A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (24 page)

26

B
UNGEE CORDS
,
FIVE
:
ASSORTED LENGTHS AND COLORS
.

Bishop’s real name was William Fischer, DOB 8/26/51. He’d been a resident of Bishop, California, for most of the 1980s. He had a wife, now deceased, and a daughter. He’d never been listed as missing, but he had an arrest record that included three domestic disturbances, two DWIs, a drunk and disorderly, and a misdemeanor charge for battery.

Pam had sent me his record. I looked at the photos from his arrests. It was hard to tell that he was the same man from the photo Henry had given us. I had to look closely at the bone structure, the shape of his nose, the set of his eyes. But the more I studied the face, the more certain I became. It was him.

With the solid ID, I was able to find a half a dozen more arrests spread across California throughout the early ’90s. Based on the dates, it appeared he left Bishop sometime in ’88 or ’89. Then he apparently headed to the coast, where he was picked up for assault in Santa Cruz. The charges were dropped. The first vagrancy hit was in ’92 in Salinas. He spent a few days in the city lockup and was released on his own recognizance. He drifted south over the next few years. The most recent arrest had been in Oxnard in ’96. No charges were filed in that case either.

I would have expected to get a fingerprint match from at least one of those incidents, but they were relatively minor infractions in small towns like the city of Bishop, so it wasn’t too great a surprise that none of his prints had found their way into the federal database.

That was the last record I could find of William Fischer. I’d need to follow up on everything I found in regard to the arrests. But first I’d need to find his daughter, Rose.

With the help of public records and the DMV, I had an address and a phone number for her in less than an hour.

When I told Jen I had Bishop’s daughter, she asked, “How are you going to handle it?”

“I’ll call.”

I did. It went straight to her voice mail.

Her message was short and direct. “This is Rose. Leave a message.” Her voice was indistinct—neither particularly high nor low, and there wasn’t much affect to it. Nothing that gave me any sense of her personality.

“Hello, Ms. Fischer,” I said. “My name is Danny Beckett. I’m a detective with the Long Beach Police Department. I may have some information regarding your father.” I left my number and asked her to call me back as soon as she could. “You can call anytime. Thanks for your assistance.”

“Thanks for your assistance?” Jen said.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“She hasn’t assisted you with anything yet.”

“I’m thanking her in advance. That way she’ll feel compelled to call back.”

“You don’t think news of her father is a good enough reason?”

We bickered over the inconsequential comment because we didn’t want to address anything real. The emotional rush I’d felt when the ID came through was beginning to wane. I knew better, but on some basic level I’d hoped that discovering Bishop’s real name would somehow magically fill the emptiness, that it would grant me some sort of grand epiphany that would bring sense and order and closure to the last few weeks of unanswered questions.

Instead, it was only a name.

And a rap sheet.

Now, I realized, I was transferring that burden to a dead man’s daughter, hoping she’d somehow be able to fill the gaping hole that was not knowing, hoping she’d finish the story. I was doing what I’d done all my life—trying to understand the people I’d lost. My father, Megan, and every victim whose death I’d ever investigated. Why would I expect to find the answers here?

It was after nine when I got the return call. I had already added her number to my contacts so I’d know who it was before I answered. That was the thing I liked most about cell phones. Caller ID. Those three or four seconds between the moment the call comes in and the moment I answer have become so necessary to me that I feel disadvantaged when I answer a call from a number I don’t recognize or when the display reads “Unknown.” But I knew who was calling. I knew what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.

“Detective Danny Beckett,” I said in what might have been the softest tone I’d used with that particular combination of words.

“This is Rose Fischer.” There was a familiar nervousness in her voice. No one associates messages from detectives with good news. That usually comes across in people’s voices when they return our calls. If
they return our calls. “I’m sorry to get back to you so late.”

“No, please don’t worry about that.” My voice was warm and friendly, but with a practiced seriousness underlying the pleasantry. It was the voice I’d developed over the years for talking to victims’ families. “When I said ‘anytime,’ I meant it.”

“How can I help you?”

“What can you tell me about your father?” I asked.

She said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been investigating the murder of a man here in Long Beach. We’ve been having some difficulty positively identifying him.”

A nervous edge slipped into her voice. “Do you need me to look at him or something?” And a tinge of trepidation. “I don’t even know if I’d recognize him.”

“No, I’m afraid that wouldn’t help in this case.” I shouldn’t have said that. In the silence, I could almost hear her mind running through the various reasons why a body might not be able to be visually identified.

“Why?”

“The victim’s body was in a condition that would make that kind of identification difficult.” Now I was just sounding like a dick. “What we’d really like to do is a DNA test. Would you be willing to help us with that?”

She thought about it. “Yes, of course. I could do that.”

I made arrangements to meet her the following evening after she got home from work. It would have been easier to arrange for the sheriff’s department to do the test in La Quinta and forward it to us in Long Beach, but I didn’t want to wait. And I didn’t want to trust it to anyone else.

I’d be heading out to the desert again.

“Want to go to La Quinta?”

“What do you mean?” Jen asked. We were eating takeout from Enrique’s in her backyard. I thought it was still too hot to eat outside, especially since she had air-conditioning. She didn’t agree. “The motel?”

“No,” I said. “The city.”

“I didn’t know there was a city. Where is it?”

“Out by Palm Springs. It’s ‘The Gem of the Desert.’”

“That why you want to go there?”

“No.”

“Then what’s in La Quinta?”

“Bishop’s daughter.”

“When do we leave?”

We took my Camry. The overtime request had been turned down, so that meant we’d have to make up the time, but Jen was still on board. We cleared our call lists and messages and wrapped up as much paperwork as we could after lunch in order to get on the road by two thirty. Much later and the traffic would have doubled our driving time.

I kept waiting for Jen to ask me why we were doing this. By the time we passed Riverside, I went ahead and answered the unspoken question myself. “I know we could have had the locals do it.”

“What?” she asked.

“The DNA swab. We didn’t need to make this drive ourselves.”

“I know.”

“I figured it would be quicker this way. How long would we have to wait for some deputy to make time for a low-priority request?”

“It’s okay.”

“And then how much longer would it take to get it processed through their office and transported to us?”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“And you didn’t need to come. I could have managed myself. But thank you. I’m glad you did.”

“You’re welcome.”

I was tempted to keep explaining, but I knew better. I think I also knew, on some level at least, that the explanations were as much for me as they were for her. I needed to rationalize my connection to the case. Driving two hours one way to do a simple DNA test wasn’t unheard of, but it also wasn’t something we’d do for many investigations. We were going out of the way, and not just in the geographic sense. But I needed to do this one myself. I needed to make the connection. And I needed to know. Jen understood.

On the stereo, the
Fresh Air
podcast that had been playing ended with Ken Tucker reviewing Bob Dylan’s
Another Self Portrait
. I wondered if I was still interested enough in him to give it a listen. I probably was, but I realized I wasn’t really invested in what I was listening to and that within five minutes I’d forget I’d ever heard the review. Bishop and his daughter were the only things I could actually focus on.

My iPhone cycled another installment through the Bluetooth connection.

“Are you kidding?” Jen said. “How much Terry Gross do you have on that thing?”

I stopped it and said, “You pick something.”

She took the phone out of the cup holder and began searching through the music. Her choice surprised me—Loudon Wainwright III’s
High Wide & Handsome.
I don’t know why she chose it, but it didn’t take long for his banjo frailing and his buoyant voice on the title track to get me out of my head.

Rose Fischer lived in a gated community called Solida del Sol
.
It looked like just about every other gated community we’d passed since Orange County. It was just after five when we got there. The guard had our names on a list and gave us directions to her house. Everything looked the same inside, too, all beige stucco and red-tile roofs, but Jen paid close attention to the signs, so we made our way through narrow and winding streets without any wrong turns.

The guard had called ahead. She was waiting for us outside, surrounded by drought-tolerant plants that looked surprisingly lush. She gave us a small wave as we pulled up to the curb. I opened the door, and it felt like I’d stepped too close to a bonfire.

“Ms. Fischer?” I said as we climbed the two glazed-tile steps up onto her porch.

“Yes, hello. Detective Beckett?”

I nodded. “This is my partner, Jennifer Tanaka.”

Jen shook her hand.

She led us inside and closed the stout alder door behind us. Jen had almost chosen one like it for her house, but decided the wrought-iron detailing made it look like it was trying too hard. It wasn’t a big house, but it was very comfortably furnished. Everything seemed to be at least a few years old, not worn or shabby, but well used. After the door, I was expecting something that looked a lot more like a Pottery Barn catalogue.