“The way his aunt was talking, I doubt it. First time he was out here didn’t work out. That’s why he went back to Austin. He’s only been back for three months.”
Pat told me she would ask around, then we hung up and I settled back in my broken office to read over Chen’s reports. I thought about the Mexican oxycodones. If Byrd was in so much pain he couldn’t walk or drive, he probably needed a steady supply. If he couldn’t walk or drive, someone might have delivered, and maybe that same someone might know how he came by the pictures. I decided to ask his neighbors.
At one-fourteen that afternoon I packed up the file on Byrd, locked the office as best I could, and went down to my car. When I pulled out of my building, a black Toyota truck with tinted glass fell in behind and followed me.
12
THE BLACK Toyota turned toward Laurel Canyon with me, but so did half a dozen other cars. No one shot at me or behaved in an overly aggressive manner, so I told myself I was being paranoid. Your office gets trashed, it’s easy to imagine you’re being followed.
But two blocks later I slid through a yellow. The driver of the Toyota busted the red to keep up, then jammed on his brakes as soon as he was clear of the light. So much for my imagination. Two men appeared to be in the cab, but I couldn’t be sure with the heavily tinted glass.
I took an abrupt right turn without using my blinker, and the Toyota turned with me. When he came around the corner, I saw a sticker on his front bumper. It was a promotional sticker for a chick band called Tattooed Beach Sluts.
I turned again and pulled to the curb, but the Toyota didn’t follow. When it still hadn’t appeared five minutes later, I continued on into Laurel Canyon. If I didn’t watch myself, I would become the new Chen.
Broken branches and leaves littered the streets in the canyon and were piled against parked cars and curbs like drifting snow. The big cedars and eucalyptuses hung motionless for the first time in days, drooping now as if resting from their fight with the wind. The smell of their sap was strong.
When I reached Byrd’s house, the police and the crime scene tape were gone, but a news crew and a short-bed moving van were at the bottom of the steps. The news crew was up on the porch, interviewing an older man with dyed-black hair and liverish skin. A white Eldorado was parked behind the van. The Eldo probably belonged to the interviewee, who likely owned the house and had been Byrd’s landlord. While they talked, two Latin guys lugged pieces of furniture down to the truck.
I was waiting for the reporter to finish when I saw the woman in the vine-covered house across the street. She was back at her window, watching the interview, so I decided to start with her.
I climbed her steps, but before I reached the top, she opened the window.
“Go away. I’ve had enough of this.”
“I’m with Easter Seals. Don’t you want to help dying children?”
She slammed the window.
I continued to her door, then leaned on the bell until she answered. She had seemed older from across the street, with her grey hair up and frizzy.
“I’m not really from Easter Seals. I just said that.”
“I know you’re not, and I know you know I know. You’re with the police. I saw you here yesterday, and you saw me.”
Her name was Tina Isbecki. I introduced myself, letting her think what she thought. Operators like me are trained to go with the flow. This is called “lying.”
I glanced across at the interview.
“Who’s that?”
“Sharla Lee. She’s on the news.”
“Not the reporter. The man she’s interviewing.”
“That’s Mr. Gladstone. He owns the house.”
The police had released the house, and now Mr. Gladstone was dumping the furniture. He would have to clean the house, paint it, and hope he could find a tenant who wouldn’t mind living where a multiple-murderer blew out his own brains.
I turned back to Tina Isbecki.
“Saw you on TV last night, saying now you could sleep easy. You looked very natural.”
The Detective, buttering up the hostile subject.
She scowled.
“That isn’t at all what I said. I told’m now I could sleep because all the goddamned cops were out of the neighborhood. They made it look like I meant Mr. Byrd.”
“Did you know him very well?”
“I tried to avoid him. He was crude and offensive. The first time we met, he asked if I enjoyed anal sex. Just like that. Who would say something like that?”
Welcome to Lionel Byrd.
“Was he close to anyone here in the neighborhood?”
“I doubt it. A lot of these people are renters and boarders, and most are just kids. They come and they go.”
Which was pretty much what Starkey had told me.
“You must have been asked these things a hundred times.”
“A thousand. Let me answer your other questions to save us both time-”
She ticked off her answers, bending each finger back so far I thought it might snap.
“No, I never saw anything suspicious. No, he never threatened me. No, I did not know he had been arrested, and I did not hear the gunshot. And yes, I am surprised he killed all those women, but this is Laurel Canyon.”
She crossed her arms with a smugness indicating she had answered every question I could possibly ask.
I said, “Did he have many visitors?”
“I never saw anyone.”
“Do you know how he got his drugs?”
The smugness vanished.
“A quantity of nonprescribed oxycodone was found in his home. Do you know what that is?”
“Well, of course I know, but I barely knew the man. There’s no reason I would know he was a drug addict.”
“I understand. But we’re wondering where he got the pills.”
“He didn’t get them from me.”
Defensive.
“On the day of the evacuation, it was you who told the officers he was housebound?”
“That’s right. I was concerned. He hadn’t been driving, what with his foot. He couldn’t press the brake.”
“When was the last time you saw him driving?”
“Believe it or not, I have more to do than watch my neighbors.”
“This isn’t a test. I’m trying to get an idea how difficult it was for him to get around.”
“Well, I don’t know. A few weeks, I guess. I know his foot had been getting worse. Some days he couldn’t even come for the mail, and it would pile up.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so I thanked her and went down to the street. Gladstone was still being interviewed, so I knocked on the neighboring doors. No one was home at most of the houses, and the few people who were either had never met Byrd or had seen him only in passing. Only one person I interviewed had exchanged words with him, and she described him as crude, vulgar, and offensive, just like Tina Isbecki. Nobody had witnessed anyone visiting his house.
By the time I finished knocking on doors, the news crew was leaving. I squeezed around the movers’ truck and climbed the steps just as Gladstone emerged from the house.
Gladstone was locking the front door, and scowled when he saw me approaching.
“Cut me some slack, all right? I didn’t know the sonofabitch was a maniac.”
“I’m not a reporter. I’m investigating the case.”
I showed him the ID, but he had been looking at IDs all week. He waved me off.
“I got nothing to say. The man paid his rent and never made trouble. Now I got a house with brains on the ceiling and people like you wasting my time. I gotta get this place cleaned out by the end of the day.”
He ducked past me and hurried after his movers.
I returned to my car, but didn’t leave. The moving crew locked their truck, then rumbled away with Gladstone behind them. When they were gone, I got out of my car and pushed past low-hanging cedar boughs onto the walkway alongside the garage. A black plastic garbage can blocked the walk, but a flight of stairs led up to a door.