by Rex Burns
CHAPTER 5
THE CALIFORNIA BUREAU of Vital Statistics in Sacramento will, for a two-dollar fee per inquiry, provide information on marriage and divorce records as well as birth and death records. It was a long shot, but I took it, more to rest my conscience than with the expectation of finding anything. I’d telephoned both the admiral and Margaret when I got home from Julian to tell them my conclusions about Dorcas planning for a short trip. I didn’t tell either one of them about her pregnancy. She wanted to keep that private and I respected her wishes. It’s what I would have offered Dorcas if I’d found her, as well as what, by implication, I’d promised Mrs. Gannet. But that promise added urgency to the search. If the girl was in trouble, her pregnancy made it worse.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with my lap-top and the telephone. The first was to draft standard inquiries to various state bureaus. The latter was to call the highway patrol offices in neighboring states in case a white Mustang had been in an accident. Neither Arizona nor Nevada reported a Mustang with Dori’s California plates, and that left Baja California as a possibility. But how to get that information was a puzzle which local federal agencies didn’t solve. A call to Washington finally reached a woman in the State Department. She made it plain they were not inclined to endanger international relations with cavalier searches for missing Americans in Mexico. Most definitely, no one in the State Department would initiate any inquiries about an American citizen without bona fide evidence of peril. And if said citizen had violated any laws of the host nation, no action would be taken anyway. What she meant was State’s interests were a hell of a lot more important than those of mere citizens and taxpayers. And by no means coincided. I felt the familiar stir of anger. The Washington establishment—major and minor—demanded, in the name of the flag, loyalty, sacrifice, and cash. But their real purpose was self-service. Not all patriots are scoundrels, but by God it seems all Washington scoundrels make loud use of patriotism. It’s no wonder the word has come to feel bulgy and false on the tongue.
But anger wouldn’t help. I reminded myself that without more evidence Mexico was just another possibility, and cursing the servants of the people wouldn’t help. But even the next item, a call to the telephone company, was only a little more helpful. The directory had told me that area 303 was for northern Colorado; a recording told me the number had been disconnected. Sensitive to the company security, the operator would not tell me who the subscriber was or even which town the prefix referred to. Finally I called the reference desk at the San Diego State University library. They had a collection of telephone books, including several for Colorado. One listed the prefix as serving Kremmling and vicinity. A reverse directory would have told me who rented the number, but I no longer had easy access to that little jewel—it was reserved for government agencies.
Still, I did find out that Dorcas had made three calls to Kremmling, Colorado, in the month before she disappeared. A look at the map gave me the county that Kremmling was in—Grand—and more telephone calls let me know that no one by the name of Dorcas Wilcox and no white Mustang with California plates had come to the official attention of the county hospital or the sheriff’s department. A clerk in the sheriff’s office took the missing girl’s name and solemnly promised to call if something should turn up. In my mind’s eye, I could see the notice possibly making it as far as a crowded and little-read bulletin board.
I recorded the names and numbers I’d telephoned in a small notebook. The record was less for Henry’s cost sheet than out of the habit of keeping track of all names and addresses relating to an investigation. In fact, I felt myself slipping easily into that old, familiar frame of mind which I called On the Hunt.
The next calls were to the names Henry provided as Dorcas’s old high school buddies. One had married and still lived in La Jolla. The other numbers had prefixes that meant San Diego and the southern half of LA County. I tried the nearby one first. A recorded message played assorted roars and growls and then said Hi and told me it was feeding time at the zoo, would I leave a name and number or call back later, thanks. I left my name and number, saying it was very important. I didn’t have the slightest temptation to bark good-bye. The La Jolla call was answered on the second ring by a woman with a heavy Spanish accent who said, “Just a moment, please.” Then a young woman’s voice said yes, it was Kimberly Overstreet Goddard, and, yes, Henry Wilcox had talked to her about Dorcas.
“But I really don’t know where she might have gone. I mean, we really haven’t talked all that much in the last couple years, and especially since my marriage and all.”
“Do you know if she has a boyfriend or someone she’s been dating lately?”
“No.”
“How about anyone called Dwayne?”
A short silence. “Not that I recall. I mean she might, but like I say, we really didn’t have all that much to talk about anymore. I mean she’s interested in doing her own thing, and I’ve been more and more involved with my married friends and with the wives of my husband’s associates—there’s a very active social program for attorneys’ wives here in La Jolla. So Dori and I’ve just sort of drifted apart.”
“Do you know of anyone in Colorado she might have gone to see?”
“Colorado? No. But a lot of people from California go there. I mean, it’s sort of an in place to go. All those mountains and open spaces, you know. In fact, my husband’s been thinking of taking a position there—he’s an attorney—but I don’t know, the economy isn’t all that great, I hear.”
I let the woman talk through the possibilities of moving to Denver in the hope she might mention something pertinent. But the hope was false. All I ended up with was a hot ear and the repeated fact that her husband was an attorney.
The Santa Ana number didn’t answer, nor did Riverside. To give my ear a rest, I changed into running clothes and headed across the highway for the long, surf-hazed beach on the ocean side of the Strand. By the time I trotted back, waving a hand to Mrs. Meisner, a next-door neighbor who was busily poking petunias into her tiny patch of new lawn, I had justified my thirst for a beer and worked up an appetite for that slab of swordfish waiting for the grill. I was halfway through an early dinner when the telephone rang and a female voice said, “This is Stacey Briggs. I’m returning your call.”
Rinsing the rest of the fish out of my mouth, I told her who I was. “I understand Mr. Wilcox spoke with you earlier.”
“Yes. And I don’t know what more I can tell you—Dori called me sometime last month and that was the last time we talked.”
“Did she mention any boyfriend? Or say anything about her health?”
“No. Is she sick?”
“That’s one of the things I’m trying to find out. Did she say anything about making a trip?”
“No. We just talked about this and that. Nothing special, really.”
“Do you know of any friends she might have in Colorado?”
“… No. Do you think that’s where she went?”
“It’s possible. Do you know anybody named Dwayne?”
This time the pause was longer, and suddenly I wished I could see her eyes. “Dwayne who?”
“I don’t have a last name yet. But apparently he was a good friend of Dorcas’s.”
“Call her Dori—she doesn’t like ‘Dorcas.’ ” A pause. “Dori has her own friends, now. I don’t know all the people she sees.”
“What about a Shirley?”
“No.”
“Kimberly Overstreet or Margot Hoyer?”
“Oh, sure. We all ran around together in high school. But I haven’t seen much of them in the last couple years. We talk on the phone now and then, but that’s about it.” She added, “Kimberly’s married, and Margot’s living up in Santa Ana, working as a paralegal. Her brother Jason’s with one of their dad’s banks out in Riverside. You might give them a call—I know Dori talked with them, too.”
I thanked Miss Briggs and sat back to finish my dinner and to let the stray thoug
hts and impressions form into words. Then I dialed Henry and asked a few more questions.
One of the things I asked of Henry was Dorcas’s high school yearbook. On my way north through early-evening traffic, I stopped in La Jolla long enough to look through the glossy pages.
“You think there might be something in this?” Henry, glass in one hand, handed me the yearbook with the other. Its richly padded cover had an engraving of palm trees and ocean cliffs. Rows of tinted portraits smiled back with clear-eyed faith in the future, and alphabetized names in the margins. Margaret, Henry said, had gone to bed early; the only lights on in the rambling home were the living room’s soft lamps and the cooler flicker of the television room. Apparently, Henry spent his evenings there alone. The whole house was filled with a quiet gloom. It might have been despair over their daughter, but the mood seemed more routine than that. It was a kind of surrender to ennui, as if Henry and Margaret had created a refuge where no further effort was needed and nothing called for change. I could understand a young girl’s unwillingness to live in that atmosphere. Or to bring her child into it.
My finger traced the names in the margins beside the rows of photographs. “It’s just a hunch—that’s about all I have to go on so far.”
Henry swigged at his glass, ice cubes clinking. Finally he asked, “You don’t think she might be dead, do you?”
I looked up from the glare of the shiny pages and tried to read his expression. “Do you think she might be?”
He shook his head. “I think she’s just run off again. But Margaret’s worried about it. And … and you read about things in the papers. …” He drank deeply. “I want to know what you think about it.”
That kind of question wasn’t something you lied about. “I don’t think she is. But it’s a possibility.”
He watched me bend over the pages of the yearbook. “Margaret told me you called earlier and what you said about Dori taking a short trip. I can’t even let myself think she might be dead.”
“Well, let’s not, then. It’s worrisome that she didn’t return as soon as she apparently planned to. But there’s a lot to find out before we can be sure of anything.”
“Right, right.” He cleared his throat. “But if you do find out bad news, tell me—not Margaret. She—ah—she has a hard time handling things like that, Steele.”
“Will do.” I found another Dwayne and jotted that name under the first one.
“What’s that you’re doing?”
“Dorcas had a letter in her trash from someone named Dwayne. It’s possible he’s another high school friend. I want to try out the names, anyway.”
“Dwayne?”
“Do you recognize it?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know many of her high school friends. College, either, for that matter.”
When I finally closed the yearbook, I had five Dwaynes and four Shirleys, which, I supposed, wasn’t bad from a graduating class of several hundred. Henry walked me to the door, fresh drink in hand.
“You’re going up to LA now? This late?”
I glanced at my watch. “I’ll get there about eight or nine, depending on traffic.”
“I—ah—do appreciate what you’re doing, Steele. Margaret does, too.” He added, “You’ll be certain to let me know the minute you find out anything, right?”
I told him I would.
“Thanks. And good luck.” The closing door made a slightly hollow sound in the street’s silence.
CHAPTER 6
I PACED MYSELF through the traffic lights back to the San Diego Freeway, then headed north. Long rows of anonymous cars sped bumper-to-bumper twenty miles an hour above the speed limit. The familiar interchanges to Camp Pendleton and the El Toro air base dredged up a lot of echoes and even some hurt. But I pushed that away and concentrated on reaching LA in one piece. A river of cars in six oncoming lanes began to glitter with headlights. The evening’s smog and dust settled in to shadow the streets below the elevated freeway, and neon signs glowed dimly against the thick mix of twilight and carbon monoxide. Marking main avenues, rows of tall royal palms lifted out of the haze in bushy-headed silhouette, emphasizing beauty in the delicate and deepening purple shades of poisonous gases. I made my descent down the ramp into a wide thoroughfare lined on each side by the smooth trunks. A couple of eye-watering blocks later, I turned onto one of those empty residential streets that make up so much of greater Los Angeles. Silent and seemingly vacant houses with blank picture windows faced each other across small lawns trimmed with flowering shrubs. Margot Hoyer’s address was a corner fourplex in what was called California Mission design. Beneath a miniature bell-tower, the stucco entry arch led to a tiny patio whose only sound was the brittle splash of a neglected fountain.
She knew even less about Dorcas than Stacey Briggs did. “We chat on the phone now and then. Once in a great while we happen to be in La Jolla together, and we might have lunch. But as for knowing her plans. …” The woman shook shoulder-length, crimped hair that flared like the sides of a brown tent around her face.
“Do any of these names sound familiar to you?” I showed her the list of Dwaynes and Shirleys.
Slowly, she read down the column. “Dwayne Hoover—he was in our high school class. Dwayne Vengley was, too.” She looked up at me. “Shirley Ellman. Are all these from our class?”
“Yes. Do you know if Dorcas is still in touch with any of them?”
“In touch?”
“Writing. Talking to. Seeing.”
The hair shook again.
“Have you talked to any of these people lately?”
“No—of course not. Why should I?”
“They’re old classmates. Like Dorcas.”
“Dori and Kimberly, Stacey and me—we were sort of a club.” A small laugh, half scorn, half affection. “We called ourselves the Four Femmes.” She handed the list back to me. “None of these were in our group.”
“Did Dorcas mention any boyfriend at all?”
“Not to me.”
There wasn’t much more I could think to ask, and it was obvious Margot Hoyer would be happy to see me go. It was less obvious that she was avoiding something, but that feeling was there. I left my telephone number for her to call if she happened to remember anything at all that might help. The woman smiled widely and assured me she would.
Her brother’s apartment was half of a ranch-style duplex that he shared with two other young men. When I telephoned, Jason Hoyer—surprise clear in his voice—said he wasn’t sure what he could say that would help any, but I was welcome to come by.
“I went out with her a few times—nothing heavy. Just movies and things. She’s a nice girl and all, but we didn’t have that much in common. She and my sister were big buddies. They had this clique, the Four Femmes, and I wasn’t going with anybody at the time, so I sort of asked her out once in a while.”
“You weren’t in her senior class, though?”
“No. I graduated a year ahead. They were all a nice bunch of girls. Fun people, you know?”
Jason Hoyer was still slender with youth and exercise. But his heavy shoulders and hips promised bulk. There was some resemblance to his sister, especially around the eyes and the thrust of his jaw. He was tanned in a way that clerking in a bank would not provide, and I noted that, as the man reached for the list of names, his arm was brown far up under the cuff of his pin-striped shirt.
“The only one I know is Dwayne Vengley. He was in Margot’s class.”
“Did your sister or Dorcas have much to do with him?”
“Margot didn’t, thank God.”
“Why ‘thank God’?”
“Aw, the guy was a real asshole—pardon my French. Always acting like he had some big secret nobody else was in on. Trying to make himself look important all the time. Crap.”
“Did Dorcas see a lot of him?”
He shrugged. “Not while I was in school.” Leaning back in the kitchen chair, he glanced through the open doorway to the living room
where his two suitemates watched a television set mounted in the center of an almost empty bookcase. “I guess she might have her senior year—they were in the spring musical together. Dori was in the chorus and Dwayne was the cowboy—what’s his name—the one who sings ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ ”
“Dorcas was in the school play?”
“Yeah. Kind of surprised me. She didn’t usually do that kind of stuff. But she said it was her senior year and she felt she ought to try it. She’d surprise you like that now and then.”
“And that’s when she dated Vengley?”
“I guess. I was at the university so I didn’t see much of the Four except when I came home. I remember on spring break, when the Gates thing happened, Margot was royally pissed at Dori and the others for even being there.”
“The Gates thing?”
Jason looked slightly embarrassed as if he’d mentioned something better left unsaid. Then he shrugged. “Yeah. It was in all the newspapers. David Gates. He, Dori, Dwayne, Kimberly, and Stacey. They went on a picnic out on Point Loma and David got lost or something and died falling over a cliff. It was really a bad scene—the Gates kid was a kind of feeb, but he was all right, you know? That’s the only time I ever felt close to sorry for Dwayne; he was really cut up about it. Crying, everything. They all were. Thank God Margot didn’t go on that one.” He shrugged again. “Nobody liked Dwayne. Dwayne the Pain we called him. I don’t know why Dori was hanging around with him.”
The rest of the questions dealt with any recent information Jason had about Dorcas, but there wasn’t much. “She telephoned maybe six, eight weeks ago, just to talk. I was kind of surprised to hear from her, but she’s like that: you don’t hear anything for six months or a year and then she calls. Said she tried Margot but she was out, so she called me instead.”
“Did she seem at all worried or upset?”
He thought about that. “No, I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell with her; she’s pretty intense, you know? But she really holds herself in.” He rubbed an earlobe in thought. “Kind of unhealthy, if you think about it. Maybe that’s why she was getting into crystals.”
