by Dane Hartman
“These last two I can’t really say too much about. They’re just too far gone, so I guess you’ll have to rely on your lab analyses for them.”
She turned away from the evidence spread out before her on the table and shrugged almost in apology. “I wish I could do more for you.”
“No, no, really, you’ve been very helpful,” Harry assured her.
“You’re not just saying that.”
“No. All right, all this stuff, what you’re saying is that it’s the latest in fashion, glamorous, chic? Is that the proper conclusion to draw?”
“Oh yes.”
“Could you walk into a department store and buy this junk, you pardon the expression?”
Mary Beth shook her head determinedly. “Oh no. This is specialized, you would probably find these items in a classy boutique.”
“Maybe we are getting someplace,” Owens said.
Harry looked at him, noting his use of the plural; he seemed to be getting caught up in this case, too.
“But wait, I think the shop you want is a very unique place. Because of this cloche hat, you see.”
“How do you mean?”
“If it is antique like I think it is, then it was probably purchased at a store that specializes in accessories as well as highly experimental fashion. And if my guess is right one of these velvet numbers could be antique just like that hat.”
“Of course, all these things could have been purchased from different stores,” Owens said. “I don’t want to spoil the party or anything.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Harry admitted. “What do you think, Mary Beth?”
“I think that most of these things came from one, maybe two shops. These Tocador girls, as you call them, they undoubtedly had a great many clothes at home.”
“Wherever home is,” Harry added.
“And they could be expected to spend a lot of their time shopping. Which leads me to believe that for the image they wanted to project they very well might have relied on a kind of customer service. There might be a woman or a man, it could be either, who dressed them.”
“Like a fashion designer?” Owens suggested.
“I don’t think they were models though. Models you find may show off fancy clothes and very fashionable things, but as a rule most of the ones I know dress fairly simply on their own. No, these were girls who liked to costume themselves. At least that’s my guess. I could be wrong.”
“You could be, yes,” Harry said, “but since nobody else has come up with a better theory—in fact, nobody has come up with any theory—I am going to operate on the assumption that you are right, that there is such a store and that if I can find it, somebody there will be able to tell me who the Tocador girls are. A long shot but what the hell?”
“What I suggest you do, Harry, is to go to places like Daljeet’s on Haight or Tropics on Market. Or you might try Flora which is somewhere in Fairfax. They’re the kind of specialty boutiques that might be able to help you even if they don’t carry these exact sort of things.”
“You think you could write those names down for me? I would greatly appreciate it.”
“No problem.” Then she broke out in laughter that had both men looking at her in bewilderment.
“What is it?” her husband asked.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it. It’s just the idea of Harry marching from one boutique to another, asking if they sell antique cloche hats and velvet skirts. It strikes me as very funny.”
“I’ll just think of it as an education. Mary Beth, I owe you a dinner—and a dress.”
“Nothing like what these girls wore, please,” she said. “I’m just a simple country girl.”
“Thank God for that,” Owens breathed. “Imagine being married to them?” He gestured to the mats with their charred contents glimmering in the intensity of the light. It was almost as if they had collectively conjured up the two dead women from the remnants of the clothes they’d worn.
“I wonder if somebody was,” Harry said. “I wonder if somebody was.”
C H A P T E R
T w e l v e
After undertaking an investigation into the nature of places like Hot Chilly, Orpheus, Mom’s Apple Grave, Tropics, and East/West Leather, Harry began to feel, in a word, foolish. Each boutique seemed to him more eccentric and more theatrical than the last. Who bought all this weird attire? he kept asking himself. Most of the clothes on exhibit seemed meant for a certain type, which to Harry’s mind was a sixteen-year-old girl with a lithe body, tight ass, small breasts, frizzy hair dyed a chilling shade of green or blue, who favored big tinted glasses and chewed gum interminably throughout the day and night.
He supposed he was prejudiced. His work, after all, seldom obliged him to explore the world of fashion, high, low, or retro, and understandably, he was in near total ignorance of the way it operated.
His presence in these shops was immediately noticed by proprietors and customers alike. They did not regard him with suspicion, but they certainly did give him some very curious looks. When he identified himself as a police officer, the salesperson he was addressing acted as though she—most often it was a she—was about to be arrested for some obscure crime she’d committed and then forgotten about. But that was not at all an unusual reaction. Everyone felt guilty about something, and it was Harry’s sense that a great many people were only waiting for a man with authority to tap them on the shoulder and announce that their time was up. While most of these individuals, randomly selected, would probably protest and assert their innocence, it was very likely that they would secretly believe the officer justified in making his arrest.
When Harry declared that he was just seeking information, the salesperson would visibly relax, breathe easier, and because she would generally feel, however irrationally, that she had just been let off the hook, she would be far readier to help.
Then, one by one, Harry would draw out of the large manila envelope he carried with him full-color glossies of the half-burned evidence. He would then carefully explain just what he was showing them since to the untutored eye what had once been a suede jacket and a velvet dress and a cloche hat looked indistinguishable from one another.
But despite the good intentions of the boutiques’ personnel, nobody could say whether these were the sort of items that they might have at one time sold or whether they had once regularly served two young women who mysteriously no longer shopped there.
After a full day of making the rounds, Harry had begun to feel that he was wasting his time. Still he had a strong, gut-level feeling that there was something to what Mary Beth had told him, that it made sense to continue looking further.
Before abandoning the Polk Street area altogether, he stopped in at the Palace Museum, located at 1546. Aside from carrying a full and exhaustive (perhaps even exhausting) line of designer jeans, the store featured what one guidebook said were “once-loved clothes from the twenties to the forties.”
A man whom Harry guessed to be in his twenties stepped forward to help. He stared at Harry for a few moments in something like astonishment. “Don’t tell me,” he started. “You wish to change your whole image. We had in a man just the other day, he was going through a mid-life crisis, you know, divorcing his wife, leaving his home, his work, his family, throwing it all aside for love.”
“A younger woman?”
“No, a younger man. It’s hard to keep up.”
“I imagine it is. But the fact of the matter is I am not looking to change my image.”
The man sighed. “What a shame. You certainly could do with a change.”
After a day of touring shops like this, Harry was scarcely in the mood to exchange mindless banter with anyone. He got right down to business, pulling out the glossies with an air of resignation. He did not expect to be rewarded here any more than he’d been in the last dozen boutiques.
But after he had described what he was displaying to the man, it proved to be more enlightening than Harry was prepared for.
/> “We don’t sell exactly this sort of thing in our store, but I am pretty certain that the place you are searching for is Lazlo’s.”
“Lazlo’s?”
“It’s a specialty shop, very expensive, exorbitant I should say. I’m told there are people who come from halfway around the world to be outfitted there. It’s located in Los Angeles. Maybe Beverly Hills, I’m not sure. But they would certainly have the combination of high fashion and antique clothes and unique accessories you’re looking for. And they do have personnel trained to clothe their regular customers. Sometimes they will go to the homes of their clients and outfit them there, sparing them the trouble of turning out in public. You know how some of these celebrities get?”
Harry said that he had an idea and then, thanking the man, left, wondering whether this was the lead he’d been searching for.
He phoned Mary Beth with the news.
“Lazlo’s, of course,” she said. “How stupid of me not to think of it. I could have saved you a lot of time.”
“No problem. Tell me, do you think a phone call to them would help?”
“I have the feeling, Harry, that Lazlo—and there is a real Lazlo, some doddering European who claims to have aristocratic lineage, I’m told—acts like he’s psychiatrist and father-confessor rolled into one, and he is very scrupulous about protecting his customers. He fears that some newsman will leak word of a star’s new fall wardrobe. I know it sounds foolish, but that’s the way some of the people in this business are.”
“Then I suppose I’ll just have to go to L.A. and present myself in person.”
“I’m sure you’ll be very persuasive.”
There was no question of Bressler authorizing the excursion to L.A. He had, for once, given Harry virtual carte blanche (though this latitude on his part could scarcely be expected to persist beyond this case). He might very well have authorized a trip to Hong Kong if it would have helped.
But what Harry did not anticipate was Bressler’s insistence that he not go by himself.
“Who is stuck with me this time?”
“The same man who was stuck with you last time,” Bressler told him.
This astounded Harry. “Why? Have you informed Drake of this?”
“Informed?” Bressler looked mildly surprised as he sat there, tilting slightly in his seat. “I thought you knew. It was Owens who pleaded with me to let him join you. And since you seem to work so well together, after bringing down that monster in Golden Gate, I figured why not?”
Harry realized it was pointless to argue with Bressler, but he did his best to talk Owens out of it. Just as he had been beginning to feel relieved of the burden of guilt that went with having a partner, particularly a partner he liked, that burden had been reimposed.
But Owens was insistent. “I know Los Angeles, I lived there for years, I have contacts there. And besides, we might walk into Lazlo’s and find out nothing, just a dead end. That’ll be it. It’ll be like a small vacation. There’s almost no chance of trouble.”
“You haven’t been around me long enough,” Harry said, interrupting him.
“What I was about to say was that if there is trouble I want to be with you. I feel like we, that is my wife and myself, have a stake in this case. If it weren’t for Mary Beth you wouldn’t even be going to L.A.”
His reasoning was not out of line, Harry recognized, but it was Owens’ sheer tenacity that convinced him to acquiesce.
He glanced at his watch. They were seated in the living room of Owens’ rambling house. It was approaching three in the afternoon. “You know somebody we can stay with there?”
“I surely do. An uncle of Mary Beth, retired film producer, used to be pretty big in the business years ago. His wife died, his kids have all gone off, so he has a lot of extra room.”
“Well, call him right now, say that we’re coming down there today. Then let’s get out to the airport and catch a shuttle.”
Within 463.7 square miles there exist eighty-one cities, which together constitute Los Angeles. And in that vast dominion there are six hundred movie and television firms. And in that vast dominion, too, there are more than five million registered vehicles.
And it seemed to Harry and Owens as they drove their rented Ford Matador from the airport into the city that all of those five million vehicles were on the road. Specifically, the road they were taking. It was rush hour, though that phrase carries the rather erroneous implication that a rush is in progress. On the contrary, the freeway system that defined Los Angeles County almost as much as it crisscrossed it had been turned into what New York refugees might call a gridlock. Nothing was moving, and nothing looked like it was going to move any time soon.
As the sun sank lower, the sky, filled with a thick haze to begin with, began to pale, growing not darker but yellower with dust and smog and smoke from brush fires that were erupting on the hillsides with perilous frequency, turning million-dollar houses into burnt-out shells and causing scrub pine and chapparal and sumac to disappear while at the same time releasing their respective odors and dispatching them throughout the city.
The radio was filled with reports about the fires in Sunland, in the Verdugo Hills, and in Carbon Canyon to the east, and the blaze that was running out of control near Lake Elsinore and the one that almost wiped out all of exclusive Country Club Drive.
Harry shut the radio off. He’d had enough news about doom, both impending doom and doom that was already here. After all, he had only to open the windows of the car to discover that there were fires raging on the outskirts of L.A. He didn’t need a news commentator telling him about it, too.
“It gets like this this time of year,” Owens said with the air of a man who feels obliged to apologize for a home that is in a constant state of disrepair. “The winds, and then there’s the dryness. But usually it’s not so bad.”
Harry and Owens had packed light suitcases on the premise that they wouldn’t be staying in L.A. longer than a day or two. Harry, who rarely got to L.A. and even less frequently felt the urge to, hoped that they could find out all they needed and leave by tomorrow. That is if they could ever get off this damn freeway. “At this rate, we could walk and be there faster,” he commented ruefully.
“Just hold on. We’re beginning to move.”
They nosed ahead to the next light. Not far.
“Some move,” noted Harry who then lapsed into a sullen silence that did not end until the traffic jam did.
As it turned out, Lazlo’s, which was their first stop even before putting in at Mary Beth’s uncle’s house, was in Beverly Hills, just as the man at the Palace had thought. It was to be found on Melrose Avenue, between La Cienega and Robertson boulevards. This was a predictable location since there were well over a hundred boutiques and antique stores crowded into the same stretch of Melrose. Many of the shops Harry noticed were converted bungalows, testifying to the onetime residential character of the street.
Lazlo’s, in size and in elaborateness dwarfed its competitors. The interior was filled with silver latticework and mirrors and tiled floors that brightly reflected the patrons who walked on them. Fountains, partially shielded from view by an enormous profusion of plants and tendril-like growths inching their way up marble columns, sputtered constantly with recycled water.
But the effect was neither warm nor welcoming but rather cold, almost severe, as though the place were designed by some of the same people who put together sets for sci-fi movies. Women who might be customers or mannequins, it was hard to tell which, sauntered from one display to the other, casting indifferent looks at the dresses, jackets, coats, handbags, hats, blouses, underthings, overthings, and jewelry almost as though nothing in the world, be it person or object, could interest them at all.
It required considerable skill to locate somebody who was responsible for more than one department (cosmetics, say, or the exclusive Yendi forties collection). Eventually they were guided to an office where the Matisse and Klee and de Koonings that hung on the
walls were not prints but very much originals.
A matronly woman, with hair that looked like one of the traditional wigs British judges wear in court, rose to greet them.
“You are policemen,” she said, mulling over the implications of this. “From San Francisco?”
Owens explained why they had come. He then proffered the glossies that Harry had taken on his rounds of San Francisco boutiques.
The woman, whose name was Ms. Weil (or so it said on the small sign on her desk), shook her head when she saw them. “Such destructiveness,” she muttered.
Harry assumed she was referring to the clothes and not to the women who’d worn them. Owens leaned forward to point out to her what each charred shred of cloth represented. He had undertaken the role of spokesman because Harry had wanted it that way. Being more impatient and more irritable than Owens, particularly after their tortuous ride into L.A., Harry had the feeling he would say something, even an innocent remark, that would offend this proper lady, which was the last thing he wanted to do—at least until they obtained the information they wanted from her.
“Is it possible that these items might have been purchased in your store?” Owens asked with the deference he thought appropriate to Ms. Weil’s exalted station.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She scrutinized the prints again. “We do stock such apparel as you mention.” She was being as noncommittal as possible within the limits of the truth.
“Do you keep a list of your regular clients?”
“We do.”
“Would it be possible to examine that list and to have a look at the sales receipts going back say, three or four months?”
“We could never allow that.”
Harry could no longer remain silent. “And why not?”
“As a private company we are under no such obligation.”
