Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 19

The dump site was in Pacific Palisades, above Pacific Coast Highway, just past the Getty Villa and up a skinny bait-worm of a street.

Unremarkable houses sat on too-small lots. The air was cool and salty and expensive. Between the meager space separating the homes, glimpses of ocean flashed, starlit onyx. I drove until a cop slouching against a cruiser stopped me.

My name got me waved to the end of the block. A construction site, what looked to be the beginnings of a mega-mansion.

Block foundation, wooden framing, fake-tile roof, all of which appeared shopworn. Heaps of trash filled most of the lot. An Andy Gump with its door agape and a poorly tended rent-a-fence completed the picture: The project hadn’t been worked on for a while.

The drive-in gate was chain-locked but the fence, high and topped by barbed wire, sported a man-sized hole. Milo had filled me in as I drove. Discovery of the body had been accidental, a pair of lovebirds, barely thirteen, sneaking out of their houses a few blocks east, had hurried over to the site with plans of passion amid rusted rebar, warped plywood, and rotting roof shingles.

A regular thing for the kids, as it turned out. Nice to know the girl/boy-next-door thing had durability.

This time, a stench gave them pause, curiosity surpassing true love and hormones.

Tracing the reek, the kids had discovered something rotted worse than the shingles. Horror-struck but fascinated, they’d illuminated the body with the flashlight the girl always brought because she was studying ballet and didn’t want to “fall down and mess up my body in the dark.”

Romeo and Juliet stood off to the side now, near an officer absently working his cellphone. Both were blond, cute, skinny, the girl taller and surprisingly composed. The boy cowered next to her, eyes hazed by huge, red-rimmed designer eyeglasses.

Milo said, “Sean and Shawna. Adorable, no? All four parents are M.D.’s and pals and were out to dinner. On their way back, now, and mightily irritated. I might need to offer the young’uns some police protection.”

His smile was a grim strobe. “Little Lothario looks freaked out, no? Maybe he’ll need you, as well.”

I said, “Nothing like ambulance chasing. It’s definitely Waters?”

“We’ll verify with prints but, yeah, there’s enough left to say it is.”

“Where’s the body?”

He pointed at one of the junk heaps. I moved toward it.

He said, “Sure, why not.”

Gerard Waters’s naked body had been covered with objects taken from the trash, each one tagged with an evidence marker: scrap wood, broken blocks, a sheet of black plastic tarp pocked by little jagged holes that Milo assured me were the work of Mickey and Minnie. “They chewed on him a little, too. Over here. And here.”

Indicating the ragged tips of fingers. And toes. Then a pile of vomit.

“Courtesy Sean. After Shawna pulled back the tarp and exposed the face.”

I said, “Tough girl.”

Milo said, “Blood doesn’t bother her, she wants to be a surgeon like Daddy and Mommy. They run a plastic practice in Malibu. Nip and tuck won’t help Mr. Waters.”

Another point: neck flesh flaccid and sloughing. A hunk of shoulder mottled like overripe cheese.

I said, “He wearing anything?”

“Stripped nude.”

I bent and took a closer look. The face was bloated and decaying, folds and wrinkles filled with fluid and gas, straining like the seams of too-tight trousers. Crime lab pole-lights accentuated the damage but failed to clarify the precise color of the skin. I guessed gray. Maybe overlaid with purple. Maybe even some green.

A dark patch nearly hid the tattoo on the left calf. Degraded but I could still make it out. Daffy Duck.

I said, “A lot of decomp for how cool it’s been.”

“C.I. guesses he was kept warm somewhere else before being moved.”

I said, “Any idea what killed him?”

“Single bullet, here.” Poking the back of his own skull. “No casing, no exit wound, and our chewy friends have enlarged the entry hole. But when you poke around, the tunnel’s narrow enough to say small caliber.”

“You stuck your finger in there?”

“After the C.I. okayed it.” He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Shake on it, buddy.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“In answer to your next question, until the pathologist weighs in, best estimate of time is the C.I.’s off-the-record guess. Days, not hours.”

“Soon after Waters cleared out on his landlord,” I said. “He went to meet up with his partners, maybe figured they’d all be traveling, and got a surprise. If Thalia’s bungalow had given up serious cash, the pie got reduced to two slices.”

“Miss Hotcha-Hotcha and Mr. Handsome,” he said. “That’s the scene I picture. I went back to the hotel today and showed Henry Bakstrom’s mug to Refugia and a couple of desk clerks. They all had trouble seeing past the Mohawk but no one said it couldn’t be Bakstrom. Then I showed it to Alicia Bogomil and she said ninety percent it was him.”

“Cop eyes.”

“Or she’s eager to please. Techs will be looking for prints on or near the body and with the bullet still in Waters’s head, maybe it’ll give up something.”

I said, “Why dump the body here when there are trails and canyons up the coast?”

“You’re thinking someone familiar with the neighborhood. Bakstrom and Bad Girl going high-rent?”

“Not necessarily. There are cheap motels in Santa Monica and Venice. I’m suggesting this isn’t random because bad guys tend to stay close to home and they’ve also been known to work freelance jobs, like pickup construction.”

“Maybe Bakstrom was here nailing or pouring concrete,” he said. “Good point, I’ll talk to the contractor. Probably the former contractor, the kids say no one’s worked here for a while.”

“People hike in rural spots, not in junkyards,” I said. “If Mr. and Ms. Cute were in a hurry to split and knew the job was abandoned, this would be the perfect dump spot. Give them a head start while decay sets in and hinders identification. Maybe they were hoping the remains would eventually end up in some recycling facility. Unfortunately for them, Romeo and Juliet intervened.”

“Head start,” he said. “So they’re already in the wind.”

“I was a criminal with a windfall, I wouldn’t stick around.”

Noise on the other side of the fence drew our attention. A quartet of well-dressed people in their forties passed through and converged on the young lovers. A rush of hugs was followed by angry adult oration and allegro finger-wagging.

Shawna stood her ground; Sean tried to hide behind her but his mother yanked him out by the arm and worked her mouth rapidly.

The uniform pretending to watch the kids looked over at Milo. Milo pushed his palm frontward. Permission to leave. The cop said something, the parents took the kids with them.

As the families separated, Shawna finger-waved at Sean and Sean blew a kiss.