Gone

Reynold Peaty’s hands lowered onto the girl’s shoulders. His right thumb slipped under the right spaghetti strap. Toyed with the string. Slid it off.

The girl jumped and twisted, craned to see him. His left hand gripped the top of her head and held her in place.

“He’s hurting- ”

“Mouth shut!” said Brad Dowd. “Don’t want to catch flies.”

Peaty’s right hand reached around and clamped over the girl’s mouth.

She made frantic little muffled noises. Peaty’s hand slapped her so hard, her eyes rolled back. With one hand, Peaty pulled her up by her hair. The other edged closer to her throat.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Perfect,” said Brad. “This is Reynold. The two of you are going to improvise a little skit.”

I flicked off the picture.

Milo was wide awake, looking sadder than I’d ever seen him.

I said, “You told me so,” and walked out of the room.

CHAPTER 46

The next week was emotional bouillabaisse.

Trying, with no success, to get Billy Dowd more appropriate lodgings and regular therapy.

Fending off Erica Weiss’s requests for another deposition, so she could “slam the final nail in Hauser’s coffin.”

Ignoring increasingly strident calls from Hauser’s defense attorney.

I hadn’t been to the station since viewing the DVD. Six minutes watching a girl I’d never met.

The day I moved Robin in, I pretended my head was clear. After I schlepped the last carton of her clothes into the bedroom, she sat me down on the edge of the mattress, rubbed my temples, and kissed the back of my neck. “Still thinking about it, huh?”

“Using unfamiliar muscles. The ribs don’t help.”

“Don’t waste energy trying to convince me,” she said. “This time I know what I’m getting myself into.”

My contact with Milo was limited to one eleven p.m. phone call. His voice, thick with fatigue, wondering if I could take care of some “ancillary stuff” while he coped with the mountain of evidence on what the papers were calling the “Bomb Shelter Murders.”

One nitwit columnist in the Times trying to co

I said, “Sure. What’s ancillary stuff?”

“Anything you can do better than me.”

That came down to being a grief sponge.

A forty-five-minute session with Lou and Arlene Giacomo lasted two hours. He’d lost weight since I’d seen him and his eyes were dead. She was a quiet, dignified woman, hunched over like someone twice her age.

I sat there as his rage alternated with her anguished accounts of Life With Tori, the two of them trading off with a rhythm so precise it could’ve been scripted. As the time ground on, their chairs edged farther and farther apart. Arlene was talking about Tori’s confirmation dress when Lou shot to his feet, snarling, and left my office. She started to apologize, changed her mind. We found him down by the pond, feeding the fish. They left silently and neither answered my calls that night. The clerk at their hotel said they’d checked out.

The widowed mother of Brad Dowd’s Las Vegas victim, Juliet Dutchey, turned out to be a former showgirl herself, a veteran of the old Flamingo Hotel. Mid-fifties and still toned, Andrea Dutchey blamed herself for not discouraging her daughter from moving to Vegas, then switched to squeezing my hand and thanking me for all I’d done. I felt I’d done nothing and her gratitude made me sad.

Dr. Susan Palmer came in with her husband, Dr. Barry Palmer, a tall, quiet, well-coiffed man who wanted to be anywhere else. She started off all business, crumpled fast. He kept his mouth shut and studied the prints on my wall.

Michaela Brand’s mother was too ill to travel from Arizona so I spoke with her over the phone. Her air machine hissed in the background and if she cried, I didn’t hear it. Maybe tears required too much oxygen. I stayed on the line until she hung up without warning.

No relative of Dylan Meserve surfaced.

I phoned Robin at her studio and said, “I’m finished, you can come back.”

“I wasn’t escaping,” she said. “Just doing my job.”

“Busy?”

“Pretty much.”

“Come home anyway.”

Silence. “Sure.”

I called Albert Beamish.

He said, “I’ve been reading about it. Apparently, I can still be shocked.”

“It’s shocking stuff.”

“They were spoiled and indolent but I had no idea they were fiends.”

“Beyond persimmons,” I said.

“Good God, yes! Alex- may I call you that- ”

“Sure. Mister Beamish.”

He chortled. “First off, thanks for informing me, that was uncharacteristically courteous. Especially coming from a member of the me-generation.”

“You’re welcome. I think.”

He cleared his throat. “Second, do you golf?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Never got into it.”

“Damn shame. At least you drink…perhaps one day, should you have time…”

“If you bring out the good stuff.”

“I only stock the good stuff, young man. What do you take me for?”

Two weeks after his arrest, Brad Dowd was found dead in his cell. The noose he’d used to hang himself had been fashioned from a pair of pajama pants he’d ripped into strips after lights-out. He’d been on suicide watch, housed in the High Power ward where things like that weren’t supposed to happen. The guards had been diverted by a neighboring inmate pretending to go crazy and smearing his cell with feces. That prisoner, a gang leader and murder suspect named Theofolis Moomah, underwent a miraculous recovery the moment Brad’s body was cut down. A search of Moomah’s cell uncovered a stash of extra commissary cigarettes and a roll of fifty-dollar bills. Brad’s attorney, a downtown court regular who’d defended several gang leaders, express-mailed his bill to the arraignment judge.

Stavros Menas, Esq. called a press conference and bellowed that the suicide supported his claim that Brad had been a “mad Svengali,” and his client an unwitting dupe.

The D.A. offered a contradictory analysis.

Get ready for a circus the animal-rights people wouldn’t mind.

I vowed to forget about all of it, figured the whydunit would stop eating at me eventually.

When it didn’t, I got on the computer.

CHAPTER 47

The woman said, “I still can’t believe you tracked me down that way.”

Her name was Elise Van Syoc and she was a Realtor working out of the Coldwell Banker Encino office. It had taken a long time but I’d found her using her maiden name, Ryan, and a decades-old nickname.

Ginger.

Groovy bass player for the Kolor Krew!

Her identity and a print of the photo I’d seen at the PlayHouse finally surfaced courtesy www.noshotwonders.com, a cruelly mocking compendium of failed pop bands flung by the gargantuan slingshot that was the Internet.

When I called her, she said, “I’m not getting involved in any court stuff.”

“It’s not about court stuff.”

“What, then?”

“Curiosity,” I said. “Professional and personal. At this point, I’m not sure I can separate the two.”

“That sounds complicated.”

“It’s a complicated situation.”

“You’re not writing a book or doing a movie?”

“Absolutely not.”

“A psychologist…whose therapist are you, exactly?”

I tried to explain my role.

She cut me off. “Where do you live?”

“Beverly Glen.”