By the time my return flight to San Francisco left on Saturday, the DA had embarked on the 1872 statute on duels and challenges with a missionary-like zeal and planned to take the Winslip case to the grand jury. Daniel Pope would be on hand to give convincing testimony about traveling to Tijuana primed for hand-to-hand combat with Dominguez and his cohort. Renny D was as yet unsuspecting but would soon be behind bars.
And at a Friday-night dinner party, the other half of the “detecting duo” had regaled the San Diego branch of the McCone family with his highly colored version of our exploits.
I accepted a cup of coffee from the flight attendant and settled back in the seat with my beat-up copy of Standard California Codes. I had a more current one on the shelf in my office, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to part with this one. Besides, I needed something to read on the hour-and-a-half flight.
Disguised Firearms or Other Deadly Weapons. Interesting.
Lipstick Case Knife. Oh, them deadly dames, as they used to say.
Shobi-zue: a staff, crutch, rod, or pole with a knife enclosed. Well, if I ever break a leg…
Writing Pen Knife. That’s a good one. Proves the pen can be mightier that the sword.
But wait now, here’s one that’s really fascinating…
THE WALL
I
I’d been on the Conway case for close to twenty-four hours before I started paying serious attention to Adrian’s bedroom wall. A big oversight, considering it was dark purple and covered with a collage of clippings and photographs and junk that looked like it had been dug out of a garbage can. But then I’ve never been too quick on the uptake on Monday mornings, which was the only other time I’d seen it.
The wall, the missing girl’s mother had explained, was a form of therapy, and even though its creation had more or less trashed the room, she-the mother, Donna Conway-considered it well worth the cost. After all, a sixteen-year-old whose father had run off a year and a half ago with a woman of twenty whom she-the daughter, Adrian Conway-insisted on calling “Dad’s bimbo” needed something, didn’t she? And it was cheaper than paying for a shrink.
Or for any more self-help books, I thought, if there are any left that you don’t already have.
The Conway house made me damn twitchy, and not just because there wasn’t a book in it that didn’t have the words “relationship” or “self” in its title. It was in San Francisco’s Diamond Heights district-a place that looks like some alien hand has picked up an entire suburb and plunked it down on one of our southeastern hills. The streets are cutesily named-Jade, Topaz, Turquoise-and the Conway’s, Goldmine Drive, was no exception. The house, tucked behind its own garage and further hidden from the street by a high wall, was pretty much like all the other houses and condos and apartments around there: white walls and light carpeting and standard modern kitchen; skylights and picture windows and a balcony with a barbecue that could hardly ever be used because the wind would put icicles on your briquettes up there. The view was nice enough, but it couldn’t make up for the worn spots on the carpet and the cracks that showed where the builder had cut corners. When Donna Conway told me-for God knows what reason-that the house was the sum total of her divorce settlement, I started feeling depressed for her. I didn’t get much myself when I got divorced, but a VCR and half the good silverware were at least hockable, and from the rust on the FOR SALE sign out front, I gathered that this house was not.
Anyway, Adrian Conway had been missing for two weeks by the time her mother turned for help to the firm where I work, All Souls Legal Cooperative. We’re kind of a poor man’s McKenzie, Brackman-a motley collection of crusaders and mainstream liberals and people like me who don’t function too well in a structured environment, and one of the biggest legal-services plans in northern California. Donna Conway was a medical technician with a hospital that offered membership in the plan as part of their benefits package, so she went to her lawyer when she decided the police weren’t doing all they could to find her daughter. Her lawyer handed the case to our chief investigator, Sharon McCone, who passed it on to me, Rae Kelleher.
So on a Monday morning in early November I was sitting in Donna Conway’s drafty living room (God, didn’t she know about weather stripping?), sipping weak instant coffee and wishing I didn’t have to look at her sad, sad eyes. If it weren’t for her sadness and the deep lines of discontentment that made parentheses around the corners of her mouth, she would have been a pretty woman-soft shoulder-length dark hair and a heart-shaped face, and a willowy body that made me green with envy. Her daughter didn’t look anything like her, at least not from the picture she gave me. Adrian had curly red-gold hair and a quirky little smile, and her eyes gleamed with mischief that I took to be evidence of an offbeat sense of humor.
Adrian, Donna Conway told me, had never come home two weeks ago Friday from her after-school job as a salesclerk at Left Coast Casuals at the huge Ocean Park Shopping Plaza out near the beach. Turned out she hadn’t even shown up for work, and although several of her classmates at nearby McAteer High School had seen her waiting for the bus that would take her to the shopping center, nobody remembered her actually boarding it. Adrian hadn’t taken anything with her except the backpack she usually took to school. She hadn’t contacted her father; he and his new wife were living in Switzerland now, and the police there had checked them out carefully. She wasn’t with friends, her boyfriend, or her favorite relative, Aunt June. And now the police had back burnered her file, labeled it just another of the teenage disappearances that happen thousands and thousands of times a year in big cities and suburbs and small towns. But Donna Conway wasn’t about to let her daughter become just another statistic-no way! She would pay to have Adrian found, even if it took every cent of the equity she’d built up in the house.
I’d noticed two things about Donna while she was telling me all that: She seemed to harbor the usual amount of malice toward her ex’s new wife, and an even larger amount toward Adrian’s Aunt June.
On Monday I went by the book: talked with the officer in Missing Persons assigned to Adrian’s case; talked with the classmates who had seen her leaving McAteer that Friday; talked with her supervisor at Left Coast Casuals and the head of security at Ocean Park Plaza. Then I checked out the boyfriend, a few girlfriends, and a couple of teachers at the high school, ran through the usual questions. Did Adrian use drugs or alcohol? Had she been having romantic problems? Could she be pregnant? Had she talked about trouble at home, other than the obvious? No to everything. Adrian Conway was apparently your all-American average, which worked out to a big zero as far as leads were concerned. By nightfall I’d decided that it was the old story: gone on purpose, for some reason all her own; a relative innocent who probably hadn’t gotten far before becoming somebody’s easy victim.
Sad old story, as sad as Donna Conway’s eyes.
It was the memory of those eyes that made me go back to take a second look at Adrian’s room on Tuesday afternoon-that, and the thought that nobody could be as average as she sounded. I had to find out just who Adrian Conway really was. Maybe then I could locate her.
I started with the collage wall. Dark purple paint that had stained the edges of the white ceiling and splotched on the cream carpet. Over that, pictures cut from glossy magazines-the usual trite stuff that thrills you when you’re in your teens. Sunsets and sailboats. Men with chiseled profiles and windblown hair; women in gauzy dresses lazing in flower-strewn meadows. Generic romance with about as much relationship to reality as Mother Goose.