“Why?”
“If she hadn’t broken up with him, he never woulda left Stockton and gotten carried away by big-city sin. I asked her about their years together, the picture I got is a couple of poor kids barely scratching by. Rented trailer, Braun pumped gas part-time, both of them picked crops seasonally.”
“From that to knight in armor,” I said.
“Speaking of which, Braun had hero fantasies way back. Talked to Barbara about joining the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service. Only place he actually applied was the Coast Guard but they turned him down. Something about allergies.”
“Any attempts to be a cop?”
“Nothing she was aware of, though in high school he’d been a police cadet. She does recall him participating in a search party for a missing kid. Nothing obviously creepy about his motives, the whole town turned out and the kid was found safe.”
“Maybe he wasn’t drawn to the city by sin,” I said. “More like expanding his altruistic horizons.”
“Being a big-time hero but he ends up selling shoes and then messing up his leg? Sure, but it doesn’t explain how he ended up on the Corvins’ hardwood. I asked Barbara if Hal had spent any time in San Francisco, trying to connect him to Bitt. It’s not far from Stockton but she said she never knew him to go there.”
“Speaking of Bitt.” I told him Maillot Bernard’s story.
“A long gun. But he didn’t threaten her with it?”
“Just held it and stared at her. She can’t tell the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, but wouldn’t it be interesting if what Bitt showed her was a 12-gauge that he still owns?”
“Easy enough to find out if I could get a warrant to cross his damn threshold.”
I said, “If Chelsea could be documented actually going into Bitt’s house, could you make a case for a welfare check?”
“On what grounds?”
“Mentally impaired minor sneaks into the home of a person of interest in a homicide.”
“Elegantly devious, Alex. But if she just goes in and comes out, iffy... maybe a coupla nights’ surveillance will help. I get lucky, see the two of them actually make inappropriate physical contact, I can go in there with no paper.”
Night one, he parked a block from Evada and watched through binoculars from the far end of the block. Chelsea Corvin never left her house. Bitt’s lights were out.
Night two, just after ten p.m., Bitt’s front door opened and the artist, carrying something, got in his pickup and drove away. Too dark to make out details. By the time Milo made it back to his car, the truck was out of sight.
He enlisted Binchy and Reed for two more nights. Nothing on Binchy’s Sunday watch. Two weeks had passed since the murder. The Corvins didn’t go out for dinner.
On Monday night, when Reed arrived, Bitt’s truck was already gone. No spotting of Chelsea.
Tuesday morning, both of the young D’s were pulled from Milo’s supervision, Reed handling a bar fight in Palms, Binchy catching an armed robbery in Pico-Robertson.
Milo said, “So much for that. Nguyen says it woulda been doubtful without an obvious felony.”
I worked long days on two custody evals but found time to recheck social network sites for anything on Hargis Braun and the three women who’d lived with him.
Barbara Braun’s Facebook page was a skimpy thing. A few relatives, no human friends. The only posted photographs were her and a massive black Newfoundland.
Wally was certified as a therapy dog and demonstrated his interpersonal skills by never leaving the side of a small, pinched-faced woman.
Barb Braun was dependent on a pair of forearm crutches. Add that to EmJay’s arthritis and you didn’t need to be Freud.
Mary Ellen Braun had seemed healthy. I Googled her anyway. Her LinkedIn listing reached out to retailers, said nothing about health problems. But her name showed up in a support group for women with chronic fatigue syndrome.
A man attracted to disability.
The impulse was to tag that as pathological. My training leads me to avoid dime-store diagnosis.
Joining search parties. Planting unsanctioned trees. Butting in during a domestic.
Saving a snake.
For all I knew, Hal Braun’s taste in women spoke to a rare nobility. A man with ideals and goals, however absurdly romanticized.
A poster boy for No Good Deed.
Voicemail on all of Milo’s lines. I left messages but he didn’t call back. Maybe sixteen days of nothing on Braun had put him in a funk. Or his attention had shifted to a more manageable crime.
That night, Robin and I had a late dinner at the Grill on the Alley and were walking to the Seville when my cell chirped.
Ten ten p.m.
He said, “Sitting down, amigo?”
“Upright.”
“Then maybe you should brace yourself. You’re not gonna believe this.”
Chapter 18
At eight forty-nine p.m., Hollywood Division patrol officers finishing their dinner at Tio Taco had responded to an anonymous report of a “415” — unspecified disturbance — and driven to the Sahara Motor Inn on Franklin Avenue just east of Western.
Parking in the mostly empty lot, they knocked on the door of room fourteen. After receiving no reply, Officer Eugene Stargill pretended to peer through a slit in the plastic vertical blinds and see nothing out of order.
“Bogus,” he pronounced. “Let’s book.”
His partner, a gung-ho kid fresh out of the academy named Bradley Buttons, insisted on having the manager check.
As Stargill figured out ways of getting back at the pain-in-the-ass rookie, the manager, Kiran “Keith” Singh, unlocked the door.
At eight fifty-four p.m., Stargill phoned in a dead body, making it sound as if he’d been conscientious.
Hollywood detectives Petra Connor and Raul Biro arrived on the scene at nine eighteen. By nine forty, a coroner’s investigator had gone through the DB’s pockets and produced I.D.
During the brief drive from Wilcox Avenue, the victim’s name had sparked Petra’s memory but she couldn’t get a handle on it. One of those tip-of-the-mind things.
Just as Biro turned off the ignition and she saw the motel, she figured it out. Scanning the homicide list and checking out the details of weird ones was a daily habit for her, though it rarely paid off.
This time it did.
She called Milo. He called me.
I arrived at ten forty-eight, spotted both of them just inside the yellow tape, bootied and gloved. The air smelled of cheap gasoline and fried food. The motel layout was basic: fifteen green doors arrayed to the right, a pitted but generous parking lot. The building was sad gray stucco with a matching warped roof. If the east end of Hollywood ever really got renewed, the value was the lot. The obvious replacement, yet another strip mall.
Milo was facing away and didn’t notice me. His clothes were rumpled, his hair ragged. Petra stood next to him, slim, elegant, black wedge cut swept back from a finely molded ivory face. She looked like a socialite hanging with the uncle who’d blown his inheritance.
She waved. He turned and said, “As promised, insane.”
By ten fifty, I was looking at the prone form of Chet Corvin, facedown on a pink, blood-soaked polyester carpet.
For a hot-sheet Hollywood motel, not a bad room. Management here utilized something minty-fresh to disinfect. The fragrance failed to compete with the copper of fresh blood and the sulfurous emissions from relaxed bowels.
Walls covered in flesh-colored vinyl were freckled with red halfway up and to the right of the corpse. A royal-blue velveteen spread that looked cheap but new lay smoothly, neatly atop the queen-sized bed. A pay-by-the-minute vibrating gizmo, complete with credit card reader, gave off a chromium glare.