As hard as everyone tried to make things work, Casey had never lasted more than seven days with her stepmother. Hillary had lasted over thirty.
The first pay phone I came to, I stopped and called Lyle. “How are things this morning?” I asked.
“Status quo. And what do you mean, I skimped on the pineapple? I don’t put pineapple in my bran muffins.”
“No wonder,” I said. “Did Casey get off to school okay?”
“Oh yeah. She’s one repentant little tyke. Even made her bed before school.”
“Lyle, did she tell you why Scotty dropped her at the airport so early?”
“If I tell you, are you going to scream in my ear?”
“Probably.”
“Just be gentle. According to Casey, it seems that Linda was done in by the baptism party, pooped. So she talked old Scotty into taking her out for dinner to some special place. They could only get an early reservation, so…”
“So they dumped Casey.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Thanks, Lyle. I’ll call Casey after school.”
“How come you’re not yelling? What’s the matter?”
“I have to think about it. When I’m ready to yell, I’ll call back.”
“Lookin’ forward to it,” he chuckled. “The grant administrator on your film called a couple of times. She wants a progress report before she releases the next check. We haven’t paid bills yet this month.”
“I’ll get in touch with her.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Take care of yourself, Mag.”
“You, too. I’ll bring you home a pineapple. Bye, Lyle.”
I got back into the Blazer and rejoined the stream of Monday-morning traffic.
Amazing, I was thinking, how easily an intelligent, normally careful, affectionate father like Scotty could be yanked around. As if Linda were magnetic north and his dick were a compass. All evidence suggested that Randy had also been a pushover in that department.
My plan was to do some research in the local library, find out what I could about Amy Elizabeth Metrano. According to my map, the city’s main library was in the Civic Center. It took me a couple of passes to get myself oriented on the right one-way street, but I managed to find the entrance of the public lot. And a parking space.
When I walked up out of the lot and into the sunshine, I was in a brick courtyard between City Hall and the library. There were a few homeless types sunning themselves on benches, but for the most part the people I saw were city workers going about their business, and schoolchildren with picture books under their arms. No one panhandled me.
Once inside the library, I asked for directions to the periodicals section. I found the shelves of newspaper indexes and looked up Amy Elizabeth Metrano in both the Los Angeles Times and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
Through October 1983, when Amy disappeared, and continuing well into November, there was at least one, and frequently several, Amy Metrano stories daily in the first section of both papers. Around Thanksgiving the frequency of the stories began to taper off and move toward the back pages. I found irregular listings, a month or so apart, over the next year. Progress updates.
I made a list of the newspaper editions I wanted to check. By the time I had pulled all of the pertinent spools of newspaper on microfilm from the files, I needed a basket to carry them.
Reading newspapers on microfilm is a bitch. The image on the projection screen quivers constantly and wears out the eyes in a hurry. I learned a long time ago that it’s best to make hard copies of the text I want and then read it all later. I staked out a working projector, went out to the circulation desk for a couple of rolls of quarters, then set to the dismal task in the dim light of the reading room.
After two hours, I had a thick sheaf of slick photocopies on the table beside the spools of microfilm. In the process, I had also gleaned a fair outline of the major events surrounding the disappearance of little Amy Elizabeth Metrano and the comprehensive, heartbreaking search that went on for months afterward. And I had a massive headache.
I boxed the spools of film, put them in the basket for refiling, gathered up my notes and copies, and went back out into the light.
It seemed to me that the press had been hung up on the details of the search and the questioning of a legion of possible witnesses. Most of the ink was spent on speculation, covering a huge range: all the way from the kid got lost in the woods to she was snatched by aliens. I saw sparks of creativity, but very little hard information.
The reportage was space-filling puffery and human-interest sidebar because, in the end, the only facts were these: Amy Elizabeth Metrano, age four and a half, on a family outing to Lake Arrowhead, vanished during a game of hide and seek with her four older sisters. Period.
I went downstairs to the city directories and looked up George Metrano. In 1983, the year Amy disappeared, the Metranos lived on Sixty-eighth Way in Long Beach, George and Leslie and five minor children. Mr. Metrano’s occupation was listed as pipefitter, hers as waitress. The house was rented.
Over the following nine years, the Metranos moved three times. Their last listed address was on Cartagena Street. He was listed as self-employed, she as homemaker. They owned the house.
I found a table in a quiet corner of the stacks and sorted through my copies, looking for Metrano biography. Anything suggestive.
According to the Press-Telegram, at the time of Amy’s disappearance her father was an unemployed shipworker, laid off when the Long Beach shipyards cut back. Money was tight. The patrons of Hof s Hut, “a popular local eatery” where Leslie Metrano worked, had contributed to the search fund. The management had given her time off at full pay to tend to her family. The pipefitters’ union was helping with old bills. The community, it seemed, had embraced the grieving Metranos in a number of decent and generous ways. People can be good. It was nice to be reminded.
While I had the directories out, I had looked up Randall Ramsdale, too. There was no city listing until late 1984 when Randall, Hanna, and minor daughter were in residence at the address in Naples. The occupation listed for him was investments. I interpreted that to mean coupon clipping.
Usually when people talk about a man, his job is maybe the second or third thing mentioned about him, after his marital status. No one yet had even suggested that Randy was inconvenienced by the need to work. If the way he lived was a fair indication, Randy had money. Lots of it. Ergo and to whit, a sluggard scion of the idle rich, as my father would have defined him.
I walked across the library to the government documents section and looked up birth certificates for both Amy and Hillary. Amy’s I found. Hillary’s I didn’t. But only births in California are recorded. No one had said where the Ramsdales lived before they moved to Long Beach. Could have been anywhere.
As I walked back out toward the parking lot I felt I had made some progress. I at least had some interesting avenues to pursue.
Back in the car, I took the list I had made of Metrano family addresses and looked them up on the map. Sixty-eighth Way, where Amy had last lived with her family, was in North Long Beach. Using that address as a starting point, I charted the Metrano family’s moves, a jagged line heading south, toward the water.
In California cities generally, the closer to the ocean, the higher the rent. I was increasingly bothered by something George Metrano had said that day at the morgue. If he was renting and out of work when Amy disappeared, how had he acquired the house he’d said he’d mortgaged to hire a private detective? The implication of that story was that they had spent every nickel, and then some, looking for their little girl.