The Murder Book (15 page)

The sports venture fizzled as had the movie game, and for a couple years, the Cossacks were out of print. Then Garvey Cossack resurfaced with plans for a federally funded community redevelopment project in the San Fernando Valley, and Bobo garnered attention for attempting to demolish a Hollywood bowling alley that the locals wanted preserved as a landmark in order to put up a giant strip mall.

Their mother’s obituary was dated three years ago. Ilse Cossack had died “
… after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease… private services, in lieu of flowers, donations to…”

Still no mention of Sister Caroline.

I began scanning the Web and the periodicals files for accounts of sexual homicides taking place within five years of Janie Ingalls’s murder, found nothing dramatically similar. Interesting, because sexual sadists don’t quit voluntarily, so maybe Janie’s murderer was dead or imprisoned. If so, would Milo ever get the answers he wanted?

I went downstairs to the Public Affairs Room, got my hands on every back issue of the
FBI Law Enforcement Journal
I could find, along with stacks of forensic magazines and crime periodicals. Because the savagery of what had been done to Janie was notable and perhaps the wound pattern — scalping in particular — had repeated itself.

But if it had, I couldn’t find the evidence. The FBI magazine had veered away from VICAP alerts and detailed crime studies to bland cop-speak articles geared for public relations, and the only case report involving removal of cranial skin cropped up in a wire service piece on crime in Brazil: A German-born doctor, son of a Nazi immigrant, had murdered several prostitutes and kept their scalps as trophies. The man was in his late twenties — a toddler at the time of the Ingalls case. Everyone starts off as a cute little baby.

Maybe Janie’s murderer had continued to pursue his grisly interests without leaving any bodies behind.

But that didn’t make sense. He’d flaunted Janie’s corpse twenty years ago and was likely to get more, not less, brazen.

When I got home, my message machine registered zero calls. I phoned Milo’s house and Rick Silverman answered, sounding sleepy. He’s an ER surgeon. No matter when I call, I seem to be waking him up.

“Alex. How’s it going?” He sounded casual. So Milo hadn’t told him about Robin.

“Fine, and with you?”

“I’m working, they’re paying me, I’m not complaining.”

“You’re the only doctor who isn’t.”

He laughed. “Actually, I’m bitching plenty, but too much of that, and you get bored with yourself. I keep telling myself it’s a good thing I’m salaried, don’t have to deal with the HMOs directly. Maybe one day Milo’ll pay all the bills.”

“That’ll be the year he heads to Paris for the big couture shows.”

He laughed again but I was thinking:
Paris? Where did that come from, Professor Freud?

“So you’re busy,” I said.

“Just came off an eighteen-hour fun-fest. Multicar collision. Daddy and Mommy having a spat in front, two kids in the back, three and five, no car seats, no belts. Daddy and Mommy survived. She may even walk again — enough of this or I’ll have to pay you. The big guy’s not in. Breezed by for dinner, then left.”

“He say where he was going?”

“Nope. We had Chinese takeout and I nearly fell asleep in my moo goo. When I woke, he’d tucked me in and left a note saying he might be busy for a while. He did seem a little edgy. Is there something I should know about? You two into something new?”

“No,” I said. “Everything’s old.”

I tried reading, watching TV, listening to music, meditating — what a joke
that
was, all I could focus on was bad stuff. By 10
P.M.
I was ready to claw the plaster from the walls and wondering when Robin would call again.

At this hour, the Eugene concert would be in full force and she’d be backstage, wonderfully harried.
Needed.
All those guitar-strumming, save-the-world sonofabitch—

Rrrrring.

My “hello” was breathless.

“What, you in the middle of working out?” said Milo.

“I’m in the middle of nothing. What’s up?”

“I can’t locate Schwinn, but I might’ve found his old lady.”

“First name Marge? Mecca Ranch in Oak View?” I said.

His exhalation was a protracted hiss. “Well, well, well, someone’s been a busy worker bee.”

“More like a drone. How’d you find her?”

“Exemplary detective work,” he said. “I got hold of Schwinn’s retirement file — a naughty thing, so this stays between you and me.”

“His pension checks went to the ranch?”

“For the first fifteen years after he left, they went to an address in Simi Valley. Then he switched to a post-office box in Oxnard for two years,
then
the ranch. He’s not listed in any DMV files, but the address cross-referenced to Marge Schwinn. I just called her, got a machine, left a message.”

“No DMV listing for him,” I said. “Think he’s dead?”

“Or he doesn’t drive anymore.”

“An ex-cop who doesn’t drive?”

“Yeah,” he said. “True.”

“Suburban life in Simi followed by a two-year POB interlude before the ranch. That could be divorce, intervening lonely bachelorhood, remarriage.”

“Or widowhood. His first wife was named Dorothy and she stopped being a beneficiary when he moved to Oxnard. Two years later, Marge came on.” He paused. “Dorothy… I think he mentioned her name. It’s getting hard to tell what I remember and what’s wishful thinking. Anyway, that’s it, for now.”

I recounted my time in the library, what I’d learned about the Cossacks.

“Rich kids stay rich,” he said. “Big surprise. I also looked for Melinda Waters. She’s on no state files, and neither is her mother, Eileen. That may not mean much if she got married and/or Mom got remarried and they both changed their names. I wish I knew the name of Melinda’s Navy dad, but I never learned it. The guy had shipped out to Turkey, good luck tracing that. I did locate Bowie Ingalls, and he’s definitely dead. Nineteen years dead.”

“A year after Janie,” I said. “What happened?”

“Single-motorist vehicular accident up in the hills. Ingalls plowed into a tree and went through the windshield. Blood alcohol four times the legal limit, dozen Bud empties in the car.”

“Up in the hills where?”

“Bel Air. Near the reservoir. Why?”

“Not that far from the party house.”

“So maybe he was reminiscing,” he said. “The facts still say drunk driver. The whole Cossack angle was pure supposition. For all I know, Janie and Melinda went to a whole other party. Or Schwinn was right and there was no Westside link at all, they got picked up by a psychopath and slaughtered nearer to the dump site. I’m tired, Alex. Gonna head home.”

“What’s the plan with Marge Schwinn?”

“She’s got my message.”

“And if she doesn’t return it?”

“I’ll try again.”

“If Schwinn is dead, maybe Marge sent the murder book,” I said. “She could’ve come across it in his effects, along with a reference to you and me—”

“Anything’s possible, my friend.”

“If you do reach her, mind if I tag along?”

“Who says I’m visiting her?”

I didn’t answer. He said, “What, you’ve got nothing better to do?”

“Not a thing.”

He humphed.

“Robin called,” I said. “We talked.”

“Good,” he said, putting a question mark on the end of it.

I swerved back into safe territory: “By the way, did you have time to run the prints on the murder book?”

“Just one set that I can see.”

“Mine.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m no ace powder man, but I
have
printed you, and those whorls look familiar.”

“So whoever sent it wiped it clean,” I said. “Interesting. Either way.”

He knew exactly what I meant: a careful cop, or a fastidious, taunting killer.

“Whatever,” he said. “Nighty-night.”

“Have some sweet dreams, yourself.”

“Oh, sure. Here come the sugarplum fairies.”

I
didn’t expect to hear from him anytime soon, but the following morning at eleven, he showed up at my front door, wearing a navy windbreaker over a plaid shirt and baggy jeans. Below the jacket, his gun bulged his waistline, but otherwise he looked like a guy with a day off. I was still in my robe. No call, so far, from Robin.

“Ready for fresh air?” he said. “Horse manure? All of the above?”

“The second Mrs. Schwinn got back to you.”

“The second Mrs. Schwinn didn’t, but I figured what the hell, Ojai’s pretty this time of year.”

A reflexive “Ah” rose in my throat and stuck there. “I’ll get dressed.”

“That would be best.”

He said, “The Seville’s nice on long drives,” and I obliged. The moment I started the engine, he threw back his head, shut his eyes, covered them with a handkerchief, let his mouth drop open. For the next hour, he dozed in the passenger seat, opening his eyes periodically to gaze out the window and appraise the world with distrust and wonder, the way kids and cops do.

I didn’t feel conversational, either, and I played music for company. Some old Oscar Aleman cuts from the Buenos Aires days, Aleman wailing away on a diamond-bright, nickel-silver National guitar. The route to Oak View was north on the 405, transfer to the 101 toward Ventura, then an exit on Highway 33. Ten more miles on two lanes that sliced through pink-gray mountains but rose barely above sea level, took us toward Ojai. Ocean moisture hung in the air and the sky was cottony white above the horizon, then slate-colored strata where the sun should have been. The stifled light brought out the greens, turned the world nuclear-blast emerald.

It had been a few years since I’d been here — chasing down a psychopath bent on revenge and meeting up with an impressive man named Wilbert Harrison. I had no idea if Harrison still lived in Ojai. A psychiatrist and a philosopher, he’d taken a reflective view of life, and given the violence I’d introduced him to, I could see him moving on.

The first few miles of Highway 33 were insulted by slag fields, oil rigs, rows of metallic coils that crowned the cable-and-pylon salad of an electrical plant like so much oversize
fusilli
. Soon after that everything turned woodsy and Ojai-heterogenous: cute little cabins graced by meticulous stone walls and shadowed by live oaks and pines, cute little shops selling homemade candles and fragrances. Massage clinics, yoga institutes, schools that would teach you how to draw, paint, sculpt, find inner peace, if only you’d let them into your consciousness. Mixed in with all that was the other side of small-town life: rusty mobile homes be-hind barbed-wire fencing, bait-and-tackle sheds, trucks on blocks, dusty homesteads with one or two hollow-bellied horses nosing the dirt, crude placards advertising beef jerky and homemade chili, boarding stables, modest shrines to the conventional God. And everywhere the hawks, huge, relaxed, confident, circling in lazy predatory arcs.

Mecca Ranch was on the west side of 33, announced by nailed-on iron letters in a pine slab, the sign bordered by cactus and some sort of wild grass. A left turn up a barely paved road lined with scraggly birds of paradise in poor flower, took us five hundred yards into low, gentle hills that topped off at a couple of acres of gravel-colored mesa. Off to the right was a corral fashioned from iron posts and wooden crossbeams, more than big enough for the five brown horses grazing. Sleek, well-nourished steeds. They paid us no attention. Directly behind the enclosure were several unhitched horse trailers and a bunk of paddocks. Up at road’s end, the birds of paradise were planted more closely together and better tended, and the orange-and-blue blossoms led the eye to a small, flat-roofed salmon-colored house with teal green wood trim. Parked in front were a ten-year-old brown Jeep Wagoneer and a Dodge pickup of the same color and vintage. A transitory shadow washed over the corral — a hawk orbiting so low I could see the surgical curve of its beak.

I turned off the engine, got out, filled my nose with the bite of pine and that curious maple syrup-and-rot tang of dried equine dung. Dead silence. I could see Pierce Schwinn thinking this would be heaven. But if he was like Milo and so many other people hooked on noise and evil, how long would that have lasted?

Milo slammed the passenger door hard, as if offering fair warning. But no one came out to greet us, and no face appeared in the house’s undraped front windows.

We walked to the front door. Milo’s bell-push set off fifteen seconds of chimes — some tune I couldn’t identify, but it brought back memories of Missouri department store elevators.

Now, sound from the corral: one horse whinnying. Still no human response. The hawk had flown off.

I studied the animals. Well-muscled mahogany creatures, two stallions, three mares, manes glossy and combed. Over the corral arced a semicircle of iron soldered with vaguely Moorish lettering.
Mecca.
A triangle of blue had broken through the cottony sky. The foothills ringing the ranch were green-topped, gentle, a nurturant border. It was hard to imagine the murder book emanating from this quiet place.

Milo rang again, and a female voice called out, “One minute!” Moments later the door opened.

The woman who stood there was petite and strong-shouldered, anywhere from fifty to sixty. She wore a royal blue and yellow checked shirt tucked into tight jeans that showed off a flat tummy, tight waist, boyish hips. Creased but clean work boots peeked out from under the jeans. White hair that retained some of its blond origins was tied back in a short ponytail — a merest upward twist of free locks. Her features were strong in a way that made them attractive in later life, but as a girl she’d probably been plain. Her eyes were a mottle of green and brown, lacking too much of the former to be called hazel. She’d plucked her eyebrows into spidery commas but wore no makeup. Her skin was testament to everything the sun could to do to skin: puckered, cracked, corrugated, coarse to the point of woodiness. A few scary-looking dark patches danced under the eyes and crowned her chin. When she smiled, her teeth were the milky white pearls of a healthy virgin.