“Dress up?”
“Like Oldies guys — extra hair, leather.” She giggled. “Like a uniform I guess.” She plucked at her blouse. “I got to wear one at Health Aid, so whatever.”
“These other guys in the band have names?”
“Um, one I think is Chuck, the other’s Morris?”
“Maybe Boris?”
“Could be. I didn’t really meet ’em ever to talk, I just seen ’em picking up Winky, everyone’s wearing extra hair, so I figure they working. They play at a club, Winky said I could come for free.”
“You ever take him up on the offer?”
“Uh-uh, I work two doubles a week at Health Aid, Carlos’s daddy’s in Afghanistan, I’m doing everything myself except when my mother has time but she works, too.”
“Super-busy.”
“Well … I’ll get there to hear ’em, I’m sure they’re good. I guess. Also, I don’t want to bring Carlos to a place like that and Winky can’t watch him if he’s playing music so I need to wait for my mother to have all night and lately she works doubles, too. At the Farmer John sausage factory over in Vernon.”
“Does Winky charge you to babysit?”
“I offered,” she said. “He wouldn’t take it. Says he had no kids, always wanted a son of his own, Carlos is a cool little dude, got talent, he’s gonna make him a little musician.” Reaching behind, she ruffled the little boy’s hair. “That right, Carlito? You gonna play music?”
Grave nod.
“Know what talent means, hijo?”
“I play good.”
“That’s right,” she said, stooping and kissing his cheek. “You’re like a genius, my smart baby.”
Carlos squirmed. “I’m hungry.”
“Okay, okay — anyway, sir, nice to meet you.”
Milo said, “One more question: Does Winky have any female friends?”
“Not that I saw.” Her mouth constricted. “But he’s not like that. I don’t think.”
“Like what?”
She cupped her hand to the side of her mouth. Mouthed, Gay.
“Likes girls.”
“I never saw different,” said Lourdes Vega. “All he does is teach Carlos guitar. You’re not saying I should be nervous?”
“Not at all.”
“Good. I mean I figured he was okay. I mean a mother knows.”
CHAPTER 27
Black in the car, Milo got a text. He read, scowling.
“Binchy. Ree Sykes’s car just showed up in the lot at Union Station, parking stub puts it there since the night Connie was killed. If she paid cash she’s untraceable. Motive, timing, a definite rabbit, and that blood in her apartment says a lot to me, amigo.”
I didn’t answer.
He started the car. “Just what I need, Mama and baby riding the rails to who-knows-where. Most likely with ol’ Winky, seeing as he cut out right around the same time. Talk about a paternity test.”
Steering with one hand, he phoned Sean Binchy, ordered him to remain at the train station for as long as it took to show DMV photos of Cherie Sykes and William Melandrano to Amtrak clerks, porters, and security guards. “They’ve got cameras but with all the in and out, who knows. Nothing pans out, Sean, have a big steak on Uncle Milo then go back and see if the night shift remembers anything. Really work the place. You need help, get Reed. He’s busy, draft someone else.”
He hung up and drove faster. I said, “Ree kept her secret all these years, finally told Melandrano he was the daddy.”
“Why now?”
“Who knows?”
Thinking to myself: They’re creating a new family.
He said, “She took a chance he’d be pissed, her keeping it from him all this time. Maybe she risked it because she wanted help in her time of homicidal need.”
“The two of them did Connie together?”
“Why not? A tag team fits the crime scene perfectly: Ree knocks on Connie’s door, says she wants to talk things over, work out an amicable arrangement. Connie lets her in, before she knows it, Melandrano’s there, sticking her in the gut. Connie goes down, Melandrano finishes her off with her own belt. No resistance, no mess, nice and organized. Baby was probably in the car the whole time. Now they’re gone, traveling light because they’re serious about disappearing.”
My head was flooding with what-ifs. So many things to be wrong about.
Taking on a case that should never have been allowed in the first place and nearly dying for it.
Milo rubbed his hands together. “Let’s bust up a happy-family road trip.”
Pulling over, he got back on the phone, initiating the APB process on Cherie Sykes and William Melandrano. Then he reached Binchy again and checked the progress of the workup on Ree’s car.
A few fingerprints in the expected places but no obvious signs of anything suspicious. The vehicle would be towed to the auto lab for a closer look. Once the prints were cataloged, an AFIS search would start rolling.
He pocketed his phone. “Her arrests are dinky and they predate AFIS, and Melandrano’s not in the system. Too bad, I’d love to confirm his presence in the car, start laying the grounds for conspiracy.”
I said, “You could send someone to swab his apartment door, see if anything matches.”
He looked at me. “If you weren’t so helpful I’d be irritated.” Brief call to the crime lab before turning back to me. “Someone’ll be at Winky’s place in a couple of hours, thank you, Perfessor. Okay, let’s try to talk to the lucky guy who isn’t the father, see what he has to say.”
Bernard “Boris” Chamberlain’s address was on Franklin just east of the avenue’s terminus at La Brea. This was the heart of residential Hollywood, a mixed bag of run-down short-term rentals and once-lavish structures from the twenties prettied up to varying degrees.
Chamberlain lived in one of the rehabbed buildings, a multi-turreted, five-story, vanilla-colored fantasy tagged Le Richelieu by a calligraphic neon sign dribbling over brass-framed double glass doors.
The lobby evoked the reception hall of an old deco oceanliner with rounded corners and stepped molding tracing the perimeter of a twenty-foot ceiling. The plaster was moisture-spotted. A chrome chandelier was unlit. Puckered brown wallpaper was patterned with calla lilies. The carpet was a patchwork of gray remnants laid down clumsily.
No doorman, no security of any sort. Two brass-cage elevators were each marked Out of Order. The directory between the lifts listed B. Chamberlain in Apt. 405.
We climbed.
Ash-colored floors, walls, and doors made the walk up the fourth-floor hallway an ooze through an oversized lead pipe. Milo’s knock on Chamberlain’s door elicited an immediate, emotionally neutral “Hold on.”
The man who opened was middle-aged and bald but for gray side-hairs gathered into a foot of braid that rested atop his left shoulder. His features were meaty and compressed, his skin the color and texture of Muenster cheese. An immense torso balanced precariously on curiously spindly legs. He wore a black sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off to allow tree-trunk arms some room to maneuver, brown velvet pajama pants, Japanese sandals. Behind him was a dim space set up with a barbell on a rack, a pressing bench, a pair of electric basses, and a small, football-colored Pignose practice amp.
Milo said, “Mr. Chamberlain?”
“Yeah?”
“Police—”
“Finally. Those idiots.” Chamberlain crooked a thumb to his right. “Idiots,” said Milo.
“The tweakers? Two doors down in 409? Rich kids slumming and slamming. They wear designer threads, have that rotting skin, look like skeletons.”
Milo said nothing.
Chamberlain said, “All’s I know is Cat and Jeremy, that’s what they call each other. All’s the directory says is Cat.”