Stalking the Angel (16 page)

Jillian Becker’s lips tightened and she put down her fork and I thought she was going to stand. She didn’t. She said, “Bradley has been very fair to me. He’s treated me just as he’s treated everyone else in his organization. He’s recognized and rewarded my abilities. It’s a good job.”

“And you’ve got the BMW to prove it.”

“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? Tearing up checks. Standing on your head in your office.”

“How about Sheila? You think I could talk with her?”

Silence.

“Sheila went with him.”

Slow nod.

I finished off the Dos Equis. “Parents of the Year, all right.”

Jillian started to say something, then stopped. She looked angry and embarrassed.

I said, “You could get me into their house. We could look in Mimi’s room.”

“Bradley would fire me.”

“Maybe.”

Her jaw worked and she sipped some water and didn’t say anything for a long time. When she did, she said, “I don’t like you.”

I nodded.

Her jaw flexed again, and she stood up. “God damn you,” she said. “Let’s go. I have a key.”

We took two cars, Jillian pulling out in her white BMW and me following her west along Sunset toward Beverly Hills, then up Beverly Glen to the Warrens’. Jillian parked by the front of the house and I parked next to her. She had the front door open by the time I got out of my car. She said, “Mimi’s room is in the rear. I’ll walk back with you.” She walked in ahead without waiting.

The big house was as cold as a mausoleum, and our footsteps echoed on the terrazzo entry. I hadn’t heard it when I’d been in the house before, but when I was in the house before there’d been other people and things going on. Now the house seemed abandoned and desolate. Life in an Andrew Wyeth landscape.

Mimi’s room was big and white and empty the way I remembered it. The single bed was made and tight and the desk was neat and the walls bare and the high shelf of
Britannica
and Laura Ingalls Wilder just as it
had been before. I had hoped that since the last time I had seen the room, posters would have gone up on the walls and someone would have doodled on the desk and a pile of dirty clothes would’ve grown in the corner. Jillian said, “Sixteen years old.” She was standing with her arms crossed and her hands cupping her upper arms, feeling the cold.

I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

She looked at me. “As long as I’m here, I may as well help you.”

“Take the desk.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Address books, yearbooks, letters, a diary. Anything that might have names and phone numbers. Search one drawer at a time. Empty it item by item, then put it back together. Make yourself go slowly.”

Jillian went over to the desk and opened the large bottom drawer. Hesitant. She said, “You do this a lot, don’t you? Look through people’s things.”

“Yes. People keep secrets. You have to look into personal places to find them.”

“It makes me uncomfortable.”

“It makes me uncomfortable, too, but there’s no other way.”

She looked at me some more, then bent to the drawer and started taking out things. I went to the bed, stripped down the covers, threw them into the center of the room, and lifted the mattress off the box springs. No hidden diary. No secret compartments cut into the side of the mattress. I tilted the bed up on its edge. Nothing beneath the box springs. I put the bed back the way it had been, then I looked through the
Britannica
and the matched set of Laura Ingalls Wilder. A pink $50 Monopoly money bill fell out of volume E of the
Britannica
. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books had never been opened.

To the left of the desk there was a walk-in closet. A rail of clothes hung on the right side of the closet with a shoe board and shoes beneath the clothes, each pair neatly together and all the shoes forming a nice neat row. On the left side of the closet there were shelves with more books and game boxes. On the lowest shelf there was a blue hat that said
Disneyland
and a little stuffed monkey and what had once been an ant farm but was now just an empty plastic box. Next to the ant farm there was a very old set of a children’s encyclopedia and a book about standard poodles that looked like it had been read a lot and four brochures on the work of a Japanese artist named Kira Asano. The brochures showed reproductions of bleak landscapes and described Asano as a dynamic, charismatic visionary whose gallery showings and lectures were not to be missed. One of the brochures had a picture of Asano made up like a samurai with a white and red headband, no shirt, and a samurai sword. Visionary, all right. Beneath the brochures were two slim volumes of what looked like Japanese poetry. There was something handwritten in Japanese in the front of each volume. I put the volumes of poetry aside and called Jillian.

“Can you read this?”

“Haiku by Bashō and Issa.” She read the inscriptions and smiled. “They were a gift from someone named Edo. ‘May there always be warm sun.’ ”

“Can Mimi read Japanese?”

“Maybe a little. I don’t really know.” Mimi Warren, the Invisible Child.

I put the poetry back on the shelf. “Did you finish going through the desk?”

“I didn’t find anything.”

I nodded. “Okay. I’ll finish here in a minute.”

“We could carry this stuff out and I could help.”

“If we carried this stuff out, we wouldn’t remember where it belongs.”

She cocked her head at me. Curious.

“These aren’t our things,” I said. “We have to respect that.”

She stared at me some more, then stepped back. “Of course. I’ll wait in the front.”

Halfway through the games, I found seven smudged envelopes in a Parcheesi box. They were postmarked Westwood and had been addressed to Ms. Mimi Warren at the Shintazi Hotel in Kyoto, Japan, and were return-addressed to Traci Louise Fishman, 816 Chandelle Road, Beverly Hills. Both the address and return had been neatly printed in bright, violet ink, with plenty of curlicues and swirls and hearts rather than dots over the
i
’s. I took out each letter and read it. Traci Louise Fishman was sixteen years old, and wondered why Mimi’s father had to ruin every vacation by dragging her best friend off to Japan. In one letter, she had a crush on a boy named David who went to Birmingham High in Van Nuys, and desperately wanted him to “make her a woman.” In another, David had become a stuck-up shit who wouldn’t look at her, being a typical shallow Valley dude more interested in brainless bimbos with surfer-chick tans than women of intellect and sensitivity. Traci smoked too much, but was going to quit, having read a
Harvard Medical School Health Letter
which said that teenage girls who smoke would almost certainly have deformed children and breast cancer. She really really really liked Bruce Willis, but she’d just die if she could ever meet Judd Nelson, even
though he had a funny-looking nose. Her dad had promised her a new car if she took two summer-session classes at the Glenlake School for Girls so maybe she could graduate one semester early. She was gonna do it ’cause what she wanted more than anything else in the world was a snow-white Volkswagen Rabbit convertible even though her old man was such a cheap shit it would probably never happen. She couldn’t wait for Mimi to get home, she missed their talks soooooooo much! And—ohmyGod, fur shure!—she had spotted in a pair of white pants through a
Super
Tampax and was so embarrassed she thought she would die!!!! The letters went on. The stuff of life.

When I had read all seven letters, I returned them to the Parcheesi box, then went through the rest of the boxes, but found nothing else. When I left the closet, Jillian Becker was gone. I made sure the closet was as I had found it, fixed the bed, shut the light, then left and went back through the dark house to the front.

Jillian was leaning against a little table in the entry with her arms crossed when I got there. I thought she might have looked sad, but maybe not. She said, “Did you find anything?” Her voice was quiet.

“No mention of Carol or Kerri, but I found seven letters from someone named Traci Louise Fishman. Traci Louise Fishman told Mimi everything that was going on in her life. Maybe Mimi returned the favor.”

Jillian uncrossed her arms. “Good. I’m glad this was helpful. Now let me lock up.”

I went out and waited. It was cool in upper Holmby and the earth smelled damp from having been recently watered. When Jillian came out, I said, “Thanks for getting me in here.”

She walked past without looking at me and went to
her BMW. She opened her door, then she closed it and turned back to me. Her eyes were bright. She said, “I worked my butt off for a job like this.”

“I know.”

“You don’t walk away from something you’ve worked so hard for.”

“I know.”

She opened her car door again, but still didn’t get in. Out in the street some rich kid’s Firebird with a Glaspak muffler blasted past, wrecking the calm. She said, “You go to school, you work hard, you play the game. When you’re in school, they don’t tell you how much it costs. They don’t tell you what you’ve got to give up to get to where you want to be.”

“They never do.”

Jillian looked at me some more, then she said good night and got into her white BMW and drove away. I watched her. Then I drove away, too.

Glenlake School for Girls is on a manicured green campus at the border between Westwood and Bel Air, in the midst of some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It is a fine school for fine girls from fine families, the sort of place that would not take kindly to an unemployed private cop asking to be alone with one of its young ladies. Real cops would probably be called. As would the young lady’s parents. When you got to that point, you could just about always count on the kid clamming up. So. Ixnay on the direct approach.

There were other options. I could go to Traci Louise’s home, but that, too, would involve parents and an equal possibility of clamming. Or I could stake out the Glenlake campus and abduct Traci Louise Fishman as she arrived. This seemed the most likely option. There was only one problem. I had no idea what Traci Louise Fishman looked like.

The next morning I forwent my usual wardrobe
and selected a conservative blue three-piece pinstripe suit and black Bally loafers. I hadn’t worn the Ballys for over a year. There was dust on them. When the tie was tied and the vest buttoned and the jacket in place and riding squarely on my shoulders, the cat topped the stairs and looked at me.

“Pretty nice, huh?”

His ears went down and he ran under the bed. Some people are never happy.

At twenty minutes after nine I parked in the Glenlake visitors’ lot, found my way to the office, went up to an overweight lady behind the counter, and said, “My name’s Cole. I’m thinking about applying to Glenlake for my daughter. Would it be all right if I looked around?”

The woman said, “Let me get Mrs. Farley.”

A thin woman in her early fifties came out of an office and over to the counter. She had blond hair going to gray and sharp blue eyes and a smile as toothy as a Pontiac’s grill. I tried to look like I made two hundred thou a year. She said, “Hello, Mr. Cole, I’m Mrs. Farley. Mrs. Engle said you wished to see the school.”

“That’s right.”

She looked me over. “Had you made an appointment?”

“I didn’t think one was necessary. Should I have called?”

“I’m afraid so. I have an interview scheduled with another couple in ten minutes.”

I nodded gravely, and tried to look like I would look if I was recalling an overbooked personal calendar, then shook my head. “Of course. Being a single parent and having just been made a partner in the firm, my schedule tends to get out of hand, but maybe I can get
back in a couple of weeks.” I let my eyes drift down the line of her body and linger.

She shifted behind the counter and glanced at her watch. “It seems a shame not to see the school after you’ve gone to such trouble,” she said.

“True. But I understand if you can’t make the time.” I touched her arm.

The tip of her tongue peeked out and wet the left corner of her mouth. “Well,” she said, “maybe if we hurry I can give you a short tour.” She said it deviously.