He righted the mattress, looked up at the ceiling, then back at the empty closet.
"She wasn't moving out, Alex. This is where she lived. If you can call it that."
In the office, he put his hands together prayerfully and said, "Give me something to work with, Lord."
"Thought you already went through it."
"Not thoroughly. Couldn't, with the criminalists buzzing around. Just that box." He pointed to a cardboard file on the floor. "That's where I found the divorce papers.
Near the top."
He approached the desk and studied the books in the cheap plywood cases that covered two walls. Shelves stuffed and sagging. Volumes on psychology, psychiatry, neurology, biology, sociology, bound stacks of journals arranged by date. White powder and prints everywhere.
Milo had emptied the top drawer of staples and paper clips, bits of paper and lint, was into the second drawer, rummaging. "Okay, here we go." He waved a red leatherette savings account passbook. "Century Bank, Sunset and Cahuenga... Well, well, well-looks like she was doing okay."
I went over and looked at the page he held out. Balance of $240,000 and some cents.
He flipped to the front of the booklet. The initial transaction had taken place three years ago, rolled over from a previous passbook, when the balance had been ninety-eight thousand less.
Accrual of nearly a hundred thousand in three years. The deposit pattern was repetitive: no withdrawals, deposits of three thousand at the end of each month.
"Probably a portion of her salary," I said.
"Theobold said her take-home was around four, so she probably banked three, took out a grand for expenses. Looks like it didn't change during the time she worked at
Starkweather. Which makes sense. Her civil service job classification puts her at a comparable salary."
"Frugal," I said. "How'd she pay her bills? And her tax Is there a checking account?"
He found it seconds later, in the same drawer. "Mont deposits of five hundred... last Friday of the month-sa day she deposited into the savings account. The woman w; clock.... Looks like she wrote mostly small check probably household stuff.... Maybe she had a credit c; paid the rest of her bills in cash. So she kept five hundrei so around the house. Or in her purse. To some junkie i could be a sizable score. And the purse hasn't been found But this doesn't feel like robbery, does it."
I said, "No. Still, people have been killed for a lot less. Without her purse, how'd you identify her?"
"Car registration gave us her name. We ran her pri matched them to her psychologist's license.... A sti junkie robbery, wouldn't that be something? She's out si ping, gets mugged for her cash. But what junkie muj would bother stashing her in trash bags, driving her to a Sœ public spot, and leaving her car behind, when he could 1 thrown her somewhere dark, gotten himself some wheel; the night? Then again, most criminals take stupid pills. Okay, let's see what else she left behind."
He got to work on the rest of the desk. The money sho up in a plain white envelope, pushed to the back of the hand bottom drawer. Nine fifty-dollar bills, under a b
leatherette appointment book issued as a gift by a drug c pany. Three-year-old calendar, blank pages in the book.
"So maybe she had fifty or so with her," he said. ' spender. This does not feel like robbery."
I asked him for the bankbook, examined every page.
"What?" he said.
"So mechanical. Exact same pattern, week in, week No sizable withdrawals also means no vacations or predictable splurges. And no deposits other than her si implies she got no alimony, either. Unless she put it ir other account. Also, she maintained her individual ace throughout her marriage. What about her tax return? Die file jointly?"
He crossed the room to the cardboard file box. Inside were two years of state and federal tax returns, neatly ordered. "No outside income other than salary, no dependents other than herself... nope, individual return. Something's off. It's like she was denying being married."
"Or she had doubts from the beginning."
He came up with a stack of stapled paper, started flipping. "Utility bills... Ah, here's the credit card.... Visa... She charged food, clothing, gasoline for the
Buick, and books.... Not very often-most months there're only three, four charges.... She paid on time, too. No interest."
At the bottom of the stack were auto insurance receipts. Low premium for no smoking and good driving record. No financing on the Buick meant she probably owned the car.
No way for her to know it would end up being a coffin on wheels.
Milo scribbled notes and placed the paper back in the carton. I thought of what we hadn't found: mementos, photographs, correspondence, greeting cards. Anything personal.
No property tax receipts or deductions for property tax. If she rented, why no record of rent checks?
I raised the question. Milo said, "So maybe the ex paid the mortgage and taxes.
Maybe that was his alimony."
"And now that she's gone, he's off the hook. And if he's maintained some ownership of the house, there's a bit of incentive for you. Any idea who gets the two hundred forty? Any will show up?"
"Not yet. So you like the husband?"
"I'm just thinking about what you always tell me. Follow the money."
He grunted. I returned to the bookcase, pulled a few books out. Foxed pages, neatly printed notes in margins. Next to five years' worth of Brain was a collection of journal reprints.
Articles Claire Argent had authored. A dozen studies, all related to the neuropsychology of alcoholism, funded by the National Institutes of Health. The writing was clear, the subject matter repetitive. Lots of technical terms, but I got the gist.
During graduate school and the five years following, she'd filled her hours measuring human motor and visual skills under various levels of intoxication. Easy access to subjects: County Hospital was the treatment center of last resort for physically wasted alcoholic paupers who used the emergency room as their private clinic. E.R. docs called them GOMER's-Get Out of My Emergency Room.
Her results had been consistent: booze slowed you down. Statistically significant but hardly profound. Lots of academics drudged through undistinguished careers with that kind of stuff. Maybe she had tired of the grant game.
One interesting fact: she'd always published solo-unusual for academic medicine, where chairmen commonly stuck their names on everything underlings produced.
Maybe Myron Theobold had integrity.
Letting Claire do her own thing.
Claire going it alone from the very beginning.
A rattling sound made me turn. Milo had been handling the objects on the desktop and a pen had dropped. He retrieved it and placed it next to a small calendar in a green plastic frame. Another drug company giveaway. Empty memo pad. No appointments, no indentations on the pad.
Such a spare life.
Several books trumpeting the virtues of serene simplicity had recently gone best-seller. I wondered if the newly rich authors practiced what they preached.
This house didn't seem serene, just blank, hollow, null.
We left the office and moved to the bathroom. Shampoo, soap, toothpaste, multiple vitamins, sanitary napkins, Advil. No birth control pills, no diaphragm. The travertine deck around the tub was clear of niceties. No bath beads or bubble bath or loofah sponge-none of the solitary pleasures women sometimes crave. The porcelain was streaked with amber.
Milo said, "Luminol. No blood in the tub or the drain. No semen on the towels or sheets, just some sweat that matches Claire's blood type."
Wondering if anyone but Claire had ever set foot in this house, I thought of the work pattern she'd chosen for herself. Five years with drunks, six months with dangerous psy-chotics. Perhaps, after days immersed in delusion and warp, she'd craved silence, her own brand of Zen.
But that didn't explain the lack of letters from home, not even a snapshot of parents, nieces, nephews. Some kind of contact.
The ultimate Zen triumph was the ability to lose identity, to thrive on nothingness.
But this place didn't bespeak any sort of victory. Such a sad little box... or was
I missing something? Projecting my own need for attachment?
I thought of what Claire had hoarded: her books and her articles.
Maybe work had been everything and she had been content.
Yet she'd abandoned her first job impulsively, relinquishing grant money, trading dry but durable science for the chance to school psychotic murderers in the art of daily living.
To what end?
I kept searching for reasons she'd traded County for Starkweather, but the shift continued to bother me. Even with comparable salaries, a civil service position was a comedown from the white-coat work she'd been doing at County. And if she'd craved contact with schizophrenics, County had plenty of those. Dangerous patients? The jail ward was right there.
If she was tired of the publish-or-perish grind, then why not do some private
practice? Neuropsych skills were highly prized, and well-trained neuropsychologists could do forensic work, consult to lawyers on injury cases, bypass the HMO's and earn five, ten times what Starkweather paid.
Even if money hadn't been important to her, what about job satisfaction? Why had she subjected herself to shift after shift in the ugly gray building? And the drive to
Starkweather- day after day past the slag.
There had to be some other reason for what I couldn't stop thinking of as a self-demotion.
It was almost as if she'd punished herself. For what?
Or had she been fleeing something? Had it caught up with her?
7.
IT WAS JUST after two P.M. when we left the house. Outside, the air felt alive.
Milo connected to Laurel Canyon, headed south to Sunset, drove west on the Strip. An accident near Holloway and the usual jam of misery ghouls slowed us, and it was nearly three by the time we crossed through Beverly Hills and over to Beverly Glen.
Neither Milo nor I was saying much. Talked out. He zoomed up the bridle path to my house. Robin's truck was in the carport.
"Thanks for your time."
"Where are you headed?"
"Hall of Records, look for real estate paper, see what else comes up on Mr.
Stargill. Then a call to Heidi Ott."
He looked tired, and his tone said optimism was a felony. I said, "Good luck," and watched him speed away.
I walked up to my new house. Three years, and I still thought of it as a bit of an interloper. The old house, the one I'd bought with my first real earnings, had been an amalgam of redwood and idiosyncrasy. A psychopath out to kill me torched it to cinders. Robin had supervised the construction of something white, airy, a good deal more spacious and practical, undeniably charming. I told her I loved it. For the most part, I did. One day, I'd stop being secretly stodgy.
I expected to find her out back hi her studio, but she was in the kitchen reading the morning paper. Spike was curled up at her feet, black-brindle pot-roast body heaving with each snoring breath, jowls flowing onto the floor. He's a French bulldog, a miniature version of the English breed, with upright bat ears and enough vanity for an entire opera troupe. He lifted one eyelid as I entered-Oh, you again-and let it drop. A subsequent sigh was laden with ennui.
Robin stood, spread her arms, and squeezed me around the waist. Her head pressed against my chest. She smelled of hardwood and perfume, and her curls tickled my chin. I lifted a handful of auburn coils and kissed the back of her neck. She's a charitable five three but has the long, swanlike neck of a fashion model. Her skin was hot, slightly moist.
"How'd it go?" she said, putting her hand in my hair.
"Uneventful."
"No problem from the inmates, huh?"
"Nothing." I held her closer, rubbing the taut musculature of her shoulders, moved down to delicate vertebrae, magical curves, then back up to the clean line of her jaw and the silk of her eyelids.
She stepped away, took my chin in one hand. "That place made you romantic?"
"Being out of there makes me romantic."
"Well, I'm glad you're back in one piece."
"It wasn't dangerous," I said. "Not even close."
"Five thousand murderers and no danger?"
"Twelve hundred, but who's counting."
"Twelve hundred," she said. "How silly of me to worry." At the last word, her voice rose a notch.
