A Death In Beverly Hills (3 page)

Chapter Five

Steve opened his eyes and forced himself to leaf through the folders in the first box of police reports. It held months of interviews generated while the police went through the motions of looking for a missing person whom everyone believed was dead. The files contained statements from witnesses swearing that they had seen Marian Travis in San Diego, Reno, Vancouver, Saint Louis and points east. She had supposedly bought gas in Tacoma, a burger in Baton Rouge and rented a sail boat on Maryland's Eastern Shore. One psychic had reported her dead and buried near a large body of water. In another's vision her lifeless body was covered with rocks ten feet west of a tall pine tree.

Janson skipped them all, flipping almost four months forward to the next bit of forensic solid ground, the fifth search of the Double Peaks Recreational Preserve. Steve let his mind slip past the report's stilted police jargon, translating Simon Katz's cold words into a flickering movie in his brain.

* * *

The road was packed dirt and meandered through a valley formed by two crumbling shale cliffs. Katz and Furley followed a San Bernardino County Sheriff's Cherokee, choking in its trailing plume of alkali dust. Katz's window vibrated to the rhythm of an unmufflered engine a quarter mile to the east.

"People do this for fun?" Katz muttered as their Crown Vic bottomed out in a dry wash.

"Not in a car like this. We need one of those bad boys." Furley pointed at a bathtub-sized ATV bounding over a stretch of low dunes.

The Cherokee pulled into blade scraped parking lot. Katz had finally given in to necessity and today was wearing Sears sneakers and jeans instead of his customary baggy brown suit.

The deputy, Harley Kress, stepped out and poured himself a cup of coffee from a chrome Thermos. "You want some?" he asked. Katz tried to identify Kress's accent, some kind of a flattened twang. Blond and rangy, all elbows and knees, the deputy slurped half his coffee in a gulp. "You think we'll find her today?" he asked Furley, then glanced at the sky. Somewhere above a National Guard plane with ground-penetrating radar and thermal imaging was flying an imaginary grid.

"We've covered sixty percent of the park. If she's here. . . ." Furley shrugged and shaded his eyes, searching the sky for the buzzing black dot.
Of course,
Katz reminded himself,
if Travis wasn't the killer, they were wasting their time. But what were the odds of that?

"Not like the old days, I guess," the deputy said, nodding at Katz.

"I've never searched the desert for a body before."

"I mean the gizmos they've got now, GPS, the stuff in that plane up there." The deputy waved vaguely at the pale sky. "That guy knows exactly where he is, where he's been and where he's goin', down to a couple of feet. Try and search fifty wild acres without somethin' like that, and well Hell, good luck to ya."

Katz nodded, muttered something innocuous, and scratched a line in the dust with the toe of his new shoe. Gizmos. The bastard, son-of-a-bitch Tom Travis had murdered his wife and their unborn baby and left them out here in this God-forsaken wilderness and all this kid wanted to talk about were the latest toys from Circuit City.

A squawk sounded from Kress's radio. "Baker Four, this is Eagle One. Over."

Harley pressed a plastic box the size of a jumbo Hershey bar to his lips. "This is Baker Four. GA Eagle One. Over."

"Thermal's showing a point of interest nine hundred meters northwest of your position."

"On the move, Eagle One. Hang on." The deputy jumped into the Jeep and waved at Katz and Furley. "You guys will have to ride with me the rest of the way."

The Cherokee bounded over rocks and scrub occasionally taking a detour around boulders and the banks of dead streams too steep to traverse. "Baker Four, turn twenty degrees to your left," the pilot ordered, then refined his directions yard by yard until they reached the site.

"You see anything?" the pilot asked once they were on foot.

To Furley the patch of desert looked no different from any other piece of dirt a mile in any direction. Ahead of them a twenty foot high ledge of mud-colored rock showed through the side of an eroded slope. More rocks, red, brown, burnt orange and dark gray littered the earth at the base of the hill, turning to sand and tussocks of wild grass all the way to the broken streambed behind them. A huge, lonely boulder, twenty feet high, stood to their left almost at the edge of the bend in the dry creek. In its shadow lay an eight foot oval-shaped litter of rocks in colors from ashes to chocolate.

"Just some rocks. Why don't you go get back on your grid while we take a look. Over."

"Roger, Baker One," the pilot said, slipping back into protocol. "Out."

"Okay, boys, let's move these guys." The deputy smiled and grabbed a pitted gray stone the size of a loaf of bread.

"Put on your gloves!" Katz ordered.

"I can take it." Kress smiled and held up a calloused palm.

"I'm sure you can, deputy, but this is a potential crime scene. First we take photographs with yardsticks in them for reference. Then we sketch and measure. Then, wearing gloves, we move the rocks to a specific location for forensic analysis if needed."

For moment the deputy froze then carefully replaced his stone. Fifteen minutes later they had exposed a ten foot by ten foot patch of gray sand. Furley took three more pictures then handed Kress a shovel.

"Scrape, don't dig!" Katz shouted before Harley could turn his first spade full of earth. The deputy frowned but did what he was told. This was the fifth time they had come out here and the third time they had used the National Guard plane. On each expedition they were assigned a different deputy. By the time they were done, Katz figured he and Furley would have trained half the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department in proper forensic procedures.

"Huh!" Harley muttered and knelt close to the ground. Barely eight inches down the shovel's blade had snagged something then slipped free. Kress reached down, then pulled. A piece of grimy plastic ballooned, shedding puffs of gray dust.

"Jack, get a picture!"

"Is this her?" Harley asked, not believing his eyes.

"Back up!" Katz pulled brushes and small garden tools from a bag. Together he and Furley removed enough dirt to confirm they had an adult female body then called it in over the deputy's radio.

Harley carefully approached the excavated grave and peered down at the corpse, then backed away.

"I guess you've seen a lot of them," he said to Furley, "DB's." Jack didn't reply. Harley turned toward Katz and shook his head. "Gee, Marian Travis. I can't believe we found her."

"That's not Marian Travis," Katz said almost under his breath.

"Huh? You mean that's some other poor--"

"That's just what's left of the container Marian Travis came in," Simon said wearily. "Marian Travis, the human being, was lost forever the instant she died. That over there is just a bag of bones."

An hour later a helicopter dropped the Sheriff's forensic team and all their gear. It took them eight hours to fully expose, photograph, and remove the body. Every handful of sand was sifted, every rock photographed.

Katz and Furley were still there when Marian Travis's corpse was lifted from her shallow grave, a lamp cord still knotted around her neck. A slight swell distended her belly containing the body of her unborn child, a little girl the coroner later reported.

Secretly, Simon Katz named her Rachel and for her, secretly, he wept.

Chapter Six

As Steve closed the file a heavy brown envelope slipped free. Inside were a dozen plastic pages each holding six color prints -- the rock strewn burial site, the scratched earth with one silk-clad arm exposed, a chronicle of the body's excavation and, finally, the sad, withered corpse that had once contained two human lives.

Against his will, Steve stared at the remains, the matted hair, skin sloughing off the bone, and then doubled over in spasm.
Lynn! Lynn!
A voice screamed in his head. Finally Janson fell back against the cushions, his face clammy and damp. With his left hand he managed to slide another file on top of the photos.

Behind his closed his eyes a movie began to play: he opened his old apartment door. It was dark and the light switch clicked loudly. A sealed card was propped in the center of the kitchen table,
Steve
was written across the front in Lynn's handwriting.

"Now you're writing me notes instead of talking to me face to face?" he had shouted toward the light spilling from the bedroom doorway at the end of the hall.

He stormed into the bedroom and saw Lynn's body sprawled across the blood-soaked bed . . . . Steve pressed his palms to his skull and forced his eyes open, battling the relentless memory, willing away the horrible pictures. Drained, he half staggered to the phone.

"This is Steve Janson. I've got to talk to Greg."

The line clicked and in a few seconds Markham picked up.

"Greg, it's Steve Janson. I can't do this. I just can't."

"Steve, slow down. What happened?"

"What happened? What do you think happened? I can't deal with this."

"Greg, you--"

"I can't go through this again, not for Tom Travis."

"He's not that bad. Don't believe everything you read in the papers."

"That's not it."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't want to get into that."

"Are you telling me you have personal issue with Travis? Did something happen between you two?"

"Just drop it, okay? I don't want to talk about him. I just can't handle this poor woman's murder."

"But what about the girl?"

"I can't bring back the dead. God, if only I could."

"I don't mean Marian Travis."

"I'm sorry about the baby too, but what's done is done."

"I'm talking about her daughter, Sarah. She's still out there somewhere. What about her?"

"Sarah, she--"

"She disappeared with Marian but they never found her body. If the murderer had killed her, why wasn't her body in the grave? The cops searched the whole damn park. Sarah isn't there."

"So he buried her someplace else. Who knows why people do what they do?"

"She wasn't in the grave because she's not dead. She was too young to identify the killer so he didn't have to murder her. He just got rid of her, did something with her, kept her, sold her, dumped her, but she's out there alive, alone, and in trouble. We're her last hope. Steve, you're her last hope."

"Let the cops find her."

"Officially the cops think Travis killed them both and they've stopped looking for her. They
can't
search for her because if they did that would make it look like maybe they believed Travis didn't do it."

"Travis probably did do it. He's the one who knows where she is. Get him to tell you."

"Jesus, Steve, if Travis is the killer he'll never, ever admit it and, alive or dead, we'll never find that little girl. If Travis didn't do it, there's a chance, a good chance, that she's alive out there someplace, alone and in trouble. Steve, she's depending on you."

"Find someone else."

"There isn't anyone else! The trial's going to be over in a couple of weeks and unless you find some new evidence Travis is going to be convicted and everything will stop, case closed. I won't have authority to look for the girl. Once the verdict is in, I'm done. No money, no subpoena power, nothing."

"Greg, I can't--"

"Stop thinking about yourself for once! You didn't do what you did for Lynn. You did it for you! It was all about you! Well, fuck you!
Fuck you!
Do something for somebody else for a change! This time, God damn it, save the innocent instead of punishing the guilty! I'm begging you, Steve, do the right thing. Forget about yourself just for once and save that little girl before it's too late, before she ends up like Lynn. . . . Steve. . . Steve?"

For a long moment the line crackled faintly, the only sound a hollow, whooshing noise.

"I'll never forgive you for this."

"Steve--"

"I'll try," Steve whispered and the line went dead.

Chapter Seven

Steve contemplated the vodka bottle for thirty seconds then snapped the seal. He drizzled the juice from a wrinkled lemon into half a glass of Von's orange juice and followed it with a handful of ice cubes and then vodka all the way to the top. The concoction went down like broken razor blades but it numbed him enough to get him back to the file box on the couch. Randomly, he leafed through the folders without conscious plan or direction. The air filled with the musty smell of paper and old toner and the stink of his recently cleaned vomit.

Steve took another sip then laid his head back and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he had no idea which file he was holding and he squinted at the header on the first page: "Interview by Katz, S. (Det.) and Furley, J. (Det.) with Thomas Travis" followed by a date in late January, a bit over three weeks after Marian Travis had disappeared. Steve was surprised to see that Tom Travis had come in without a lawyer.
More ego than brains
, Steve muttered and flipped to the transcript's first page.

* * *

"Thanks for coming down, Mr. Travis," Katz began. "We appreciate your help."

"No, I appreciate
your
help. And call me Tom."

Katz forced a weak smile and plowed on.

"We here hoping, Tom, that you might have remembered something new about the day Marian disappeared."

"Gee, guys, I've told you everything I know. You've seen the poster, right?"

Thousands of eleven by fourteen inch placards with the heading:

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?

followed by a picture of Marian Travis in her wedding dress holding a glass of Dom had been scattered all over Southern California. The phone number in red at the bottom was 1-800-MISSING. Travis was reported to have paid someone $25,000 for the number. Katz suspected that he had gotten it in exchange for an autographed head shot and a lunch at Ivy.

"Yeah, Tom, we sure have," Furley assured him.

"We've already gotten over five thousand tips. Most of them are whackos," Travis smirked and fluttered his hands like flapping cuckoo birds, "but we've gotten some good leads too. Turned them over to you guys, of course."

Katz shot Furley an embarrassed glance and turned back to Travis. "Yeah, we're checking them out. But, back to the day she disappeared, were you able to remember anything else she said about where she was going?"

"All a blank, sorry," Travis said, shrugging.

"Your maid, Delfina Angelinez, said Mrs. Travis was planning on spending the day at home with her daughter. Does that ring any bells?"

"Delfina would know better than me." Travis sneaked a peek at his watch, a Patek Philippe, no thicker than a business card, all done in silver and gold and secured to his tanned wrist with a silver strap. "I figure that since you found her car at the Beverly Center, someone probably grabbed them from there."

"That's a possibility--"

"You know, I did a film once,
Against The Grain
, you remember it?" he asked Furley. "I played this private detective hired to find a missing rich girl. Daddy was worried about her but my character thought she had set up her own kidnapping to get daddy's money. But Razor, that was my character, Razor Sands, he was wrong. Her step mother had really grabbed the girl so that the Old Man would leave all his money to her. So--" Travis held up his hand, "so, anyway," he continued speaking faster, "the way they kidnapped her in the movie, they let the air out of one of her tires at the mall and when she bent over to look at it, two guys jumped out of the van parked next to her and grabbed her up."

Travis paused for a quick breath and studied Katz and Furley for some sign that they were following him. "So, I was thinking, you found Marian's Escalade at the mall, what if . . . ." Travis paused theatrically, "the bad guys had studied me, you know checked out my films, and copied that scene. Marian's about to get into the car and bang, the van door flies open, two guys grab her, throw her in, the door slides closed. Ten seconds later, they're gone. Nobody's seen anything." Travis looked expectantly at Furley.

"What about the little girl?"

"Sarah?"

"Yeah, what about little Sarah?"

"Okay, well, after they get Marian in the van, one of them ties her up, tape or something, while the other one grabs Sarah." Travis spread his hands palms up. "Five more seconds is all it would take."

"We'll take another look at the security tapes for any vans near your wife's car," Katz said in as sincere a tone as he could manage. Travis gave him a quick smile.

"So, guys . . . ." Travis glanced at his $15,000 watch.

"Just a couple of other things. We don't want to have to ask you to come back again."

"Hey, I'm the star. They aren't making the movie without me."

"We've been going over the list of people who were in your house in the weeks before your wife disappeared. There are still some prints we can't match up. Can you think of anyone else?"

"I gave you the pool guy, right?" Page in hand, Furley checked the list and nodded. "Let's see, Delfina . . . the gardener, he might have come inside to use the can. He's supposed to use the one in the pool house but, well, what are you gonna do? He's probably Delfina's second cousin or something." Travis pursed his lips in thought as if multiplying two five digit numbers in his head. "My personal trainer, the catering crew for the Christmas party, all the guests from the party, Marian's family, father, brother-- that kid's a piece of work. I told you to check him out, right?"

Katz nodded.

"Well, okay. You know how it is. The caterer brings his crew, waiters, bartender, busboys, who knows?"

"We've printed all of them."

"Sure, you printed the ones they told you about. Half those people are probably hiding from
Imigracion
. Last thing they're gonna do is line up to be fingerprinted by the
policia
. That's probably who your missing prints belong to. Besides . . . " Travis shrugged.

"Besides what?"

"Well, what are the odds that someone who could have done something like this would leave his prints in my house and not already have a record? I mean, anybody who was in my house who isn't already in your computers is probably a producer or a studio guy, not a kidnapper." Seeing Katz's blank stare, Travis frowned. "I'd like to help you but I'm just saying that I think this fingerprint thing is a dead end. If you ask me, it's some whack job like the guy who killed Lennon."

"You think your wife is dead?"

"No, Hell no! I didn't mean that, just that when you're a celebrity, shit like this becomes part of your life, they paint a target on you," Travis tapped his chest and scowled.

I
don't believe this guy
, Katz thought.
His pregnant wife is missing and probably dead and he's complaining that there's a target on his chest
!

Simon suppressed his anger and gave Travis another forced smile and as politely as possible said: "You know, Tom, in cases like this, we have to consider all the possibilities."

"Sure."

"It's like a pilot, before he takes off, he goes through the checklist."

"It's not that he thinks the gas tank is empty," Furley cut in, "but he still calls off 'Fuel?' and the co-pilot checks the gauge. That way, if something goes wrong later and someone asks, 'Did you run out of gas,' the pilot can say, 'No, we checked that specifically before we took off.' It's like that with us. Just because we ask a question doesn't mean we think something is wrong. We just gotta go through the checklist."

"Sure, I understand. You've got to be thorough."

"Right," Furley said, smiling weakly. "We've got to check off all the boxes."

"Okay, lay it on me."

"You know, Tom," Katz began in a fatherly tone, "we've heard some things, that in the past maybe you've gotten physical with people now and then. True?"

"I don't let anybody push me around."

"Of course not. You're not some pansy musical star," Furley added. "We get that. But, we've got to deal with this part of the checklist."

Katz opened a folder and flipped a couple of sheets over the top. "You were in a fight in August of '98 with a . . . Gary Dolenz?"

Travis waved his hand as if shooing a fly. "One of those guys in a bar who thinks he'll look tough if he sucker punches Tom Travis. I don't sucker punch that easy."

"December '99 at the Ionic Grill?"

"You guys ever jump off the back of a pickup truck doing thirty miles an hour? The director couldn't get the shot he wanted and I told him, 'To Hell with the stunt guy. I'll do it myself.' -- I did it all right. Fucked up my back for weeks. Anyway, long story short, never mix Vicodin with two bottles of Fogarty Reserve Cab. Did I trash the place? Yes, I did, and I also paid all the damages the next day. Do I remember what happened?" Travis gave Katz a level stare. "Not a fucking thing. Nada. One minute I'm ordering the appetizer, the next I'm waking up in one of your cells." Travis shook his head. "Taught me a lesson -- never mix pain pills and alcohol."

Katz looked back at his list. "February of 2000?"

Travis frowned. "Yeah, I messed up bad on that one. That one's on me. Valentine's day. Clare Cantrell had just moved in with me a couple of weeks before. She was my co-star in
Danger Nights
. You do a movie like that with a woman like her, built like a you-know-what, and stuff's gonna happen unless you're playing for the other team, which I never was. Anyway, we think it's love or lust or some damn thing and the next thing you know she moves in. Brings her fucking rat dog, and her maid and her dietician and her personal trainer and her life coach and twenty other losers and starts taking over. 'Don't eat red meat', 'Don't drink so much', 'Try my herbal tea,' 'Why are you so mean to Mr. Whiskers?' God damn disaster from day one but the sex was good, so what are you going to do?

"Let met tell you, by the middle of February I was at the end of my rope. A nice ass can only take you so far. Anyway, I come home, beat, and she starts in, I don't appreciate her, I take her for granted, I didn't bring her anything for Valentine's Day. . . . you get the picture. And she won't shut up. She just keeps going and going and going like the frigging Energizer Bunny!" Travis frowned and threw up his hands. "I snapped, okay? I just snapped."

"You split her lip and knocked out one of her teeth," Katz said, reading from his file.

"I just gave her one shot, one little shot, just to shut her up." Travis waved his hands as if to dispel the unpleasant memory. "She tripped. Yeah, I hit her. I admit that, but not hard. She got excited, I don't blame her for that, and she tried to back up and caught her foot on the rug or something and fell against the coffee table. That's how her lip got split and her tooth knocked out. Hell, you know that, Jack" Travis said, turning to Furley.

Katz glanced sourly at his partner.

"I've told Simon about being the investigating officer that night," Furley said, embarrassed.

"Then you know what happened," Travis said to Katz. "Jack did a great job. You've got one hell of a good cop for a partner here. Professional all the way. He got Clare to the hospital, stayed with her, got her calmed down. An hour later she realized that we were both out of line and neither of us needed the bad publicity. She refused to testify and I went to anger management. Best thing I ever did. Changed me, really, I have to admit that. Hey, we're good friends now. I see her all the time on the Drive. Can't even tell which tooth was the one that got knocked out. Glued it back in. Fucking doctors are miracle workers these days." Travis gave Katz a quizzical glance and looked at his watch. "We just started shooting my new project last week, a horror flick but in sort of a
Film Noir
style,
The Boneyard
. I'll get you guys passes to the premiere. So, are we all done?"

Katz glanced at Furley then closed the file. "Yeah, Tom, we're done. If you think of anything else, you give us a call."

"You bet. Oh-oh," another quick glance at his Patek Philippe, "gotta jet."

"Tripped on something sticky and fell on something hard?" Katz muttered after Travis had left the room.

"He hit her with a solid right cross. His ring knocked out the tooth. She figured pressing charges would just cause her grief in the industry and anyway, at most all he'd get would be a slap on the wrist."

"Well, at least he took an anger management class."

"Yeah. I wonder how that worked out for him?" Furley mused, hitting the 'Off' switch on the video camera.