”
“What was she escaping from?”
“God, who knows. Herself. Her mother. She hated her mother.”
“Why?”
“She would say because the woman was mean to her father, hated his gambling and so would nag him, which just made him stay out more. But really I think it was because they were both competing for his attention. I also think that’s why she became anorexic.”
“What do you mean?”
“When she was about sixteen, her father started to lose again and he shut her out entirely, no more late-night breakfasts or secret messages. See, he started treating her the way he treated her mom, a woman Eve had always hated. So she became determined not to be anything like her mom.”
“Her mom was heavy, so Eve was determined to be thin,” Windy said, mentally put a check next to the line item “Substitutes food for sex as means of control” on the killer’s profile.
“Exactly. When we were younger I thought Eve always went for drugs over alcohol just because she liked them better, never really paying attention when she muttered about ’empty calories.’ For two months all she would eat were dog biscuits. She wouldn’t eat bread long before no-carb diets became fashionable and she used to give blow jobs because she read in Cosmo they were a good source of low-calorie protein.”
That was one of the saddest things Windy could imagine. “It seems so unlikely, a chef being anorexic.”
“Oh, that’s Eve, full of contradictions. Like, you’d expect her to drive some sporty car, with her bad girl license plate, right? But no, she goes Soccer Mom and chooses the car with the highest safety rating she could find. Or her apartment when she lived in L.A. She decided where she wanted to live based on where they had the best armed patrol system. And she still put extra locks on the door.”
“In Vegas she lives in a gated development.”
“Figures. She probably did a lot of research to find which one was the safest. But at the same time she is overprotecting her body, she puts herself in positions that set herself up to be hurt emotionally. Eve’s worst enemy has always been herself. One time she was staying at my house and she passed out so I put her on the bed, undressed her. She was always wearing long sleeves, always cold she said. Anyway, I took off her sweater and I saw her arms. They were covered with cigarette burn marks.” She looked straight at Windy. “When I asked her about it, she eventually admitted she had done it to herself.”
“Why?”
“She said she was curious what it would be like. But I think it was a way to punish herself, because her bastard father didn’t love her.” Now Trish shook her head. “She wouldn’t let me help her with it, refused to talk about it. Being friends with Eve is not easy.”
“You obviously care about her if you made her Nicole’s godmother.”
“How did you know about that?”
“I saw the copy of A Little Princess Nicole gave her at her apartment. She keeps it on her night stand.”
Trish looked away, fumbled for a cigarette, and took a long drag. She shook her head. “Nikkie and Devon, my youngest, they both keep asking when we’re going to get to visit Aunt Eve. She’s really great with kids. She used to baby-sit all the time when we were growing up. Kids adore her.”
Windy thought of the six-year-old Waters twins, Minette and Martine, and needed to change the topic. “Did she ever talk to you about anyone she was seeing in Vegas? Or even just any friends? Anyone named Harry or Barry? Or anyone from her past?”
“No. She never really talked about the men she was seeing with me. She was really private about that. And our fight happened the day before her restaurant opened. She’d only been there a month. Not that that isn’t long enough for her to have fucked a dozen guys.”
Hearing the anger in Trish’s voice, Windy asked, “Is that what you fought about?”
“More or less. Here in L.A. she was like the unstoppable sex machine, the Bad Girl. Another leftover from craving her daddy’s attention if you ask me. She’d sleep with anyone if it would help her career, which is a pity because Eve is a damn good chef. Moving up the ranks the way she did, she’s managed to convince herself it was only because she was a good lay. Anyway, she swore when she got to Vegas she was going to settle down, find a real relationship with a man who wasn’t already in a relationship with someone else. It was like she thought that she could trade in her bad-girl persona for a new improved Good Girl model and like that—” Trish snapped her fingers, “—find herself in a long term relationship. All she had to do was deal with her ‘intimacy issues.’ ”
And her license plate, Windy thought. Said, “You don’t sound like you believe in ‘intimacy issues.’ ”
“Eve has always loved self-help books, easy answers. Branding her inability to get into a relationship an intimacy issue was like that, a way to pretend she’d dealt with it. She definitely has a problem letting people get close to her, but that is a symptom of something larger, not the cause. You can’t be close to someone unless you let yourself get vulnerable, and Eve’s not willing.” She looked intently at Windy. “It really is uncanny how much you remind me of her.” Trish sighed and stood up. “I should probably go back and save Davido. This is about the time when tourists start to emerge from the Beverly Wilshire with a hundred grand burning a hole in their pocket, just waiting for me to turn it into a commission, and then new sneakers for my kids.”
“Do you like selling art?”
Trish’s voice became patrician. “Not selling, assisting our esteemed clients acquire quality artworks. Last week a gentleman bought a five-hundred-thousand-dollar painting without even removing his sunglasses. It is an honor to be part of a transaction like that.” She smiled, tossed the cup toward the garbage can, and missed. “Does that answer your question?”
“Oh yes.”
“Have I helped you?”
“Yes, very much,” Windy said, not sure if it was true. “You mentioned that Eve wrote you letters that one summer. Is there any chance you still have them? Or anything with her writing on it?” she asked, thinking of return addresses and handwriting samples.
“Sorry, no. I’m not sentimental that way.”
“Just a shot. If you think of anything else, will you call me?” She handed Trish her card. “Or if you hear from Eve.”
“She’s not in trouble, is she? I mean if I hear from her and then call you, she’s not going to go to jail.”
Windy’s cell phone rang then but she ignored it, standing up to hold Trish’s eyes. “I’m not going to lie to you. She probably won’t go to jail. She’ll probably wind up in a hospital. She needs help. You know it as well as I do.”
Trish stared at Windy’s card, went to slip it into her pocket, then said, “Wait.” She pulled a wallet out of her pocket, old and worn, a contrast with the rest of her expensive outfit, another layer to the woman. She extracted a school photo of a teenage girl taken at least fifteen years earlier, judging from her feathered hair.
“This was Eve our senior year of high school,” Trish explained. She looked at it for a long moment, then held it toward Windy. “It has her writing on the back.”
Windy turned it over. Don’t let the bastards get you down—unless they have a NICE car!, it said in big, loopy writing and then below it, in all capitals, BGNSA.
“What does this mean, B-G-N-S-A?” Windy looked up to ask, and discovered that Trish had already started walking away.
> She stopped and faced Windy, hugging herself. “B-G-N-S-A. Bad Girls Never Sleep Alone. It’s Eve’s motto. Something she is proud of.”
Their eyes met. “Thank you.”
Trish nodded, saying, “I want to help. Help Eve. She—she is not a bad person. Whatever she has done, she’s not a bad person.”
Windy was glad that the woman turned around again and started striding back to the gallery then, because she knew she couldn’t give Trish any comfort. Settling back into the uncomfortable metal chair, Windy pulled out her cell phone, checked the caller ID and found another UNKNOWN NUMBER, another call with no message. She sat and stared at the photo thinking that Eve was much prettier then she was, thinking about red wine on a white tablecloth and what it really meant to be a bad girl.
Then caught herself, as she waited for Ash to pull up, wondering if a minivan would count as a NICE car.
CHAPTER 36
Officers Steve Birch and Paul Kenny were just debating whether it would be Baja Fresh for break time or maybe get some burgers, when the call came over from dispatch, asking any unit in the area of 2204 Cottonwood to do a check of the property, possible woman in need of assistance.
“Always at break time, huh?” Paul said, pulling a U-turn and hitting the flashers. They logged their arrival at 4:18 P.M., no suspicious vehicles in the vicinity, and approached the house. They passed the mailbox with THE O’CONNELLS painted in script on the side, Steve telling Paul he and his wife had gotten one like it for their wedding.
They rang the doorbell and as they waited, Steve fingered the blue and pink ribbons tied around the door handle, one of them dangling a half inflated balloon. “Looks like someone had a baby shower.”
“Nice work, Sherlock,” Paul said. “Just a matter of time before your promotion to detective comes through.”
“When Marcy had a baby shower, the place smelled like those scented candles for weeks afterwards. Maybe that’s why the person was screaming. They could make you loony.”
They rang again, got no answer, knocked. No answer. Paul went left, Steve went right, they walked the perimeter of the house, looking for lights on inside, a window broken, anything suspicious. They couldn’t bust in on a simple suspicion call.
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