Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
In the bedroom she found a
purse with a wallet. There was a thick pinch of hundreds in the wallet, some
twenties, several credit cards and a driver's license. Aubrey Whittaker.
Nineteen.
The woman was a girl and
the girl was only a little over half her own age. The year Aubrey Whittaker was
born, Merci was a junior in high school. The year Aubrey Whittaker was
murdered, Merci was an Orange County Sheriff Department sergeant, Homicide Detail,
age 36. A single mother. A once proud woman recovering from a broken heart,
and from what police psychologists like to call critical incident stress. She'd
painted up her exterior, but inside she was still a wreck.
Aubrey's slaughtered youth
made Merci sad and angry, but many things about her career made her feel that
way. She looked out the bedroom window toward Coast Highway. The building next
door already had its Christmas lights up, a neat outline of tiny white bulbs
blinking at random. On the big dresser across from the bed Merci found a
jewelry box filled with expensive-looking rings and necklaces. Under the lamp
there was a greeting card propped up, this one with a soft-focus photograph of
a tree on a hillside. She bent and read it without touching it.
In the muted blue sky were
the words:
In God's World...
The
quip was completed inside:
There's a
special place for Friendship.
It was signed:
Sincerely, Your D.C.
She could hear the
footsteps on the walkway, louder now. She listened as they came toward the door
and stopped. Voices.
She went to the door and
looked through the peephole. She saw Paul Zamorra in the elliptical foreground,
and the two Coroner's Autopsy Team techs behind him. When she opened the door
her partner met her with his joyless black eyes, then stepped inside. The techs
followed him.
They all looked at Aubrey
Whittaker. Zamorra walked to her side, knelt down and looked at her some more.
He brought gloves from the pocket of his sport coat, worked them on. "Get
to it, guys," he said. "We've got about twenty minutes before the
hordes thunder in."
The hordes thundered in:
three more patrol units bearing six deputies; the paramedic supervisors; the
Coroner's Investigation Team; the rest of the Coroner's Autopsy Team; the
county pathologist; the crime-scene scientists; the crime-scene technicians;
the criminalists; the assistant district attorney and two of his investigators,
all trudging down the wooden walkway to Aubrey Whittaker's place under the
drone of two Sheriff Department choppers that circled overhead and beamed
unhopeful shafts of light into the city below. The police reporters came next. And, as always, concerned citizens multiplied as
the minutes wore on, drawn from the darkness by the flashing lights of the
prowl cars.
Close neighbors compared
notes on the apparently deceased girl who came and went from 23 Wave Street at
late hours: very attractive, well dressed, very tall, quiet. There was firm
disagreement on what color, style or length of hair she had.
Outsiders gathered what they could, speculated. Most
everyone was bundled up in something, arms around themselves or each other,
blowing on their hands, puffs of breath coming out when they spoke. Surfers in
hooded Mexican ponchos leaned against their little trucks drinking tall beers,
slurring their vowels.
Merci Rayborn at first
admitted only five people into number 23. Two were the best crime-scene people
she'd ever worked with—Criminalist Lynda Coiner and Crime-Scene Investigator
Evan O'Brien. They were standing near the door when she finally opened it, knowing
she'd need them first
Then, the assistant DA and
his man. The People. They were the ones she'd bring her case to, the ones for
whom she was really gathering evidence. It didn't hurt that they were smart,
quiet and knew the drill. Last, the coroner's investigator, mainly for the
body temp, which would help them with rime of death, and the body cavities,
which can leak evidentiary fluids into the transport bags, complicating the
job of the lab pathologists.
And everyone else, thought
Merci, can stay the hell out for half an hour. Let my people work.
While they worked, Merci
and Zamorra toured the apartment. It was an upscale interior in a downscale
building: good carpet, leather furniture, recessed lighting aimed to dramatize
good prints of Kahlo and O'Keeffe, Hockney and Basquiat. Over the expansive
black leather sofa in the living room hung a painting she'd never seen before.
It was ghostly but vibrant at the same time, a little too crime-lab for an
ocean-view room, in her opinion. It was a Rembrandt of someone raising somebody
else from the dead.
Good luck, she
thought. She had tried it herself, twice.
Zamorra spoke occasionally
into a tiny tape recorder. Merci, as always, wrote her observations into a
small notebook with a blue cover.
She wrote:
Aubrey Whittaker, what did you do1
But between the contents
of Aubrey's closet—provocative clothes and lots of them—and the contents of a
leather-bound calendar in her purse—a blizzard of dates with a blizzard of
people listed only by initials, coded notes in the margins, phone numbers all
over it—Merci came to suspect that Aubrey's profession was one of the oldest.
The 240-count box of condoms Zamorra found beside a pair of thigh-high leather
boots in the bottom of the closet seemed to confirm it.
Nineteen and a real
pro.
The bed was neatly made.
There was a Bible open on the stand beside it. A crucifix hung on one of the
bedroom walls. And the damned evangelist on TV. Zamorra stared at Merci. It
hurt. Zamorra's newlywed bride had been diagnosed with a brain tumor just two
months ago; since that day his sharp face, once sly and charming, had taken on
an expression of increasingly resigned menace. She was worried about him but
didn't think she knew him well enough to question or intrude. Good fences made
good neighbors and Zamorra's fence seemed excellent: He said almost nothing
about anything. She was going to talk to a doctor about him.
"I saw her
yesterday," Zamorra said.
Merci felt her heart
rise, settle. "Yesterday. Where?"
"Some of the vices
were huddling with her at Pedro's. I took it she was a call girl they were
going to chum with. I sat at the counter, got a number four and didn't
ask."
"Who in
vice?"
"Kathy Hulet and
your tall blond friend."
"Mike?"
"Yeah. Mike
McNally."
Til be damned."
"We all
are."
"It's a matter
of timing. Let's go see the neighbor."
On her way out of number
23 Merci asked Lynda Coiner if they'd found any brass. "None yet,"
she said. "But if it's here, we will."
*
The neighbor was Alexander
Coates. He lived downstairs, three units over, in number 2. He wore baggy
black nylon pants with elastic at the ankles, a scoop-neck T-shirt and a red
silk robe. Athletic shoes, new. Short gray hair in a widow's peak, neat gray
beard, wide gray eyes. He asked them to sit. In the fireplace, gas flames
huffed over ceramic logs. Wooden letters on the mantle spelled NOEL. Merci
smelled a familiar green aroma, masked by a floral spray.
"I'm devastated by
this," he said. "Aubrey was such a sweet girl. So young and good
and ...
oh, I guess you could
say mixed-up."
"Let's start with
what you saw and heard," Merci suggested.
Coates looked at Zamorra.
"Can I get you coffee, cocoa, anything?"
"No."
Coates exhaled, looked
into the fire, began. He was home alone tonight. Around eight-thirty he heard
footsteps on the wooden walkway above. He heard a knock upstairs— Aubrey
Whittaker's place, number 23. A moment later he heard the door shut. Nothing of
consequence, then, until a little after ten o'clock, when he heard Aubrey
Whittaker's door shut again, and footsteps going back down the upper walkway in
the direction from which they had come earlier.
"How could you tell
her door from number twenty-four or twenty-two?" asked Merci.
"From living here
eighteen years. I've listened to lots of people come and go. You know."
Yes, she did know. Because
she could imagine Alexander Coates. You've waited for lots of dates, she
thought. You've waited and listened to their footsteps and wondered how they'd
turn out. You can tell a lot about a man by the way he walks.
"All right.
Next.""Next, at approximately ten-fifteen, I heard footsteps coming
down the walkway again, in the same direction. I heard them stop at Aubrey's. I
heard the door open. Then, immediately after the door opened, or almost
immediately, I heard a loud thump, like something heavy hitting the floor. Then
the door closed. Not a slam,
but...
forcefully. Nothing for a minute or two. Then, thumping on the floor again. It
was like the first thump, but continuous, like moving furniture or a fight or
a struggle of some kind. It lasted for maybe a minute. Then quiet again. Then
footsteps going back down the walkway toward the stairs."
"Did you
look?" asked Merci.
"No. I was in
the bath."
"Did you hear a
gunshot, a car backfiring?"
"Nothing like
that."
"Did you think
of calling the police ?" asked Zamorra.
Coates looked at Zamorra
with his wide gray eyes, then back into the fire. "No. None of the noises
I heard were alarming. None were loud or seemed to indicate trouble. They were
just noises. My policy, Detectives, my personal belief on such matters is that
privacy should be honored. Unless disaster
is...
well, you know, happening right in front of you."
"But when you got out
of the bath, you decided to go to her door?"
"Correct. When 1 got
there—this would have been around ten forty-five, I saw her door was
open."
Coates sat forward, set
his elbows on his knees, rested his head in his hands. "I thought it was
blood on the door. The door was open
maybe
...
six inches. I did not touch it or look past it. I literally raced
back to my home and dialed nine-one-one immediately. 1 didn't know what to do
with myself. I went back upstairs and looked at the door again. I said her
name, foolishly perhaps. I came back down here. I paced the floor for what
seemed like hours. The young officers arrived at exactly ten fifty-six."
Merci watched Alexander
Coates weep into his hands. Experience had taught her to keep a witness talking
and thinking instead of crying. Tears cleanse the memory as well as the eyes.
"You did all right,
Mr. Coates."
"Did I really?"
"Absolutely. Now,
when you went up to number twenty-three the first time, was Aubrey Whittaker's
porch light on or off?"
The sniffling
stopped. "On."
"And the second
time?"
"On as
well."
"Did you hear cars
coming or going from the parking lot during this time?"
"Yes. But there's the
Coast Highway traffic, so the sounds get mixed up. I can't really help you
there. You learn not to hear cars, after eighteen years on Coast Highway."
Half an hour later they
were almost finished with Alexander Coates. He said that Aubrey Whittaker
rarely had visitors that he noticed. He said that he and Aubrey sometimes
talked in the laundry room by the office, because neither worked days, so they
washed their clothes in the slow hours. She had gorgeous sad eyes and a sharp
sense of humor. She never mentioned irate boyfriends, stalking ex-husbands or
enemies of any kind. She was not, in his opinion, hard or mean-spirited.
However, in his opinion, she was alone and on a journey, searching for
something in her life she had not found yet. It was Coates's impression that
Aubrey was an escort of some kind. She drove a dark red, late-model Cadillac.
Merci nodded at this
summation, again wondering her way into Alexander Coates. Years ago, a wise old
mentor had told her that putting herself in another's shoes would make her a
better detective and a better person. She had absolutely no knack for it, and she
didn't believe him then. She'd never seen a reason to try to understand people
she didn't like in the first place, which was almost everyone. But the old guy,
Hess, had been right: In the two years, three months and twenty-two days he'd
been dead, Merci had worked hard at this, and she'd learned a few things she
might not have learned otherwise.
Such as, if you spent
eighteen years in the same apartment, listening to your neighbors and their
lovers come and go, you got good at it.
"Mr. Coates, those
two arrivals you heard upstairs, they were the footsteps of men, correct?"
"Yes." A
confessional glance and nod.
"The same man,
or two different ones?"
"Oh, different men,
certainly. I was going to tell you that if you didn't ask."
"How sure are
you of that?"
"Well, if you hear
two voices, you know there are two people. Same with footsteps."