“A submissive lawyer? That’s a novel concept.”
“Some people keep work and play separate. Think of the specifics of the settlement:
Claire ends up with the house, gets him to carry the mortgage and the taxes, and he feels grateful because she didn’t take more. Even their first meeting has that same lopsided feel: she’s sober, he isn’t. She’s in control, he isn’t. He spills his guts about his drunken father and brother, alcoholic tendencies of his own that he keeps in check. The guy’s her polar opposite: turns every conversation into therapy. Some women might be put off. Claire goes upstairs with him and gives him the time of his life. Later on, whenever she wants to shut him up, she uses sex. She was clearly drawn to people with serious problems. Maybe she left County because she needed a bigger dose of pathology.”
“So,” he said, “Maybe she found a nutcase who’d gotten out of the hospital, tried to dominate him, pushed the wrong button. I’ve got to see if anyone was released from
Starkweather during the last six months. But if nothing turns up, then what?”
He looked worn out. I said, “You ask me to theorize, I theorize. It could still turn out to be a carjacking gone really bad.”
We walked to the Seville.
“Something else,” he said. “The big taboo she had on talking about her family. To me that says rotten background. Only, unlike Stargill, she kept the bandage on.”
“When are her parents coming out?”
“Couple of days. Why don’t you meet them with me?”
“Sure.” I got in the car.
He said, “She starts out as your basic nice lady, and now we’re thinking of her as some kind of dominatrix…. So all I have to do is find some highly disturbed joker with sadistic tendencies who held on to her credit card. Speaking of which, better call Visa.”
He looked back at the house. “Maybe she did have visitors no one saw. Or just one sicko loverboy… Her living room woulda been a great playpen, wouldn’t it? Plenty of space to roll around in-those floors are baby smooth. No body fluid traces on the wood, but who knows?”
“What’s easier to clean than lacquered hardwood?” I said.
“True,” he said. “Carpet would have yielded something.”
“Stargill said she took the carpeting out.”
He rubbed his face. “Ex-patient or ex-con, some bad boy she thinks she can control.”
“Both would fit with the fact that she was found in her own car. Someone without his own wheels.”
“Putting her in the driver’s seat, again.” Faint smile. “A late-night pickup-we know from Stargill that she wasn’t opposed to being picked up. They go somewhere, things go bad. No semen in her, so it never got to hanky-panky…. Bad Boy cuts her, puts her in the trash bag, stashes her in the trunk and drives her over to West L.A.
Doesn’t steal the car, because that’s a sure way to get busted. Smart. Meticulous.
Not a Starkweather fellow.” He grimaced. “Meaning I’m wasting my time over there.
Back to square one.”
His cell phone chirped. Snapping it off his belt, he said, “Sturgis-… Oh, hi….
Yes, thank you- Oh? How so? Why don’t you just tell- Okay, sure, that would be fine, give me directions.”
Cradling the phone under his chin, he produced his pad, wrote something down, clicked off.
“That,” he said, “was young Miss Ott. She does the night shift today at
Starkweather, wants to talk before work.”
“Talk about what?”
“She wouldn’t say, but I know scared when I hear it.”
She’d asked to meet at Plummer Park in West Hollywood. I followed Milo, connecting to Laurel, turning east on Mel-rose. On the way, I passed a billboard advertising a kick-boxing gym: terrific-looking woman in a sports bra drawing back a glove for a roundhouse. The ad line was “You can rest when you’re dead.” Theology everywhere.
The park was scrubby, crowded, more Russian spoken than English. Most of the inhabitants were old people on benches, heavily garbed despite the heat. A sprinkle of kids on bicycles circled a dry oval of grass in the center, sleepy-looking dog walkers were led by the leash, a few scruffy types in designer T-shirts and cheap shoes hung out near the pay phones trying to radiate Moscow Mafia.