Читать книгу Reason To Kill - Andy Weinberger - Страница 9

Chapter 2

I LIKE TO KNOW who I’m working for. Some guy comes along out of the blue with a big crazy story, a leinga meisa that makes no sense, well, it’s always a good idea to check it out. I flip open my Rolodex at home and find the old phone number for Denny Marlborough, which is no longer in service. Then I call Maxine in personnel; she’s been at the LAPD forever. She calls me honey. I like to think that’s because she’s sweet on me, but the truth is I’m not special: She calls damn near everyone honey. Wait a minute, honey, I’m going to put you on hold and I’ll be right back. “Detective Marlborough,” she informs me when she returns, “has moved on to greener pastures.”

“He quit?”

“Last September. We still have his employment file, of course. Thank God for bureaucracy, I say.”

“Tell me, Maxine, does that file of yours give any clues as to where I might find him?”

“More than a clue,” she says. “He’s got his new business card stapled right here, in case we ever need to reach him. He started his own home security service. Calls it Stop, Look & Listen. Remember they used to say that to us all the time when we were growing up.”

“I remember it well, Maxine.”

She reads me all the pertinent information. He has a plant in El Segundo where they manufacture electronic kits to stop home burglaries and unwanted intruders. I think about driving down there, but the last time I was in El Segundo it left a bad taste in my mouth. When I was a kid, it was just a lot of oil wells. Then when they built LAX, it became home to Douglas Aircraft and Hughes and Northrop. Better, but still nothing much to get excited about. El Segundo was where you went on your way to somewhere else. I call him instead, and his secretary, a young man named Corbett or Corbin—I couldn’t tell which—puts me through. We chat about old times for a while, what I’m up to these days, why he left the LAPD, then I ask him about Pincus Bleistiff.

“Oh yeah,” he says, “we talked about installing a system at his house. That was last year, I guess. In the end he changed his mind. I think he thought we were trying to gouge him.”

“That what he said?”

“No. It was all very cordial.”

“But were you?”

“No,” he says, “it was a fair price. Just more than he wanted to pay.”

“Okay,” I say. “That was then. So now he calls you looking for a detective?”

“Actually,” Marlborough says, “he wanted to hire me to find that singer of his. I told him I don’t do that, turned him down. That’s when I mentioned your name.”

“Thanks,” I say. I don’t think I’m being sarcastic, but my voice has betrayed me so many times in the past, that’s what he must have heard.

“You could turn him down, too, Amos,” he says after a lengthy silence. “I mean, if it’s not that interesting. I just figured at your age, you might get a kick out of it.”

“A check is more what I’m looking for, Denny. A kick I don’t need.”

“So you took him up on his offer, then.”

“You bet.”

“Well, if his house on Mulholland is any indication, he’s got money to burn. I’d charge him the going rate, whatever it is. No discounts for senior citizens.”

“Not to worry,” I say. Then I tell him thanks again. And this time I mean it.

The next morning, after I get Loretta her oatmeal and set her down in front of The Today Show to settle her until Carmen arrives to take over the caregiving, I go into my office to think things over. I call it my office; it’s really just a spare bedroom with a foldout couch, but since we haven’t had overnight guests since my cousin Shelly slept there once when he got drunk and his first wife threw him out, I’ve taken to calling it my office. There’s a small oak desk I got at a synagogue rummage sale. That’s where my laptop sits, along with the Rolodex and a yellow legal pad and a jelly jar full of pens and pencils and paper clips. Also one of those art deco lamps, just a reproduction, really, but to the untrained eye it lends an air of sophistication.

There’s one other venerable object—a six-inch framed black-and-white photo of a kid. His name’s Enrique Avila. He’s staring into the camera from an alley behind his house. A little boy with a thick mop of dark, uncombed hair and a goofy grin. He’s got his whole life in front of him. Once upon a time he lived in Alhambra. His family was poor. Neither of his parents spoke much English, and he didn’t stand out in the classroom. He never raised his hand, his teacher told me; he was a nice boy, a well-mannered boy, but that was the main thing she remembered about him. And then he disappeared one day on the way home from school. Just vanished into the warm June air. There were no witnesses, no clues, no ransom notes, nothing. He was eight years old. I’ve been looking for him, it must be going on forty years now.

I type in Pincus Bleistiff on my computer. He’s not hard to find, and if you believe the internet, he is who he says he is—a music promoter. There were a number of bands in the sixties that he was affiliated with and a few record albums he somehow had a hand in. I hadn’t heard of these groups, or maybe I did know them at the time, but hey, it was the sixties. My life then was so full of distractions—sex, drugs, Vietnam—I’m just lucky I came through it all in one piece. Other interesting facts that pop up: Pinky was married once. No mention of the former Mrs. Bleistiff, but he has two grown children—a son, Joshua, who lives in Israel, and Julie, who is married and makes her home in Santa Monica. There is no mention of the house on Mulholland Drive, the one Denny was going to trick out with electronic devices. I meditate on that neighborhood for a moment. Chances are he’s sitting on a fortune. Either that or he’s up to his eyeballs in debt.

Loretta’s calling me from the living room. She wants me to change the channel. This has become a problem lately. She gets bored with the relentlessly happy talk, or she hates the blouse the weather girl is wearing this morning, or the commercials for certain women’s skin products annoy her because she’s tried them before and it’s all a hoax, whatever. I’ve shown her at least a dozen times how to work the remote, but she can’t get it straight. That’s what she says. Or maybe it’s none of those things, I think. Maybe she’s scared and won’t admit it. Maybe she’s getting older and misses my company. Or not even me. Just another living human being.

“What’s wrong with the channel you got?” I say now through the open door. “How many years you been watching The Today Show? You want me to tell you?”

There’s no response. I sigh, push myself slowly out of the chair I’m in, and wander back. She’s shaking her head. Her finger points accusingly at the screen. “What’s wrong with those people?” she says. “Don’t they know how sad the whole world is? Don’t they read the newspaper? What’s so funny?”

I grab a seat beside her, throw my arm around her shoulder, and give her a squeeze. “That’s when you need comedy the most,” I say, “when the whole world is going to hell.”

She looks at me and sniffs. “You don’t understand,” she mumbles. “I want to see something else.”

“Fine.” I pick up the remote and roam around until I find a stout, earnest, middle-aged woman wearing a white apron and chopping leeks. “Big, green beautiful leeks,” she says. “Just perfect for our potage de bonne femme.”

“Here, you like this any better?”

“Much,” Loretta says with satisfaction. “I used to cook, you know. You liked the way I cooked. Once upon a time.”

I get up from the couch. “I’m going back to where I came from,” I tell her. “You let me know if she starts cracking jokes about food.”

In my office again I shut the door quietly behind me. I sit down at the desk, close my eyes, and cup my head in my hands. Carmen should be here any minute. Carmen is a lifesaver. She’ll take Loretta out for a walk, or maybe they’ll go shopping for cheap clothes at Ross and then pretty soon it’ll be afternoon, and before you know it, evening. It’s been like this for a while. Minute to minute. Hour to hour. I don’t try to analyze Loretta anymore. You do what you can, of course. This pill, that pill. I stopped arguing with the doctors long ago. Whatever they give her helps, but the truth is, I don’t have much faith left in modern medicine. Maybe that was another thing that died in Vietnam, I don’t know. When you see your best friend collapse in front of you, when you see how fast a grown man can bleed and bleed and bleed in the tall spiky grass no matter what you stuff in his chest to stop it or what drugs the medic pumps up his arm or how loud you scream into the radio for the chopper to come, come, come now, come take him away goddammit—once you see that, it doesn’t matter, once you see his eyes roll like gray marbles back into his head, something just snaps inside of you and your buddies grab you and pull you off and you bite your lip and you lie there in the cool grass and you forget everything you were taught to believe.

I hear the front door click open and close, followed by Carmen’s sweet, “Buenos dias, señora.” The problem with the television is forgotten, and the two of them murmur affectionately like little birds on a wire. Lorerra loves me, okay. But she needs Carmen’s voice and strong, caring arms in a way I can’t possibly compete with. When Carmen walks in, that’s when I start to relax. That’s when I know the rest of Loretta’s day will go off smoothly, without a hitch.

Two skinny Asian teenagers on skateboards are laughing and racing around the lot at Park La Brea outside our tower. Both of them wear identical blue hoodies and white shorts. Both of them forgot to put on socks to go with their high-top sneakers. Both of them need to be in school. I watch them fly by me and shake my head. This younger generation, I mutter to myself. Then, before I turn the key in my Honda Civic and head north on the Hollywood Freeway toward Van Nuys, I decide to call my old friend, Lieutenant Malloy. We go way back. He’s on the homicide desk now, but I haven’t talked to him in a while and I figure he probably wouldn’t mind doing a little missing persons research for me. The LAPD has all those fancy new computers, after all. Why not put them to use?

He answers on the third ring. “You busy?” I say.

“I’m always busy, Amos. The city never sleeps, you know.”

“Yeah, so I heard.” I tell him about my meeting with Pinky Bleistiff and how he’s missing his lead singer.

“Maybe she found a better gig,” he offers.

“No,” I tell him, “it’s not like that.”

Malloy is slightly younger than me. He relocated to California a million years ago from the frozen streets of Chicago. Once he saw the blue Pacific, he realized he’d died and gone to heaven, and he never bothered looking back. For an Irish Catholic who once walked a beat and cracked heads with his trusty nightstick, he’s an exceedingly thoughtful man, which may be why we’re close. You shoulda been a philosopher, I’m always telling him. Or a priest. That makes him laugh.

“Why didn’t he just call the police?” Malloy says. “If he thinks something’s gone haywire, I mean—what the hell—that’s what you do, right?”

“I asked him that myself, Bill.”

“And?”

“And he kind of danced around it. I think he’s in love with her. He as much as said so, in fact.”

“Okay, so it’s romantic.”

“Right,” I say. “And when you put it in that light, well, then, maybe she’s not missing exactly—maybe it’s something else, maybe she’s just trying as best she can to disentangle herself from seeing him anymore.”

“Did you suggest that to him?”

“I—no. I didn’t say that. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to break his heart.”

“So you’re going to politely take his money instead? That doesn’t sound like something Amos Parisman would do.”

“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t. But Risa Barsky’s not the only one. There’s a drummer and fiddle player in the same band. Also vanished.”

Malloy is silent for a moment. Three musicians kicks it up to a new level of concern, I figure. “Okay,” he says finally. “Give me their names and anything else you got. I’ll send it downstairs and get back to you.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant. I owe you a lunch.”

“You still owe me a lunch from the last time I helped you,” he says and hangs up.

I fiddle with my radio dial while I cruise over to Van Nuys. Mariachi fades into basketball, which fades into rock n’ roll, which fades mercifully into Jesus. Help me, Jesus. I decide there’s nothing worth listening to finally and turn it off. By then I’m on the freeway, which isn’t too bad this time of day, and I’m feeling lucky because I’ve slipped between the morning rush hour and the next one that supposedly starts up about two o’clock. That’s what they say, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter. If you live long enough in LA you know damn well there’s nothing to be done. Too many people, too many things that can go wrong. You’re always under the thumb of the traffic god. I once drove to the dry cleaner’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, just a mile away—it took an hour, I swear.

Risa Barsky lives in a three-story tan stucco apartment building sandwiched between a series of similar ones. They all have names like Vista del Sol and Rancho Sereno. Hers is called Plata y Oro. The colors vary, but it’s pretty much the same bunch of pastel boxes all the way down the block. The sameness, in fact, reminds me of the slipshod apartments they used to crank out in the old gray Soviet Union. Only this is California. These places aren’t gray; they won’t collapse in the snow; the pipes won’t break or be stolen by the tenants. That’s not how it works here in paradise. Each unit has a tiny balcony of its own, big enough to park a bicycle or maybe a small barbecue grill. There are also newly planted magnolia trees on the apron up and down the avenue. In twenty years, if the drought doesn’t kill them, they’ll be spectacular. In twenty years, this will be a venerable neighborhood, worth millions. Not now, however. At the moment the street feels bored and barren and so sunny you have to squint to see where you’re going.

Except for yours truly, there is no one on the sidewalk. I adjust the brim of my Dodger cap and step inside the foyer. There’s no art on the walls, but the air-conditioning makes me feel right at home. Next to the elevator, management has placed a round black table with a tall glass vase in the center full of red and white roses. No water in the vase, but then you don’t need water if the roses are plastic, now do you?

Her number is B16. I ride the elevator up to the second floor and wander down the industrial-carpeted hallway. The door to B14 is slightly ajar, and I hear a young woman singing softly to herself in Spanish. I stop at B16, ring the buzzer. No answer. I wait ten seconds, try it again. No luck. Then I go back to B14 and knock. The singing stops, and a young, dark-haired woman opens the door slightly and leans against it. I feel some kind of tension coming off her; it’s like the door is all she has and she’s coiled in back of it, ready to slam it in my face.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for your next-door neighbor,” I say. “Risa Barsky? You know her?”

I put a breezy smile on my lips as I say this. Take my hat off like a gentleman. Do what I can to make a good impression. You don’t have to worry, I almost say to her. I’m not a rapist or an ex-husband. It’s not that kind of thing. We stare at each other in silence. What must I look like to her? I wonder. A strange old white guy who forgot to shave this morning, knocking on her door, asking impertinent questions. Maybe she doesn’t get out much. Maybe the walls of this apartment in Van Nuys are her whole world. I see her hand gradually relax around the doorframe. Whatever she was afraid of now subsides. She looks at me cautiously.

“She hasn’t been here in a couple of weeks,” she says. “How do you know her? You a friend? She owe you money?”

“No,” I say. I chuckle, and it comes out sounding like a cough. “No, not at all. We’ve never met. But I like the way she sings. My grandson, Elijah, is having a bar mitzvah in June, and I thought maybe we could work something out.” This is a bald-face lie, obviously. But as lies go, it’s pretty harmless. I’ve told far bigger ones in my time. And it’s good enough. I could be searching for someone to sing at Elijah’s bar mitzvah, if only I had such a grandson and his name was Elijah. In this business you say what you have to sometimes if you want to hear what you need.

The woman, who I guess is a Latina, in her mid-twenties, with long dark ringlets of hair, squirms a little, and for the first time I notice she has a small child hiding behind her skirt. “I don’t know what a bar mitzvah is, but Risa is in some kind of band.”

“Right. So my question is, do you know where I can find her? It could be worth money to her.”

“I don’t know where she goes every day. We just moved here three months ago. You should ask Lola in B26.” She points to her left. “They are good friends.”

“Lola. B26,” I say. “Thanks.”

She closes the door, and I hear her saying something in Spanish to her child. It sounds soft and soothing, but then Spanish is a beautiful language and almost everything I’ve ever heard in Spanish sounds soothing, even when someone’s telling you to go to hell.

I wander down the hall, stop at B26, brace myself, and press the buzzer. A shuffling noise comes from inside, followed by the sharp click of two deadbolt locks extricating themselves in the door. Then all at once, there she is. Lola gives me the once-over.

“Oh hi,” I say. I smile. She’s what my dad used to call an original or, sometimes, a pistol. A stout, feisty woman in her fifties. Her cheeks are powdered and her lips are painted red. Horn-rimmed glasses dangle from around her neck, and she’s wearing a lavender velour tracksuit and tennis shoes, but her hair is in curlers and I’d be willing to bet you a dollar she’s not about to go for her daily run.

“Hello there, handsome,” she says. “What can I do for you, young man?” Maybe it’s my Dodger cap, I think, that confused her. I take it off.

“I haven’t been a young man for a long time,” I say. “Handsome, okay, I’ll give you that.”

She grins. “All right, you win. You’re neither. But still, you’re here, so you must want something. Nobody knocks on Lola’s door unless they want something.”

I hold out my hand for her to shake. She stares at it, and I shove it back in my pocket. “The name is Parisman. Your neighbor told me you might be able to tell me where to find Risa Barsky.”

“I might. I might know a lot of things. But why should I tell you?” She folds her arms resolutely in front of her. She’s not suspicious or scared, exactly, not like the other woman with the child, but I can see I’m not going to get very far without giving her a few hard facts.

“As you must know already, Risa’s in a band,” I say. “What you may not know is that she hasn’t shown up for rehearsals in a couple weeks.”

“Oh no?”

“Not only that,” I say, “she doesn’t answer her phone or return messages or emails. Some people are starting to worry. It’s like she’s on the other side of the moon.”

“You a cop?” Lola asks. Her eyes narrow.

I frown. “Would it make any difference if I were?”

“No, not much,” she says. “I’ve just never had any use for cops. They didn’t show up the one goddamn time I needed them. You pay for their services, right? You’d think they’d show up.”

“I can’t argue with you there,” I say. Then I reach into my wallet, pull out one of my little blue business cards, and hand it to her. “I’ve been paid to find her. My client cares about her. He’s hoping she’s all right, but he’s anxious, you know. It’s keeping him awake at night. Like I say, she hasn’t shown up in a while. That’s not normal.”

Lola looks hard at my card. There’s not much printed on it—just my name and address and phone number and what I do for a living now and then. Finally she lowers it, then heaves a sigh.

“Who’s your client?”

“I can’t tell you that,” I say. “Some people probably would. Some people would say anything to get you to help. That’s not me. Not how I work. But you wouldn’t know him anyway.”

“Fair enough,” she says.

“Tell me, Lola. Is there a manager around? Somebody with a passkey? I’d love to take a real quick peek inside her apartment. Just to be sure she wasn’t tied up in the bathtub or something like that.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know what to think. She doesn’t answer her phone. She doesn’t come to the door. Maybe she hasn’t gone anywhere. Maybe she’s in a coma, maybe she’s still alive, maybe she’s hurt, but if—God forbid—she’s lying there dead on the floor, well, you’re going to smell it pretty soon.”

Lola looks at me sternly. “You wait here, buster. I’ll be right back.” Something in her manner has changed. The door slams in my face. Then, before I can speculate on what the hell’s going on, she’s back again and she’s marching me double time like a drill sergeant down the hall toward B16. “You’re a damn good talker,” she says. “And I don’t do this for anybody, you understand? Not ordinarily, I mean. Not unless I believe them.” She halts at the door and produces a large gold key chain with a rabbit’s foot attached. “Risa gave me this, just in case.” She puts the key in the lock and twists. It opens. “Go on in, Mr. Detective. You look around. But you don’t touch anything, and you have exactly five minutes. That’s all. And remember—I’m keeping my eye on you.”

I nod. “You’ve very kind, Lola. I appreciate it.” I step gingerly into the darkened living room, which, with the blinds drawn, probably looks and feels like every other living room in this apartment complex. Then Lola switches on the lights behind me, and the first thing that comes to my attention is how messy everything is.

“Oh my God,” Lola whispers. Everything is overturned. Pillows that should be propped up neatly on the couch are strewn on the floor. A large campaign poster of Barack Obama is hanging askew over the mantel, and a bundle of sheet music is scattered on the rug. In the kitchen, the three wood-veneer cabinet drawers have been yanked out, and someone has tossed all the silverware into the sink. I press my lips together and move quickly and quietly from room to room, with Lola right on my tail. No sign of Risa Barsky.

In the bedroom I pause and turn around. Like everything else, it’s a jumble. The nightstand has been upended. There’s a scrapbook lying on its side and a handful of fashion magazines she was apparently reading. There’s also a small torn black-and-white photo staring up at me next to the bed. I bend down to check it out. It looks as though there were two people in it once upon a time, but the person on the right is gone, or maybe ripped to shreds. Now it’s just a portrait of a young, dark-eyed, voluptuous woman in a tight sweater. I pick it up.

“Mind if I hang on to this for a while?” I ask Lola.

“Yes, I do,” Lola says. “It’s Risa’s. Leave it the hell alone. Didn’t I tell you not to touch anything?”

I show her the picture. “You recognize this woman?”

“No,” she says, “but that doesn’t matter. It’s not yours. It belongs right where you found it.”

“Okay, okay, you win.” I nod and drop the picture, which floats back down to the carpet.

The bed is unmade, though the left side is neat and tidy while the right indicates there was once a living, breathing person there. “Does she own a suitcase?” I ask.

“Every woman in the world owns a suitcase,” Lola says contemptuously. “You never know when it’s time to move.”

“So where would Risa keep hers, do you guess?”

She points with her head. “That closet, probably. On the rack above her clothes. I saw it in there, if I remember.”

Risa Barsky has a long foldout closet with twin wooden doors. I pry them open cautiously and check out the overhead rack. Nothing. Some skirts and pants and blouses down below, but at least half the hangers are bare. “Looks like she left in a hurry,” I say.

We walk back toward the front door. Lola taps me forcefully on the shoulder. She’s staring hard now; this brief tour of her neighbor’s has upset her. “Okay,” she says, “I let you in. Now you owe me. Tell me what you think.”

I shrug. “What do I think? Well, that should be pretty plain, right? I think she’s in trouble. Somebody—some man—wants something she has. A woman would never do this. So a man. Maybe he’s an old lover, maybe he’s still fuming about how it ended and he wants to get back at her. Scare her half to death. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to walk right in and tear up the place, can you?”

Lola shakes her head. “I guess not,” she says.

“And then later that day she came home from wherever she works. She looked around and got the message. She’s not stupid. She probably knew who he was, what he was capable of. That he might come back. She needed to protect herself, so she packed her bag and left.”

“She’s had a lot of boyfriends,” Lola admits. “But how would he get in without breaking down the door?”

“Maybe she gave him a key in a weak moment. Or maybe he stole her key and made a duplicate without telling her. You’re right, though,” I say. “He just walked in the door.”

We head back toward B26. Lola asks me if I’d like to come in, have a cup of coffee, talk. “Why not?” I say.

Her apartment is much warmer and more orderly. Everything is in its place, but she’s obviously been here a very long time, long enough to invest it with her own personality. When she sets her glasses on her nose from a certain angle, she looks a little bit like an owl. She must have embraced this years ago, I figure, because there seem to be lots of owl tchotchkes everywhere you turn. Owl paintings. Owl throw rugs. Owl salt and pepper shakers. She has a thing about owls. She sits me down at the Formica table in the kitchen nook and presently I’m nursing a mug of black French roast. Lola sits across from me with her own cup warming her hands.

“When was the last time you saw her, Lola?”

“I’m not good with time,” she says. “Four or five days ago? A week?”

“And how did she seem to you then? What did you talk about? She say anything? Was she scared?”

She shakes her head. “No, but I’m scared,” she says. “Should we call the police?”

“I thought you didn’t care for the police.”

“I know, I know. But this isn’t about me. Risa’s a friend. And like you said, she’s in trouble. She moved to this complex about a year ago. I was still married then, barely. She helped me get through my divorce.”

“That’s what friends are for. Maybe you should call the police, Lola. I’m thinking about doing it myself.”

“All right,” she says. “I will. And while I’m at it, I’m going downstairs to check her mailbox, too.” She holds up a smaller bronze key attached to the gold chain with the rabbit’s foot. “Risa left me a copy, just in case she was ever on the road with a band, you know. I haven’t been too good about checking it, though.”

“She gets a lot of mail?”

“I don’t know. The usual. Magazines, bills, requests for donations. She’s a big donor to political causes. Well, maybe not a big donor. But a regular one.”

When we finish our coffee, Lola and I ride the elevator down to the ground floor where there’s a large bank of mailboxes. She opens Risa’s, pulls everything out, and hands it to me. There’s a Wells Fargo statement. Also a phone bill and a heating bill and one from a dentist named Samuel Wong in Culver City. A New Yorker that’s a week old, a plea for money from Planned Parenthood, and a glossy invitation to a new Vietnamese nail salon coming soon to Sherman Oaks. At the bottom of the pile is a small powder-blue envelope from Pincus Bleistiff. It’s dated seven days earlier.

“So how much does she trust you?” I ask Lola.

“What do you mean? We’re best friends. Best fucking friends in the world. She trusts me with everything.”

“What I mean is, seeing as how she’s missing and may be in trouble, do you think she’d mind if you took it upon yourself to look at her mail?”

“Isn’t that against the law?”

I sigh. She’s a long way from being a child; surely she gets where I’m going. “A lot of things are against the law, Lola, but sometimes, if you have to, if it’s your best fucking friend, you do it anyway, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

She stares at me and folds her arms, but she doesn’t say anything more, and I take her rumpled brow and prolonged silence as a form of consent. With my thumb I pry open Pinky’s letter and read it aloud.

Dear Risa, we missed you the last few times. I’m writing you an old-fashioned letter tonight because I’m at my wits’ end. You don’t answer your phone or email and we have to have a resolution to this or the band simply can’t go on. I hope you know how important you are to us. If there’s something wrong, if any one of us said something that offended you, please, please tell me. I’m here to help. Love, Pinky

“Do you know this fellow—this Pincus Bleistiff?” I ask, trying not to sound too disingenuous.

Lola shakes her head. “Sounds like one of her musician buddies. There were a lot of guitar players and guys with saxophones trooping in and out of her place. Sometimes she slept with them. Sometimes they slept on the couch. That was one area of her life I never got involved in. I like to get out on the dance floor now and then, but I’m not very musical.”

I open the Wells Fargo statement. There’s nothing there to write home about. The phone bill gives me more hope. Seems like she made a ton of calls last month to one particular number. I pull out my notepad and jot it down. “All right, fine,” I say. “You weren’t very musical. But who was her last boyfriend?”

Lola kind of winces. “The last boyfriend? Or the last one I can name? Which?”

“Is there a difference?”

“Like I say, people trooped in and out of her place at all hours.”

“Think, Lola.”

“Okay, I don’t know where he stood in the lineup, but the last man she seemed to be sweet on was a guy named Ray Ballo.”

“And what can you tell me about him?”

“He was much younger than her, in his mid-twenties. Tall, skinny, long dark hair. Cute, but he could stand to wash his hair more often, if you ask me. Blue jeans and cowboy boots, that’s all he ever wore. He played bass in a country-western group, I think, but I could be wrong about that.”

“Ray Ballo.” I write his name down on my pad. “What’d she say about him?”

“Hell,” she says, “I don’t know. It was just girl talk. He was a gentleman. He brought her flowers one time, I remember that. That meant something to her. Made him special. And she liked his brown eyes, she said, oh, and the way he treated her in bed. Very slow. Very formal.”

“She talked about how he was in bed?”

“We’re best friends, remember?”

After I say goodbye to Lola, I cruise the neighborhood a while. Van Nuys is in the exact middle of nowhere. It always has been. When I was a kid in the olden days, if you lived in LA, you prayed that your parents wouldn’t move to Van Nuys. It was a guaranteed death sentence. Death by boredom. But that was then. Now, three million more people have moved in, and there are hardly any houses or apartments for rent. It’s close enough to downtown that it doesn’t matter. They’ll gladly crawl along on the freeway, they’ll live large chunks of their lives in their cars if they have to. And they don’t care how ticky-tacky or ugly it is, they’re just looking for that one-bedroom that doesn’t cost them more than their college degree. Welcome to Van Nuys.