“Not that I know of. But there were always prowlers, and some might have been him, if there was a Creeper. Nobody really knew.”
“What did you think?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “What did I think? Let me tell you something. When that second girl was killed-Leslie was her name, I think-they found a Mexican who worked for the family gardener, and they thought they had their man. He’d been looking at her through the window at night; we knew that. Took him up to the fourth floor and beat him with saps for an hour, and he was ready to confess to anything. That’s how it was done then. The dicks thought they had solved that one, so how could the cases be linked?”
“So why isn’t that in the reports?”
“Because they beat him to death. Internal bleeding, didn’t show up at first. He died in the city jail overnight. They put him in a pauper’s grave, and that was that.”
***
Tuesday night, I stayed home to write an update for Peralta. I also needed to go over my lecture notes for the American history survey I was teaching at Phoenix College-another few bucks for my dwindling bank account. And I wanted to rewire the back porch light. So I got comfort food-chilies rellenos from Ramiro’s-settled behind Grandfather’s old desk in the study off the living room, and booted up the PowerBook. That’s when the doorbell rang.
Once again, Julie Riding was on my doorstep. This time, she wore a light blue denim shirt and blue jeans. Her hair was pulled back, and she looked startlingly like the Julie I had known twenty years before.
“I know I’m bothering you,” she said. I said something polite and invited her in.
Back in the facing chairs, I told Julie what I had found out about her sister, which wasn’t much. Her eyes were dreamy, unfocused, and she seemed drunk.
“I brought you something,” she said, handing over an envelope. “It has some of Phaedra’s things. Photos, an address book. That kind of thing.”
In my mind, I was still back in the fifties-with young John Rogers and Opal Harvey and Rebecca Stokes-and the dissonance of being pulled back made me a little cross.
“Julie, I can’t search for Phaedra,” I said. “I’m barely making a living. I said I’d make some inquiries, and I did. No Jane Does who match her description in the postmortem lab. No body drops…”
When I looked up, Julie’s face had reddened and she was crying. I instantly felt terrible.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to-”
“Goddamn you,” she said, sniffling. “You are still angry with me after twenty years.”
I poured us both a McClelland’s. She lighted a smoke.
“Do you know what happened after I left you?” she said.
I made no response.
“I went to San Diego for a week with Chet, whom you were so threatened by.…”
“Yeah, he was a wealthy heart surgeon, and I was a college student and part-time deputy making ten thousand dollars a year,” I said.
“And after a week, he told me he was going back to his wife. So I came back to Phoenix and started waiting tables.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Julie ignored me. “You thought I had this great life because of my looks.”
I started to protest, but she cut me off. “Yes, you did,” she said. “But it wasn’t a great life. I was so young, and I was just…just…overwhelmed by it all. All these men, all of them after me. I know you think it would be wonderful to be so desired, but it wasn’t that way. You’ll never know how lonely it is when somebody just wants to fuck you. I was just too young to know any better.”
I don’t know why I asked this, but it just came out: “Did you ever care about me?”
“Oh, David,” she said in a voice I had heard so many times before. “That’s history.”
She drank the scotch. “I was so fucked up then. Nobody should have wanted me.”
“I did,” I ventured.
“You didn’t know me,” she said. Fair enough, I thought.
“We had a very unhappy home life,” she went on. “I moved out when I was sixteen just to get away. I tried to keep you away from that. I was afraid if you knew, really knew about me, you’d just hate me.”
“I would never have hated you. All those years, I wondered about you.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, her voice a mix of anger and irony. “Do you really want to know? All those years I spent in dead-end jobs, a pretty ornament on some guy’s arm. I got into cocaine, and God, I loved it.”
She stubbed out the cigarette and drank the last of her scotch. “There was always some asshole, thinking with his cock, who would buy it for me. Before he left me. Then I married a lawyer; God, what a mistake. He controlled me with coke and beat the shit out of me when I mouthed off to him. It was hell, but it was really hard to give up, too. Does that make any sense to you? I loved the money and the beautiful people and the feeling that the drugs gave me.”
I walked to her chair, put my hand on her shoulder, and she came into my arms. I held her a long time while she cried silently, angrily.
“I’m a mess, David,” she said finally. “Everything I touch turns bad.”
Chapter Five
“She got the looks in the family,” Julie said. “And the brains.”
We had moved over to the sofa, where the pictures were spread between us. I used Kleenex and scotch to nurse Julie through the tears; then I put a Charlie Parker CD on low and we got to work. I knew she was mind-fucking me, but, hell, I was lonely and it was nice to be needed, if only for the moment and on unreliable terms.
The photos showed a young woman, pretty in a fair, red-haired way that stood out in Phoenix, with its battalions of tanned hotties. Her finely boned face had an intensely direct stare. Her smile had that ironic, mocking quality that reminded me of Julie long ago. And that hair: the natural shade of flame titian. Phaedra was beautiful in a way that would have been dangerous to me, but I was always a sucker for redheads.
Julie blew her nose and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. “You’re sure this is okay?”
“It was never a problem,” I said, and she lighted it. “If I were more politically correct, I’d have tenure.” I poured two more glasses of McClelland’s and asked her to walk me through the past year of Phaedra’s life.
“She’d been living with a man in Sedona. His name is Greg Townsend. Twenty years older. His father made a fortune in real estate. Very well-off.”
“Takes after her older sister?” I have such a mouth.
Julie smiled unhappily. “Anyway, they’d been living together for about three months.”
“They met how?”
“Oh, who knows,” Julie said. “She just told me she was in love, and that she was moving to Sedona.”
“How did he treat her?”
“Oh, he took her to London, Paris. Mexico every other weekend, seemed like. He had his own airplane. Bought her clothes, Indian art, whatever she wanted, I guess. But who knows what he was really like. Some real bastards can spend lots of money on you.”
“You two talked?”
“She’d call.”
“Did she seem happy?”
“It was always hard to tell with Phaedra. At first, yes.”
“Did he abuse her? Hurt her physically? Make threats?”
“No,” Julie said, leaning forward, seeming to search for the words. “She never mentioned anything like that, although she had been in a relationship like that a few years ago. Greg was-I don’t know, he seemed like a flake to me. New Age. One of these going-to-extremes athletes. Lots of money. But nothing real underneath.”
“Well, you know what they say, ‘No money, no life.’ How’d it end?”
“Let me put it this way, David. Phaedra was always good at making her escape. I think she looked at Mom and Dad together, looked at all my disasters in love-God, what a bunch of role models! — and she decided she was never going to be trapped. Never going to be dependent on a man. She walked. Her relationships always had a short half-life. Greg was no different. Phaedra called me one Sunday and said she was back in Phoenix, asked if she could stay with me a few days.”