“Well, I’d talk to them sooner rather than later. It looks like Tiffany paid her credit card bill the same day she went shopping. The date and amount’s been recorded on the statement, right here.”
Smartass Truesdale’s discovery led them to the Simi Valley Town Center and a videotape of Tiffany Rutherford paying her bill in Macy’s customer-service department. Just as Tiffany was leaving, a white male wearing a Kirin baseball cap was recorded bumping into her. After they exchanged a few words, he approached the counter as if to ask the clerk a question, then headed in the same direction as the victim.
“Pause it right there,” Truesdale had ordered the guard in Security, where they were watching the tapes. She started fumbling through her notebook, muttering, “So that’s what she was saying!”
“What is it?” Steve had asked.
“Mrs. Apkarian, the salesperson in the lingerie section of Bloomie’s, Beverly Center, thought our seventh vic, Yustina Flores, was being followed by a white male in a baseball cap. With her accent, I thought she was saying ‘Korn,’ like the band, was the logo on the cap, not ‘Kirin.’” She handed a police artist’s drawing to Steve. “Mrs. Apkarian said he eased up on Flores like he did to your vic on the video, squeezing her forearm as he made his apology, as if sizing her up. I blew her off as being overly dramatic, but damn if I’m not watching this guy do the same thing she described!”
“She remember if he bought anything?”
“A pink flannel nightshirt with dogs on it.”
Steve suddenly felt cold in the pit of his stomach. “There were pink fibers found on my vic’s ankles and wrists. Was Yustina a stripper?”
“No, she was an exchange student from Argentina.”
“So if it’s the same guy you suspect did the strippers, then he was stepping outside his pattern with Yustina…”
“But went right back to it with your vic a few days later,” Truesdale added. “Sounds like he’s escalating.”
Which made him that much more dangerous. “What else do you have?” Steve asked.
“Apkarian almost got him to sign up for a credit card, but he decided midway through filling out the application to pay cash. Left without his change.”
“Probably in hot pursuit of your vic. Wonder what set him off.” Steve stared at the video as if it could tell him. “Did the saleslady, by any chance, keep the application?”
It was Truesdale’s turn to be embarrassed. “I didn’t think to ask.”
Thank God he did. A quick call to Bloomingdale’s revealed that Mrs. Apkarian, assuming the man was part of the store’s mystery-shopping team, had folded his change up with the application in case he returned to claim it. She dug it out from under the bill drawer to show Truesdale and Steve when they arrived an hour later.
Holding the application gingerly by the edges, Steve had known instinctively that it was bogus – the name “D. Vinedropletz” sounded completely made up, and the address the guy had given on PCH was so far up the coast, it should have been in Oregon. But there was always the hope that his prints would show up in one of the computerized systems, if he had a prior.
Because the prints were related to a murder in the LAPD’s jurisdiction, Truesdale had SID, the department’s Scientific Investigation Division, run them through the AFIS database. She got back a Christophe Nolent, convicted of a misdemeanor assault on a girlfriend back in the early nineties. A search of court records revealed that the charge had originally been felonious assault, but his attorneys had somehow been able to get the charges reduced and their client probation, a fine, and anger-management courses.
Christophe Nolent’s name also generated a DMV photo with an address in Bel-Air. But the license, like the conviction, was more than ten years old, although a check of the property’s address revealed the title was held in the name of the Solange Nolent Family Trust.
The name didn’t ring a bell with Truesdale when she called Steve on Friday afternoon to share her findings, but Steve knew it well. “My ex used to buy that Solange shit all the time,” he said, tapping the mother’s and son’s names into the “search” feature on his computer’s browser. “Little dresses like the one you were looking at in Tiffany’s place, expensive perfumes, and purses that cost a small fortune. I never understood the appeal, but when a woman’s got to have it, what can you do?”
Truesdale was silent on the phone for a moment, although Steve could hear the sound of pages being flipped. “You know that dress was one of the things she bought the day she died.”
Steve got back more than a million hits on the names search. Scanning the list, he randomly clicked on the fifth link and started reading about Solange Nolent’s car collection. “My gut tells me we should pay Christophe Nolent a visit.”
IF HE HAD followed his gut, he never would have let them in. They’d stood outside the gates in their nondescript car, peering into the surveillance camera and talking as nice as pie, so sorry to disturb your Saturday. The curly-haired man seemed clearly aware of whose Saturday he was disturbing, as he meekly identified himself as Steve Firestone of the Simi Valley Police Department and his cohort as Billie Truesdale of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division. They had traced him through a credit-card application and they had taken the liberty of calling on him on a Saturday because they needed his assistance on a case they were working.
“And to give you your change,” the woman named Truesdale had chimed in.
Ignoring his gut, he’d invited them in anyway, had the housekeeper set them up with green tea in the kitchen, and listened politely as the two of them rattled on about how they found him because of the saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s and the change he forgot to take, and how they, these two poorly dressed cops, had been working with a task force to capture a ring of boosters who’d been ripping off stores all over the Southland for tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise.
He knew he hadn’t used his real name on that application, but he went along with their little game, just to see where they were headed. “‘Boosters’ sounds like a group of cheerleaders.” He’d tried to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. “So you think I’m one of these booster people?”
Detective Truesdale gave him a mirthless smile as the other cop, Firestone, explained that they were talking to customers in all the departments the thieves hit, and something he may have seen in the store last Tuesday, no matter how small, could help them hook up these criminals. “You were in the lingerie department, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“You visit any other departments?”
“Just fragrances and women’s accessories.” When Detective Firestone raised an eyebrow, Christophe added, “I was on a mission.”
Detective Truesdale shifted in her chair. “Mission?”
“Yes. I was looking for a gift.”
“Do you remember anything unusual as you were shopping for this gift?” Firestone prodded. “Anything unusual the women were doing?”
“Just shopping, like women do.” But Christophe remembered everything about one particular woman, down to the repellent perfume he saw her trying on in the fragrance department. Dense, cloying, artificial, his keen sense of smell identified it immediately as Chanel No. 5. His mother had told him the story about the millions of women who bought it after Marilyn Monroe claimed two drops of it were all she wore to bed. The losses his mother’s company suffered in both perfume and lingerie sales had almost put her out of business all those years ago, a fact she never stopped yammering about, even on her deathbed.
“How about the woman you spoke with in Lingerie?” Detective Truesdale had prompted. “Yustina Flores? Was she doing anything unusual?”