Motive (15 page)

“She used the word ‘need’?”

Kleffer thought. “I’m pretty sure that’s how she put it. I see what you’re saying, the asshole pressured her. She also said she wanted stability in her life and I told her I could provide stability. Kathy didn’t argue, she just kept quiet and that was even worse.”

“Dismissing the idea.”

“Knowing the idea was bullshit but too polite to say so,” said Kleffer. “It kind of drove home how she outclassed me.”

I said, “Stability.”

“Chicks want that.”

Milo said, “Most people want that.”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe even I want it, who knows?” Kleffer looked at the ground. “Can I ask what exactly happened to her?”

“We’re keeping the details confidential right now.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. I just hope she didn’t suffer a lot.”

I said, “Would Kathy let a stranger into her apartment?”

Kleffer straightened his leg. “She let him in?”

“That surprises you.”

“I was thinking some scumbag broke in to steal something and got crazy.”

“Why’s that?” said Milo.

“Because that’s what happens mostly, right?”

Neither of us replied.

Kleffer said, “It didn’t happen that way?”

Milo said, “There was no sign of forced entry.”

Kleffer pressed his back to the wall and began sliding down. Lowering himself several inches, he lost balance and forced himself upright. “She let some asshole in? Oh God, I used to tell her be more careful.”

“She was careless?”

“Not like crazy reckless, more like, don’t go shopping by yourself at night. You need stuff, tell me and I’ll pick it up for you. I also said get an alarm, you’re a chick living alone. She said thanks for caring, I’m fine. You’re telling me she let someone in. Fuck! The new guy? Maybe I should’ve found out who the hell he was.”

Milo said, “At this point, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, sir.”

“She let him the fuck in,” said Kleffer. He punched stucco. Bloody speckles rose on his knuckles, dark dew. He wiped his hand on his apron. Fresh red human stain mixed with the blood of other species. “
Stupid
girl.”

Darius Kleffer returned to work, plodding slowly and smoking and rubbing his hand.

Milo and I lingered in the alley. He said, “Any thoughts besides he’s a litterbug?”

“We know he didn’t kill Kathy Hennepin himself and I don’t see him hiring out. Plus, he’s not someone Ursula would likely be attracted to.”

“So total waste of time.”

I said, “Maybe not. His suspicions about another man could dovetail with Fellinger getting together with Kathy.”

“Someone to provide stability.”

“A Century City lawyer would fit the bill.”

“You don’t see that as Kleffer’s low self-esteem? When he drinks he gets low.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But Kleffer’s reasoning makes sense. Right from the start he and Kathy made an odd couple. She resisted him, finally gave in but eventually she went back to being a conventional woman with conventional tastes. Maybe because an older lawyer flirted
with her in the elevator of a high-rent office building. Someone self-confident and worldly and smooth around the edges, talk about the anti-Kleffer.”

His turn to kick the wall. “And hell, maybe he even cooks.”

“Catering to her every need.”

“It’s still a long way from evidence,” he said. “But like you said, what else do I have? Let’s learn more about the monkey-man.”

Back at the station, we detoured for toxic coffee in the big detective room and headed for Milo’s closet-sized, solitary-confinement office. While he logged onto his email, I pushed the spare chair into a corner and checked my messages. Robin saying hi, no need to call. I stepped out into the hall, anyway, and took a vacation from ugly. Hearing about her day, divulging as little of mine as possible, planning dinner at home, the two of us grilling hanger steaks.

“Wine?” she said. “Or we stay clearheaded?”

“No payoff in clear,” I said.

“Because no progress?”

“Something like that.”

“No sense getting into it?”

“I’ll tell you over wine.”

Reentering the windowless cell, I found Milo working his desktop with the grim concentration of a truant kid video-zapping alien spacecraft.

His targets: the criminal files, local and NCIC.

Nothing on Grant Fellinger.

DMV gave up three moving traffic violations in as many years, two near Fellinger’s office, one less than a mile west on Santa Monica Boulevard near Westwood. Two vehicles, a BMW 6 series and a vintage Dodge Challenger. Same offense each time: incomplete stop.

Milo said, “Man in a hurry. That mean something psychologically?”

“If I could answer that with a straight face I’d have a talk show.”

“Dr. Alex,” he said. “Dispensing folksy wisdom and tough love in
between commercials for reverse mortgages … onward, here are his real estate records … he’s got a house in the Palisades … not real close to Hennepin’s apartment but not that far, either, he gets the urge, easy enough to booty-call and drop over.”

“Booty-calls would’ve meant phone calls between Kathy and him.”

His mouth worked. He checked the Hennepin murder book, just in case. Slammed it shut. “Zilch. So what, he just drops in, joy of spontaneity and all that? She’s impressed by him, rich confident guy, making her feel
stable
. Which to her also means safe, she leaves the door unlocked for him.”

“So he can tote in the evening’s refreshments.”

“With all that, you’d expect someone to notice, Alex. But like I said, the only guy anyone ever saw go in and out was Kleffer.”

I said, “Kleffer’s hard to miss. A middle-aged guy arriving after dark wouldn’t be. Or for most of their trysts they used Fellinger’s place, not Kathy’s. Any record of a second home?”

“Little fun pad for ol’ Grant? I like it.” He typed.

His enthusiasm was short-lived. No other real estate listings in L.A., Ventura, Orange, or San Bernardino counties under Fellinger’s name, his family trust, or his law firm. He turned away from the screen.

“Doesn’t rule out rentals, but no way to uncover that. Or maybe ol’ Grant likes hotels. Where would you start? Four-star or easy-sleazy? Either way, unless he used his own name, forget it.”

I said, “If he over-plied his charm at work, perhaps a female employee complained about him.”

He logged onto the criminal court docket, found nothing and tried the civil suit roster. Sitting back heavily enough to make his chair wheeze, he pointed at the screen.

No one had complained about Grant Fellinger but just under a month ago, he’d filed harassment charges against a woman named Deirdre Mae Brand. No further details.

Milo looked Brand up. No driver’s license, no address. “He goes after a phantom?”

“If we’re right about Fellinger, his thing is controlling women. The fact that this woman threatened him enough for him to sue, could mean she managed to intimidate him.”

“Scary lady?”

“Scary enough. See if anyone else has ever filed on her and if that doesn’t work, check for a criminal history.”

Deirdre Mae Brand, age forty-nine, had an extensive multistate record for vagrancy, theft, larceny, and drug possession. The chronology of her arrests was as good as a road map: westward trajectory through Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada.

Nothing violent, but people do things they never get caught for.

One way or the other, Fellinger and Brand had developed an explosive chemistry.

My bet was their clash had occurred at or close to Fellinger’s office building, because Deirdre Brand’s most recent arrest had been for attempted shoplifting at a nearby boutique in Century City. Two months before Fellinger lodged his complaint.

Milo searched for records on the lawsuit, found no trial date assigned, no settlement.

“He’s a lawyer and he just folds his tent?”

“The complaint could’ve been enough to scare her off,” I said. “Scroll back to Brand’s arrest record.”

That revealed a pattern: Brand had always been released with no charges or after spending a night or two in local jails. Not a single day in prison.

Milo said, “She’s got charm of her own?”

“Or she has reason to be pitied.”

“Such as?”

“Mental illness.”

Pulling up Deirdre Brand’s mug shots created a sad photo-tour.

At nineteen she’d been a fresh-faced towhead busted for marijuana. But even back then, she’d worn a numbed expression emphasized by
flat, hostile eyes, with none of the fear you’d expect at a first arrest. Meaning she’d had previous run-ins with the law that never got to the point of arrest.

Or her affect was blunted by psychiatric disease.

By twenty-five, she’d aged freakishly fast, shedding enough teeth to collapse her face. In the final photo, thirty years into her criminal career and not yet fifty, she was withered and drawn with a misshapen hatchet face, bony where it wasn’t bloated and topped by a bird’s-nest of wild white hair. A roseate glow seemed to incandesce her skin, the gloss that comes from years of living on the streets.

A different variety of flatness in her eyes now: a locked-ward vacancy I’d seen so many times.

Forty-nine; I’d have pegged her at seventy.

Milo said, “No address ’cause she’s homeless. She looks pathetic, Alex. This is who scared Fellinger?”

“Maybe I was wrong and she just became a nuisance he couldn’t get rid of.”

“We’re trying to make Fellinger a psychopath killer. Why wouldn’t he fix his problem the old-fashioned way?”

“Who says he didn’t?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

He began the tortuous search for the paperwork on Fellinger’s complaint. A challenge because cases that don’t go to trial are non-events that can get discarded or filed in obscure places or simply lost. Finally, he received a verbal summary from a law student intern at the city attorney’s office.

He hung up. “You’re right, it happened at the shopping mall west of Fellinger’s building. He was lunching there and Ms. Brand was a frequent panhandler and chronic pain in the ass. The loitering laws have pretty much been destroyed by court decisions so unless she got physically aggressive there wasn’t much mall security could do. Her problem with Fellinger occurred after she’d cadged change out of other
people but not him. Words were exchanged and he claims she tried to hit him, though no one else verifies that. He made a citizen’s arrest, put her down on the ground to do it, and confined her until the real cops showed up. D.A. refused to file criminally so Fellinger went the civil route, claiming Brand had exhibited ‘conspicuous socially hazardous behavior.’ That mean something to you?”

“She bothered him.”

“Ha. Brand spent forty-eight hours in County psychiatric and was released. She never showed up for preliminary hearings and Fellinger eventually dropped his complaint.”

“She irks him enough for a citizen’s arrest, then he develops a soft heart?”

“I don’t like the smell of it, either.”

Deirdre Brand’s name was nowhere to be found in any division’s victim roster nor at the crypt on South Mission Road.

Milo said, “Woman like that would be the perfect throwaway, she could be anywhere.”

I said, “Unless he reverted to type and left her out in the open to brag.”

“Along with dinner for two?”

“Maybe fastfood,” I said. “Social ranking and all that.”

By the time I was ready to leave Milo’s office, he’d set his priorities.

No sense searching for a mentally ill homeless woman who could be anywhere. And though he still wasn’t convinced Grant Fellinger was his killer, the lawyer would be the focus of a three-man surveillance carried out by himself, Binchy, and Reed.

“Kiss the woman, pet the pooch, enjoy the steaks.” He turned toward his monitor.

I said, “How about a copy of Deirdre Brand’s last mug shot?”

“You planning to look for her yourself?”

“If time permits.”

“How?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“Your educational level, you could be spending time more profitably.” But he pressed the
Print
button.

That night, in my office, I organized my own priorities. During holidays and sometimes at random times, Robin and I deliver food and clothing
to homeless people too independent or paranoid to enter shelters and soup kitchens, so I knew some of the places where the forgotten congregate.

Communicating with psychotic people can be tortured, and for all its affluence, the Westside of L.A. has too many fetid hideouts to canvass in a week. But I figured I’d start with a few freeway underpasses, see where that led.

The following morning, just as I was about to let Robin know I was leaving, I thought of something: Milo had searched the coroner’s records for a file under Deirdre Brand’s name. But people like her didn’t carry I.D.

If her corpse had come into the crypt unidentified, a check of the fingerprint database could’ve pulled up a match to her arrest records. But when the bodies pile up, steps can be overlooked.

I phoned a friendly face at the coroner’s, an investigator named Gloria Mendez. She said, “Hi, Alex, I’m out in the field. Literally, vacant lot in East L.A., billowing weeds, looks like Kansas in
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“Gang shooting?”

“Good guess. Fifteen-year-old nails a sixteen-year-old because the other kid had the nerve to live two blocks south. What’s up?”

I told her.

She said, “No, we always run prints. With a criminal record, we’d know who she is.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“On the other hand, I don’t want to give you false hope but sometimes even when matches do come up they don’t make it into the files immediately, all the backlog. The person to call is Martha Shisick. I don’t have her extension offhand but she’s always at her desk.”

“Thanks for the tip. How do you spell Shisick?”

“Not sure, she’s got lots of consonants. But if you log onto our site then onto Records, she’ll be listed. If you catch her in a mood, use my name.”