The Middle Sister Page 12

  I landed on a chair. “How big a security crew do you have here?”

  “One guard twenty-four seven at the guard shack, one guard roaming the facility around the clock. The total works out to eight heads annually, full-time. I do a little roaming myself. I like to walk the perimeter and go here and there and stick my nose into things at random times. The employees never know when I’m going to appear. Sometimes, if we have an extra-special celebrity patient, I bring in extra muscle. We only use contract labor. I’m the only salaried security employee other than clerical help and a secretary I share with the HR Department.”

  “How’s the ownership and management?”

  “As long as the revenue continues to flow, and the patients don’t go running down the coast highway screaming, the management is great. They let me do my job. I haven’t had any serious security breaches in my five years here, but you never know what’s going to happen in a place like this. How do you know Gabriel?”

  “We worked together at Western Investigative Services in our younger days. Sometimes we help each other on our cases.”

  Thurman lowered his voice. Serious. “Gabriel Van Buren is one of my favorite people of all time. Helped me get a job when I was having a rough time. Saved my ass. Anyway, he gave me a general idea of what you’re looking for. What can I do for you?”

  “Did you hear about a girl found dead in Castellammare last Friday?”

  “The Manning girl. I saw it on the news. A member of the Lucky Sperm Club. News made it sound like an OD.”

  “That’s what the detectives think. I was hired to find her, and I found her dead, which didn’t exactly please her mother. Didn’t please me either, and I think there might be a little more to it than a simple OD. I think an ex-patient of yours might have been the last to see her alive. The name is Sophia Strauss, also known as Cinnamon Strauss. She used to be big in the exercise and fitness world. She entered Latigo Alliance couple of years ago and left the program early.”

  “Gabriel told me her name already, and everything you said is essentially correct.”

  “Was there any special reason she left?”

  He tilted his head and gave a crooked smile. “The word special doesn’t quite give the whole picture. Miss Cinnamon Hot Pants was banging one of our rehabilitation technicians. The tech was sneaking cocaine to her, and they were tooting and screwing. Anyway, that was the judgment of me and the medical staff. Couldn’t prove it, because they both refused drug tests. The tech got canned, and Cinnamon went out the door with him.”

  “Who was the technician?”

  “A character named Dewey Rubens. In all my years in police and security work, I have encountered some world-class weasels, but nothing quite like Rubens. He was a very bright boy who always had an angle on things, a little too clever for his own good. If he wasn’t talking through his ass, he was lying through his teeth. Thought he was a combination of Fred Astaire and Steve McQueen. When he was trying to impress someone, especially anyone in a dress, he would break into a little tap dance to emphasize the point he was making.”

  “What’s the Steve McQueen angle?”

  “He drove one of those Ford Mustang Bullitt special editions. You know, dark green paint job and the old-school mag wheels—like the car in the big chase scene in the movie Bullitt?”

  Those words sat me up straight. “All normal growing boys know about that car.”

  Thurman continued, “Rubens thought he was a tough guy, liked to wear his collar turned up. Always had a swagger and a quick mouth, but his mouth wrote checks his butt couldn’t cash. One of the patients decked him one time when Rubens wised off at him. I would of paid to see that.”

  Thurman now had my full attention. “I think I’ve heard of this guy Rubens. He was a white boy, dark hair, tall and thin, younger than Cinnamon?”

  He nodded. “That’s him all right, and he was seven or eight years younger. The apparent age difference was even more than that. Rubens has a definite boyish look. Cinnamon is more on the high-mileage side. I’m not saying she didn’t look good, but she looked like she’s traveled a lot, maybe around the world in eighty beds.”

  “So how was this made-in-heaven union formed?”

  “The way I saw it, Rubens was hot for the Cinnamon Strauss he used to watch on television, and Cinnamon wanted some fresh meat. She made quite a splash when she arrived here. I heard the male rehab techs and the doctors yakking it up about Cinnamon’s old TV show, where she was always in a thin leotard with her tits bouncing. Somehow, Dewey was the lucky boy who scored.”

  “So, Dewey and Cinnamon departed Latigo Alliance together . . . as a couple?”

  “And they did it in style. When Dewey was escorted off the property by me and two security guards, he and Cinnamon got strapped into his Bullitt Mustang, and then he did a burnout in the parking lot. Cinnamon sat there and laughed her ass off.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Little over two years ago.”

  “You have a residential address on Rubens?”

  He pulled a brown accordion folder out of his desk. “I just happen to have his personnel contact card right here, and his photo. I wasn’t able to get access to his employment application, anyway not on short notice.”

  “Does the contact card show the license plate on his car?”

  Thurman looked at the card and frowned. “Negative on that, just his address and phone numbers. When I knew you were coming, I checked the phones, and both were disconnected. A flake like Rubens moves around a lot.” He pushed two sheets across the desk. “These are copies. You can keep them.”

  The full-face photo showed a young man with even, somewhat weak features. He smiled boldly, his head leaning at a carefree angle.

  I said, “I see what you mean. Just looking at this photo, it’s obvious he has the kind of lip that needs to be split. By the way, I understand a thirty-day program in this place costs up to a hundred grand.”

  “And worth every penny, I should say. I think the program Miss Strauss was on was more like seventy grand.”

  “Did she get a pro-rata refund when she cancelled her engagement?”

  “No refunds for walk-outs.”

  “Who paid the tab?”

  “Good question. Seventy thousand would have been a big chunk of change for her to cough up. I could look up the financial arrangements on my computer, but I wouldn’t want to leave a record of me peeking into those particular files. At Latigo Alliance, we are very sensitive to the privacy of the celebrity hop-heads’ personal information.”

  “I don’t want you to stick your neck out.”

  “I can probably get it for you by going a different route.”

  “What’s the risk?”

  He shook his head. “None. I have full access to most of the hard-copy records. When I’m into those files, there’s no record of what I look at and what I don’t, and no one is going to be looking over my shoulder.”

  “I’m going to owe you one.”

  He held his hands up flat. “You owe me nothing. Absolutely nothing. I owe Gabe a few favors. If he hadn’t helped me get a job at Ingram Security, I’d still be working as a lock-rattler in a warehouse full of cow shit. I presume you heard the circumstances of my leaving LAPD fourteen years ago?”

  I smiled innocently. “That’s why I’m wearing a Kevlar jockstrap. I didn’t want to get my balls shot off.”

  His small mouth spread into a wide dimpled grin. “You got to admit, there’s a lot of human scum that could use the same treatment.” He headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”

  Five minutes later he returned, softly shut the door behind him, and said, “The full seventy thousand plus change was paid by Sparkes Investments. S-P-A-R-K-E-S. I wasn’t able to get an address.”

  I said, “If it’s a real company, I can find them.”

  On the way out, I told Thurman I owed him a favor, regardless of what he had to say about it.

  22

  4r />
  As I drove down the coast highway and neared the point where Sunset Boulevard dead-ends at the ocean, I looked up once more at the Castellammare neighborhood where Lillie Manning had come to the end of the road. A parking space appeared on my right. I slipped into it and stared up at the hillside. The only visible person was a gardener wearing a cowboy hat, pulling a lawnmower off the bed of a pickup truck.

  During the police investigation on the day I discovered Lillie, neighbors told the detectives they had seen nothing unusual at or near Loretta Sommer’s house. I wondered if any gardeners had seen anything unusual. They typically work on a weekly schedule, and tomorrow morning would be exactly one week after Cinnamon Strauss’s alleged visit to Lillie Manning. That was when I wanted to nose around the neighborhood. I eased back into the traffic and continued south on the coast highway.

  The address Thurman had given me for Dewey Rubens was in Santa Monica. It was a two-story, nine-unit apartment building with an open carport in back. The lower units and the stairwells to the upper units were accessible from a concrete walkway on the north side. The name of a property management company was posted over the mailboxes, and there was no indication of an on-site manager.

  Rubens’s Latigo Alliance employee card showed him in apartment number four, but the mailboxes showed a T. U in that unit. At the back of the building, SWEET was also penciled on the electric meter tag for unit number four. The previous name was RUBENS, whose tenancy had ended seven months earlier, according to the dates on the tag.

  I found two tenants who were home and willing to open their door. One neighbor told me Dewey had moved out six months ago. She said she had never spoken to him, other than to say hello, and she knew nothing of his personal life. She smiled and closed her door softly. The other neighbor suggested I commit an unnatural act and slammed her door. There are times when the conscientious private investigator goes through all the right steps and walks away with nothing but a bemused smile on his face and a boot print on his ass.

  23

  4

  My unofficial office hour at Coast College usually went from six p.m. until seven, when my class started. My “office” was a corner table in the Student Union. I didn’t rate a real office, because I taught only one class. This semester it was Introduction to Logic.

  My best student Carmen Reyes took a seat at my table and asked me to look at the outline for her proposed term paper. She was a tall nineteen-year-old who made me wish I were twenty years younger. The assignment was to write a short paper relating formal logic to real-world practicality. Her proposed subject was many-valued logic, a system allowing for the values true, false, and various degrees of maybe. Carmen was an I/T major, interested in many-valued logic, fuzzy logic, and artificial intelligence. I reviewed her outline and suggested that she put some historical perspective in the introduction and give credit to the Polish logician Jan Lukasiewicz, who developed a three-value system in 1917.

  During the class, I addressed one of my favorite annoyances: the misuse of begging the question. It is a logical term that means “circular reasoning,” not “suggesting the question.” If you want to show off, you can cite the fallacy’s proper name Petitio Principii, which is Latin for basing the conclusion of an argument on premises that are no more than a paraphrase of the conclusion.

  Two English majors disagreed with me, basing their sloppy thinking on the frequency begging the question was used in print and electronic media in the sense of which I disapproved.

  One of them said, “How can it be incorrect if it’s used on television all the time?”

  The other said, “I hear it being used to mean suggesting the question over and over. It’s like everywhere.”

  I thought, “What is the plural form of shit-for-brains? Shit-for-brainses? Shits-for-brainses? Shits-for-brains?”

  Other than Carmen, only three or four students in my class of twenty-four had any intellectual curiosity. But it was my solemn duty to power up the lightbulbs over all my students’ heads, even the dimwits.

  24

  4

  It was ten o’clock Tuesday morning, exactly one week after Cinnamon Strauss was alleged to have entered Loretta Sommer’s Castellammare house, hoping to connect with Lillie Manning. I was back in that same neighborhood, driving slowly up the hill.

  A gardener’s truck was parked in front of the house directly below the Sommer residence. I grabbed my iPad and walked a short distance up the concrete staircase that ran up the hill.

  Two Hispanic men were trimming an oak tree in the backyard of the house that now had my attention. The younger man was up in the tree, balancing himself confidently and operating a cordless electric chainsaw. The older man was on the ground, cutting up the fallen limbs with another power saw. They wore identical LA Dodgers caps.

  I turned on my iPad and brought up a six-pack photo display showing attractive redheaded females. One of them was Cinnamon Strauss. I held two fifty-dollar bills against the computer display and angled everything over the fence, toward the workers. The younger guy noticed me first, powered down his saw, and swung out of the tree like Tarzan. Both men joined me in an over-the-fence conversation.

  The older man gazed at the six-pack and the currency, and said, “What can we do for you?”

  “Were you guys here one week ago, on Tuesday morning, at this same time?”

  He nodded. “My son and I come here every Tuesday from nine till noon.”

  I held the iPad where they could both get a clear view. “Around ten o’clock, a good-looking redhead might have been walking on these stairs. Do any of these girls look familiar?”

  They studied the photos carefully. The younger guy pointed to Cinnamon Strauss. His father pointed to a different redhead. They spoke rapidly back and forth in Spanish and looked at the photos again.

  The younger guy said, “We’re not sure exactly which girl. We’re pretty sure it’s one of those two, but we can’t take your money if we’re not sure.”

  I said, “Was it before or after ten o’clock?”

  They looked at each other and conferred again in Spanish.

  The younger guy said, “We think it was a little after ten, because we already mowed the lawn and fixed the barbecue, and we were checking the fence for some repairs. It would have been right around ten-fifteen.”

  I said, “Did you see her get into a car?”

  The older man leaned over the fence and pointed at the street below. “I leaned over the fence, so I could look at her ass. She went down there, and some guy picked her up in his car.”

  I said, “Was it a red Camaro?”

  He looked at me suspiciously and shook his head. “Green Mustang. Dark green. Black wheels.”

  I forked over the two fifties. “You got it right. Thanks, I appreciate your help.”

  The guy in the Mustang had to be Dewey Rubens. I was looking forward to meeting him.

  25

  4

  Lillie’s graveside service was on a Culver City hillside near the San Diego Freeway. I was in my car, about a hundred yards distant, looking down at the mourners through my binoculars. The hazy noontime winter sun cast a solemn light over the cemetery. The relaxed ocean breeze lifted blurred, indistinct voices up the hill.

  Lillie’s flowered casket rested on a tarp in front of a canopy shading a row of folding chairs. Greta Manning was seated front and center, between Zara and Arden. Next to Zara was an older couple I had never seen. On the other side were Nikki Wolf and Viola Klein. Standing behind the chairs were three young couples, none of whom I knew. This group’s clothing was a bit cheerful in color, considering the event. Probably members of Lillie’s party scene.

  Another couple stood to the rear, apart from the others—Rod Damian and Cinnamon Strauss. I was surprised to see them together. They eased back from the other mourners, leaning into each other, talking out of the sides of their mouths. I wondered if Rod was inviting himself, Marty Trask, and Marty’s torpedoes to her new house, so they could slap her a
round and inquire about her last visit with Lillie Manning. Whatever they were talking about, their stiff body language said it was serious.

  Two men in dark suits had been standing to the side. One of them stepped to the podium carrying a black book. The mourners all came to attention. I would have been interested to hang around and watch Rod and Cinnamon, but I had a better option. I drove straight to Cinnamon’s house.

  There was no car in Cinnamon’s driveway. No car at the curb in front. I parked around the corner and approached her back yard from the alley. The gate was latched from the inside, but it wasn’t set squarely in its frame. I lifted it hard and popped the latch. It made less noise than I expected.

  I stepped into the yard, left the gate latched, and strolled down a concrete walkway that ran alongside the garage. On my left, a rectangle of damp, emerald-green grass had the sharp corners of recently installed sod. Straight ahead was a fresh-looking flagstone patio. The paint on the house and garage also looked fresh. The rain gutters and downspouts were new. Ross Halliday the sugar daddy had spared no expense.

  On the ground next to the west side of the house was a sheet of plywood on which evidence of the remodeling project sat: cardboard boxes holding construction and paint supplies, a window air conditioner in an unopened carton, and an aluminum step ladder. A canvas drop cloth had covered everything, slipped off with the wind, and bunched up against the house.

  I stood at the back door and assessed the situation. There was no line of sight to any of the neighbors’ windows. That was good, but it was too quiet. A little background noise would have been better. Screaming children in the neighbors’ back yards would have been ideal. I had to assume that the neighbors were sitting in their back yards listening for overzealous private investigators.

  The back door was secured with a heavy-duty deadbolt. I passed on the door for the time being and checked all the windows that were accessible from the back yard. I peeked into each one to check for maids and boyfriends. I gently tapped on each one to check for Rottweilers. The windows were well-secured, except for the one at the master bedroom, which had no locking hardware at all. A carpenter’s pencil and a bubble level sat on the interior window sill. Pencil markings on the sill showed where the air conditioner would soon be installed. Burglar’s delight.