Most of the time, the marks didn't even know they'd been fleeced. And the withdrawals weren't huge-five, six hundred bucks-so the banks didn't notice. It ended when some old lady's son got wind of it-local surgeon. He waited with his mom on the beach until she pointed out Derrick."
"They serve time?"
"Nah," said Castro angrily. "Never even got charged. Because Daddy hired a lawyer-the same smart-mouth who shielded them on the boat thing. The weakness was the identification angle. The lawyer said he'd have fun with the old people on the stand-show they were too demented to be reliable witnesses. The D.A. didn't want to risk it. A couple of bank tellers thought they could make an I.D. but they weren't sure. Because Derrick and Cliff wore disguises-wigs, fake mustaches, glasses. Stupid stuff, amateurish, they coulda dressed up like Fidel for all the marks noticed. We couldn't trace the phony deeds back to them, either-primitive shit, mimeographed jobs. The whole thing was so low-level it woulda been funny if it hadn't been so cruel. In the end, the old man made restitution, case closed."
"How much restitution?"
"I think it was six, seven thou. Not a major con, but remember, we're talking a one-month period and two kids in their early twenties. That's what I found scary: so young and so cold. My experience was you got plenty violent kids at any age, but it usually takes a few years to season a frosty con like that. It wasn't like they were so bright-neither of them went to college, both just bummed around on the beach.
Cliff was actually kind of a cabbage-head. But they had that con edge.
They were lucky, too. One good I.D. and they mighta gone down-at least probation."
He laughed again. "Lucky bastards. The excuse they gave was the stupidest thing of all: big misunderstanding, die old folk were too mentally disturbed to know the difference between reality and fantasy, the land thing was never supposed to be taken seriously. It was all part of some movie they were doing on con games. They even showed us the outline of a script. One page of bullshit-scam games and hot cars- something like The Sringmeets CannonballRun. They claimed they were gonna sell it to Hollywood." He laughed again. "So they actually got out there, huh?"
"Derrick made it," said Milo. "Cliff died a few years after Daddy and Stepmom.
Motocross accident near Reno."
"Oh boy," said Castro. "Interesting."
"Very."
"Like I told you, cold. I always saw Derrick as the idea guy. Cliff was a party dude. Better-looking than Derrick, nice tan, expert water-skiier, pussy hound. And, yeah, motorcycles, too. He had a bunch of them. A collection. They both did. So
Derrick might very well know how to rig one.... I figured if anyone cracked, it'd be
Cliff, my plan was to split them apart, see if I could play one against the other.
But the lawyer wouldn't let me get close. I'll never forget the last time I talked to them. I'm asking questions, faking being civil, and those two are looking at their lawyer and he's telling me they don't have to answer and they're smirking.
Finally, I leave, and Derrick makes a point of walking me to the door. Big old house, tons of furniture, and he and his brother are gonna get it all. Then he smiles at me, again. Like,'I know, you know, fuck you, Charlie.' The only comfort I got out of it was they didn't get as rich as they thought they would."
"How much they get?" said Milo.
"Eighty grand each, mostly from the sale of the house. The place was heavily mortgaged, and by the time they paid estate taxes, commission, all that good stuff, there wasn't much left. They were figuring the old man was sitting on big-time cash, but turns out he'd made some bad investments-land deals, as a matter of fact-which is funny, don't you think? Leveraged up the Y.Y. He'd even cashed in his insurance policies as collateral for some loans. The only other assets were the furniture, pair of three-year-old Caddies, golf clubs and a golf cart, and the stepmom's jewelry, half of which turned out to be costume and the rest new stuff, which doesn't maintain its value once you take it out of the store. The other funny thing was, the boat hadn 't been borrowed on. Apparently the old man loved it, kept up with his slip fees and maintenance. Nice-looking thing, from the pictures. The old man had stuffed fish all over the house." He laughed louder. "Fifty grand worth of boat, minimum, free and clear, and that they blew up. So tell me more about what
Derrick did out there."
Milo kept it sketchy.
"Whoa," said Castro. "Creepy murder, that's a whole new level.... Makes sense, I guess. Keep getting away with it, you start thinking you're God."
"The thing that interests me," said Milo, "is from what we can tell, Derrick isn't living well. No car registrations, no address in any swank neighborhood that we can find, and he may have taken a low-paying job under an alias. So he must not have invested that eighty grand."
"He wouldn't. He'd plow right through it, just like any other sociopath."
"I can't find any Social Security for him except when he lived in Miami," said Milo.
"So no jobs under his own name. Any idea what he's been doing all these years?"
"Nah," said Castro. "He left town nine or ten months after the murder, they both did, left no trail. The case was officially open, but no one was really working on it. In my spare time, I kept following the money, drove by some clubs they hung out at. Then one day a source at County Records called me-I'd asked to be told when the
estate was settled. That's when I learned how little they were gonna get. The address on the transfer was in Utah. Park City. I traced it. FOB. It was winter by then. I figured the little fucks went skiing with the death money."
"Scams, murder, movies," I said. "No known address. Need a closer fit?"
Milo shook his head. I felt sparked by what we'd just learned but he seemed dejected.
"What is it?"
"First Derrick offs his parents, then his brother, probably for Cliff's share of the eighty grand. This is professional evil."
"What was left of Cliff's share," I said. "Like Castro said, they probably chewed right through it. Maybe Derrick chewed faster."
"Derrick the dominator... arrogant, just like you've been saying."
"Good criminal self-esteem," I said. "And why not? He does bad things and gets away clean. And maybe he had practice with family elimination."
"The Ardullos," he said. "Spurring Peake on-well, your guesses have been pretty right on, haven't they?"
"Aw shucks," I said. "Now all we need to do is find Derrick. Let me get back on the line with the psychiatric board."
"Sure. I'll hit Pimm again. And Park City. Maybe Derrick tried a land scam there, too."
"If you want, I'll give you some other possibilities."
"What?"
"Aspen, Telluride, Vegas, Tahoe. This is a party boy. He goes where the fun is."
The dejected look returned. "Those kinds of record checks could take weeks," he said. "The guy's right here, polluting my city, and I can't put a finger on him."
It took several calls to learn that psychiatric tech licenses were granted for periods ranging from thirteen to twenty-four months. Individual names could be verified, but sending the entire list was unheard-of. Finally, I found a supervisor willing to fax the roster. Another twenty minutes passed before paper began spooling out of the sorry-looking machine across the room.
I read as it unraveled. Page after page of names, no Crim-mins, no Wark.
Another alias?
Griffith D. Wark. Scrambling a film maestro. Manipulative, pretentious, arrogant.
And strangely childlike-playing pretend games.
Seeing himself as a major Hollywood player. The fact that he'd never produced anything was a nasty bit of potential dissonance, but the same could be said of so many coutured reptiles occupying tables at Spago.
Psychopaths could deal with dissonance.
Psychopaths had low levels of anxiety.
Besides, there were other types of productions.
Blood Walk.
Bad eyes in a box.
Something else about human snakes: they lacked emotional depth, faked humanity.
Craved repetition. Patterns.
So maybe Wark had co-opted other major directors. I was no film expert but several names came to mind: Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Huston, John Ford, Frank
Capra.... I scanned the tech list. None of the above.
But Wark was D. W. Griffith's middle name. What was Hitchcock's?
I called the research library at the U, asked for the reference desk, and explained what I needed. The librarian must have been puzzled, but odd requests are their business and, God bless her, she didn't argue.
Five minutes later I had what I needed: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. John no middle name
Huston. Frank NMN Capra. George Orson Welles. John NMN Ford; real name, Sean
Aloysius O'Feeney.
Thanking her, I turned back to the tech list. No Capras, four Fords, one Hitchcock, no Hustons, no O'Feeneys... no obviously cute manipulations of Hitchcock or Ford...
.Then I saw it.
G. W. Orson.
Co-opting a genius.
Delusions were everywhere.
31.
"CITIZEN CREEP," SAID Milo, looking at the circled name.
"G. W. Orson got licensed twenty-two months ago," I said. "That's about all I could get except for the address he put on his application form."
He studied the address slip. "South Shenandoah Street... around Eighteenth. West
L.A. territory... only a few blocks from the shopping center where Claire was dumped."
"The center's far from Claire's house, so why would she shop there? Unless she went with someone else."
"Crimmins? They had a relationship?"
"Why not?" I said. "Let's assume Orson-and Wark-are both Crimmins aliases. We have no employment records yet, but Crimmins is a psych tech, so it's not much of a leap to assume he works at Starkweather, or did in the past. He ran into Claire.
Something developed. Because they had two common interests: the movies and Ardis
Peake. When Claire told Crimmins she'd picked Peake as a project, he decided to find out more. When Crimmins learned Claire was uncovering information potentially threatening to him, he decided to cast hex in Blood Walk."
"Kills her, films her, dumps her," he said. "It holds together logically; now all I have to do is prove it. I canvassed the shopping center, showed her picture to every
clerk who'd been working the day she was killed. No one remembered seeing her, alone or with anyone else. That doesn't mean much, it's a huge place, and if I can get a picture of Crimmins, I'll go back. But maybe we can get a look at him in person."
He waved the address slip. "This helps big-time. First let's see if he registered his 'Vette."
The call to DMV left him shaking his head. "No G. W. Orson cars anywhere in the state."
"Lives in L. A., but no legal car," I said. "That alone tells us he's dirty. Try another scrambled director's name."
"Later," he said, pocketing the address. "This is something real. Let's go for it."
The block was quiet, intermittently treed, filled with plain-wrap, single-story houses set on vest-pocket lots that ranged from compulsively tended to ragged. Birds chirped, dogs barked. A man in an undershirt pushed a lawn mower in slo-mo. A dark-skinned woman strolling a baby looked up as we passed. Apprehension, then relief; the unmarked was anything but inconspicuous.
Years ago, the neighborhood had been ravaged by crime and white flight. Rising real estate prices had reversed some of that, and the result was a mixed-race district that resonated with tense, tentative pride.
The place G. W. Orson had called home twenty-two months ago was a pale green Spanish bungalow with a neatly edged lawn and no other landscaping. A FOR LEASE sign was staked dead center in the grass. In the driveway was a late-model Oldsmobile
Cutlass. Milo drove halfway down the block and ran the plates. "TBL Properties, address on Wilshire near La Brea."
He U-turned, parked in front of the green house. A stunted old magnolia tree planted in the parkway next door cast some shade upon the Olds. Nailed to the trunk was a poster. Cloudy picture of a dog with some Rottweiler in it. Eager canine grin. "Have
You Seen Buddy?" over a phone number and a typed message: Buddy had been missing for a week and needed daily thyroid medication. Finding him would bring a hundred-dollar reward. For no reason I could think of, Buddy looked strangely familiar. Everything was starting to remind me of something.