Tears welled. She wiped them away.
I said, “A gentle guy.”
“The gentlest. Why would anyone hurt him? Unless it had something to do with the neighborhood. Something he ran into while walking back.”
“You’ve had problems in the neighborhood?”
“Fewer than you’d expect, but sure, it’s like any other urban thing. I mean I’m not judging and disparaging an entire region because it’s low-income, but my first year of grad school I had a placement at one of the downtown shelters and it was scary. Not most of the homeless, just a few. You’d get some who were totally irrational with major anger issues.”
She touched her left forearm. “I got my arm sprained once. Ladling out food and a guy, a total schizophrenic, thought I wasn’t moving fast enough and grabbed me and twisted.”
“Scary,” I said.
“Petrifying. So when Benny still didn’t show up, I thought, What if he ran into someone like that? He’d be defenseless. But you can’t imprison them. There are always risks to be weighed. Right?”
We nodded.
She threw up her hands. “Working with the disabled, nothing they teach you in school prepares you. Like that shelter, how could I be ready for that?”
Milo said, “Any problems between Benny and the other residents?”
“Of course not. Andrea selects for gentleness, she doesn’t want to waste time on discipline and control.”
“Okay. What about Benny’s family?”
“He didn’t have any family.”
“No one at all?”
“Isn’t that sad? That’s how he ended up here. He was an only child, lived with his mother, she had him late, died two years ago when she was in her late eighties. You see that with Down syndrome. Older parents, three of our residents are Down. But Benny wasn’t Down, he was just UDD — undifferentiated developmental delay.”
I said, “He was living with his mother until she died?”
“He was the one who found her, he got all terrified and ran out of their apartment and sat on the curb crying. A neighbor saw him, found out what happened, and called 911. Benny was put in adult foster placement until he got in here.”
Milo said, “No cousins, aunts, that kind of thing?”
“No one,” said Justine Merck. “That’s true of most of our residents. They’re kind of like foundlings. It’s society’s responsibility to take care of them.”
“How about a look at Benny’s room?”
“Sure. You’ll see his art. How much he loved it.”
She took us up a mahogany staircase softened by brown shag. The house’s second floor was the same mahogany. Nature prints taken from commercial calendars hung askew at irregular intervals. Five open doors on each side of the hall. Some were set up with a bunk bed, others with a single.
Benny Alvarez had roomed alone in a beige eight-by-eight space at the rear of the house, probably built as servants’ quarters. A single, narrow window, the view partly obstructed by the broad, rust-edged leaves of a towering sycamore. The Sesame Street quilt on the bed was neatly tucked, a matching pillow fluffed.
I said, “Did Benny make his own bed?”
Justine Merck said, “Oh, yes, he took pride in it. He was always neat and clean. Loved to wash his hands and was the first to line up for shower time. He was picky about his clothes, too. Buttoned his shirts up to the neck even in hot weather.”
I thought: Military dad? Convict dad?
I said, “What do you know about his father? His upbringing, period.”
“Nothing, just what I was told about his mom. With some of them you get abuse histories but not Benny. He was well taken care of by his mom and his foster parents.”
“Speaking of which, what’s their name?”
“The Baxters but they moved back to Utah two years ago. That’s why Benny came here.”
Milo and I took in the tiny room. Other than the bed, only one piece of furniture: a white three-drawer dresser. Resting on top, several sheets of paper covered with stick figures.
Milo rifled through the drawers, then checked a small closet. Meager wardrobe, a pair of sneakers on the floor, nothing on the shelf. I thought of Rick Gurnsey’s condom stash. Two men, so different, slaughtered and abased together.
We turned to leave.
Justine Merck said, “Darn. I was hoping you’d find something. Like I said, I’m stupid, so I never stop hoping.”
She watched us from the door until we drove away. Two blocks later, Milo pulled over, entering the shadow of the freeway. “Another one with no local family.”
We each pulled out our phones.
His research began with the basics on Andrea Bauer and Marcella McGann. McGann’s Facebook page portrayed a heavyset, brown-haired woman in her thirties. Favorite music and movies, nothing unconventional. Three photos with an equally chubby boyfriend named Steve.
Dr. Andrea Bauer lived in Montecito and donated to worthy causes. Ph.D. in sociology from Yale, inherited wealth from a deceased developer husband. Buddhist, pacifist, vegan, self-labeled as an “activist,” mother of two, grandmother of one. Lots of images on the Web for her, all at fundraisers. Angular, pretty woman in her sixties with short iron-colored hair brushed straight back from a clear, tan brow.
Nothing remotely nasty in either woman’s background. Perfect driving record for McGann’s five-year-old Nissan Sentra, Bauer had gotten a few speeding tickets in her Porsche Panamera GTS. The 101 north. Heading home in a hurry.
As Milo continued clicking, I looked up art galleries on Hart Street and found Verlang Contemporary. An image search revealed a narrow storefront on the ground floor of an ornate, gargoyle-encrusted twenties building. Gray limestone, somber and impressive; maybe built as a bank.
The elegance diminished by a discarded shopping cart up the block, chips and stains on the stone.
I ran a map search. As Justine Merck had said, not far — .61 mile from the cantaloupe-colored house.
Twenty minutes if you ambled, add a bit more time for the possible distractedness of a mentally challenged man with a creative mind.
Milo clicked off. “Hate when everyone’s law abiding.”
I said, “Short walk home so he was likely abducted sometime Friday afternoon, kept somewhere until he was murdered on Saturday. Skid Row isn’t that far so what Justine told us about the soup kitchen might be relevant. All kinds of people on the street.”
He frowned. “Damn men’s jail isn’t that far, either. Scrotes walking out to freedom, who knows what they’d do.”
He placed a call to Dr. Andrea Bauer, got voicemail. The same for Marcella McGann.
“Okay, let’s have a look at that gallery.”
The brief ride took us past residential and commercial buildings of varying ages and conditions and a fetid homeless encampment occupied by six vagrants, none of whom recognized Benny Alvarez or the woman in the black hat. The outdoor inhabitants seemed strangely serene when questioned, an attitude buttressed by Milo’s distribution of singles and cheap cigars. As we left, a man called out, “God bless you, General!”
The limestone building housing Verlang Contemporary was another holdover, flanked on the north by an eighties motel called The Flower Drum festooned with English, Japanese, and Korean signage and on the left by a two-story block cube housing New World Elegant Jewelers. (WE BUY GOLD!!!) Off in the distance, the pagoda roofs of Chinatown pierced the smog, strangely quaint against the brutalist towers of municipal government.
Verlang’s windows were dark but for a Closed sign. Same for two neighboring art emporia: AB-Original Gallery and The Hoard Collection. The building had two additional stories, no lights from within.