It was shaping up as another brutal Los Angeles winter, low seventies, scattered clouds, clearing. The sky was that deep blue we get just before or just after a rain. The white stucco houses along the ridges were sharp and brilliant in the sun. I passed the coed-specked running paths of UCLA, then wound my way past a house that may have been the one William Holden used to slip the repossessors in Sunset Boulevard. Old Spanish. Same cornices and pilasters. The ghosts of old Hollywood haunting the eaves. I’ve wondered about that house since I discovered it, just two days after I mustered out of the Army in 1972. I’ve wondered, but I’ve never wanted to know for sure. After the Army, magic was in short supply and when you found some, you held on tight. It wouldn’t be the same if I knew the house belonged to some guy who made his millions inventing Fruit Loops.
A half mile past the San Diego Freeway I turned left on Barrington and dropped south toward San Vicente, then hung another left on Gorham. The Piedmont Arms is on the south side of the street in a stretch of apartment houses and condominiums. I drove past, turned around at a cross street, and parked. It looked like a nice place to live. An older woman with wispy white hair eased a Hughes Market cart off a curb and across a street. She smiled at a man and a woman in their twenties, the man with his shirt off, the woman in an airy Navajo top. L.A. winter. They smiled back. Two women in jogging suits were walking back toward Barrington, probably off to lunch at one of the little nouveaux restaurants on San Vicente. Hot duck salad with raspberry sauce. A sturdily built Chicano woman with a purse the size of a mobile home waited at a bus stop, squinting into the sun. Somewhere a screw gun started up, then cut short. There were gulls and a scent of the sea. Nice. Four cars in front of me, north side of the street, two guys sat in a dark blue ’69 Nova with a bad rust spot on the left rear fender. Chicanos. The driver tried to scowl like Charles Bronson as I cruised past. Maybe they were from the government.
The Piedmont is a clean, two-story, U-shaped stucco building with a garden entry at the front braced by stairs that go up to the second floor. Around each stair is a stand of bamboo and a couple of banana trees for that always-popular rain forest look. There are two rows of brass-burnished mailboxes in front of the bamboo, with a big open bin beneath them for magazines and packages and Pygmies with blowguns. Kimberly Marsh’s drop was the fourth from the left on the top row. I could see eight or nine envelopes through the slot. In the bin there were three catalogs and a couple of those giveaway flyers that everyone gets. Lot of mail. Maybe four days’ worth.
I walked through the little courtyard past some more banana trees. Apartment 4 was all the way back on the left. That Janet. I knocked, but there was no answer. I walked back up to apartment 1, where a little sign on the door said MANAGER. A fat man built like a pear came around the mailboxes, started up the stairs, and saw me. Jo-Jo isn’t here,” he said. “He’s got the aerobics class on Tuesday.”
“Jo-Jo the manager?”
He nodded. “He’ll be back around five or six. But I can tell you, there aren’t any vacancies.”
“Maybe I could pitch a tent.”
He thought about that. “Oh, that was a joke.”
“You know Kimberly Marsh?” I said. “In number four.”
He said, “Number four,” and thought about it. “That the pretty blonde girl?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “You see her around, that’s all. I said hi once and she said hi back, that’s all.”
I took out the photograph of Mort. “You see this guy around with her?”
He squinted at me. “Mr. Suspicious I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“Johnny Staccato, Confidential Investigations.”
He nodded and stared at the picture and rubbed his arm. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “Gee.” Gee.
I thanked him and walked around until I heard a door upstairs open and close. Then I walked back to number 4. I knocked again in case she had been in the shower, then took out two little tools I keep in my wallet and popped Kimberly Marsh’s deadbolt lock. “Ms. Marsh?” Maybe she was taking a nap. Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to answer the door. Maybe she was waiting behind it with an ice pick she had dipped in rat poison.
No answer.
I pushed open the door and went in.
There was a davenport against one wall with a wicker and glass coffee table in front of it and a matching Morris chair at the far end. From the doorway, I could see across the living room to the dining area and the kitchen. To the left was a short hall. Above the couch was a slickly framed poster of James Dean walking in the rain. He looked lonely.
A dozen brown daisies sat in a glass bowl on the coffee table. Propped against the bowl was a little lavender card. For the girl who gives me life, all my love, Mort. Papery petals had rained around the card.
On the end table there was a Panasonic phone-answering machine. I passed it, walked back to the kitchen, then glanced down the little hall to the bedroom before I went into the bath. No bodies. No messages scrawled in blood. No stopped-up toilet with red-tinted water. There were two towels on the bathroom floor as if someone had stepped out of the shower, toweled off, then dropped the towels. They were dry, at least two days old. There was a little chrome toothbrush holder with the stains those things get when you park a toothbrush in them, only there was no toothbrush. The medicine cabinet held all the stuff medicine cabinets hold, though maybe there were a couple of spaces where things had been but now weren’t. I went back out into the living room and checked the message machine. The message counter said zero-no messages. I played it back anyway. The counter was right.
I went into the bedroom. The bed was made and neat. There was a little desk in the corner beneath the window, cluttered and messy with old copies of the L.A. Times, Vogue, I. Magnin shopping bags, and other junk. Halfway down a stack of trade papers and Casting Calls I found the kind of 8?10 black-and-white stills actors bring to readings. Most were head shots of a pretty blonde with clean healthy features. At the bottom of the 8?10 it said Kimberly Marsh in an elegant flowing script. On the back was stapled a Xeroxed copy of her acting credits, her training, and her physical description. She was 5? 6?, 120 pounds, had honey hair and green eyes. She was 26 years old and wore a size 8. She could play tennis, enjoyed water sports, could ski, and ride both Western and English. Her credits as an actress didn’t amount to much. Mostly regional theater from Arizona. She claimed to have studied with Nina Foch. Farther down the stack I found some full body shots, one with Kimberly in a fur bikini doing her best to look like a Pictish warrior. She looked pretty good in that fur bikini. I thought of Ellen Lang invisible in my director’s chair. Sit, Ellen. Speak. I put one of the head shots in my pocket.
I finished with the desk and moved to the closet. There were twelve shoe boxes stacked against the wall. I found a snapshot of a sleeping dog in one of them. There was a large empty space about the size of a suitcase on the right side of the closet shelf. Maybe Morton Lang had called and said, I’ve finally had my fill of this invisible sexless drudge I’m married to so how’s about you and me and Perry hit the beach in Hawaii? And maybe Kimberly Marsh had said, You bet, but I havta get back for this role I got on “One Life to Live,” so she’d pulled down the suitcase and packed her toothbrush and enough clothes for a week and they had split. Sounded good to me. Ellen Lang wouldn’t like it, but there you are.
I shut the closet and went through the dresser, starting with the top drawer and working down. In the third drawer from the top I found a small wooden box containing a plastic bag of marijuana, three joints, two well-used pipes, a small bong, a broken mirror, four empty glass vials, and a short candle. Well, well, well. There was a 9?12 envelope under the stash box, folded in half and held tight by a rubber band. There was a pack of photographs in it. The first picture featured a nude Kimberly seated on her davenport, stark white triangles offsetting a rich tan. Not all of the shots were raw. A couple showed her posing on the back of a Triumph motorcycle, a couple more had her at the beach with a big, well-muscled, sandy-haired kid who had probably played end for the University of Mars. Near the bottom of the pack I found Morton Lang. He was naked on the bed, grinning, propped up on one elbow. A well-tanned female leg reached in from the bottom of the picture to play toesies with his privates. Mort. You jerk. I tore the picture of Morton in two and put it in my pocket. I put the rest of the stuff back, closed the drawers, and made sure the apartment was the way I’d found it. Then I let myself out.