The clerk finally lost all patience and all but snatched the form back from me. When I asked if I could make a copy, she said, “You should have thought of that option four and a half minutes ago. Come back tomorrow.”
A friendly, helpful clerk in county records is an asset in my line of work, and not someone you want to piss off, so I apologized profusely, and told her I owed her big time.
She laughed and said, “Honey, I hear that every day from one person or another, and I ain’t seen no ‘big time’ yet.”
Rachel called on Thursday night to say she hadn’t been able to find anything on Travis, but had some luck locating the DeMonts. I told her I had Friday off, and we decided to meet in the morning.
“You hear anything more from Jimmy Mac?” she asked.
I told her I hadn’t been contacted again by McCain and was beginning to believe he wasn’t much interested in me as a suspect, but she warned me against this kind of thinking. I tried to get her to talk about how she had come to know so much about him.
“See you tomorrow morning,” she said, once again shying away from any discussion about her past connection to him.
But our Friday plans were changed about ten minutes later, when Sophia Longworth called from the Mission Viejo Library.
“I think I know where you can meet up with your cousin,” she said.
“Great!” I said, not realizing that all hell was about to break loose.
11
Sophia Longworth asked if I had heard back from my cousin by e-mail.
“Nothing yet,” I said.
“He travels a lot,” she said, “and he may not be checking his e-mail from the road. That’s why I posted a note on PUBYAC.”
“PUBYAC?”
“It’s an Internet list for librarians who specialize in services for children and young adults. I received several responses, but most of them were places where he had been, not where he was scheduled to appear in the future. Only one of the librarians responded with a future date. It’s not much notice, I know, but if you can get up to North Hollywood tomorrow morning, you might catch him at the Valley Plaza Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. He’s doing two performances there, one in Spanish, one in English.”
“What time?” I asked.
“The Spanish performance is at nine, the English at ten.”
When I called Rachel back to tell her that my plans had changed again, she offered to come with me. “That way, you can use the carpool lanes,” she said.
“Don’t give me that,” I said. “You’ll never convince me that you’re just volunteering to be my diamond-lane dummy.”
“You can be the dummy. We’ll take my car.”
“The Karmann Ghia will get us there.”
“Yeah, well, my car will get us there and back. I don’t mind driving. Besides, I want to talk to you about what I’ve learned so far.”
So the next morning we were on our way to North Hollywood. North Hollywood, like Hollywood itself, isn’t a city. West Hollywood is, but Hollywood and North Hollywood are part of the City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is full of irregularly drawn boundaries; some of them can be seen on maps.
North Hollywood is near the eastern edge of the San Fernando Valley, about forty miles from Las Piernas. There was no way to get to it during business hours without going through some patch of traffic hell.
Not all of the old freeways between Las Piernas and North Hollywood had been retrofitted with carpool lanes, though, so although we were both curious about Travis’s storytelling, neither of us had wanted to leave at five in the morning and then hang out in the Valley for three hours, which is what we would have to do to be at the library at nine. We had decided we’d aim for the ten o’clock English performance and try to miss some of the morning rush hour-an “hour” that begins around six and often lasts as late as ten.
As we made our way up the San Gabriel River Freeway to Interstate 5, my nervousness over the upcoming encounter with Travis increased. Rachel was humming “Jimmy Mac” to herself again, but I was too preoccupied with more immediate worries to pursue that line of conversation. I feigned an interest in the passengers of other cars, all the while trying to rehearse what I would say to Travis. It occurred to me that he might not even know he had cousins.
It suddenly seemed hot and stuffy in the car, and though I knew the sensation had nothing to do with the climate inside the car, I rolled the window down a little. I was immediately greeted by a puff of diesel exhaust and the rattling, banging metal clamor of a semi in the next lane. I rolled the window back up. Rachel looked over at me, then turned the air conditioner on.
“That won’t help,” I said.
She shrugged and turned it off.
After a minute or two had gone by, she said, “I’ve managed to track down most of the people who were mentioned in those articles.”
“The articles about the murder of Gwendolyn DeMont?”
“Right.” She cast another quick look in my direction, then said, “You know, even if he has no interest in getting to know you and your sister, maybe Travis will want to contact someone in his father’s family.”
“Maybe,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant about that possibility. I pulled the sun visor down, adjusted it up and down as I looked in the little mirror on it-as if I were checking my makeup. It might have been more convincing if I had been wearing any. In the car behind us, I noticed a man in a baseball cap driving a dark green Oldsmo-bile sedan, a car that been behind us once or twice before. I couldn’t make out his face, but there was something vaguely familiar about him.
“Well, if he does want to contact them, I’ve got an address for Gerald Spanning,” Rachel said, getting my full attention.
“Arthur’s brother? I talked to him.”
“The one in Los Alamitos?”
“I didn’t have an address for him, just a phone number. So he stayed in the same town all these years?” I said.
“Looks like it. You’ve talked to him?”
“Very briefly. Says he never met Travis, and didn’t seem to hold doing so as one of his life’s ambitions. You talked to him, too?”
“No, just found out where he lived.”
“Do I want to know how you managed to do this?”
She laughed. “Probably not.”
Curiosity got the better of me. “How?”
“From a voter registration list.”
“Voter registration? That information isn’t available to just anybody. Don’t tell me you-”
“No, I didn’t have to call in any favors,” she said.
“For some reason, I have a suspicion I’m not going to like the answer anyway.”
This apparently did not cause her much concern. “Well, I’ll tell you how someone might get them, then you can stop imagining that I’m bribing people who work in the County Registrar of Voters office.” Making a wholly unconvincing attempt to look as if she were working from imagination rather than memory, she said, “Let’s say a person files as a candidate for an office.”
“Okay…”
“That person, who is not obliged to put on much of a campaign, may obtain voter registration information, such as the names and addresses and-sometimes-the phone numbers of voters. The information is printed out by a computer.”
“Yes. Precinct lists. Are you a candidate?”
“Oh, no, I haven’t lived here long enough to be a candidate. And I’m speaking hypothetically, remember?”
“Certainly.”
She laughed again. “And those who don’t want to go to the trouble of filing for candidacy just volunteer to work on a campaign, then make copies of the lists.”
“I know you haven’t worked on any campaigns,” I said, “because there hasn’t been an election since you’ve moved here.”