The Murder Book (14 page)

“Maybe ‘NS’ means someone else thinks you should pursue it now. Do any of the other photos in the book mean anything to you?”

“Nope.”

I looked at the gloves he’d discarded. “Going to run prints?”

“Maybe,” he said. Then he grimaced.

“What?”

“Ghost of failures past.”

He poured a fourth glass, mostly juice, maybe an ounce of vodka.

I said, “Any guesses who sent it?”

“Sounds like you’ve got one.”

“Your ex-partner, Schwinn. He had a fondness for photography. And access to old police files.”

“Why the hell would he be contacting me, now? He couldn’t stand me. Didn’t give a damn about the Ingalls case or any other.”

“Maybe time has mellowed him. He worked Homicide for twenty years before you came on. Meaning he’d have been on the job during much of the period covered by the photos. The ones that preceded his watch, he swiped. He bent the rules, so lifting a few crime-scene photos wouldn’t have been much of an ethical stretch. The book could be part of a collection he assembled over the years. He called it the murder book and bound it in blue, to be cute.”

“But why send it to me
via
you? Why now? What’s his damn point?”

“Is Janie’s picture one Schwinn could’ve snapped himself?”

Peeling on a new pair of gloves, he flipped back to the death shot.

“Nah, this is professionally developed, better quality than what he’d have gotten with that Instamatic.”

“Maybe he had the film reprocessed. Or if he’s still a photography bug, he’s got himself a home darkroom.”

“Schwinn,” he said. “Screw all this hypothesizing, Alex. The guy didn’t trust me when we worked together. Why would he be contacting me?”

“What if he learned something twenty years ago that he’s finally ready to share? Such as the source that directed him to Bowie Ingalls and the party. Maybe he feels guilty about holding back, has the urge to come clean. By now, he’d be close to seventy, could be sick or dying. Or just introspective — age can do that. He knows
he’s
in no position to do anything about the case but figures you might be.”

He thought about that. Degloved again, stood, stared at the fridge but didn’t move. “We can spin theories all day, but the book could’ve been sent by anyone.”

“Could it?” I said. “Janie’s murder never hit the news, so it had to be someone with inside information. And Schwinn’s belief in science becoming a major investigative tool might play into it. That day has arrived, right? DNA testing, all that other good stuff. If semen and blood samples were saved—”

“I don’t even know if there
was
any semen in her, Alex. Schwinn figured it for a sex thing, but neither of us ever saw the autopsy results. Once they closed us down, I never saw a scrap of official paper.” A big fist slammed the table, and the murder book jumped. “This is total bullshit.”

I kept my mouth shut.

He began pacing the dining room. “Bastard — I have a good mind to go face-to-face with him. If it was him — so why was it sent to you?”

“Covering tracks,” I said. “Schwinn knew we worked together — another indication of an interest in police affairs.”

“Or just someone who reads the paper, Alex. Our names were paired on the Teague case.”

“And you came out of that one smelling sweet, big solve. Schwinn may not have liked you or respected or trusted you, but maybe he’s followed your career and changed his mind.”

“Give me a break.” He picked up his glass. A thread of vodka had settled on the bottom, an icy ribbon of alcohol. “All this hypothesizing, my head feels like it’s gonna split open. Sometimes I wonder what exactly it is that forms the basis for our friendship.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “Common pathology.”

“What pathology?”

“Mutual inability to let go. Schwinn — or whoever sent the murder book knows it.”

“Yeah, well screw him. I’m not biting.”

“Your decision.”

“Damn right.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I hate when you do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Say ‘Ah.’ Like a fucking dentist.”

“Ah.”

His arm drew back and a big-fisted hand shot toward my jaw. He tapped gently, mouthed, “Pow.”

I hooked a thumb at the blue album. “So what do you want me to do, toss it?”

“Don’t do anything.” He got to his feet. “I’m feeling a little… gonna take a nap. The spare bedroom fixed up?”

“As always. Pleasant dreams.”

“Thank you, Norman Bates.” He stomped toward the rear of the house, was gone for maybe ten minutes before returning tieless, shirt untucked. Looking as if he’d crammed a night’s worth of nightmares into six hundred seconds.

“What I’m gonna do,” he said. “—
all
I’m gonna do, is make a basic attempt to find Schwinn. As in make a call. If I find him and it turns out he did send the book, he and I will have a little chat, believe me. If it wasn’t him, we forget the whole thing.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“What? You don’t like it?”

“It’s fine with me,” I said.

“Good. ’Cause that’s it.”

“Great.”

Regloving, he picked up the murder book, headed for the front door, said, “Sayonara. It’s almost been fun.” As he stepped outside, he said: “Be there for Robin’s call. Deal with it, Alex.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t like when you get agreeable.”

“Then screw you.”

He grinned. “Ah.”

I sat there a long time, feeling low. Wondering if Robin would call from Eugene. Figuring if she didn’t within a couple of hours, I’d go somewhere, anywhere.

I fell asleep at the dining room table. The phone woke me two hours later.

“Alex.”

“Hi.”

“I finally got you,” she said. “I’ve tried so many times.”

“Been out. Sorry.”

“Out of town?”

“Just errands. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Great — the tour. We’ve been getting excellent publicity. Sellout crowds.”

“How’s Oregon?”

“Green, pretty. Mostly I’ve seen soundstages.”

“How’s Spike?”

“He’s good… adapting… I miss you.”

“Miss you, too.”

“Alex?”

“Uh-huh?”

“What’s — are you okay?”

“Sure… so tell me, are sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll what they’re cracked up to be?”

“It’s not like that,” she said.

“Which part? The sex or the drugs?”

Silence. “I’m working really hard,” she said. “Everyone is. The logistics are incredible, putting everything together.”

“Exciting.”

“It’s satisfying.”

“I’d hope so,” I said.

Longer silence. “I feel,” she said, “that you’re very far away from me. And please don’t be literal.”

“As opposed to metaphorical?”

“You’re angry.”

“I’m not, I love you.”

“I really
do
miss you, Alex.”

“Nothing’s stopping you from coming home anytime,” I said.

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?” I said. “What, it’s turned into a heavy metal tour, shackles and chains?”

“Please don’t be like this, Alex.”

“Like what?”

“Sarcastic — veiled. I know you’re mad at me, and that’s probably the real reason you didn’t call me back right away, but—”

“You leave, and I’m the bad guy?” I said. “Yes, the real reason we missed each other was I was in no shape to talk to anyone. Not anger, I just got… hollow. After that I did try to call but like you said, you’re busy. I’m not angry, I’m… do what you need to do.”

“Do you want me to quit?”

“No, you’d never forgive me for that.”

“I want to stay.”

“Then stay.”

“Oh, Alex…”

“I’ll try to be Mr. Cheerful,” I said.

“No, I don’t want that.”

“Probably couldn’t pull it off anyway. Never been much of a performer — guess I wouldn’t fit in with your new buddies.”

“Alex, please… oh,
damn
— Hold on! They’re calling me, some sort of crisis — dammit, I don’t want to sign off like this—”

“Do what you need to do,” I said.

“I’ll call you later — I love you, Alex.”

“Love-you-too.”

Click.

Good work, Delaware. For this we sent you to therapist school?

I shut my eyes, struggled to empty my head, then filled it with mental snapshots.

Finally, I found the image I wanted and wedged it behind my eyes.

Janie Ingalls’s brutalized body.

A dead girl, granting me momentary grace, as I lost myself in her imagined agony.

O
ne thing about sensory deprivation: It does tend to freshen
up your perceptions. And a plan — any plan — opens the door to
self-importance.

When I left the house, the sun kissed me like a lover, and the trees were greener under a benevolent sun that reminded me why people kept moving to California. I collected the day’s mail — junk junk junk — then walked around to the rear garden and stopped at the pond. The koi were a sinuous brocade, hyperactive, clamoring at the rock border, brought to the surface by my footsteps.

Ten very hungry fish. I made them happy. Then I drove to school.

I used my crosstown med school faculty card to get a parking spot on the U.’s north campus, walked to the Research Library, sat myself down in front of a computer, began with the in-house data banks, then logged onto the Internet and made my way through half a dozen search engines.

Janie
or
Jane Ingalls
pulled up the Ingalls-Dudenhoffer family tree website from Hannibal, Missouri. Great-great-great-grandmother Jane Martha Ingalls would be 237 years old next week.

Bowie Ingalls
connected me to a David Bowie fan club in Manchester, England, and to a University of Oklahoma history professor’s site on Jim Bowie.

Several
Melinda Waters
hits popped up but none seemed remotely relevant: A physicist by that name worked at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, nineteen-year-old Melinda Sue Waters was hawking nude pictures of herself from a small town in Arkansas, and Melinda Waters, Attorney-at-Law
(“Specializing in Bankruptcy and Evictions!”)
advertised her services on a legal bulletin board out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

No crime stories or death notices on either girl. Perhaps Janie’s friend had indeed surfaced, as Milo had suggested, and slipped back into society unnoticed.

I tried her mother’s name — Eileen — with no success.

Next search: Tonya Marie Stumpf. Nothing on Pierce Schwinn’s backseat playmate. No surprise there, I hadn’t expected an aging hooker to have her own website.

No data on Pierce Schwinn, either. His surname pulled up several Schwinn bicycle items and one news piece that caught my eye because it was relatively local: a Ventura weekly’s account of a horse show last year. One of the winners was a woman named Marge Schwinn, who raised Arabians in a place called Oak View. I looked up the town. Seventy miles north of L.A., near Ojai. Exactly the kind of semirural escape that might attract an ex-cop. I wrote down her name.

Logging the activities of the Cossack family kept me busy for a long time, as I caught dozens of articles in the
L.A. Times
and the
Daily News
that stretched back to the sixties.

The boys’ father, Garvey Cossack, Senior, had received intermittent coverage for tearing down buildings and putting up shopping centers, working the zoning board for variances, mixing with politicians at fund-raisers. Cossack Development had contributed to the United Way and to all the right diseases, but I found no records of donations to the Police Benevolent Society or any links to John G. Broussard or the LAPD.

A twenty-five-year-old social-page picture showed Cossack Senior to be a short, bald, rotund man, with huge black-framed eyeglasses, a tiny dyspeptic mouth, and a fondness for oversize pocket squares. His wife, Ilse, was taller than he by half a head, with dishwater hair worn too long for her middle-aged face, hollow cheeks, tense hands, and barbiturate eyes. Other than chairmanship of a Wilshire Country Club charity debutante ball, she’d stayed out of the limelight. I checked the list of young women presented at the ball. No mention of Caroline Cossack, the girl who never changed her clothes and might’ve poisoned a dog.

Garvey Jr. and Bob Cossack began making the papers by their midtwenties — just a few years after the Ingalls murder. Senior had keeled over on the seventh hole of the Wilshire Country Club golf course, and the reins of Cossack Development passed to the sons. They’d diversified almost immediately, continuing ongoing construction projects but also bankrolling a slew of independent foreign films, none of which made money.

Calendar
shots showed the Cossack brothers attending premieres, sunning in Cannes, venturing to Park City for the Sundance Festival, eating hip-for-a-nanosecond cuisine, hanging out with starlets and fashion photographers, addicted heirs, people famous for being famous, the usual assortment of Hollywood leeches.

Garvey Cossack Jr. seemed to love the camera — his face was always closest to the lens. But if he thought himself photogenic, that was more than a bit of delusion. The visage he flaunted was squat, porcine, topped by thinning, curly, light brown hair and anchored by a squishy dinner roll of a neck that propped up the sphere of cranium like an adipose brace. Younger brother Bob (“Bobo” because as a kid he’d loved the wrestler Bobo Brazil) was also coarse-featured, but thinner than his brother, with long, dark hair combed straight back from a low, square brow and a Frank Zappa mustache that diminished his chin. Both brothers favored the black suit-and-T-shirt combo, but it came across as costumery. Nothing fit Garvey right, and Bobo looked as if he’d shoplifted his threads. These countenances were meant for the back room, not the klieg lights.

The Cossack brothers’ big-screen adventures appeared to last for three years, then they shifted gears and began making noises about bringing a football team to the Coliseum. Resurrecting one of their father’s unfulfilled dreams. Assembling a “consortium” of financial types, the brothers submitted a proposal to the city council that ended up being denounced by the more populist members as a scheme to lock in taxpayer financing of their for-profit plan.