estate was settled. That’s when I learned how little they were gonna get. The address on the transfer was in Utah. Park City. I traced it. FOB. It was winter by then. I figured the little fucks went skiing with the death money.”
“Scams, murder, movies,” I said. “No known address. Need a closer fit?”
Milo shook his head. I felt sparked by what we’d just learned but he seemed dejected.
“What is it?”
“First Derrick offs his parents, then his brother, probably for Cliff’s share of the eighty grand. This is professional evil.”
“What was left of Cliff’s share,” I said. “Like Castro said, they probably chewed right through it. Maybe Derrick chewed faster.”
“Derrick the dominator… arrogant, just like you’ve been saying.”
“Good criminal self-esteem,” I said. “And why not? He does bad things and gets away clean. And maybe he had practice with family elimination.”
“The Ardullos,” he said. “Spurring Peake on-well, your guesses have been pretty right on, haven’t they?”
“Aw shucks,” I said. “Now all we need to do is find Derrick. Let me get back on the line with the psychiatric board.”
“Sure. I’ll hit Pimm again. And Park City. Maybe Derrick tried a land scam there, too.”
“If you want, I’ll give you some other possibilities.”
“What?”
“Aspen, Telluride, Vegas, Tahoe. This is a party boy. He goes where the fun is.”
The dejected look returned. “Those kinds of record checks could take weeks,” he said. “The guy’s right here, polluting my city, and I can’t put a finger on him.”
It took several calls to learn that psychiatric tech licenses were granted for periods ranging from thirteen to twenty-four months. Individual names could be verified, but sending the entire list was unheard-of. Finally, I found a supervisor willing to fax the roster. Another twenty minutes passed before paper began spooling out of the sorry-looking machine across the room.
I read as it unraveled. Page after page of names, no Crim-mins, no Wark.
Another alias?
Griffith D. Wark. Scrambling a film maestro. Manipulative, pretentious, arrogant.
And strangely childlike-playing pretend games.
Seeing himself as a major Hollywood player. The fact that he’d never produced anything was a nasty bit of potential dissonance, but the same could be said of so many coutured reptiles occupying tables at Spago.
Psychopaths could deal with dissonance.
Psychopaths had low levels of anxiety.
Besides, there were other types of productions.
Blood Walk.
Bad eyes in a box.
Something else about human snakes: they lacked emotional depth, faked humanity.
Craved repetition. Patterns.
So maybe Wark had co-opted other major directors. I was no film expert but several names came to mind: Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Huston, John Ford, Frank
Capra…. I scanned the tech list. None of the above.
But Wark was D. W. Griffith’s middle name. What was Hitchcock’s?
I called the research library at the U, asked for the reference desk, and explained what I needed. The librarian must have been puzzled, but odd requests are their business and, God bless her, she didn’t argue.
Five minutes later I had what I needed: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. John no middle name
Huston. Frank NMN Capra. George Orson Welles. John NMN Ford; real name, Sean
Aloysius O’Feeney.
Thanking her, I turned back to the tech list. No Capras, four Fords, one Hitchcock, no Hustons, no O’Feeneys… no obviously cute manipulations of Hitchcock or Ford…
.Then I saw it.
G. W. Orson.
Co-opting a genius.
Delusions were everywhere.
31.
“CITIZEN CREEP,” SAID Milo, looking at the circled name.
“G. W. Orson got licensed twenty-two months ago,” I said. “That’s about all I could get except for the address he put on his application form.”
He studied the address slip. “South Shenandoah Street… around Eighteenth. West
L.A. territory… only a few blocks from the shopping center where Claire was dumped.”
“The center’s far from Claire’s house, so why would she shop there? Unless she went with someone else.”
“Crimmins? They had a relationship?”
“Why not?” I said. “Let’s assume Orson-and Wark-are both Crimmins aliases. We have no employment records yet, but Crimmins is a psych tech, so it’s not much of a leap to assume he works at Starkweather, or did in the past. He ran into Claire.