“Maybe I’ll just knock on the door,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said.
I went around to the front and tried the gate. Locked. So I walked around to the other side and climbed over the wall.
The house was wood, stained dark brown. The trim was white. The front yard was grass, healthy and trimmed along the cement drive that led to the garage. No flowers, hedges or shrubs. There was a long porch running along the front. No patio furniture. No flower pots. No birdbath or naked cherub or St. Francis or painted deer. A busy guy’s place, I thought: neat, efficient, low maintenance. Two guys, like the old man said? There were two windows facing the front, both with blinds drawn shut tight I knocked on the door and nothing happened. I waited and knocked again. Then I went around to the guest quarters behind. It looked closed up to me. The porch was littered with leaves and the windows were blocked off by thick curtains I couldn’t see through or around. I tried some windows on the side of the little cottage, but couldn’t see inside so much as an inch. The garage was connected: door locked, window blinds down.
I talked to three more neighbors but gathered little. Suburbs can be the most private places on earth, which is why places like Orange County can harbor some of the worst people in the world. Like Chet. Like The Horridus. One of the neighbors said he thought two young men lived there; the others said it was just one. They all agreed that the occupant(s) came and went in a white Saturn four-door.
Looking back at the place in the rearview I was reminded of the Grantley place in Hopkin. But then, I wanted to be.
On my way home I called the listing agent for the Loach house, to find out anything I could about Collette and the property. What I found out was that the owner had retracted the listing just after the MLS sheet went to print. My spirits sank and I cursed my luck. Then they began to rise. What would be a better reflection of an unstable, changing character than listing and unlisting a home in less than one week? The agent told me that Collette Loach had personal reasons for changing her mind. I asked for her phone number, but the agent said she was under strict orders from Loach not to give it out to anyone — a common practice for busy, private individuals, she informed me. All inquiries were to be handled by the realtor. I begged, pleaded and got nowhere with her. I toyed with the idea of telling her that I was not really an interested buyer, but worried that she might have read the papers or seen the news. I toyed with the idea of impersonating another deputy, say, Johnny Escobedo, but I remembered the look of warning on his face at the café. Plus, believe it or not, I know the difference between a moral act and an immoral one, not that I haven’t in my life chosen the latter. But I did call a friend of mine at the phone company in L.A. He was kind enough to check their statewide for me, only to confirm what I had feared: no Collette Loach with a telephone number in California.
Halfway home it was my turn to get a call. Will Fortune from Idaho, with an edge to his voice.
“Good news, bad news, and maybe news,” he said.
“Bad first.”
“The photographs were partially made by your old Yashica.”
My heart fell and my mouth went dry as sand.
“The good news is, I don’t think the final images were taken exclusively from photographs at all. They’re mainly digitized composites done by someone with a lot of patience, a lot of skill and some pretty good materials to start with — pictures of you and pictures of the girl and pictures of that cave. Our artist shot the final digitized images with a film recorder, thus a photograph. But he was careless. The edge marks from the original photos of the cave — taken with your camera — were still on the negs, just inside the edge marks the film recorder left. It’s a slick piece of work, but he was off by fractions of a millimeter. That fraction was big enough for me to drive a truck through.”
“If the photographs came from my camera, I’m sunk.”
“No. The final image was made up from photographs taken with your camera and photographs that may not have been. It’s image manipulation, pure and simple, and I will testify to that. But it gets better... maybe.”
“Give me the maybe better.”
“The shadow analysis worked beautifully. Those cave shots were taken on January the eleventh of this year. That was a Friday. If you can put yourself somewhere else, it means someone else took them. If someone else took them, you’ve been set up. I’ll testify to that, too. The DA can argue with me all he wants, but he can’t argue with the sun.”
It’s such a strange feeling, to have your heart shooting around inside your body like a balloon with the air escaping.
“You’ll be the first to know.”
“I’d reserve that privilege for Loren if I were you. Good luck.”
Few dates stay in the memory that long, unless they’re special. January the eleventh was all of that: I was with Donna. Newport Marriott Hotel, room 317. Our third time consummating the powerful desire that had grown since those first moments alone together in a county elevator two months before. I’d told Ishmael I was leaving the office, claiming an interview with a suspected child molester, up in Anaheim. It seemed like a small thing at the time: so little risked and so much gained. I did the actual interview the next Monday and dated the notes three days earlier. The suspected child molester was the man who became our turncoat, Professor Christopher Muhlberger, aka Danny, who blew out his brains in despair by the pool in Chet Alton’s rented Orange house.
It was an easy date to remember, too, because it was my fortieth birthday, and Melinda and Penny had awakened me that morning with a cake bearing a single candle that, when you lit it, whistled “Happy Birthday” over and over, until you blew it out.
Danny wouldn’t be contesting our interview time and date, though Danny’s calendar might. University professors keep pretty tight schedules, but he wouldn’t have stated his true reason for being away from his professional duties — ratting out friends so he’d get a lesser sex-with-minors pop — would he?
Ishmael might not “remember” my leaving at all. Why should he?
If need be, I could call Donna Mason to the stand and humiliate her in front of each and every one of her CNB viewers. And she could tell the truth about Terry Naughton, champion of the little people, where he was and what he was really doing that day. Maybe if I gave her the white rose sitting on the seat beside me, she’d be willing. Here, take this.
Twenty-Five
By late evening I was back in my apartment, with the windows open and the TV turned to CNB. What a program lineup that night: Sheriff Department press conference on The Horridus, followed by an exclusive interview with accused child molester Terry Naughton. Must-see TV.
I checked my e-mail again: no word from I. R. Shroud. I was almost certain he’d blown me off. Cautious. Scared. The acid test was tonight, though: what would he do if he saw me — as I had to assume he would — plastered all over CNB, or one of their sister stations around the country, or in any of thousands of newspapers the next day? Would he think Mal was a profoundly disturbed cop who had ordered up customs of himself for his personal needs? Would he assume the pictures he sold were used against me, or would he assume there was more evidence than just those? Might he speculate that Naughton had been framed by Mal? Worst of all, would he wonder if Mal’s fall was all part of some elaborate covert plan to locate him, The Horridus?
How should I play it? That was the only question I really had an answer to.
I listened to a long message from Donna, who sounded exhausted. She said she’d gotten some dramatic film for the Texas connection story; Welborn was a great guy; the sight of Mary Lou Kidder’s skull had made her cry on camera and she’d never once done that in her life. She said Gene was a monster, and her guts told her that he was our guy. She said she hoped the interview this evening would help somehow. She said she loved me and she’d be home late, but she’d be home. She left her number at the Holiday Inn, but told me she’d only go back there to shower, pack and head out.